Followed by Frost

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  My breath fogged against the hot air as I asked, “They’re all so close?”

  “The cities are clustered against the mountains. That’s where the water comes . . . or used to.”

  Three men from the party broke off the formation and galloped their camels toward the mountains. I watched them, curious, but they continued onward without slowing.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  Eyan didn’t watch the riders, but the mountains. “Captain must have seen something.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Our sheikh isn’t here.”

  When I didn’t respond, he said, “There’s never been a reign in Zareed where a king has been safe.”

  This alarmed me, but I tried to ignore the sensation, as Eyan showed no interest in further discussing the topic. And he was right: Even if there were men in the mountains, I shouldn’t worry about Imad. He was safe in the palace.

  I scanned the horizon for Sadriel but did not see him. No one would die here today.

  We reached Kittat after two days in the desert. It did not surprise me to learn the people were expecting us. Clouds were a rare thing in Zareed, especially large ones, and the white sheet of my snow cloud was as impossible as it was real. The sheila, a sort of governor, welcomed us eagerly. Apparently word of my “snow miracles,” as the translation went, had already reached Kittat, and the people were eager for my relief. The men and women, dressed in their loose and colorful clothing, greeted me with smiles and bows, of all things, and then the sheila’s men began passing out coats. If any crossed their arms and patted their shoulders, they did it where my eyes could not see. Though I had brought upon them the cold, they could not have offered me a warmer reception.

  The sheila took our party to an orange-painted inn made of small mud bricks. It stood two stories in height and had tightly woven sinew screens over the narrow rectangular windows. The inn had been cleared out just to accommodate me and the soldiers. The innkeeper and his wife seemed eager to serve us, and eager to please me, as if the slightest disappointment would prevent my snow from falling. One hour after we reached the inn, snow began to fall, whisking through the city on bitter winds that drove families indoors to light fires for warmth—a rarity in these lands. Our inn had a hearth for cooking purposes, but the innkeeper kept it stoked with black rocks and the twisted, thorny brush that grew in patches along the mountains.

  Most of the soldiers, some wrapped in blankets, chose to take their dinner in the front room at my table. The hearth drove back a good deal of my chill, so I imagined, for I only heard the occasional chattering of teeth other than my own. I kept my gloves on as I ate my spicy stew, spooning it into my mouth as neatly as I could manage. Others, including Eyan, ate more like ravenous dogs, which eased my mind concerning my own strange dinner habits.

  Halfway through the meal, Eyan chuckled. “Smeesa, you have a curry icicle on your face!” He reached for my cheek.

  I jolted back from his fingers hard enough to shake the bench, causing the soldier next to me, Qisam, to slosh a spoonful of stew onto the stone tabletop. A few others glanced at me, including Lo, who sat at the far end of the long table.

  I touched my cheek, grateful once more that I didn’t flush, and found the droplet of broth frozen there. I peeled it off and let it fall to the floor.

  “Careful,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. “I don’t wear these gloves for fashion.” I didn’t know all the niceties of Hraric, so I spoke directly. “My touch is colder than a man can bear. I do not wish to harm you.”

  The fleeting thought of Sadriel entered my mind.

  Eyan looked startled for a moment, but then he laughed and pounded his palm on the table. “She is like a cobra!” he said to the others. “Quick and fascinating, but one kiss and you’re a dead man!”

  The table laughed at the comparison, and I smiled, glad for Eyan’s good humor. When the noise died down, I said, “I will have to have a helmet made.”

  To my surprise, Lo chuckled from the end of the table, though he did not look my way. It was the first sign that the man of steel was not quite metal all the way through.

  The second night, as the snow collected on the streets and the winds whistled through the sinew screens, Lo addressed me from the end of the table—the first time he had spoken to me when the situation did not require it.

  “I find it interesting,” he began, swirling his spoon over the bed of rice before him, “that a Northlander would speak Hraric, especially as well as you do.”

