Authors: Jude Fisher
Aran recoiled in horror and the thing fell from his fingers and landed noiselessly in the wind-blown snow. It lay there like the reminder of another life, like an accusation. No man would voluntarily be parted from such an auspicious object; and Flint Hakason was no exception. As they excavated the bear’s internal cavity they came across further horrible and undeniable evidence of the creature’s last meal before it had attacked them.
‘I cannot eat this bear,’ Aran declared fervently. ‘It is surely the worst luck in the world to eat a beast which has eaten one’s shipmates.’
‘Worse to die for want of a meal, with such a creature lying before you and your shipmates unavenged.’
‘Fent avenged them by taking its life.’
‘Aye, and it seems the bear has come grievously close to taking his.’
Aran thought about this for a short while. Then he nodded. ‘We will eat the bear. But save the heart for my son.’
They charred and ate the best of the meat they could find on the beast and, thus reinvigorated, they then cooked the snowbear’s heart and Aran carefully chopped it into tiny pieces and pushed them into his son’s mouth. When there was no response, they sat Fent upright and bent his head back until the passage lay clear, and Aran washed the pieces down with water while Urse stroked the boy’s throat until he swallowed automatically. But still Fent did not revive, and it was with heavy hearts that they cut up what they could carry of the bear’s butchered carcass and walked on into the night.
Fent Aranson lay wrapped in darkness, and a vein beat steadily in his neck. He was aware, yet not aware, floating in a state between wakefulness and sleep. He felt warm, and cold at the same time. He existed in two regions at once – that of living men and that of the dead – yet neither seemed ready to claim him as its own, and it appeared that he was not in a position to decide his own fate. So he lay inert, slung like a sack of turnips over the giant’s shoulder while his father walked before him and did not even know the moment when they crossed the lonely, snow-blown boundary which demarcated the end of the world of men and passed into the land of legend.
Epilogue
In the hour before midnight, the Queen’s labour pains began. She had been talking with her lady-in-waiting, a pretty dark, rather fat girl from the Galian Isles who sat beside her and who went by the uncommon name of Leta Gullwing. The girl then imparted this knowledge to the forbiddingly tall figure who stood always behind the Queen’s throne.
The healer from Blackshore turned her single eye upon the courtiers present. ‘The hour of birth has come upon the Queen. Leta and I will take the lady to her chambers,’ Festrin said loudly, and her voice reverberated off the stone walls and high beams of Halbo’s Great Hall. ‘No one else may be permitted to attend the event. The Queen must be entirely relaxed and comfortable if this birth is to go well.’
‘Who are you to make such a pronouncement?’ demanded Erol Bardson, feeling the seither’s magic upon him and resisting it as hard as he could. His chin jutted belligerently. ‘This is a matter of state; not one of convenience.’ If a child was to be born to his rival he wanted to be there to witness it: like many other malcontents, he had given credence to the rumours which surrounded the Rosa Eldi’s true state – that she was not pregnant at all, that she had surrounded herself with illusions which distracted the eye and mazed the mind. And if there was indeed a child inside the pale woman, the chirurgeon he had bribed to assist at the birth was well briefed and knew exactly what to do.
Despite the invisible blanket of calm that Festrin had laid across the company, his was not the only voice to be raised in protest. Auda, the King’s mother, ranted and railed; the ladies of the court complained that it was traditional they be present to help the Queen in her time of need; the lords argued that it was crucial they bend a knee to the babe as soon as it emerged; but more than one of them was inspired to make this affirmation not out of loyalty to the Crown, but out of sheer prurient curiosity as to the precise nature of what their lord’s enchanting wife had between her elegant legs.
But Ravn Asharson, King of the Northern Isles, fell to the ground at his wife’s feet and embraced her so that his head rested upon the great swell of her belly. ‘My darling,’ he said fervently, ‘is it truly your wish to retire with only these two ladies to attend you?’
Mutely, the Rose of the World nodded her head, her beautiful green eyes beseeching.
Ravn sighed. It was a sigh of regret; but also, as he would admit only to himself, one of relief as well. Much as he craved a healthy heir for the northern throne, he adored his wife so greatly that he could not stand to see her suffer a moment’s pain; and he had heard that many men – though hardened by years of battle and bloodshed and all the atrocities which war could offer – had fainted clean away at the sight of a child making its forcible passage into the world between the thighs of the woman they had married. Those thighs . . . He shivered at the memory of their silken grasp around him, and pushed the thought away. That would come again, soon enough; but first let her come safely through the birth. He sent up a silent prayer to Feya, the women’s deity and hoped Sur would not hold it against him.
And as for leaving his beloved in the hands of the seither – well, the one-eyed woman terrified him; but he did not doubt her skills.
He stood up and addressed the company. ‘It shall be as my queen wishes,’ he declared.
The babe was born a scant hour later. It was a messy birth, and Leta Gullwing lost a lot of blood, for the child was large for its somewhat shorter than usual gestation period, as well as vigorous and determined, and the girl’s channel was narrow. But while the Rosa Eldi, looking somewhat appalled by the entire event, held the bloody, purple-headed child at arm’s length and wondered what in the world she would do with it, Festrin had snipped the cord which connected the baby to Selen Issian and with this last piece of evidence removed, applied herself to the Istrian woman’s wounds.
Then the seither wrapped the child in the royal blue of Ravn’s house and carried it down to the Great Hall.
‘Eyra has a new prince!’ she announced. ‘Long live Ravn Asharson, King of the Northern Isles, and his queen, the Rose of the World; for their union has been blessed by the birth of a fine and healthy boy.’
It was not precisely a lie.
From his tower room window, he watched the first visitors ever to survive the perilous journey – a dark man and his huge companion, carrying the limp form of another – enter his hidden kingdom along the thin isthmus of ice he had opened for them.
‘The giant, the madman and the fool,’ he murmured with some satisfaction.
He rubbed his hands together. They felt cold and dry and ill-tended. He looked down at himself and found that he was wearing no more than a thin, urine-stained shift, that his beard had grown past his waist and was spotted with food and worse; and that an overgrown yellow toenail was protruding from a hole in his threadbare tapestried slipper. The adventures of the voyagers had been altogether too gripping of late: he had not been taking good care of himself. As the world’s most powerful mage, it would hardly do to appear to them thus: an air of majesty and gravitas was surely required.
Summoning the shreds of his magic, the Master of Sanctuary descended the winding ice stairs and prepared to greet his guests.
Iron and water; water and iron. Salt and mineral and ash. This is what the blood tastes like. My blood; spilled on the ground and on my leg. The flavour is strong and invigorating; it fills my senses. Lick and lick again. Hair with the blood; annoying but no more than that. Down it goes. All good nourishment.
The wound is deep: I feel the draw of the healing muscle as I stretch. The fibres have knit quickly, maybe too quickly, as our kind often mend too fast for our own good. I will have to clean it, to worry at it and drain the pus if it goes bad.
Sleep has strengthened me; but sleep has also taken the others away, too far to pursue: too far in the wrong direction. I feel their presence in the world – the pale man, the quiet one and the woman like the flickering of gnats over a distant pond; but they are heading north, north with the cruel men, north with the death-stone, Falla’s tear.
There is nothing I can do for them, even had I the strength to follow, to claw, to kill.
No: my course takes me south, south to the Red Peak. My lady may be lost to me; but my lord has awoken: I can sense his presence. If I listen hard enough, I can hear him – in the earth, in the rocks. Mountains shift, lava flows, boulders shatter as he moves.
He calls me, he calls me and I come . . .