Winter of Ice and Iron

by Rachel Neumeier

  The dragon glittered like glass or ice or winter itself. It was the color of the terrible winds from which it had been born, translucent black streaked with white and silver and carnelian. One could see right through its wings, but the sky on the other side was dark and the light that struck though those wings turned a strange nacreous silver. Where its shadow fell, the very air tasted of darkness and storms and despair.

  Kehera could not keep from looking to the Eänetén duke as though he could stop even this, though she knew it must be impossible.

  But the Eänetén duke dropped his reins and lifted his hands, and Eänetaìsarè rose through him. Fire bloomed. . . . For that first instant, Kehera thought it was real fire. Then she knew it was Eänetaìsarè, rising like fire. Like a storm of fire that might crack the very stone beneath his feet and pour from the earth.

  The dragon of wind turned in a slow drifting arc and soared away, back over the high mountains. The shadow from its wings shredded into cold gusts of wind and a spatter of freezing rain, and the light fell naturally across the woods and the fields and across the men who had paused in their struggle to stare upward in amazement and terror.

  Then, while Innisth terè Maèr Eänetaì still gazed upward after the dragon, a single narrow black arrow sang down out of the air toward him. This one was not deflected by any invisible force. It dropped straight and clean, and struck him in the chest, with an impact that Kehera almost thought she could hear, almost thought she could feel in her own body. Maybe she could. Maybe Raëhemaiëth felt it for her.

  Innisth crumpled slowly from his horse. The officers and aides about him simply stared, shocked, as he fell. Not one made a move to catch him, and he hit the ground, it seemed to Kehera, watching in horror, with terrible force.

  She found herself on her own horse with no memory of how she had gotten up on it. But it seemed to her that her body, acting independently of her mind, had had an excellent idea. The horse had been left saddled and ready, and she tore its tether free and turned its head up the hill.

  Tageiny threw himself in front of her, grabbing for her reins, and she leaned forward and struck him across the face with all her strength. He fell back, undoubtedly more shocked than hurt, and she kicked her horse forward. Behind her, she was narrowly aware of the big man cursing roundly and hurling himself onto one of the other horses, and Luad scrambling after him for the third.

  She did not wait. She whipped the reins across the neck of the horse and sent it racing across the slope at a pace that was just barely controlled. It seemed to her that it took a very long time to cover the distance to the duke’s hill. She skirted the edge of the battle, with Tageiny, still cursing, coming up hard to her side to ward off any chance attack. Luad, not such an accomplished rider as either of the others, trailed them by a few lengths.

  Then she was on the hill, pulling her horse to a skidding halt on the frozen earth, swinging down from its back. The men there were arguing ferociously, but they fell back in astonishment at her precipitous arrival. One of them, she noted, was Riheir Coärin, and in passing she grabbed his arm and pulled him around to face her. His shocked eyes met hers, but she cut off whatever he had opened his mouth to say.

  “Don’t you dare let us lose now,” she said furiously. “Don’t you dare, Riheir. You take these men and do something useful with them! And you!” She rounded on the nearest Eänetén officer, who had his mouth open in what might have been protest. “You make sure your people cooperate with his! There are only two armies on this mountain and one of them is Pohorin! All the rest of us are on the same side.”

  “Yes, my lady,” the man said with great earnestness. “But—”

  “I don’t care!” snapped Kehera. “Deal with it until we get Eänetaìsarè anchored here again!” She flung herself down beside the duke. She was aware, dimly, that the icy moisture of the ground was rapidly soaking through her skirts, and that this was uncomfortable. She was also aware, in much the same way, that Tageiny and Luad had found canvas somewhere and were putting up a barrier of some kind that would stand between her and any more of those little black arrows that should come their way. She noticed this mainly because the canvas got in the way of the light.

  The duke was still alive. She knew that almost at once. Someone had found time, before she had arrived, to stretch him out on a cloak and cut through his shirt to show the arrow, where it stood in his chest. It rose and fell with his breathing. His head had been turned to the side, and she saw that blood bubbled out of his mouth with every exhalation. Reaching out, she touched the shaft of the arrow very gently, with the tips of two fingers.

