Cold Steel

21

“Catherine! Stop fighting me! You’re impossible to keep hold of when you wriggle like this.”

I slithered out of a grip that was dragging me through icy water, but my numb limbs had no strength. The tide dragged me under as it hauled at my skirts.

A man lifted me above the water. I spewed all the cursed salt water I had swallowed. My bitten lip stung. I sluggishly realized that Vai was carrying me out of the sea. He dumped me onto a stony shore, then slapped me repeatedly on the back as I retched.

I found my voice, although it was sadly thin and mewling. “Why must I always swallow seawater? It tastes so foul.”

Vai collapsed beside me onto the pebbled strand. He fumbled to unbuckle himself from his carpenter’s apron, wheezing as he gulped in air.

I thought the weight of the pack was going to crush me. Rolling onto my side took all my strength. The hard stones felt heavenly because they were solid. The sea sloshed up to tickle my boots, then receded. Fiery Shemesh, but I was freezing!

The wind was coarse and unforgivingly cold.

Vai was still wheezing. I tugged my arms out of the straps to shed the pack. With the sodden basket bumping on my rear, I crawled over to him, only to realize he was not wheezing but laughing in a hoarse sort of way.

He smiled at me. Smiled!

His smile acted as an infusion of hope. My lips twitched, fighting upward.

“Look!” He gestured.

A blustery gray sea stretched away from the shore. Across the channel, barely visible under a haze of cloud, rose the blue-dark shore of another land. But that was not the strange thing. A ship glided atop the waves, three-masted, sails unfurled but unmoving despite the stinging breeze. As I gaped, wondering why I could not see any sailors racing about on the deck or climbing the masts, one of the sails began to ripple, then the second, and then the third. Where there hadn’t been one before, a man appeared halfway up the mainmast.

It was illusion, taking form in front of my eyes as he wove cold magic with a speed and dexterity that astounded me.

“We’ve been washed back into the mortal world, love.” The ship vanished as he sat up and spat. “Gah. What I wouldn’t do for a glass of my mother’s hoarhound tea sweetened with honey. Catherine! You’re shuddering.”

He pulled me against him. I could have sworn warmth radiated from his body, although it was hard to feel anything. My wool skirt clung to my legs, the fabric crackling as if it were actually beginning to freeze.

“There’s shelter,” he said. “Walk with me.”

The shoreline was stony beach. A little peninsula of land sloped up to a cliff of ice that loomed over us like fate. There was no vegetation, nothing but rock and ice and sand. Crevices and canyons had dug staircases into the ice cliff, pocked with boulders. On the tiny peninsula, lying between ice cliff and icy sea, a deposit of huge rocks formed a low cave.

“See if there’s any driftwood to build a fire,” he said. “The cave is the sort of place it might get swept into and caught.”

“I c-c-can’t build a fire.”

“Did you pack no flint?”

“You’ll k-k-kill the fire.”

“As long as I can work cold magic, I will not freeze to death, but you will. Do you hear me, Catherine? Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”

The wind gusted out of the north, sweeping over the lip of the ice. A voice flew on that wind, dangerous and wild. A howl rose.

I staggered to a halt. “Do you hear that?”

“Come on, love. Just a little farther. We’ll see if there’s fuel for a fire and then I’ll go back and fetch our gear…”

Wolves.

We hadn’t escaped. The Hunt was after us. My sire had already found us. What did he want from me? Or was he just angry that I had rescued first my cousin and then my husband from him?

The presence of beasts stalking a person concentrates the mind wonderfully. The landscape before me settled and I knew where I was. I had reached for my mother, and somehow the connection between us had brought me to a place she had once walked. “They left the other boat in the cave. We’ve got to drag it down to the water and get out of here before the wolves come.”

His grip tightened on my arm. “Love, you’re raving. There’s no wolves, and no boat…” I curled my lips in a silent snarl that made his eyes widen. “But let’s just go see about the boat.”

We picked our way up the slope and in under the dank shadow. A huge slab of a boulder made a weighty roof, giving the cave the look of a crude shelter of stone built by a giant. I cleared debris off a hump to reveal canvas stretched taut over a rowboat. The boat had been turned over and raised off the ground on stones. Two oilcloth bundles with oars and oarlocks had been tucked along the underside of the benches, together with an unexpected bounty of a spare flint, an iron pot, and a hunter’s knife.

“Lord of All. How did you know this would be here?”

“My mother reached out to me from the past and pulled me here.” I dragged the canvas off the boat. It was big enough to seat six men, but I thought we could handle it. Howls drifted off the height. “We have to get out of here before the wolves come. Can’t you hear them?”

“It’s just the wind.” He rubbed my hands between his. “You need to warm yourself at a fire before we try to cross the water. Your lips are blue. People can die just from exposure to cold.”

Through chattering teeth, I spoke. “You have to believe me about my mother.”

He paused, then resumed chafing my hands. “I don’t see why not. The chain that binds our marriage pulled you to me in Expedition.”

