About twenty minutes after her mother had gone out to meet the warlord, Elva felt the gods relax, and knew that Martine and Arvid had resolved their coldness.
She didn’t want to think about how they’d resolved it; Martine was her mother, after all, and imagining her and Arvid together was just plain wrong. She smiled at herself. She was always annoyed when her own children complained about her kissing their father in front of them, but here she was, feeling just the same about Martine.
We are all alike, under the surface, she thought, and that similarity may be what saves us now.
Ash joined her at the glass table, looking no older than one of her own sons. She sent a prayer for Ash and Cedar’s safety out into the darkness, and the gods hushed her fears, but without giving her any solid news. Nothing beyond, They are alive and traveling.
“All’s well, then,” Ash said, as if the gods kept him informed too. She raised her eyebrows at him and he touched the stonecaster’s pouch at his side to show the source of his knowledge.
Stones. People thought she herself was extraordinary because the gods spoke through her, but that was straightforward compared to the stones. Everyone believed that the gods gave knowledge through the stones, but she had lived with the gods for her whole life and not once had they ever mentioned casting. And surely, if they were giving knowledge away like that, she should be able to cast? But stones were just stones to her; they told her nothing.
She wished Mabry were here. He’d stand at her back and lend her all the strength she would soon need. The eyes and hands of an artist, and the heart and hands of a farmer, that was her husband. Kind, gentle, strong… she sighed. Also stubborn, shy, and sometimes aggravating. But she missed him with a physical pain under her heart.
Outside, the wind increased. The windows had been shuttered as though it were mid-winter, but through a couple of narrow cracks she could see that the moon had risen. It was almost full, and looked enormous, golden and full of promise. But she looked at it through a fern-pattern of frost on the horn windowpane, which distorted and smeared its light.
Not for long.
Elva had had a good life. Oh, yes, her parents and family had been massacred by warlord’s men, but she had been so young that she didn’t even remember them. Mam was the only family she’d known, and together they’d traveled and laughed all the way from cliff to cove and back again. And then she’d taken the Road on her own and met Mabry, fallen in love, married, borne six children, and each and every one of them had lived to adulthood, which she thought was the greatest gift the gods had given her. Prophecy, which came to her as easy as breathing, had never seemed as important as her children’s laughter and tears.
She knew, though, that she’d had that life because Martine, among others, had risked life and soul for the Domains.
Now it was her turn, so that her children could have a safe life, as she had done. And if she died in the doing, as she might well, that would be all right; but she wished she could kiss Mabry goodbye.
The others: women, children, men, old and young and in between, were mostly sleeping, curled up in family groups to keep warm. The cold was growing worse, even here with the human fug deepening each minute. Outside, she could hear the flick-flick of ice hitting the walls.
“Time to wake them,” Ash said.
“Aye,” she answered reluctantly. She didn’t think she was a coward, but she knew all the power they raised this morning would funnel through her, like water through a millrace, and she had no idea what the consequences would be. She might end up a drooling idiot, like Widow Cowslip’s daughter in the Valley. She might drop dead.
“I hate getting up early,” she sighed, and Ash laughed. It reminded her of the morning her own Ash had been born, and this boy had peeked through her window holding a potted cedar tree, because Mabry wanted to make sure the baby would be named something “decent”—not Slug or Snail or, worse yet, Violet! So he’d tried to control what the first living thing she saw outside the birthing room would be; and like all attempts to control destiny, he had failed, because the first thing she had seen was Ash, not the cedar tree, and the baby was named after him. He had laughed then, too. It was a good name, she’d thought at the time, and she knew it had made the older Ash very happy. He’d gone red and quiet that morning and had smiled for months every time anyone said the baby’s name. Then he had gone, and apart from a couple of flying visits when the childer were little, she had barely seen him again. But the winter he and Mam had stayed with them, after little Ash was born, had turned him into the brother she’d never had, and that bond was strong yet.
