Ember and Ash Page 28

  A breeze touched his face with chill fingers, searching for a way inside his clothes, stroking him; it felt like real hands, real fingers, cold as hunger, but when he put his hand to his face there was only air.

  His father reached back to pat him on the arm, but kept walking. Had he made some sound when the fingers touched him? He hoped not. Hoped his father didn’t realize how scared he was. Then he remembered the fear in Ari’s eyes, and knew that every heir, every Hárugur King, felt this terror as they walked the King’s Passage.

  Under his feet the floor was rising. He bent his knees and trudged on, one hand shaking his flask, the other feeling his way along the ragged wall. They had been walking for hours, now, he thought, and had only twice stopped to take a drink. He should be hungry, but he was not. He was getting tired. He could walk all day on the mountainside without feeling it, but this…

  The passage began to wind as it climbed, curving around in a wide circle. A spiral, Nyr thought, as they went further up. There was no sense of direction underground, but as they ascended he could feel the air change, becoming thinner and colder still. He wound his scarf over his face, breathing shallowly so the cold air did not burn his lungs.

  He remembered sitting next to Andur, his brother, and his cousin Seid, in the Council Cave, listening open-mouthed to his father as he described the journey to the Ice King. All the heirs had to know the ritual, in case of disaster. It had happened before, more than once in the last thousand years, that the Hárugur King and his heir had both been killed by enemies or avalanche, and the younger heir had to take on the duties without warning.

  “I do not know,” Ari had said slowly, his eyes on Andur, “if the place we go to is in this world or another. But we must climb and climb far to get there. It will feel to you like we are at the very peak of the world. Maybe we are. But this is how the Hárugur King was first chosen—he was the one who was brave enough to stand on the peak of the world and look the Ice King in the face. You must look him in the face, or he will not speak to you, and you will be cast down as Hárugur King and your people will be left leaderless.”

  It had not sounded too hard to Nyr at the time, despite Ari’s solemn tones, but the night Andur had come back, weak and pale, from his first meeting with the king, Nyr had reconsidered. Andur was as strong as a bull elk, and yet he had staggered into the Council Cave and collapsed by the fire like a grandfather of eighty. He had stared into the fire, shaking, his face gray, and when his mother had come through the archway from the main hall he had turned his face into her skirt like a child.

  Andur had been far braver than he was, Nyr thought. But he had wondered, in the seasons that followed, as Andur took risk after risk—including the late-season raid that got him killed—if he was trying to prove to himself that he still had courage, after that meeting.

  Nyr was not a warrior born, like Andur. He was a thinker, a planner. A trader by inclination as well as need. He could fight, of course. Who couldn’t? And he did well enough that the men followed him without complaint or snide remarks. He had more strategy than Andur, and since he had started leading the raids, last summer, they had lost only one man.

  But he couldn’t draw on the reserves of bravery that Andur had had. He would have to use stubbornness instead. His mother always said he was as stubborn as his father, and perhaps that was what was needed, on this long, long trek up the inside of a mountain.

  The rhythm of his father’s flask was slowing, faltering. He stopped shaking his own flask and came up close behind Ari, reaching forward to place his hand on his father’s shoulder. Ari patted it reassuringly and moved forward again, but more slowly.

  The flecks of light which still danced on his eyeballs were moving faster. Then his eyes started to water and he realized he could see a vague outline in front of him—his father’s broad shoulders and head. Light.

  Relief and fear washed over him. His body welcomed the light. His mind sheered away from it because it meant the end of the journey. Eyes smarting, he understood that his father was moving forward so slowly to let them get accustomed to the glare. Snow glare, he thought. Ice glare. The kind that can turn you blind.

  The passage was widening. Nyr tucked the water flask into his belt and moved up next to his father, the two of them walking slowly, carefully, their feet oddly unbalanced now they could see where they were going.

