We walked a hard road, over chasms and hills and plateaus, and it would require another story to detail its progress here. An uneventful story––our wicked saebel cleared the path ahead so that we were troubled only by passing shadows.
The worst of the shadows was the wind. It bore into my head, mocking me with voices from the past until I was lulled to sleep each night with my mother’s singing and woken in the morning by my father’s laugh.
As we ventured farther north the nights stretched longer and longer. The sun barely scraped past the horizon and the dark was thick and even as water. The riverbed was shallow here, growing ever more so, and the slate shimmered with veins of strange, beautiful minerals, smoothing, and then luffing, like sails in a capricious wind.
The wind threw the snow into frenzy when we came among the ice people. They were all sorts, dotting the path like an infantry. We looked down and saw we were stepping on faces, arms, legs. They lay beneath the ice, layers and layers of them, wind-worn and smooth.
As we walked, we saw ice trees, too, and castles, cities, and mountains, all in miniature, all perfect, all ice. Like colorless dreams. Further on, the faces of the people grew grave and sad. The palaces and cities took on a haunted, hollow look; they became mammoth, some almost life-size, and the people grew slim and tall, reaching up on either side of the riverbed, faces obscured by the blowing snow.
I looked along the Cheldony until her bed ran out, and kept looking, eyes smarting with the wind. A pale light poured from a thinning in the snow ahead, and a twilit sea of ice stretched endlessly, blurring with the snow and then coming into view. Before this, just ahead, the great banks of the Cheldony came together.
There was water there. The river’s head: a deeply sunken pool with its edges iced over. The black center stirred in the wind.
Liskara’s breath steamed through my mitt, warming my hand. The world rolled on to evening, and the wind steepened, hiding the pool behind a curtain of snow. My mother sang, low and loose, and so true to memory that I looked to my right and saw her standing before me. Her song was strange:
The door opens beneath the water,
But he won’t help you.
And my father stood beside her:
The door opens beneath the water,
But the key is a light too vivid for him to look at.
You’re not real, I thought back at them.
The door won’t open, my mother sang.
“You’re not real,” I whispered. They were the first words I’d spoken in over a month.
The door won’t open.
“What door? What the hell door are you talking about?” This rang through the wind and startled me. Andrei stared. “They don’t like you at all.” My voice was rusty, sticking like an old key.
The color in my mother and father’s faces had faded to white. I took off my mitt and touched my mother’s cheek. Ice-cold. The ice infantry had grown by two.
“Not real,” Andrei said. He avoided looking at them, as though they were private. I suppose they were. “The Tolrenaimon.” He rubbed snow out of his eyes. “A gate. Right out of our old tales. Before going on you have to leave memories, dreams, other things––” He stopped.
To his right, behind the wind and snow, stood a tall woman. The wind took the snow another direction, and her gilt eyes lit on Andrei. As if compelled, he drew his arm back and cracked Faiorsa across the face. His hand struck flesh.
I reached for the knife in my boot, paused. Her eyes were utterly flat, without glint. She opened her mouth and there was no wet there.
“You’re not Faiorsa,” I said to her. “You’re a djain.”
Andrei stepped back, bewildered. The djain-Faiorsa slowly turned her head; I wondered if she were mute, and Andrei followed her gaze, looked past her, looked at my ice father, at his broad shoulders and curly hair. He turned as ashen as my father.
“Princess,” said the djain-Faiorsa. She unfortunately wasn’t mute. “You have been a terrific nuisance.”
“And you,” she said to Andrei. “Why do you ignore me?”
Andrei stared at me, at my hands. Hatred froze his face. “Where’d you come from?” he said to the djain.
“You,” she said. “You’ve been chipping away at yourself. Didn’t you know what you would find down in the deepest pit?” She grinned.
“You’re lying,” he said. “You’re lying, you always lie.”
He turned to me, “Did you bring me up here to kill me?” Sweat was running down his temples, freezing into beads. “Why haven’t you yet? My mother murdered your whole family, every last one, for my sake. Where’s your rage?” I turned into the wind but his voice was like thunder: “Is your spirit too ruined to feel anything?”
“Yes,” said the djain. “Kill her and have done.”
Andrei turned away, began to walk, was forced to stop. Because the city of Ellyned stood in his way: chin-high, glittering––every tower and shack made of ice.
