Kushiel’s Dart

Chapter Fifty-Two

I awoke in the morning alone, stiff and cold.

If I had thought the voyage from Gunter’s steading to Selig’s was hard, it was nothing to this. Whether I had known it or not, I endured that journey as a cherished and pampered member of the tribe. I did not think, then, on the fact that I’d no need to saddle my own horse, to cook my own meals, and make do for myself in every way possible.

Now, I needs must shift for myself, for speed was of the essence, and Joscelin-no matter how efficient-was but one man, and not bred to the Skaldi wilderness, where the cold cuts deeper and the snow drifts higher than in the mountains of Siovale.

We came to a new language together on that deadly journey, one of quick gestures, nods and grimaces. I learned things I had never known, nor ever thought it would be needful to know, such as the most efficient way to pack a horse and the best way to pick a trail through dense growth where twining branches hidden beneath the snow formed traps to entangle horses and humans alike.

I learned to wrap my head in wool as if in a burnouse, saving precious heat, draping a length across my face to protect it from the wind. I learned to crack the ice from my garments and press onward without pausing. I learned to dig ice out of my pony’s hooves, when the tender pad inside cracked and bled. I learned to carry a dagger-Trygve’s dagger, that Joscelin had kept-at my waist and to use it for simple chores.

These things I learned, and quickly, for we traveled as fast as we dared, pushing ourselves and our horses close to the point of foundering. Our flesh grew numb, and we had to check our extremities for signs of the dead white flesh that betokened frostbite. On the second night, a pack of wolves circled round while we made camp, close enough that we caught glimpses of them through the trees. Joscelin worked frantically to build the fire and raced around the edges of the camp shouting when it was lit, brandishing a torch. They withdrew, then, into the forest, but we caught sight of their eyes reflecting fire in the night.

Still, we saw no one on the second day, nor on the next. That was the third day, when we lost a precious hour in a near disaster. It befell us atop a snowy ridge, where we dismounted and paused to get our bearings. Shading my eyes against the snow glare, I pointed to the distant north, where a thin trail of smoke threaded into the blue sky behind a twin-forked mountain peak.

"Raskogr’s steading," I said, my voice muffled through the wool shroud across my face. "One of the Suevi. We need to bear a little south and follow the ridge."

Joscelin nodded and took one step forward.

The ledge of snow crumbled beneath his feet, nothing under it. With a shout, he went down, tumbling head over heels in a sliding sheet of snow. I flung myself backward in terror, scrabbling for solid rock, and found myself clinging to a rough boulder that thrust out of the snow, empty air inches beyond my toes. My faithful pony tossed his head and snorted in alarm, while Joscelin’s horse bolted some yards away and stopped, rolling the whites of its eyes.

Trembling, I leaned forward to look.

Far below, Joscelin was pulling himself out of the snow, apparently unharmed. As I watched, he tested his limbs, checking himself for injury, then felt for his weapons. His daggers were at his waist, but his sword had come out of its sheath. I could see it protruding from the snow, a length of blade and the hilt, halfway up the ridge.

Seeing me peer over the ledge, he signaled he was well. I waved back and pointed at his sword. Even from here, I could see his disgust.

It took him the better part of an hour to climb back up the ridge, for thrice the sliding snows gave way beneath him, casting him back down half the distance he’d gained. Much of the time I spent stomping after his recalcitrant horse, that blew out its breath in a frightened cloud of frost and floundered away through the snow when I got near. Finally I remembered what the children of Perrinwolde had done, and lured it with a handful of oats. When at last I captured its reins, I was so cold and tired and frustrated that I leaned my face against its warm neck and wept, until my tears froze bitter and icy on my cheeks. Joscelin’s horse munched its bit of fodder and nuzzled my hair as if it hadn’t been the cause of such dismay.

Joscelin, upon gaining the summit, simply lay on his back and stared at the sky, exhausted. I gave him the waterskin without speaking, and he drank.

"We have to keep going." His voice was reedy, lungs seared by his exertions in the cold air, but he heaved himself to his feet.