“That was the machinations of General Camjiata and James Drake.”

“Yes, that as well, but didn’t you ever wonder why you found me so easily the moment you stepped onto the jetty? The chain that binds us drew you to me. You’ll always be bound to your parents as well. We’ll rig these ropes so we can pull the boat over, then haul it down on the canvas. But once we get it down there with everything in it, then you must promise me if there are no wolves you’ll build a fire for long enough to warm up and dry out that wool a little bit, and my coat and gloves, which you so wisely brought. By the way the light falls I’m pretty sure it’s late winter or early spring. It’s still morning, so we’ll have time to cross before dusk. Catherine? Are you listening?”

“Yes,” I said, for the sound of his voice was so comforting.

We rigged the rope, flipped the boat, and dragged it over the stone beach to the water. The work warmed me but at the same time sucked all energy from me. Afterward, it was all I could do to stay upright, leaning on the stern, as he fetched our gear and arranged it as ballast. The cold gnawed through my flesh to the bone. He set the oarlocks and oars. Out of the dripping pack he unfolded the winter coat I had carried just for him and put it on me. He looked me up and down. He had the worst frown on his face, startling in its intensity. I had never seen that expression on him before. I had no idea what to make of it.

“Catherine.” He spoke my name with what sounded like anger. “You are now returning to the cave. I’ll build a fire and leave so you can light it and get warm…”

A howl skirled down on the wind. I watched him register the sound. His brow wrinkled. Anger flickered in the twitch of his cheeks. His gaze lifted to the rim of the ice shelf.

High up on the path, three shaggy wolves nosed into view. Four more wolves were already most of the way down a canyon path that led from the rim to the beach. In our effort to shove the boat to the shore, we hadn’t noticed them. They were huge. I smelled their hunger.

Desperation sheared through me. I braced and shoved, but the boat shifted barely a finger’s breadth. “We’ve got to go…”

“Wait.”

My cane stung my leg, woken by Vai’s cold magic. A change in pressure made my ears pop. I dropped to my knees, sure I was about to be slammed into the ground.

A crack ripped through the air. A weird moaning noise followed, succeeded by a rushing whoosh, and then by a rumble. His mouth curved into the sort of smile a man gives to his hated opponent when he knows he has won and can rub it in the other man’s face. It was the smile that had driven Drake to hate him so much that the fire mage had tried to get revenge on Vai through me.

“Move!” he said with a laugh, throwing his shoulder to the boat.

The rumble grew to a roar. Vai slung me into the boat and hopped in, scrambling to the oars. He rowed hard. I turned to look behind.

Ice calved off the high cliff. Caught in the collapse, the wolves tumbled and vanished into the crash of ice. The boom of the avalanche filled the world as it buried the canyon. White mist boiled up in sheets.

“Brace yourself, Catherine.”

A rolling tongue of ice and frozen snow spilled across the tiny peninsula, hissed over the beach, and slumped into the water with a crackling roar like a hundred muskets going off at once. A wave pitched us backward, but Vai kept the boat steady as we were driven partway across the channel. Out in the middle of the water, the choppy waves and wind caught us in a buffeting pitch and yaw. He set to, rowing hard, as I shivered inside his wet wool coat.

“Can you row, Catherine? It would warm you up.”

Looking at his bare hands on the oars made me want to weep. Cold had dug its claws all the way to my heart. Strangely, the bitter air and cold spray off the sea had no effect on him. If anything, he seemed invigorated. “I c-c-can try, but I haven’t before.”

“Then not in these conditions, love.”

The rocking and tipping of the rowboat was beginning to make me feel queasy. “Can’t you make a wind to blow us?”

“You don’t want wind out on the open water in a rowboat. Anyway, it’s not like that. Wind can’t be confined or channeled. I can shift masses of air and freeze rain in the clouds so it falls as sleet or hail…” He glanced past me, eyes widening.

More wedges of ice shook free from the ice shelf. Mist sprayed. The sound of their crashing fall rolled over the channel. A swell rose under us, then a second and a third. He swore in a low voice. I huddled in the wet coat. It would be easier just to go to sleep.

“I didn’t mean that to happen, and I’m not sure what just did.” He frowned at me as if I had said something to offend him. “Talk to me, Catherine. Tell me about your father.”

Fury shook me awake. “I never want to speak of him again!”

“I don’t mean the one who sired you. I meant your father. Daniel Hassi Barahal. The one whose portrait is in your locket. Did you see your father on the beach?”

My father.

Words emerged, although I scarcely knew what I meant to say. “They had just come down from the ice shelf. They were fighting wolves. There was a dead man all bloody. I think his name was Gaius. The Baltic Ice Expedition ended in disaster. Most of the explorers died on the ice, but some survived. Most of the other attempts to explore the ice have ended with the expeditions vanishing forever. I wonder if they accidentally cross into the spirit world and get eaten there. Probably it was just wolves who caught them.”

