James West - Queen of the North

He cracked a gap-toothed grin. “I believe you would at that.”

“If I cannot keep my word, I’ll not make much of a queen.”

He bobbed his head in agreement. “Aye, true enough.” A moment later, he grew serious. “You have a care in those accursed mountains.”

“As long as you promise to have a care here.”

Instead of agreeing, Breyon faced the common room’s north wall and raised his gaze toward the ceiling. His wizened face fell slowly, as if he could see beyond the planks and timbers to the Gyntors and all the dark mysteries that crept and crawled amidst their snowy crags, things that could drive a man to madness before devouring him. “May the gods keep you safe,” he whispered.

In the days that followed, Erryn had little time to contemplate the gods or their protection.

General Aedran shouted into the frigid gale, but the howling winds ripped his words to shreds, and tumbled them away with gleeful menace.

Hunkered as deep as she could get within her hooded wolfskin cloak, Erryn sat her saddle wishing she were still warm and drunk in the Cracked Flagon. “What’re you on about?” she shouted back.

Aedran angled his horse closer to hers and leaned in. “We’ll get through!” His blue eyes burned with irrational confidence. Crusted ice hung from the deep red stubble on his chin, and clods of snow dangled from the fur lining his hood. He looked like a bear risen from its den at the first hint of spring.

Erryn nodded, too cold and weary to contend with the storm. She could not remember the last time she had been able to feel her fingers or toes, but her arse felt like frozen slabs of iron encased in the icy wool and leather of her trousers. The rest of her burned and tingled by turns from the constant touch of frost.

She looked from Aedran to the trail cutting through gorge around them. At dawn, sheer rock walls on either side, hung with beards of ice, had reached high to embrace a pale blue sky. Now the storm concealed everything beyond a few paces in screaming white.

Up ahead, she could just make out the shuffling column of Prythians beating a path through the snow. Eight hundred soldiers, fully three-fourths of the men she had brought with her, walked ten abreast on wide snowshoes. The front ranks wielded flat-bladed shovels. Laboring to a Prythian chant, they scooped the snow and flung it aside, creating berms along either side of the path. Those who trudged behind the first ranks carried stout poles attached to rounded squares of flat iron. Working to the same monotonous chant, the tampers beat down the snow in time with their shoveling brethren, creating a lumpy road. To gain a handful of leagues each day, they worked from first light to well after dark.

Behind Erryn came the rest of the Prythians, those who had worked the shovels on the first day, the iron tampers the second, and on the third day had earned the far easier task of guiding the supply train of four hundred blanketed horses, each harnessed to a sledge heaped with all the army would need to cross the Gyntors. All they would need, that was, if they could cross the mountains in the abysmally short time Aedran had allowed….

“We take longer than a fortnight,” Aedran had warned before setting out, “we will die.” To this, the Prythians had beat their chests with their fists, and roared a challenge to the mountains, as well as to the gods and demons who claimed those crags as their home.

What lives here? Erryn wondered, because thinking of that was better than wondering if her nipples might turn black and fall off from the cold. She had heard many grim tales, but had never believed them. Shadenmok hunted the forested foothills around Hilan and Valdar, a race of she-devils that took the seed of dead men into their wombs and gave birth to Hilyoth, a hellish beast with the form of a hound and the head of an ape. Most folk believed far worse lurked in the high vales of the Gyntors.

“The Gyntors frighten most folk who live in their shadow,” Aedran told her and Breyon. “But don’t fear. We Prythians are born to snow and cold, and our mountains are higher and far more merciless. The elders among my people say the Gray Horns of Pryth are the children of the gods of war and lust, fire and lightning, and that from the craggy loins of those mountains crawled their feebler children-the Gyntors.”

Breyon’s bulging eyes scanned the mountains in question. Their crowns, unusually free of clouds, had been made into ragged pink teeth by the light of the rising sun. If he had anything to say, the fear in him closed his throat.

“Nonsense,” Erryn declared, trying to imagine gods of stone rutting with each other to make what … rocklings ?

“Perhaps,” Aedran answered blandly. “Either way, we know many paths across the Gyntors, and also the safest routes around places where men once lived, but where only the dead walk now. Make no mistake, it will be a hard go, for where winter winks and smiles at us here in Valdar, it rages in the high passes.” A dark, taunting gleam came into his eyes then. “Of course, those of my kindred who never returned home are out there still, frozen where they fell, or naught but lumps of dung shat out by whatever ate them.” He roared laughter at that.

Erryn managed a nervous smile that felt like a grimace. “Can you promise to get us across?”

“Aye,” Aedran said, all jesting gone. “I don’t want to freeze, and neither do I care to fill the gullet of some filthy beast … or worse. We’ll follow only the lowest valleys, which are nothing to fear, if you don’t mind a bit of cold….”

A bit of cold , Erryn thought now, squinting against the icy gale. What had decided her before setting out, and what kept her from ordering the column to turn around now, was that if they succeeded in striking Cerrikoth and its sovereign in this most unexpected way, she would never again have to worry about King Nabar and his armies. There would be other enemies, there always were, but Nabar was the most immediate threat. Besides, defeating him in the way she intended would make her a legend-and legends had a way of giving pause to any foe.

Yet first, her and her army must survive the crossing.

The storm grew fiercer every day they traveled. When Erryn lay in her billowing tent after marching all day, wrapped in a dozen blankets and still shivering, her breath turning into a sparkling mist in the light of an oil lamp, she saw herself crossing the mountains and entering the Iron Marches, said to be a great and frozen wasteland beyond the Gyntors. None of the tales of those lands ended with smiles.

One morning when Aedran came to rouse her from her blankets, she asked him about their destination. He cast a look over his shoulder and watched the men preparing to march, then crawled deeper into the tent, and closed the flap behind him. A shadow seemed to smother some of the normal brightness of his eyes.

“The Iron Marches are nothing compared to these blasted mountains,” he said, sounding nervous for the first time since she had met him. Always with Aedran it was charge ahead, laugh in the face of death, and die well. Hearing that hint of unease troubled and angered Erryn.

“You said the Gyntors were the lesser children of the Gray Horns, and nothing to fear.”

Aedran scraped nuggets of ice from the short beard he had started growing. He had to sit hunched over, but his head still brushed the top of the tent. “Aye, I did say that.” He flashed a rueful smirk. “And I hold that my words were true … but the Gyntors are often savaged by the most fearsome storms I’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe if you’d admitted that,” Erryn said hotly, “I’d not have marched my army until spring.”