THE ICE GROANED beneath my feet, threatening to cleave in two. I regained my balance and continued trudging forward. One step at a time, that was what I needed to focus on. Not the groaning, creaking, shifting icefall.
The icefall—a deadly mass of broken snow and ice that flowed slowly down the side of a mountain—was the only viable route onto Raksha, according to Mingma’s maps. I had estimated that it should only take River and me an hour or two to cross it, if we kept up a good pace. I thought we could reach the summit of the mountain, and the sky city, in three or four days.
It was pure guesswork. I had no idea what we were facing.
I hopped across a narrow crevasse, my arms out at both sides for balance. Despite the eeriness of walking over a moving carpet of ice, I couldn’t deny that the icefall was beautiful. It was as if some giant had taken an ax and carved the glacier into strange and beautiful shapes. When the sunlight hit the pillars of ice that poked up from the surface, they shone like blue-green glass. Ripples and cracks in the ice reminded me of the rings of a tree stump, only there was no discernible pattern.
I tried to keep my mind off the painful scene that had unfolded with Tem, once he realized I was leaving. I had told him the plan, which was highly sensible—he and Dargye would remain at camp, to rest and stand watch over the bulk of our supplies. When River and I returned with the witch talisman, hopefully in a week or so, they would be ready with spells and medicines and anything else we needed to recover from our journey.
To say Tem wasn’t happy with this plan was an understatement.
“How can you say this is sensible?” he had yelled. It was all he managed to get out before his voice dissolved into a wracking cough. I grabbed his shoulder and forced him to sit down by the fire. He leaned against his knees, coughing until he could barely breathe. Finally, he leaned against me, spent.
“Please don’t do this,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
I felt a wrenching pain in my chest. “I have to.”
“I’m coming with you.”
I would have laughed if it weren’t so sad. “Tem. You’ll be dead before the day is out.”
“I have my magic.”
“Yes.” I leaned back to look at him. “And if you stay here and rest a few days, you might be able to use it to heal yourself and Dargye. You need to stop worrying about following me.”
“Kamzin.” Tem gazed at me. His face was so pale that I could have cried, his eyes larger in his thin face. He had lost the most weight out of all of us over the course of our journey. “Kamzin, you’re all I have. How can I stop worrying about you?”
I pressed his hand between mine, pushing the tears back. “Because I’ll be all right,” I said fiercely. “I promise. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Tem seemed about to say something, but the fight had left him. His gaze dropped to the ground. We sat there for a long moment, and the only sound was the wind whistling over the glacier, and the rustling of oilcloth. Then, Tem rose and ducked inside our tent. When he reemerged, he was carrying the kinnika.
“Take them,” he said, pressing them into my hand.
“I can’t.” I tried to give them back. But Tem stepped away, and they fell onto the rock. The black bell made no sound when it hit, but then, of its own accord, it let out a whisper. I paid it no heed—I was used to its errant murmurings by now.
“You need them.”
“Not as much as you do.” He picked up the kinnika and dropped them in my lap. “At least you’ll have fair warning if anything attacks you. And you know the protective spells. I know you do.”
I stared glumly at the chain of bells. Certainly, they would warn me that some monstrous beast was about to tear me in two, allowing me time to mull over my demise before it arrived. I could say as much to Tem, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. Magic came as easily to him as breathing, and so, naturally, he refused to accept that it couldn’t be the same for me, if not for my obstinate refusal to apply myself. I gazed into his eyes, and swallowed my arguments. If it would make him happy, I would take the kinnika. But that was the only reason.
Half an hour later, I was packed. I gave Tem one final hug good-bye, part of me hating myself as I saw the sorrow in his eyes. I knew he would spend every moment worrying until I returned. I fell into step behind River, and I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to have that image of my best friend as he grew smaller and smaller burned into my mind.
Unfortunately, my imagination supplied it anyway.
In contrast to my gloomy mood, River was in high spirits, chattering about rappelling techniques and hot-air-balloon maintenance and the last party he had attended in the Three Cities, and a dozen other things—I had a hard time keeping up with it all. He seemed relieved to be moving again, and determined to cover as much ground as possible by sundown. He paused only to hurry Azar-at, who was slithering over the ice some yards away. I wished he wouldn’t bother—I was much happier when the fire demon was out of sight.