I nodded. "At least the horses are rested." It was a feeble witticism at best, but that was how we kept ourselves going.

And onward we went.

Neither of us spoke that night about the time we had lost, but we were both on edge, jumping at the sounds of the forest: shifting snow, the sharp crack branches will make when the sap freezes in their woody veins. Joscelin stared moodily at the fire, poking at it as he did when he was thinking.

"Phèdre." His voice startled me, and I realized the extent of my nerves' fraying. I met his sober look. "If…when…they catch us, I want you to do something. Whatever I say, whatever I do, play along with it. Here, I want to show you something." Rising, he went to our packs, and came back with Trygve’s shield. It was a simple round buckler, hide-covered, with a steel disk at the center and straps to go over one’s arm. I’d wondered why he hadn’t discarded it, when he fought better without one.

Under the Skaldic night skies, he showed me how to wield it, slipping my arm into the straps and covering my body.

"If you have a chance," he said quietly, "any chance, to get away, take it. You know enough to survive on your own, while the supplies hold out. But if you don’t…use the shield. And I will do what I can."

"Protect and serve," I whispered, gazing up at him, silhouetted against the starry night. He nodded, tears in his eyes, glimmering in the dark. I felt a pain in my heart I had never felt before. "Ah, Joscelin…"

"Go to sleep." He murmured it, turning away. "I’ll take the first watch."

On the fourth day, it snowed.

It was the sort of weather that played with us as a cat will play with a mouse between its paws, battering us with whipping wind and a flurry of whiteness, then drawing back to allow us enough of a respite to press forward, sometimes huddled over our mounts' necks, sometimes wading through snow waist-deep, until the next blast came, swiping at us with wintry claws.

I fell into a cold dream, numb and frozen, huddled in the saddle or stumbling in Joscelin’s trail, only his curses and exhortations keeping me moving. I don’t know how long we traveled that way. Time becomes meaningless, measured out in lengths of endless staggering in a frigid daze, broken only by brief moments of lucidity when the snows broke and the landscape lay visible before us, showing our markers.

There is a sound the wind makes when it gusts, a high keening sound, as it bends around rock and tree. I grew so used to it, I scarce noticed when it changed, no longer rising and falling but rising steadily, rising and rising.

"Joscelin!"

The wind tore the word from my lips, but he caught it, turning back, a strange and hoary figure under the wolf-pelt. I pointed back along our trail with one mittened hand.

"They’re coming."

He threw his head back in alarm, gaze sweeping our surroundings. There was nothing for the eye to see, nothing but swirling snow. "How many?"

"I can’t tell." I made myself be still, straining to hear the distant yells over the keening wind. "Six. Maybe eight."

His face was grim. "Ride!"

We rode, then, blindly, the way one flees in a nightmare. I hunched in the saddle and clung to my pony’s neck, the air gasping in my lungs like knives as my mount struggled gamely in Joscelin’s wake, plunging and churning the snow. I could hear them now, clearly, a bloodthirsty Skaldic war-chant that rose above the wind and battered our ears like raven’s wings, urging us onward, onward, into the madness of flight.

It was too much, and we had too little left to give. I heard the sound of howling Skaldi pursuers string out, half their number circling around our forefront. I rode, floundering, alongside Joscelin and shook my head at him as we burst into a clearing, near a promontory of rock. His horse was nigh done in, and I could feel my pony’s sturdy sides heaving under me.

Joscelin drew up his horse, then, a serene calm settling over his wind-burned features. "We will make a stand, Phèdre," he said to me, very clearly. I remember that so well. He nodded at the promontory, dismounting and handing me Trygve’s shield. "Take this, and guard yourself as best you may."

I obeyed, getting down from my exhausted mount and settling the shield on my arm, my back against the rock. Our horses stood without moving, heads low, trembling as the lather turned to ice on their coats. Shield-armed and settled, I stood watching while Joscelin drew his sword and walked out into the middle of the clearing to meet them, a lonely figure half-lost in the swirling snows.

