They were a day and a half riding through the foothills, a shapeless landscape of dry grasses and rough stones. By noon of the second day King Ristil’s army began their ascent of the mountains. At first the way was easy, the road leading through grassy uplands where the slope was gentle. Later, they came into a forested region of birch, alder, and hawthen, where it was necessary to slow the pace. There the ground was steep and rocky, and the trees came right down to the edge of the road, causing the way to narrow until no more than six or seven men could ride abreast. In the disciplined confusion of re-forming the line, those to the rear had a long wait before they were able to fall in and follow after the leaders.
Riding along beside the King, Sindérian finally found an opportunity to ask him the question she had been longing to ask since their first meeting. “You told us,” she said, “that Éireamhóine was separated from the Princess’s nurse in the Cadmin Aernan. Yet I’m certain I recognized her at the Heldenhof—and more than that, she knew me, too!”
All along King Ristil had maintained an appearance of unruffled serenity, but Sindérian was healer enough to sense the taut nerves, knotted muscles, and clenched jaw beneath his outward display of calm. She knew that he had been thinking of his son and adopted niece, that behind that unclouded blue-eyed gaze a thousand fears were gnawing at his mind. But now he smiled at some pleasant memory, and his whole aspect brightened.
“The answer to that is such a remarkable story, I wonder if you would even believe it.” He laughed and shook his head. “And yet—why not? No doubt you’ve heard more incredible things at your school for wizards on Leal.
“My tale begins more than two years after the wizard brought Winloki to Lückenbörg. It was that time at the end of winter when it first becomes possible to cross the Cadmin Aernan, and a large party of merchants was travelling from Hythe to sell their goods in Arkenfell and Skyrra. Strange things are often seen and experienced in those mountains, as perhaps you know, but none more amazing, I think, than the sight that met these travellers as they neared the summit: a beautiful young woman encased in a block of ice. One of them said that she looked like an enchanted princess sleeping in a crystal coffin; another said no, she resembled a mermaid or a water nymph, floating just under the surface of the water. He almost believed he could see her long brown hair moving in an invisible current.”
Caught up in his own story, the King had relaxed. His jaw unclenched; some of the rigidity was gone from the muscles in his neck and shoulders. “They thought it would be a fine thing to take the frozen maiden with them, as a kind of curio. So they loaded the block onto a sledge, covering her up with their furs and woven blankets to keep the ice from melting, and made their way down from the Cadmin Aernan, through Arkenfell, and across the waters of the Necke to Skyrra. Spring is slow to arrive in the north, but by the time they came to the channel the ice was already slowly melting.
“I first saw her at a village not far from the coast, where I used to keep a hunting lodge. By then, very little of the ice remained. The crystal coffin had become a crystal shroud, a thin skin of ice clinging to her own skin. Still, she was a wonder! She looked so fair and so perfectly lifelike, I knelt down beside her to take a closer look. You will be thinking,” he added, with a faint reminiscent smile, “that I woke the lady with a kiss.”
Sindérian nodded. That was exactly what she had been thinking.
“I believe I had some such notion, but there was no need. Hardly had my knees touched the ground when the last of the ice melted away. Then all of her lovely color came back, she opened her eyes and sat up on her couch of furs, with the water pouring off of her and all her clothes and hair streaming wet.
“All memory of her life until that moment was gone,” he continued. “She could not remember her name, or where she had been before the mountains, or even what it was that brought her into the high reaches of the Cadmin Aernan. I insisted that she travel with me back to the Heldenhof, and there—because she was in a sense newborn—she was taken to the nursery and cared for along with the children, until she grew stronger.”
“And you never guessed who she might be?” Sindérian said, with a skeptical quirk of her dark brows.