“Are you sure you want to bring him along?” River said. He was eyeing Ragtooth, whose lithe body was slung half over my shoulder and half across my pack. He had been waiting outside my tent when River and I set off, looking as self-satisfied as it was possible for a fox to look.
“He’s coming whether I bring him or not.” In truth, I had been relieved to see Ragtooth again, so much that I had almost crushed his ribs hugging him. The fox had struggled mightily, twisting his head this way and that in a futile attempt to bite. I released him before he succeeded, and so he had to content himself with gnawing on my boot.
“There’s something unnatural about that creature,” River muttered, but he made no further complaint.
The terrain rose steadily as we left the icefall and followed a ridge that ran along the southern face of the mountain. The snow was only ankle-deep, and the going was still easy, but the terrain had steepened. We were climbing now, not hiking.
We were climbing Raksha. The thought made me shudder with a not-unpleasant fear.
Now that we were alone, with no one to wait for, River and I moved quickly. It was a wonderfully freeing feeling—I hadn’t realized, before, how much I had been holding myself back, forcing my steps to assume a slower rhythm than was natural. Lusha had once nicknamed me “the plow horse” for my dogged, tireless energy, and even I had to admit it fit. I would never be as graceful as my sister, who often seemed to float, rather than walk, across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud, but I had greater reserves of strength than anyone I knew.
I felt a pang when I thought of Lusha. I trusted Tem when he said that she and Mara had turned back—but why had they done so? Had they decided the mountain was too much for them? Or had something else, an injury perhaps, forced them to retreat?
As the sun rose higher, I estimated that we were nearly halfway to the Ngadi face, a wall of ice that connected the smaller Mount Ngadi to Raksha. Below the feature, Mingma had added a single note:
Tricky.
We stopped for an early lunch atop a knuckle of rock overlooking the glacier below. From this vantage point, it was stunningly enormous—easily a mile across when it reached the valley, a long tongue of ice nestled between Raksha and a neighboring, nameless mountain. The landscape in this part of the Aryas was little explored, and not all of the peaks had names. I felt strangely sorry for the smaller mountain, which, after all, was still much higher than those that surrounded my village.
“We should name it,” River said when I mentioned this. “Why not? Most mountains are named by explorers. Go ahead, pick something.”
“I don’t know.” I squinted. “From this angle, it reminds me of a boot. That curve there could be the arch.”
“Mount Boot? I think we can do better than that.” River dusted the crumbs off his hands, and pointed. “That little band there? Those are the coils of a snake ready to strike. The col is a hand wrapped around the snake’s neck—the peak is the head of a man, you can see the nose and a hint of a mouth. It’s Belak-ilen—the hero who slayed the serpent of creation before it swallowed the Earth. He strangled it with his bare hands, even as its venom spread through his body, killing him.”
I couldn’t help smiling. River’s face grew animated as he spoke, his cheeks flushed red by the cold. He looked several years younger than he was, and about as far as could be from the fearsome explorer of his reputation.
“Belak-ilen is all right,” I said. “Though I’ve never liked that story. I prefer ones with happy endings.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Yes.” My voice was quiet. “Aimo.”
River’s expression grew thoughtful. He gazed at the mountain. “There’s hardly a happy ending in that. But it is fitting, isn’t it?”
We began packing up the remains of lunch. We were traveling as light as possible, and not a single scrap of food could be wasted. We weren’t even bringing dragons, in order to avoid having to carry enough to satisfy their voracious appetites.
River glanced back at me often, to make sure I was keeping up, and I smiled at him, delighting in the simple pleasure of movement. He smiled back. His face was flushed, but otherwise he seemed about as tired as I was—which, with the warm sun on my face, and the mountainside stretched out before me like a dream, was not much. The foreboding I had felt at the thought of Raksha seemed to have vanished, unexpectedly, now that I was actually climbing it.
It grew warm as the day wore on. The sky was cloudless, the sun seeming to burn hotter the higher we climbed. Fortunately, the wind picked up in the afternoon, drying the sweat on my brow.
I can do this, I thought as we traversed a maze of seracs, boulder-sized lumps of ice and snow that towered over our heads, or leaned heavily against one another like weary giants. I felt better than I had in days. As if I could fly up the mountain, as if it were barely a challenge at all. It was how I often felt back in Azmiri, roaming about with Tem. And really, what was Raksha? A mountain. I had climbed mountains. I would climb Raksha just as I had climbed the others—by putting one foot in front of the other.
