Little Fur was glad of the rain, for although no road beast had passed along the road yet, there were marks to show that several had gone by in the night, and more were likely to pass in the day. Rain, like night, would make it hard for the humans to see them.
By midday no road beast had gone by, and the rain stopped but the sky was a dull, dark gray that promised more snow before night. The pass had widened, and its steep walls now sloped backward. Graysong explained that they were entering a long sliver of a valley that ran lengthwise along the mountain range. The black road ran straight across the valley to another pass. There was also a place where a number of smaller roads set off in different directions. They would take one of these smaller roads up into the mountains.
“How long will it take us to find the Mystery?” Little Fur asked.
“Their territory is two wolf lopes away,” the wolf answered. Little Fur smelled that this meant two days, for a wolf could lope for a whole day in his prime.
The sky had begun to darken again when Crow flapped down to say that there was a crossroads ahead. Suddenly they heard the low roar of a road beast. Looking back, they could see that it was moving very slowly. They had plenty of time to get behind some snowy shrubs. As it passed, Little Fur saw that it wore chains, and it clanked and crunched and groaned so laboriously along the icy road that she wondered if it was an old road beast.
“I need to hunt,” Graysong said when the road beast was gone. “Keep going along the black road until you come to the crossroads. Find a safe place and wait for me.”
Little Fur nodded. The wolf padded away, a gray shape only a little too light to be a shadow. Two more road beasts passed before she reached the crossroads, but they did not slow. Little Fur found a clump of bushes growing over a big rock, under which there was a good dry den. It smelled of fox, but it was empty. The smell reminded her of Sorrow, and Little Fur hoped with all her heart that the gallant fox had found what he sought in the great wilderness. She lay down and slept, only to be awakened by a vixen. Little Fur was startled to see that she was entirely white.
“Greetings, vixen,” she said politely. “I am sorry for the invasion. I thought the den abandoned.”
“I abandoned it only two nights past, but something made me return,” the vixen said. “Are you journeying to the midwinter weaving? Perhaps you do not know that there is no longer a ceremony in the mountains?”
“I am journeying to help a friend,” Little Fur told her. “My name is Little Fur.”
“My name is No-One,” the vixen said.
“Little Fur!” Crow screamed.
Little Fur crawled out from under the bush to see the vulture from the zoo descending—but she was not attacking. She landed beside Little Fur and folded her feathers up.
“I have been looking for you, elf troll,” she said.
“Why?” Little Fur asked, bemused.
No-One had come out now, too. Little Fur was fascinated to see that she was not white after all, but the palest glimmering silver gray.
“I have a message, so to speak,” the vulture said. “Indeed, you might say I was given it because I was seeking you.” She paused and looked at Little Fur, first out of one eye and then out of the other. She added, “The message was given to me en route.”
“On the way?” Little Fur smelled the meaning of her words. “Who gave the message to you? A wolf?”
“I suppose you mean that wolf you helped to escape from the zoo. Oh, what a to-do there was! Who would have imagined such a fuss over a mere wolf? Of course, they have not even noticed my absence. So many humans running to and fro.” She seemed disgusted, though whether it was because of the fuss over the wolf or the lack of fuss over herself Little Fur could not tell.
“Why did you go back to the zoo?” Little Fur asked.
“It was not my intention. I meant to fly away, but I kept ending up back there. It was most troubling. Then it came to me that perhaps I had not discharged my debt to you. I promised to get a key and I did not get it. So I decided to come see you and offer my service. I knew you were going to the mountains, and as soon as I thought of coming to you, I was able to leave the zoo. It is amazing what direction can come of a purpose!”
“You said there was a message?” Little Fur prompted the long-winded bird.
“Aha. Ah, yes. The message. Well. As I said, I was seeking you and I spied two nice ferrets. One of them was wounded, and I thought it would make a nice snack. But the she-ferret attacked me. Thin and weary she looked, but she attacked me so ferociously!”
“Two ferrets! What were their names?” Little Fur cried.
“Well, usually, you know, I do not ask the names of my prey. It would be rude to eat someone whose name I knew. But I might as well have asked, for in the end I did not eat her or her brother. I told the she-ferret that it was her duty to nourish one who had a debt to repay. She said she had a vow to fulfill and that a vow was more important than a debt. I asked what she had vowed and to whom. ‘I must deliver an urgent message to the healer Little Fur,’ she said. You can imagine my astoundment. ‘My debt is to Little Fur!’ I told her. Then I said that you had gone to the mountains to save a cat. She gave a great cry and said she must return to find you, but that her brother was so ill, she didn’t know how she could. I offered to eat him and relieve her of her burden, but she was most—”
“Did she say anything about Ginger? The cat?” Little Fur interrupted.
“She said that he had been captured by—” She broke off and frowned. “Was it a rat?”
“One of those he traveled with was a rat,” Little Fur said.
“Really? A rat and a cat and two ferrets. How extraordinary. Well, I don’t suppose it can have been a rat that captured the cat, in that case, though they are said to be dangerously clever creatures….”
“Please! Try to remember who captured him?” Little Fur pleaded.