I’d been right; there were seven of them. Volunteers, Selig’s best, the fastest riders, the most skilled trackers. It was something, that it had taken them four days to catch us. The howling had stopped when we ceased to flee, and they rode silently out of the snows, dark and ominous. Seven. They halted before Joscelin, ranged in a semicircle. He stood alone, his sword hilt at shoulder-height, the blade angled across his body in the Cassiline defensive pose.

And then he threw it down, and clasped his hands in the air above his head.

"In Selig’s name," he cried in passable Skaldic, "I surrender!"

I heard laughter, then a gust of wind came, and snow-devils obscured my vision. When it died, I saw four had dismounted and approached him on foot, swords drawn, and one battle-axe among them. Two riders hung back.

The third rode toward me.

Joscelin, hands clasped above his head, waited unmoving until the nearest Skaldi reached him, poking his chest with the tip of his sword.

Then he moved, and steel rang in the clearing as he swept the Skaldi blade away with one vambraced forearm, both daggers suddenly in his hands, moving as unexpectedly as the skirling winds. No one will ever write of the strange poetry of that battle, the Cassiline’s ballet of snow and steel and death in the Skaldic hinterlands. Figures moved like wraiths in the snow-veiled clearing, only the clash of arms giving the deadly lie to their dance.

And the Skaldi rider approaching me drew nearer, until I shrank back against the rock and threw up my shield in defense.

It was Harald the Beardless, of Gunter’s steading.

I stared, astonished; in two heartbeats, he was off his horse and inside the reach of my shield, wrapping one arm around me and setting the point of his dagger to my throat. "D’Angeline!" he cried, pitching his voice toward the battle. "Let be! I have the girl!" I struggled in his grip, and he tightened it. "Don’t worry," he muttered under his breath. "I’ll not do it, Selig wants you alive."

On the field, I could see one of the figures pause; Joscelin, it had to be. He had his sword back, and I knew it by the angle at which he wielded it. Two of the Skaldi were down, but as I watched, one of those still mounted spurred his horse forward, axe sweeping for a blow.

"Joscelin!" I filled my lungs to bursting with the shout, willing it to reach him. "Don’t listen to him!"

Harald swore at me, clamping a hand over my mouth. I stamped on his foot and nearly broke free, but he regained his grip, shifting the dagger so I felt its edge. From the corner of my eye, I could see that Joscelin was down, rolling, but he fought still; the mounted Skaldi was slumping sideways in the saddle.

"I traded places with one of Selig’s thanes to come after you," Harald hissed. "Don’t make me harm you, D’Angeline! I mean to regain the honor of our steading with your return."

He held me hard against his side, my shoulders pinned, the shield awkward between us. Fumbling at my waist, I slid my hand out of my oversized mitten and felt the hilt of Trygve’s dagger beneath me. I wrapped my fingers about it and eased it from its sheath.

Joscelin was on his feet again, dodging through the snow, quick and agile. If nothing else, he had learned to maneuver on this terrain, the hard way. Two Skaldi yet opposed him on foot, and one on horseback. None of them had ever been forced to run over miles of wasteland behind one of Gunter Arnlaugson’s horses. The Cassiline sword flashed through the snow-laden air, and another of the unmounted Skaldi went down.

"Let me go, Harald," I said softly, twisting to gaze at his face. So young, the golden stubble of his first beard just thickening. Despite the cold, my hand was slippery with sweat, clenched about the hidden dagger hilt. "I am a free D’Angeline."

"Don’t try to sway me!" He looked away stubbornly, refusing to meet my eyes. "I’ll not fall under your witchcraft, D’Angeline. You belong to Waldemar Selig!"

"Harald." My hand was trembling, holding the dagger so near his vitals, hidden behind the shield bound so awkwardly to my left arm. Pinned against him, I could feel his warmth. He had given me the fur cloak I still wore and been the first to sing songs about me. My vision was blurred with tears. "Let me go, or I swear I will kill you."