  “It’s in the lung, Your Highness,” a diffident voice said beside her, and she turned to look into the tense face of a man wearing the poppy-and-thorn badge of the physicker as well as the leaping Eänetén wolf. “There’s nothing either of us can do for him now but ease his passing. Taking the arrow out would only speed his death—”

  “Not acceptable,” Kehera snapped. “If he dies, we’ll lose; if not today, then soon. So he won’t die.”

  The man made to protest. But Luad, stopping behind him, gripped his arm and growled in his most forbidding tone, “We both heard the lady, man. Shut your mouth.”

  Then Caèr Reiöft arrived, white and stricken, and with unarguable authority told the physicker, “Shut up, get out of the way, and wait till you can do something useful.” Then he turned to Kehera.

  Kehera barely noticed him. She put her left hand on the duke’s chest, close by the arrow, and curled the fingers of her right about the shaft of the arrow.

  Tageiny, dropping to one knee on the muddy ground on the duke’s other side, said, his tone rough with distress, “You don’t want to hear it, but the physicker is right, you know. If that arrow comes out, his life will go out with it. I’ve seen it before.”

  Kehera looked up at him. “If Eänetaìsarè can’t hold him, Raëhemaiëth will have to. He’s dying anyway, after all.” And, taking hold of the arrow, she pulled.

  The duke made a horrible wordless sound, body contorting. His eyes opened, but without awareness. Bright red blood ran out of his mouth. The arrow moved sickeningly, but it did not come out.

  Someone made a low whimpering noise, and after a moment Kehera realized it was her own voice. It didn’t seem to matter.

  Tageiny reached over the wracked body between them and took the arrow in his own hand, close to where it entered the flesh, and twisted sharply as he pulled. It came out. A flood of bright blood followed it.

  And Kehera drew in her breath hard, laid her hand over the hole, closed her eyes, and said sharply into the stinging silence she found in the back of her mind, “Raëhemaiëth! Raëhemaiëth!”

  A hot, heavy presence flooded over the world. It was like being smothered by summer, like being buried in the earth. It was not like either of those things. Though it did not hurt, Kehera cried out. And the duke cried out as well, in a deeper voice, and opened his eyes.

  Then a more savage Immanent rose, brutal, and Raëhemaiëth’s warm presence swooped and swelled and receded, and . . . broke. . . . It burst and fell away from her, not toward her father, but toward Tiro. And Kehera, half aware of crushing disaster not here but elsewhere, followed a terrible sense of loss and grief and guilt down into the darkness.

  She woke in her own tent, in a nest of blankets, in the dark. A single lamp, hanging from the roof of her tent, cast its warm yellow light over the pillows and the canvas walls of the tent, and a brazier glowed near at hand. Despite the blankets and the brazier, she felt very cold. Too cold to shiver. So cold she wondered if she might be already dead after all, and this seeming to wake just a dream.

  The tent looked strange to her. Although she knew at once where she was, for some reason she had expected to wake in Raëh, in her own room. Without knowing why she should, she felt wretched. Tears threatened, and her throat felt tight and constricted. And she had a pounding headache. Grimacing, she turned her head.

  Sitting in a chair besi
de her makeshift bed was the Eänetén duke. His long legs were stretched out in front of him, his elbows supported by the arms of the chair. His forehead rested on his interlaced fingers, and she could see that his eyes were closed. He might have been asleep, but she knew he was not. Although his attitude spoke of weariness, even of grief, he was immaculate. There was no sign that he had lately been injured; no sign at all that he had lain bleeding and dying on a muddy hillside with blood coming out of his mouth.

  She sat up.

  Hearing the rustle of the blankets, the duke opened his eyes and lifted his head. For a long moment he only looked at her. The lambent light caught in his eyes, turning them to a bright flame-gold. He lowered his hands to grip the arms of his chair, but he made no other movement. He did not speak.

  Kehera said, and was surprised at the high shakiness of her voice, “Are you all right?”