“Did she mention a human?” the vulture pondered.
“A human?”
“Perhaps it wasn’t a human.” The vulture sank her head into her feathers and gave a depressed sniff. “I knew there was too much to remember. Some of it must have fallen out as I was flying. But I do remember one thing. The she-ferret said that Little Fur must not…not…”
“Not…?” Little Fur prompted.
“Risk yourself. He will free himself. That was the message. Little Fur must not come to Ginger.”
“I must go,” Little Fur said.
“Oh dear!” said the vulture. “If only I could recall the rest.” Her neck straightened out suddenly and rather alarmingly. “I must fly back and ask her! I’m sure she will not be too hard to find. The sick ferret was going very slowly. He might even have died,” she added hopefully.
“All right,” Little Fur said. “But I am still going up into the mountains.”
“Very well,” the vulture said. Her stomach rumbled loudly, and she glanced with wistful hunger at Gem. “I suppose you need that owl.”
“Begone!” Crow screamed.
“I merely asked,” the vulture said haughtily before flapping into the air.
“If the friend you seek is in the mountains, you must forget him,” No-
One said.
Little Fur looked at her. “Why do you say I should not go to the mountains?”
“Because beasts who go there die.”
CHAPTER 8
The Fjord Spirit
The night had come, the silver fox had gone and a hazy moon had risen before Graysong returned. The old wolf insisted that they set off at once, for he meant them to reach the mountains by the morning.
When they reached another crossroads, Graysong said they would follow a narrow road of crushed rock. Little Fur scattered snow to let her cross the black road safely. The narrow road ran over flat ground at first; then it slanted and climbed the side of the valley. It narrowed further, becoming more of a track with a rock wall on one side and a sheer drop on the other.
“What if a road beast comes?” Lit
tle Fur panted.
“The way ahead was broken off by a rockslide when I was a cub,” said Graysong. “What remains is too narrow for road beasts to pass.”
Little Fur did not know whether to be reassured or to begin worrying about rockslides. To distract herself, she told the wolf about the news that the vulture had brought. Then she told him what the fox had said.
“You are still determined to go to the mountains?”
“Yes,” Little Fur said. “The Sett Owl said I had to find the Mystery.”
“She said you were to seek it if you wished to find your friend,” Graysong said.
“Ginger would find me if I was in danger,” Little Fur answered, a trollish stubbornness filling her.
Up and up they climbed as the moon marched across the sky. Despite her worries, Little Fur’s elf blood rejoiced in the sharp air and the bright moon. The night grew steadily colder, and finally Crow began to be troubled by it. When they stopped to nibble some of Little Fur’s diminishing store of food, Little Fur wrapped the cloth and her arms about the black bird to warm him.
“Do we have to climb higher?” she asked Graysong.
“Another hour,” the wolf answered. “Then we will need to find somewhere to rest properly.”
The snow on the ground was very thick, and although Little Fur could make herself light enough to walk across the top of it, that was tiring, too. Whenever her concentration faltered, she would fall through the soft crust and have to dig herself out. It was three hours, not one, before they finally reached the summit.
Little Fur gasped. At the summit was a wide plateau encircled by snow-streaked black mountain peaks. A freezing wind blew into their faces, and caught helplessly in it, Crow was dashed against a stony outcrop. He fell to the snow and lay motionless. Little Fur gathered him into her arms again and wrapped the cloth around them.
“I need to get him to some shelter,” she gasped.
“There is a cave, if you can carry him,” Graysong said.
Little Fur nodded, hoping it was true. They headed for two peaks whose jagged tips leaned toward one another. The old wolf explained that the cave was in the first mountain, close to a narrow pass. Little Fur kept her eyes on it until the snow fell so thickly that she lost sight of everything but Graysong’s shape ahead of her.
Little Fur was plodding along in a waking dream by the time they reached the twin peaks. She could not see them, but the wolf nosed along the rocks at the base of the mountain, smelling of certainty. She followed him, her arms burning from Crow’s weight. The only parts of her that did not feel numb were where Crow was against her chest and Gem against her neck.
Graysong vanished into a crack in the side of the mountain. Little Fur followed him. Inside was a vast dry chamber full of sinister echoes, but Little Fur’s nose told her there was nothing dangerous. A collection of snow bats locked in their winter dream hung from the ceiling. Little Fur’s troll blood surged with delight at being enclosed by the earth. She set Crow and Gem down, wrapping the cloth about them. Then she dug into the bottom of her pouch for a tiny set of flint stones given to her by a dwarf.
There was no wood, but Little Fur’s troll blood told her there was black rock in the walls of the cavern. The dwarf who had given her the flint had said that black rock was what he used for the fires in which he smelted metals. She dug out a few chunks of the greasy black rock and heaped them about a pile of fibers she unraveled from one of the pieces of cloth she had intended to use as cloak pockets. She struck the flint and a spark fell at once, but she had to use her dried herbs as well as another piece of cloth to keep the flame alive long enough for the black rock to catch.
Little Fur had lit fires only a few times in her life. The sight of the leaping flames that she had summoned fascinated her so much that it took a moment for her to notice that Graysong was staring at her with a mixture of astonishment and wonder.
