The snow is deep beneath my boots as we finally near the ridgeline. I’m leading, and pushing the path through is making me sweat despite the cold. The sun is low and golden, the sky an amazing vivid blue that dips to purple at the horizon.
For storm birds that love blue things, this is the perfect place to nest.
I feel the mountain. Beneath me. Above me. Around me. I am the mountain, and Praseep is as well. There’s a connectivity that pulses through everything up here. And I feel something else, getting stronger as we get closer. Calling me forward.
Could it be the Stone?
The stark and beautiful world of the Ice-People is mapped out behind me. The vast brown plain, dotted with magnificent temples, the SkyCity an emerald jewel at one end. And the snow valley we followed when we first arrived, so pure I want to smile with the joy of looking at it.
Another dragging step and I’m able to reach forward and throw my hands over the ridgeline, as sharp as a knife in the wind. I haul myself up until I’m crouched just below it. Praseep moves to crouch beside me.
We’re looking out across my home lands now. There’s no real comparison. Countless valleys and tiny villages jumbled wherever it is fairly flat, terraced slopes showing beneath the vanishing snow. A hint of green that’s not stone, but vegetation. Grasses, perhaps the first shoots of potatoes.
‘I have read of your lands, but I have never seen them like this,’ Praseep says.
I hesitate. He was so dismissive of me and ‘the Dirt’ when we first met, and now I see the stark difference between his glittering world, and the grit of life laid out in front. But there’s a real beauty down there, too. Of simplicity and survival and the brief season of warmth that brings flowers and plenty. And a cart-load more food.
‘We should keep going,’ I say, thinking of Danam. He’s somewhere beneath us, deep in the Cloud Dragon Tests, and each moment we catch our breath, he may be closer to taking his last.
I haul myself up, careful to balance against the wind that climbs the slope on the other side, setting off a spray of sparkling snow crystals into the air. The mountain is calm, despite the sun. No chance of avalanche. I walk along the edge of the ridge, one foot either side, straddling a border that has stood for so long. A Dirt-Girl and an Ice-Prince. No one would believe me if I told them.
The storm bird nesting site is up to the left, in a cliff face that towers over the Dirt. From below, that distinctive slash of bare rock always looked like the Dragon’s smile to me.
I let my mind wander along the path we need to take, and I sense Praseep checking it too.
‘It feels okay,’ I say.
‘There is something strange midway, we can check it when we are closer.’
I feel along the path, and I find what he’s talking about. So slight, I hadn’t noticed it the first time. A sense of teetering imbalance. My cheeks grow hot. I’m supposed to be the fancy Protector here, and I missed it. We leave the ridgeline for the route we must take. The slope below us is as steep as any I’ve seen. If we fall now, we won’t stop rolling until we reach the Valley of Tombs below. The hermits will be there, as they always are, basking in the glow of the Dragon. Do they see us? I doubt it. We’re too high up.
I’m used to this sort of thing, but still my heart is beating extra fast as I forge a path across the slope.
What if I’m wrong about the Stone? What if we’ve come all this way only to find storm bird droppings and a messy pile of turquoise?
I sigh. The only true fail is to not try.
The spot with the strange feel is close now, and I stare at it, try and see what might be wrong about it. It looks the same as everything else on this slope. But it feels off.
I pause on the edge of the spot. It’s no more than a body length across before the snow feels like snow again to my extended mind.
‘Let me cross first,’ says Praseep.
I shake my head. ‘No, you’re the Prince. I’ll go.’ ‘You’re the Princess’ future Cloud Dragon, that’s more important.’
Just the thought of him walking these few dangerous paces makes me shiver.
Then he steps past me.
I feel the wrong immediately. This is a mistake. We need a different way across to the nest tunnels. I start to say it. Try to stop him. But Praseep’s leg is vanishing with the snow beneath it.
His other leg slips into the mini-avalanche he has set off, and he grapples with his hands on the snow. Anything to stop falling. So far down.
His hands slip through the snow to claw the rock beneath. I can feel it. Too cold to grip. Too slippery to hold.
He’s going to fall.
Terror cold like ice.
I throw myself forward and grab his wrist. He’s dangling, legs flailing for purchase in the fluff. Snow in my eyes, freezing my throat, choking my lungs.
‘Hold still!’ I cry to Praseep. I am straining. Have I got him?
