For the rest of the day, they traveled blind, but Ember could tell they were gradually moving up, through narrow ways and over rocky passes that led to ever higher valleys.
The men talked very little, and she couldn’t make out more than a word or two, most of which had to do with the ponies and the track. But as she listened, she began to realize how close their language was to her own. Over and over she heard words that were almost like her tongue, as though at one time the Ice King’s people and hers had spoken the same.
It was a thousand years since Acton had led his men through Death Pass to invade the Domains. The Ice King’s people had never been able to settle over the mountains. Legend said that Acton’s son had brought down the rocks in Death Pass to bar their way, because they were enemies of Acton’s folk.
Ember wondered if they still resented that. Resented being shut out of the fertile, kind lands of the southern domains. She would, if she were them.
The air was growing chillier, although she couldn’t tell if that was because the day was lengthening or because they were higher up. She was grateful for her coat, and even grateful for the blindfold, which at least kept her ears and nose warm, but she regretted not putting on her hat.
She wished she knew exactly where Ash was.
The horses labored up another steep slope, Merry breathing hard in the thin air. Ember tilted in the saddle to ease her back. Then they came out onto a flat space, and the horses stopped. Merry hung her head.
“My horse needs water,” she called out, trying to slide her words so they sounded like the Ice King’s language. Maybe they would understand.
Another horse bumped her knee and a hand pulled the blindfold from her face, leaving her blinking. Nyr. He smiled at her.
“We’re home,” he said. “She be well cared now.”
The light brought tears to Ember’s eyes, and she brushed them away impatiently. Ash, Cedar and Tern were safe behind her. They were on a plateau bounded a mile or so away on the west by a high cliff and on the east by a sharp drop—another cliff that led too far down for her to see the bottom.
The plateau itself stretched for as far as she could see. It was grassed, and there were goats grazing. A track led toward the cliff face. Between them and it, some houses stood—round homes made of stone, she thought, although at this distance it was hard to be sure, even with the clarity of the mountain air. Their roofs were brightly painted in some pattern she couldn’t make out: blue and yellow, mostly.
“Come,” the Hárugur King said, and the word was the same as in her language, exactly. “Come.”
They followed him through the grass.
Not only goats were grazing, she saw. Geese, too, and ponies. And—gracious, hares on long leashes, tied to a stake in the ground and watched over by a young girl. That was clever.
There was smoke coming out of one of the houses, more than you’d expect for a house fire. A smithy? She caught the unmistakable smell of tanning from a structure set far apart from the others—not a round house, this one, but more a long curved wall with a sheltering roof, the sides left open to show big stone vats like wide wells. Did these people use stone for everything? But the roofs, now she was closer, she could see were leather, great hides stitched together and then painted blue and yellow and red.
Nyr looked back and saw her observing. He held his pony back until she came alongside, and said, “Strong, yes?”
“Stone is strong,” she agreed.
He nodded, satisfied by her appreciation.
“Wood, brick, not so strong,” he said, and she realized he wanted her admiration, to feel that his home was comparable to hers, was not contemptible. That was easy to give.
“It is very beautiful here,” she said, waving at the plateau and the mountains beyond. Nyr was surprised and looked around as though he’d never thought of that before.
“Good land,” he said. He reminded her of one of Arvid’s officers, who assessed every acre of his property by its yield, and saw no other value in it or its people.
People came out of the houses to watch them pass and bow to their king as he went. Mostly women and older men, she noted. The men themselves—hunting? Raiding? Or off to trade, like Nyr?
They were closer to the windowless houses, now, and she could see that around their sides was all the normal clutter of living: tools, buckets, children’s toys, the children themselves, getting underfoot and calling to the horsemen. They were sturdy but not tall; blond or redheaded, with rosy cheeks. Although they all looked healthy, bar one mewling infant in its mother’s arms, they were thin.
Early spring, she thought. The hungry time. In the Last Domain, her father put grain aside for early spring, when the smoked meat was almost gone, the oat crocks almost empty, the jars of honey and salted fish dwindling. No one went hungry in the Last Domain except those too proud to ask for help. Arvid bought that grain from the south with furs and walrus tusks. She wondered if Nyr had planned to do the same thing with the goods on his pack ponies.