“You can’t mess with water.” He looked back at the djain. “It’ll break you.”
“That’s not mine,” said the djain. “It’s your dream. You’re a prophet.” She had his attention now and her smile deepened. “Look at your city.” She pointed at the tiny harbor, the delicate ice ships and cloud spray. “Do you see the sails? They’re a new sort: the stars of Even-Alehn, promised, sent for, and finally come to restore the natural order. But your words have spread and the city believes no Lauriad exists. So the Even-Alehn troops will assist the one who comes next.” She ran her dry tongue over her lips. “You.”
“Herist has joined forces with Caveira to bully the Lorilan Ravyir, and he controls the Ombenelvan contingent with only his word. But these mercenaries are treacherous. And backed by Even-Alehn and your silver pendant, you can persuade them to switch to your side, and then you can do whatever you like with Herist and Caveira. Something ghastly, I hope, and when you’re through, by all means, continue bullying Lorila. But first you must get past me.” The snow blowing round her head darkened to violet. Her eyes turned to holes; she smiled and her tongue was black. “You’ve spoken ill of Norembry before, but I know you love her and want only to improve her standing.”
“Yes.” It came out as a bark. He was caught, heart hooked.
“You may yet prove your love, given a few concessions.”
“Go on and say them.”
“Your pendant. You can keep it for negotiating––I only want what’s inside it, and then I’ll leave you alone.”
My eyes widened. This thing had followed us all the way up here for that? “You’re the Ombenelvan god,” I said. “The one who wants the Aebelavadar.”
“I have many names,” she said.
She turned back to Andrei. “The other concession is the girl. If she were more tractable you might have taken her back and wedded her, strengthening your claim. But she’s wild and she hates you. Best not leave the weed uncut and spilling seed.”
She slid her hand under Andrei’s cloak and placed his dagger into his mitt.
Panic welled in me. My hands made ready to draw the knife, to tear at him.
“Master Djain,” he said, and turned the blade over in his hand, as though wondering how it had got there.
“What?”
“My pardons to Norembry, but I care rather more for the girl.” He looked up at her. “And you’re not getting my pendant. Not any of it.”
The wind blew hard and fast, and the lady’s eyes glowed like firebrands. Her figure went rigid, sucking the last light from the sky. “Aloren––” Andrei looked sick, now, like he had purged himself and there was nothing left inside him.
He raised his hand as if to thrust the dagger into the djain’s breast, but I pulled his arms behind him. “Are you stupid?” I yelled. “You can’t kill it. You’ll drop dead.”
He pushed me away. “Which should be some consolation to both of us.”
“You bastard.” I pounded on his back. “You selfish, selfish bastard.”
He pushed me away again, and plunged the dagger into the djain.
The darkness spread, blotted out the snow and the wild sky, swallowed Andrei and Liskara and the ground I stood on, until I could see and feel nothing.
***
A hole opened right before me, pinching off my thoughts, my emotions. I looked away from it, trying to clear my mind, looked to the side and saw Andrei’s pendant.
The light burned white through its silver urn, white as chalk on a slate. My eyes adjusted––Andrei had had fallen against me. The hole crouched before us like a great cat.
I took the pendant, the Aebelavadar, in my hands. “What is this thing?” I said to the hole, which must be the djain. I felt calm, almost incomplete, as though all my fear had been eaten away by the hole. “You went through an awful lot to get this close.”
“Give it to me.” It tore words into the air.
“What is it?”
“A light.”
“Obviously.”
“A strong light,” said the djain, “to shine so next to me.”
“You’re just a hole,” I said, “you ain’t even there.”
“I am. I am being realized as we speak. I am growing stronger and stronger.” It sucked at my skin.
“I, I, I,” I said, still oddly fearless. “It’s all your kind think of. You think so hard and so deep about I that you scrape it away until nothing’s left.”
“Give it to me.”
It blew its ragged breath on me, and the light in my hand burned against the cold. “Why?” My fingers glowed around it, looking transparent, insubstantial. I was reminded of little Daira, the way she burned in my arms. “It’s a soul, in’t it?”
“Give it here.”
“Whose is it?”
“I followed it from Lorlen.”
I stared at my bright hands, wondering that I hadn’t been stricken dead. “A Simargh soul?”
