Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

“He’s a cook’s boy and a philosopher,” he heard Rulf wheeze.

“I can hardly decide which is the more useless out here,” muttered Nothing. “I should have let Trigg kill him. Gettlanders are clearly …”

He fell silent as he crested the ridge. They all did. A forest lay before them, stretching away in every direction until it was lost in the gray veil of the falling snow.

“Trees?” whispered Sumael, as though she hardly dared believe her own senses.

“Trees could mean food,” said Yarvi.

“Trees could mean fire,” said Ankran.

Suddenly they were all plunging down the hillside, whooping like children freed from their chores. Yarvi fell, tumbled in a shower of snow and was up again. They floundered eagerly between the stunted outliers, then in amongst towering firs with trunks so thick Yarvi could scarcely have linked his hands around them. Mighty pillars as in some sacred place and they unwelcome trespassers.

They slowed from run to jog, from jog to cautious shuffle. No fruit fell from the sparse branches. No deer flung themselves onto Nothing’s sword. Such fallen wood as they found was soaked and rotted. Beneath the snow the ground was treacherous with tangled roots and countless years of rotted needles.

Their laughter guttered out and the wood was perfectly quiet, not so much as a bird’s chirrup to scratch the heavy silence.

“Gods,” whispered Ankran. “We’re no better here than out there.”

Yarvi scrambled to a tree trunk, breaking off a piece of half-frozen fungus with a trembling hand.

“Have you found something?” asked Jaud, squeaky with hope.

“No.” Yarvi tossed it aside. “This kind can’t be eaten.” And despair began to float down with the snow and settle on Yarvi even more heavily than before.

“Fire is what we need,” he said, trying to keep the flickering of hope alive. Fire would warm them, and raise their spirits, and bring them together, and keep them going a little longer. Where that might bring them he could not afford to think about. One stroke at a time, as Jaud had always told him.

“For a fire we need dry wood,” said Ankran. “Might the cook’s boy know where to find some?”

“I’d know where to buy it in Thorlby,” Yarvi snapped back. In truth, he probably wouldn’t have. There had been slaves for that.

“Higher ground should be drier ground.” Sumael set off at a jog and Yarvi struggled after, sliding down a slope and into a treeless dip, covered in clean white snow. “Maybe up here …”

She hurried out into that scar in the forest and Yarvi followed the trail of her quick footprints. Gods he was tired. He could scarcely feel his feet. There was something strange about the ground here, flat and hard under a thin blanket of snow, black patches scattered. At Sumael’s next step there came a strange creaking.

She froze, frowning down.

“Wait!” Nothing stood on the slope behind them, clutching a tree with one hand and his sword with the other. “It’s a river!”

Yarvi stared at his feet, every hair on him prickling with horror. The ice pinged, clicked, shifted under his boots. It gave a long groan as Sumael turned towards him, her wide eyes flicking up to his. There was no more than a stride or two between them.

Yarvi swallowed, hardly daring even to breathe, and held out his hand to her.

“Tread softly,” he whispered.

She took a step and, without so much as a gasp, vanished through the ice.

First he stood frozen.

Then his whole body twitched as if to dash forward.

He stopped himself with a moan, floundered down onto all fours and wriggled to where she had disappeared. Black water, and splinters of ice floating, and not the slightest sign of her. He stared over his shoulder to see Jaud bounding down the bank in a shower of snow.

“Stay!” shrieked Yarvi. “You’re too heavy!”

He thought he saw movement under the ice, dragged himself to it sprawled out on his face, scrubbed away snow, could see nothing down there but blackness, lonely bubbles shifting.

Ankran teetered out onto the river, arms spread wide, skittered to a halt as the frozen surface groaned. Nothing was floundering through the snow downstream, towards a patch of bare ice where jagged rocks poked through.

Awful silence stretched out.

“Where is she?” screamed Yarvi. Rulf only stared from the bank, mouth hanging helplessly.

How long could someone hold their breath? Not this long, surely.

He saw Nothing hop a few steps from the bank and raise his sword high, point downwards.

“Are you mad?” Yarvi screeched, before he realized.

Of course he was.

The sword darted down, spray fountained up, and Nothing dropped on the ice and thrust his other arm into the water.

“I have her!” He hauled Sumael from the river, limp as rags and streaming freezing water, dragged her towards the bank where Jaud and Rulf were waiting.

“Is she breathing?” screamed Yarvi, crawling on hands and knees for fear of going through himself.

“How do I tell?” asked Jaud, kneeling beside her.

“Put your cheek to her mouth!”

“I don’t think so!”

“Lift her feet!” Yarvi scrambled from the frozen river and forced his leaden legs along the snow-covered bank.

“What?”

“Get her upside-down!”

Jaud dumbly lifted her by her ankles, her loose head dragging in the snow, and Yarvi struggled up and forced two fingers into her mouth, hooked them round and down her throat.

“Come on!” he growled, spitting, and straining. “Come on!” He had seen Mother Gundring do it once, to a boy who fell in a mill-pond.

The boy had died.

Sumael didn’t move. She was clammy-cold, like a dead thing already, and Yarvi snarled a mess of prayers through his clenched teeth, he hardly even knew who to.

He felt Nothing’s hand on his shoulder. “Death waits for us all.”

Yarvi shrugged him off and pushed harder. “Come on!”

And as suddenly as a child pinched awake Sumael jerked and coughed out water, rasped in half a breath and coughed out more.

“Gods!” said Rulf, taking a dumbstruck step back.

Yarvi was almost as surprised as he was, and certainly had never been so glad to have a handful of cold puke.

“You going to put me down?” croaked Sumael, eyes swivelling to the corners. Jaud let her drop and she hunched on the snow, plucking at her thrall-collar, and coughing and spitting, and starting to shiver hard.

Rulf was staring as if he had witnessed seen a miracle. “You’re a sorcerer!”

“Or a minister,” murmured Ankran.

Yarvi had no wish to let anyone pick at that scab. “We need to get her warm.”

They struggled to coax a fire with Ankran’s little flint, tearing sheets of moss from the trees for kindling, but everything was wet and the few sparks would not take. One after another they tried while Sumael stared, eyes fever-bright, shivering harder and harder until they could hear her clothes flapping against her.

Jaud who had once lit the ovens in a bakery every morning could do nothing, and Rulf who had set fires on beaches windswept and rain-lashed all about the Shattered Sea could do nothing, and even Yarvi made a futile effort, fumbling the flint in his useless stub of a hand until his fingers were cut while all the while Ankran muttered a prayer to He Who Makes the Flame.

But the gods were working no more miracles that day.

“Can we dig a shelter?” Jaud rocked back on his heels. “Like we did in the blizzard?”

“Not enough snow,” said Yarvi.

“With branches, then?”

“Too much snow.”

“Got keep going.” Sumael suddenly wobbled to her feet, Rulf’s outsize coat dropping in the snow behind her. “Too hot,” she said, unwinding the sailcloth from her hands so it flapped free, tugging her shirt open and pulling at the chain inside. “Scarf’s too tight.” She took a couple more shambling steps and pitched straight on her face. “Got keep going,” she mumbled into the snow.