The women she saw were all dressed in red, in heavily embroidered shawls and long gowns that reached to the ground, unlike the calf-length dresses she was used to, worn over breeches and boots. The boots were there, right enough, underneath—beautiful, beautiful boots with intricately decorated leather dyed red and blue. She’d love some of those boots!
Or the dyed leather thongs the women braided into their hair, which ended in beads and feathers and carved bone. Maybe they’d keep her unruly hair in trim.
The women eyed her as curiously as she did them, and she tried a smile or two, but no one smiled back. They didn’t scowl, though, which was encouraging.
She smiled at some of the children, instead, and they grinned, calling in broken words that she couldn’t make out.
Ash brought Blackie up next to her and nodded toward the cliff face. Long houses were built against it, their back walls the cliff itself. Although the cliff leaned away from them, she shivered. What if the rock fell from above?
These houses had windows, and shutters too, made not of wood but of leather stretched over bone. She had seen no trees on the plateau, and in the valleys only small, stunted versions of the pines and larches which had towered over them in the Forest. Mountain ash grew a little taller on the sides of the valleys, but not much.
The houses set against the cliff had slate roofs. Chimneys with thin threads of cream smoke that drifted up between the crannies of the cliff. Painted spells over doors and windows and on the shutters. Woven blankets in bright colors airing on the windowsills. Women came and went, carrying buckets, butter churns, baskets, crocks. Like the fort at home, Ember thought, where everyone has a task and knows how to do it.
There were few old women. Few old men. And no young ones.
Boys came running to take their horses and lead them away. Ember wanted to go with them, to see Merry’s stable and make sure she was all right, but suspected that this would be seen as a slight, an insult to their hospitality.
So she followed the Hárugur King and Nyr, deliberately taking precedence over the others in the party, her own people and the Ice King’s alike. The king’s men fell back for her readily enough, but they closed in afterward, and casting a look backward she saw Ash scowling at her. She kept her face impassive. He had to learn diplomacy, and fast.
But a small warmth under her breastbone bloomed at the thought that he worried about her. She followed Nyr along the well-worn track to a double door set wide open.
At the door a woman stood, dressed not in red but in ice blue and the pale cream of undyed wool. Her golden braids were wound around her head and she carried herself erect, her long neck encircled by a golden torque. Her green eyes searched Nyr’s face, and then came to Ember. That is a queen, Ember thought, and not used to bowing to anyone. She bowed herself, exactly as deep as she had bowed to Osfrid’s mother the first time they met. The woman looked at her carefully, and then, surprisingly, smiled warmly and came to take Ember by the hand.
“Welcome to Mountainside,” she said. “Come. These men of mine can explain later, when you are rested and clean.”
She had a strong accent, but she spoke in the language of home, and Ember’s eyes swam with sudden homesickness. The queen saw, and squeezed her hand.
“I am Halda Geransdottir,” she said. “And it seems my son has brought home more than he went trading for!”
Ember smiled.
“I am Ember Arvidsdottir. I think we were a surprise to him,” she said.
“No doubt.” Halda cast a critical eye over both son and husband.
“Show the king’s men the baths and I will take care of his dottir,” she ordered them.
“Ae,” Nyr said hurriedly.
Ember followed Halda through room after room, far too many to fit in the long narrow house outside the cliff. She realized, with a little shiver of fear, that they were deep in the mountain itself.
Garn the Songkeeper, ever curious, had come to inspect the strangers, his eyes alight with interest.
Ari, Hárugur King, gave the three men into his care, and motioned Nyr to come aside and talk. Nyr watched as the three strangers disappeared into the men’s passageway. Three very different men: a youngling, a seer—and the third, the large one who looked after his princess so carefully, what was he? A true bowyer, or a braggart apprentice? He didn’t have the look of a braggart, Nyr thought, but then, who knew what braggarts looked like in the land beyond the mountains? Why had Arvid Warlord sent only these three, and no female companion for his daughter?
Ash, they said the big one’s name was. An odd name, it made Nyr uneasy, as did the princess’s. What kind of people named their children for the leavings of a fire?
The big man was carrying his bow and quiver, although they’d left most of their gear on the horses.
“We need that bow,” his father Ari said to him, following his glance.
“That is so,” Nyr said, resolutely formal.
“You will get it while I consult the king.”
“Let Garn get it. Take me with you.”
The Hárugur King hesitated, king fighting with father.
