“What … what happened to you?” asked Avrel, his voice expressing tenderness at first, then fear. Tenderness. Not something a fighting bear was used to.
“If you’re going to kill me, strike quickly,” said Kailar. Despite the toxins swelling his tongue, his voice was still able, fearsome and low.
Avrel gulped and shook his head. “Are you Kailar?” he asked. Instantly, he knew this was too quick a prompt. The fighting bear shook with confusion and rage, an act which only increased his suffering and made him cough spots of bright red blood.
“Be calm,” Avrel said, shuffling back. He trod his paws anxiously, fretful that the fit would end the bear’s life. And where would his mission be, then?
“How do you know me?” Kailar said. The words were a gargle of air and bile. His brown eyes rolled and he saw the sky shift. He put out a paw, as if to touch it.
“I am a Teller. I was sent to find you,” said Avrel.
“Teller?” said Kailar in a whisper of death.
“Listen to me! You’re not going to die!” said Avrel. He stamped the ice hard, making Kailar snort himself back to full consciousness. Avrel stepped forward and sniffed at the awful, bitter-tasting substance that covered nearly three parts of Kailar’s body. Twice he reeled back, for the stench was foul. And the texture? Like blood, half-gelling into blubber. “This is oil,” he said, as a memory of it came to him. He and his mother had once swum close to a small vessel — a boat, steered by men, that leaked this dirt. She had made him taste it, not to ease his hunger but to warn him that some things were worse than hunger. On the water, the oil had seemed harmless enough. On Kailar, it looked like a coat of death.
“How did you come to be like this?”
“What does it matter?” Kailar replied. “Who sent you? How could you find what you do not know?”
But Avrel was no longer listening to him. His gaze was fastened into the distance where the dome of the sky was steadily changing. He could feel a strange wind rising off the ice and prayed for the help and relief it might bring. “Look!” he gasped suddenly. “Look ahead of you! Now!”
Kailar had already seen it and thought he must be dreaming. Far ahead was another landscape of ice, somehow in the sky but tilted toward them. It was not a reflection, for the patterns of the leads and ridges were different and the sky there was brighter, like another season. Neither was it upside down. This he could tell because walking across it was a large male bear. It was padding toward them.
“Turn around, Teller,” Kailar said wearily. “This spirit is for me. Go, or he might take your ears for a prize.”
“No,” said Avrel, standing his ground. “His name is Ingavar. He is your Nanukapik, come to be with you.”
Kailar looked up and saw the air shimmer. When it was still, there was one lot of ice but two bears over him. Nanukapik? The word bubbled through his head like water emerging out of a seal hole. He was a cub the last time he’d heard this term. It meant “greatest bear.” Was this the nature of death, he wondered? Regression? A swift return to the den?
Ingavar looked at the stricken body. “You have done well to find him,” he said, even though Avrel thought he could see a great fury raging in Ingavar’s eyes. How deeply it must pain him to see such a proud bear wounded so.
“I am dying,” said Kailar. “Leave me in peace.”
“You were strong once, you can be strong again,” said Ingavar.
Kailar snorted and closed his eyes.
“Listen to him. Trust him,” Avrel said urgently. “You saw him walk out of another world.”
“Then maybe he could lick this poison off me!” Kailar said bitterly, trying to growl. His head thumped back against the ice once more. Nanukapiks. Tellers. Death by spoiling. Would this torture never end?
Ingavar slowly circled the body, pausing at last by Kailar’s head, where a paw print of oil was clear on the surface. “What would you do for a new life, Kailar?”
“I have nothing to give,” he said.
“All I ask is your devotion,” Ingavar said. And he placed his paw briefly where Kailar’s had stood. Avrel shuddered as a circle of flames leapt off the ice, eating up the space where the oil had been.
Kailar saw them and snarled. “Do what you want to me, spirit. I was born into the line of the ice bear, Ragnar. I will fight your fire to my dying breath.”
