Pilgrim

  Drago shifted his eyes so he did not have to bear the angry scrutiny in her own.

  “You are the StarSon, Drago. You!”

  Still he did not speak, and Faraday, her frustration at his obstinacy almost unbearable, tore at the throat laces of the gown. She pulled the bodice apart, exposing the swell of her breasts.

  “If you accept your heritage, Drago, if you accept your role as StarSon, then you may bed me. Tonight. Here. Now. But tell me that you are the StarSon.”

  “And what shall I tell Caelum?” Drago said softly, once more looking her in the eye. “That I again betrayed him? And this time for a night with our father’s lover?”

  The colour drained from Faraday’s face and she wrenched away from him, jerking the bodice closed over her breasts.

  “What lies between us,” Drago snapped, “needs no blackmail to force a consummation!”

  He turned and strode over to the door. “I’ll get some food from our packs,” he said, then slammed the door behind him.

  Faraday lowered her head into her hands, and her shoulders shuddered.

  “Never, never say you love me,” she whispered into the lonely night, “for that I could not bear.”

  She trod the snowdrifts with the firmness of one who regarded the winter as a lover.

  About her Gorkentown lay windswept and frosty, and she raised her great head and sniffed the thickening wind, half-expecting to find the scent of prey upon it.

  But there was nothing, and so she rumbled a great sigh, and padded further into the town. Puffs of snow lifted into the air with every step she took.

  She did not like it. It was too close, the streets too narrow, and she yearned for the vastness of the ice-packs to the north.

  But it was time, more than time, that she came south to see to her miscreant children. There were lessons to be learned, and no-one left but she to teach them.

  Of course, Noah could have been a trifle more forthcoming, but that was a man for you, and it was no wonder that Drago, as all her children, was mildly confused.

  She halted, raising her head to stare at the rising bulk of Gorkenfort with dark eyes suddenly sharp with knowledge. So. One side of her razor-toothed red mouth lifted as if in a smile—or perhaps a feral grin—then she dropped her head and resumed her slow padding towards the fort.

  One of her ears was so badly tattered it was virtually non-existent, as if it had been lost in some ancient ursine dispute.

  She wished she could sink her teeth into the back of a seal, but they lay many days’ journey to the north, and she’d have to wait a little longer before she could look forward to that pleasure again.

  The fire had died down to glowing coals, but the chamber was warm. Faraday lay curled up in her cloak before the fire, having refused to lie once more in the bed she’d shared with Borneheld.

  Now Drago lay there, snug under the heavy quilt, yet cold in its lonely spaces.

  The fire cracked and popped, and both sank deeper into their dreams.

  Then a massive, frightful roar echoed about the chamber, disintegrating both peace and dream.

  Something grabbed and clawed at the foot of the bed, and Drago jerked awake, momentarily too disorientated to do anything save clutch uselessly at the covers sliding towards the floor.

  He shouted at Faraday, but she was already awake and crouching against the back wall, staring at something between the door and the bed.

  Drago wrenched his eyes away from her and to the foot of the bed.

  A dark shape loomed over the mattress. It roared again, and then a flame flickered among the coals, and Drago and Faraday saw that a great icebear stood with its forepaws on the foot of the bed, shaking its head to and fro, and growling around the feathered lizard it held between its teeth.

  37

  The Lesson of the Sparrow

  Faraday blinked, and she saw a great icebear savaging the feathered lizard.

  She blinked again, and she saw a grey-haired woman, clothed in ice, impossibly lifting a bull seal in her bare ivory arms and sinking great white fangs into his spine. Blood ran down the seal’s fur, and pooled in the quilt tangled about Drago’s feet.

  “It’s all right,” Drago said to Faraday, and she blinked one more time, and the visionary woman vanished.

  The icebear spat the lizard out with a disgusted growl. The lizard squealed, landed in Drago’s lap and immediately scrabbled for a hiding place among the disarranged quilt.

  Blue feathers drifted about in the air.

  “It bit me,” the icebear said, her tone disgusted at the temerity of the lizard, and then she tipped her head and looked at Drago, her black eyes gleaming with interest.

