David Cook: Soldiers of Ice

“Excellent. The less time wasted, the better. Here’s to a safe journey and a successful mission, my dear.” With tankard raised, Jazrac toasted her success.

The next day Martine, suffering from a slight hangover, set to work preparing for her departure. Shadowdale wasn’t a large city, nor even a border town where outfitters thronged, so it took only the better part of the day to gather all that was needed—flour, salt, jerky, dried fruit, flatbread, sugar, lard, arrowheads, oil, extra bowstrings, needles, thread, and more. She especially wanted soap, since she had no desire to do without the luxury a bath might offer, even in some glacial lake. By nightfall, as she stretched her legs before the fire at the Old Skull, the ranger was relieved to be through haggling with the village’s only trader, the irascible Weregund. Her status as a Harper, which it seemed everyone in town knew about, didn’t make much of an impression on him, and every purchase had been a battle. Her supplies were finally complete, though, even the soap, and tomorrow she and Astriphie could hit the trail. As she gingerly sipped at her ale, she toyed with Jazrac’s little knife, playfully refracting the flames of the fire from its blade.

“You’ll be leaving us tomorrow, then?” Jhaele asked, her hair the bloody color of a hunter’s moon in the blazing firelight. Pot in one hand, she offered up a fresh ladle of ale. “Old Weregund told me you were at his place buying supplies.”

Martine nodded, tossing back the dregs of her mug. The innkeeper sloshed another round into Martine’s cup. “This one’s on the house.”

“Well, thank you, Jhaele.” Suddenly flustered by the landlady’s kindness, it was the best Martine could manage. “Call it a traveler’s blessing. May Tymora’s wheel turn in your favor.”

“And may your house know the joy of Lliira’s smile,” Martine replied. She reluctantly raised her mug to Jhaele, unwilling to get into another night of toasting.

“Fair enough. Here’s to the ladies of luck and joy.” She raised her ladle to match Martine’s toast. Draining it in a long draught, she wiped the foam from her chin and looked down with a kindly expression at the younger woman, still stretched in the chair. “I’ll see that the stableboy has Astriphie fed and ready in the morning. You’d better rest up for tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Jhaele.” The landlady was already leaving as Martine spoke. Left again to herself, Martine settled back into the small firelit cocoon that surrounded her chair. The knife blade resumed its flashing in the light, somehow less playful than before.

Although she’d only been staying at the inn for a few weeks, Martine hadn’t expected the farewells to sting so much. After all, besides Jhaele and Jazrac, there were few people she really knew here. She’d been pointedly avoiding most of the Dalesmen with a Harper’s natural instinct for secrecy. Now, slightly tipsy and pleasantly tired, she felt a poignant stab of regret at the prospect of leaving the sleepy little hamlet. The flowing river, the winter-stripped trees, even the cracked, barren slopes of Old Skull seemed somehow homey and comforting. I could live here as well as anywhere else , the Harper thought idly, but she knew she wasn’t ready to settle anywhere just yet. I’ll be back , she told herself before draining her mug and trundling off to bed.

The dawn came with Martine feeling ill-rested and anxious. Journeys always do this to me, she noted irritably as she climbed out of bed. She could never sleep soundly the night before a trip, always waking up at hours only marked by their darkness, always jittery with the hopes and the tensions of wanderlust.

Astriphie’s shrill cry from the stable yard got the ranger’s sluggish blood moving. It was time to shake off the numbness of town and return to the wilds where she really belonged.

After a quick splash of chill water that passed for a rinse and a struggle with her traveling clothes, Martine clomped down the worn wooden stairs and into the yard. The pale morning sun washed over the cobblestones, the light having yet to reach the full richness of the day.

Martine was greeted by a harsh birdlike shrill that turned to a whinnying squawk. “Astriphie, keep still!” she shouted as her mount reared back, tossing its head so that it threatened to swing the goggle-eyed stableboy clinging to its halter clean over the yard fence. Astriphie was no ordinary steed, but a hippogriff, with the forequarters an enormous bird and the hindquarters a sturdy horse, the juncture between the two marked by a pair of golden-feathered wings. The beast clicked the bill of its eaglelike head, threatening playfully to snap the stableboy’s arm like a dry splinter. The lad trembled, almost dropping the rope in abject terror, not being able to distinguish the hippogriff’s playfulness from hunger.

The Harper hurriedly took the reins, and the boy scrambled to safety behind a stable door. “Astriphie, stop!” Martine commanded, punctuating her words with a quick falconer’s whistle as the hippogriff reared up again. A sharp tug brought the creature back down, its front talons scrabbling on the stone while its rear hooves beat out an irritated tattoo. It craned its feathered head around to fix one blinking eye on Martine and then clacked in disapproval until she reached up and stroked the feathers of its massive wings soothingly. The long equine tail flicked against its haunches as if to point out where to scratch next.

“Good girl, Astriphie,” the Harper said softly as she automatically ran her hands over the saddle straps, checking their fittings, making sure her packs and saddlebags were secure. High above the forests was no place to discover a loose girth. Golden-pinioned wings beat the air in a gentle whoomph that swirled a maelstrom of dust and straw. The saddle slipped as the mighty trapezius muscles of the flying beast rippled under the leather seat, but the straps held tight. Satisfied, Martine tossed a coin to the boy. By now he had recovered enough to venture out from behind the door. Martine led Astriphie out into the road and lightly swung into the saddle. The stableboy ran to the fence to watch as the pair trotted, then galloped down the road, until at last, with a muscular heave of its great wings, the hippogriff lifted from the earth and sailed away over the top of the brown-leafed forest.

All day they flew east, soaring over the forest, the coast of the Moonsea barely in sight to the north. With only the briefest of stops for rest, they pressed on the next day and those that followed, until on the fourth day, they passed the vulture-haunted spires of Hillsfar, then three more to carry them past the streets of Mulmaster tumbling down the mountain slopes, and farther east to where boats could cross the Moonsea to the rocky shores of Vaasa. Here Martine nosed Astriphie northward and piloted the hippogriff over the stormy waters of the Moonsea until they sighted the northern coast, where they rested in a village of fishermen too poor to be suspicious of such a strange traveling pair.

After a few days of dining on fish while Astriphie took a well-deserved rest, the pair resumed their northerly course, following the trails up passes winding through the mountains that isolated the north. They flew over the northern stretches of Vaasa, where people thought all strangers were Damaran spies, and beyond to the plains of Damara, where villagers spoke in whispers of her supposedly Vaasan looks. Mindful of these animosities and suspicions, Martine kept her questions few and short when she stopped in villages, passing herself off as a merchant’s agent looking for new markets for her employer.

By this subterfuge, Martine passed through Damara and found herself at last flying over the snowbound ridge of an isolated valley, the last before the walls of the Great Glacier itself. Samek, it was called, home to a village of gnomes, or so the garrulous frontiersman farther south had claimed. “Be the last outpost afore the wilds,” he swore. “Mebbe they can guide you to the glacier, though ’tain’t a harder-headed batch than them little folk. ’Tain’t got no trade, an’ they put up with no truck at all from outsiders, big folks especially.”