Above the Snowline

by Steph Swainston

  ‘What was that?’ Lightning gasped.

  ‘Barrels of cheap gin. The Rhydanne porters’ wages.’

  Now the faint chimes of the hall clock drifted out, striking twelve. Several people hesitated and turned to listen. Snipe glared round at them, whooped and flung his arms in the air. ‘Happy New Year! Happy bloody New Year, all! Open your presents. Hoosh! Go home. Go to your sodding homes! Do you want to catch your deaths?’

  Raven cast no glance behind him. He stormed straight past the stables to the kennels and climbed the steps onto the portico. It was covered in a thin layer of impacted snow, as slippery as satin. Dellin grabbed the rail with her free hand and pulled Raven to a halt. He turned and kicked her hand brutally - she screamed and let go. The dogs in their open run were making an ear-splitting din. They jumped up at the wire mesh, clung with their forepaws, barking furiously as Raven pounded past. He stomped along the portico and into a room at the end. Snipe followed him, then Lightning and myself. The plank room was dark, its fireplace empty and shutters closed. The livid light of the burning keep was shining through fretwork holes in both shutters and pulsing orange hearts and stars on the floor.

  A bear cage, about two metres square, stood in the corner. Raven ripped its door open and flung Dellin inside with such force she buckled against its far side. He slammed the door, locked it and dropped the key into his pocket.

  Dellin crouched and tucked her broken hand into her armpit. She glared at Raven with utter hatred. Then she threw herself against the cage door with her full strength. ‘Let me out! Out!’ She picked herself up and cast herself against the bars again and again until they rang.

  Her struggles had no effect on Raven, who was calmly winding a handkerchief around his bitten hand.

  She lunged from one side of the cage to the other, jumped and thrust her palms against the roof, dashed herself to her knees and tore at the bars of the floor. Finding no weak points, she turned her whirlwind energy to rattling the door.

  I knelt by the cage. ‘Dellin!’ I said. ‘Listen. Listen to me! Calm down and wait. You won’t be in there long.’ I looked up to Raven. ‘This will kill her. You have to release her.’

  ‘From the cage? I have no other room that will hold her.’

  ‘She can’t stand being enclosed. For god’s sake, have a heart!’

  He tucked in the end of his bandage and said nothing.

  I turned to Lightning. ‘Remember she couldn’t stand being in the coach? She doesn’t even like houses, let alone a cage!’

  ‘The girl is used to open spaces,’ Lightning told Raven. ‘She can’t abide to be trapped.’

  ‘You’ll drive her mad!’ I said.

  ‘Better than she should drive me mad. All my money, all my books, gone!’

  ‘You can keep her in custody, but not like this. It’s inhuman.’

  ‘She isn’t human.’ Raven’s lips twisted in triumph. Behind him, Snipe opened the door and we saw the settlers and soldiers had formed bucket chains into the keep. Their shadows jumped and flickered across the trampled snow. They seemed to be gaining control of the blaze, but the hall windows had lost their glass and smoke like dark grey fur was pouring out of them.

  ‘For god’s sake,’ I said. ‘She’s a thinking woman, not an animal!’

  ‘Then she should have thought harder before committing arson. The cage stays locked. Comet, Lightning, if you release her I will charge you with jail breaking. Tomorrow we will, as civilised people, try her. Then there will be a hanging. Snipe, come, let us see the damage.’ He put his injured hand in his pocket and walked out.

  Dellin was ferociously poking her fingernail into the keyhole. I tried to touch her hand through the bars but she jerked it back. I said, ‘I can pick locks. I learnt in the city. Trust me.’

  I drew my knife, slipped it between the mortise and the frame, and tried to push the catch back. When it became clear that this was a high-quality lock, I slid the knife into the keyhole and began trying to turn the tumblers.

  Dellin stopped watching me and slumped in the far corner, her expression vacant. Lightning paced back and forth, clutching his coat tight and making no move to stop me, but after I had been at the lock for ten minutes he asked, ‘Is it too difficult?’

  ‘I can’t do it. Damn it, all my tools are at the Castle.’ I threw the knife down. ‘I’ll stay with her. Send someone for blankets and food and drink.’