  The walls of the passage here were ice, not rock. Rough and smooth, blue and white, walls and roof and floor were all covered with it. But there was not one single icicle. This was not a place that ever grew warm enough for water to flow before it froze again. Their breath, coming through the scarves, created a constellation of ice crystals which clung, sparkling, to the wool.

  At the end of the passage his father waved him back again, turned hard left and then right, into a dazzle of blue and white. Ari went two more steps, and stopped. Nyr came up close behind him.

  They were standing on a ledge, barely big enough for the two of them, above a cliff that curved back in beneath them, so they were suspended, with open air all around them. In front was—Nyr sucked his breath in, biting back an exclamation. He understood now why his father wondered if they were still in the real world. Below them, stretching as far into the distance as they could see, was ice. Not the snow-covered river of the glaciers which Nyr had often seen in the high reaches of the mountain. This was pure ice, swept clean by the constant whistling wind.

  He leaned into the wind without thought, and his father put out an arm to push him back, shaking his head warningly. Nyr understood. Lean into the wind here and if it dropped… so did you.

  Beautiful. No one had ever told him the Ice King was beautiful. Deep blue and green in the shadows, blindingly white on the surface, it was curved and banked and carved by the wind into a great sculpture, a vast decoration over the face of the world. Clouds sped across the sun and light suddenly streamed down, striking sparks and fire from the ice. The light was unbearable, forcing him to look down, away, anywhere else.

  His father knelt and covered his eyes with his hands, the mark of respect due to kings, a gesture he had never seen his father make. Nyr copied him.

  It was profoundly unsettling, kneeling in the high air, cold shafting up through his knees and boots, his eyes shrouded by his hands but the terrible, searing light still blinding him.

  Up through his knees and his boots a vibration began, a small steady shivering. He thought it was his own cold, but then the shiver turned to a thrum, a sound that was made using his own flesh, as though he were a drum in the hands of a musician.

  It pulsed in him, harder and harder, louder and louder, shaking him, loosening his soul, he felt, from its bonds. Deep and high at the same time, a sound he finally recognized—it was the noise ice made as sections of it were scraped together in the bed of a glacier. A terrible, unliving noise. He wanted to piss with fear. He wanted to run away. Only his father kept him there. His father had faced this time after time.

  Nyr bit the inside of his cheek to stop from crying out, to stop himself asking for mercy. This sound had no mercy in it, any more than the ice did as it froze a traveler to death; any more than the winter itself did.

  The thrum and screech built and took shape, not in his ears, but in his mind.

  “Speak.” The voice of the Ice King, dark and piercingly high, almost pushed him to the ground with its force. He would be deaf after this, he thought in a panic. But then it paused, the sudden silence ringing, and his father spoke. Nyr had never admired his father more. To be able to find your voice in the face of this power!

  “Ari, Hárugur King, greets the Ice King with humility and devotion,” he said hoarsely. “I present my heir, Nyr Arissen.”

  In the moment that followed, Nyr felt the thrumming stream through him, a low pounding—the most dangerous of sounds, the telltale drumming of thin ice over a crevasse which might collapse at any moment. The sound of death.

  It was an inspection, and he held still, hands clasping his face
, and prayed hard that he would pass the test. But who he prayed to, he didn’t know.

  “You may uncover your face, Nyr Arissen,” the voice came at last.

  Slowly, almost unwillingly, Nyr dropped his hands. He had expected a person, a great lord, a giant like the ones who would eat the sun in the last days. But there was nothing there except the ice sheet, duller now that the clouds had flowed back across the sun. He hadn’t even noticed the light dimming, he had been so afraid.

  Was still so afraid. Nothingness was worse, he thought. A giant you might bargain with, or plead with, but Ice…

  “Speak,” the voice said, reverberating in his own chest, shaking his bones. Nyr felt panic overwhelm him. Was he supposed to say something? What?

  “A woman has come,” Ari said, rescuing him. “The warlord’s daughter from the Last Domain. She is tasked by her father to go to the Fire Mountain.”