He’d been avoiding this ever since Andur, Nyr’s older brother, had died. The heir should be presented to the king. It was custom—more, it was the king’s order.
“Is it so terrible, to see his face?” Nyr asked softly.
“Yes.”
His father wiped his hands on his trews nervously, but he met Nyr’s eyes, allowing him to see the true fear he felt. Nyr’s stomach lurched. All the world knew that the Ice King was terrifying, but his father had faced him time after time since becoming Hárugur King eighteen years ago, and had come back each time none the worse.
“I must meet him, come wind or weather,” Nyr said. “Better now than later, when he might be offended at the delay.”
Ari nodded, but only once, as though he resented having to agree. His face was pale under his ruddy beard.
“Come now, then,” he said, “and prepare.”
Nyr followed his father through the men’s passage to the main hall. The strangers were not there, but there were more people around the fire than he had ever seen on a fine day, and they were buzzing like lowland bees. The strangers had been here, for certain, on their way to the baths with Garn.
He spared a look up at Urno Ravenssen’s great painting—the butterflies almost seemed to flutter in the wind. It lifted his spirits and he kept close behind his father as he entered the arch that led to his father’s Council Cave. For the first time, he followed Ari behind his throne, to the narrow passageway in which only the king or his heir could set foot.
Next to the entrance was a basket filled with winter suits. Without speaking, Ari and Nyr climbed into the thick furs, closing the toggles firmly, overlapping the layers to prevent wind chill. Ari left his scarf hanging around his neck, so Nyr did the same.
Ari laid his gloved hand on Nyr’s right shoulder.
“You are the heir,” he pronounced, speaking as though the whole clan were gathered to hear. “You have the right to enter.”
Then he turned to face the passageway and squared his shoulders, taking a deep breath before moving forward. Nyr followed close behind.
“You can’t get lost,” his father’s voice reassured him. “There is only one passageway, and it leads to only one place. Feel your way. But don’t talk. You may not speak until you speak to the king, if he wishes.”
As Nyr took the first step between the rock walls, he shivered. It was cold, suddenly, as cold as winter. Although he could see the fire burning in the Council Cave if he looked over his shoulder, it sent no warmth into the passageway. They were already in the domain of the Ice King.
Then it was dark, the great formless darkness of the deeps.
It was forbidden to take fire to the Ice King. No light at all, that was the rule. Nyr felt his way along the rough wall, following his father as much by sound as by touch. It was like the game children played, Delver in the Deep Dark Cave, where they blew the lantern out and hid, and the child chosen as Delver had to feel their way to find the others.
He had hated that game as a child. Hated being Delver and hated being one of the Gemstones the Delver was seeking, waiting, muffled under some blanket that smelled of baby pee. He had never seen the point of it all. Why fumble in the dark when you could have light? But here he could not have light. As always in the great dark, his eyes made light for themselves—splashes and flecks of color chased across his vision. As children, they were taught that these were the gift of the Ice King, to keep them company in the cold dark. They were unfailing, as the king himself was, and grew stronger the longer light was absent. Nyr welcomed them now, as he had welcomed them as a child, put to sleep in a winter cave with his brother, under the deep, sheltering rock.
The passage was long, and the cold grew sharper as they went further in. After a time, Nyr heard a familiar clink, rattle and slosh, repeated over and over. He smiled.
Like all winter suits, theirs had water flasks, complete with the small stones inside which broke up the ice when the flask was shaken, allowing the water to melt just a little, enough to drink. In a blizzard, you had to shake the flask all the time—apart from anything else, keeping close to the sound of the stones was a good way of staying with your companions.
His father was shaking his flask. Nyr fished his own out and settled into the rhythmic up and down motion that used up the least energy. He tried to match his own rhythm to his father’s—that was a children’s game, too. But he was taller than his father, with a different walking gait, so he had to concentrate. It helped still the growing fear in his belly.
He shouldn’t be this afraid, not yet. They still had a long way to go. And he was no stranger to dark, or cold. But the cold was increasing, as though winter was advancing on them at a walking pace, as though they were walking out of season, going backward or forward into the coldest time of the year, when the sun fled and the stars failed and the wolves sang desperation to the shrouded moon.
A breeze touched his face with chill fingers, searching for a way inside his clothes, stroking him; it felt like real hands, real fingers, cold as hunger, but when he put his hand to his face there was only air.