I will his panicked limbs to still. He risks dragging us both down. My panting breaths are loud in my ears. I blink to clear my eyes, then make the mistake of looking down.
‘Praseep!’
He slips lower. No.
‘Don’t fall, please.’
He doesn’t respond. He slips lower again, and I grab his elbow with my other hand. He grunts and my arm scrapes along the icy edge as I pull. I bite my lip. And pull harder.
He shimmies up, and his face is now against the rocky edge that was our path. I haul again, and suddenly he’s there. On the snow and the rock, sprawled against me.
Lying down has never been so welcome. All I hear is our breathing, puffing gusts in the thin mountain air. I open my eyes and look around. He’s leaning against the slope beside me.
‘You saved me!’
I chuckle weakly. ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’
‘Well, I mean, thank you.’ He sits up straighter. ‘You’re bleeding.’
I check the arm I pulled Praseep up with, then immediately try to hide it beneath my torn cloak. But Praseep grabs my hand and inspects the long graze up the inside of my arm.
‘Allow me.’
‘Allow you what?’ I edge my arm away.
He beckons with his fingers. ‘To Heal you.’
‘You can …? I don’t … um.’ I stop talking because he actually looks serious. I inch my arm forward until it’s within his reach and hope I’m not going to regret it. ‘Okay then.’
He takes my arm with both hands and a wave of ice rushes through me. I gasp. The pain is gone. Praseep uses the edge of his white cloak to wipe away the blood from my arm. Beneath it my skin is perfectly intact. And it kind of feels like an echo of Praseep.
‘Whoa. What did you do?’
‘Healed you.’
‘Yeah, I got that. I mean, how?’
He shrugs. ‘It takes many months to learn. I will teach you back at SkyCity.’
I nod, head spinning like a snowflake in an eddy. He talks so easily of a future where I stay. That is my future, I realise that, it’s just I haven’t got my head around everything it’ll mean for me.
He looks at me carefully. ‘Are you okay otherwise?’
I push aside my snowstorming thoughts and nod. ‘Are you?’
‘Ecstatic. I thought I was going to die.’
I look at him. ‘So did I.’
His lip twitches and then we’re both laughing. This is madness, on the side of Dragon Mountain, higher than I’ve ever been before, tackling avalanches to try to find a magic Stone we’re not even sure is there, to break through an enchanted door and save a boy we don’t really know how to save. And we might die doing it. But we’re laughing anyway.
‘Thank you for saving me,’ he says.
‘My pleasure, um, Your Highness.’
He grins. ‘You don’t need to be all Your Highness-ey with me.’
I swallow. That’s the second time he’s told me I don’t need to call him by his title. But this time it’s for a vastly different reason. And this time, I actually kind of want to defy him.
He shakes his head at me. ‘Do not make me make a formal decree about this, Sunaya.’
‘Okay. Praseep.’
He grins again, looks over my shoulder to where the storm birds still wheel. The grin falls away. ‘We are in a pickle, how do we get across now?’
I swivel, looking at the edge by my toes, with all its beaten up snow, the only sign of the struggle we just had. Then I look beyond. If we were down on the valley floor, and there was only soft snow below, I would try to jump that gap.
But we’re not.
And it’s not.
And I don’t know how to get across.
I think, then turn to Praseep. ‘When the Princess was at risk of falling into the crevasse that time, did I feel you do something to the ice?’
He nods. ‘Yes, I held it steady. So did … you! I had thought it was Danam. I suppose we could try to do the same here, pull some snow together to make a step.’
I risk a glance down to where he almost fell, so very far below that clouds scoot between us and the ground. ‘A hovering step?’
‘Yes. I have never tried it before, but there is no reason why it should not work …’
I’m regretting ever starting this conversation.
I feel his mind activating, and a quick glance at him shows his normally brown eyes, which have been a muddy blue most of this climb, are now as white as the snow beneath us, flecked through with a blue so intense a glacier would be jealous.
Is that how I look sometimes? There would have been no way for me to hide this.
I shake my head and concentrate on what he’s doing. Magically, a section of snow wraps itself together beside me, and moves until it hovers just in front of me. I tap it carefully. It’s solid, like the snow-ropes Aji made.
Praseep hisses. ‘This is harder than I thought.’
