AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Almost.
Hold, and Be Ready
So the Blessed directed him, and so did my father build his city. While fell things might go forth from Agramar and pass nearby, they long could not discover its fastness, and well ’twas so. Even the Enemy may be blind to the closest danger; long did he brood in his citadel, for of all the Children of the Star he hated Taeron not the least.
—Naciel Silverfoot,The Rise of Laeliquaende
Stormwind died between one step and the next as we edged wearily along yet another ice-ravine’s southron lip. The Northerners had drawn close, for even a wolf’s nose might well lose companions’ scents in the driving, whirling white of ground-snow scrape-gathered and flung skyward. My mantle was heavy, ice building upon my shoulders, and at every stop Arn and I had to endure the Elder breaking frost from our clothes—quick, skimming hand-brushes laden withseidhrgauged just hard enough to shake the carapace free without damaging cloth or flesh underneath.
I saw how they performed that feat—Daerith let me stand close by while he attended to Arn, and did not bother to hide the technique—but I had little enough strength to try it myself. The warming breath andseidhrboth barely sufficed to keep me from freezing solid.
The light was failing. All day something other than the cold had thickened around us, a steady invisible current dragging at our progress.When the wind stilled, heavy vapor exhaled from the Glass’s deep crevasses, giving the entire plain an eerie likeness to a steam-boiling pot.
I was almost too weary to shiver. Even the Elder cannot forever hold off a Secondborn’s need for rest, and there is only so much sleep one may take while walking. When Aeredh halted that violet-dusky afternoon I could not even wonder at the event, for I was staring at my ice-capped overboots and the pebble-laced frost underneath, and at the edge of my vision the ragged edge of a ravine yawned. The crevasse was shaped like one of the spear-harbor shores far to the west; I had seen those only while my invisible selves traveled with the aid of herbal fumes from Idra’s brass brazier.
Arn’s sudden soft inhale brought my head up, my mantle-hood slipping slightly. I almost twisted to glance behind us—for we were once more in loose file, Daerith and my shieldmaid following, Elder before and behind us, and the Northerners upon our southron side suddenly appearing through rising icefog, drawing close. I caught sight of gaunt Eol slipping between two forms, and his dark gaze lingered upon me for a long moment before he turned, his snow-crusted back presented to us and his swordblade gleaming as he drew.
Aeredh muttered summat in the Old Tongue, and even had I not known that language I would have understood the curse. I still could not guess his true age, but he sounded as deeply unsurprised as Flokin, who could bring together scathing couplets capable of flaying a fellow warrior to bone, pride,ormuscle, given strength by the sharp sheer depth of his experience in life and battle both.
“Do not,” Daerith said, then cursed alike and used the southron tongue. “Do not, lady shieldmaid. This is beyond you. My king?”
“Hold, and be ready.” For once, Aeredh did not take the harpist to task for addressing him with that particular honorific. “Stay close, Solveig.”
I could not have moved, in any case. I was too tired.
A wolf-howl rose before us—Efain, I thought, for its modulation carried aseidhr-breath of his scars and his silences. It cut short, and there was a flurry of movement; Elder and perhaps Gelad and Karas, for they had been taking lead against the terrible stinging wind, relieving others who had endured its brunt most of the day.
Eol did not move, his broadsword’s length catching a last ruddy gleam as the sun broke free of perpetual icefog, the golden flower of day reduced to a strengthless red coin as it sank to the westron horizon.
I shuddered, but not with the cold. At that moment it seemed there had never been anything other than journeying half-frozen through this nightmare, Arn and I simply fumbling strengthless in a trap. The Elder, especially the one holding me still as danger approached, had merely brought us here to die.
A great quiet ate every sound, even the clash of battle near the front of our line. Eol stood, sword still glowing, his shaggy, haggard head slightly cocked. He looked very small against the indistinct smear of ice-hummocks, icebreath fog rising in billows since the wind was now not knifing it to shreds, and jumbled, frozen thornbushes.
“Sol?” Arn whispered, as if from very far away. I had never heard her sound so…
Well, sofrightened. And well she should be, for the certainty of death closed iron-frozen fingers around my throat. I gasped, and the tiny sound caught something’s attention.
I see you, a foul rotting voice mumbled, yet I did not hear it with my physical ears. No, it lunged for my living warmth with a quick blind grasping of rot-clottedseidhrI had not noticed in my misery, for it had crept upon us in stealthy stages for days now.Come, little thing. You are ours now.
“Hold,” Aeredh said quietly. His arm was an iron bar, his fingers digging into my mantle-clad shoulder. The eerie blue radiance of an Elder’sseidhr-selves burned fitfully around him, coruscating like Fryja’s shimmerveils—for, as I had discovered, they do not merely fight with hand or sword, the Children of the Star. “And be ready.”
“Nathlàs,” Yedras answered, and there was a terrible weight to the word. I tasted it, bitter forge-ash against the very back of my tongue, and there was another faint scuffling sound much nearer—Arn attempting to draw away from Daerith’s grasp, to meet this foe the only way she could, with spear and warcry both.
Thatmanaged to loosen the thing’s grip upon me. Not the presence of the Elder nor their collective might, not the copper tasteof danger nor the sudden terrified pounding of my overburdened heart. But my fear for my shieldmaid, that she might somehow slip Daerith’s hold and fling herself at this new terror—no, that broke the hypnotizing, blurring, buzzing invisible whisper of its preliminary attack. “Arn,” I gasped, loud in the unnatural stillness. “No.Stop.”
The words held a snap ofseidhr, a wild striking-out—not at her, but at the thing I could not see, the thing Eol faced, the thing stalking us.
It rose from the icefog, tall and dark, just as the sun slipped below the horizon. At first I thought a white-freighted thornbush had somehow been brought to life, for it was crowned with spikes and more sharp points rose from its shoulders. Its armor was iron, and over it a great sable mantle full of rents like the lich’s spread in waves, faint unhealthy gleams showing as if its very being tore holes in thick dark fabric.
Now I understood, far too late, what manner of horror the North truly held. I cowered against Aeredh even as the thing let out a chilling, piercing cry, for my instinctive, invisible movement had snapped whatever hold it had gained upon us.
The howl was unearthly, and far colder than the Glass’s frigid breath. It pierced me in a thousand places until I was tattered as its cloak, and my heart might have stopped but for Daerith’s voice lifted in return, a mighty sound the likes of which I had never heard.
He was a harpist, true, and even a thrall may compose a saga. But there are those the Aesyr or Vanyr grant music more than earthly to; we call themscvellingor bards or even—when they are great indeed—songmasters, possessed of thegranritself, that holy echo of the Allmother’s own making-voice.
Daerith of Nithraen was a songmaster of the Elder, one who had learned his craft before the rising of the Sun and practiced with diligence ever since. A welter of strummed strings lay under his words, mixing with brazen trumpets and the throb of man-sized drums pounding echoes against a greathall’s walls. He used the Old Tongue, performing the oldest ofseidhrlike the Allmother herself before the world itself was made.
What is named isknown, and may be fought or turned to someuse; he addressed the thing before us by its proper word, and his song stripped some camouflage of dread and fear.