  ‘Of course. But please come away. Leave her alone.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He nodded, sadly, and left, passing on the way out a pikeman arriving under orders to guard the cage. The man began setting logs in the hearth and I sat beside Dellin, on the other side of the iron grille, but she did not acknowledge me at all nor seem to draw solace from my presence.

  I had a pain in my chest, in the depth of my heart. My years in the city had taught me that violent emotion brings on real and physical pain. Now I felt my heart cracked and bleeding. Whatever the Castle’s Doctor says, the heart is truly the place where love originates and Dellin had broken mine for good. My only other sensation was one of disbelief. How could she do this to me? The thought was too excruciating, so I gently pried at how she could have found it in herself to lead me into the forest, then double back and climb into the keep. She had let me chase her and duped me. We were supposed to be hunting partners - not an hour later she was Raven’s captive and I was numbed by her duplicity. How could it all have gone so badly wrong?

  Dellin stirred and, from staring at nothing, her pine-green eyes rolled to focus on me. ‘Help,’ she whispered desperately.

  ‘I will, Dellin.’

  ‘Free me, to run in the forest again.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, though I was sick to the core.

  ‘If you don’t free me, I will tell Raven …’

  ‘What? What will you tell him?’

  ‘That you ate a man like him … You ate the meat of an Awian.’

  ‘God!’ I recoiled. Anger swept through me, numbing my aching heart and hollow stomach. ‘Everything’s a barter for you, isn’t it? I’ll free you because I love you - don’t you believe that? Or loved you - I don’t know any more! Why do you think you have to bargain? Don’t I mean anything to you?’

  I felt she was certainly capable of telling Raven. I would never be able to trust her again. Raven knew she was a man-eater and he’d think she had no reason to lie. He would believe her and I would be firmly in his power.

  If a Rhydanne eats an Awian she isn’t, strictly speaking, a cannibal, but I had consumed the flesh of my own kind. I had been the only true cannibal that night! If Dellin opened her mouth the news would snowball through the Fourlands and everyone would hear it, no matter how much I protested. All the Eszai, all the governors, the Emperor himself!

  She held the bars and leant her cheek against the cold metal. I drew away and rested by the wall. I had thought I’d found a woman wild and untainted, but her love was a lie and she was mercenary scum like all the others. Emotions swirled within me, as if I’d heard news of the death of my closest friend. Thoroughly lost, thoroughly shaken, I abandoned myself to sitting in that grey room, on the hard floorboards, with the freezing draught stealing in. I would never feel the same for her again, that much was clear, but I couldn’t know, could not determine, which way my cards would fall.

  LIGHTNING

  At dawn the trodden snow was frozen solid, with all the dirt of last night pressed into it. Fragments of ash, shards of charred wood, pieces of foil tinsel would stand witness to the blaze until the spring. Under the ugly, blackened archway the snow had partially melted and refrozen with the iron hoops from the gin barrels embedded in it. I trod over the medley of footprints to the kennels.

  Jant was sitting against the wall, huddled under his folded wing. His head rested on the wrist of his wing and he watched Dellin. She was kneeling behind the door of her cage, grasping one of its bars. She was rocking a little, and every time she rocked back she tugged the door, jarring it with her weigh
t. She stared vacantly and her thick hair hung unkempt. Her lips were cracked and sore at the corners, and her eyes deep-shadowed, sunk in their sockets.

  The guard saluted me and resumed warming his feet at the grate. I touched Jant’s wing and more keenly felt his anguish, as if it coursed into me. ‘I suppose you haven’t slept?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then go to bed. Go on, I’ll look after her.’

  He nodded once, gathered himself and staggered out. I sat on a crude chair and watched Dellin. She wasn’t staring into thin air; she was watching the window. Its shutters were bolted and she could see no more than two hearts and stars of agate sky, but she attended to them deliriously. Her whole body was so tense she shook, prepared to spring from the cage and out of the window in a single bound.