  He said it in Northlander, which I found interesting, for only a few of our party knew my native tongue. Most would not be able to understand the conversation, let alone interject their own thoughts.

  I glanced at him, wondering at his motives.

  “In Zareed, learning the northern tongue is a necessity for any businessman, diplomat, or traveler,” he continued, setting down his spoon and staring at me with those dark, near-black eyes. “The earth is fertile north of the Unclaimed Lands, and trade with those farmers and merchants is essential for us. But the Northlanders care little for our own goods, outside of spices and jewelry, which they can obtain with little speech.”

  Eyan whispered to the soldier beside him, perhaps trying to decipher Lo’s words.

  “I admit,” I answered in Hraric, if only for the others’ benefit, “that I did not learn Hraric for love of the Southlands. Since I was a child I have found languages fascinating, especially old or forgotten ones. To me, they are like secrets.”

  Lo watched me with an unreadable expression. I hesitated but went on.

  “The study of Hraric was available to me, and so I learned what I could. Listening to the talk of your men is very helpful, though I fear I now know more slang than actual words.”

  A few soldiers snickered. Lo smirked.

  Folding my hands in my lap, I said, “It’s very interesting, really, the provenance of a language. I believe a creole derived from an old Northlander tongue, Angrean, must have made its way down to the Southlands, because many of your root words are similar.”

  Lo raised an eyebrow but nodded.

  “For example,” I went on, slow with my Hraric, “the word ha means ‘man,’ and tar means ‘summer,’ which is not so different from the Hraric word for camel: fapar. And if a camel is derived from men and heat, that deftly explains why I cannot ride one.”

  The men laughed around us, Eyan especially, for those who had ridden with me from Iyoden to Mac’Hliah still found my awkwardness with camels a good joke. I smiled at their reaction, then dared to chance a look at Lo.

  He smirked, a glint in his eye. Shaking his head, he returned to his meal and did not speak to me again that night.

  Lo’s silence did not last long, for the day we left Kittat to relish in the wake of my blizzard, Eyan took the front of our traveling formation and Lo rode farther back, his eyes constantly searching the mountains as we passed over them to make our way to Ir. I did spy a few people amidst the cliffs, but if Lo did not feel threatened by them, I knew I need not worry.

  I was grateful when he finally spoke to me. Aside from the soreness of riding a camel for so long, my coldness felt especially brisk to me at that moment, and with nothing to distract me from it, I focused on its chill—the way it seemed to chew on me from the inside, like falling through ice and the shock of hitting the cold water, except that lightning-like sensation never subsided or calmed, only ached and throbbed.

  Lo was the distraction I needed.

  “You say you study languages,” he said in Northlander, twisting his camel’s reins around his bronze fingers. “How many do you know?”

  “Fluently? Only three, not including my native,” I admitted. “Four, if you count my own handtalk.”

  He raised a brow. “Handtalk?”

  “A signed code that I made with a friend back home,” I said, thinking of Ashlen. I wondered how her last year of schooling had gone, and whether or not she had married by now. “Most of the words are done with one hand, and there is
a signal for each letter of the alphabet, so we can spell out words we don’t have signs for. It drops things like articles and auxiliary verbs, which really are more modern inventions. It’s all present tense, unless past is specified.”

  I waved my hand down without thought, the signal for past tense.

  Lo steered his mount around a hole in the ground before saying, “And this handtalk, you communicated efficiently with it?”

  “It was as efficient as two schoolgirls needed it to be,” I said with a smile, remembering long-ago days in the schoolyard together. One time, when Ashlen took the blame for something I had done, the teacher forced her to sit on the stairs during recess while the rest of us played. We used handtalk to chat about the boy she liked—Alvin Modder—the largest boy in class and perhaps the slowest. I signed to her each small thing he did, and she signed back how they were obviously signs of his unknown affection for her.

  Lo shouted an order behind him to Qisam, telling him to ride ahead and scout.

  “I-I could show you, if you’d like.”

