Cold Steel (Spiritwalker 3)

Fury shook me awake. “I never want to speak of him again!”

“I don’t mean the one who sired you. I meant your father. Daniel Hassi Barahal. The one whose portrait is in your locket. Did you see your father on the beach?”

My father.

Words emerged, although I scarcely knew what I meant to say. “They had just come down from the ice shelf. They were fighting wolves. There was a dead man all bloody. I think his name was Gaius. The Baltic Ice Expedition ended in disaster. Most of the explorers died on the ice, but some survived. Most of the other attempts to explore the ice have ended with the expeditions vanishing forever. I wonder if they accidentally cross into the spirit world and get eaten there. Probably it was just wolves who caught them.”

“Are you suggesting this boat is left over from the Baltic Ice Expedition?” he asked in the calmest voice imaginable, although he looked annoyed and stern in that way he had when he was overcome by a strong emotion. “Tell me about that, Catherine. Keep talking.”

If there was one thing I was good at, it was talking. So I kept talking, even if I stumbled and lost my train of thought. He persisted in asking questions, prodded and poked in a verbal sort of way since obviously because he was rowing the entire time he could not actually poke and prod me, although I had a vague memory that I ought to wish he ought to be able to, but that was a long time ago and anyway it was so very cold and my body ached so much and I was so very tired that eventually I lapsed into silence.

We bumped up on a shore in the lee of a tiny inlet. Ice rimed the shallow water where a stream burbled through a tumble of rocks. A blanket of snow carpeted the hollows, but the wind had swept most of the land clean. There were no trees and little vegetation, only lichen and moss. In the sheltered lee of forgotten boulders and clefts in the earth, waxy-leafed plants spread, laced with frost. Nothing stirred, not even birds a-wing.

Pull up the boat. Turn it over and stow the oars. Fill the bottles with stream water. Walk. Walk. Walk.

I did what he told me to do, as a goblin’s automaton obeys. Was that how the coachman functioned? Was the coachman truly of a goblin’s making, or was that just a story he had told me? Would I ever find out?

There was no wood or we would have stopped to make a fire, even though Vai would have had to leave me. By following the stream, he found an animal trail that he tracked like a hunter.

We rounded a boulder to find ourselves face-to-face with a huge woolly rhinoceros. Its twinned horns dipped as it gave a growling snort. A muzzy instinct woke in the pit of my stomach that the creature could trample and gore us. Vai placed himself between me and the animal. He spoke words I did not know in a cadence whose rhythms sailed past, as if he was politely greeting the beast. It snorted as in answer. As Vai eased us past, it silently watched us go.

For an eternity we walked. Once we ran across a fire pit ringed with stone, sheltered on the lee side of a slope, but there was nothing to burn except straggling patches of gorse, so he decided we should go on.

It was just so hard to put one foot in front of the other because I kept staggering off the path and catching myself at the last moment on the point of my cane. An idea grew in my head, a very compelling idea that I ought to have thought of long before.

“I would be warmer if I took off these wet clothes,” I said.

He was striding up a slope amid winter-whitened grasses and hardy sedge. The thought of trudging after him up such a brutal incline made my legs congeal, so I stopped moving and fumbled at the coat.

He ran back to me. “No! Absolutely not, Catherine.” He kept talking as he dragged me along. “Do you see the prints? There have been hunters or trappers here. The track leads to a place people go. There’s likely a sheltered spot where they camp.”

He broke off as we reached the top of the slope. I really wanted to find a small hole to crawl into. Instead I looked up.

The land ended at a flat shoreline. Beyond it silver waters spread like a mirror. The distant haze of the far shore melted into the encroaching dusk. Maybe there were trees on the other side, but I couldn’t be sure. The near shore was dusted with snow, so the whole land radiated a white sheen. A wide stream was crackled over with a skin of ice. Someone had built a crude wooden pier where the stream flowed into the wide water. Just inland from the pier stood a shed, and next to it huddled a small log house with a sod roof. A rowboat had been tipped onto its side under the low eaves of the hut.

He thought it was a good idea to go down. I slogged along, steered by his grip. My sword flared as he shaped bulbs of cold fire. A door gave way to a narrow entry hall with a stall for animals, where he dumped our gear. Inside a second door lay a bench and table and a bed tucked into an alcove with cupboards built in beneath. The hearth was empty but for a large kettle and roasting spit. The room was cold, windowless, and dark, with barely enough room to turn around in.

While he explored, I drifted, reflexively setting my cane and the basket on the table. Hadn’t I been carrying a pack before? I couldn’t remember how he had come to have it. Fortunately I was no longer cold. His exclamation roused me. He was pulling skins and furs from the cupboards beneath the bed.

“This is a hunters’ refuge. A place men can take shelter if they’re caught out in bad weather. There’s bound to be a village within a few days’ travel. My village keeps the same sort of shelters.” He glanced at me. “Catherine, now you must take off your wet clothes.”

My fingers were too numb to unfasten buttons.

He undressed me, dried me roughly, and wrapped me up on the bed in the furs. Then he went outside with the kettle, brought it back full, and laid wood onto the hearth although obviously he could not light it. Our wet clothes and gear he spread over the table and bench.

He stripped and got in with me. His skin was so warm that after a while I began to hurt all over. Chafing my hands, my cheeks, my legs, he talked a stream of words that I did not fully understand except that I loved to hear him speak. I began to shiver, and at length the shivering subsided as a frail glow of warmth took root in my frozen heart.

Blessed Tanit! We had escaped the spirit world! We were going to live!

As I relaxed, so did he, and I slid into a sleep without dreams.

22

I opened my eyes to darkness. A night breeze whistled in the chimney, but nothing else stirred. The air was wintry cold except where we were bundled warmly together, skin to skin. I lay for a while, wondering about him. He had rowed and tramped for miles in wet clothes after being half drowned in the icy sea, just as I had. In all the time I’d known him he had never seemed particularly affected by cold. Hadn’t he once told me that magic fed him? I had thought it a figure of speech but now I wondered if it was true in a strange and secret way.

He shifted but did not wake as his hand settled on my hip. I had him back.

My spirit exulted, and I was surprised at how amorous I felt. However, my throat was raw, my mouth tasted like a stew of brine and bile, and I wanted a bath. I was ravenously hungry and still tired, and well aware of how desperately we needed drink, food, and dry clothes. And then?