  Tears streaked her dirty face. She pressed her lips together and moaned quietly in time with her rocking. The blankets and leg of beef I had brought lay untouched in the corner of the cage and, against the wall, a pool of urine spread on the floorboards. I hoped the guard had averted his gaze.

  I leant forward. She snapped out of watching the sky and turned dulled eyes on me. She tapped her nail on the lock. ‘Make. Me. Out.’

  ‘Dellin, I can’t.’

  ‘Make me out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dellin. Look …’

  ‘“I’m sorry, Dellin. Look.”’ She hooked her fingers over one of the bars and I saw she had worn her nails ragged. The metal showed polished around a crack in the frame - she must have been trying to prise it apart. She had set her hopes on a minuscule gap that didn’t even go all the way through.

  ‘Oh, Miss Wildcat,’ I said, ‘why did you do it? You could have been immortal this time next month.’

  She slipped her hand between the bars and reached out to me. It may have been the shadows, but her bones seemed more prominent than before and her wrist thinner than I would have thought possible. Jant had said that she has to eat all the time. If she refused to eat I thought she would die very soon.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she whispered. ‘I want … I want …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I want a drink.’

  I dug Raven’s hip flask from my pocket. ‘Here, some brandy. Altergate XO. Have as much as you want.’

  She stroked my hand - her skin was cold to the touch. She took the hip flask gently and turned it sideways to pass it between the bars. She sniffed it and sipped, sucking in her pinched cheeks. I raised my hand to say she should keep it and drink at her own pace.

  ‘Make me out, Lightning, please.’ She said ‘please’ so hollowly I wondered if she knew its meaning. Was it only a sound she was shaping, no more than a key to obtain what she wanted? I understood her need to be free and I even admired her determination in pursuing her hostilities. But setting fire to the keep while we partied? Wasn’t that the act of a savage?

  ‘No,’ I said aloud. ‘You’re not so different from us, it’s just that your desires are different. You want to get rid of Raven. I’ve heard a lot worse. Your wants are at odds with ours, your understanding of the world is different. But I’m afraid for your people, Dellin.’

  She leant close to the bars, tilted her head with her too-fast movement. She listened.

  I said, ‘The Castle wants me to bring Rhydanne and Awians together. But Rhydanne don’t want to live with Awians. Your people have pride just as Awians do; they don’t want to rub shoulders with us slow herders. You are both good, proud peoples, but if I force you together you’ll just fight the more. It will make things worse. You both have rights but I’m not sure how you can share Carniss … This is beyond me.’

  ‘Make me out.’

  ‘I’ve done all I can to win Raven round.’

  She rattled the bars.

  ‘Dellin, you’re the blank card. We don’t know what you’ll do if he releases you. Not even Jant knows what you’re thinking … Especially not Jant.’

  ‘Outside …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Out to the forest,’ she moaned in desperation. She hugged her knees, so tense she must be aching with cold. ‘Lightning, Dealan Lightning, is fheudar dhuit teasaiginn mi.’

  Even if we could understand each other’s speech, I could tell her nothing. She would find all the wisdom of my long life completely meaningless. Was she capable of loving? Rhydanne or not, I’ve known many women who aren’t. I wondered whether she simply didn’t love Jant or whether she was devoid of the ability to love at all. What emotions were involved in being a hunting partner? Could they possibly be as insidious and addictive as love?

  ‘Please let me out.’

  ‘Jant says your language has no word for “please”. Do you have any idea what he’s going through? What you’ve done to him? I told him he should try to sleep, but I doubt he will. You should try to sleep too.’

  She resumed rocking, murmuring, ‘Make me out, make me out, make me out,’ tugging the bars every time she said ‘out’. She seemed thinner every minute, inside her bulky clothes. She stared at the holes in the shutters, which were now brightening though the room stayed dim. A dash of light reflected on the hip flask and on the tears in her red-rimmed eyes. The nails in the floorboards, polished by the passage of so many boots, shone like a sultry set of stars.

  Footsteps crunched the salt on the portico and Snipe swung into the room. He saw me and stopped, startled. He was carrying a full bottle of whisky.

  ‘Ah …’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right.’ I stood up. ‘I’m going to talk to Raven now, anyway. Thank you for bringing her drink, and for god’s sake get her to eat something.’