Ingavar came forward and raised his paw. “This is the fire of life,” he said. “Believe it, if you want to survive …” And from each of his claws came a short burst of light. When he stepped back again, Kailar was burning.
It was the most chilling sight Avrel had ever witnessed. Twice before he had seen the spectacle of fire and even once seen a careless bear singed by its heat. This was different. Kailar was immersed in a purifying blizzard. A white fire that neither made the ice around them zing nor sent smoke lines curling through the air. It consumed his whole body from tail tip to snout. And Avrel saw — for an instant, before terror turned his head — the dry bones, the frame, the peltless Kailar. Only when Ingavar said, It is done, did he find the courage to look back again.
Kailar was alive. Alive and unstained. The only marks on his creamy pelt now were old battle scars. The tattoos of his life. The symbols of his lineage, importance, and strength.
He got up groggily, as far as one knee. “My name is Kailar,” he said — a gesture of formality. “Everything I am is yours to command.”
“Rise,” said Ingavar, and when Kailar was standing he addressed both bears. “You are my chosen companions: a bear from the noblest of fighting packs and a Teller’s son.” (Avrel tipped his head.) “We are on a journey of life,” said Ingavar. “The ice is changing. The North is under threat. Bears are starving because the seasons have altered. The spirit that is Gaia, goddess of the Earth, is restless and wanting to act upon these changes. All living things may suffer if she does.”
“Can we fight this spirit?” Kailar asked boldly. “No,” said Ingavar, “we must work with her to bring about the means for change. There will be stories to Tell,” he said to Avrel, “some battles to be fought,” he said to Kailar, “but the greatest battle is here, inside us.” He turned a paw inward, close to his chest. “Soon, the world will turn its eyes north, and the ice will be melting in the souls of men —”
“Men?” said Kailar, deep in his throat. Avrel glanced uneasily at him. Kailar looked taller now, prouder, dangerous.
“The enemy and the savior,” Ingavar said. “We must appeal to them, Kailar. We must make them understand that protecting the North protects them also.”
“How do we do this?” Avrel asked. He was thinking back to the oldest stories, of the Inuk, Oomara, and the war with Ragnar.
“We make our struggle known to them,” Ingavar replied. “To as many as we can, in all the ways that we can. Some of these ways you will not understand.”
“And then?” Kailar remembered asking.
“Then something wonderful will come of it,” said Ingavar. And he struck the ice with fire once more, sending a blaze far back across the pack until, in the distance, a light could be seen on the ocean itself.
It was a flicker of light, not as bright as fire, that brought Kailar’s thoughts back into the present. He glanced at the sky where a star was winking. There was nothing unusual in that, but the more he looked at this weak yellow speck, the more he thought it resembled an eye. He let his gaze widen and thought he could make out a shape around it. A bird’s head. A raven’s head. A raven.
A sign.
He looked down. Just ahead of him, a pressure ridge had formed with a heavy collection of snow at its base. Instinct told him that was where he should dig.
He went in with powerful scoops of his paws, throwing back layers of compacted snow as if they were no heavier than the fur around his ears. Soon, he had a hole as large as his body. But still he plowed on, convinced he was correct, until — fortune: His claws struck ice. Ice within ice that resisted his raking. He shuffled his position and dug sideway
s a little, uncovering a block that seemed to measure almost the width of his chest. Before long, two sides were completely revealed. He grew impatient then and threw his body weight behind it, pushing with all of a fighting bear’s might. The block spilled out and tumbled to the flat. It was filled with fracture lines and opaque patches, but even in dim light the shadows at its center were unmistakable. Feathers. Feet. A raven in flight.
Kailar snouted it and eyed it for life. He had been enclosed in some dens in his time, but never one quite as tight as this. The creature looked perfect, but had to be dead. Even Ingavar’s fire couldn’t bring it back, surely? But if the Nanukapik’s words were true, this thing would walk once its legs were freed. Intrigued, he knocked the block onto its side, where he had a better overall view. The bird’s frozen yellow eye unnerved him for a second. So he rose up and laid a paw over the chunk, blocking the stare from view. He tapped the ice with his stronger left paw, figuring out where best to make his strike. He knew he must be accurate — forceful, but restrained. One serious blow would crush the whole thing, and all that would be left would be water and smears.
