Snow-Walker

by Catherine Fisher

  Finally Moongarm, who had some strange instinct about time, told them it was near dawn. Jessa sat up, restless. “Right. We go now.”

  Each of them looked at Kari, not knowing what to expect. But he sat against the wall, unmoving.

  “What can you do?” Hakon asked at last.

  “Quiet!” Brochael growled. “Look!”

  The door was being unbarred, quietly and smoothly from the outside. A figure slid around it, well muffled against the cold. It was the guard. He leaned his spear against the wall and came forward; they saw his eyes were wide with terror.

  “Don’t make me do this,” he pleaded hoarsely. “How can you be here in my mind?”

  “I’m sorry.” Kari shifted from the wall. “I have no choice.”

  The man bent; despite his own will his hands went to the ropes about Kari’s wrists.

  “Hurry up,” Jessa said, “or they’ll notice he’s missing!”

  When they were all untied, the man stood still, as if Kari had forbidden him to move. His eyes watched them as they gathered their belongings, buckled on belts and weapons, picked up the sacks of supplies.

  “Now,” Kari said to him gently. “Outside.”

  At the door, he picked up his spear again; Hakon looked out cautiously. “No one about.”

  In the snow the man bolted the door and stood against it. Even in the cold he was sweating. Kari reached out and touched him lightly, once, on the forehead.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  Then he turned and walked away between the houses. The others followed; they paused in the shadow of a wall.

  “Will he remember?” Jessa whispered.

  “No. When they find us gone, he’ll be as surprised as the rest.” He sounded disgusted with himself. Moongarm looked at him with a strange respect. “I fear you more than them, Kari.”

  Kari glared at him, his eyes cold as frost. “So you should,” he said bitterly.

  The village was silent, held in frozen night. Only the drum still beat, an ominous reminder of time passing. Jessa led them to the wharves; there she crouched down and nodded out onto the lake.

  “That’s our way off.”

  “The ice!” Moongarm raised his eyebrows. “Ingenious. But will it bear our weight?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s our only way off this island.”

  “And Skapti?”

  “We wait until they bring him, at the bog. We’ll see them coming. Then we attack.”

  “Yes, but the horses!” Hakon was aghast. “We can’t leave them!”

  There was silence. Each of them knew they could never get the horses out without rousing the entire village.

  “It’s a heavy choice,” Brochael said grimly, “but Jessa’s right, this is the only way. I think we’re on foot from now on.”

  They climbed down over the edge of the wharf to the timbers beneath. Jessa stepped off first, carefully. The dawn cold was bitter; her breath clouded and froze on her knotted scarves. The lake lay before her, a rigid, shimmering mirror, white under the crescent moon, with the long blue shadows of the buildings stretching across it.

  The night was silent. Stars glittered, clear and hard.

  As she put her toe on the ice she felt the coldness underfoot, expected the slab to tip, to crack, but although her growing weight made strange wheezing sounds deep under the surface, it stayed solid. She stepped out and stood still, her footsteps ringing.

  “It’s thick.”

  Carefully, testing every step, she walked out into the lake, the others slipping behind her. In the hard frost every step and creak sounded loud, every slither enormous. She found herself holding her breath, and let it out in a cloud of mist. Every moment she expected the crack—the darkness underneath to open and swallow her. And why not, because it was the darkness they were defying, the darkness that wanted Skapti.

  You won’t get him, she thought. Looking back, she saw the others; Kari was light, and Hakon too. But Brochael was taking careful steps, as if he feared his own weight would bring him down. Silent and surefooted, Moongarm was a gray shape under the moon.

  Halfway over, she heard voices. Lights flared on the causeway.

  She crouched, hearing Hakon slither up beside her. “Brochael says hurry. They’re coming out.”

  She nodded and crawled on, keeping on hands and knees now, until the plate of ice under her wet glove suddenly shifted, and she stopped. “It’s the edge.”

  “Be careful, Jessa!”