  “You are Drago,” she said. “You were but a babe when Azhure talked of you to me.”

  “And you are Urbeth.”

  Urbeth, the mysterious icebear of the northern ice-packs, worshipped by the Ravensbundmen and feared by every seal, seagull and fish in existence.

  “Quite so,” Urbeth said, then sat down on the floor, her hind legs splayed, one of her forepaws absently combing out the yellowed fur of her belly.

  Drago slid out of the bed and pulled on his clothes. “Why did Noah send me north to see you?”

  Urbeth ignored him. She had turned her head to regard Faraday curiously. “So, I finally meet Faraday. When Axis and Azhure gossiped with me on the Icebear Coast so many years ago, images of you suffused both their thoughts.

  “And then, of course, Gorgrael had you brought north into his ice fortress. I came too late to that place to meet you.” But Urbeth remembered how she’d met Axis, on one knee in the freezing snow and wind, his head bowed with grief. And, looking into Faraday’s eyes, the bear knew she was remembering, too.

  “We all had our different purposes then,” Faraday said, and threw her blanket aside, pulling her dress straight.

  “Why do you need to speak to me?” Drago said.

  Urbeth sighed. “Have you no patience? I have walked many leagues and have blistered my paws to meet you. The least you could do is share with me what gossip you have before badgering me with bald questions.”

  “No doubt you have heard of the Demons, Urbeth?” Faraday said, stirring the embers into life again.

  Urbeth snarled, causing both Drago and Faraday to stare at her.

  “Curse Noah, to hide in this land cargo to tempt such Demons through the Star Gate!”

  “If you know of Noah,” Drago said quietly, “then what gossip can we tell you?”

  “Everything,” said the bear. “Well may I know a name or two, but those damned Ravensbund are too reticent to share every piece of gossip from the south. When did the Demons come through? How? And how lies Tencendor?”

  Drago exchanged a glance with Faraday, then sank down on a stool by the fire.

  “There is much to tell,” he said, as Faraday sat across the hearth from him.

  “Then tell,” said Urbeth.

  Drago and Faraday shared turns to talk through the night of what they knew. Urbeth stretched out by the fire, her eyes half-closed, occasionally rolling on to her back with her four paws dangling in the air to toast her belly.

  Every time either Drago or Faraday paused, Urbeth would widen one of her eyes and press them to continue. And yet, Drago had the oddest feeling that little of this was new to the bear.

  Finally, as Drago brought their tale to the gates of Gorkenfort itself, he asked again, “Why did Noah ask me to come north to Gorkenfort to meet you? What did he mean, our ‘ancestral’ mother?”

  Urbeth lay on her back staring at the ceiling for a while before she answered.

  “Noah wanted me to remind you of something,” she said.

  “What?” Drago asked.

  “A story,” Urbeth said. “A lesson.”

  Drago exchanged a puzzled glance with Faraday. “A story?”

  Urbeth rolled over onto her side, and pushed herself into a sitting position with her forepaws. “The Story of the Sparrow,” she said. “Do you know it?” br />
  Drago half-laughed. “But that’s—”

  “Necessary!” Urbeth said, and a growl rumbled from her chest. “Tell it!”

  Drago looked again at Faraday, whose eyes were bright with curiosity, then acceded to Urbeth’s request—or demand.

  “This story has only been found relatively recently,” he said. “It was discovered among the ancient books that my father and StarDrifter found in Spiredore when they freed it from the Brothers of the Seneschal.”

  He paused, clearly disquieted about something. “No Enchanters pay it much heed. I mean…”

  Drago stopped, and Urbeth grinned and scratched her stomach. “I can well imagine why they would want to disregard it, boy. But please…”

  “It is only a myth,” he said. “Unverifiable. A children’s tale only. StarDrifter told it to me to amuse me one evening.”

  “So now amuse us with it,” Faraday said.

  Drago sighed and capitulated.

