The Unfinished Land

Old Ice and Two Trods

ON THE EDGE of the forest, a dense wall of dark green, Valdis pulled back on her horse, wheeled it halfway around, and said calmly, “Flood is here.”

The men looked at each other, hearing nothing, but the horses, without guidance, broke into a run, then stopped abruptly and spun to face the cavern. Reynard held on as best he could with neither saddle nor stirrups. The rumble grew to a roar, and a frothy tide of sour grayness, higher than the horses’ withers, rushed around them. Reynard clung to the short mane with both his hands and all his strength, and felt his horse flinch in pain as chunks of ice and pieces of branch and smaller rocks struck legs and belly, and then, as all their horses shrieked, larger stones and even boulders.

The horses did not resist the flow, but stampeded to keep up with it, and right alongside them flew or swam creatures he had never seen before—nightmare creatures, furred snakes with great fangs and huge red eyes, winding around or climbing over spinning chunks of melting ice, hissing and screeching, gripping the horses’ legs or biting at them to hold on, as the flood bounced riders and horses from trees and rocks hidden in creepers.

Reynard thought he saw, over the neck of his animal, a gargoyle or something like it—a hippogriff, perhaps, though he had seen such only once, spouting rain off the roof of an Aldeburgh church. The creature, trying to stay above water on its spread wings, already half drowned, stretched its head up, gave him a beseeching gape of its beak, and went under.

They had no choice but to go with the flood into the trees.

Reynard heard Widsith call his name just as something wrenched him about. He let go of the mane and tumbled into the water.