Fifteen: Tin

“The master of textiles will take us.” I yelled it into the crowd, ignoring the grunt of surprise from Magda. “He’ll escort us to the glacier, where we’ll be well off your lands.”

Sameer pushed forward, approaching my horse. I sat back in the saddle as he leaned in, his face contorted in rage.

I lowered my voice. “Escort us out of town. Please. I’m not guilded, but the royal daughter is, and Amada—”

Sameer’s face looked like an overripe mangosteen. “Fuck Amada.”

Maybe Mother had made the right choice in never allowing me to know my sibling. I didn’t have the patience for this. “You’d have to find her to do that, and you won’t find her with us dead.”

His eyes flashed with some emotion I couldn’t pinpoint, and then he let out a short growl, mounted my horse, and sat directly behind me in the saddle. Startled, I tried to stand and slide off, but Sameer’s arm snaked around my waist and held me down. He whispered into my ear, “You and I need to have a long talk.”

“Great,” I growled back. “After we get out of the village, okay?”

“Master of textiles?” the lead woman called up to us. “You trust them?”

Sameer snorted. “Absolutely not, but I do know them, sort of. I’ll take them to the damn glacier. Let the ice be their executioner. I didn’t work on that spirit house to have it trampled by a mob.”

The old woman tossed her head in a funny sort of nod. “Acceptable, Master.” She sheathed her knife. “Don’t ever visit Miantri again.” The woman’s words might have been meant for Magda, but her eyes glared only at me.

I tried to urge my horse forward while simultaneously elbowing Sameer. He was way too close, and he smelled like old sweat and rotting birch.

Magda gave me a tense, questioning look, but I frowned. “He’s fine. Let’s go.”

“Thank you for your understanding,” she said to the woman. She took my horse’s reins and kicked her horse to a trot along the path that led from the village. The wind followed us, twirling our cloaks and stinging the tips of our ears as the villagers jeered.

The witch’s voice mingled along with them.

You’re going to die. You’re going to die die die die die.

I spat at the wind, though I’d never been much good at spitting, and all I succeeded in doing was getting Peanut’s ear wet.

“Sorin?” Magda asked at Peanut’s snort.

I shook my head. “Witches in my head. Trying to keep us off the glacier.”

“Possibly the witch isn’t as naïve as you two are about ice,” Sameer offered, a little too smugly.

“Please be quiet,” I hissed.

“Eyes ahead then. Don’t want the village to think you’re going to hex them.”

I slumped. The only other option was to try to land an elbow on Sameer’s nose, which the village would definitely not have approved of. So, I stayed silent as we passed through the square at a tense canter, slow enough to watch people shove knives into boots and overhear conversations about guilds and witches and alchemists mingling with questions about lunch. Magda’s shoulders progressively relaxed as we neared the city wall, and even Sameer’s grip lessened once we’d passed the line of loose gray stones and came to the main path crossroads.

There, while Magda debated which road to take, a soft purple light caught my eyes. It lined the left side of our trail, then cut south, along the road back to Thuja and Sorpsi’s capital.

Thousands of ways to die on a glacier. Turn back, Sorin of Thuja. This path will take you home.

Home. The witch meant Thuja, but home also meant the capital, and Master Rahad, and my apprenticeship. A desperate, irrational desire to run down the trail of purple crumbled over me.

“Sorin, what are those? Some of your fungi?” Magda pointed not south, but to the north trail where dotted patches of normal, white foxfire lead into a forest of scraggly firs coated in snow.

I took a deep breath. Magda was the reason I was still here. Magda would release me from my guild inheritance once we finished our trip. Magda, and the northern trail, were what I needed to focus on.

“Those are just foxfire. They’re out of season, but maybe this is a winter variety we don’t have in Thuja. I don’t know. Most glow blue or green in the dark, depending on variety, but it is normal for them to be white in daylight.” I didn’t mention the south trail. If she hadn’t commented on it, then likely she couldn’t see it, and now wasn’t the time to have another conversation about witches.

Magda backed her horse up so it paralleled mine. “Would you check the fungi? Even though they look normal? This close to the glacier, I’d like to be sure.”

Anything to get me out of the saddle and away from Sameer and his stink.

I dismounted my horse, stepped onto the north trail, then knelt at the first fungal cluster. “Okay?” I murmured as I touched the top of one of the little white mushrooms, enjoying the moist, delicate feeling on my skin. In the spring or summer, the texture wouldn’t have been strange. For the middle of winter, the fungus was far too alive. “Going to dance or anything? Turn Sameer into a capybara?” I snickered. The fungus, as I had hoped, did not respond.

“It’s typical,” I said as I looked farther down the trail. “Just some fungi in a fairy trail. A mild enchantment. There’s probably an old amulet nearby like Master Rahad said. A broken old amulet leaking some old magic into the duff.”

“Is that why it started glowing?” Sameer shot back. “Or is that your magic?”

“I’m not a… Glowing? What?” I looked down at the fungi near my knee; they had, in fact, started glowing green. Which was impossible, of course, because it was far too light to see the pale luminescence of foxfire, and the tiny things were so bright I almost had to look away. I frowned and got back on my horse. The glow faded out.

I sighed. I really hated magic.

“Magda, would you take your horse forward? I want to test something.”

“The fungi aren’t going to kill me or my horse, right?”