  A deep, deep vibration. Disapproving, uncertain—Nyr couldn’t tell.

  “Why?” the Ice King asked, the question spearing into Nyr’s bowels.

  “She will not say. But she promises trade concessions if we help her, and I think she is speaking the truth.”

  “No. No one goes to the Mountain.”

  And He was gone, just like that, letting go of Nyr’s body as a boy drops an apple core after eating the sweet flesh.

  His father collapsed onto the floor, but Nyr couldn’t move, still. If he moved, he felt, he might break apart. He had to find some way to knit himself back together. He heard his breath, and listened. In and out, that was the sound of life, the only antidote to death. The only one.

  Slowly, his father clambered to his feet and reached down to help him up. With human contact, he was finally able to move, to stand, to inch back from the edge and lean his back on the wall of the passageway.

  He opened his mouth to say something—anything, to hear the sound of a human voice—but his father quickly put a hand over his mouth and shook his head. Nyr realized they had to make the whole long trek back through the dark in silence, as they had come.

  Whatever was necessary. He would never, never, do anything which displeased the Ice King. Never.

  Mountainside, the Ice King’s Country

  Ash, Cedar and Tern followed the older man, Garn, into a corridor cut through the rock. Ash was used to caves—the sides of Hidden Valley, where he had grown up, were full of them, and the children of the valley played in them all summer, once the bears had left. He’d always liked caves, but only when he could feel fresh air on his face. As they went downward, he felt the air become stiller, and found himself drawing deeper breaths.

  Cedar, he knew, did not like being underground at all, so he put a hand on his shoulder in encouragement. But Cedar, who avoided the caves which stank of bear even in mid-summer, met his eyes with delight and pointed up as they came out of the passageway into a natural cavern which had been shaped into a hall, huge and high-roofed. He looked where Cedar pointed, and gaped.

  The long wall of the hall was covered with pictures. Paintings, row upon row of them, climbing the walls, becoming lighter and brighter as they went, as though the ones at the bottom were old. The hall was so far across that Ash couldn’t make out the details, but he could see they were scenes of ordinary life. Green grass with animals, women spinning in the sunshine, a tree. Some of them were obscured by scaffolding, and looking up to its top he saw a burly man lying flat on the topmost platform, carefully daubing the wall with paint. His face was as blank as a stonecaster’s as they let the stones fall. Behind him, stretching right across the long wall, was a flight of butterflies against a clear blue sky. Ash laughed. He couldn’t help it—the painting was so full of light and joy in flight that it called deeply to him. It was very different from the careful, painstaking works below it.

  Garn smiled at him, waiting patiently for him to stop gawking. Ash met Garn’s eyes, and nodded. Garn reminded him of his father, Mabry, who was a woodcarver and had a keen appreciation of beauty. For a moment they stood side by side, looking up, united in pleasure.

  “Urno is breaking many traditions,” he said, as if apologizing, “but he calls the Spring into our hearts, so we forgive him.”

  He raised his voice at the end of the sentence, and the painter above popped his head over the side of the scaffolding and grinned at him. Ash heard Tern gasp. It did look high, he thought, but Tern’s face was a mixture of shock and horror, which was strange.

  He looked a question at him, but Tern had wiped the expression away and stared back at him blankly.

  Garn sighed, noticing nothing of the exchange.

  “Come,” he said. “Or spring itself will have passed and winter be nipping at our heels before we are done.”

  There were very few people in the hall, and most of them were passing through on some errand, carrying pots or skeins of wool or tools or babies. Each person looked at them with frank curiosity, especially the women, who eyed Cedar in particular with real interest.

  Garn chuckled. “A new face as pretty as yours, lad, will have them all talking!”

  Cedar smiled at a young girl who giggled behind her hand and ran away to join a couple of older women near the big central fire.

  “Enough,” Ash growled at him, but he bowed anyway, with a flourish.

