Bela stood atop a snowy ridge, at least three grueling leagues away from the open beach and the warmth of the cave that had become their home. Whenever the weather allowed it, she’d been sending the crew out in teams to take stock of their surrounds, telling them that they needed to determine the long-term viability of their shelter, or whether something better could be found. One of their first discoveries had been that there was no sign of a beachhead among the cliffs for many leagues to the east or west. They’d been most fortunate indeed to approach the beach they’d found so directly. A sign of the Mother’s kindness, many of them said. Bela, for her part, had taken it as a sign that if they were going to get farther north, they’d need to begin looking for a direct route inland. There would be no going around the ragged mountains along the shoreline. They’d need to go at them. And to even begin to do that, they’d need to forge a path through the tangled maze of frozen cliffs and broken crags that rose up around the beach.
And here, it seemed, it looked like they had.
Ahead of her, Bela saw a broad valley of snow and ice that sparkled in the sun between twin ridges of icy rock.
There was nothing there—around every corner, she’d hoped to find an ancient city, a crumbling ruin, something to give her hope that she’d found the fabled Ealond—but it was still something. A path forward.
The sound of crunching snow brought Oni up to stand beside her. “Well,” her maiden said, panting in the cold air, “that’s a sight.”
Bela stared up at the low point at the head of the valley. “That pass can’t be that far away, can it?”
It was a bright-sky day. Oni squinted. “Distances are deceiving out here.”
Her maiden was right. The smoothness of the snow erased so many of the markers on the landscape that could’ve given them a sense of scale and distance. It didn’t help that the same snow played havoc with their eyesight, especially on bright days like this.
“Could be two days,” Bela said.
“Or two weeks,” Oni suggested. “We don’t know how deep that snow is. How solid it is. What’s under it. How long—”
“I know. I know.”
“I’m sorry, mistress.”
Oni reached over and wrapped an arm around her waist. Even through their layers of clothing, Bela imagined she could feel its warmth there. Bela wanted to reach down and grip Oni’s hand against her hip, but the maiden was on the wrong side of her: she didn’t have a hand to reach to that hip. Instead, she leaned her head over to touch Oni’s. “Thank you,” she said.
Oni turned to her, smiled. They kissed with cold lips.
“You know I couldn’t have made it this far without you,” Bela said.
Oni pulled away and smiled. Then she turned and looked back south. The path they’d made quickly disappeared into the fractured terrain, but in the far distance they could see the flat expanse of the frozen sea—at the shore of which the rest of the crew waited with a warm fire. “Of course you would’ve,” she said. “Look at how far we’ve come. Against all odds. I know you don’t like to hear it, but you’re Belakané. The one thing we all knew of you in the songs is that you don’t give up. You keep going. You keep fighting. Even if we were all gone, you’d still walk on. You’d find Ealond alone if you had to.” She turned back to Bela, and there was something like adoration in her eyes. “That’s the reason I follow you, mistress.”
“Oni, I—”
Her maiden reached out to hold her shoulders. “You’ll keep going. You’ll find it. Promise me, mistress. You’ll make this worth it.”
Bela nodded. “We will. Together.”
Oni smiled, kissed her again. “Even better. Now let’s get back, warm up so I can actually feel those lips, and then we can convince the others.”
*
“But we’ve good shelter here,” Eshe said. “Plenty of food and oil. We have snow to melt for clean water. Why leave?”
The women were all standing around the fire, their faces red with the flames—and with the heat of the argument.
“Because our good mistress still thinks she can save the Isles,” Neka said.
Oni narrowed her eyes on the bigger woman. “I don’t like your tone.”
“Always the dog, maiden?” Malaika asked.
“Always above you,” Oni hissed.
Malaika started to move, but Neka reached out and stayed the woman with a big hand on her chest. Bela reached out to do the same to Oni.
“Stand down, both of you,” Bela said. “We need to work together in whatever we do. Separated, we die.”
“Orders ain’t working together.” There was none of the amusement that sometimes lilted in Sanyu’s voice.
“Which is why I keep saying I want us to talk about this,” Bela explained, using the most diplomatic tone she could manage. “Each of us must make up her own mind about going on or staying here. And we must then take the next step together. All six of us. Agreed?”
Malaika, Sanyu, and Neka exchanged long looks. Finally, Neka nodded. “Agreed. But we’ll have a straight cast on it. No hand above another. As you say, we’re in this together.”
“Fine. All of us get a cast. Agreed, Oni?”
Her maiden nodded, though her eyes were still hurling daggers at Malaika. “At your command, shipmistress.”
“Good.” Bela took a deep breath and let her hand fall away from Oni. “Good. Then it comes to this: I want to begin hiking north through the mountains. Not because I want to save the world, but because those are my orders. And I swore upon the staff of the High Matron that I’d do my part to fulfill her commands, come difficulty or death. I gave my word upon my honor. It’s my duty, as it is yours. We can stock up well for the journey, with plenty of oil and meat and water. We can leave behind one of the outboats, dragging only one for supplies. We’ve already trodden a path to that valley. We should be able to make good time beyond that and see what lies ahead. And if we find the mountains impassable, we can simply come back here.”
Oni nodded. “I agree completely.”
“To what end?” Neka looked like a woman speaking to untested children. “There’s nothing to be found in this forsaken land. No great cities, no long-lost peoples. Certainly no great secret power. There’s only death up in those mountains, mistress.”
