“Princess Jondralyn Bronachell saw things the right way,” Val-Draekin went on. “She wished to fight for the rights of women. She wished to be a warrior.”
“But wasn’t the princess nearly slain by a Sør Sevier knight?” Nail asked. “Culpa said it was Jondralyn that I saw on that litter in Ravenker, her face cut in half.”
“But she survived. She came back to Amadon. And I’ve a feeling she will grow stronger for the experience. She is one Gul Kana woman to be admired.”
“They say she was the most beautiful and fair woman alive.”
“Aye, she was that,” Val-Draekin admitted. “Still is. As is her younger sister, Princess Tala. Though Tala doesn’t see it, she could grow into a more beautiful woman than Jondralyn. She would be about your age, I am guessing. Tala Bronachell reminds me of you, some. Naught but unfaltering and dogged determination anyway.”
Another blockage of ice reared up in their path. Nail guided them around it. The tunnel was growing darker now, gloomy. More and more murky shards of ice rose up in giant, shadowy forms. He silently weaved the raft between them all, their glacial waterway slowing down to almost a crawl. Nail paddled for a bit on one side of the driftwood raft, and then the other, alternating, trying to build up some speed.
The bowels of the glacier were such a bleak place, starved of all warmth. His legs dangling in the water were so numb it worried him, and the rest of his body was riddled with piercing agony. But if he kept his mind on other things besides the pain, he figured he could bear it. So he thought of beautiful girls.
He tried to picture Jondralyn and Tala Bronachell. Mostly he tried to picture Tala, considering she was nearer to his age. But all he saw was Ava Shay’s face in his mind. And thoughts of Ava only made him feel guilty. He could still feel her turtle carving hanging at his neck—after all he had been through, it was still there.
They traveled into complete blackness now, a howling wind racing up the chasm, a hollow and lingering sound, like choral voices echoing and discordant. The wayward crashes and booms of the shifting ice above were a mournful accompaniment to the sheer stark majesty of the sounding wind. Nail had once heard a group of traveling bards perform a song in the Gallows Haven chapel with flutists and drummers—their divine music almost as haunting as this glacial melody. But the musical wind eventually died to a hushed whisper.
Nail took a ragged breath that burned his lungs, felt the weight of the glacier above pressing down. The titanic mass of the ice overhead made him, and everything about his life, seem small. I’m bound to die in here. . . .
He saw blue light grow out of the darkness ahead, a luminosity far more clear and brilliant than any yet. Still, the glorious sight of so much divine light ahead gave him scant hope. Val-Draekin craned his neck around to see what held Nail’s gaze captive.
Within just a few minutes, the dark tunnel they journeyed in was lit nearly as bright as day. Their boat carried them out into the middle of the most spectacular sight—a mammoth vaulted ice cave of such unspoiled magnificence and splendor it stole Nail’s breath. All he could do was stare upward in wonder, wincing in pain at the frosty rays of sunlight slanting down. Even Val-Draekin stared upward in awe.
A vast silence engulfed the raft as they floated across the clear lake into the spacious cavern. A cavern at least a hundred times larger in scale than the inside of the Lord’s Point Cathedral, an endless cavern of stark columns of ice towering to heights of three hundred feet or more. Straight above hung a thin roof, a natural layer of ice. Like stained glass, it reflected a melting cascade of brilliant blues and whites and yellows, refracted sunlight that sifted and spilled in shattered flares and sparkles. Shifting and dancing off sharp columns of ice, this glorious light filtered down at a myriad of harsh angles, bathing Nail’s face in its bright warm beams. He could imagine himself trekking across the glacier and breaking through that thin sheet of ice above, plummeting hundreds of feet straight down to the frigid waters waiting below. He wondered if Stefan, Seita, and Culpa Barra had crossed over this very spot on their journey.
The lake was calm. Scarcely even a ripple was left in the wake of their raft as they crept along. When Nail looked down at the still waters, the breath was yanked from his lungs again. The water was so clean and clear he could see all the way to the bottom, hundreds of feet down. House-sized chunks of ice and dark black boulders looked like small children’s toys strewn about. And trees, long uprooted by violent glacial rivers, lay haphazardly, scattered like thousands of spilled little matchsticks. The entire mazelike lake bottom stared back up at Nail, as crystal clear as if it were inches from his face.
