“Yes.” The quin with the longest life expectancy flashed me a smile.
“How is it that Snorri’s in charge here?” I asked. “You’re Jarl Torsteff’s heir, aren’t you?” I didn’t plan to undermine Snorri’s authority, unless it turned out Ein could order him to give up his quest—which seemed unlikely whatever the chain of command should be—but as a prince it did strike me as odd that a man whose only birthright was a few acres of sloping rock fields should be ordering the North’s aristocracy about.
“Actually I have seven older brothers. Two sets of triplets and a singleton, Agar, Father’s heir. It might be that they’re all dead now, I suppose.” He pursed his lips at that, as if seeing how the idea tasted. “But Snorri is a champion of the Undoreth. There are songs about his deeds in battle. If Einhaur and my father’s halls are burned—then my authority stands on nothing but ash. Better to let a man who truly knows war to lead us on our last raid.”
I nodded. If we were bound to our course, then Snorri was the man to take us to the bitter end. Even so, I didn’t like the concept of a man’s rank being something that could so easily be set aside. It might be true for a jarl’s son here amidst the snows, but in the warmth of Red March a prince would be a prince no matter what came. I took a measure of comfort in that, and in the fact that dawn had long since passed so Baraqel couldn’t sour my mood with his own judgment on the matter of princes.
• • •
Towards evening of that second day we reached a great work and wonder of the Builders, high amongst the peaks. A huge dam wall had been constructed, spanning a valley, taller than any tower, thick enough at the top for four wagons to drive along it side by side, and wider still at the bottom. A vast lake must once have been held behind it, though to what purpose I couldn’t say.
“Wait!” I needed a rest and the ruins provided the perfect excuse.
Snorri came back along the slope, frowning, but he allowed that we might stop for a few minutes whilst I satisfied my aristocratic curiosity. I satisfied it from a sitting position, letting my gaze roam along the valley sides. Enormous stone pipes ran out through the bedrock beneath the dam, obviously to control the flow of water, but why I couldn’t guess. The whole place was built on the scale of the mountains, each structure huge enough to make ants of men. Even the pipes would accommodate several elephants walking side by side, with headroom for riders. In such a place you could believe the Norse stories of frost giants who shaped the world and cared nothing for humanity.
I sat on my pack beside Tuttugu, staring out across the valley, both of us munching on apples he’d dug from his pack, wizened but still sweet with the taste of summer.
“So every Viking name seems to mean something . . . Snorri means ‘attack,’ Arne is ‘eagle,’ the quins came out numbered . . .” I broke off to let Tuttugu supply the explanation of his own, something heroic probably. If they applied names with any accuracy, Tuttugu would mean “timid fatty” and Jalan would mean “runs away screaming.”
“Twenty,” he said.
“What?”
“Twenty.”
I glanced towards the huddle of quins. “Good God! Your poor mother!”
Tuttugu grinned at that. “No, it’s not my birth name, just what people call me. There was a contest at Jarl Torsteff’s feast after the victory over Hoddof of Iron Tors, and I won.”
“A contest?” I frowned, trying to puzzle how Tuttugu won anything.
“An eating contest.” He patted his belly.
“You ate twenty . . .” I tried to think of something a person might reasonably eat twenty of. “Eggs?”
“Close.” He rubbed his chins, short fingers buried in ginger fuzz. “Chickens.”
• • •
It took four days rather than the promised two before we looked down upon the sparkling length of the Uulisk from a high ridge, endless miles of mountain trekking to our rear. Snorri pointed out a dark spot along the shoreline.
“Einhaur.” I could tell nothing of its fate from our remove, save there were no fishing boats at its quays.
“Look.” Arne pointed out along the fjord, further seaward. A longship, tiny from where we stood, a child’s toy out on the flat waters of the Uulisk. Near the prow a red dot . . . a painted eye?
