by Shannon Hale
“Have you visited their village?” Tarik asked.
The woman shook her head. “They come to visit us here. We wouldn’t know where to find them.”
It was good they had Pia’s compass, Rollan thought.
“There is much more hospitable land in Eura,” said Conor. “Why do you live here?”
“We love it here,” she said. “Our Marked relatives know where to find us. The wind and waters know us. And some nights, we lie back and watch the sky dance.”
Sky dance? Rollan wondered if the cold and loneliness were getting to the Ardu people’s heads.
The Ardu were happy to sell them provisions for the journey, as well as cold-weather gear — hooded cloaks made from thick caribou fur, gloves extending nearly to the elbow, high boots with roughshod soles, the nails hammered only halfway through to better grip the ice.
So much leather and fur; Rollan was sweating immediately, drops rolling down his back. It tickled and itched, as if spiders crawled beneath his clothes, and he cursed the ridiculously heavy clothing. Give him cold over heat any day.
Within a few hours he’d changed his mind.
Dirt led to snow, which led to ice. Endless ice, more than an ocean’s worth, it seemed to Rollan.
The ice was mostly flat, with subtle rises and crests, as if mimicking the waves of a gentle sea. A fine layer of snow lay over the ice, chased by flickers of wind. The sunlight was bright, reflecting off a white world so that there was nowhere to look that didn’t hurt the eye. After several hours of walking, Rollan closed his eyes and tried walking blind.
Rollan squinted his eyes open to get his bearings and noticed spots of black on the ice in the distance. Then they moved. The black spots were a nose and eyes.
“Polar bear,” Tarik whispered.
“Suka?” asked Meilin.
Tarik shook his head. “Far too small. But even a regular polar bear is the most fearsome predator on land. We would be wise to avoid it.”
They took a longer route, attempting to stay away from the polar bear’s hunting ground, and then continued on north. They walked a half hour in peace until a snowbank immediately to their left unexpectedly moved, proving it had not been a snowbank at all. The polar bear rose to its full height, and the team froze. This terrifying creature couldn’t be a “regular” polar bear, could it?
“Suka?” Rollan squeaked.
The bear opened a mouth the size of Jhi’s entire head and roared. Rollan noticed blood staining the fur around the bear’s mouth, and he drew back in terror. The bear lunged and swatted with a long arm, the black claws of its paw just missing Rollan. He had already stumbled backward in fright, and now fell flat onto the ice.
But Briggan moved in fast, hunched low, warning the bear off with a growl-bark-bark, growl-bark-bark. Uraza was loose and crouched, a threat gurgling in her throat. Maya fumbled off her gloves, closed her eyes, and smacked the fist of her right hand into the palm of the left. Sparks exploded out from her body like someone dropping a heavy log on a dying fire. The sight was spectacular, but the sparks dissipated quickly, even before hitting the ground. The bear watched the sparks fade, and then swung one heavy paw at a nearby snowbank, icy snow cracking with a sound like broken bones. Snow showered over the team, and chunks of ice went flying.
A piece the size of his fist struck Rollan in the shoulder, and he sprawled back to the ground. When he wiped the snow from his eyes, he saw the bear several meters off, lumbering away in no apparent hurry. The polar bear, it seemed, had no predator to fear among their group.
They all watched in silence as the bear disappeared into the white plain, its fur indistinguishable from the Arctican surroundings.
“That was my big move,” Maya whispered. “And it didn’t even flinch.”
“That was a regular polar bear?” said Rollan. “It was . . . huge.”
“Suka will be much, much larger,” said Tarik.
With Briggan alert for polar bears, sniffing and stopping to look as they walked, Rollan soon fell into a drowsy complacency. Surely no other danger could accost them out here. After all, nothing was visible but flat ice for miles and miles.
The walk was beyond wearying. The scenery never changed — just whiteness, the glare of sunlight. Beneath all those layers, he was sweating, feeling sticky and itchy across his back and under his arms. But his uncovered face was glaringly cold, nose running and eyes streaming, teeth in a permanent state of chatter.