“Kamzin!” River shouted.
“What?” I almost laughed at the look on his face, it was so uncharacteristically serious. Something groaned strangely behind us. I felt something brush my pack, light as a bird’s wing, as a shadow passed over me. Then, suddenly, I was knocked off my feet by a tremendous impact.
I rolled, and would have rolled farther, if River hadn’t raced to my side and seized my arm. I drew myself to my knees, dazed. When I looked behind me, my heart stopped.
A serac had fallen into the space where I had been standing only a heartbeat ago. It was a monstrous size, taller than two men and wider than the widest tree. So heavy that its own impact had cleaved it in three—long, jagged fissures running through the ice like veins.
“Spirits,” I whispered. I couldn’t stop staring.
River took my chin in his hand. “Are you all right?”
I let him help me to my feet. My knees wobbled, and River grabbed me again. “I’m all right.”
Was I?
“I thought you were finished when I saw it start to fall,” River said. His expression was strange—he looked almost frightened. I had never known River to be frightened of anything, apart from the yak. He touched my face again, as if to reassure himself. “The spirits are looking out for you.”
“Are they?” I said faintly, glancing at the serac again. I could still feel its brush against my back, see its shadow envelop me.
“Let’s keep going,” I said. “I’m fine, really.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded, though my knees still felt weak. I wanted to put as much distance between us and the seracs as possible. But we had not traveled ten paces before there came another tremendous groan from behind us.
Another serac, perhaps weakened by its neighbor’s fall, crashed to the ground, sending up a plume of snow crystals. Another fell across it, cracking in two. Behind that, three more seracs, one after the other, toppled over with a mighty thud. I felt each impact through my boots.
River was still holding me. “Well,” he said, as finally the sounds of groaning and splintering melted to echoes, “at least we’re through the seracs.”
We didn’t speak much after that. By silent agreement, we hiked as rapidly as possible, our breath rising in great clouds around us. As the moments passed, and the terrain opened onto a steep but even meadow of snow, I began to feel like myself again. My hands stopped shaking, and I no longer heard the uncanny groan of the serac echo in my mind. But its shadow did not leave me.
We moved more cautiously, even after leaving the seracs behind. Our progress slowed further as we made our way up the side of a small cirque, a bowl-shaped depression in the mountainside. Mingma’s map clearly indicated that this was the best route, though it was exhausting—an uphill climb over broken piles of snow and ice. River and I were forced to stop frequently, to navigate the difficult path ahead. My knee throbbed with renewed vigor, slowing my pace and further dampening my mood.
We didn’t reach the Ngadi face until late afternoon. The shadow of the land had fallen upon it, and clouds obscured the hopefully flat terrain above. If possible, these things only made it more terrifying. The ice rose up, up, up—impossibly high and unforgivingly sheer. It curved around the mountainside, fading into mist and shadow, but what could be seen was monstrous, bigger than any ice wall I had ever faced. It could have been the edge of the world, a great solid barrier preventing entry to the mysteries beyond. The jagged striations reminded me of tear tracks, as if the ice was weeping.
“I guess this is it.” I swallowed. “There’s no other way up.”
“Mingma didn’t think so,” River said. “He surveyed this side of the mountain thoroughly, before he disappeared.”
It began to snow. The wind whistled around us, a thin, billowing sound. I shivered, trying unsuccessfully to shake off the shadow of unease that had stalked me all day. River tapped his ax against the ice wall, seeming to consider.
“We should make camp,” he said. “It’s only a couple of hours until sunset. We’ll hope for better weather in the morning.”
I squinted up at the mountain. “Why don’t we give it a try? I bet I can get high enough to see what’s above these clouds.”
“The winds will only get worse with elevation. And even if we do reach the top, we don’t know what sort of terrain we’ll be facing—Mingma’s notes past this point are unclear. I’m not getting stuck out in this storm.”
“All right,” I grumbled. River was making sense, and that was what annoyed me. He saw my expression and laughed.
“I can be patient sometimes,” he said.
