Ember and Ash

by Pamela Freeman

  That brought him up short and he snorted as if dismissing her greeting, but then he nodded brusquely. Something flickered in his eyes. Greed? Satisfaction?

  “The Hárugur King greets Arvid King’s dottir.”

  Hárugur King. Hárugur meant—small? Small king? Not the Ice King? She was confused. Was he just a minor royalty then, who ruled over this part of the Ice King’s Country? She would ask Nyr later.

  Ash, hearing her voice, pulled off his own scarf and looked swiftly around. His hand went to his bow, but she shook her head at him and he took it away immediately. He looked up, as if involuntarily, and she followed his gaze for a brief moment. The valley had narrowed again, or they’d taken a couple of turnings away from it, and they were hemmed in on both sides by high gray cliffs. No terraces here, just rock. The pale sky shone clear above them and Ash seemed to take heart from it. He looked at her and grinned, shrugging helplessness.

  Nyr and the king were arguing energetically. Cedar and Tern removed their own blindfolds and looked at Ash questioningly. Ember watched Bren. He was listening to the argument intently and when they at last paused for breath, he said one sentence. She didn’t know what it was, but the word “konung” was in there.

  Both Nyr and the king paled. They looked at each other soberly, and Ember saw the resemblance in the tilt of their heads, the set of their mouths. They were agreed about this, whatever it was. As they turned together to look at her, she knew she wasn’t going to like it.

  Nyr glanced at his father for permission to speak. The king nodded.

  “The Hárugur King does not wish you to go to the mountain. Danger. Evil.”

  Ember listened quietly, but Nyr put up his hand as though she had protested. “I tell him you must to obey father. Bren says, ask the Ice King. Hárugur King agrees.”

  He sat back as though he had said something truly startling. When none of them reacted, he frowned.

  “Hárugur King will ask the Ice King for you,” he chided. She knew that tone, even if she didn’t understand what was really going on.

  “Ember Arvidsdottir thanks the Hárugur King for his kindness,” she said dutifully. “Arvid Konung will thank him greatly also.”

  The Hárugur King nodded, as if that was no more than was due. Was asking the Ice King so large a favor? How far above the Hárugur King in rank was He? Had she been too friendly with Nyr, if he was only a minor princeling?

  The Hárugur King gestured for them to put their blindfolds back on, and they complied silently, but Ember sneaked a glance at Ash as she did so. He was looking thoughtful, and he pursed his lips at her behind a screen of scarf before he wound it around his eyes. Behind him, Cedar raised an eyebrow. She noticed, as the light disappeared, that the Hárugur King was swallowing and wiping his hands on his trews. Nervous. She felt a small bone of ice lodge itself at the base of her spine. She knew men like the Hárugur King—they prided themselves on being afraid of nothing. So what made a man like that nervous? Who was the Ice King?

  Palisade Fort, the Last Domain

  Has the word gone out to everyone? Every village?” Arvid demanded.

  Elva shrugged. “There are some small places which don’t have an altar, or anyone who can hear the gods—but we’ve asked those who can hear to alert them. Whether they’ll get to everyone…”

  Martine passed Elva a cup of hot cha. Luxury, in these circumstances, Arvid thought, but Elva deserved it. She was clearly exhausted after communing with the gods for hours. Martine didn’t look at him. She hadn’t looked at him directly for two days.

  The cold was so intense now that frost had formed on the inside of the precious glasses which were used at his table. Everyone was in their winter gear—and the oddest thing, Arvid thought, was the length of the cold days. In the Last Domain, cold and dark were intertwined, the winter days brief and the nights long. But now the days were longer than the nights, and it was odd beyond belief to work through a long, cold watch and find yourself still waiting for sunset.

  He was very worried about the outlying villages—they were all poor, all living on the edge, and if they didn’t get the warning there would be deaths aplenty. Elva and Martine had done all they could—Martine had lent Elva strength in some way he didn’t understand, to let her contact mind after mind. Saffron and Poppy had been easy, and the boy at the Plantation, but the others had needed convincing, and it had taken time and energy. Three days of dawns, three days of sunset rituals to reach them all.