He dipped his branch into the water and rippled the scene into a million pieces. He steered them around a jutting tower of ice. The sound of his driftwood paddle stirring the water trickled endlessly, like chiming music. As they floated languidly along, there was something holy and reverent about this clear bright chamber and its sheer ice columns of blue and crystal waters.
In its absolute quiet, this alien place held a hushed, sacred majesty.
“Your face is bruised, swollen.” The Vallè eventually broke the pristine silence as his gaze fell on Nail. “I can now see it clearly in this light.”
The devouring pain of the cold had so consumed Nail, he occasionally completely forgot about his injured face. He recalled the journey over the falls, cracking his head on the ice. The poison darts. I must look a fright.
“Better than a broken leg, I reckon,” Val-Draekin said, straightening the leather straps around his makeshift splint. “Or the wounds the oghuls gave me.” The bandages around his arm and shoulder were ragged and coming apart.
“If we get out of here, can you walk?” Nail asked, realizing it was a stupid question on many levels as soon as it spilled from between his stiff, dry lips.
“Let’s worry about getting out of here first.” The Vallè’s eyes drifted up again, taking in the lofty view. “It’s warmer here, sun filtering down, probably why this vast lake hasn’t frozen over.”
There was some dark tangle of wood floating in their path. Nail eyed it warily as they drifted closer.
“This is truly a sight Breita would die to see,” Val-Draekin commented.
“It is a sight to see,” was all Nail could think to say, eyes still on the dark debris in the water.
“Seita and Breita were inseparable as sisters,” Val-Draekin went on, dark eyes still roaming the massive cave. “I was jealous of their closeness, of the bond between the one I loved and her sister, Seita. I don’t know why I admit that now, here, of all places and times, and to you. But it just seems like it’s something I need to say out loud.”
Nail silently guided the boat around the floating bit of debris, a wagon-wheel-sized clump of driftwood and ice melded together. It was a twisted mass, grotesque. It reminded Nail of an oghul’s brutal face. Foul creatures. Savage and vile.
“Have you ever had a bond like that with someone?” Val-Draekin asked, his own concerned gaze falling on the pile of debris. “Someone so close you were nearly inseparable?”
Nail was hesitant to answer. “I wouldn’t know,” he finally said. “Or I wouldn’t know what a bond like that would even feel like. I’ve never had a family.”
“I didn’t say the bond had to be with family.”
Nail let the truth of his existence settle over him. He’d spent a lifetime feeling like nobody loved him or even cared, that he was just Shawcroft’s inconvenient baggage. “I don’t really feel like talking about this subject.”
“Well, we should talk of something,” Val-Draekin said matter-of-factly. “Else I think I shall die of boredom down here, despite how beautiful this place is.”
Indeed, the staggering grandeur and radiance of the cavern captivated Nail everywhere he looked. But it was also a deadly place. And he wasn’t certain a conversation with the Vallè would make him feel any better about their predicament, especially if it involved talk of relationships and family. He already felt guilty for puttin
g his friends in so much danger. Stefan. Dokie. Liz Hen. Even Beer Mug. I should have abandoned in the Autumn Range. Their lives would have been better off without me.
But he had felt a bond with those in the company. Was the Company of Nine his family? Is that what Val-Draekin is talking about? His only kin was perhaps his former master, Shawcroft, and he wasn’t even certain about that—he had only Hawkwood’s word to go on. Cassietta Raybourne. Aevrett Raijael. Could they really be his parents?
“I’m naught but a slave,” he finally muttered. “Merely existing to do the bidding of my betters.”
“I’ve never detected anything servile in your speech or demeanor,” Val Draekin said. “You’ve certainly never acted the slave in the time we’ve known each other. Do not run yourself down like that. You are worth more.”
Nail raised his oar up out of the water. It seemed if left alone, the flow moved them slowly in whatever direction it wanted. So he let the current have its way.
“Shawcroft must have known this glacier well,” the Vallè stated. “If your master worked those mines for as long as he did, he would have crossed over the ice many times. I wonder if this cavern was here, even back then.”