  He regarded me for a moment, almost in that amused way Sadriel so often affected, and I shivered at the comparison.

  “How would you say,” he began, staring ahead, “‘a bandit stands fifty paces to the left’?”

  “I don’t have a word for bandit,” I said, “so I would have to spell it out”—I moved my fingers to form the letters, many of which looked nothing like their scripted forms, to make it hard for others to guess the meaning—“or create a new sign for it. Bandits . . . They wear masks even here, yes? So perhaps . . .”

  I split my fingers in the middle and laid my hand over one eye, forming half a mask. I then signed the rest of the sentence slowly: “stands fifty paces left.”

  “That is useful,” Lo said, winding and unwinding the reins around his fingers. “To communicate in silence, assuming there is light to see. Simple enough for a soldier.”

  “Even one with only one arm.”

  The corner of his mouth formed a half smile. “That it can be done one handed makes it even more clandestine.”

  His vocabulary—and astuteness—amazed me. I had thought my handtalk rather clever, but already the captain of Imad’s guard saw the roots of its fashion.

  I nodded.

  “And the subject comes first, as in Northlander?”

  “Yes, but it can be changed for Hraric.”

  “No,” he said. “It is clearer this way. How do you show geography or distance?”

  I began the symbol for mountain, but from the corner of my eye I caught a spot of maroon. I turned my head and spied Sadriel atop one of the steep cliffs lining our path. Though the shadow of his broad-rimmed hat hid his eyes, I felt him watching me.

  “Smeesa?”

  I shook my head and turned back to Lo, who scanned the area that had captured my attention.

  “I’m sorry. Just . . . cold.”

  I cleared my throat, arched my hand, and pointed my fingers and thumb toward the ground. “Mountain,” I said. “To indicate a direction in regards to the mountain, you move the sign itself. Over,” I explained, moving my hand in a half circle, up and down, “or under”—I again drew a half circle, down and up.

  Lo mimicked my signs. I glanced back to the mountain, but Sadriel had already disappeared.

  CHAPTER 13

  My mother always said that God made the world in perfect balance, an idea she used to explain the smallest fortunes and mishaps in our lives. I recall a time when she dropped a plate—a piece of my grandmother’s china, which we only used at winter solstice and on my father’s birthday—onto the kitchen floor. It shattered into hundreds of sharp porcelain pieces, some scattering as far as the hearth. Instead of crying or stomping her foot, as I was wont to do, she merely pressed her fists to her hips and said, “I knew that would happen. I found two extra eggs in the henhouse this morning.”

  I thought of her and my grandmother’s china often in Ir.

  Where men and women had been cheering in the streets of Kittat as we rode into town, we were only greeted in Ir by scowls. The townsfolk crossed their arms and patted their shoulders to ward off my evil spirits, though nothing they did could ward off my cold. Where Kittat’s sheila had welcomed us with open arms and appointed us an inn, the one in Ir questioned Lo roughly, only offering us shelter after he was provided with a written edict from Imad himself. My snow fell heavily that first night, and while some found relief from the water, I heard rumors of many falling ill, which terrified me. I told Lo of Bennion Hutches, and though he did not seem to take my warnings seriously, we left before nightfall on the second day rather than staying the designated three. I prayed earnestly that the ill would recover, hoping that the prayers of a coldhearted woman would be enough to help them.

  I had little time to worry, for as soon as we departed from Ir for our southbound trek to Shi’wanara, Lo had me instructing him again on my handtalk, which was how we spent the majority of the journey. He learned quickly, and only occasionally tweaked signs to motions he found more efficient. I knew his changes would have bothered me in Euwan, yet I found myself agreeing with him more often than not. Eyan, and then Qisam, eavesdropped on our mobile lessons, and soon my entire escort began learning the unspoken language. I noticed that the random bouts of laughter increased as soldiers fingered jokes one to another. To my surprise, Lo let them laugh.