“How can we know?” Oni asked. “We need to be sure. What if there is a city? What if there are still great vessels there, ships we can take back to the Isles? What if there really is a portal? The books say—”
“The books!” Malaika motioned toward Tewrick, who was sitting apart from the others. “How do we know? He’s the only one of us who can read. So, what if he’s lying? How can we know he speaks truth? And how can we know to believe the books, anyway? Can they not lie too?”
“They can,” Tewrick interrupted. “And they do.”
His sudden entrance into the argument—the fact that he was daring to speak among his betters at all—cast an uncertain silence over the cave for a few seconds.
“You see?” Malaika finally managed to stammer, seizing on what the reader had said rather than the fact he’d spoken. “Lies.”
The reader took a long, deep breath, as if he were bracing himself—though Bela couldn’t tell if that was because of what he was about to say or his realization that he’d spoken out of turn. “I didn’t say that all books are lies. I didn’t say that these books”—he held up one of his tattered, soot-stained tomes—“are lies. I admit only that scripts are written by people, and as surely as people can lie and cheat and withhold and betray, so, too, must their books always be viewed with caution. You all have heard, no doubt, that there are three lessons taught to every member of my guild. That books can lie is the second of them.”
Such was the secrecy of the reader’s guild that Tewrick’s free admission of one of the three lessons draped a quiet awe over everyone. Bela found herself staring at the scholar, wondering if, at this moment, she knew more of the scriptors than her mother had. How many in the whole of the Isles were so privileged?
Across the fire, Eshe shifted on her feet. “What’s the first lesson?”
“That books can tell the truth,” Tew replied. “That they can heal and bond and record and give hope.”
“And the third lesson?” Eshe looked like an anxious puppy, and for once Bela didn’t feel the need to rebuke the weak-willed girl. She was certain she looked the same.
Tewrick shook his head with a smile. “The third lesson dies with me.”
Bela let out the air she didn’t know she’d been holding in her lungs. Others did the same. “But I want to say this,” Tewrick said, looking over at Eshe. “You’re right to wonder why we should leave here. We have food and oil and fire and shelter and water. We thought that we’d die aboard the Sandcrow. But we survived. Then we thought we’d die on the frozen sea. But we survived. By fate or luck or the warm winds of the Father, we survived. And now that we have safety, there is no one who could blame us for refusing to give it up. Not even the High Matron to whom we swore our oaths.”
“Aye,” Neka muttered, staring over at Bela. “Not even her.”
“So I understand the reluctance we all have to leave,” the reader continued. “I, too, am reluctant to go.”
Neka and Sanyu exchanged hopeful glances. Malaika’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “But you’ve something more to say,” she growled.
“I do,” Tewrick said. He stood and walked to the back of the room. Tracing his hand up the rock surface, he pointed to a thin white line that ran horizontally across it. “There’s this problem.”
“What is it?” Eshe asked.
Oni narrowed her eyes across the space. “It looks like a waterline,” she said.
Tewrick nodded. “I think it is.”
Malaika made a scoffing sound in the back of her throat. “Are you saying this room is normally under water?”
“When the sea isn’t frozen,” the reader said, “I think the tide probably comes in this high. If so, when the cold melts back a bit, we might be standing up to our chests in the Sea of Ice.”
Neka looked doubtful. “It’s dry enough for now. You’ve proof of this?”
“No,” Tewrick admitted. “I do not.”
Neka grunted, waved her hand dismissively. “It’s dry enough for now. I cast we stay.”
“Me, too,” Malaika said.
Oni shook her head. “I cast we go.”
Bela nodded. “As do I. Two to stay, two to go. Sanyu?”
“Stay.”
“That’s three. Tew?”
“The boy gets a cast?” Malaika’s face was aghast.
“As you said, we are all in this together. Men and women.”
Malaika seemed ready to spit. “He’s not even a breeder. He’s cut. He’s not a man.”
“Ridiculous,” Bela snapped. “His eggs wouldn’t make him a man if he had them. We are valued for what makes us useful. Whether it’s timekeeping or reading the winds.”
“Or reading books,” Oni chimed in.
Bela smiled over at her maiden, glad for the support, and gave her the slightest of smiles.
Oni smiled back, though Bela could see a hint of redness on her cheeks that she didn’t understand. “Or reading books,” she repeated. “What is your cast, reader?”
Tewrick came back from the wall and sat down with his bag of books. “We’ve nothing to lose. If we find nothing and I’m wrong, we can come back. So I cast we should go.”
“That’s three and three. Eshe? Stay or go?”
Eshe looked from Tewrick to Malaika to the fire and back again. “We can come back if it doesn’t work?”
“That’s the plan,” Bela said. “But we can’t know.”
Eshe stared at the ground for a long moment. “Then we should try it.”
Malaika kicked at the sand. Neka groaned. Sanyu’s jaw tightened. But none said anything more. They all knew they’d agreed. They’d given their word.
Bela crossed her arms, hiding her missing hand in the hope it would make her seem stronger. “Then it’s settled. Four casts to three, no one counted more than another. We go.”
There was a minute of silence as the crew mulled things over in their minds. Bela tried to think of something more to say, but no words came to her.
“We’ll need to slaughter a few more seals, shipmistress,” Oni finally whispered, her eyes fixed upon the low fire. “For meat.”
“And as much oil as we can manage,” Bela agreed, ever grateful for her maiden. “There’s much to do and precious little time to do it. We need to leave while the weather is good.”
“That could change tomorrow.” Eshe’s voice was even more timid than usual, and she didn’t look at the others.
Bela nodded, but she said nothing more. Eshe’s gaze returned to the sandy ground.
Oni ran her hands along her legs as if she were dusting them off. “Then I suppose we should get started.”