He punched it. A corner broke off with ease. He punched again, harder, and heard the ice groan. Once more and it split along an internal rupture. Kailar scraped at it and thumped again. Away came the uppermost section of the chunk, freeing the raven’s head in the process.
Success.
“Bird, can you hear me? Speak to me, raven.” Several times he repeated these words, even tilting his ear to the animal’s beak to try to detect any whispers from its lungs. But there was nothing. And he dared not touch it. The slightest pressure from his clumsy paw would snap the head right off the body. Legs, he thought, would be even more fragile. What should he do? Leave it? Wait? Eat it and be done? He chose to wait, lie down, and sleep for a while.
Later, when the journey back to Ingavar was about to begin, he wished many times that he had not been so patient or so lenient. He was sleeping soundly when an awful caark! caark! ripped through his brain. He shook himself awake, unsettling several light ridges of snow that had collected around his eyes and ears. The raven had not been so lucky. Its head was entirely covered with snow, apart from a minor breathing hole created by the constant spitting from its beak. Caark! it sounded again, making Kailar jump. He approached, half-thinking he might kill it anyway just for having his sleep disturbed. But he relented and merely blew the snow away, as much as he could remove by snorting anyway.
The raven shook its head. One eye swiveled forward. “Oh, perfect,” it sneered. “That’s all I needed. Stale seal breath from a snow-shuffling lump of potbellied fur. Let me go, you squinty-eyed piece of …” The insults went on and on, but Kailar was tired — and the blizzard was beginning to increase in strength. As the first cold spicules pinged his snout, he remembered some advice his mother had given him. “When you can’t sleep, imagine your ears are filling with snow. Count the flakes and sleep will take you.” Kailar settled down again.
“What?” screeched the bird.
Tomorrow, or however long it took to wake, he would free the bird’s legs and they would search for Ingavar —
“Lemming brain!” it spat.
— if he hadn’t rolled over and flattened it by then.
One flake, two flakes, three flakes …
10
AN EVENING AT ALLANDALE’S
It was during the final weeks of her pregnancy, and for the first months after Alexa had been born, that Zanna had found she needed the most support. Liz was always on hand, of course. Lucy, too, had been a tower of strength then. And though Gretel had helped with restful potions, especially at night when Zanna had sometimes had difficulty sleeping, no one could calm her quite like Arthur. It was during this stressful phase that he had first invited her to meditate with him. Peace, he told her, came from inner silence. In the silence she would find contentment and truth.
Arthur was no stranger to the concept of silence. He had spent many isolated, troubled years at an island monastery, trying to understand the nature of the universe and how it related to human consciousness, a journey that had shown him many wonders and dealt him many blows. The blindness he endured, caused by the agent of an alien life form in the struggle to protect a guardian of the universe, a dragon known to them all as Grockle, was both a hindrance and a blessing. In his daily life, the darkness was inconvenient. But in the Dragon’s Den, locked away in deep contemplation, it was a catalyst of enlightenment, a window which opened on the quality of devotion. For these trials, ordeals, and years of hardship had finally brought him here, to this house, to Elizabeth.
Everything happened for a reason.
Everything.
So when Zanna sat with him that Sunday afternoon, before she chose to go out and meet Tam Farrell, Arthur listened to her, not with the ear of a priest or its surrogate, but with the ear of a man who felt nothing but unconditional love for her. A state in which he could not pass judgment. A pool in which she could mirror her thoughts.
“I mean, I feel … I don’t know what I feel. Help me, Arthur. I’m …”
“Be calm,” he said. “Breathe slowly. Breathe deep.”