  ‘Um … yes. Yes, my lord.’

  ‘And San protect us all.’ I nodded to him and left for the keep.

  JANT

  I tossed and turned, thinking again and again how Dellin had made such a fool of me. I turned from her image in anger. Nobody treats me that way. I’d have killed any man who showed me that much disrespect. I had done before. They knew it in Hacilith - nobody ever burned me on a drug deal. They knew it in the Castle too; I’d grown used to the deference that comes with my position, which was no more than I deserved. But Raven had stamped all over my self-respect and now Dellin had put an end to it permanently.

  The inner street kid laughed and sneered. I should be ashamed. I’d been acting like a naive stripling not an immortal. I had let a girl tie me in knots and bluff me into chasing her without pausing to consider her real aims. I must have grown very soft indeed to end up the willing lapdog of a savage.

  So why, if I recoil from her image, does it keep recurring in my mind’s eye? I lay on the couch in the guard room with my parka spread over my chest and thought: it isn’t right that I should think of her smiling when in reality she’s shaking the bars of a cage, snarling and spitting in emerald-eyed loathing.

  Love seemed more than ever to be like a disease. I had caught a virulent infection and it had spread through my body until I had been completely overcome. Unrequited, it had caused a fever and now thankfully my natural defences of independence and injured pride were kicking in. I was at a transition stage, sometimes coherent, sometimes lapsing to love, and I hoped that if the fever broke I could return to my old self.

  In the meantime I had better see Dellin. I jumped off the couch and searched in my rucksack for my original clothes, my Castle clothes, and put them on deliberately. I left the bare room. Lightning and Raven’s voices emanated from Raven’s chamber opposite, talking in a low, earnest tone. I didn’t go in. If I saw Raven at this moment I’d bury my ice axe in his head.

  I hurried down the stairs. The staircase stank of smoke. Remains of decorations hung from the ceiling, shrivelled to spider’s webs. Strands of blistered tinsel with baubles attached lay sadly on the steps. I kicked them aside.

  I ran past the kennels - the dogs were unusually subdued - opened the door and slipped inside. The cage was empty. Dellin was gone.

  The cube-shaped cage shone dully in the dim light. I ran to it and found it locked - nothing
inside apart from a congealed joint of meat and some blankets still creased where Lightning had threaded them between the bars. In front of its door lay a hip flask. I kicked it across the floorboards and sat down, head in hands. What had Raven done to her? He could have let me talk to her one last time before dragging her to her execution! A hundred terrible eventualities flooded my mind. There was no blood on the floor, only piss. Had he strangled her? I could see no clues - the guard had gone and the hearth was ash. Had he laid hands on her and dragged her out to a firing squad? I imagined her pincushioned with arrows, imagined her swinging from a branch, imagined her crushed down onto the snow under his strong arm, as he drew his sword to slit her throat.

  I paced back and forth, making no effort to collect my thoughts. Dellin was gone. Raven had put an end to her without allowing me a final farewell. I was desolate, empty, and fitful gusts tore through me.

  Her scent lingered in the cage, enough to bring tears to my eyes, but the tears became those of anger as I gradually gathered my senses - they rushed together and erupted in a great spout of wrath. I’ll kill him! I’m going to bloody kill him! So what, if I spend a mortal’s lifetime in jail? That was nothing compared to life without Dellin.

  No. Wait. I might be in time to save her! I leapt up and ran out, so fast I never felt the ice ridges under my boots. I whisked into the staircase tower and sped up the steps. Lightning and hateful Raven’s voices droned on up ahead, in the same conversation. Were they talking about her? I spun left on the landing and into the room.

  LIGHTNING

  Jant appeared in the doorway, his face a mask of fury. His eyes venomous and mouth open in the middle of saying something, he belted across the room and dived on Raven, grabbed his collar in both hands and shook him thoroughly. Tried to shake him; it was like a rawhide weasel trying to shake a tree. Raven fended him off and smoothed his coat. Without losing any dignity he left his throne and walked to the fireplace, to put some distance between him and Jant, who stood still, panting.