James West - Queen of the North

Fumbling his coin purse, Rathe stooped to retrieve it from the ground. Yesterday’s slushy quagmire of mud and snow had frozen into an uneven crust overnight, leaving him to brush dirty bits of ice off the leather sack. Before he straightened, eyes darting imperceptibly, he searched up and down the street for any sign of followers. He saw nothing suspicious.

Two turns back, he had paused to look through a chandler’s window, feigning interest in the displayed candles and soaps, while at the same time taking pains to see if anyone seemed out of place. Perhaps a watchful man leaning against a doorframe, or the flash of someone ducking into an alley. Then as now, Rathe had seen only the folk of Iceford going about their daily tasks.

He tilted his head back to scratch idly at his dark-whiskered chin, his gaze flickering across the rooftops to a pair of chimneys rising above a baker’s shop. Other than a line of watchful crows perched just beyond the lazy plumes of rising smoke, there was nothing alarming.

Where are you? he wondered, picturing the thin face of the fellow he had named the Shadowman, who had trailed him across the Gyntors, and who he had fought in the halls of Ravenhold. Despite what Loro, Nesaea, and Fira believed, Rathe was sure the murderous bastard had also been stalking him during their time in Iceford. His belief was so strong that he had shaved off his black locks and grown a short beard, in order to disguise himself against the Shadowman, who moved about the world with ghostlike ease.

Hiding his disquiet behind a bored expression, Rathe set off again, glancing at the stone-and-timber shops and homes lining the narrow street, their thatched roofs thrusting toward a lowering gray sky. Being from the warm climes of Cerrikoth, the frosty reaches of the Iron Marches were strange to him in many ways, but he knew weather when he saw it. More snow would soon fall. Over the last fortnight, it snowed more days than not.

Snow and increasingly bitter cold distressed Rathe almost as much as the unseen eyes he sensed, for Captain Ostre had warned of the need to reach the White Sea before the River Sedge froze. Rathe’s companions were confident Ostre would get his ship in order, and the burly captain impressed Rathe as a man of his word, but after walking the decks of the Lamprey , Rathe was not so sure the wallowing tub could meet its master’s demands. More troublesome were the continual setbacks that plagued ship and crew. As it stood now, the Lamprey was not sailing anywhere.

Not for the first time, Rathe weighed the option of riding west along the River Sedge to the White Sea, and there boarding a merchant ship bound for the south. He drew up his hood as the first flakes of snow began to fall, knowing in his heart the time for riding downriver was long past. If Ostre failed to get the Lamprey fit to sail, Rathe and his friends would be stuck in Iceford until the spring thaw.

There are worse things than spending a long winter in the arms of a beautiful woman , he thought, envisioning Nesaea’s raven curls falling over her smooth shoulders, her violet eyes, her-

He cleaved the visions of his lover before they became too distracting. All his fruitless cautions had put him behind schedule. He needed to reach the far side of the village by noontime, for those awaiting him were the most impatient lot he had ever met.

Wending his way across the village took him through Iceford’s market square, where hordes of men in drab woolen cloaks and women in heavy, unflattering dresses slowed him further. He mingled with the crowds, and the watched feeling faded a bit.

The market was little different from any others he had been to. Noisy children ran about underfoot. Chickens clucked in their wicker cages, and geese honked in theirs, each unknowing that cook pots waited in their future. Wood smoke mingled with the scent of pigs and sheep, sweat and cooking meat.

When Rathe passed by a pen holding a handful of yaks, he wondered about his fidgety friend Horge who, it had turned out, was a shapeshifter. When Loro had queried about eating yak, Horge had explained that folk prized the wooly beasts’ milk and cheese over their meat. Horge, Rathe expected, was doing fine in his new home of Ravenhold.

Soon after he escaped the market square, the weight of unseen eyes fell on him again, heavier than before. The sensation was so strong that he ducked into an alley beside a cooper’s workshop. A glance over his shoulder showed him nothing, and he fell into a crouch between two wagons loaded with barrels and casks. Looking through the wheels, he watched folk leaving the market square, and others going toward it. Am I imagining watchers ?

Rathe stood up and hurried down the alley. He came out on a side street, searched both ways, then headed toward a rutted track that led to the eastern edge of Iceford. Here the forest tumbled down off the snowy feet of the Gyntors, and grew thickly amongst a scatter of hovels. Neither Iceford nor Wyvernmoor, farther east, had defensive walls. With the fall of the once powerful Iron Kings some five hundred years before, the last hostile armies of the north had long since dwindled to nothing. Roving brigands kept to the River Sedge in hopes of finding a grounded barge or river trader. They knew better than to attack villages inhabited by able-bodied woodcutters, miners, and trappers, folk who would dispatch a troublesome sort without hesitation, and then happily dump what was left of the marauder in the forest to feed bears, wolves, or frost leopards.

Rathe kept on along the frozen track until coming to a long, low, weathered-gray building. Iceford’s tannery. Despite the increasing snowfall and the deepening cold, the reek of rotten hides filled the air. The lower, riper stench of urine and dung fermenting in large vats, both used to soften rawhide into leather, made Rathe wish he had chosen a different sort to do his bidding. But Nesaea had told him urchins tended to see more than adults, as their lives very often depended on keen observation. The children he had employed were not the usual urchins found in a city, but dung-gathers serving the tanners.

He angled away from the track toward a stand of firs cut through by a frothy creek, its banks rimed in ice gone a poisoned brown from tanning wastes. The waters burbled by, taking their befouled load around Iceford, and emptying it into the River Sedge well downstream from the village. There was no sign of those he sought, so he waited.

Stiny came alone, a young boy of twelve years or less carrying a wooden bucket loaded with dung. Had it been high summer, doubtless flies would have plagued him. Now only the stench of his burden perfumed the frosty air. Short and skinny as he was, the ratty collection of moth-eaten wool he wore as a coat made him look as if he were wearing an older brother’s clothes.

Rathe glanced around. “Where are the others?”

Stiny dropped his bucket and gave a languid, one-shouldered shrug. “Berry had to go fishing with her da,” he said, speaking of the young girl with the large red wen growing on her chin. “An’ last night, Amers tried to steal a stew bone back from a bastard of a cur-dog and got bit-lost a finger, he did.” Stiny wiggled his little finger to indicate which one. “Helmund … well, he says you’re naught but a lack-witted arsehole, if you think shadows are after you. He wants no part.”

Rathe took no offense. “Then I take it you haven’t seen any shadows?”

“Oh, I see ‘em all the time.” Stiny rubbed a hand through his tangled nest of wheat-colored hair, making it stand up in greasy knots. “Course, they ain’t really shadows, so much as folk who think if they stay in the dark, no one will know what they’re up to.”