  Merroc had been listening, and now he asked, “When will the crisis come?”

  “It’s already here, for some places,” Arvid said. “But we are timing our defense for tomorrow’s dawn.”

  “The Summer Solstice?” Merroc said thoughtfully. “Yes. That’s sound.” He looked far older than when he had arrived with Sigurd and Osfrid, but his initial desire for revenge seemed to have dissipated in the face of the current threat. Elva’s revelation that the Ice King was a Power had somehow calmed him. They had fought the Ice King for a thousand years, and the Domains had never completely lost. Some villages, some men, some women, but they had maintained their borders despite every attack.

  We both think of this in the same way, Arvid realized. Another assault; and our only shield is this frail woman and her connection to the gods.

  The Domains had been invaded once before, when Acton came over the mountains. It could happen again. He sat straighter in his chair. It will not happen, he promised himself. They would survive.

  Martine looked straight at him as he sat up, half-smiling as though she had heard his thoughts and wanted to encourage him. Their gaze held and he felt his heart leap; his hand moved without his volition a scant inch toward her. Then he caught it back and she turned away, a faint flush on her pale cheeks. Arvid pushed himself to his feet and went out, inviting Merroc to join him by a nod toward the door. He had to get away from her. Every minute in her presence undermined him. Made him weak. It was because of her that his people were in danger of slow, cold death.

  “Your wife,” he asked Merroc cautiously as they inspected the wedding fire, where the cooks brewed a constant supply of soup or porridge for the children and old people. “How is she?”

  Merroc sighed and thrust his hands into his jacket pockets. “Convinced that Osfrid will quicken sometime. Soon. She watches the fire from her window constantly, hoping.”

  His tone was leached of emotion, which meant a great deal. “I am sorry,” Arvid said. “If I had known…”

  “But you did not, although your wife did,” Merroc observed. His jaw was tight, and his eyes angry. “Do you intend to take action in that respect?”

  Arvid paused. There it was, the question which kept him awake night after night. What should he do about Martine’s treachery?

  “I will take action,” he promised Merroc. “But I will not weaken the spirits of my people at this point.”

  Merroc nodded abruptly. “Understood. If you do not act later, however, I will.”

  He walked off toward the gate, leaving Arvid to stare at the betraying, insouciant fire. His mind whirled with conflicting impulses: outrage that Merroc thought he could harm Martine; relief that someone else might take the action he could not; and overriding everything else, the desire to protect her.

  “Fight the first fight first,” he told himself, as his granfer had always told him. Tomorrow was the solstice, and Martine might perish along with the rest of them if they did not succeed.

  He went to the well, next, where he had set up a relay of boys to keep the surface ice free by drawing water constantly. If no one wanted it at the moment, it was poured back again. In winter they simply melted snow by the fire, but there was no snow—yet. Arvid had ordered Lily to set up the blizzard ropes, just in case. They stretched now from door to door across the muster yard, held firm on their customary posts, ready to guide when the snow blinded them all. They were a symbol of everything that was wrong: blizzard ropes at high summer.

  The well was working fine and the
boys, as boys will, had turned it into a competition, to see who could draw up a bucket fastest. He gave them the compliment of watching for a while and laughing, and then went on to the stream, to check how the animals were doing. In summer, the dairy goats were pastured outside the fort, but Lily had brought them back in again, in case they needed shelter. Arvid reflected that he hadn’t valued Lily enough—the man was both imaginative and thorough, and should be given more permanent responsibility. If he could be lured from his blacksmithing, when the fires returned.

  Ember. Arvid went through the day trying to concentrate on what had to be done, but every so often he would trip over the thought of her and his will to go on drained away, replaced by a desperate fear. She was so young…

  The goats were tethered well away from the stream, to keep it dung free, and they had plenty of feed. Perhaps too much. The dairymaid might have to ration that, if it got colder.