“Yes.”
I remembered the stolen Simargh baby––the one from long ago, whose soul was stamped out. The Simargh that became a djain.
“What do you want with it?” I said.
“Give it here.”
“Funny how you haven’t just taken it. You can’t, can you? Cause it don’t belong to you. It belongs to him.” I pointed to Andrei. “I don’t know why or how he got it, but you can’t use it without his permission.”
“He’s dead.”
Something trickled down my neck. Fear, giving me weight, a shadow. Everyone knew the djain told half-truths.
“If that’s so,” I said, forcing it down, “it belongs to me now, and I ain’t givin it to a nasty hole.”
And I thought about what Andrei had said, that at the end of the path there was a hiding place, a portal to another world, some sort of door.
I said silently to myself, “The door opens beneath the water.” That’s what my ice mother had said. I didn’t know how much my ice mother knew, but she’d sounded fairly certain about the door. The door must be there somewhere. In the water.
The djain couldn’t do any mischief in any sort of water. But I didn’t know where the water was, so I put Andrei’s arms over my shoulders and stood to find it. His head lolled next to mine, and the Simargh soul dangled from his neck. My feet were suspended in the air; there was nothing beneath me, nothing around me.
“Let us alone,” I said. The hole’s black breath made cracks in my thoughts. “You can’t have it.”
A searching wind blew at my back, confusing me: who was this dead boy, why was I so cold? I wanted so badly to lie down and sleep.
But I held onto one thought––the water––and walked through the air, dragging the dead boy behind me. The light cast a path, and finally ice crunched under my boots. The cat-shaped hole followed on big paws. The ice groaned, and water pressed up against it; the dark of the pool spread beyond my feet. There was a door somewhere beneath it.
“He will drown,” said the cat-hole. When it lay down between us and the open water, a great crack spread through the ice. I stepped across it.
“But he’s dead,” I muttered. I slid the knife from my boot with a free hand and wedged it in the crack. My boot stamped hard on the handle. The ice screamed and buckled under my weight. The cat leaped, and the boy and I fell through into the pool.
Water jammed into my nostrils, ears, throat, whole body. Silence thumped around me. I couldn’t feel anything for the cold, and I hung onto the boy.
His light cast an orb of blue around us. Outside the blue a wall of blindness spread: the cat opened its maw, forced us between its jaws. It moved us back in its mouth and tried to swallow. I saw the pit of its throat, a sickening void. I closed my eyes, trying not to vomit.
But we might as well have been encased in a diamond. All the sudden the tortured water shrank back with a terrific thrust. A snap filled the universe, and a fissure appeared in my vision. The fissure widened, swallowing the djain.
***
What happened next is almost impossible to describe. I remember it as an illogical dream: a tangle of color, like a burst of sun through deep water.
I was standing on a terrace of stone at the bottom of the pool, and I could breathe as well as if the water had been air. The dead boy wasn’t in my arms. He was standing with his back to me, holding something that glowed brighter than his pendant, so bright I could see all the sides of the pool and the surface shimmering high above.
It shifted in his hand, lengthened, changed into a flaming bird that spread great wings. A spray like molten metal came off his hands and hair. He glowed and stretched like a burning leaf.
I stared. “You’re supposed to be dead. What are you doing?”
“Making a door.” He reached and took a skein of something–a fabric that tugged on my hair, and the light, and the silken feel of water on my skin, and my very thoughts––and he wound it up with another. I was thinking and feeling in double.
“Isn’t that what humans do?” I said, and marveled at how rich my voice sounded.
The air right in front of him was a more vivid blue than I had ever seen. “I know why the river stopped flowing,” he said, reminding me unpleasantly of one of my brothers––Mordan. “The djain clawed the old door up. So the water couldn’t get through.”
“Why?”
“Made the Girelden angry and stupid, didn’t it?”
“Jackass.”
He ignored me, just kept winding together the same strange stuff. I could see it now: the door he was making. It looked like a circle of daylight growing brighter and brighter through layers of glass. I couldn’t fathom how he had learned to do it.
At last he finished and stepped away, and the golden bird shrank, become a key in his hand. It was made of flame, like the bird. “Where did you get that?” I was inexplicably jealous, as though the thing should have been mine.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “You gave it to me.” He stuck the key into the middle of the door. It melted and fire spread over the blue glass, turned the door a blinding white.