“Meilin, did any of your tutors in Zhong teach you how to keep from shivering? I could use a lesson.”
There was a sound to his left like a huff of breath and a moan. Was she annoyed with him for just asking that? He turned, feeling surprisingly hurt, and saw no Meilin at all.
“Meilin?” he said.
No sign of her. Anywhere. Rollan’s stomach plunged. He shouted for her, hurrying back toward where he’d last noticed her out of the corner of his eye. He tended to keep Meilin in the corner of his eye a lot lately.
Essix screeched, startling Rollan as she landed on his shoulder. Her talons pressed against the front of his shoulder, as if warning him back. With the contact, his vision became even sharper, his awareness of his surroundings increased. He detected now a subtle difference in the ice that lay before him. And beyond it, a hole.
Carefully walking around the different-looking ice, he moved toward the hole. Lying on his stomach, he peered down.
A crevasse about two feet wide and perhaps a hundred feet long had riven the solid ice. A thick layer of ice and snow had coated over it, camouflaging it with the nearly identical solid ground. The crevasse was so deep that sunlight couldn’t reach the bottom. And Meilin was clinging to the rough edge of the crevasse’s icy cliff, about ten feet down. She looked up at him, her face a mask of panic, her frown frozen. She seemed unable to speak, to move, to do anything but keep gripping the tiny ledges in the ice. One slip and she’d fall.
“Meilin!” Rollan shouted. “Help, she’s fallen!”
Rollan almost called for the Slate Elephant. Wearing it would make Essix large enough to carry Meilin, but the crevasse was too narrow. Great Essix’s wingspan would be too wide to fit.
But apparently Abeke had had the same idea, because Rollan heard rolling thunder beside him.
It was Uraza. Great Uraza. Huge Uraza. Clearly Abeke was wearing the Slate Elephant, making her spirit animal the size of a Great Beast. The deepest parts of Rollan wanted to scream and run from the enormous thing charging at him, but he just stared. Uraza was like a monster from a storybook, a giant terror that shouldn’t exist. He watched as a tremendous paw landed next to him, each claw the size of a man’s arm, cracking into the ice, anchoring the giant cat to the frozen plain.
Uraza’s huge shoulder muscles rolled as she crouched and extended one long arm. She couldn’t quite reach Meilin. She crouched even closer to the cliff, knocking bits of ice down the crevasse. She reached lower. Her paw just managed to extend to Meilin’s shoulder. Meilin hesitated to let go of her precarious hold on the cliff to grab the paw. Rollan heard her short, panicked breaths.
“Let go, Meilin,” he said. “She’s got you. Let go. It’s going to be okay.”
Though he didn’t feel like it’d be okay. Meilin was one inch from falling into a bottomless crevasse.
“Okay.” Meilin breathed out. She let go, clawing at Uraza’s paw, hanging on by gripping handfuls of fur.
Uraza pulled her up slightly, curled her paw, and then batted her into the air as if she were a toy ball. Meilin rose, flying out of the crevasse, emitting a strangled scream. Uraza caught her in her paws, setting her down on the ice.
“Are you okay?” Rollan asked. “Are you all right? Meilin?”
Meilin stood on her feet, straightening her spine.
“I feel . . . a great deal . . . like a mouse,” she said, wobbling slightly.
“What
happened?” Conor asked.
Meilin cleared her throat, as if trying to get her voice to stop shaking. “It would seem that some ice is false ice. Covering deep holes.”
Uraza began shivering, and the ground shuddered with the sheer magnitude of it. Abeke lifted the Slate Elephant so it was no longer in contact with her skin, and Uraza flickered back to big-kitty size. Then Abeke pulled up the sleeve of her coat, and the leopard became a mark on her skin. “Some of us are more accustomed to warmth,” she said.
“My pack fell down,” Meilin said. “And with it, a third of our food.”
Everyone groaned. They’d been traveling light as it was. Tarik had them all unpack, divvying up the remaining food equally between all the packs.
“It was foolish of me to put all the food in only three packs,” he said. “I’m sorry, team, but the days will be lean.”
