Princeps' Fury (Codex Alera 5)

Everyone turned to regard the barbarian, who stood beside his huge gargant, leaning his shoulders against Walker's tree trunk of a leg.

"First impressions are important," Doroga continued. "Icemen don't look like you. That makes you people nervous."

Araris grunted. "A bad first meeting. Tempers flare. There's a fight. Then more encounters and more fights."

"Happens long enough, you call that a war," Doroga said, nodding.

Lady Placida was silent for a moment. Then she said, "It can't possibly be that simple."

"Of course not," Isana said. "But a single pebble can start a rockslide."

"Three hundred years," Doroga said, idly kicking at the snow. "Not over territory. Not over hunting grounds. No one gains anything. You're just killing each other."

Aria considered that for a moment and shrugged. "It does seem a bit irrational, I suppose. But after so much killing, so much death... it takes on a momentum of its own."

The Marat grunted. "Thought I heard someone say something about a rockslide less than a minute ago. But maybe I imagined that."

Aria arched an imperiously exasperated eyebrow at the barbarian.

Doroga smiled.

Aria sighed and shook her head, folding her arms a little closer to her chest. "You don't think much of us, do you, Doroga?"

The barbarian shrugged his heavy shoulders. "I like the ones I talk to. But taken as a whole, you can be pretty stupid."

Aria smiled faintly at the barbarian. "For example?"

The chieftain considered for a moment with pursed lips. "Be my guess that your folk never even considered that you might have it backward."

"Backward?" Lady Placida asked.

Doroga nodded. "Backward. Icemen don't follow the storms when they attack, Your Grace." He gave Aria a shrewd look as a particularly cold gust of wind threw up a brief, blinding curtain of snow. "The storms," he called, "follow them!"

The snow kept Isana from seeing Aria's face, but she clearly felt the startled little flicker of surprise-and concern-that suddenly permeated the woman's emotions.

The wind died away, and as suddenly as that, nine Icemen stood in a loose circle around them.

Isana felt Araris and Aria immediately touch shoulders with her and with each other, forming an outward-facing triangle. Araris exuded nothing-no tension, no discomfort, no fear: She sensed nothing but the steady confidence and detachment of a master metalcrafter withdrawn into communion with his furies, ignoring all emotion and discomfort to stand ready against a threat. That presence bolstered Isana, granted her confidence she badly needed, and she studied the newly appeared Icemen closely.

There were differences in them, Isana saw at once. Instead of bearing similar styles of weaponry and adornment, as the group with Big Shoulders had, each of the nine was perfectly distinctive.

Big Shoulders was there again, fur and leathers and a handmade but obviously functional spear in his hands. But the Iceman beside him was at least a foot taller and far thinner, with a barely perceptible orange tint to his white fur. He carried a large club made out of what looked like the leg bone of some enormous animal, though Isana had no idea what could possibly grow femurs six and a half feet long. The fur around his head was threaded with seashells, a hole bored through each of them to make them into beads.

The Iceman on the other side of Big Shoulders was shorter than Isana, and probably weighed three or four of her. He was clad in a mantle and breastplate of what looked like sharkskin, and carried in one hand a broad-headed, barbed harpoon carved from some kind of bone, and wore over his shoulder a quiver of what looked like smaller versions of the weapon.

Walker let out a low, trumpeting huff that was equally a greeting and a warning, and Doroga nodded to Big Shoulders. "Morning."

"Friend Doroga," Big Shoulders said. He gestured to the orange-tinted Iceman beside him, and said, "Sunset." He made a similar gesture to the harpoon-bearing Iceman on his other side, and said, "Red Water."

Doroga nodded to each of them, then said, to Isana, "Sunset is the eldest of the peace-chiefs. Red Water is the eldest war-chief."

Isana frowned. "They have different leaders, then?"

"Divide areas of authority between tasks of peace and tasks of war," Doroga corrected her.

The presence of both the head peace leader and senior war leader was a statement, then, Isana realized. The Icemen were equally disposed toward either outcome. It might mean that they did not want her to sense that they would be reluctant to fight-or they might genuinely want to sabotage any possible talk of truce in favor of ongoing hostilities. Then again, perhaps they were simply being sincere.

Isana let out a slow breath, and lowered the defenses with which she habitually shielded herself from the overwhelming emotions of others. She wanted every scrap of insight she could get about the Icemen.

Lady Aria's faint, tightly controlled anxiety became a painful rasp against Amara's senses, as did Doroga's low-key, abiding worry for his daughter. Behind her, very faintly, she could literally sense the presence of Alerans on the Shieldwall, cloaked in their gentle firecraftings against the cold. The wall hummed with a sensation of constant, quiet, long-term emotion that might or might not have stopped short of the line between anger and hatred.

"The young one tells us you are here to seek peace," said Sunset quietly, in accented but intelligible Aleran.

Isana arched an eyebrow and nodded to him. "We are."

Though none of them moved or reacted, Isana felt a ripple of suspicion and uneasiness flicker around the circle of Icemen.

Isana drew in a quick breath, touched Araris's wrist to tell him to stay where he was, and stepped forward, focusing on making her emotions as plain and obvious as they could be. She stepped forward toward Sunset and offered her hand.

There was a flash of suspicious fury, and Red Waters was abruptly between them, the wickedly sharp tip of his harpoon dimpling the skin of Isana's cheek.

Steel hissed as two swords leapt clear of their sheaths, and there was an abrupt surge of light and hot air at Isana's back.

"Aria, no!" Isana snapped in a tone of sudden, iron authority. "You will not do this." She turned-a calm, deliberate motion that nonetheless dragged the tip of Red Waters's harpoon against her cheek in a tingling line.

Aria and Araris stood side by side, weapons in their hands. Aria's left wrist was uplifted, and a small hunting falcon made of pure, white-hot fire perched there, wings already spread, ready to be launched skyward at a flick of her hand.