  They were already among the rushes on the edge of the bog. Here the ice thinned to a lace-fine fringe that crackled and splintered under her. Then her feet were in brown brackish water, knee-deep, the reeds high above her.

  “Why doesn’t it freeze?” she breathed.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” Brochael growled out of the dark. “Keep to the edge. It’ll be treacherous farther in.”

  They waded through the ice-cold muck, working their way around to the causeway. Once Hakon’s foot went deep and he staggered; Moongarm hauled him out silently. Shadows among the reeds, they crouched and watched the torches approach from the village. The stink of stagnant rotting growth hung about them.

  A small group were crossing the causeway.

  “How many?” Brochael said.

  “Four.”

  Behind, well back, the villagers stood, as if they dared come no nearer.

  “Where is he?”

  “In front,” Moongarm murmured. “With the Speaker.”

  She saw him then, his thin, upright figure, that lanky walk. They had taken his coat off; his shirt was open and about his neck was a great noose of hemp, knotted strangely. He was silent, maybe gagged. He was alert though, she thought. He was probably wondering where they were.

  But Skapti knew exactly where they were. He also knew what was happening; as Brochael had guessed, he had heard of such things before. And as he stumbled on, pushed from behind and shivering with cold and fear, he tugged and twisted his bound wrists uselessly to red sores until the voice spoke quietly inside his mind.

  “Get ready, Skapti. You weren’t afraid we would leave you?”

  He grinned, unable to help it.

  The voice had been Kari’s.

  The Speaker and his prisoner and two torchbearers came right on into the swampy ground, the morass of clotted peat and moss squelching under them.

  “Ready,” Brochael whispered.

  Each of them had their weapons to hand; Hakon gripped his sword tight.

  “Here’s your chance to name that,” Jessa breathed.

  He wondered how she could joke; his own chest was tight with tension.

  “I’ll take the Speaker,” Brochael said. “You two, the others. Jessa, get Skapti.” He looked at Kari. “You’ll have to deal with the rest—the people on the causeway. If they cross…”

  “Leave them to me.” The ravens had come down; one was perched on his shoulder, gripping the dark cloth with its great talons.

  “What will you do?”

  “Keep them back.”

  “Yes, but how?”

  “Like this.”

  As he said it the night seemed to crack open. The Speaker spun around as a white gate of searing flame leaped up to bar the causeway; it spat and sparked like lightning. People screamed.

  “Now!” Brochael urged.

  They leaped out, yelling, flinging the torchbearers aside, the flames falling and hissing out in the black water.

  The Speaker cried out something in rage. Jessa saw him turn at her, but Hakon was there; he sliced the air with his sword between them and the shaman jerked back, stumbled, twisted away from Brochael’s ax. He fell, full length, floundering in the black ooze.

  Jessa grabbed Skapti, sliced his bonds. “It’s us!”

  He grinned. “Thought you’d abandoned me.”

  “Not us.”

  As she turned she thought the Speaker would be up, but he wasn’t; instead she saw the marsh was bubbling and churning around him, and a
blackness seemed to rise and gather from it, covering him as he screamed and struggled, bending over him, a dark form. His voice choked, broke, bubbled. Half a cry hung endlessly on the silent air.

  Skapti grabbed her arm. “Come on!”

  As they fled, the sudden silence behind chilled them. Only Kari’s fire gate crackled under the moon, the people behind it watching, without a sound.

  Along the road they raced, into the darkness, laden with packs and weapons, always looking back. Snow, deeper than before, slowed them, and then, just ahead, they heard the howl of wolves, a pack, hungry.

  Jessa stopped dead, the others slamming into her.

  “Get up the hill!” Moongarm yelled. “Leave these to me.” He flung his pack at Hakon and drew his sword.

  “Not alone,” Brochael growled.

  But the man was gone, transformed suddenly to shadow.

  Kari turned away. “Let him go. Come on!”

  Uphill they raced, to a stand of pines that rose in a dark line against the stars. Once there, they leaned against the trees, gasping for breath.

