Winter of Ice and Iron

by Rachel Neumeier

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  FOR CAROLINE EVARTS, who read an early draft many years ago, fell in love with the Wolf Duke, and never quite stopped nagging me to knock this story into shape. Here you go! I hope you love this incarnation even more than the first.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With thanks to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, who was, as always, instrumental in knocking a rough manuscript into shape; and my awesome editor, Navah Wolfe, whose advice was indispensable for those final tweaks that make all the difference.

  There are twelve months of thirty days, except the hinge months each end on day twenty-nine. Following the twenty-ninth day, there are four uncounted hinge days before the year turns and the next month commences. The Golden Hinge marks the turning of spring into summer. The Iron Hinge marks the turning of autumn into winter.

  THE MONTH OF DEEP COLD

  WOLF MONTH

  THE MONTH OF BRIGHT RAINS

  APPLE BLOSSOM MONTH

  THE BURGEONING MONTH

  THE GOLDEN HINGE MONTH. THE HEIGHT OF THE YEAR.

  THE FATTENING MONTH

  THE MONTH OF HONEY

  THE HARVEST MONTH

  FIRE MAPLE MONTH

  THE MONTH OF FROST

  THE IRON HINGE MONTH. THE END OF THE YEAR.

  PROLOGUE

  Jeneil inè Suon was a beautiful girl. Her beauty did not serve her well: not as a child in her father’s house and not in her youth and certainly not when, as a woman grown, she caught the eye of Iheraïn terè Iönei Eänetaì. The Iron Duke, the Wolf Duke, the Black Duke: Iheraïn Eänetaì, possibly the cruelest of all the lords of Pohorir. The very first lord of Eäneté had possessed a difficult temperament that had unhappily found an echo in the emerging Eänetén Power. The Immanent Power that formed from those mountains, from their thin soils and their broken stones, from their forests and creatures and the folk dwelling within their small, scattered villages, had even from those earliest days exhibited a savage disposition. That savagery had echoed back and forth between the lords of Eäneté and their strengthening Immanent, until cruelty no less than molten fire burned beneath the stone of its mountains.

  Jeneil loved music and painting and small pretty songbirds: nothing that flourished in the house of Iheraïn Eänetaì. Her lord permitted her paints and canvas because these could be used silently and alone, and because sometimes it amused him to take them away. Jeneil’s mother had taught her to love music, but her lord forbade instruments in his house. When she sang, she had a voice pure as the voice of a lark—or so said the servants of the house, pitying her. But she seldom sang after she entered the Black Duke’s keeping, and never when her lord was anywhere in his house, because in that house she became as fragile and timid as a little bird.

  Jeneil had always known fear. Her own father had taught her that lesson well. But in the Black Duke’s house, she found that lesson refined. She grew more delicate every day she lived there. Even so, at first she stole moments of happiness; moments when, just for a little while, she forgot to be afraid. Small things might give Jeneil a moment of happiness: a spring crocus blooming through the snow, a bird coming to her hand for bread, a line flowing from her brush to the canvas in just the way she had imagined it.

  She found love in that house too. She loved one of the duke’s stewards, a young man named Gereth Murrel, for Jeneil had a generous and loving heart and she needed to love someone. He loved her in return. But for Jeneil this was a wistful and distant love, and for the young man a cruel one, for neither dared break her marriage vows. Iheraïn Eänetaì would have known, as he knew all things that occurred in his house and his city and his province.

  Even so, Jeneil turned to the young steward for companionship in her misery, though she feared for him lest her lord destroy him as he sometimes destroyed her paintings. She turned to Gereth for comfort anyway, just as she turned to painting to create the illusion of freedom; just as she sang, when she dared, to distract herself from her unhappiness. But in the face of her fear, neither the love of the steward nor her own wistful thoughts of what her life might have been gave Jeneil reason enough to hold to life. A year after her marriage to the duke, she turned to her child-bed with relief, knowing she might die of the birth. She wished to die, because she no longer hoped for any other escape from her life.

  There was nothing especially difficult about the birth. Jeneil Suon delivered the child, a son. When the midwife cut the cord and laid the child in her arms, Jeneil gazed for some time upon his small, wrinkled form. If she had borne a daughter, perhaps it would have been different. But even so young, this boy-infant had his father’s black hair and, rather than the cloudy blue eyes of any common newborn, his father’s yellow wolf eyes. So after gazing upon him for a little while, Jeneil set the child aside in his crib and turned her face to the wall. She died on her next breath.

  1

  When he was fourteen, Innisth terè Maèr Eänetaì tried for the first time to kill his father. He did not succeed. He found out instead something that he should have realized beforehand: that the Immanent Power of Eäneté protected the Duke of Eäneté from any ordinary attack.