“Edris and his Hardanger friends, I’m guessing,” Snorri said. “Best press on.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
The trek to the Black Fort proved much as Snorri had described it. Only a lot worse. Although Edris might have followed us, or have been ahead in the race to the fort, in such a huge and empty expanse it’s impossible to think of yourself as chased or chasing. You are either alone, or not alone. We were alone, and our enemy pressed us on every side. The wind and the cold of the Uplands are things that must be experienced; words will not tame them into something that can be given over. We left behind trees, then bushes, then even the hardiest of grasses until the world was nothing but rock and snow. The snow patches joined each to the next to become unbroken. The days grew shorter with frightening speed, and each morning Baraqel would no longer harangue me but merely unfold his wings, golden with the dawn, and bid me be worthy of my line. Snorri would sit apart from us when the sun fell, plunging from the sky and drawing the long night behind it. In those moments, as ice devoured sun, I could see her walk about him: Aslaug, a lean beauty fashioned from the gloom, her spider form scurrying in her footsteps, black across the snow.
Each hour became a process of taking a dull future and squeezing it into a dull past through the narrow slot of the moment—a moment, like each other, crowded with pain and exhaustion, and with a cold that crept around you like a lover carrying murder in her heart. I tried to keep myself warm with thoughts of better times, most of them in someone else’s bed. Strange to say, and surely a sign of my brain’s slow freeze, although I could summon to mind countless moments of coitus, long limbs, smooth curves, waves of hair, the only face that would appear was Lisa DeVeer’s, showing—as it always did—part amusement, part exasperation, part affection. In fact, as the cold North sucked the life out of me I found myself remembering times outside her bed more than within it—conversations, the way she ran her fingers through her hair when puzzling, the cleverness of her replies. I blamed it on snow fever.
We camped in the lee of any outcrop we could find and burned charcoal from our packs to put a little warmth into our food. The snows south of the Bitter Ice would thaw occasionally. Maybe two years would pass, maybe five, but eventually a particularly high summer would melt them back to bare rock in all but the deep places, and so the ice we walked on was never thick enough to cover every rise and fold of the land. The Bitter Ice itself, however, that glacial sheet never melted, though it might retreat a mile or three over the course of lifetimes. And the land beneath it hadn’t seen the sun in centuries, maybe since Christ walked the world. Maybe never.
On the long march through an icy waste, no one talks. You keep your mouth closed to seal the heat in your body. You cover your face and watch a white world through the slit that remains. You put one foot before the next and hope that it’s a straight line you’re plotting—letting the rise and fall of the sun guide your progress. And while you try to force your body along the straightest path, the paths your mind follows become increasingly twisted. Your thoughts wander. Old friends revisit. Old times catch you up once more. You dream. With your eyes open, and with the plod and plod of numb feet to punctuate each minute, you dream.
I dreamed of Great-Uncle Garyus, lying broken in his high tower, older than sin and smelling only slightly better. His nurses cleaned him, carried him, fed him, took away a measure of his dignity every day, though he never seemed to lack for more.
Garyus probably would have thanked any god that could give him even a day of walking, even in a place like this. And even at the end of a day of such labour, bone-cold, bone-tired, hunched within my misery, I wouldn’t have swapped with him.
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My great-uncle had lain there year upon year, placed by age and infirmity on death’s doorstep. The Red Queen had told us that there really was a door into death, and it seemed that Garyus had been knocking on it since the day he’d come broken into the world.
In my dreams I returned to that day with the sun slanting in past his shutters, when Garyus had folded my hands around that locket in his own, large-knuckled, liver-spotted, and tremulous. “Your mother’s likeness,” he had said. “Keep it safe.” And safe meant secret. I knew that, even at six.
I’d sat and watched that old and broken man. Listened to his stories, laughed at them as children do, sat silent and round-eyed when the tales turned dark. Most of that time I never knew him as my great-uncle. And none of that time did I know him as brother to the Silent Sister—though of course it seemed only right the Sister should be someone’s sister.