  The rune gate still burned below, the searing light from it crackling above the lake. But Kari was looking elsewhere, at the wolves hurtling after them up the slope, at least ten low, misty shapes.

  “Give me my sword!” Skapti yelled.

  “You won’t need it.” Kari pointed. “Look down there.”

  A gray shape sat waiting on the hillside. It too was a wolf, but larger than any Jessa had ever seen, and it sat as still as a stone under the stars. Its amber eyes glinted in the rune light.

  The wolf pack saw it. They slowed, stopped, yelping.

  Then one by one they slunk away from it, in terror.

  Eighteen

  The wolf is loose.

  Miles away and hours later, huddled under an overhang of rock, the travelers watched the sun strengthen.

  They were silent, breathless from the long scramble into the hills. No one wanted to ask the question; it was Hakon who finally couldn’t bear it anymore.

  He turned to Moongarm abruptly. “That wolf,” he said, clenching his hand nervously. “What was it?”

  The gray man stared at him, expressionless. “Just a wolf. It came from nowhere. A pack leader, I would say. The others seemed to slink off when they saw it.”

  His amber eyes challenged them all, levelly. Then he went back to eating the villagers’ bread.

  Hakon turned a bewildered look on Jessa. She glanced at Brochael.

  The big man was glaring at Moongarm, his face set with a grim, hostile fear. “So where did it go,” he asked harshly, “this convenient wolf? Does it still follow us? Has it been with us all along?”

  The man did not turn. “It went into the dark,” he said quietly.

  Brochael was livid; Jessa knew Moongarm’s coolness made him want to explode with rage. It was only Kari’s urgent shake of the head that kept him silent. Intrigued, she kicked snow from her boots. So the man was a shape-shifter. A werebeast. All of them seemed to have guessed that now, and all of them, she thought drily, were terrified of it. Except perhaps Kari. You never knew what Kari was thinking. And she liked Moongarm, had come to like him. He was quiet, watchful, yes, but shy, a man with a great secret. Now they knew what it was. And he obviously wasn’t going to explain anything.

  “At least,” Skapti said quietly, “we’re all alive.”

  “Without the horses,” Hakon said.

  “There was no help for that. And I have to say I’m grateful to you all for getting my neck out of that noose. Especially Jessa.” He put a long arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. She grinned.

  “Kari made the fire gate.”

  He nodded.

  “I know you wouldn’t have worried,” Brochael said gruffly. “Not with your courage.”

  Jessa giggled.

  “Thank you,” Skapti said lazily. “I was, of course, terrified. And did you also know, or haven’t you worked it out in your snail-shell of a brain yet, that I wasn’t chosen by any earth goddess, but by the shaman?”

  They all stared at him. Only Kari nodded.

  “The ravenmaster has, I see.” Skapti sat up, rubbing his cold hands together. “They knew we were coming, didn’t they—the Speaker knew. So we were a godsend. He made sure one of us would be the gift to their earth hunger. I had plenty of time tied up in the hut to work it out. He chose me, probably because he thought I was the cleverest.” He grinned. “They didn’t know about Jessa.”

  “So they knew where the seed was?” Hakon said. “In which piece?”

  “Not all of them. He knew.”

  “And what about afterward? That thing in the marsh that dragged him in…”

  For a moment they all saw it again, the dark bubbling of the peaty water.

  “Ah, now. That’s beyond me.” Skapti sat back. “Kari’s the one for spirits and earth wraiths. Something came out of there for him, that’s sure enough. Something out of the dark.”

  They sat silent, thinking about it. Then Brochael sighed and reached for his pack. “Let’s get on.” He glanced at Moongarm, as if to say something. Then he turned away.

  Already they were high in the foothills, the snow here deep under a frozen crust. As they traveled north all vestige of the giant road was lost; they waded up bare white slopes, leaving a blue tear of shadow, through gloomy stunted firs whitened with thick snowfalls frosted into place.

