Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  The Ice King’s Country

  Nyr made them ride in the middle of the group, behind the warriors and in front of the pack ponies. But apart from that he treated them with respect. The ponies could travel only at a walk and the afternoon seemed endless as they worked their way back into the mountains. Ash, on Curlew’s Blackie, gradually lost the dazed look, much to Ember’s relief.

  There was plenty of evidence that the ponies had come that way in the morning, and Ember found the piles of dung reassuring. They were on the right track.

  They came to a valley hidden by several twisting turns between high valley walls. The hillsides opened out to show rough grass pasture, a stream falling in white mist from a cliff to the right and forming a wide pool before it meandered away across the valley floor. Quickening their pace, the ponies made for a campsite near the pool, where a big blackened circle of rocks showed where the campfire had been the night before. Ember wondered, with a quick squeeze of her breath, how the fire would react tonight. Would it come when the men struck flint? Or would she have to call it?

  The sky above was darkening and Nyr’s men dismounted thankfully and went about the prosaic tasks of making camp: looking after the horses, gathering the sparse wood from the hillsides, as well as old dung pats, getting out food and cooking pots.

  Ember slid down from Merry to find Ash ready to take the reins.

  “Allow me, princess,” he said. She met his eyes steadily. No sign of the teasing cousin; he must be her servant now, even if he was family. Somehow that was hard for her to take; losing her laughing, challenging Ash seemed like too high a price to pay. But she handed the reins over with a nod and went to sit on a large stone near the campfire, allowing the men to work around her.

  They glanced at her occasionally, but didn’t seem to resent her idleness, although Nyr was feeding and watering his own horse.

  Then the youngest of them knelt by the kindling and tried to start the fire.

  Tried and failed. Ember almost panicked, but Ash’s hand came down on her shoulder and he whispered, “Help him.” She took a breath, steadied, and as the young man struck his flint again she called the fire. Gently, gently, she imagined the sparks forming on the kindling; imagined the small flames licking at the twigs; imagined the fire growing bit by bit, stick by stick.

  The young man sat back, satisfied, as the flames took hold, bathing him in yellow light. But Ember could see that the colors were the intense, deep hues of true Fire, and something in her belly curled up and shrivelled. Would she take the curse of dead fires to Nyr’s people, too? Could she risk others so much?

  Stricken, she looked up at Ash, and he patted her shoulder. “They’re with us,” he said. “They had no trouble last night, and they won’t again, once they let us go.”

  She moved forward before the young man could reach to place more wood on the pile.

  “I will tend the fire,” she said. He nodded, unsurprised, moving off to collect water from the pool.

  She knelt on the soft grass and added stick after stick carefully, hoping past hope that Fire would not appear. When she placed the first dried horse pat on the edge of the flames, she tensed, but nothing happened.

  “He wants you to come to him,” Ash said quietly, squatting next to her. “He won’t show himself to these men, because that might stop you.”

  She hoped it would be that simple, but remembering the sulky, smouldering eyes of Fire, she wasn’t sure. There had been a bitter note in Ash’s voice she hadn’t heard before, and she wondered, as he moved away, what had brought it out now. Curlew’s death? The flames built as she looked at him, and she felt again the surge of pure desire she had experienced in the Forest. Fire-wrought; false, but still hard to bear, hard to resist. She forced herself to look away before her very bones melted.

  Once the cooking pot was full of water and the food laid out, the men looked at her. Ah. Women’s work. No doubt they’d be quite capable of cooking for themselves, but since she was here… even Nyr seemed to expect it of her. With an inward grin, she remembered her mother insisting on teaching her to cook.

  “I’ll never need it!” she’d protested. “I’ll always have a cook!”

  “Always is a long time,” Martine had said. “And a good mistress can do everything she asks of a servant.”

  Martine herself had, Ember knew, doggedly learned all the skills of the women in the fort: butter and cheese making, spinning, weaving, tending the kitchen garden, preserving, and, of course, brewing, the mistress’s main responsibility. She had insisted that Ember learn them all, too, as well as the fine sewing and embroidery that were appropriate to her rank.