  No Immanent Power was concerned with action or achievement or triumph, not when it was young and new and first stretched itself out in the earth and stone and forests and creatures of its land. Such matters were human concerns. But Immanents took something of the character of those to whom they were tied. Ambition and domination and triumph had been the driving concern even for the first of the Maèr line. So Innisth should have realized that the Immanent Power would move to shield his father from any attack. Even an unexpected attack. Even an attack by the heir.

  He also learned that it is a great deal easier and less painful to discover such things through logic than it is to learn them through trial and error. Both lessons proved useful, in time.

  Innisth survived his father’s punishment and the subsequent years of his youth. When he was twenty, he tried again to murder his father. This time he succeeded. This time he thought out his plan with cold deliberation, and when the opportunity presented itself, on the twenty-eighth day of the Month of Wolves, he seized his chance.

  Wolf Month was the starving month, the bitter month, the month when winter stores grew lean and the new growth had not yet come, the month when the long haunting cries of the wolves drifted almost nightly from the high mountains. It was a hard month. The cold lingered. But one could look forward from the Month of Wolves to the approaching spring. It was a good month for sharp change, for renewal, for the rekindling of life out of grim silence. Perhaps that, too, drove Innisth to make and seize his chance.

  This time, he knew that the Eänetén
Immanent would block any attempt to stab or bludgeon or poison its master. But there was nothing it could do to preserve a man flung down a sheer thousand-foot cliff.

  The Immanent Power of Eäneté came down upon Innisth after his father’s death. By that time it was immensely strong, for the dukes of Eäneté had always, despite their cruelty, been intelligent enough to steward their province with an eye toward the prosperity of both land and people. It was not a Great Power such as ruled and bound lesser Immanences into a unified nation. It was not quite that. But it had learned ambition and pride—not in any mortal or human way, but in the way the soul of the land could learn such things from those most closely bound to it. Now only stark will could rule it.

  Generally, a duke’s heir mastered his Power while surrounded by supporters and allies, men and women bound to allied lesser Immanences, who knew best how to help a new heir survive the often brutal transference of the deep tie. Innisth Eänetaì mastered the Immanent of Eäneté alone, in the cold heights, lying in the trampled snow at the top of the ice-edged granite cliff. It was a cruel and ferocious Immanent, long shaped by the sharp-edged mountains and the high cutting winds of Eäneté and by the savagery of a long, long line of Eänetén dukes, none of whom had taught it much of gentleness.

  But Innisth was his father’s true son. He encompassed the Eänetén Power, and mastered it, and bound it, and he did not freeze to death there in the heights because Eänetaìsarè would not allow its master to die such a death.

  By the time he got to his feet and brushed the snow off his face and out of his hair, it was nearly dusk. Innisth did not look toward the cliff edge where his father had fallen. He found his horse and his father’s horse not far away, in the shelter of the firs in the lee of the mountain’s high ridge. Though he was stiff with cold, he mounted and rode down the long steep way to the gate at the mouth of the pass.

  The men stationed there knew immediately what had happened. At least, they knew the important part of what had happened. They knew because Innisth Eänetaì came out of the pass alone, leading his father’s horse by its reins. And they knew because of the look on Innisth’s face, or by some subtle difference in his manner, or perhaps because they could feel the dense, invisible presence of the Eänetén Power spreading out above and around him. They knelt there in the snow and made their vows.

  Innisth did not accept an escort back to the house that was now his: the massive house that loomed, gray and thick-walled and forbidding, dominating the town below. He told the men where to look for his father’s body. They took his orders with white-faced impassivity. He left his father’s horse with them and rode his own black mare down from the gate of the pass toward that great grim house. He did not look back.

  There were more men-at-arms at the courtyard gate, of course. They were not so quick to understand, until Innisth said, “I am now Eäneté.” Then he said, “Send for my seneschal, and for your captain, and bid all the household staff assemble here in the courtyard.”

  It was cold, with the frigid stillness that sometimes lay across the mountains during the winter dusk. But the courtyard was the only place large enough for all the staff to assemble. And there were other advantages to the courtyard besides its sheer size. Even at night. “Light all the lanterns, and light torches,” Innisth commanded the men-at-arms. They ran to obey.

  If one included all the men-at-arms, the household staff comprised well over a hundred men and women. There were the stablemen and grooms, the huntsmen and kennel girls, the kitchen staff and scullery maids, the old women who stayed in the attics of the servants’ quarters and spun wool and wove cloth, and the seamstresses who made the cloth into finished clothing. In the back of the assembly hovered the girls who endlessly polished the wooden floors and the brass doorknobs and the boys who clambered dangerously about on the outside walls to wash the house’s many fine glass windows. To one side stood the house physickers and the grim old librarian with his assistant scribe. To the other side stood the men-at-arms, drawn up in their neat ranks, with their captain at their head. Before them all, with the torchlight casting his heavy features into unreadable shadow, stood Innisth’s father’s seneschal and his father’s personal servants—including the special servants, with their rusty-black clothing that did not show blood.