  Arvid bent and scooped a handful of water to drink. Rising, he stumbled back in surprise. Ash—the Prowman—stood in the shallow water next to him, where there had been no one and nothing in sight a moment before.

  “I am sorry to startle you,” the Prowman said with courtesy, his voice almost singing, “but I have someone you must meet.”

  In the distance, Merroc shouted out a warning. Reaching forward, the Prowman took hold of Arvid’s arm above the wrist. Arvid moved, unthinking, to free himself, but it was too late.

  There was water, rushing, streaming, jumping, and he was in the water, with the water, was the water. It was profoundly unpleasant, disquieting, like being turned into a fish.

  Perhaps he was a fish.

  On the horror of that thought, Arvid found himself standing again, in darkness, rock under his feet, up to his ankles in cold water, shaking. The Prowman’s hand was still on his arm, but he let go, saying, “A moment, while I make light.”

  Arvid had wanted to break free of that hold, but with it gone he was adrift in darkness. He barely knew which way was up. Listening intently, he heard water trickling, dropping, plinking into pools, a constant murmur and susurration. And other, more homely sounds: a tinderbox being opened, a flint being struck. The tiny glow of lit tinder illuminated the Prowman’s face and the relief the light brought made Arvid sweat. Blowing gently, the Prowman coaxed the small flame and lit a candle.

  “Fire?” Arvid said.

  “Fire’s influence does not reach here.”

  “Where are we?” He had to take control of this situation in any way he could, Arvid thought. Ask questions, demand answers.

  The Prowman held the candle up high. They were in a cave, huge and grotesque, with pillars of stone and twisted shapes everywhere. Arvid was standing in a pool. He took a step up onto the bank and was astonished to find himself immediately dry, even to his boots.

  “These are the Weeping Caverns,” the Prowman said conversationally. The Weeping Caverns! The home of Lady Death herself, it was said.

  “Why have you brought me here?” He was proud that his voice didn’t shake.

  “To introduce you.” He put the candle down on a rock near him, and stood up straight, addressing Arvid in the tone a storyteller, a singer, might use to ensnare an audience. “Imagine, Arvid Warlord, if you were twelve or thirteen years old. And your father or your uncle—a man you trusted—brought you to a place like this. Perhaps to a place even stranger.”

  Arvid kept silent. He might learn, at last, what he needed to know. Ash went on.

  “And he said to you: ‘This is the oath we ask of you: to be silent to death of what you see, of what you hear, of what you do.’ And you swore. Then he said: ‘Do you swear upon pain beyond death, the pain of never being reborn, to keep the secrets of this place with your honor, with your strength, with your life?’ And you swore. Imagine that, Arvid Warlord, and then tell me: would you reveal those secrets later, to your wife?”

  The silence in the cave was magnified by the constant dripping. The spaces in between the sounds were as deep as death. What could he say? If he had made that pledge, he would have kept it. But—

  “Do the women so swear?”

  The Prowman’s voice took on a rueful tinge. “I cannot say. What is done by women stays with women; what is done by men stays with men.” Arvid recognized a maxim when he heard one. “But I would be surprised,” the Prowman went on, “if they did not. The secrets have been kept a thousand years because the oaths are real. Any boy or man who talked was killed.”

  “Yet Martine knew about—about the Lake, about your…”

  “Martine is a seer, and no one controls what the gods reveal to someone like her. But she knew, also, that it was a dangerous secret. I have another question for you, Arvid Warlord—if your fellow warlords were to find out that Traveler men were meeting in secret, what would they do?”

  That was an easy question, but a hard answer. In honesty, he had to admit it.

  “Kill them all.”

  Arvid stared down at his hands. All this was very logical, but it did nothing to heal the scar of betrayal on his heart.

  “You must understand, also, that we are not used to thinking of the Powers as enemies,” the Prowman said. “They have been our refuge.”

  His mind accepted it, but his belly was still tied in knots, and there was a stubborn part of his mind which simply repeated: she should have told me.

