The sky was just beginning to lighten when Bela got up.
She hadn’t slept. She’d spent the night staring out at the snow and sky: the familiar moon passing over the stars; the strange green fires dancing among them. She and Tewrick had taken what shelter they could against a rock outcropping, sharing what warmth they could beneath their sealskins and the reader’s overstretched white bear-fur cloak.
There’d been no snows or great winds, at least. The god of storms, she supposed, saw fit to give them that reprieve.
But she knew the sun would bring no real warmth.
The world seemed so much emptier than it had ever been before.
In silence, she wiped frozen crystals from her cheeks. Then she began to check the few supplies they had. The reader still had his bookbag to carry. She had a pack with a container of oil and two seal-meat bundles that had fallen off the outboat before it careened over the edge and then somehow managed to float their way to the surface of the snow as it spent its energy and settled out.
Not for the first time, a distant voice in her mind told her she ought to thank the Mother for such a miracle.
Not for the first time, she did not.
The avalanche had swept enough snow and ice from the side of the mountain that it had been possible to make their way across it with far more ease than before. The two of them had made a fast pace. This morning, the ridgeline was only just ahead.
For this, too, she’d not said thanks.
Tew stirred, and she broke loose some pieces of the frozen meat for them to chew on cold. What little oil they had needed to last.
Neither of them spoke as they ate. Without a word, they cinched up their packs and began trudging toward the ridgeline.
There was, Bela thought, nothing else to do. She’d given her word.
The ridgeline wasn’t far. In less than an hour, they crested it and saw, at last, the full extent of the land they’d reached. Tew pulled one of the maps from his bookbag, and together they held it under the bright morning sun, talking for the first time since the others had died, trying to find comfort in pointing out various possible landmarks and surveying Ealond.
The maps showed a massive but largely flat land, laid out like a great saddle between a line of southern mountains—the divide of which was beneath their feet—and a line of mountains out of sight farther north that were, according to the map, even taller than those in the south.
Bundled up against the cold and having difficulty catching their breath from the altitude, Bela and Tew found such an idea difficult to believe. The southern mountains, after all, were taller than anything they’d ever seen. But the map left no room for question: the more northern range was far taller, far more foreboding.
Pointing to the odd shapes of scripting on the map, the reader told her that their ancestors called the northern range the Bordweall. The peaks there were like a boundary wall for the hospitable lands of Ealond. Beyond that range, according to his books, was an inhospitable and frozen land, filled with little more than icy wastes.
Bela looked around them with disbelief. “This is hardly hospitable.”
He shrugged. “The Breaking,” he said, as if it were all the explanation needed.
Perhaps it was, though for all the stories she’d heard about the great war in these ancient lands—of ancient magicks and the breaking of Ealond that left it a frozen wasteland overrun by metal men and the spirits of the dead—it was jarring to see that anything of it was actually real.
But here it was. The icy wastes had crossed over the Bordweall. They’d swallowed the whole of Ealond. That meant, maybe …
Bela shook, holding back tears.
Tew quickly folded the map away. “Mistress, are you well?”
“It’s real,” she whispered.
He looked back and forth between her and the cold landscape ahead. He didn’t seem sure what to say. “Yes, shipmistress,” he finally managed.
“All of it, I mean. Ealond. The Breaking.” She swallowed hard. “The portal, too, I guess.”
He nodded. “If the map is right, it isn’t far. The city of Niwdraca, they called it. Nestled at the base of these mountains, where a river meets the sea.” He pointed toward the west. The mountains swung slightly northward in that direction, cutting off a direct line of sight to where the ancient city might have been, but they could see the frozen ribbon of a river in the valley below. And every Seaborn girl and boy knew that all rivers, frozen or not, led to the sea.
“I’m not sure how to feel,” Bela said. “I guess … I’m not sure I really ever expected to find anything.”
“Not even from before, when we left?”
“Not even when I swore before the High Matron,” she admitted. It was the truth of it. She didn’t see why she should lie.
“So why did you come?” Tew asked.
Bela looked down at the cut-man. His eyes were red. She imagined hers were the same. “I told you before,” she said. “Hope. If not for me, then for the Isles.”
The reader nodded in understanding, gripped her arm for a moment, then walked off a few paces, leaving her with her thoughts. And when she began to weep, he pulled out one of his books and pretended to read.
*
Going downhill was far easier, and far faster, than climbing uphill. Even so, the shadows of evening had grown across the snowy valley by the time they’d reached the river at its bottom.
Less than an hour later, the river was a cascade of glittering icefalls, plunging toward a deepening, narrowing canyon of shorn black rock. They decided to camp there, to face the canyon in the morning. And as they searched for a place to shelter, they found the wall.
Or at least it had been a wall once. It was little more than a short line of ragged blocks now, just the top of it protruding from the ice and snow. It was unnatural, though. A man-made thing. And it hinted at far more both beneath the ice and up ahead.
The structure’s appearance after such a long journey, after so many months of seeing nothing but storm and sea and desolation, felt like a dream, and the two of them touched it repeatedly, even taking off their gloves to run their bare fingers into the cold seams between the stones, as if to reassure themselves that it was real.
“We were so close,” Bela said.
The reader didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. “She was a good woman, shipmistress.”
Bela looked up at the ribbon of sky that was visible above the canyon ahead. The stars were many, filling even such a small space. “Bela,” she said.
“Shipmistress?”
“My name, Tew. It’s Bela. Oni called me that. You should too.”
The reader was silent for a moment. “Bela is a beautiful name,” he said. “This man … I am honored to speak it.”
Bela smiled through a long sigh, watched her breath float upward. “I miss her. She was, indeed, a good woman.”
“So are you,” he said.
“I’ve no right hand. I’m hardly a woman.”
“I’ve no eggs,” he said. “But you said yourself that I’m still a man.”
She looked over at him. “You are.”
He shrugged. “Then you’re still a woman.”
“We’re worth the use we have.” She reached out and touched the white fur of his cloak. “Being cut didn’t stop you from saving my life against that bear.”
The reader hesitated for a moment and then reached up to grip her hand against the fur. “And being one-handed didn’t stop you from pulling me up that cliff, Belakané.”