  He moved slightly, as though he might get up, but then he was still again. “Yes,” he answered. His voice was very quiet. “And you?”

  “Me?” Kehera said uncertainly.

  His long fingers tightened over the arms of his chair, though no shadow of impatience touched his face or his voice. “Are you well?”

  “Oh,” said Kehera, and her voice rose sharply and broke. “No. My father is dead.” As she said it, she knew it was true. She had called Raëhemaiëth, and it had come; her father had let it come to her and . . . something had happened.

  She had thought their own battle was enough. She should have remembered there were other battles, too, and that her own need for Raëhemaiëth was not the only need.

  The tears that had threatened did come, then, and she sobbed once out loud and covered her face with her hands.

  The duke left his chair to kneel beside her, reaching one tentative hand out to touch her shoulder. Lost in grief, she caught his hand in both of hers without thought and clung hard, pressing her face against his chest. The fine linen of his shirt was smooth against her cheek.

  For a long moment he did not respond at all, but only held very still. Then, carefully, he shifted to a more comfortable position at her side and laid his other hand over her shoulder. He said nothing.

  Through tears, Kehera cried, “Why did you let yourself get hit?” She could not weep prettily, as some girls could; her nose ran, and she pulled away from him to hunt, without success, for a cloth. Her voice, thick with misery, was hardly understandable.

  But the duke understood her. He handed her one of his extremely elegant black silk handkerchiefs and said, in a strict tone more expressionless than any she had ever heard from him, “I did not intend to allow that to happen. The calling of the dragon was something I did not anticipate. I am . . . sorry.”

  Kehera blew her nose and wiped her eyes. And said savagely, wanting to hurt him as she was hurt, “Why were you up on that hill anyway? You were showing off. You could have carried a shield like a normal man! It was nothing but vanity to make yourself a target.”

  He did not respond, but only looked at her with a perfectly still face, which she saw for the first time was pale and drawn with weariness. There were dark circles under his yellow wolf’s eyes.

  Seeing this, and knowing she had hurt him, made Kehera feel guilty, even in the midst of her own distress. Gripped by a furious feeling, she cried, “My father was distracted, too. By the tie. Because I called Raëhemaiëth. I killed him, saving you! He died in your place! It’s your fault he’s dead!”

  She knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that not only was this unforgivable, but it was also not true. It had been her choice to call on the tie, not the duke’s. It was not his fault. It was hers. She pressed her hands over her mouth and sat frozen, tangled in the blankets, staring at him with wide eyes.

  Whatever he saw in her face sent the duke to his feet in one sharp motion. He strode for the door, brushed the hanging door out of the way with a violent gesture of one hand, and disappeared into the darkness.

  Kehera, watching him go, was consumed by an absolute desolation.

  But the next moment he had returned. He carried a round pot in both hands, with a single small cup hanging from his finger. Coming back to where she lay, he knelt at her side and poured from the pot. The rich, sweet smell of the spices filled the tent like incense. He held the steaming cup out to her and said, “Drink.” There was no anger in his voice, and no impatience, though the set of his jaw and the corded tension in his arms betrayed both emotions, or perhaps others that she could not recognize.

  She took the cup and drank. It was hot wine, liberally laced with spices and herbs. Even in her distress it warmed her.

  He said, “I grieve for your loss. It was certainly not your fault, however.” His voice was cold, but so definite that she felt obscurely comforted. He took the cup away from her with delicate care, his fingers barely touching her hands, filled it again, and gave it back to her. And commanded curtly, when she only stared at him through the steam that rose from it, “Drink.”

  She drained the cup obediently, and he filled it a third time and lifted a strict eyebrow at her when she would have refused it. She lifted it to her lips and sipped.

  “In preserving my life, you saved not only me, but also the shield I hold between Pohorir and your father’s country,” he told her, with the same cold assurance. “Drink that. Drink it.”

  It would have taken too much energy to resist, and so she obeyed, and he poured again. She blinked at him dizzily through the fragrant steam, and her hand, holding the little cup, wavered. The hot wine sloshed and nearly spilled.

