How can wraiths attack?” Arvid demanded furiously. “What about the compact?”
Martine shook her head. “The compact is against air, water, fire and earth beings. We’ve never needed one against ice…”
Her voice faltered. “Poppy. Saffron. They’re both north of here.”
Elva listened and waved reassurance, and then signaled for them both to start singing. They would need everyone. Everyone.
The braid in her mind was growing thicker and more intricate as she brought in the new strands, from Salt and Oakmere and Purple Lights and Tinderbox and the Plantation and Brown Hill and Marsh River.
Each a different texture and color, in her mind they were brown and blond and red and black, Traveler and Acton’s people, townsfolk and farmer, woodster and crafter, officer and soldier.
This is the first time, she thought. The first time ever we have been bound together, with no distinction made. It made her vaguely proud, but a small part of her wondered what changes that would bring, if any. She could imagine her sister-in-law, Drema, advising dryly, “Don’t get your hopes up, lass. People don’t like changing the way things work.”
But now, but now… now she wove them all in, every color, every kind, and they were together, singing together, swaying together, a whole domain of unity. This was the time. She focused on Purple Lights, where Atos was still trying to sing while he nailed a board across the window, sobs interrupting his song.
As he did so, the door burst open to a flurry of sleet and the ice wraiths surged through.
SING! she shouted at him but he was too frightened, too slow. She was losing her ability to sense him. Help me, she begged the gods, but they didn’t answer her. Then she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder, and her mother’s calm strength enter her mind. She reached out to Atos. Sing, she begged him. The wraiths were playing as a cat plays with prey, making little feints to goad him further. Atos swallowed against a dry throat and hummed one note. Just one, but it was the note that everyone, everyone in the domain, was humming at that instant, and Elva gathered up the strength from Poppy and Saffron and Thyme and all the others and sent it down that note into the shabby hut at Purple Lights, sent it through the frailest vessel they had, an old, old man, and he put his hands out as though to ward off the wraiths.
Begone! Elva commanded them.
It was as though a wind had picked them up and sent them reeling back outside the door. He slammed it shut behind them and dragged the table over to hold it closed.
They’ll be back, Atos sent to her.
Aye, Elva said. It’s time to attack.
The braid had to become a wall which moved farther and farther north. That was the plan. Sealmother had showed her some of it, but She had protected a much smaller area. On the other hand, She had had fewer people powering her spell, if spell it was.
It was enchantment, sure enough, but spell was a small word for what they were making between them.
Elva opened her mind to her mother as she had opened it to the gods, time and again, sharing the image of the many-colored braid. Martine caught her breath.
Beautiful, she thought. Strong.
Now we make it a wall.
Together, they began to take the strands from each place and strengthen them further, the image changing in Elva’s mind from a braid—essentially decorative—to a woven wall. Martine helped. Arvid’s father had owned a shield made in the Wind Cities; a shield of woven steel laid over a withy base. It was a beautiful thing, and had saved his father’s life more than once in battles with the Ice King. That would be their model, now. Still singing, Martine went to Arvid’s workroom and took the shield down from the wall, bringing it back to the glass table and holding it high.
The assembled people understood immediately. The soldiers punched the air, the women nodded, the children clapped. Martine placed it on the table in front of Elva and she stood, putting her hands flat on its surface.
Arvid stood up, too, and said clearly, “Now we will make a shield so strong that nothing will penetrate it!” The singing grew louder in response, and Arvid was loudest of all.
Elva and Martine, because it was easiest, felt for Poppy and Saffron first, and shared the image with them. The four together began the reshaping of the braid into a shield, gradually bringing Thyme in, and Atos, and all the others, one by one. Elva was concentrating so hard that she wasn’t aware of anything else except that image in her mind, the shield growing, lengthening, curving up and over the fort and moving north, getting bigger as it went.
“It’s getting warmer!” a woman exclaimed. A few people broke off singing to happily agree, and Elva felt the shield weaken. She punched Arvid on the shoulder and he shouted out, “It won’t get warmer unless you sing!”
Those who had broken off resumed singing, shamed. Elva could feel the shame through the braided shield, but she also felt the joy the warmth was bringing, and she fed that in, too, because it had a warmth of its own which would work against ice.
As the shield moved further north, though, she began to feel something. Someone, it might be. Heavy, inimical, a brooding presence envious of and hating everything the braid contained: life, love, warmth, fellowship. Difference. She had never known one of the Great Powers, but this was unmistakable, and she understood what it was He wanted, could feel His desire for the unchanged, unchangeable permanence of Ice. For ice which never melted, for form which stayed, immutable. For an eternity of sameness, safe and solid and forever.