Rollan shouldered his new pack, full of food, a bedroll, and part of their tent. It was heavy, though he wished it were heavier with food. He got an uncomfortable feeling they were about to starve in this icy desert.
Tarik brought out his long, thin rope, knotting it through everyone’s belt with several feet between.
“Better keep animals in passive form,” he said. “We don’t have enough rope to secure them to us . . . or food to spare to feed them.”
“Sure, let me just . . .” Rollan pulled up his sleeve, whistling to Essix. She whistled back that dipping, laughing note. “Huh, Essix won’t obey me. What a shocker.”
“We don’t even know how far we have to go,” said Conor. “We could run out of food before reaching Suka!”
“Do you wish to return?” asked Tarik.
Conor considered, then shook his head. He pulled up his sleeve and Briggan disappeared.
Rollan sighed and looked up at Essix.
“Did you see that, girl?” Rollan said. “Come on now, you pretty birdie.” He offered her his arm with his most charming smile on his face.
Essix landed on his shoulders and ruffled his hair with her beak, like an older sibling rubbing a fist against a younger brother’s head. A gyrfalcon was native to northern climates anyway. And she could hunt for herself. Passive state offered her nothing that she wanted or needed.
Though for Rollan, the ache in his chest still as real as the ice beneath his feet, the chance to be unconscious for a while sounded like bliss.
They camped each night, all six huddled in their small tent. Rollan was too cold to sleep deeply, too aware of the others twitching in their sleep, breathing, snoring. Each morning he woke up feeling as if he’d been in an overnight street brawl.
All day they walked, the monotony of ice, snow, and hunger interspersed with the constant threat of death by falling.
Tarik had rationed the food to a hand’s breadth of meat jerky, one dry travel biscuit, and one apple each day. Hungry and bored, they played a game as they walked called Best Meal Ever.
“Hot pepper sauce over antelope steak,” Abeke said. “Heaps and heaps of black grapes. Honeyed bread braids with goat’s milk pudding.”
“Just bread,” Rollan said, brushing snow off his coat. “A huge loaf of hot bread, crusty on the outside, soft as a sigh on the inside, smeared with melty butter and a great deal of raspberry preserves.”
“Raw, fresh tuna, juiced with lemon and ginger, over a hot bed of sweet rice,” said Meilin. “Mangoes so fresh they’re creamy, and —”
Meilin dropped.
“Crevasse!” Rollan shouted. “Hurry! Crevasse, cre-vasse!”
He held tight to the end of his rope that secured him to Meilin and was scrambling for a foothold on the ice. The others were digging in too, Conor beside him, but the rope was slack. Meilin hadn’t fallen down a crevasse.
Meilin stood up, dusting herself off.
“I just tripped,” she said. “How embarrassing.”
Rollan was the one who felt embarrassed at his overreaction. He felt his cheeks coloring. “So, um, Conor said you keep falling because you’re so heavy, but I defended your honor,” he said, helping brush snow and ice chunks off her hood and arms.
“I said no such thing!” Conor shouted, and Rollan gave him a grin.
“I am heavy,” she said. “It’s all these brains.”
She tried to smile at Rollan, and the failure of it made his chest ache anew.
They began walking again. Rollan tried whistling quietly to Essix. If the falcon sat on his shoulder, he might be able to detect the crevasses before Meilin fell again. Essix swooped down, knocking his hood back with the air of her passing, but wouldn’t land.
“Mutton pie,” Conor was saying, “with egg-basted flaky crust, stuffed full of tender mutton and potatoes and carrots and covered in thick, hot, salty gravy.”
Rollan had never tried mutton. The Greencloaks served it sometimes at Greenhaven Castle, but with so many other choices, he’d turned away from meat that smelled exactly like what it was — old sheep. But just then, mutton sounded like the best idea since —
There was no ground. Rollan was falling.
“Crevasse!” he heard someone shout from above.