Zanna synchronized her airflow again. The third time she’d done so since the session started. She pulled her left foot tight against her thigh. That was a measure of her tension, she thought: cramp, sitting in the lotus position. She glanced at Gwillan. Would she like him to hurr on her toes? he asked.
“No,” she said gratefully, and set herself again. “I mean, I see Liz’s point, but I feel mixed up.”
“Are you frightened of letting go?” asked Arthur.
“Of David?” She sounded alarmed. “I could never give him up. He’s …”
Arthur parted his lips again. “Are you afraid of letting go of yourself, Zanna?”
She tipped her head forward, sending her long hair cascading down her cheeks. After a few seconds lost in thought she replied, “I told Lexie about G’lant.” She looked up for any sign of a reaction, but his face was a model of stillness and serenity. “Was that letting go? Or was I just passing the buck to my child because I can’t cope alone with the burden of carrying that invisible flame?”
Gadzooks, sitting on a stool behind Zanna, shifted his wings uncomfortably.
Arthur opened his eyes. She preferred it like this. Although he could not see her, it seemed as though he did. It felt more personal. “When I was blinded by the Fain,” he said, “I was terrified, but not for the reason you imagine. In the moment I commingled with that extraordinary creature, I was exposed to a greater part of the universe. I saw worlds I did not believe I could imagine. I sensed feelings …” He swallowed and closed his eyes again. “Every light is visible somewhere, Zanna. Your love for David is alive. You created it. On some level, you can be certain he knows you care for him. And that’s enough, enough for you to open your hands and let G’lant fly free.”
“I know, I know, I know,” she repeated, dragging the back of her hand under her eye. “But I don’t want to feel I’m betraying him, Arthur.”
“Let go,” he counseled her, quiet and assured. “Follow your instinct. Follow your heart.”
Zanna sighed and looked up. On a shelf just behind Liz’s workbench was a dragon called Gauge. He was a counting dragon and the most accurate “clock” in the house. She raised an eyebrow and Gauge in turn raised his paws for her, making the hands for 7:10 p.m. Fifty minutes before the poetry reading began.
Zanna uncrossed her legs and nudged her feet into her shoes. “Follow my heart?”
“Always,” said Arthur.
She nodded, bent forward, and gently kissed his cheek. “Thank you. I know what I have to do. We’ll speak again tomorrow. Love and light.”
“Love and light,” he said in return. “Enjoy yourself.”
Zanna knew Allandale’s bookshop well. When David’s first book, Snigger and the Nutbeast, had been published, the shop had organized a small promotional event to celebrate the success of their most
local — and mysterious — author. This was the first time the readers of Scrubbley had come to discover that the man who had made their library gardens famous was doing so posthumously. A journalist and photographer from the Scrubbley Evening Echo had turned up that night, hoping to talk to the “family” of Mr. Rain. Zanna, by prior agreement with Liz, had opted to stay anonymous, and it was Liz and David’s editor, Dilys Whutton, who gave the paper what they needed to know: David disappeared tragically, presumed drowned, on a scientific expedition to the Arctic. His next — and last — book, White Fire, would be set there. For the sake of his nearest and dearest, that was all they wished to say.
Zanna caught her breath. It was the same room, set out in just the same way, with three arcs of soft-backed chairs and a small lectern at the front. The main ceiling lights had been turned off, and the room was illuminated by filtered blue halogens built into the two walls of bookshelves. Ten or a dozen people were already randomly seated, poring over programs, but Zanna’s eye was drawn to a larger group, clustered around a table where tea and fruit juice were being served. She spotted Tam Farrell in quiet conversation with a spiky-haired woman, whom she knew to be the bookshop owner, Cassandra. He was dressed almost identically to the way she’d last seen him, but without his glasses. He seemed more handsome, if less stylish, as a result. Zanna gulped at the embedded disloyalty of this thought and almost turned to leave, but by then he had spotted her and was waving in acknowledgement. He finished off his drink and came hurrying to greet her, hand extended.
“Hi. Glad you could make it. Come on in. What would you like to drink?”