  “Find me some herbs,” Ember said now to Tern. “Rosemary, thyme, bay, whatever you can.”

  She approached the pot confidently and inspected the food they’d laid out. It was barely recognizable; dried meat, by the look of it, and hard black bread. Onions, at least, she knew. Something purple that looked like a carrot. She sniffed it—yes, it smelled like carrot, too, only more bitter. Small dried somethings—peas? Berries? She couldn’t tell.

  “This will take a while,” she said grimly, pulling out her belt knife and beginning to chop the onions.

  The Ice King’s men were accustomed to waiting for their meal, it seemed, as they’d scattered again, looking after the horses and their tack. Several of them were gathered around Ash, looking at his bow from a polite distance, and at him, too.

  “Their bows aren’t as good,” Cedar said quietly to him. Ash had noticed that, of course. They were using single recurved bows, too long for horseback. Good for stalking and accuracy close up, but without the reach of his new bow.

  He knew that if the Ice King took his bow, they could make their own, with a little trial and error. They might not be able to make the fish-skin glue he used, but there were other glues, not quite as good, that would serve. And the sinew backing which was the core of its strength was easy enough to come by in a land with deer and elk.

  Nyr approached and sat on a stone next to him and Cedar, and pointed at the bow, his eyes bright with interest.

  “Arvid trade?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ash said. He was pretty sure the answer would be “no,” but Arvid was a strange one, not like a normal warlord. Who knew what he would decide?

  “It may be,” Cedar said. “Arvid Warlord likes trade.”

  Nyr nodded with satisfaction.

  “Good bow.”

  “Thank you,” Ash said.

  Nyr’s eyes sharpened. “You make?” he asked.

  Ash cursed himself. If the bow was valuable to them, how much more the bowyer?

  He shrugged.

  “You teach,” Nyr said.

  Ash shook his head, and saw Nyr’s face harden.

  Nyr glared at him and rose abruptly to go and talk to Bren. They spoke earnestly for a few moments, shooting glances at Ash and Cedar.

  “I’m a fool,” Ash said.

  “Yes,” Cedar said, but he put his hand on Ash’s shoulder.

  Bren and Nyr came back and stood in front of them, shoulder to shoulder. Ember noticed and came back from the fire circle to stand to one side, looking a question at Ash.

  “You teach,” Bren said. “Fire Mountain long way. You teach on way. Or not go.”

  “Teach what?” Ember said.

  “How to make bow.”

  “He can’t,” she said flatly.

  “He is maker,” Bren said, scowling.

  Ember laughed.

  “Him? He is polisher.”

  She mimed smoothing down the wood. Ash flushed. What was she doing?

  “He is still learning to make the perfect bow,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  She wasn’t lying. She was selecting her statements very carefully. Clever, but on a trip like this, he felt it was dangerous to twist the truth. He couldn’t gainsay her, so he nodded, shamefaced, as though he’d claimed more skill than he had. And who was twisting the truth now? he thought.

 
“Too young,” Ember said dismissively. “Could so young a man have made so good a bow?”

  Nyr still looked suspicious, but that argument seemed to carry weight with Bren. He shrugged and tapped Nyr on the arm, to come back to the fire. Nyr left with a backward glance at Ash’s bow; hungry for it. Ash doubted if they’d be allowed to leave with it, and thought he should probably break it right now, to make sure the Ice King didn’t get hold of it. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it yet. They might need it, he told himself.

  Cedar had turned away, as if uninterested, but Ash knew that he just wanted to make sure they didn’t ask him what the truth was. Stonecasters didn’t lie. If they did, their castings went astray, doubled back to bite them. Cedar was only at the beginning of being a caster, and Ash knew he didn’t want to do anything to endanger that.

  But the space at his back felt cold and empty, nonetheless.