  The women hid smiles, but they kept looking, at Ash as well. Tern they assessed and dismissed.

  “A couple more years, lad, and they’ll all be running after you,” Garn reassured him, leading the way toward a curtained arch.

  “I hope not!” Tern said with real horror, and they all chuckled.

  It was too easy, Ash thought. They were in the heart of enemy land, in the middle of the Ice King’s Country, and they were sharing a jest. It made him uneasy, when he suspected Garn was trying to put him at ease. He would rather have met open hostility or suspicion.

  They went downward again, on a path smoothed by centuries of wear. Here the walls were decorated with hangings and objects hung or displayed on shelves. With a shock Ash recognized a piece of Domain pottery, a wine jug from the far south, with its unmistakable yellow and blue glaze. Thieves, he thought, glad of the reminder. These were the killers of hundreds of Domain people. Hidden Valley had been attacked three times in his own memory, and many times before that. They had fought the invaders off, but they had lost men—his own cousin, Aunty Gytha’s oldest son, had only one leg because of an Ice King attack. These people were not their friends, no matter how friendly they seemed.

  Alerted, he heard faint footfalls behind them. Garn might be simply taking them to the baths, whatever they were, but the Hárugur King was not a fool. There were other men watching them, ready for any trouble.

  He tightened his grip on his bow. He could not let them have it, and there was only one way to make sure of that.

  They passed turnings and archways hung with weavings; strange designs mostly in green and blue, as though these people were trying to bring the outside in. No, he realized, not the outside. The summer.

  Pity struck him, then, but he shook it away. No matter how hard and long the winters were here in the mountains, it did not excuse generations of murder and pillage by the Ice King’s men.

  Garn turned into a smaller passageway, and then ducked under a low arch. This was a natural cleft in the rock, not one of the smooth doors made by human hands. Beyond, Ash was struck by a rush of damp, hot air smelling faintly of brimstone, and by light: lamps were set on a series of ledges around the empty cave.

  In the middle was a pool—no, two, joined by a narrow channel. They were big enough to take a dozen men each, and steam wafted gently from their surface. Beyond the pools, far down in the corner of the long cave, was what looked like a small open fire pit. Ash took another step so he could see further, and found himself seared by the heat, his skin shrinking over his cheekbones. This was not a human fire. No fire that small could give out so much heat. It came from the mountain itself, and looked exactly like iron heated by a smith until it is whi
te hot.

  Cedar took his breath in and went still, his face in that blank stare that Ash knew meant Sight.

  “There is power here,” he said, forcing the words out with difficulty.

  Garn nodded.

  “The power of the Ice King,” he said. “He cares for his people.”

  Cedar shook his head. “No. No. Not the Ice King.”

  Garn’s face hardened. “That is not a thing which you should say, stranger. You are talking of things you know nothing about.” His accent had worsened—this was something he felt very strongly about.

  Cedar looked down at his hands, which were shaking.

  “I thank you for the advice,” he said carefully, “and will follow it.”

  Nodding, Garn turned away. “Strip and bathe,” he said, carefully casual. “Enjoy the gift of the Ice King.”

  He began to take off his boots, and Cedar and Tern followed suit. Ash could feel Cedar looking at him, waiting for him to take the lead. This was the time, Ash thought. The only time he could be sure of succeeding. He felt his heart twist. This bow had taken him so long, and was so beautiful. The arrows it loosed flew high and sure and certain, and they took his spirit with them as no other arrows ever had. He firmed his lips, took two steps toward the fire pit, until he couldn’t bear the heat any longer, and threw the bow into the pit. It flashed into flame and burned in an instant, leaving only a squiggle of ash where the sinew had been. A breeze came from nowhere to lift the ash into the air, swirl it, and let it settle again. Then that was consumed, too, and there was only the glowing pit.

  Tern exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

  When Ash turned back, Garn was frowning, and Cedar had a queer smile on his face, as though he had seen something he hadn’t expected.