  The cold became intense; the daylight always shorter. For two days they struggled over the high passes, stumbling and falling and pulling one another up, soaked and shivering, trying to keep the food sacks dry. Their lungs ached with the tingling air. Without Kari’s rune fires they would have frozen; as it was, each night was an ordeal of cold, a quest for kindling and a place out of the raw winds that seared the exposed skin about their eyes. The world had turned white, had become an endless tilted plateau, and they seemed always to be climbing, their toes and ears and fingers raw with pain.

  On the second night a blizzard swept down; a howling fury of stinging ice that drove them into the only shelter they could find, a narrow cleft where all of them huddled together shivering, the ravens perched mournfully above. There was no fire; Kari had sunk into sleep at once and none of them had the heart to wake him, but at least they were out of the eternal wind.

  One by one, the others drifted off to sleep.

  Jessa couldn’t; she was shivering, and the rough knobbly floor stuck into her back. She shifted, restless.

  “Awake?” Brochael murmured.

  “Too cold.”

  “Come closer.”

  She moved against him, and he put his great arm around her, just as his left held Kari. “Better?”

  She tugged the blanket close. “You’re warmer than the floor.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  For a moment they were silent; then she whispered, “Brochael, do you think we’ll get through?”

  “Of course we will.” His voice was gruff. “They’re depending on us.”

  There was no doubt about that.

  “Still…,” she murmured.

  “I’ll tell you what worries me more than the snow, Jessa. It’s that werecreature we’re dragging with us like a shadow. What does he want? What sort of a thing is he?”

  They both watched Moongarm’s lean huddle in the corner; he slept silently, breathing deep.

  “He’s one of us now,” she said.

  “Oh no! He’d like to be. But I’ll never have that—I’ll never trust him, not until I know where he’s going and why, and how this curse came on him. A man who can slither into wolf-shape is no fellow traveler for me. He could turn on any of us. Is he man or animal?”

  “Kari is more than a match for him,” Jessa murmured sleepily.

  When he didn’t answer, she opened her eyes, surprised. “Don’t you think so?”

  “Kari sometimes worries me more.”

  She sat up then and looked at him. In the pale shimmer of the reflected snow all the russ
et of his hair and beard seemed drained from him; he looked thinner, with a gather of lines between his eyebrows.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  He looked at her. “Jessa, where are we going? To Gudrun, if we get there. To some land of sorcery and soul theft that’s not even in this world. And all the time I can feel him gathering himself, summoning all the skill and mind craft that’s in him. His mind is often away somehow—back in the Jarlshold, talking to ghosts and spirits and the birds… I don’t know where. I’m afraid of what it’s doing to him.”

  She shook her head. “He’s done this before, the fire gate....”

  “Oh, lights and fires, that’s nothing. It’s the rest. The outlaw. That guard.”

  She pulled a face. “Moving minds?”

  He nodded, wondering. “Imagine the power of that, Jessa, the secret, tingling power! Making everyone around you do just what you want. And they—we—would never know.”

  “He won’t. He wouldn’t.” Jessa settled back firmly.

  “He may have to. To defeat Gudrun he may have to become like her. Almost certainly, he will have to kill her.”

  Appalled, she stared at him. On his other side Kari twisted in his sleep, the long hair falling from his eyes.

  “Or she him,” Brochael murmured.

  In the morning they went on, weak from cold. It froze on their eyebrows and lashes; all the brief afternoon the snow fell, relentless. Only after nightfall did the sky clear and reveal the breath-catching steely glitter of millions of stars, the aurora shimmering over them.

  By the third day the travelers were worn to numbness. They were high in the mountains, a place of bare rock, frozen, icy chasms and passes, clattering rockfalls and the eternal howling wind. They rarely spoke now, plowing on in a straggling group, their thoughts wandering, lost in their own pain and hunger. There was only snow to drink; they gathered handfuls and sucked it. The food from the village was almost gone, and Brochael handed it out rarely.