She knew that feeling. Every mother knew the feeling of wanting time to stop, wanting the child to stay a baby, wanting the youth to stay a child, wanting the moment when the little arms came around your neck to last forever. Every human knew that feeling, of wanting tomorrow to be the same as today, so that you could just go on being who you were, without the pains that age brought.
But as a mother, as a human, she knew the stupidity of that. Knew that the child could give more joy than the baby, as well as more grief; knew that age had its compensations; knew that growth always hurt.
Well, this shield was going to grow and it was going to hurt.
Just before she began to push it north in earnest, she wondered where Ash was, and why he hadn’t joined in the singing. We could use a voice like his, she thought vaguely, then slid in a strand as strong as steel from a tiny village called Acorn, where a nut-brown aged woman stood over the corpse of an ice wraith as it melted on the floor, a flint knife in her hand.
“No one kills me or mine,” the woman said, and Elva fed her exultation and determination into the shield.
Then the Ice King struck back.
He struck from the north, where if you dug a foot down, the earth itself was ice all year round. From there he sent the ice down every channel of water he could find. Lakes and rivers froze every year, and there was no one hurt by that—but now, in an instant the groundwater froze and swelled, sending the earth above it into rolling hills and breaking chasms, undoing the foundations of house after house, hall after hall.
Panic broke out as the freeze hit each village. In Oakmere the singing faltered as the great columns which held up the Moot Hall roof tilted and began to sink on one side. The slate floor buckled and parents snatched their children up and began to run before the roof fell in. Elva heard the screams as the walls themselves shifted.
As the humming failed, He grew stronger, and Elva despaired. Ice would sweep down, the houses would be destroyed, forcing everyone out into the unforgiving cold. They would all die and lie, forever frozen, unrotting, in the eternal ice.
But then she felt a hand on her shoulder and felt a warm strength flow into her. It was unlike anything she had ever felt before, a mixture of male and female, fuelled by both love and anger.
“He is using water to destroy us,” the Prowman said, “and that is not allowed. She can fight Him, now, as She always does, each spring. Give Her your trust.”
Beyond the warm humanness, the extraordinary strength of Ash’s mind, underneath the music of flute and drum which sounded a war beat in his thoughts, there She was: cool but not cold, a Power but so intricately bound with humans that Elva slid easily into communion with Her. She was angry.
I will take my streams back, She said. Be you ready to remount your shield.
“Aye, my lady,” Elva said aloud. Ash’s hand tightened on her shoulder in encouragement, and strength slid into her from that contact as easily as from her mother’s mind. She felt her mother smile, and sent reassurance to everyone still in contact. All is well, she said. Water fights with us.
Elva felt the wave of power that went out from Her: the order to every drop of water in the domain to flow, flow, be free.
South and north the groundwater was melting, flowing, seeping back and flowing further.
Houses were still tilted, but they settled, uneasily, creaking. Ice fought it, but She was strong, unbelievably strong. And then, far north, She reached the limit of Her power, where the ground was frozen all year, where Ice held permanent sway. And from there, He was gathering His strength to attack again.
Elva called the gods in.
Now, she said, if you are going to help us, it must be now.
They came reluctantly, but they came. It is not for us to defy the Powers, they said, much as a commoner might have said, It is not for me to defy the warlord. But Elva had an answer for that, now. Not the Powers, only Ice. Water fights with us.
She sensed that it was only that which had brought them this far.
Very well, they said. Use the altars to anchor your shield, and we will hold it fast.
It was what they had needed. The shield was fragmented, fraying, failing. Painstakingly, as quickly as they could, Elva and Martine and Poppy and Saffron and Thyme and Atos rewove it, each village mind sending its strand first to their altar and then on to Elva, the lacemaker with her pillow laid out before her, each altar a pin to secure a single thread of power. This shield was far stronger, far, far stronger than the first. With triumph, Elva began to push it back, from the fort to the nearby villages, from those villages to towns, north and south and east and west, bringing all the domain under its protection. She could feel the hall warming around them as it worked, as Ice was pushed farther back.
The people were still singing, still feeding her power, and so was Martine and Ash and everyone else in the lace.
She heard, vaguely, a voice shrieking nearby, but she didn’t pay any attention to it.
“You are making spells!” the voice screamed, its pitch interrupting the smooth humming of her people. “This is the spell which stops my son returning to me! Stop! I command you to stop!”
And she turned sideways to see Sigurd, wild-eyed, being held back by Merroc, while the Prowman moved toward her to help him. Back, she thought to the shield, bringing Salt under its protection with a sigh of relief that Poppy was safe. And then Sigurd launched herself forward, dragging out of Merroc’s grip, ducking under Ash’s elbow. He grabbed her from behind, but she snatched up the big pottery pitcher from the table and threw it straight at Elva. Her mind in Salt, her attention on the humming, Water, Ice, she reacted far too slowly.
The pitcher hit her head and all thought stopped.