Instinctively I move my mind closer to the floating snow-step, and mimic what I feel Praseep doing. In my head, it’s like the two of us mix, like white milk into black tea, and …
The snow drops as Praseep’s mind recoils.
‘What the … what did you do?’ he says, his eyes turning a dark blue.
I feel my cheeks go hot. ‘Sorry, I don’t know … I just tried …’
He grabs my hand. ‘No, do not be sorry! That was … amazing, I did not even know that could happen! I suddenly had all this extra power, but I was so surprised I lost it all. Let us try it again.’
I push my shoulders back and nod to him. His mind activates, his eyes whiten, and the snow reforms. He nods, and I do what I did last time, reaching out to mimic his powers. This time he’s expecting the melding. I don’t resist when I feel Praseep drawing on my power. The snow-step hovers, looking as solid as rock. Praseep stands up and steps on it. It holds steady, though I feel the energy it takes for Praseep to keep it there, as he balances one-legged.
I grin. Together we’re far stronger than apart.
He steps down, grins back at me, and directs the snow-step to the middle of the gap in our path.
‘Let me go first,’ I say.
‘No chance. You are the future Cloud Dragon.’ His nervous grin fades as he concentrates again on the snow-step.
He jumps lightly onto the snow-step. It dips, shudders, one corner shears off. Before I have the chance to gasp he’s continued his momentum and leapt to the solid ground on the other side.
He made it across!
His face is glowing when he turns to me. He beckons. ‘Quickly now, I do not know how long I can hold this, even with your help.’
Now, that’s reassuring.
I breathe in, look at Praseep. He’s there, waiting, eyes intent. He believes I can do this. And so do I. I leap, step on the snow-step only a moment before launching to the side Praseep is on. It’s the weirdest sensation, to feel my power being sapped by the very thing I’m stepping on.
Relief fights adrenalin as I land on the other side. As soon as I’m across, Praseep lets the snow fall. My mind remains merged with his as he looks at me, white teeth and white eyes flashing in the sunlight. ‘That. Was. Cool,’ he says.
I grin back at him. We can do anything! We just walked on air! I’m almost disappointed when I feel his hold on my mind relax. His eyes darken slightly, but they remain blue. I can feel him searching the slopes and the path ahead.
He nods. ‘Let us get going.’
As if it can sense our intent, a storm bird wheels in at us, a flurry of angry grey feathers, screeching. It hits a film of snow that wasn’t there before, snow that now hovers all around us like the dome in the Queen’s audience chamber. The snow dome feels of Praseep. I grin at him. ‘Nice work.’
‘I am a quick learner,’ he says.
We walk forward, with the protective dome repelling several more bird attacks, before we reach the first of the nests. It’s a tunnel into the rock, very much like the tombs in the valley below. Praseep turns to me and I nod.
He pulls one of the light boxes out of his pack, and it begins to glow.
I follow Praseep into the tunnel. It looks like the tunnels I went through this morning. Perhaps all of Dragon Mountain is a labyrinth.
The tunnel winds deeper into the rock, and the floor is scattered with bird droppings and dust. A fresh breeze flows into our faces, and the air smells faintly like orange blossom. Finally, the tunnel opens out into a chamber, not as grand as the one below where I found Praseep, but large nonetheless. There are no stalactites or stalagmites, no crystal sheen on the walls. One side is pocked with small holes, through which the setting sun, and the breeze, flood. On the other side, another dark tunnel sets out. And the floor is scattered with blue items. I squint. Turquoise and old silks, glittering slates, tattered prayer flags.
‘Can you see it?’ I ask.
Praseep shakes his head. ‘I feel it though.’
We’re both moving towards a nondescript pile of dusty rocks in the corner. I drop to my knees at the pile, and carefully riffle through with my hands. Beside me, Praseep does the same. I feel his mind questing, and I let mine roam too.
‘If it is really here, do you know what this means?’ Praseep whispers. His eyes are wild.
I nod. ‘It means the Split was for nothing.’
He grins. ‘Ice and Dirt could be one again.’
Together we push the rocks aside, revealing a pile of rubble. The side of the cavern must’ve fallen in here once, long ago. Praseep holds the light box as I filter the rubble through my fingers.
Shards of rock. An aquamarine hairclip. A smooth river pebble.