I wondered if Garyus were scared of his twin, the blind-eye woman, his silent sister. Could a person be scared of their twin? Would that be like being scared of yourself? I knew that many men were scared of themselves, frightened that they would let themselves down, that they would run rather than fight, choose the dishonourable path, the easy path rather than the hard. Me, I trusted myself always to do what was right—for Jalan Kendeth. The only times I scared myself were the rare occasions I was tempted to stand and fight, those few times when anger had gotten the better of me and almost stepped me into danger.
How much did Garyus, there in his tower with his stories and gifts for children, know of his sisters’ battles? I looked at those memories now as a puzzle. Was there another way to see them? Like those trick drawings where everything is obvious until someone tells you “the lump is a dent” and suddenly you see it—what was a bump is now a hollow, pushed in, not standing out—they all are, every rise and hollow reversed, the image has changed, its meaning flipped around, and try as you like you can’t see it as before: solid, unambiguous, worthy of your trust.
Did Garyus know his younger sister thought she knew where death’s door lay?
“Jal.” A tired voice. “Jal.”
I thought of Garyus, the Red Queen’s brother, eyes aglitter in that narrow bed. Older than her, surely? Had he known her plans? How much of all this had that crippled old man set in motion?
“Jal!”
Shouldn’t he have been king? Wouldn’t he have been King of the Red March if he weren’t broken so?
“JAL!”
“What?” I stumbled, almost fell.
“We’re stopping.” Snorri, bowed and tired, the ice wastes making mock of his strength just as it did of all men’s strength. He raised a hand, pointing within his glove. I followed his direction. Ahead of us the walls of the Bitter Ice rose without preamble: sheer, beautiful, taller than my imagination.
• • •
We ate despite the effort it took, fumbling with dead fingers to make a spark, using the last of our kindling, lighting the charcoal to heat a pot and knowing there would be no heat but what our bodies made from then on.
That night for the longest time I didn’t sleep. The skies grew clear overhead and stars dazzled down upon us as the temperature fell away. Each breath hurt, drawing frozen razors of air into my chest. Death seemed both near and inviting. I shivered despite the furs, despite layers and more layers. And when at last dreams took me down I held no surety of ever waking.
In some dead hour past midnight the silence woke me. The unrelenting wind had for once relented, dropping away to nothing. I cracked open an eye and stared into the darkness. The miracle came suddenly and without warning. In one moment the sky lit with shifting veils of light, rolling through the colours, first red, then an eerie green, next a blue I’d not seen before. And always shifting, from one serpentlike form to the next. The silence and the scale of it kept the breath in my chest. The whole sky overwritten, a hundred miles and more of the heavens dancing with glory to some tune that only angels hear.
I know now that it must have been a dream, but in that moment I believed it with all my heart, and it filled me with wonder and with fear. Nothing before or since has made me feel so small, and yet that great and dancing mystery of light, huger than mountains, played out above an empty wasteland to no audience but me . . . it made me feel, just for the briefest time . . . significant.
In the morning Fimm did not rise.
“Now it is my turn.” Fjórir sewed his brother into his sleeping sack with a long bone needle and gut thread.
“Will he rise?” I eyed the sack, half-expecting it to move.
Snorri shook his head, solemn. Behind him Tuttugu rubbed his eyes. Of all of us the quins, now quads, seemed least moved.
“He’s frozen,” Snorri said.
“But.” My face felt too solid for frowning. “But you found a dead man struggling after a day or more in a snowbank.”
“The necromancers inject them with an elixir. Something of oils and salts, the Broke-Oar said. It keeps them from locking solid.” Snorri had told me this before, but the cold had frozen my memory.
“This army beneath the ice . . . Olaaf Rikeson’s troops—the Dead King’s men—will need to thaw them and treat them in this manner. Unless they have some new magics it doesn’t seem possible. The effort involved to drag them frozen to the south, or to bear sufficient fuel north . . .” I thought of the other part to the tale Snorri had told. The key that would open the frost giants’ gates—Loki’s gift. The key that would open anything. “Perhaps all they ever wanted was Rikeson’s key. That one thing.” And for some reason that thought worried me more than an army of corpses rising from the ice.