  “Well,” he said, shifting about in his chair, “there has always been some mystery about the origins of the four races of Tencendor. The Avar’s origins remain shrouded in the secret mysteries of the Sacred Groves, and they have never shared that mystery with any outsiders, even the Icarii. So,” he shrugged, “of the Avar I cannot tell.

  “The Story of the Sparrow, however, tells a little of the ancient Enchantress, of the origins of the Icarii race, of their father, of how they found their wings, and of the SunSoar affection each for the other.”

  Again Drago paused, but this time it was only for reflection. The firelight played over his face, lending it both warmth and mystery, and Faraday’s own expression stilled as she watched him. Here, now, where the shadows of the fire hid her face and Drago concentrated on something else, it was safe to let herself love him a little.

  But only a little…enough to pull back before it hurt.

  “Listen to the Story of the Sparrow,” he said, and leaned forward, his voice taking on the hypnotic quality of a court troubadour and the rhythmic beauty of a SunSoar:

  As you must both know, the Icarii, as the Charonites and the Acharites, were all born of the ancient Enchantress. She had three sons, fathered by the gods only alone knew, and of those three sons she favoured only the younger two. To them she whispered some of her myriad of secrets, while the eldest she cast from her door and turned her back on his pleas. This eldest wandered desolate into the land, which he eventually destroyed to assuage his grief at his mother’s rejection, while his younger brothers stayed many more years learning at the Enchantress’ knee.

  “You have a duty,” she told her middle son, “to wander and watch.” He nodded, and thought he understood.

  “You have a duty,” she told her youngest son, “to dance your delight to the stars.” And he too nodded, thinking he understood.

  Her two younger sons made their way into the world. The middle brother was reflective, and haunted shadows, thinking there to catch a glimpse of the unknowable. Eventually, his eyes turned downwards to the chasms that led into the earth, and there he made his way.

  The youngest brother was wide of smile and bright of curiosity. He clutched in his hand his mother’s ring, that which would give birth to all of the Enchanters’ rings, and it impelled him to cast his eye to the high places, and to there he climbed.

  All three brothers took to themselves many wives from among the humanoid races that populated the land, and these wives bore them many children. These children took to themselves husbands and wives, and they likewise bred many children. Within a thousand years the plains and the chasms and the mountains rang with the voices of the brother races. Mankind, the Acharites, who followed their cattle through dusty plain trails and built themselves houses of brick. The Charonites, who explored the misty waterways beneath the trails and took the houses others had left behind. And the Icarii, beloved of the gods, who climbed the crags and cried out to the stars and built themselves houses of music and mystery.

  Then, the Icarii did not have wings.

  The story of how the Icarii found their wings is rightly the love story of EverHeart and CrimsonStar. CrimsonStar was an Enchanter unparalleled in the as yet young history of the Icarii, but his love for the stars and for the Star Dance paled into insignificance beside the love he bore his wife, EverHeart. CrimsonStar and EverHeart lived in the lower ranges of the Icescarp Alps. Then, long, long before the Wars of the Axe, the Icarii populated most of the mountain ranges of Tencendor, the majority living in the Minaret Peaks. But CrimsonStar and EverHeart were newly married and preferred to enjoy the relative isolation of the Icescarp Alps. Talon Spike was only just being opened up and hollowed out, and the few dozen Icarii within their immediate vicinity were, truth to tell, a few dozen too many for CrimsonStar and EverHeart.

  They did what they could to keep themselves distant, climbing frightening precipices to achieve privacy to indulge their frequent cravings for love, clinging to razorbacked crags to evade curious eyes and to allow the winds of thrill and danger to deepen their passion.

  They were in love and they were young, and so they were indulged by their elders. Time enough, in fifty years or so, for them to descend from the heights of newly-married explorations.

  But fifty years they did not have. Eight years after they were married, when they had barely recovered from the breathless passion of their initial consummation, EverHeart fell. She fell from a peak so high even the winds were frightened to assail it. She fell so far she was swallowed by the clouds that broiled about the knees of the mountain.

  She fell so fast even CrimsonStar’s scream could not follow her.