  Closer to Shi’wanara, Lo rode ahead to scout for bandits, and I surprised myself by actually missing his company, not that I expected much more of it. Once Lo mastered my simple handtalk, I doubted he would care to speak to me again.

  And he didn’t, not even after our arrival in Shi’wanara. The city offered us a polite reception, much to my relief, though their reactions to me were more mixed. Fortunately, even the most suspicious of my guard had warmed to me after weeks of travel.

  Many of them stayed up late with me that first night in Shi’wanara, though we sat around the fire of the inn where we were staying so the others could ward off my wintry aura.

  “I heard,” Qisam said in Hraric, his voice so low and accented I strained to understand him, “that in the Northlands, the earth waters itself every morning.”

  “How can the earth water itself?” asked Bakr, the youngest soldier in our group, three years my junior.

  “I think he means dew,” I said, using the Northlander word, which was easy to pronounce with the Zareedian accent. “Every morning its small droplets cling to the grass, only to vanish when the sun grows too strong.”

  Lo had not joined us for our fireside chat, but I spotted him at the far end of the room, handing coin to the innkeeper. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded against his chest, the firelight glinting off the gold rings and chains in his left ear. He would have looked a shadow if not for that jewelry. He was certainly as silent as one.

  “I heard once,” I said to Qisam, “that dew is fallen rain that yearns to return to heaven. Every night it struggles up from the earth that has claimed it, climbing the grass on its journey to the sky. But every day the sun, keeper of the heavens, forbids it from completing its journey and casts it back into the soil.”

  “A sad story,” said Bakr.

  I shook my head. “Were it not so, nothing would grow.”

  “And then we’d all go to the heavens!” Eyan shouted. I laughed with the others, though the thought of Death made me shiver. I had not seen Sadriel since catching a glimpse of him many days before, but I often felt as if I were being watched.

  The night grew late, and the soldiers—my friends—retired to their beds, many of which were shared by two or three men. As my snow flurries swirled outside, I, too, took to my bed on the first floor of the inn. But the insomnia that often came with the cold dragged at me hard that night, and I soon returned to the hearth, this time alone. I stared into the depths of the flames and thought of my small campfires in the mountains. I did not miss my mountains—my safe haven—despite spending three long years there. Imad had saved me by
bringing me back to the Southlands; he had reminded me what it was to be human.

  I rolled up my mustard-colored sleeves, removed my gloves, and picked up one of the red coals and turned it over in my hands, careful not to let it crumble. Often, in my loneliness, I played with embers like these, imagining that I was not cursed but blessed—a woman who could touch fire and remain unscathed. I blew onto the coal softly, my cold breath dimming its red life.

  “It does not hurt you?”

  I nearly dropped the coal at the voice. Instead, I quickly tossed it into the fire and turned around, my braid falling off my shoulder. Lo stood behind me, still wearing his many layers of warmth, the indigo on the outside.

  Instead of waiting for my reply, he said, “We move tomorrow. You need to sleep.”

  I turned and smiled at the flames. “I will in a moment, thank you.”

  “You cannot?”

  I glanced back to him. He took a seat in one of the canvas chairs set around a sage-and-lavender-woven rug. Not wishing to burden him with my woes, I answered simply, “I am a little cold tonight.”

  “And the fire does not help.”

  He looked at my hands.

  “When we were children,” he said, watching the flames, “my mother would help warm us up by filling a goat bladder with hot water and pressing it to the backs of our necks. It always helped, even if it stunk.”

  I smiled. “I do not know what a goat bladder smells like.”

  “You do not want to.”

  “You have siblings?” I asked.

  “I have nine, two in the past-lands.”

  “You are the eldest?”

  “The youngest.”

  I considered him for a moment. “That surprises me.”

  He raised a black eyebrow.

  “You seem like an older brother.”

  A smile threatened his lips. “Perhaps because Imad has given me the task of overseeing seventeen little boys.”

  I chuckled to myself, pulled down my sleeves, and replaced my gloves. “Are you from Mac’Hliah?”