All he could see was a rush of blue ice and blackness under his feet. He felt his gut loosen and the muscles along his spine tighten and twitch, as if trying to flap wings he did not have. His entire body ached with an explosion of fear, bursting out from the center of his body. The world was quiet and as slow as an exhale, and he seemed to have a lifetime of a moment to realize that he was about to die. No ground beneath him. Nothing but darkness —
A hard yank on his middle. Though it’d felt like forever, he’d only fallen as far as the rope between him and Meilin. Through the crack he heard more shouts now. They sounded desperate.
He held on to the rope, scrambling with his feet on the ice wall, trying to find traction that did not come. His feet kept slipping.
A sound like thunder and then Great Uraza’s paw lowered. Rollan reached up, the cat stretched down, but they were still a foot apart. The rope was too long.
Rollan clawed at the ice wall, hoping to find a handhold, but just drew back a chunk of ice.
“I can’t get up!” he yelled. “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!”
“Take a deep breath,” he heard Tarik call. “We’ll pull and you’ll push. We’ve got you.”
Rollan breathed, shallow gasps leading to one slow, deep inhale. This was not a street crew, ready to abandon him at the first sign of trouble. They had him. They would not let him fall.
He felt a pull on his middle, and he angled his feet to climb the side of the crevasse and then haul himself back onto land. He brushed himself off with shaking hands. Essix landed on his shoulder.
“Hey, Essix, great job scouting for crevasses,” he muttered.
Essix nuzzled her beak into his hood, bit onto a hair, and yanked it out.
“Ow,” he said, but something about the gesture actually seemed sweet.
“That was horrifying,” said Maya, staring aghast at the hole that had almost been Rollan’s grave. She started to walk, pacing in a circle. “I mean, that was really, really horrifying. I hate heights. And you’d think here on the ground you’d be safe from heights but then those holes appear like monsters from beneath, ready to grab you and —”
“Maya!” With Essix on his shoulder, Rollan could see a slight difference in the ice. “Maya, stop!”
Maya froze. She looked at Rollan with wide eyes and then down by her feet. She stomped her foot near the crevasse and a chunk of ice tumbled away, and down, and down, into a hole that had not been there a moment ago. She watched the ice fall, through loose strands of red hair fallen out of her hood and whipping against her face in the wind.
Tarik put his arm around her shoulders and helped her slowly step back.
“Good catch, Rollan,” Tarik said. “Let’s keep moving.”
&nbs
p; “Pear-and-cream-cheese tarts,” Maya said, her voice trembling. “And an entire roast chicken.”
After a few more falls and near misses, the group was exhausted. But they had no choice but to keep trudging forward. Even with his sharpened vision, Rollan could see nothing but ice desert in every direction. He was too tired, too hungry, too hopeless to find any joke in the matter.
At least Essix must be getting fed. She left him to fly out, returning perhaps an hour later to sit on his shoulder.
But Rollan noticed he hadn’t seen any blood on Essix’s beak or talons, smelled no meat on her breath.
“Couldn’t find anything out there?” Rollan asked softly.
Perhaps offended, Essix took flight.
“Wait,” said Rollan. He sighed heavily and put his mitten in his pocket, pulling out his rationed piece of jerky for the day. His stomach instantly growled, as if furious with him. But Rollan held it aloft.
Essix swooped back, taking the jerky with her beak. She sat on his shoulder while eating it primly, holding the jerky in one talon.
Rollan’s stomach protested again, and Essix stopped eating, as if she’d heard. There was one small shred of jerky left. She held it in her beak and tucked it into his mouth as if he were a baby bird. Rollan made a noise of surprise, but Essix chirped insistently, so he chewed.
Essix stayed on his shoulder for the rest of the day. With her near, Rollan led the way, able to detect the difference in the ice that hid the crevasses.
That night, the others were so exhausted they fell asleep at once. Though Rollan’s body felt bruised and spent, his mind couldn’t stop thinking.
Ma, he thought.
Had he done the right thing to run away?
The Bile cures bonding sickness, he thought. My mother returned for me. Are the Conquerors really just “Bad Guys”?
He knew he was doing good with the Greencloaks, but there was more to the story than they were telling him, and that made him nervous.