  He looked across at Ember. She kept surprising him. That little piece of misdirection—how often had she done something like that before? It had been so polished. Practiced. Warlords’ daughters… Always on show, always watched. No wonder she’d developed skills at deception. But it left him frustrated for her. She shouldn’t have to lie. She should blaze as clear and pure as the red of her hair. Well. No business of his. Never could be. And that was, suddenly, a grief he hadn’t expected. A farmer’s son couldn’t even have a place at her eventual husband’s fort, except as the lord’s bowyer, and then he’d be expected to dip his head and bow as she went past. He would miss their teasing conversations.

  Cedar had returned and stood by his shoulder again, watching with him as Ember tended the fire and the cooking pots. Something was beginning to smell good.

  “She cooks? Astonishing!” Cedar said, the ready laughter back in his voice. Ash smiled.

  “She has more surprises than that in store, I’m thinking,” he said. Cedar looked at him with a question in his eyes, but it wasn’t one Ash could answer. “Grammer’s taught her more than a warlord’s daughter usually knows,” he explained, but it wasn’t what he had meant, and Cedar knew it. Ash moved off to the horses, checking Merry’s hooves again, although he’d checked them thoroughly already.

  The food was all right, Ember decided. Not up to the standards of her mother’s cook, Ailsa, but good enough for the trail. The men ate it fast enough, and grunted appreciation as they swallowed, which she supposed was all any cook could expect. Cedar caught her eye and mimed astonishment at the taste, and she grinned. For Cedar, at least, there was no flame raised in her, and she was thankful for it.

  She banked the fire with horse pats and carefully did not speak to it, but nothing untoward happened. Ash set up their sleeping pockets with hers between him and Cedar, and she slid into it with a queer combination of fear and thankfulness. A horrible day was over, but here they were in the middle of their enemies, going into the vulnerable state of sleep. Oddly, the one thing that she should have been frightened of, as a girl alone among men, she was sure wasn’t going to happen.

  But what else would happen—not knowing that was the source of all her fear.

  Ash smiled at her, as if reading her thoughts.

  “Cedar and I will take turns at watch,” he said reassuringly. But they would be no protection against the fire. Her wrist, which had been cooled by the sweet water of the Forest, had begun to ache again, as if He were reclaiming her.

  Her last thought was of Curlew, in his dark rock tomb.

  The Ice King’s men, it seemed, didn’t believe in breakfast. They got up, packed and saddled the horses, grabbed some of the dried meat from their packs, and were off. Threading through the tortuous valleys, climbing higher with each turn, Ember felt as though she had moved into a world beyond this one. The high pale sun in a clear sky, the white-capped mountains which were revealed from time to time as they turned into a new valley, the taste of the air; all strange. Only the cold was familiar. How she hated the cold!

  Then they turned a corner and came to the most spectacular place she had ever seen. A long, long valley, floored with welcome green by the sides of a flashing stream. On either side of the grass, rising to the sheer peaks, was a scree of loose rocks that had fallen or been ground from the mountainside by year after year of snow. Above those, a narrow belt of trees, small twisted pines whose branches curled like exploring fingers. And at the end of the valley, rising tor after tor, peak after peak, the sharp white edges of the Eye Teeth. Irregular, snowy, they lured her eye up and further up until she saw the straight gray sides and pure cone shape of a different kind of mountain. Alone of the peaks, it was not covered in snow, and was wreathed in cloud—but of course it was not cloud but smoke, white as the snow it reflected. His mountain. It had to be.

  She hadn’t expected it to be beautiful, to grasp her heart and twist it, to make her yearn toward it as—as the fish yearns toward the baited hook, she thought, giving herself a shake.

  Nyr turned back and brought his pony up beside Merry.

  “Fire Mountain,” he said, disapproval in his voice, as though she should now see how stupid it was to go there. “See? No snow!”

  Ember nodded. “Fire melts snow,” she said.

  He slapped his thigh, as though she’d proved his point. “Evil.”

  “Necessary. Without fire, we die,” she said.