  It took him three days to find her, and when he did, he thought he had found a corpse. She lay broken, unmoving, her spilt blood frozen in crazy patterns across the rocks that cradled her. CrimsonStar’s tears felt as if they, too, were freezing into solid grief as they trailed down his cheeks. He touched his wife, but she did not move, and her flesh had the solidness of rock.

  Frozen.

  He wailed, then screamed, then wrenched his wife from her resting place, tearing her skin where it had frozen to the surface of the rocks. He cuddled her close, trying to warm her, then realised through his grief that, somewhere deep within EverHeart, her courageous heart, her ever heart, still thudded. Slowly, achingly slowly, but still it thudded.

  He carried her back to their home, and there he cared for her, bringing to her side all the Healers of the Icarii people, and even calling to her side Banes from the distant forests. They restored her warmth, and the colour to her cheeks. They restored the brightness of her eye, and even the gloss of her golden hair. They restored the flex to her arms and the suppleness to her long white fingers.

  But they could not restore movement or usefulness to her shattered legs, and they could not restore the laughter to her face. EverHeart was condemned to lie useless in her bed, her lower body anchoring her to immobility, its flesh a drain on the resources of her upper body and, more importantly, on her spirit.

  At CrimsonStar’s request, the Icarii Healers and the Avar Banes left. They farewelled the pair as best they could, certain that EverHeart would not survive the year, and even more certain CrimsonStar would not survive his wife’s inevitable death.

  For seven months CrimsonStar held EverHeart’s hand, and sang to her, and soothed her as best he could. He fed her and washed her and ministered to her needs. He lived only to see her smile, and to hear her tell him she was content.

  But EverHeart could do neither of these things without lying, and this she would not do.

  One night, late into the darkness, EverHeart asked CrimsonStar to kill her. It was a brutal request, but EverHeart was too tired of life to phrase it more politely.

  “I cannot,” CrimsonStar said, and turned his head aside.

  “Then build me wings to fly,” EverHeart said, bitterness twisting her voice, “that I may escape these useless legs and this prison-bed.”

  CrimsonStar looked at her. “My lovely, I cannot…”
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  “Then kill me.”

  CrimsonStar crept away, not wishing EverHeart to see the depth of his distress. Knowing she knew it anyway.

  He climbed to the crag from which EverHeart had fallen so many months before. He had no intention of throwing himself from the peak, but some instinct told him that he might find comfort at the same point where he and she had lost so much of their lives. He sat down in a sheltered crevice, and watched the stars filter their way across the night sky.

  Tears ran down his face. EverHeart had given him an impossible request…and if he didn’t help her die now, then what agony of wasting would she go through over the next few months until she died of unaided causes?

  “You should not weep so at this altitude,” a soft voice said, “for your tears will freeze to your face and leave your cheeks marred with black ice.”

  CrimsonStar jerked his head up.

  A sparrow hopped into the crevice, its feathers ruffled out against the cold.

  CrimsonStar was so stunned he could not speak.

  “I have been disappointed in you, my son,” the sparrow continued, and hopped onto CrimsonStar’s knee to better look the Icarii man in the eye.

  “Disappointed?” CrimsonStar managed, but he straightened his shoulders and brushed the tears from his eyes. Who was this sparrow to so chastise him?

  “I am your father, CrimsonStar.”

  “No…no…my father is FellowStar…alive and well…”

  The sparrow tipped his head to one side, his eyes angry yet sadly tolerant of his wayward child. “Do you not understand, CrimsonStar? I am the father of the Icarii race.”

  CrimsonStar could do nothing but stare at the sparrow.

  “I lay with the Enchantress, and she waxed great with our child. Her third and last son for her life…and my fourth son that spring. It was a good spring for me that year.”

  “I…I did not know…”

  “Few knew who the Enchantress took to her bed, child. The fathers of her elder sons are unknown to me. And I…I should not have told you of my role in your generation, save that I could not bear your sadness and that of EverHeart’s. Still,” the sparrow sighed, “I had no choice, for you have proved such a disappointment, and all fathers reserve their right to chastise and redirect their children.”