Nail eyed Val-Draekin curiously; the dark hair, sharp ears, dark round eyes, pale face, all of it as alien and strange as the ice cavern they floated through.
“Since we left Lord’s Point,” Val-Draekin continued, “Roguemoore, Godwyn, Culpa Barra, they talked of things with me. Things regarding you. Of how Shawcroft was there in Arco when your mother died.”
Nail’s heart skipped a beat. His eyes narrowed, oar still poised over the water, unmoving. “I wouldn’t trust Godwyn or the dwarf,” he muttered. “It was all secrets with them. Culpa Barra too, I wager. I doubt they know anything of Shawcroft or my mother.”
“You are right not to trust them.” The brutal frankness of the Vallè’s words hit Nail like a lightning bolt.
“How would you know who I should and should not trust?” he asked pointedly, realizing the inconsistency of his own position.
“You have many questions that need answering, Nail,” Val-Draekin said. “And until you find those answers, I fear you will always judge your life as incomplete.”
Nail said nothing, the truth of the Vallè’s words slicing through his heart. “And I should trust you?”
“There are some you can trust. But I am not promising that I am one of them. That is for you to figure out, Nail.”
“It’s easiest to just assume everyone lies. Nothing to figure out there.”
“Roguemoore did not have your best interest at heart. That I know.”
Nail was again startled at the harsh frankness of Val-Draekin’s pronouncement.
“Well, what does it even matter?” He shrugged. “I reckon the dwarf is dead now.” He could not even meet the Vallè’s gaze.
“Aye.” Val-Draekin nodded. “The dwarf wore heavy layered armor, not as easily shed as yours. He probably lies drowned at the bottom of this glacier somewhere far behind us, his secrets gone to us forever. A great blow to the Brethren of Mia. For Roguemoore was privy to information few others knew, things that not even Godwyn or Culpa Barra knew.”
Nail was not surprised by that. How is it that nobody can be truthful, ever, not even to their own Brethren? Shawcroft wasn’t. Roguemoore wasn’t. He thought of Hawkwood and what the man had told him in Ravenker about his heritage. But is nobody true to their word? He feared the Vallè was full of lies too, and this was all a game.
“There is one man who you feel may have spoken truth,” Val-Draekin said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Nail’s heart squeezed tight. He shivered. The only thing that seemed to chill him more than the icy waters of the glacial river was the uncanny clairvoyance of the Vallè sitting across from him. “Did you know Hawkwood?” he asked.
The Vallè nodded. “I knew him some.”
“Is Hawkwood like Godwyn and dwarf, full of lies?”
“I am certain of one thing,” Val-Draekin said. “Hawkwood was also in Arco with Shawcroft the day your mother died.”
Nail’s heart almost twisted in half. He could scarcely breathe.
The words spilled almost unbidden from between his frozen lips. “Hawkwood said my mother was named Cassietta Raybourne.” His heart raced inside his chest just saying her name aloud for the first time. “She was the younger sister to King Torrence Raybourne of Wyn Darrè. Hawkwood said that Shawcroft was my blood kin, my uncle. Said his real name was Ser Roderic Raybourne. He said I was of royal blood. Wyn Darrè mixed with . . .” He trailed off, realizing he must sound like an absolute fool.
“Go on,” Val-Draekin urged, dark eyes boring into his. “Wyn Darrè blood mixed with what?”
“Hawkwood told me my father was King Aevrett Raijael of Sør Sevier. Said my destiny, even Roguemoore could not fully fathom.” He expected the Vallè fellow to laugh at him as perhaps Liz Hen might if she heard such a preposterous thing.
“Angel Prince.” Val-Draekin broke his gaze from Nail’s. “That explains a lot.”
“Explains what?”
“Godwyn mentioned that Shawcroft would leave you alone for stretches of time to go into the mines to dig for the weapons and stones, right? That you would stay with Stefan’s family when Shawcroft would go off mining.”
“Aye, that is true.”
“Hardly seems like a man worried about your well-being or safety. No?”
