Barbara Hambly - 05 Icefalcons Quest

To ride with his brothers and sisters again. To lie in silence among his silent hounds. To track caribou across bad country and to know that he had them.

To be one with his people again, with their narrow dreams hard and focused as diamonds, with the bitter beauty of the dying land. If he survived.

He looked up, aware that he wasn't alone.

"Will you go, o my brother?" Her face was a dark pearl in the midst of an explosion of black fur, gleaming a little with starlight and mammoth grease.

The Icefalcon raised his brows in surprise. "I did not think there was question, o my sister. I am the Icefalcon. I would have been chief among our people. Blue Child robbed me of what would have been mine. Do you question that?"

She shook her head. "I believe that you would have been chieftain of our people," she said. She sat down next to him on the broken projection of black rock that thrust up through the snow-the tallest peak of a mountain ridge buried beneath the all-devouring ice.

"And even after eleven years, I think you could have that again. Maybe more surely because you are a man now, with a man's strength and the core of a man's experience. They will listen to your voice in counsel and follow you in war. But you are wrong when you think Blue Child robbed you out of greediness, to have what you deserved."

"For the sake of Dove in the Sun, then?" She had been much in his mind since the confrontation with Zay in the subcrypts, as if the love he had once borne for her were growing back, mutated by understanding into a different form.

Cold Death sighed. She was a long time silent, her arms folded, a stubby little figure in her heavy coat.

"You are my brother," she said at last, "and I love you. But you are not a leader."

The Icefalcon drew in breath to protest, then let it out. In all his life he had never known Cold Death to be wrong. He sat silent now, looking across into her face.

She scratched her nose and pulled her hood more closely over her shagged hair and the naked patches in her scalp. "There are those who lead," she said, "and those who follow, and those who walk alone. You walk alone, o my brother. Blue Child is a leader. She destroyed you, not out of malice, nor for jealousy's sake, but seeking the good of our people. Your adherents liked you and would have followed you in council and fought for you against her and against their kin and brothers as well. Noon liked you. You have charm, chilly bastard that you are. The Blue Child has none. But she knew she would be a better leader for the people. Do you understand?"

The Icefalcon was silent.

"Were you a leader," Cold Death went on quietly, "you would now be leading the Guards. Were you a leader, you would have gone back for Dove in the Sun when she was wounded."

"She could not have been brought back," argued the Icefalcon. "She was dying. I could not endanger the hunt for her."

"You could have sent the hunt back to safety and made sure that she did not die alone. Blue Child would have, even when there was no hope of saving her, even in the face of possible death herself."

The Icefalcon thought about that, silenced once more.

"The child Tir would have."

For a long time he simply looked down at his hands and the dagger he held in them. At the dim starshadow on the snow. But he saw Eldor Endorion, and Loses His Way, and even Zay of the Keep of the Shadow at the End of Time, who took on the burden that his shoulders were not strong enough to bear. At length he said, "She could have told me that."

"Would you have listened?"

Dove in the Sun laughing as she rode out with his hunting party. Blue Child's face, ugly and craggy, across the longhouse fire, calculation in those wolfish ice-blue eyes.

Noon weeping as he stepped from the darkness into the red light of the fire and held out to the Icefalcon the white shell.

Stays Up All Night, and Fifty Lovers, and Red Fox, all ready to fight Blue Child's friends for him. Ready to divide the tribe, or to split off from it, at a time when the harshness of the winters and the thinning away of the herds as they migrated farther and farther to the south were threat enough.

And for what? he thought. For what?

He walked by himself. He had always walked by himself. He knew this of himself; Cold Death was the same way. He had dealt well with his kin and his friends, but in a way he had always felt separated from them. Unlike Zay in the dark beneath the Keep, this isolation was a thing that he knew and loved.

But it was hard to think that he would not walk by himself in the Night River Country again.

Cold Death was gone in the morning. The day was clear; only the thinnest mist of steam rose from the center of the lake, and already the ice was blue and hard on its verges. Even with the clearing of the steam he could see no sign of the camp of the Talking Stars People, but he knew he had but to circle the lake and they would find him.

The Empty Lakes People were breaking their camp to go. Unsurprisingly, none of them mentioned Cold Death's absence. Such were her spells that the Icefalcon doubted they'd even been aware of her presence.

It mattered little since he knew he'd see her again.

"I think she departed so that she would not see the fight between Blue Child and myself," he said to Hethya, binding up their provisions of frozen caribou meat. "She considers Blue Child a better leader for the Talking Stars People than I."

"Well, that's damn cold, I must say!" Hethya bridled. Even under a coat of grease, thin with fatigue and crisscrossed with bruises and demon-bites, her face had a flirtatious prettiness. She would do well, the Icefalcon thought, at the Keep. "There's a sister for you!"

"I have learned," said the Icefalcon gravely, "never to gainsay my sister."

The others, he had noticed, steered clear of the subject of Blue Child. Ingold had not said one word that indicated that he expected the Icefalcon either to go or stay-Ingold was good at that-but had merely gone about selecting such provisions as the Empty Lakes People could spare and seeing them packed.

Now the old man came over to him, leaning on his staff, Tir walking in his shadow. The boy had had very little to say at first and showed a disinclination, even during the daylight hours, to leave the snow-house.

Hethya, and Loses His Way, and Beautiful Girl had spent a good deal of time there with him, and he looked a little better now, as if he were eating again, though the Icefalcon suspected he still had nightmares and would for many years to come.

At least he remembered, thought the Icefalcon, what it was to have friends and to value them above the solitude of complete safety in a fortress, and that was something.

In the cool gray sunlight the half-healed gash on his face was a great jagged red double line, scabbing and horrible to look at. The children back at the Keep would love it.

With them walked Loses His Way, and it was he who spoke. "My friend," he said, "shall we cross over to the camp? Your kindred should be astir by now." It was an hour or so after dawn-a sly dig, since the people of the Real World would take shame to themselves to be still sleeping after the first whisper of light.

Among the other sleds, Loses His Way called out, with Yellow-Eyed Dog gamboling and biting at snowflakes like an idiot, and Loses His Way turned to grin at him, and waved.

He had, the Icefalcon calculated, only a few days to live. Yet he would lose one or perhaps two of them-perhaps all, if the Talking Stars People took exception to his entry into their camp-to help him, should he ask for help.

So that he could return to the people he had left, to the life of the Real World, that he himself so treasured.

To give him the gift of choice.

"Go with your kindred, o my enemy," the Icefalcon said. "I have nothing to say to Blue Child, nor to any of the People of the Talking Stars."