  “I think you had better meet Her,” the Prowman said. “Step back into the water.”

  Reluctantly, Arvid put one foot into the shallow water. Reflections from the candle made it seem black and deep. The plash as his foot touched the surface echoed back a thousand times from the high walls, resounding.

  Hello, lad, his mother’s voice said, deep inside his mind.

  He pulled his foot out in a startled jerk, stumbling back from the pool in horror.

  “She says She is sorry to have distressed you.”

  Arvid could barely make words. “Why—why did it sound like my mother?”

  The Prowman bit his lip. “It often happens so. To me, She sounds quite different. Like music. But many men hear Her as the women they have loved. Or who have loved them.”

  Slowly, not reassured, Arvid placed his foot back in the pool.

  Arvid, She said.

  This time, he was ready for the voice, but not for the affection it held. He made himself hold steady.

  “I am here,” he said.

  You are a good man, his mother’s voice said, and that was both a blessing and a blasphemy. Fire has revealed us, and perhaps it was time for this to happen. It will be up to you to make sure the innocent do not suffer for His impatience.

  “Who is innocent?” he asked bitterly.

  Those of the old blood who have Settled, believing the promises of the warlords, that they and their children will be safe, She chided. She was right. The Resettlement had been easy in the north, but in the south there were still simmering resentments and old griefs which had never been allayed. There were those who would take the news of the Powers as evidence that Travelers had betrayed them all, and act accordingly. Arvid had faced the ghosts of massacred Travelers twenty years ago, and sworn to himself and them that it would never happen again. He could not be forsworn.

  “I will do my best,” he said stiffly. “I will work with the other warlords to protect the innocent.”

  Including Martine, his mother’s voice insisted.

  Every bit of the privilege he had lived with all his life reared up in him and spat at her. “You will not dictate what I do in my own home!” he said. “You will not give me orders!”

  He was braced for anything—would She drown him, as Fire had burned Osfrid? Astonishingly, She laughed.

  Oh, you and your daughter are alike to the bone! She said. Two fish from the same pool.

  Then She was gone. He didn’t know how he knew that, but it was clear. He pulled his foot from the water and turned slowly to the Prowman, who was not laughing. He was considering Arvid, looking him up and down from head to toe.
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br />   “I am wondering,” he said conversationally, but with an edge to his tone, “whether to kill you now. Martine would grieve, but at least she would stay safe.”

  Arvid drew his sword, the steel ringing and the sharp note echoing back. The Prowman merely smiled indulgently, his hand on a knife at his belt.

  “You are a warrior, yes,” he said. “But that would not help you.”

  Arvid remembered Martine’s stories about this man: trained as a safeguarder, she’d seen him take on two armed warlord’s men without a single weapon, and defeat them both. He was a killer, and much younger. Time for negotiation.

  “If I do not return and deal with Martine,” he said, “Merroc has sworn revenge on her.”

  The Prowman’s nostrils flared with anger.

  “And you let him?” he said with contempt. “Martine is worth a dozen of you.”

  “He has lost his son,” Arvid said, passion making his voice thick. “If my daughter dies…”

  The Prowman paused.

  “My namesake is traveling with her,” he said softly. “He is the only stake in the future I am ever likely to have.” There was a kind of heartbreak in the quiet voice that Arvid recognized. Loss. Regret. Fear.

  “I will deal with Martine as fairly as I can,” Arvid promised.

  “If you treated her fairly you would go down on your knees and thank her for the life of service she has given to you and yours; thank her for giving up everything that she loved for you!”

  “You love her!” Arvid accused him, jealousy striking up so hard it almost blinded him. The Prowman looked at him with pity.

  “Have you never had a comrade-in-arms, warlord? Someone whom you trusted and valued beyond life itself? That is the love I bear for your wife.”

  Without volition, Arvid thought of Holly. He had officers who took the place of second in command in battle, but Holly was always there at his shoulder, guarding his left side, reliable, brave, her fierce loyalty a shield in itself. That was why he had sent her with Ember, because she was the best he could offer.