He was taken aback by the Vallè’s inference. Everything Val-Draekin said seemed to throw him off balance. “Shawcroft cared,” Nail said, almost in defense of his master. “At Deadwood Gate when I was young, Shawcroft would take me into the mines some, but never very far, or we would pan for gold in nearby streams. If he ever did leave me for long stretches, there was always a trusted family in town that would watch over me. And Godwyn was right, in Gallows Haven I would stay with Stefan’s family.”
“A trusted family, you say?” the Vallè asked wistfully, as if he didn’t quite approve of Shawcroft’s judgment, leaving Nail with others.
“Shawcroft did what he could.” Nail didn’t know why he kept defending the man. “I was never mistreated—” He stopped. His eyes roamed the cavern. A rumbling roar, deep and savage, seemed to be growing out of the ice. A waterfall!
The air seemed to shift around him, followed by a deafening boom from behind and to his left. Nail looked back. Almost straight above, a column of ice stretching from the lake up to the ceiling cracked and folded in the middle. It sheared into shards of ice that plummeted hundreds of feet down, stabbing into the calm water around them like spears. Great waves of frothing water boiled and churned. Their little raft rose up as the first swell of water rushed underneath them. One hazardous chunk of ice lanced back out of the water, pounding violently into the underside of their tiny craft, launching both Nail and Val-Draekin spinning into the frigid lake.
Nail gasped as the icy waters folded over him, every muscle in his body cramping at once. When his head broke the surface of the lake, he saw Val-Draekin floundering not an arm’s length away, desperately trying to keep his face above water. Mustering what strength he could, Nail forced his cramped muscles into action, kicking his way toward the Vallè. Another wave rolled over them both and the Vallè was forced under.
Nail grasped the metal-ringed collar of Val-Draekin’s leathers and pulled his friend’s head to the surface again, grasping him from behind, one arm around his chest. The Vallè gulped for air. He hugged Val-Draekin with one arm, keeping the Vallè’s face above the now churning waters—waters that were now swiftly pulling them toward the towering sheer wall of the cavern. A grim gaping tunnel was visible at the base of the ice wall, the powerful current sucking them toward it, sucking them uncontrollably toward a booming noise that rose in pitch and vibration. The safety and warmth and beauty of the cavern swiftly disappeared behind them. Shards of ice, fierce and brutal, rammed into them from all sides as the rapids overtook them, pulling them into the dark of the
tunnel.
Still clutching Val-Draekin tightly with one arm, Nail prepared himself for the horror he could see looming ahead. Together they plunged over the thunderous falls, dropping into a foaming, fuming stew a hundred feet down.
Somehow Nail managed to hold on to Val-Draekin, even as the falls thrust them deep into a murderous maelstrom of sharp water and ice. The furious tumult thrashed and stirred before fiercely spitting them out into a broad river of rolling waves and tossing ice, thrusting them straight into a racing chute of roiling, brutal blackness.
They were swept along at a speed Nail figured the fastest horse in the Five Isles couldn’t even match. An endless, chaotic ride of freezing water and darkness. And scant chance for breath. Nail desperately clutched the Vallè to his chest, more out of self-preservation than anything else. Val-Draekin seemed to take the brunt force of every block of ice the river tossed their way. At times they were forced completely under water, the sadistic current scraping them along the cruel icy roof of the chute, forcing Nail to hold his breath to the breaking point. There were a few pockets of air, mere seconds to grab a breath before they were shoved under again, vicious water grating them under the ice. A never-ending torment of piercing cold and raging violence.
When they broke from the suffocating tunnel, a house-sized boulder rose up in their path. Heaps of frothing water pushed them around the jutting rock and onto a broad slab of flat ice behind the boulder. They were swept across the surface of ice and dumped into the river again, bobbing along in a much slower current, some faint light drifting in from above. Nail found it impossible to orient himself to their surroundings, until they came to an abrupt stop in a bubbling pocket of swirling waters formed against a shelf of ice, the surface of the shelf just out of his reach.
Val-Draekin struggled free of Nail’s grasp. The eddy had them both trapped, dipping and swelling, churning them low one second, thrusting them high the next. On an upswell, the Vallè reached up, and hauled himself completely out of the water, scrambling onto the shelf of ice to safety.
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