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In short order we set off again, most of the men carrying lit brands, Daerith with an arrow nocked, and every hand to hilt except mine.
We plunged deeper into the Mistwood.
Every Fire Loses
Swift as the falcon,
Fierce as the wolf,
Bright as the stars,
Cold as the North.
—Anonymous,The Rede of All Things
Idid not see the creatures again, though their evidence was everywhere. They gathered as dark fell, strange multifaceted eyes reflecting firelight, but did not dare approach. That was one comforting thing—the wood’s hanging shrouds crisp-cringe from flame, and fire is the greatest friend of those who must travel in that place.
Not many do. At least the long-limbed things living there hunt the servants of the Enemy as avidly as any other prey, and we traversed only the very barest edge of their territory.
Arn caught a clear look at the things once, during a moonless night full of relentless vigilance and stealthy shadow-sounds. She shuddered at the memory long after, and despite her desire for a good song she would not describe them beyond,Like a long-legged weaver, and yet unlike, Sol. Twisted things. That sheep-monster must be kin to them.
I spent a great deal of our time there lighting brands wrenched from the web-hung trees, blueaelflamecasting radiance far beyond its small flickering. Perhaps that was the reason the Elder were now so polite.
Aeredh, of course, was only slightly more somber than usual. But Daerith the harpist gave Arn signal attention, asking many a question of southron habits and ways in a low tone. Yedras and the others—at Redhill I had learned their names, from golden-haired Hadril to the spearman Kieris Quickwit, from Gedron son of Maevras to Aeamiril the Knifemaster, and Kirilit called Two-Sword for the paired blades he carried, and the rest all familiar from songs of our journey—often made the curious Northern salute when our gazes met, a swift light touch to heart and lips before the forehead. It seemed akin to a shieldmaid’s homage to a woman she respects, and of course the men of Naras used it occasionally, but I did not know what the Elder meant by the gesture.
I was merely glad to be of some use during sunless days of constant watch and chill misery broken with short, sharp battles I rarely saw. My only task was to light the torches for driving away many-legged creatures and the larger fires when we halted to rest, snatching sleep in brief spates until shaken awake by Arn at the approach of skittering feet and manifold eye-gleams. The calling ofaelflameburnt itself deep into my fingers, for I performed it over and over again; had it been summer the fire might have escaped and given us yet another danger.
But in winter after the deepcrack freeze, every flame—wood-consuming or hidden in the depths of a living body—loses in the end. Even now I do not know how long we traveled in that terrible forest. ’Twas well past the solstice and the days were slowly lengthening, but the nights were still terrible and far, far too long.
Especially under those shroud-choked trees.
When the gloom of Mistwood faded there was little relief. Snow crept through unwrapped branches, thickening on hard-frozen ground littered with great clumps of granite boulders and dead or sleeping undergrowth; the thornbrakes and other bushes were filigreed with heavy clear frost. It was no longer so stifling-shadowed, but even at noon sunlight barely filtered through interlocked branches far above. The clearings were choked with drifts, and sometimes thin ice-hard streams glittered balefully amid their breathless shadows.
The near-constant sensation of being watched lessened somewhat once the trees drew away, and so it was we reached the Glass.
In thaw, summer, or autumn that vast shallow bowl is a swamp, the land depressed in great roundish pockets or branching sloughs, filled with melt or the mazed wandering of a thousand tiny watercourses. It was fortunate we crossed when we did, for it was slippery but solid, and did not swallow us whole.
Even in the deepest cold, though, strange lights burn over great branching rents in the ice, sickly colors having no name pulsing from twilight to dawn with nauseating randomness. They are not the dancing sky-lights of Fryja’s veils but uncanny exhalations burning with heatless flame, as certain substances will emit noisome light when mixed. The denizens of Mistwood bear a different sickly, pale hue, so the change should have been a relief.
It was not.
I was glad of my felted overboots, for warriors’ footgear is less sure upon the Glass. Nevertheless, the Elder passed without slipping, and shadows in the distance were the black-clad Northerners, moving with less grace but equal assurance in a wide guard-ring now that we were free of the trees.
We did not stop, for there was nothing to burn but great lumps of frozen, ice-hung thorn-tangle and the shrunken, twisted remnants of summer-succulent foliage dead and dormant in the cold season. The Elder gave Arn and me draughts from their flasks—winterwine,sitheviel, and other warming things. The Northerners… well, there were small animals suitable for hunting eking out a winter existence amid the crevasses and thorns, for life endures even on the Glass in that season.
Sometimes I can still feel Aeredh’s arm over my shoulders, and the cold of that passage. When you walk with another for so long, so closely, it is impossible not to learn summat of their inner world, and it was there I glimpsed a fraction of the Crownless’s true strength and thoughts. We spoke far less than Daerith and Arneior, yet we looked to each other often, and in agreement more often than not.
A terrible wind came from the North, raising whirls of stinging snow-pellets and doing its best to rob us of all warmth. And yet sometimes at night, the clear gemlike stars also bore veils of shimmering light in more wholesome colors than those exhaled fromice-crevasses, and I could not help murmuring a wondering prayer to Fryja whom my mother loved—for while it is Vardhra who lit the bright white fires hanging in the sky and scattered them in a river of milk, it is the green-robed, fruitful lady of the Vanyr who sends the shimmerveils on certain nights to remind us of joy’s necessity.
Each time I did, Aeredh’s arm tightened slightly, and he echoed my prayer in the Old Tongue. It seemed to help conserve a little heat.
The Glass, for all its name and seeming flatness, is relatively easy to hide upon even during the dead cold, for the freeze buckles and pleats the ground in strange ways. There are even tortured ice-shapes looming, where a spume tossed high at end of autumn snap-freezes in frigid wind. Yet each welcome obstruction to the fury of frigid, moving air also makes the swamp-bowl more difficult to traverse, for great rents and crevasses open in its floor, and none has plumbed their depths—nor will they, I think, except whatever god built that place. Or perhaps they will be emptied when the Allmother finally unmakes the world like a woman retwisting a skein.
On that day everything lost in those deep places may well return for a brief moment, all mysteries solved before the maelstrom of Unmaking swallows them afresh.
A long weary time of wandering, with Elder liquids burning in our limbs to grant some semblance of strength, passed under Arn’s and my feet. The Elder shepherded us carefully, for we could not leap the ice-ravines, and often had to trudge along a crumbling edge before finding some slim thread of solid-ground safety. Yet a dark line of tree-robed hills approached in fits and starts as the Glass began to ravel at its edges, a wall of forbidding peaks topped with perpetual grey haze. Though none but Aeredh knew it, those hills meant we were ever closer to our goal.
We almost made it through without a battle.