Ristil’s chestnut stallion shied at something in the road, but he controlled it with a sure hand on the reins. “I suspected she was the girl that Éireamhóine lost between Hythe and Arkenfell. The wizard told me he cast a spell of protection in the last moments before the avalanche hit them. A spell wrought in haste, he said, and he hardly dared to imagine it had been successful, but still there was a chance, a small chance…”
The King shrugged. “I could hardly proclaim the truth to the world without telling the tale of the wizard and Winloki. And as for the young woman herself, it seemed to me that she had chosen not to remember. Éireamhóine had told me enough of her unhappy story; I hadn’t the heart to revive those bitter memories.”
“And you fell in love with her and married her.”
A cold wind came down the mouth of the pass and lifted his bright golden hair. “My sons loved her long before I did. The death of her child—from which I believe she suffered deeply, even without remembering the cause of her pain—the fact that they were still mourning their own mother, these things seemed to strike a chord of sympathy between them. It was my eldest who gave her the name of Sigvith, while she was still with them in the nursery. But I was not far behind Arinn and Kivik in learning to love her. She was so beautiful and good, what did it matter to me who or what she had been before? If I hadn’t already two sons, perhaps my jarls and thanes would have protested more vigorously when I announced I would marry her. But in the end, they were more than reconciled, for as you have seen she is as kind and gracious as she is beautiful.”
Sindérian nodded thoughtfully, remembering Luenil as she had been at seventeen: bitter, sorrowful, defiant—reckless of her own safety. It was pleasant to have seen her as she was now, in comely, prosperous, graceful middle age. This one time the Fates had been kind.
Leaving the mixed forest of the lower slopes for the cliffs and gorges, the woods of pine, spruce, and fir farther up the mountain, was like riding from summer through winter’s door.
It began with wisps and rags of vapor, and the sun making rainbows through shimmering veils of mist and cloud. Then the mist thickened into a fog so dense it muffled all sound. As the fog grew colder and colder, moisture froze on Sindérian’s eyelashes and hair; her face began to feel like a mask of ice. At the first intimation of sunlight up ahead, she drew a deep sigh of relief.
But when she finally emerged from the fog it was into a cold flurry of snowflakes. And the deeper the army rode into the mountains, the heavier and heavier fell the snow, until soon they were forced to plough a way through high drifts blocking their road.
“No, never before at this time of year, not within memory,” the King said in response to Prince Ruan’s question. “But there may be ice giants somewhere about, and it’s said that they make their own weather.”
Whatever the cause, the weather grew worse. A great wind came skirling through the mouth of the pass, hurling sleet and snow into their faces. For Sindérian, swaddled in a borrowed blanket over her cloak, there were times when the men and horses just ahead of her appeared as nothing more than bulky grey shadows. Then lightning flared and a barrage of thunder rolled down the mountainside, setting the horses dancing and fighting at their bits. She felt the shock of it carried on the air even before she heard it.
Not a natural storm, she decided, every hair on her head tingling. Far from any ordinary clash of the elements, she believed she could sense a conscious intention behind every last snowflake and freakish turn of weather. But the tempest soon passed, all but the shrilling wind and a light fall of snow. In the woods to either side of the road, icy pine needles rattled in the blast, and the horses were so dashed and buffeted by the gale, which seemed to come at them from every direction at once, they could make little progress.
The sun dipped toward the horizon; a slip of dirty yellow moon came up. Though no one wished to stop any longer than necessary in such miserable conditions, it was obvious that the horses could not go on forever. When the King finally called for a halt, the riders began to set up camps under the trees and to search the area for pinecones and seasoned wood. A hundred communal fires sprang up in the shadows, snapping and sputtering, struggling to stay alive in the falling snow. Soon, a hundred tin kettles were hard at work boiling up water for soup or comfrey-root tea.
Finding a place near one of the fires, Sindérian settled down with her back to a fallen log and her legs drawn up to her chest inside the blanket and cloak. After a while her teeth stopped chattering. The horses made a kind of wall screening their riders from the wind, and a layer of dead pine needles made a damp cushion that was better at least than sitting on the ground. Just outside the circle of firelight, Faolein landed on a snowy branch overhead, where he fluffed himself up and drew in his head until he was nothing but a round ball of feathers.