He put down a hand and pulled her to her feet. Her back creaked audibly and Ash bit back a comment.
“Easy for you to laugh,” Elva said sourly. “You’re escaping old age, seems to me.”
He sobered and shook his head. “Not escaping. I’ll get old—and when I do, I’ll be among strangers, somewhere far in the future. I’d rather age here with the people I care about.”
That was sad. She patted his hand as though he’d been Gorse, her youngest. “You can find people to love everywhere, if you try,” she said in her best mother’s voice. He recognized it, and smiled.
“Aye, Mam,” he said. She cuffed him lightly on the ear and they laughed gently, but underneath was the tension of knowing what they had to do next.
“It’s time to wake up,” Ash said, pitching his singer’s voice to the back wall.
People started to rouse, childer chirping questions, wailing, trying to climb on tables and being pulled back, fathers wiping noses and mothers trying to get their childer to the room set aside for chamber pots before they wet themselves, grammers and granfers querulous or soothing, some unsure of where they were or why they were here. People. Just ordinary people. All they had to set against one of the Great Powers.
Stupid as new-hatched chicks, the lot of us! she thought, but she was cheered by the bustle of normality, none the less.
“There’s something I haven’t told you, yet,” Ash said to her quietly. “The fires have gone out across all the other Domains.”
“You think the gods don’t know that?” she said. “No need to spread panic, though.”
He nodded, relaxing a little.
“Let’s get them organized,” he said, and clapped his hands for attention.
Slowly, with much shushing, the people in the hall and on the stairs sat and looked at him. When there was enough quiet and everyone was watching, Ash became the Prowman. Elva saw him do it—saw him straighten up, deepen his voice, act like a stronger, wiser, braver version of himself. Or maybe this was the truth, and the other a jacket he put on to hide what he was.
His voice went out to the furthest corner of the rooms, up the stairs, through the open doorways, clear and compelling.
“My friends, you are welcome here. Together, we are going to defeat more than cold, tonight. We will defeat the Ice King himself, and send him reeling!”
There was no cheering, only listening so intent it almost hissed in Elva’s ears.
“And this is what each one of you must do,” he said. “Listen carefully.”
The ice was knocking sharper against the wooden walls by the time her mam and Arvid came back, looking tired and relaxed and happy. By then Ash had organized everyone into groups, sitting comfortably.
“Make sure you’ve been to the privy and are well set where you are, because once we start we can’t stop, not for anything,” he had warned them.
After the scurry to the chamberpot room that caused, they had sat and set and begun to hum in unison, as the Sealmother had directed her. She had reached out through the gods and found the minds of the other leaders, spread throughout the Last Domain: her own two girls, Poppy and Saffron, whose minds were so much richer than she could have imagined, the boy at the Valuers’ Plantation, and others, old and young, in big towns and tiny villages, at altars and in mines, huddled in animal barns, in shops, in houses.
Humming.
The Sealmother, no doubt, could pull all her people’s minds together and hold them as She held a seal pup in the arms of a gentle spring swell. It was much, much harder for a human.
This was not the five-note safety spell which every Traveler girl learned. It was an undulation, like that gentle spring swell, which spoke of moderation and calmness and kindness and smooth, rolling motion. Movement, the enemy of Ice, who wanted to fix and freeze things in place, who desired permanence, eternity, instead of the slow drip of spring thaw, the yearly theft of His power, the inevitable cycle back to summer heat. That was what drove Him, Elva knew, although the gods had not told her so. Ice desired perfection which never changed, the purity of stillness, the calm grandeur of eternal stability. Death to a human.
So they countered it with motion. Opening her eyes, Elva saw that many in the crowd were swaying to the tune as it lifted and fell. She shut them again and reached out for the others, gathering them like strands for lacemaking, or weaving, neither of which she’d ever been good at. Another image, then: braiding her girls’ hair in the morning, ready for a party. Intricate braids made with love, under and over and under again, coming together with patience and delight into a beautiful design.