“Are you suggesting this boat is left over from the Baltic Ice Expedition?” he asked in the calmest voice imaginable, although he looked annoyed and stern in that way he had when he was overcome by a strong emotion. “Tell me about that, Catherine. Keep talking.”

If there was one thing I was good at, it was talking. So I kept talking, even if I stumbled and lost my train of thought. He persisted in asking questions, prodded and poked in a verbal sort of way since obviously because he was rowing the entire time he could not actually poke and prod me, although I had a vague memory that I ought to wish he ought to be able to, but that was a long time ago and anyway it was so very cold and my body ached so much and I was so very tired that eventually I lapsed into silence.

We bumped up on a shore in the lee of a tiny inlet. Ice rimed the shallow water where a stream burbled through a tumble of rocks. A blanket of snow carpeted the hollows, but the wind had swept most of the land clean. There were no trees and little vegetation, only lichen and moss. In the sheltered lee of forgotten boulders and clefts in the earth, waxy-leafed plants spread, laced with frost. Nothing stirred, not even birds a-wing.

Pull up the boat. Turn it over and stow the oars. Fill the bottles with stream water. Walk. Walk. Walk.

I did what he told me to do, as a goblin’s automaton obeys. Was that how the coachman functioned? Was the coachman truly of a goblin’s making, or was that just a story he had told me? Would I ever find out?

There was no wood or we would have stopped to make a fire, even though Vai would have had to leave me. By following the stream, he found an animal trail that he tracked like a hunter.

We rounded a boulder to find ourselves face-to-face with a huge woolly rhinoceros. Its twinned horns dipped as it gave a growling snort. A muzzy instinct woke in the pit of my stomach that the creature could trample and gore us. Vai placed himself between me and the animal. He spoke words I did not know in a cadence whose rhythms sailed past, as if he was politely greeting the beast. It snorted as in answer. As Vai eased us past, it silently watched us go.

For an eternity we walked. Once we ran across a fire pit ringed with stone, sheltered on the lee side of a slope, but there was nothing to burn except straggling patches of gorse, so he decided we should go on.

It was just so hard to put one foot in front of the other because I kept staggering off the path and catching myself at the last moment on the point of my cane. An idea grew in my head, a very compelling idea that I ought to have thought of long before.

“I would be warmer if I took off these wet clothes,” I said.

He was striding up a slope amid winter-whitened grasses and hardy sedge. The thought of trudging after him up such a brutal incline made my legs congeal, so I stopped moving and fumbled at the coat.

He ran back to me. “No! Absolutely not, Catherine.” He kept talking as he dragged me along. “Do you see the prints? There have been hunters or trappers here. The track leads to a place people go. There’s likely a sheltered spot where they camp.”

He broke off as we reached the top of the slope. I really wanted to find a small hole to crawl into. Instead I looked up.

The land ended at a flat shoreline. Beyond it silver waters spread like a mirror. The distant haze of the far shore melted into the encroaching dusk. Maybe there were trees on the other side, but I couldn’t be sure. The near shore was dusted with snow, so the whole land radiated a white sheen. A wide stream was crackled over with a skin of ice. Someone had built a crude wooden pier where the stream flowed into the wide water. Just inland from the pier stood a shed, and next to it huddled a small log house with a sod roof. A rowboat had been tipped onto its side under the low eaves of the hut.

He thought it was a good idea to go down. I slogged along, steered by his grip. My sword flared as he shaped bulbs of cold fire. A door gave way to a narrow entry hall with a stall for animals, where he dumped our gear. Inside a second door lay a bench and table and a bed tucked into an alcove with cupboards built in beneath. The hearth was empty but for a large kettle and roasting spit. The room was cold, windowless, and dark, with barely enough room to turn around in.

While he explored, I drifted, reflexively setting my cane and the basket on the table. Hadn’t I been carrying a pack before? I couldn’t remember how he had come to have it. Fortunately I was no longer cold. His exclamation roused me. He was pulling skins and furs from the cupboards beneath the bed.

“This is a hunters’ refuge. A place men can take shelter if they’re caught out in bad weather. There’s bound to be a village within a few days’ travel. My village keeps the same sort of shelters.” He glanced at me. “Catherine, now you must take off your wet clothes.”

My fingers were too numb to unfasten buttons.

He undressed me, dried me roughly, and wrapped me up on the bed in the furs. Then he went outside with the kettle, brought it back full, and laid wood onto the hearth although obviously he could not light it. Our wet clothes and gear he spread over the table and bench.

He stripped and got in with me. His skin was so warm that after a while I began to hurt all over. Chafing my hands, my cheeks, my legs, he talked a stream of words that I did not fully understand except that I loved to hear him speak. I began to shiver, and at length the shivering subsided as a frail glow of warmth took root in my frozen heart.

Blessed Tanit! We had escaped the spirit world! We were going to live!

As I relaxed, so did he, and I slid into a sleep without dreams.