“It must be your elf blood that lets you do magic,” the wolf said.
“I can’t do magic any more than any other creature in this age,” she laughed, and told him of the dwarf.
“But if your troll blood allows you to find this fire rock, why cannot your elf blood allow you to do magic?” the wolf asked curiously. “Were not elves great magic workers in the last age?”
“No creature can do magic in this age.”
“Is not the midwinter weaving a magic?”
Little Fur shook her head. “Only a ceremony to break the unraveling winter dreams. We sing to weave them together so that the earth spirit can draw them into its flow. The weaving is a kind of guiding.”
“Does not this Sett Owl use magic for her visions?”
“Better to say that the still magic that is in the beaked house uses her.” She stopped, because she could see that the wolf’s eyes were drooping in the warmth of the fire. Crow’s eyes were closed, too, but Gem was staring into the flames.
Little Fur took the cloth, which the birds had shrugged off. Using a thorn needle, she began to sew the remaining scraps of cloth into a hood, since she had more need of that now than pockets.
The next day, when they left the chamber, it was not snowing. The sky was gray and hard like dirty ice, and a constant bitter wind blew, fanning the snow into cold flurries. Little Fur was glad that she had sewn a hood onto the cloth, now nearly a cloak. They had been forced to leave Crow behind because he was still dizzy and his eyes were confused. Little Fur had wanted to wait until he recovered, but Crow insisted he would easily catch up to them once he was well enough to fly. In the meantime, Little Fur had left one of her precious seed pouches of food for him to eat and a pile of black rock broken into small pieces for him to add to the small fire that warmed the cavern.
Graysong said it would take one day of travel to encounter wolf scouts who could lead them to the king. After two hours, Graysong turned into a narrow pass. It was angled so that as long as she kept to the one side, Little Fur was quite protected from the wind. They walked several more hours wrapped in silence before Graysong turned back to look at her.
“This pass will take us to the edge of a frozen fjord,” he said. “We must cross it to reach the territory of the Mystery.”
Little Fur suddenly wondered why the old wolf was helping her. He had made a bargain for his freedom, sure enough, but what could he do with it? Had he some thought of trying to join the Mystery? Certainly he could not long fend for himself alone.
It was over Graysong’s shoulder that Little Fur first saw the long frozen fjord between the high walls of ice rising steeply up on both sides. “It is not more than an hour’s walk to get across,” Graysong said when they reached it.
Little Fur stepped out onto the ice. She shivered at the dense feeling of the magic that flowed through the water beneath it. She looked to where the fjord widened and ran out of sight between soaring ice banks. The wolf was staring directly across the fjord, where there was a shore of snow. The old wolf trembled, and his scent was a mingling of tension and longing and apprehension.
All at once Little Fur understood. “The Mystery was your pack,” she said.
Graysong did not appear to hear her. He lifted his head and was sniffing the wind. “I cannot smell the pack,” he said. He gave a long, haunting howl that expressed all the vast, frigid, terrifying beauty of this stark black-and-white land. The cry was long and the echo longer, but there was no answering call.
Graysong set off across the fjord, and Little Fur had no choice but to follow. The wind was behind them now, hurrying them along. When they were halfway across, it began to snow again, and the wind grew colder. For the first time in her life, Little Fur felt the cold as something cruel. But just when she felt she could not endure it any longer, the wind fell away, and all became utterly silent and still. It even stopped snowing.
Overhead, as if it had been waiting for this moment, a slit opened up in the clouds and a pallid radiance spilled down onto the ice. The white and gray became green and blue and violet.
“She come
s,” the wolf said, reverence in his voice. Then the smell changed. “She is angry.”
“She?” Little Fur echoed.
“She,” Gem hooted. Little Fur felt the frantic beat of the owlet’s tiny heart.
Little Fur sensed an enormous surge of power beneath her feet. She looked down, and although the sun was not striking the ice where she stood, she could see a gorgeous rippling glow of deep violet blue. It was coming from under the ice. The ice began to crack.
“Run!” the wolf bayed, and bounded toward the snowy shore.
But Little Fur could not run. There was another sharp crack as the ice fractured in front of her. Then the ice broke open, and a great gush of water flowed up and out. Little Fur sensed that the ice under her feet had grown thin as an eggshell.
A head and shoulders emerged from the black water in the midst of the broken ice. Little Fur stared at the creature who stared at her. She looked like a water sprite but far more powerful. She was human-sized and had pale marble-white skin with long, furled ears and hair the color of ice that blushed at dawn, which flowed over her shoulders into the black water. Her eyes were a dark violet blue.
“You are of the last age,” Little Fur said. “What is your name?”
“If you had one wish before you die, would it be to know my name?” the creature asked, her voice like the ice wind.
CHAPTER 9
The Elf Warrior and the Troll Princess
“You can kill me, for your power fills this fjord, Lady,” Little Fur said to the powerful fjord being. “But I do not think you can grant wishes save if my wish is to know your name.”
The creature’s eyes became more violet. “You have trespassed upon a sacred place and must die.”