His father reached back to pat him on the arm, but kept walking. Had he made some sound when the fingers touched him? He hoped not. Hoped his father didn’t realize how scared he was. Then he remembered the fear in Ari’s eyes, and knew that every heir, every Hárugur King, felt this terror as they walked the King’s Passage.
Under his feet the floor was rising. He bent his knees and trudged on, one hand shaking his flask, the other feeling his way along the ragged wall. They had been walking for hours, now, he thought, and had only twice stopped to take a drink. He should be hungry, but he was not. He was getting tired. He could walk all day on the mountainside without feeling it, but this…
The passage began to wind as it climbed, curving around in a wide circle. A spiral, Nyr thought, as they went further up. There was no sense of direction underground, but as they ascended he could feel the air change, becoming thinner and colder still. He wound his scarf over his face, breathing shallowly so the cold air did not burn his lungs.
He remembered sitting next to Andur, his brother, and his cousin Seid, in the Council Cave, listening open-mouthed to his father as he described the journey to the Ice King. All the heirs had to know the ritual, in case of disaster. It had happened before, more than once in the last thousand years, that the Hárugur King and his heir had both been killed by enemies or avalanche, and the younger heir had to take on the duties without warning.
“I do not know,” Ari had said slowly, his eyes on Andur, “if the place we go to is in this world or another. But we must climb and climb far to get there. It will feel to you like we are at the very peak of the world. Maybe we are. But this is how the Hárugur King was first chosen—he was the one who was brave enough to stand on the peak of the world and look the Ice King in the face. You must look him in the face, or he will not speak to you, and you will be cast down as Hárugur King and your people will be left leaderless.”
It had not sounded too hard to Nyr at the time, despite Ari’s solemn tones, but the night Andur had come back, weak and pale, from his first meeting with the king, Nyr had reconsidered. Andur was as strong as a bull elk, and yet he had staggered into the Council Cave and collapsed by the fire like a grandfather of eighty. He had stared into the fire, shaking, his face gray, and when his mother had come through the archway from the main hall he had turned his face into her skirt like a child.
Andur had been far braver than he was, Nyr thought. But he had wondered, in the seasons that followed, as Andur took risk after risk—including the late-season raid that got him killed—if he was trying to prove to himself that he still had courage, after that meeting.
Nyr was not a warrior born, like Andur. He was a thinker, a planner. A trader by inclination as well as need. He could fight, of course. Who couldn’t? And he did well enough that the men followed him without complaint or snide remarks. He had more strategy than Andur, and since he had started leading the raids, last summer, they had lost only one man.
But he couldn’t draw on the reserves of bravery that Andur had had. He would have to use stubbornness instead. His mother always said he was as stubborn as his father, and perhaps that was what was needed, on this long, long trek up the inside of a mountain.
The rhythm of his father’s flask was slowing, faltering. He stopped shaking his own flask and came up close behind Ari, reaching forward to place his hand on his father’s shoulder. Ari patted it reassuringly and moved forward again, but more slowly.
The flecks of light which still danced on his eyeballs were moving faster. Then his eyes started to water and he realized he could see a vague outline in front of him—his father’s broad shoulders and head. Light.
Relief and fear washed over him. His body welcomed the light. His mind sheered away from it because it meant the end of the journey. Eyes smarting, he understood that his father was moving forward so slowly to let them get accustomed to the glare. Snow glare, he thought. Ice glare. The kind that can turn you blind.
The passage was widening. Nyr tucked the water flask into his belt and moved up next to his father, the two of them walking slowly, carefully, their feet oddly unbalanced now they could see where they were going.
The walls of the passage here were ice, not rock. Rough and smooth, blue and white, walls and roof and floor were all covered with it. But there was not one single icicle. This was not a place that ever grew warm enough for water to flow before it froze again. Their breath, coming through the scarves, created a constellation of ice crystals which clung, sparkling, to the wool.
At the end of the passage his father waved him back again, turned hard left and then right, into a dazzle of blue and white. Ari went two more steps, and stopped. Nyr came up close behind him.
They were standing on a ledge, barely big enough for the two of them, above a cliff that curved back in beneath them, so they were suspended, with open air all around them. In front was—Nyr sucked his breath in, biting back an exclamation. He understood now why his father wondered if they were still in the real world. Below them, stretching as far into the distance as they could see, was ice. Not the snow-covered river of the glaciers which Nyr had often seen in the high reaches of the mountain. This was pure ice, swept clean by the constant whistling wind.
