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Chapter Forty
Several hours later, I was pretty sure that Rhea had gotten the better deal.
“Holy shit!” I breathed, my heart hammering, my mitten-covered hands clutching freezing stone.
It wasn’t the view that had me gasping, despite being worth it. As far as the eye could see in all directions stretched clear blue sky, tall, snowcapped peaks, and air—a lot of it. Crystal clear and so cold that it hurt the lungs I couldn’t seem to fill properly.
It felt like being on top of the world—and that was looking ahead. I didn’t glance behind me, because if I had, I’d have seen a dizzying drop down a colossal mountain face, like looking back from the top of Everest. I hadn’t had to climb all that way, although shifting hadn’t been much less taxing, under the circumstances. But it wasn’t exertion that had left me breathless, either.
No, that was due to what was moving in the narrow pass miles ahead, across the width of a deep valley, where the piece of sky visible between two huge crags was rapidly getting smaller.
&nb
sp; “What are they?” I whispered, watching humongous creatures breaking off pieces of stone the size of 747s and throwing them into the gap.
“Manlikans.”
“What?”
Familiar, icy green eyes turned from a pair of binoculars to look at me. The other war mages that had come to the suite had been a stopgap, because Pritkin was AWOL when Jonas first tried to reach him. But he’d been happy enough to make the substitution.
I wasn’t the only one who’d thought that a part fey would be vastly better for this mission.
Not that Jonas was happy to have us here at all, but even he agreed that there was no better way to spy on our enemies. With the precautions the Svarestri had taken, nobody else could get anywhere near our current location. But my abilities bypassed all those, and unlike the other war mages, Pritkin’s magic worked just fine in Faerie.
Not that we were using it at the moment. No, our current camo wasn’t a spell but rather a couple of huge, puffy suits that blended in with the snow and had enough insulation to cut through the biting cold. Pritkin had paired his with a close-fitting cap of the same color, which left his face a shocking oval of peach, a vivid thumbprint against the sky, that looked surprised and then vaguely amused at my question.
Which was unfair, considering that I was looking at a moving mountain range!
The creatures in the distance were huge, dark gray, and craggy—what the snow hadn’t covered, at least—and vaguely man-shaped, if men were hundreds of feet tall. And had beards of massive icicles hanging down almost to their waists. And small forests of trees growing out of their rocky skulls.
They looked like they’d been formed from the same dark stone as the surrounding mountains, except that mountains stay put, at least earth mountains do. Crazy-ass fey mountains, on the other hand, seemed to like to take a stroll, admiring the view, only with what, I had no idea, because they had nothing to see with. Just deep pits in the rock that gave me the creeps, and that was before I noticed one with a fir tree sticking out of its “eye.”
Unlike the copse on its head, which was growing upward in a way that eerily resembled Pritkin’s usual spiky hairstyle, this tree poked straight out. It made the creature look like it had been struck through the head by a giant arrow, although that didn’t seem to be bothering it any. No more than did the small thatched-roof hut perched on one massive shoulder, which was moving rhythmically up and down with its strides. Or the campfire burning cheerfully in front of the hut, gleaming brightly against all that ice and serving as a hand warmer for a much smaller man.
Not that he was small. Like most members of the light fey, he probably topped seven feet, maybe by a lot. And that was without the tall white plume on his close-fitting, black helmet. But at this distance, and compared to his massive ride, he looked tiny.
“They all have riders,” Pritkin whispered. “Someone to direct the magic that creates them, binds them together, and controls their actions.”
“But what are they?”
“A fey construct. You know the fey can manipulate the elements?”
I nodded.
“Well, when they need something done that their physical bodies can’t manage, they form servants out of their favorite element to do the work for them. And Aeslinn’s element—”
“Is earth.” Or whatever you called it here, because earth was far behind us now, back through the portal hidden in the trees that hugged the bottom of the slopes.
It had been cut long ago by Caedmon to spy on his rival, but hadn’t been used in centuries. The Svarestri fortress it was supposed to watch had been buried in a landslide, so there’d been no real point. Not until Aeslinn destroyed all the other ways in here, forcing Caedmon to dig it out of mothballs.
The old portal was going to form the staging point for our army’s invasion of Faerie, assuming that our current scouting trip worked out. And assuming that the pass the fort had once guarded, before the landslide, could be reopened. And assuming that the massive things in the distance weren’t doing what I thought they were.
Pritkin pulled his binoculars off his neck and passed them over, and I discovered that the manlikans were even more fascinating close up. One had a glittering slash of what appeared to be gold ore across its face, like war paint but cut into the stone. Another had the fossilized bones of some huge creature woven in and out of the rock on its shoulder and back, like some strange tribal tattoo. And a third had a frozen waterfall spewing out of a gap in the rock where its mouth ought to be, making it look like it was perpetually in the process of losing its lunch.
It was disturbingly funny, like there’d been some kind of contest to see who could create the weirdest ride. As if the fey who had called forth these giants from the surrounding cliffs had a sense of humor, although I doubted it. I’d never seen the Svarestri—Aeslinn’s silver-haired warriors—so much as crack a smile.
Of course, they were usually trying to kill me whenever we met, so I guess that might have had something to do with it.