  The duke took the cup out of her hand with a deft impersonal touch and held it to her mouth with his own fingers. He said curtly, “I don’t expect that knowledge to comfort you now, but perhaps you will find it of comfort later.”

  It seemed ungrateful not to drink, and besides, he seemed to expect it, so she did. It took her a moment to put what he had just said in context, but she said, once she had succeeded in doing so, “But it’s my fault he died.” Her voice sounded unhappy to her ears, but no longer hateful.

  “It was the fault of war that your father died,” he answered shortly. “In war, such things happen. Was it your hand on the sword or bow that took his life? No. It was a Pohorin hand. You may be right to blame me. I was on that hill to be seen, and I was, and you are right that that is why I was struck. But it is nothing but child’s foolishness to blame yourself. Drink this.”

  “I don’t want it,” Kehera protested querulously, trying not to be comforted by his words. She closed her hands into fists, refusing the cup, and added out of the odd certainty she felt, “It was an arrow, like it was for you. Raëhemaiëth couldn’t save him. Too much of it was with me. It couldn’t return to him in time.” The knowledge was almost like a memory of the arrow slicing into her own throat, as she knew, beyond doubt, it had struck her father’s. She remembered the sharp blow of it, and the coldness that had spread out from the arrowhead. Shuddering, she subsided slowly back into her blankets, barely seeing the wavering light of the hanging lantern that seemed to sway gently back and forth above her.

  The duke regarded her narrowly. Then he tossed the cupful of wine down his own throat and put both cup and pot aside. “Go to sleep,” he said. His hands on the blankets were as impersonal as his tone, but his touch as he tucked her in was gentle.

  She was tangentially aware that he had risen. But she said, drowsily, “Don’t leave. Please don’t leave me alone.”

  Above her, the light of the lantern flickering across his face, the duke paused. Then he sank down again at her side, drawing his knees up and lacing his fingers around them. He did not speak. But he was clearly settling down for a long stay.

  As she let herself drift off again into unconsciousness, she was aware of the lantern light sliding across his still face and glowing in his golden eyes.

  21

  Tirovay Raëhema remembered cold. He remembered being lost, blinded by whirling snow, hunted by a terrible winter that knew his name and wa
nted him to die. A winter dragon, many-headed, white-eyed, obsidian-winged, had hunted him through the storm, crying with all the voices of the winter winds. Though he had fled from it, he had been unable to find his way out of that deadly wind-struck winter until at last a thread of warmth had spun through it and past it. Then at last Raëhemaiëth’s strong solidity and warmth had followed that thread and found him and lifted him out of the cold.

  Tiro remembered every minute of the terrible confusion that had held him, though. So, when Riheir Coärin sent word that he expected the King of Pohorir to try to break through Meilin Gap and Tiro’s father decided, on the strength of that likelihood, that the Pohorin king might very well try the Anha Narrows at Eilin as well, Tiro knew exactly why he had to accompany his father to Eilin.

  Enmon Corvallis would hold the northern border. Tiro trusted that he would. His father trusted that too. They had to trust Corvallis would hold because it had to be true. That border lay now through what had been the south of Emmer, well north of the Imhar; an uncertain border held mainly by strength of arms and only very tenuously by recourse to Raëhemaiëth or lesser Immanences. Tiro had made that much possible when he had forced a tie to Raëhemaiëth on Sariy. Now his father had done the same to a handful of other of the smaller southernmost Emmeran provinces, those along the border between Emmer and Harivir. Most importantly Niaft and Daè. So it might be possible, they all prayed it would be possible, for Corvallis to keep that border secure against the Mad King and prevent further attacks from the north. For a while, at least.

  That freed Torrolay Raëhema and Tiro to hold the east against Methmeir Irekaì if the Pohorin king struck through the mountains at Eilin.

  So Torrolay took three companies of men marching under the Red Falcon of Raëh, and his own deep tie to Raëhemaiëth, to Eilin. And Tiro rode with him because he needed to be there, watching from a very safe place high on the walls, just in case anything happened to his father. His own presence, in fact, freed his father to take the field—because if the worst did happen, Tiro would be right there to take the tie.