Intent on the battle, he shouted a warning to the last mounted Skaldi, who narrowly avoided having his horse hamstrung by Joscelin. It was a measure of our desperate straits, that he would attempt such a thing.

As was what I did.

"Forgive me," I whispered, and pushed the dagger into Harald with all my strength.

I do not think, at first, he knew what had happened; his eyes widened, and his arms fell away from me. He looked down, then, and saw between us what the shield had hidden. With a gasping sob, I forced the dagger upward toward his heart and let go the hilt. Harald took a step backward and looked up at me, his eyes quizzical as a boy’s. What have you done? they seemed to ask of me. What have you done?

I gave no answer, and he crumpled to the ground and lay unmoving.

The last Skaldi rider saw, and gave a cry. Turning away from Joscelin, he spurred his horse toward me, looming through the snow. With nowhere to run, I waited, dumb and silent. In the distance, Joscelin dispatched the lone unmounted warrior and raced for a horse, any horse.

In dreams, things happen slowly. It was like that still, this unending frozen nightmare. I could see the Skaldi’s face, distorted with rage, shouting curses I couldn’t make out in the rising wind. Selig wanted me alive, Harald had said; I could guess his second choice. He would take me dead. At twenty yards, I saw the Skaldi cock his arm, spear at the ready. At fifteen, he cast it.

I closed my eyes and lifted Trygve’s buckler.

The impact jarred my arm to the bone, knocking me off my feet. Opening my eyes, I saw him above me, blotting out the winter sky atop his horse. Still strapped to my arm, the shield was useless, cracked beneath the force of the blow, the lethal, leaf-shaped tip of the spear gone clean through to the inside.

If he had had a second spear, I would have died then. I know this. But what spears he’d had, he had already cast. He dismounted and drew his sword.

"No!" Joscelin’s shout split the air, and the Skaldi turned, hesitating at the now-mounted Cassiline’s approach. I struggled to free myself from the useless shield, scrambling backward through the snow. Face grim, Joscelin lashed his borrowed horse forward, nigh on us.

Too hard, too fast. The horse stumbled, slid, losing its footing; it went down hard, head low, the mighty body crashing to the snow-covered earth. Sword in hand, Joscelin was flung free and fell no less hard, some distance from the thrashing horse.

The Skaldi looked back at me and grinned, the fierce, savage grin of a warrior with nothing left to lose. "You first," he said, and raised his sword high above his head, preparing to bring it down two-handed upon me.

"Elua," I whispered, and prepared to die.

The blade never fell.

It slipped, instead, falling away from his nerveless fingers to fall with a soft thump into the snow. The Skaldi stared down at himself, where the bloody tip and a handspan of Joscelin’s sword protruded. No one, I think, fails to be surprised at the death-blow when it comes in battle. He turned about slowly, his hands going to the blade’s tip. I saw the hilt and the rest of the blade standing out from between his shoulders. Joscelin was still down, propped on one arm; he’d thrown it from where he’d fallen. The Skaldi stared at him in disbelief, sinking slowly to his knees. Still clutching the tip of the sword lodged in him, he died.

It was quiet then, but for the wind and snow. Joscelin got painfully to his feet and came toward me, staggering. I saw when he drew near that he had a cut on one cheekbone, already frozen, and runnels of blood in his hair. He turned the last Skaldi on his stomach and tugged his sword free, bracing one foot on the body to get it loose. I stood wearily, and we held each other upright.

"Do you know what the odds of making that throw were?" Joscelin murmured, wavering on his feet. "We don’t even train for it. It’s not done."

"No." I swallowed, and nodded at Harald, motionless by the promontory, a dusting of snow already covering him. "Do you know he gave me his cloak? He never even asked for it back."

"I know." With an effort, Joscelin released me and stood on his own, passing one hand to his side. "We have to keep moving. Take…take anything we can use. Food, water, fodder…we could use more blankets. We’ll take a pack-horse, use whichever mounts are freshest. We need to gain some distance before we rest."