He leaned into the wind without thought, and his father put out an arm to push him back, shaking his head warningly. Nyr understood. Lean into the wind here and if it dropped… so did you.
Beautiful. No one had ever told him the Ice King was beautiful. Deep blue and green in the shadows, blindingly white on the surface, it was curved and banked and carved by the wind into a great sculpture, a vast decoration over the face of the world. Clouds sped across the sun and light suddenly streamed down, striking sparks and fire from the ice. The light was unbearable, forcing him to look down, away, anywhere else.
His father knelt and covered his eyes with his hands, the mark of respect due to kings, a gesture he had never seen his father make. Nyr copied him.
It was profoundly unsettling, kneeling in the high air, cold shafting up through his knees and boots, his eyes shrouded by his hands but the terrible, searing light still blinding him.
Up through his knees and his boots a vibration began, a small steady shivering. He thought it was his own cold, but then the shiver turned to a thrum, a sound that was made using his own flesh, as though he were a drum in the hands of a musician.
It pulsed in him, harder and harder, louder and louder, shaking him, loosening his soul, he felt, from its bonds. Deep and high at the same time, a sound he finally recognized—it was the noise ice made as sections of it were scraped together in the bed of a glacier. A terrible, unliving noise. He wanted to piss with fear. He wanted to run away. Only his father kept him there. His father had faced this time after time.
Nyr bit the inside of his cheek to stop from crying out, to stop himself asking for mercy. This sound had no mercy in it, any more than the ice did as it froze a traveler to death; any more than the winter itself did.
The thrum and screech built and took shape, not in his ears, but in his mind.
“Speak.” The voice of the Ice King, dark and piercingly high, almost pushed him to the ground with its force. He would be deaf after this, he thought in a panic. But then it paused, the sudden silence ringing, and his father spoke. Nyr had never admired his father more. To be able to find your voice in the face of this power!
“Ari, Hárugur King, greets the Ice King with humility and devotion,” he said hoarsely. “I present my heir, Nyr Arissen.”
In the moment that followed, Nyr felt the thrumming stream through him, a low pounding—the most dangerous of sounds, the telltale drumming of thin ice over a crevasse which might collapse at any moment. The sound of death.
It was an inspection, and he held still, hands clasping his face, and prayed hard that he would pass the test. But who he prayed to, he didn’t know.
“You may uncover your face, Nyr Arissen,” the voice came at last.
Slowly, almost unwillingly, Nyr dropped his hands. He had expected a person, a great lord, a giant like the ones who would eat the sun in the last days. But there was nothing there except the ice sheet, duller now that the clouds had flowed back across the sun. He hadn’t even noticed the light dimming, he had been so afraid.
Was still so afraid. Nothingness was worse, he thought. A giant you might bargain with, or plead with, but Ice…
“Speak,” the voice said, reverberating in his own chest, shaking his bones. Nyr felt panic overwhelm him. Was he supposed to say something? What?
“A woman has come,” Ari said, rescuing him. “The warlord’s daughter from the Last Domain. She is tasked by her father to go to the Fire Mountain.”
A deep, deep vibration. Disapproving, uncertain—Nyr couldn’t tell.
“Why?” the Ice King asked, the question spearing into Nyr’s bowels.
“She will not say. But she promises trade concessions if we help her, and I think she is speaking the truth.”
“No. No one goes to the Mountain.”
And He was gone, just like that, letting go of Nyr’s body as a boy drops an apple core after eating the sweet flesh.
His father collapsed onto the floor, but Nyr couldn’t move, still. If he moved, he felt, he might break apart. He had to find some way to knit himself back together. He heard his breath, and listened. In and out, that was the sound of life, the only antidote to death. The only one.
Slowly, his father clambered to his feet and reached down to help him up. With human contact, he was finally able to move, to stand, to inch back from the edge and lean his back on the wall of the passageway.
He opened his mouth to say something—anything, to hear the sound of a human voice—but his father quickly put a hand over his mouth and shook his head. Nyr realized they had to make the whole long trek back through the dark in silence, as they had come.
Whatever was necessary. He would never, never, do anything which displeased the Ice King. Never.