  They all knew the old duke was dead. Innisth did not have to tell them so. Word must have run through the house, even in the few moments they had required to assemble, but he believed they would have known anyway. He thought the empty space where his father should have stood echoed with the old duke’s absence. To him it seemed that absence echoed through the entire house, louder than a shout. The assembled staff were utterly silent. They did not know yet how the shift of power from the old duke to the younger would affect them.

  Innisth looked along the silent lines of the gathered staff. He said flatly, “Captain Tregeris,” and beckoned with the crook of one finger.

  The captain of the men-at-arms stepped out, approached Innisth, and saluted. He was not a young man, but not old; his shoulders were broad and his mouth narrow and he thought much of himself and little of others—except for Innisth’s father, whom he had always feared and admired and sought to emulate. His eyes ran up and down Innisth’s frame, curious and scornful, for he had, following the old duke’s lead in this as in all else, never much regarded his son.

  Innisth took one step forward, flicking his smallest knife out of his sleeve and into his hand. He stabbed the captain in the stomach and then stepped back while the man’s mouth fell open and he sank down, quivering, his hands clutching at the hilt of the knife. The knife was small, but it was a vicious quilled blade, and when the captain steeled himself and jerked it out, a great dark gush of blood followed, and his breath followed it in a voiceless moan, and he died.

  It had all been very quick, though at the same time the moment seemed to Innisth to stretch out and out, until he was half surprised that, when he looked up again, the whole assembly was still frozen in shocked quiet.

  Innisth said, “Sergeant Etar.”

  There was a pause. Then the man he had named stepped out of the ranks and came forward to face him. Etar was nearly of an age with the dead man, perhaps twenty years Innisth’s senior. In other ways he was not much like his former captain, for he was a plain man who did not seek to come near power. That was why he was still merely a sergeant, despite his age and competence. He met Innisth’s eyes now, expressionless save for the tightness of his mouth.

  Innisth said, “Captain Etar. The men-at-arms are yours. Over the coming days, you may set them in what order you think best. Dismiss men you do not think suited to your command; recruit other men as you see fit. I will expect you to inform me of what you do, but I do not expect I shall countermand your decisions. Is that clear?”

  Small muscles around Etar’s mouth twitched; that was the only sign of surprise. He gave a measured nod. “Your Grace.”

  Innisth sent him back to his men with a small gesture and said, not raising his voice, “Now, where is Gimil Sohoras? Where is my father’s seneschal?” His voice, though not loud, fell into the echoing silence of the courtyard as clearly as a shout.

  His father’s seneschal was, of course, right there at the front of the assembly. He was a big man with heavy bones and heavy hands and a heavy voice. He glowered at Innisth and started to speak. Innisth lifted an eyebrow, and the man closed his mouth without a word.

  “Gimil Sohoras,” said Innisth, in that same quiet, carrying tone. “Though I appreciate your years of service to my father, I find I have no need of your service myself. You may have until dawn to gather all your possessions and leave Eäneté. You are not to count the girl Ranè among your possessions, however. She will remain here. Nor are you to damage her before you depart.” There was a murmur from the gathering. Innisth pretended not to notice the young woman he had named, who turned and embraced an older woman. The woman eased Ranè away out of sight through the crowd. Innisth pretended not to notice that, either.


  The big man stared at Innisth, plainly stunned. “But—”

  “Or, of course, you may refuse to go,” said Innisth. “That is certainly an option, if you prefer.” He glanced thoughtfully down at the dead man who had been his father’s captain and then once more regarded his father’s seneschal.

  The man closed his mouth.

  “Dawn,” Innisth reminded him. “Captain Etar will provide you with the assistance of two of his men. You would not wish to risk mistaking the hour as the sunrise approaches.”

  “No,” said the man, his voice husky with suppressed rage. “No.” He backed away awkwardly, nearly bumping into one of the men-at-arms Etar had sent to oversee his departure. He wheeled on the man, but then shot a wary glance at Innisth and smothered his anger.

  “Gereth Murrel,” said Innisth, naming a man who had been a factor and steward in the great house all Innisth’s life. When the man made his way forward, Innisth met his eyes and smiled for the first time in all this long day.

  Returning his smile, Gereth came forward to take the new duke’s hand and kneel at his feet. “Innisth,” he said, but very quietly. Then he said more loudly, “Your Grace. Command me.”

  Gereth was not young, being already in his fifties, but he was the man to whom everyone turned when they were in need. Quiet and methodical, Gereth was seldom noticed: a manner he had learned bitterly in this house and taught, as well as he could, to Innisth, when he had still been young enough to sometimes escape his father’s notice. Innisth was confident that Gereth Murrel knew everything about running the house. And he knew the older man was kind.

  Resting a hand briefly on the older man’s shoulder, Innisth told him, “You are my seneschal,” and another murmur, louder than the rest, whispered through the assembly.