I looked over to glare at her but saw a lopsided smirk on her face, and grinned.

“No, Royal Daughter. I promise to protect you from the fungi. Now, if you would please? For alchemy?”

“If it’s for a guild, I suppose.” Magda uttered what sounded like a well-practiced sigh and let her horse canter a few meters along the northern trail, then turned back. No fungi glowed. She even got off and tried on foot. Again, the foxfire stayed their normal white.

“Uh-huh.” Sameer snorted. More loudly, he said, “It’s not a bad idea to lose the horses. We can’t take them on the glacier, and if Sorin is triggering some old magic, we might as well take advantage of it.”

Of course it had to be me triggering the magic. Why couldn’t this witch just leave me alone? “You’re not afraid of the snowsickness?” I asked Sameer, trying to bring my mind to other pressing issues, like us dying on the glacier.

Sameer coughed. “No. And I’m definitely going with you two to the glacier. I don’t want you getting lost and spooking some other village that I contract with. I’m charging for my guide services, though, and it won’t be cheap.”

“Fine,” Magda cut in. “You can name your price after we get to Celtis. Now, Sorin, the foxfire?”

I shrugged. “It’s no more dangerous than any other foxfire. Not that I can tell.”

Magda slid from her horse and shouldered her pack without argument. She stepped onto the trail as Sameer and I dismounted and took our own packs. She nudged a cluster of foxfire with the side of her foot, and frowned. “Their light is helpful, with the dense canopy. Sorin, you’ll have to lead.”

Sameer laughed.

“I’m pretty good in a forest,” I said to him as I moved onto the trail, and the fungi lit again to their ghostly green. Though the skin on the back of my neck prickled, I took another step, and in the space of a heartbeat, a winding path of foxfire flared to life on the packed dirt and snow of the trail.

“Yes, you’re definitely not a witch. You have me convinced.” Sameer kicked at a cluster of foxfire. Several caps broke from their stipes and fell into the snow. Color bled from the flesh until it was as white as its surroundings.

There was no point in arguing with him. I tossed my cloak over my shoulder and turned away from the village of Miantri. With a sigh, I led Magda and Sameer down a glowing trail of fungi into the northern wood.

*

Half a day later, the foxfire grew so profuse and thick I had to stomp it down just to stay on the trail. More worrying was that the wind blew milder nearest the foxfire, and the temperature ran higher. The farther we strayed from the path, whether to collect water or to relieve ourselves, the more the actual weather beat upon us until it became a chill that felt like it might break our bones. So we stayed on the magical fungal trail probably made a century ago by the old king for some nefarious purpose, and I fumed silently about magic, and witches, and my brother.

As the conifers around us shortened to head height, then waist, then finally to scrubby bushes, the fungi spun closer together until there was no path, only a thick carpet of stalked green. Underneath that, the ground transitioned to rocky pellets of ice, colored dirty brown from mixing with the soil. Another hour in and I could finally see the glacier, an enormous expanse of white and blue that stretched on into the horizon.

Gods, it was beautiful. It was terrifying. I’d never imagined so much ice, nor the surprising colors that lurked within it. I saw blues and purples mixed with dirty grays and, of course, the omnipresent white. Tall, jagged outcroppings jutted from the surface—hours away, perhaps, but terrifying nonetheless. They looked like spears, like some Puget god had sent deadly icicles raining from the heavens to pierce the ice below.

“We’re really going to walk on that?” I asked. I stopped and pointed to one of the ice towers. “Avalanche? Crushing?”

Sameer brushed past me, his shoulder hitting mine hard enough to force me forward. I scowled but didn’t push back. If he fell and cracked his head on the ice, witches would be the least of my concerns. Guilders did not look fondly on violence from outside their ranks.

Sameer took the funny axe from his pack and flipped it in his hand. “They’re just seracs, and we’ll try to stay clear if possible. We’re not going past any villages, mostly because they’re farther up the glacier, but also, I’m not subjecting them to whatever is going on with you.”

He pointed to the path, which ended abruptly at the glacier’s edge. I walked to the end of it, then stepped onto the glacier proper. Immediately, the fungi stopped glowing.

“Uh-huh.” Sameer came up next to me, followed by Magda. Without the heat from the magic foxfire, the air was almost too cold to bear. I pulled the old cloak tightly about my shoulders and clutched handfuls of the fabric to cover my hands.

“The glacier’s preamble here will take us directly to Puget if we follow it, although we’ll have to move farther into the glacier some places since there are a few lakes up here we should avoid.” Sameer looked back at Magda and held up a hand before she had even started to speak. “No side trips. Four generations haven’t been able to find Iana’s Lake, and we’re not going to either.”

Magda stared at Sameer for several moments before shaking her head and heading east. Sameer grinned, then leaned in and tugged at my cloak. I pulled away and kicked a chunk of stony ice toward him.

“I think she likes me,” he said. “It’s probably my curly hair.”

If I’d had a sword, I’d have considered running him through. My cheeks burned. “Why are you still here?” I demanded. “We’re at the glacier. Your promise to the villagers is met.”

Sameer’s grin turned down, into features almost cruel. “Because I’ve waited a long time to talk to you, Sorin of Thuja. Somewhere you can’t run away, and where Amada can’t come to your rescue. And a glacier on the top of the world, away from all the people who love you and insist on smothering you with protection? It sounds about perfect.”