It seemed to Sindérian that she must have dozed off for a time, because the next thing she knew a dim light was sifting through the branches, and she was surrounded by the groans and faint curses of men heaving themselves up off the ground, brushing themselves off, and gathering up their things.
She lifted her head from where it had been pillowed on her knees and rose stiffly to her feet. Stamping her boots in order to bring life back to her frozen limbs, she looked to the left and right, wondering what had become of her father during the night. The sparrowhawk was nowhere in sight. When she cast her thought out in search of him, she made only a tenuous contact. He seemed to be well but far away, higher up where the air was more rarified.
Reassured by the thought that it would hardly be possible for him to lose her so long as she travelled with such a vast host, she headed out of the trees, with both her horses following behind on a leading rein. When she reached the road it was to walk out into a sleety sort of drizzling rain.
All around her riders were mounting up, getting ready to ride. So it seemed that she had somehow slept through breakfast—or perhaps there had been no breakfast at all. She adjusted the hood of her cloak and took the bay gelding by the bridle. As she swung up into the saddle, a cloud bank to the east parted, and sunlight erupted like a fountain of gold above the peaks.
By noon, the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue and the weather had turned distinctly sultry. Ice and snow melted into slush, the way grew slippery, and the entire line slowed to a walk.
Long before evening, everyone was mired in a river of mud. The footing had become so treacherous, it was necessary to dismount and wade through the muck, leading the horses. Toiling along with a hand on each bridle, Sindérian tried to avoid the places where the mire was deepest, but her skirts were already soaked with muddy water halfway to her knees.
But at least, she reflected sourly, she had the satisfaction of knowing that Prince Ruan, trudging along immediately ahead of her, looked scarcely better off. If he walked with a lighter step than anyone else, if he rarely struggled to keep his footing, the horses he led still saw to it that he was splashed with his fair share of the mud. His hair hung down in damp strands like tarnished silver, and when he looked back to see how she was faring, she saw he had a long streak of mud on one side of his face.
By the time that Faolein returned, landing so softly on the black mare’s saddle that she never heard him, Sindérian was so intent on finding the best footing for herself and the horses that she failed to even notice his presence until his voice spoke inside her head. Then she glanced up with a scowl, to meet the sparrowhawk’s inscrutable golden stare.
Ask to speak to the King. I have news for him—and not of the best.
Sindérian’s request was relayed to the King, passing by word of mouth from one person to the next. She knew when it reached the front of the line because someone shouted out an order and all progress stopped. She expected an answer to be relayed back to her, but Ristil himself came striding through the filth, flanked by two of his captains.
Resting herself against the gelding’s solid flank, she repeated everything her father told her, as quickly as the words passed from his mind into hers.
I have flown as far as the Old Fortress, said Faolein. There has been a great battle there: a section of the outer wall has been reduced to rubble, the second gate is broken, and the courtyards are filled with bodies.
“If the Eisenlonders are in possession of the fortress, all of our people will be dead.” King Ristil seemed to age before Sindérian’s eyes; the lines in his face deepened and his shoulders drooped. “The barbarians never take captives and they slay without mercy. My son, my niece, young Skerry—everyone will be dead.”
“Perhaps not all of them are dead,” she replied after a swift consultation with her father. “When Faolein was there, the Eisenlonders had not reached the innermost courtyards. It’s true that both sides are greatly diminished, and the fighting is sporadic, but someone was defending the third gate.”
A silence fell as everyone looked to the King to see how he would react. Very pale and set of countenance, he stood staring down at the ground. “We will continue on,” he said at last. “There may only be a handful of our people left, and we may come too late to save even them. But either way—”
His chin went up and his eyes acquired a steely glint. “Either way, we will still ride there with all speed—if only to bury our dead.”