Douglas Niles: Winterheim

“The ogres have him now? They’ve taken him to their stronghold?” replied Mouse, his expression bleak.

Moreen nodded, then gestured to the two thanes.

“Tell them-” she began to say, then paused as another interval of coughing seized her. Even as she had started to speak, she hadn’t known what she was going to say.

“Tell them that I am going to get him back as soon as I can get ashore and make a plan.”

Kerrick looked around and quickly realized that he was lying in one of the nicer suites in the upper reaches of Brackenrock’s keep. He could see the midnight sun through the south-facing window, low and pale over the distant peaks of the Glacier Range, the rugged mountains beyond the Tusker Escarpment. His first thought was that he was dreaming, but when he shifted in the soft bed he felt a twinge in his right leg and remembered everything: the voyage back to this fortress, the desperate escape from the sinking boat, and the miraculous appearance of a sailboat on the surface of the sea.

The next thing he saw was Mouse, seated on a chair beside the bed, studying him worriedly.

“How’s the leg?” asked the Arktos sailor.

The elf blinked in surprise, stretching the limb that had been badly broken when he lost consciousness. “Not bad at all,” he replied. “Have I been out for weeks, or did Dinekki have something to do with that?”

“Her healing spells are the best in all the Icereach,” Mouse said with a smile. “She said you’d be jogging around by tomorrow. No, you haven’t been out long-we brought you, Moreen, and that little fellow ashore just a few hours ago.”

“Captain Pneumo was lost, and Divid, too,” sighed the elf, feeling a weary sadness. “Still, if you hadn’t been sailing past when you were, I don’t think any of us would have made it to shore.”

Exhausted, Kerrick leaned back and closed his eyes.

“I still can’t believe it!” the young Arktos man said, shaking his head in amazement. “I thought I was the only boat on the sea, and then people start popping up on both sides of me. To find out it was you and the Lady … and that little fellow. What kind of a person is he, anyway?”

“A gully dwarf,” Kerrick said with a grimace. “Not the most appealing folks of Krynn, but he was a loyal crewman, and … and he lost his best friend.”

“He didn’t seem too broken up about it. He was pilfering fish from the market down at the waterfront within a minute or two after landing. Moreen had to talk Old Cutscale out of throwing him into the harbor. Now he’s drunk, I think-he found his way into the cook’s beer barrel.”

“Yes, that’s Slyce,” the elf agreed. “I’m glad he had the sense to climb up when the boat started to sink.”

“You,” Mouse continued, “how … why were you coming back underwater? What about Cutter ?”

The very word, the name of his beloved sailboat, nearly broke Kerrick’s heart. He looked at his friend, very possibly the only man in all the Icereach who could understand the depths of his attachment to the boat that had been left to him by his father.

“She sank,” he explained, trying to hold back the anguish. “We accidentally rammed the same metal boat that brought us so close to Brackenrock. Staved in the bow, and she went down like a stone.”

“All your gold … it was on board?” Mouse said, remembering.

“Aye. Eight years’ work-and I would let it go without regret, if I could only have my Cutter back.”

“She was a beauty,” the man agreed. “Like a swan, while poor Marlin is at best a duckling.”

Kerrick closed his eyes again. He didn’t have the energy to think about his future-and now, without his boat, the course of his life seemed destined to be guided by forces, powers, beyond his control. He was in a land where the sun disappeared for three months at a time, where icebergs the size of mountains loomed in foggy ocean mists, where he had grown accustomed to surviving on hard bread and fiery, intoxicating warqat, on meat and fish and little more.

If he had been in a mood of fairness, he would have acknowledged that there was in fact much more to the Icereach than this. He had great friends among these loyal people, the Arktos-and among the Highlanders as well. There were summer days of literally endless sunlight, vistas of sea and fjord to explore, places where neither elf nor human nor ogre had ever ventured. Above all things Kerrick Fallabrine was a sailor, and the Icereach, notably the coastlines of the White Bear and Dracoheim Seas, made as thrilling a nautical life as anywhere upon the world.

At least, they did when those waters weren’t frozen solid, layered in mast-high snowdrifts and scoured by winds so bitter they threatened to tear flesh from bone. That was the side of the Icereach he pictured looming now, ahead of him a lifetime of such winters. Moreen would be gone after fifty or sixty of them-

He stopped short. This was a dangerous line of thought, and he had schooled himself never to go there. With his own elf blood likely to grant him five or more centuries of life, it would be foolish to nurture an attachment to any human. He had proven a useful companion, even ally, to the chiefwoman of the Arktos, and she in turn had been an ally and a friend to him. That was as far as it went, as far as it could ever go.

It did not occur to him to blame her for the loss of his boat or his gold. True, he had been bearing her upon a mission of her own devise-a mission that never would have been undertaken if not for her determination, the force of her will, and her courage, but he had gone willingly enough. At least, that’s the way he chose to remember it now.

“What about Moreen? Is she all right?”

Mouse grimaced, and Kerrick felt a stab of fear. “What? Is she injured?”

“No, not yet anyway.”

“What’s wrong, then?”

“Maybe you remember those two men on my boat? They were Highlander thanes-I was bringing them here by sea, to join a dozen of their fellows who marched here overland. They wanted to talk to Moreen.”

“And?”

“She told them that Strongwind Whalebone has been captured by the ogres that he’s been taken to Winterheim as a slave.”

“Yes-I’m sure they were unhappy to hear that their king has been taken by the enemy, but surely they don’t blame Moreen for that?”

“Well, maybe not in so many words, but Moreen seems to blame herself.”

“What do you mean?” asked the elf in growing alarm.

“Just that she spoke to the thanes as soon as she landed. She told them that she intends to go to Winterheim, to enter the ogre fortress, and to bring Strongwind Whalebone out alive.”

Kerrick slumped back in the bed, staring up at the smoke-limned ceiling beams. He, like Moreen, had witnessed Strongwind’s capture, and like Moreen he regretted it deeply, but he never would have considered such a mad scheme of rescue. No human who had ever been hauled off to Winterheim had escaped the ogre clutches, not in the long history of the Icereach. He chuckled, soon laughing out loud.

“Are you all right?” Mouse asked, concerned.

“Of course,” the elf responded. “I wonder, has there ever been a leader like Moreen Bayguard?”

“I don’t think so,” the Arktos sailor replied, allowing a smile to cross his own features. “I’m going to go with her, of course,” he added.

“I know you are,” said Kerrick, “and Bruni, naturally, and all those Highlanders. Why, it will be a regular war party-a suicide march to glory!”

Mouse scowled. “I don’t know about that. You must stay here, of course, and get better-”

“Stay here?” Kerrick snorted, laughing again. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world!”