  That stopped him, and made him think. She could see that he was frustrated by his inability to say what he wanted to say; that he was intelligent and agile of mind, hampered by his poor command of her language. That was unfortunate. She had better begin to learn his, she thought, and distracted him by saying so. He considered, and she wanted to smile. It was the negotiator’s face, and she could almost hear his thoughts. He was weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of her knowing his language. Eventually, he looked up at Bren, as though wondering what his opinion would be.

  “I will teach you more of mine in exchange,” she said.

  “Agreed,” he said immediately.

  They began swapping words and phrases. Nyr was most interested in those related to trading, which confirmed her first view that he had been telling the truth about his trading trip and that Curlew’s death had been a useless accident. It made her heart ache.

  As they reached the valley floor she realized that the green patches were all in use: goats grazed there, and there were terraces cut into the side of the hills, invisible from a distance, but up close showing a tantalizing glimpse of grass and low shrubs. The shrubs were orderly—too evenly spaced to be natural—but she saw no one tending them until Bren pulled a curved cow horn out and gave three blasts on it.

  Children and young women came out from behind rocks and slits in the cliff walls. Not many—perhaps ten on each side of the valley, spread out over the terraces. They held farming tools like hoes and sickles, but some also had spears, and the older boys had bows, while the other children had slings tucked into their belts.

  Bren signaled to one of the older lads and he raised a hand in reply, then turned and disappeared into one of the many cracks along the cliff face. That made Ember uneasy, and Ash brought his horse closer to hers as if sharing the thought.

  “Ambush?” he murmured, fingering his own bow.

  “Nothing we can do if it is,” she said, frowning. She was fairly sure that Nyr had been honest with them, but Bren… Bren reminded her of the leader of the Valuers, the head of their council, a canny woman called Lamb, who put the safety of her people above everything else, including honesty. Which her father would say was her duty.

  Bren came back to them and they reined in. He produced a long scarf and handed it to Ash.

  “Eyes,” he commanded, gesturing for Ash to tie it around his head.

  “Secret ways from here,” Nyr said.

  Nodding, Ash took the scarf, although his face was troubled. If there were an ambush, they’d be helpless. But they were helpless anyway, Ember told herself. She pulled her own scarf up and wrapped it around her eyes. As she did, Cedar and Tern followed s
uit, Ash a heartbeat behind them. She didn’t resist when someone, Nyr, she thought, took Merry’s reins from her fingers.

  “Come,” Nyr said.

  The bright day was just a vague outline of light above and below her eyes. Ember felt fear curling in her belly. Helpless. She strained to hear beyond the muffling scarf, but there was nothing. No voices, and the sounds of the horses’ hooves and the wind through the rocks was muted. Her hands felt distant to her as they clutched the front of her saddle. Only Merry’s warmth was real.

  She lost track of time, but she thought it was about an hour later when she heard hooves cantering along the rocky trail toward them. From ahead, from the Ice King’s Country.

  Men’s voices shouted. Ember tried to hear, but only caught a few words: her father’s name, Fire Mountain, death, or dead. Were they talking about Curlew, or about what to do with them? Frustration took her over and she pulled off the scarf, her whole body tightening with fear as she did so.

  A party of around twenty men had joined them, all on the stocky, sure-footed ponies. They were a mixture of ages, but one stood out—his neck and arms were ringed with gold, and the others left a space around him as he and Nyr and Bren talked together. Ember recognized that deference. This was the king.

  He was shorter and hairier than she’d thought he would be. The Ice King had been such a figure of terror in her childhood that she’d imagined him tall and ice blond, with sharp cheekbones and deep-set, brooding eyes. Long clawlike hands.

  This king was barrel-chested, with auburn hair and a ginger beard that covered his whole face, except for the startlingly blue eyes. His hands were hairy, too. He felt her gaze and whipped around, growling disapproval at her.

  She raised her chin proudly. Here, she was Arvid’s daughter, and had to be treated as such from the very start, or everything was lost.

  “Well met, Konung,” she said in his own language. “Ember Arvidsdottir greets you.”