A Sword from Red Ice

The remains of the young deer Raif had brought down at sunset had frozen into pink chunks. He'd done a hasty job of the butchering and had not skinned the carcass. Addie had helped, but there was only so much you could do after dark. Neither of them had expected the hard frost, and now most of the meat would have to be either cached or discarded. The pieces were too large to carry and could no longer be divided into smaller parts. They had the liver, which Addie had sliced into squares before he went to sleep, and the remains of the hind leg had been roasted with some of the Trenchlanders' sharp and soapy-tasting herbs. Looking at the frozen hunks of meat with the deer hide still attached Raif wondered if he was any better than the bear trappers. Even the ravens wouldn't be able to feed on it until it thawed.

" I'll put some of it in a wee bag and haul it up the tree," Addie said, showing that he had been following Raif s gaze. "But first we'd better check on those little suckers on your back."

It was not a pleasant few minutes for either of them. Addie had slept with the jar of leeches and had to travel with them close to his body all day. The risk of freezing was too great. Maybe a frozen leech could be revived, maybe it couldn't, but neither of them were taking any chances. They were already down to twenty-one and counting. Twenty after Addie rolled his fingers in the snow to cool them, spoke the three-worded prayer Gods help me and stuck his hand in the jar of black worms. He did not have Flawless' knack for it and gripped the leech midbelly, rather than below either of its sucking heads, and that meant he had to move fast. Two sets of mouth parts wanted a go at him. Raif could do nothing but pull his new rawhide tunic around his shoulders and present his back to Addie Gunn.

The cragsman's breaths were telling: short and wet with disgust. "Keep still," he cautioned, though in truth Raif had not been moving. "Sweet mother of gods."

When it was done the skin on Addie's face was tinged green. "You're gonna need to get that whole mess seen to," he said. "There's half a dozen wounds back there leaking blood, skin's peeling, something's turned black." He shuddered. "We'd better get a move on."

While Addie cached the meat—for no purpose, it seemed, other than treating the slain deer with some respect; neither of them expected to be back here again—Raif broke up the camp.

They had made good time yesterday and were now deep into the rolling cedar forests northwest of the Trenchlanders' camp. Once Raif had brought down the deer, Addie had attempted to locate some kind of meaningful clearing for setting camp, but had been forced instead to call a halt in a fallen timber gap between the trees. The ancient cedar that had toppled had provided partially seasoned wood for the fire and they'd had good, hot flames for roasting and tea-making. The embers were still firing as Raif covered them with snow.

He wished Addie had kept his opinions to himself about his back. With every movement he made he could feel the wrongness; the tight skin where the plaster had been attached, the bloating, the wounds. The teeth. Last night he'd slept on his back and when he'd risen two bloated leeches had dropped onto the blankets. They were slimy with his blood.

"Here," Addie said, startling Raif. "Eat."

Raif took the frozen cube of liver and popped it in his mouth. He sucked on it as they struck a path north through cedars the size of watch towers. It didn't please him very much, but he appreciated Addie's care. Blood for blood.

The rising sun was piercingly bright, illuminating individual ice crystals floating in the air and bringing out the red and purple tones that lay beneath the dark greens of the cedars. The trees had shed their snow and now had frozen moats around the bases of the trunks. If the temperature held trees would be lost. Sudden frosts after thaws could split pines clean in two.

Raif and Addie did not speak as they hiked up the rise, and this suited Raif well enough. He had some thinking to do. Woodpeckers were the only birds making noise in the forest and the sound of them drilling tree bark sharpened and clipped his thoughts.

The Red Ice. The Valley of Cold Mists. Mish'al Nij. The place where he was headed had many names. North, the Trenchlander had said, seeming to think that was instruction enough. Thomas Argola had been even less helpful. "The Lake of Red Ice exists at the border of four worlds and to break it you must stand in all four worlds at once." Raif had found the words so vague and self-important that he had barely thought of them since. To him they were just another of Argola's games.

Yet now he went over them again. Both the outlander and the Trenchlander had mentioned borders. Flawless had said the Red Ice lay on the border of Sull land and Bludd land. The clanholds and the Sull: they were two separate worlds.

Could the Want be the third?