A piercing cry echoes through the chamber along with the beat of wings, and Praseep curses in a very un-princely way as storm bird talons rake his hair. I try to make a protective cone, but there is no snow in here to use. I duck to avoid another swooping bird.
A flash of blue light reflects back to me, and I reach down blindly. If I could throw something blue, something bright and pretty, maybe the birds will stop caring about us and follow it. I raise my arm, ready to throw.
And gasp instead.
How close did I just come to ruining everything?
Because this is the Stone.
And it is powerful indeed.
I can feel the potency in it. Power, mastery, all in one. A great sense of calm takes over me. I think of Danam, but I cannot despair with the Stone in my hand. I know we’ll save him. Of course we will. We have the Stone now.
I pull the Stone towards me, followed by the clinking of an intricate golden chain, and use the corner of my cloak to dust it off. The deep blue shines out like it’s just been polished by a gemsmith. I hand it to Praseep.
He takes it, and I hear his intake of breath as the power waxes through him. ‘I cannot believe that all along, it has been sitting here.’
‘No one stole it at all.’
He looks at me. ‘Why could they not have trusted enough to believe what the other said? No one stole it, no one hid it. A bird collected it to adorn its nest.’
‘All those years our peoples have been apart …’ I say.
‘All the barley balls we have not eaten.’
I look at him with an eyebrow raised.
He shakes his head and smiles. ‘We cannot grow many crops. We manage potatoes and meat, some buckwheat, but that is about it. And last season was especially bad. You have seen my people. They are withered. No peasant in the Skylands looks like you and Danam do.’
‘We’re not peasants!’
He grabs my hand, so the Stone is held by both of us, and it helps my anger dissipate.
‘But you are not royalty either, and it seems all of you eat like kings down there.’
I smile. ‘You’re right, some of your food is miserable. I thought you were giving it to me as punishment.’
He smiles back. ‘I was well past punishing you by the time we got to SkyCity.’
‘Why? You disliked me so much when we first met.’
He looks away. ‘I was jealous. Of Danam, of your health and spirit. But come. We need to save Danam now.’
I nod. ‘I’m not looking forward to heading out there again.’ We’ll have to traverse back across the slope, over the terrifying gap, down the icy ridgeline, then through the deep snow drifts, and back along the long tunnel that leads to the incense chamber. And the sun is almost gone.
Then I smell something.
I gasp and leap up, moving across to the dark tunnel we haven’t yet explored. Sniffing.
‘What is it?’ he asks.
‘What can you smell?’
He shrugs. ‘Bird poo, cold stone, incense …’
I grin. ‘Yes! Orange blossom incense.’
‘So? It is pretty common, we burn it down in the entry chamber … oh.’ His face lights up.
‘Come here, smell this tunnel.’
He rushes over, and his light shows a steep spiralling staircase heading down into the heart of the mountain. ‘It smells more strongly in here. It must link with the tunnel system below!’
Praseep hands the Stone back to me, and I take it automatically, then stop. ‘Why are you giving this to me?’
‘You found it.’
‘I don’t want it!’ Its peaceful glow is filling me, but I still remember the prophecy. The less I hold that Stone the better.
He cocks his head and studies me. ‘You are worried. About what?’
I finger the edge of my brightly coloured tunic, so different to anything an Ice-Person would wear.
‘You have seen the prophecy,’ he says. It’s not really a question, but I nod anyway. ‘You know what, Sunaya? We fear the unknown, much more than we should. Feel this Stone, there is no evil in it. Its power is your power, and there is no reason to fear you will become someone you do not want to be, simply by possessing it.’
He takes the Stone again, this time lifting its chain over my head until the Stone rests against my chest. My heart flutters. I wish I could trust myself as much as he trusts me.
What I can trust is this weight around my neck. And it tells me this stairwell leads where we want to go.
‘Down here,’ I say to Praseep. I stride down the stairs. Praseep carries the light and it flickers as he follows me down. Down and down. The steps are cold and slimy, dark and slippery, tight and winding. My legs are aching before long, but my head tells me we still have a long way to go.
Down and ever down. Who built this? Finally, the air begins to warm and the scent of orange blossom gets stronger, and I know we’re nearing our goal. My legs are screaming.
Behind me there is a thump and a muffled curse. Praseep’s light goes out and we are plunged into darkness.