The pendant glowed at his chest. He slipped the chain off. Then he pushed aside the blue glass and threads and skeins until there was nothing. The door was open. Shapes and colors shone through, but my eyes were too dazzled to really see them and my head too stupid to make sense of them.
He pondered the pendant for a moment, then tossed the thing through the door. Chain, bottle, and soul.
The door puckered and bulged, as though under the weight of some great force on the other side. There was a second of stillness. The blinding light dimmed.
I heard a roar like the sea, and the boy pulled together enough sense to move out of the way. Water came through the door, a green flood of it, pushing the old, stale water back. It slammed into me, warm, as though it had just come from high summer.
It tore me from the bottom, ripped ice people from the shore, and cast us about like leaves in a whirlwind. The current dragged me back to the bottom, and I grabbed a knob in the bedrock. The pressure pounded in my ears. I looked up. A huge, winged thing of ice came down over me, just missing my head. It slammed into the rock, knocking shards of ice away.
I felt a faraway pain and looked down––my finger was caught beneath it.
It ground over my hand, crushing it against the bedrock, and I screamed, I’m sure, but the sound was lost. The current swept the thing away. I went with it, then was suddenly yanked back: my little finger was jammed in a crack in the bedrock.
I couldn’t pull it out.
I looked around. The boy was standing out of the way of the current, just to the side of his door, looking in. His head was black against the green, his hair a wild sunburst.
“You’re not going through that door,” I said.
Somehow he heard me. He looked at me and his face was full of longing.
I jerked and jerked, but couldn’t pull my finger from the crack. “You’re not going through,” I yelled. That door would be the end of him, and I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t bear it. He dragged himself over the threshold, and the water tore around him.
“Ah, shit,” I said, looking up.
I saw a glint: a knife sliding down the stone; the one that had broken the ice. With never a thought I stopped its progress and cut through my finger.
Blood curled around me. I made my way wildly forward and grabbed his shirt. He didn’t struggle and I pulled us into the upsurge.
A swell carried us to the eastern side of the pool. I grabbed hold of an ice woman standing secure in the shallows, and lodged us between her spread arms. The boy was comatose, or dead, as he should have been. I didn’t wonder at it, but dragged myself into the shallows and pulled him after.
I lay for a while on a shelf of shale, back warmed by the water. The boy drew breath beside me. Not dead, then. I remembered his name.
The sky had cleared above the thundering water and shone with a million stars. I crouched over him. “You’re a crazy idiot,” I told him, in case he could hear me. Frozen hair snapped from my cheek and lips. “The djain’s gone.” I glanced around to make sure of it, and stared.
The hilt of Andrei’s dagger stood out from my ice-mother’s breast. Before this, the banks of the pool glistened—not with snow.
Asters. They were growing alongside us, waving beneath the water. White, big as a man’s palm, lacy like the frost. They sang like harp strings when I plucked them.
Liskara found me there. She sneezed around Andrei’s face, and I pulled the cloth away from his chest. The wound was ghastly––grey and star-shaped, the tip of its longest arm reaching beneath his chin. Won by planting the dagger into the wrong woman.
“God. Look at you.” I screwed up my face and made it wet again. “Ruined. Good for nothing. I hope you never wake up.” The tears came faster, freezing on my face.
Finally I rubbed the ice off my arms and gathered more asters. Asters that looked as though they could heal anything. On a whim I pressed one into his wound and pulled his shirt over it. Then I stood up and rummaged through Liskara’s bags for dry clothes, kindling and the tinderbox, singing aloud to keep my stiff fingers moving.
Fire colored the bank and I dragged Andrei from the warm water. Before his wet wrappings froze I stripped him perilously close to the flames. Then I gave him a new aster and wrapped him in a dry cloak.
I took a stone from the fire, rolled it in a blanket and placed it beside him under the cloak. I broke the clothes from my own body, rubbed savagely at my chest, and wrapped my aching left hand, which had begun to ooze clear and red. Then I put a blanket over Liskara. I slipped under the wool and pressed myself into her flank.
The horse’s side moved against my naked skin, in and out with loud blows; and I thought and thought, and couldn’t think the feeling out of my head.