We chose a spot that was as sheltered as possible to pitch our tent. Even still, with the rising wind and blowing snow, the tent flapped and shook so loudly that I doubted I would be getting any sleep that night. I found the bell Tem had used to block the winds in Winding Pass, and muttered the incantation. Nothing happened. I tried again, and the wind seemed to abate for a few seconds—though it may have been coincidence.
“You can put those away, Kamzin,” River said, smiling slightly. He made a gesture, and a drift of snow settled over the tent like a tea cozy. We dove inside, where it was so dark I could barely see my own hands. After some muttered cursing, River managed to light the lantern, suffusing the tent in a warm glow.
We ate our dinner in silence, cross-legged on our blankets. Once I had finished, and no longer had my hunger to occupy my thoughts, I began to feel awkward. I had known, when we made our plans, that River and I would be sharing his tent—it was impractical to bring two, given the limited weight we could carry. But only now was the realization of what that meant beginning to sink in.
River, for his part, did not seem awkward at all. He unearthed a small comb from his pack and started brushing Azar-at’s smoke fur, which had grown tangled during the day’s climb. He murmured to the fire demon periodically—I only caught the odd word over the howl of the wind. I suspected that Azar-at was replying, though the creature did not include me in the conversation.
“What are you talking about?” I said, yawning. The warmth of the tent was making me sleepy. Ragtooth had already dozed off in my lap. I scratched his belly, making his back foot twitch.
“Oh, this and that,” River said. “Azar-at thinks you climbed well today.”
“How nice,” I muttered.
River was quiet for a moment. “I’m glad you’re here, Kamzin. It’s selfish of me—but I’m glad.”
I smiled. “Well, someone has to be there to stop you from tumbling off a cliff because you’re paying more attention to the path ahead than you are to your feet.”
River laughed. It was a welcome sound, a contrast to the lonely moan of the wind. “I can be headstrong, it’s true. My brother Sky used to tease me about it. He said I wanted to run before I could walk. I was constantly driving our mother mad. Quite a few of my scars are from those days.”
The image of River Shara as a clumsy child, bumbling into things, made me laugh too. I lay down, drawing my blankets around me. “Are you close to your brothers?”
“Closer these days than we were. They’re much older than me—the youngest of the three is eight years my elder. I think that, for the most part, they saw me as more of a nuisance than a brother when we were growing up.”
I scratched Ragtooth’s chin. I could certainly understand that.
“I was desperate to win their approval,” River went on. “I followed them everywhere, particularly Sky. He was the most tolerant of me. To a point.”
“Did you fight often?”
“My brothers fought. They still do, though it’s not so innocent anymore. They are great men, but they care for little other than power.”
I tried to make out his expression in the darkness. It seemed to be a vague sort of grimace. Tem’s words came back to me. “And you don’t? Care about power, I mean.”
He gazed at me. “As a means to an end, it’s useful. But power for the sake of power is meaningless—empty air. I’ve never understood the appeal.”
We were quiet again. The falling snow tapped against the oilcloth like a visitor requesting entrance. My eyelids felt very heavy. I hovered at the edge of sleep, unwilling or unable to let it take me.
“I’m worried about Lusha,” I said quietly.
River shifted position. “Well, Mara’s never been the determined sort, though he’d claim otherwise. My guess is they encountered some difficulty and turned around.”
“That’s what Tem said.”
“Tem is probably right.”
“Aimo—” I faltered. “It was so quick. I can’t stop thinking about that. One minute she was behind me, and then—” I swallowed. “What if something like that happened to Lusha? What if she’s gone, and I never even had a chance to say good-bye?”
“It’s possible,” River said. “But either way, there’s nothing you can do now.”
Somehow, his calm acknowledgment brought me comfort, more than if he had denied my fears.
“Is there something else?” he said.
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t put my feelings into words. I only knew that, when I thought of Lusha, I felt fear, and worry, and anger at myself. There was something I was missing, I was sure of it.
River moved again. I couldn’t see him—it was too dark now, beneath our blanket of snow. Then he pressed his palm against the back of my hand, and we threaded our fingers together. My heart sped up, but I was tired, so tired. I turned on my side, trying to make out his outline in the darkness, even as my eyes drifted shut. As I fell asleep, my last memory was of a warm feeling of safety, the likes of which I hadn’t felt since leaving Azmiri.