• • •
Snorri had aimed west of the fort so that the line of the Bitter Ice could lead us east towards it. If he had steered us wrong, then we were walking away from the fort into the ice-bound wastelands of the interior, where we would all die without the least inconvenience to anyone. Death seemed certain either way, and if turning back alone offered even the slightest hope of survival, then I would have been off without delay. Unfortunately, as Tuttugu had discovered in battle, running away is sometimes the least safe option, and whilst dying was the last thing I wanted to do, dying by myself seemed somehow worse.
I staggered on, across the unending whiteness, wondering if the Silent Sister had already watched my suffering when she looked beyond tomorrow. I crunched the ice, feet numb, the wind’s keening filling my head. Had she counted out each frozen step or just seen the great white shape of our trek across the snows? How many possibilities had lain strewn across the future for her? And how many of them saw us dead? Foot before foot, too cold for shivering, dying by degrees. Perhaps in some futures the crack that chased me had caught and destroyed me before I even reached Snorri; in others he may have killed me as I ran into him. Did she know for certain that her spell would find a home in us, be carried north to the very edge of the Bitter Ice? Did she know whether her magics would wither inside us or take root and grow into more than they had been? Was she certain, or was she maybe, like her great-nephew, a gambler always ready to roll those dice one time too many? I saw her narrow smile in my mind’s eye, and it did little to warm me. Foot before foot. Endlessly on.
• • •
Just as Snorri had described, the Black Fort took me by surprise. The landscape offered no clues, no buildup, no growing promise of journey’s end. One moment it was a featureless white wasteland, bounded on one side by the Bitter Ice; the next moment it was the same featureless wasteland, except there was a feature, a black dot.
The trek had worn us to our final strength—Fimm it had worn past even that—but we were none of us the shambling, frostbitten wreck that Snorri had been when he had last stumbled to the gates. We came with at least some measure of fight in us, some final reserve to draw upon. And, as little as I wanted to battle anyone, I knew for sure that without the chance to rest and restock in the shelter offered by the Bl
ack Fort, I for one would not survive a return journey.
Snorri led us closer. Urging swiftness. He wanted to be inside before the sun set—wanted Aslaug’s strength in the fight to come. The terrain offered no cover and we relied only on being white upon a white background to hide us, and also on the hope that nobody would be looking out for us. This latter proved an unfounded hope.
“Wait.” Ein, raising a gloved hand. “Man in the south tower.”
However well we blended against the snow, with the sun sinking behind us our shadow might yet announce our approach if the man were paying close enough attention.
The Black Fort is a squat, square construction with a crenellated tower at each corner. A central keep, barely taller than the outer walls, sits amidst a large courtyard. Snorri believed the keep unmanned and that the small garrison kept to chambers within the thickness of the walls around the main gates.
“The Dead-Eye will shoot him,” Snorri said. “Then we climb.”
Arne rubbed gloved fingers across his face guard, the soft hide frozen stiff and hanging with miniature icicles. The wind swirled around us, full of razors. “It’s a long shot.”
“Not for the Dead-Eye!” A quad slapped him on the shoulder.
“And the light’s failing.” A shake of the head.
“Easy!” Another quad.
A slump of shoulders. “I’ll get my bow ready,” Arne said. “Then we move closer.”
It took a damned long time, extracting and unwrapping the bow, finding the string, waxing that, flexing this, warming fingers, hooking one thing to another. They’d taught me archery back in Vermillion, of course. Every prince had to know the art. Rather than having us become crack shots, Grandmother was, apparently, more interested that we know and understand the possibilities and limitations of the weapon so that we could better utilize it en masse upon the battlefield. Even so, we still had to hit the bull’s-eye.
If all those long hours of much-resented archery practice had taught me anything, it was that wind will make a fool of even the best archer, a swirling, gusty wind especially so.