Cold Steel

Vai collapsed beside me onto the pebbled strand. He fumbled to unbuckle himself from his carpenter’s apron, wheezing as he gulped in air.



I thought the weight of the pack was going to crush me. Rolling onto my side took all my strength. The hard stones felt heavenly because they were solid. The sea sloshed up to tickle my boots, then receded. Fiery Shemesh, but I was freezing!



The wind was coarse and unforgivingly cold.



Vai was still wheezing. I tugged my arms out of the straps to shed the pack. With the sodden basket bumping on my rear, I crawled over to him, only to realize he was not wheezing but laughing in a hoarse sort of way.



He smiled at me. Smiled!



His smile acted as an infusion of hope. My lips twitched, fighting upward.



“Look!” He gestured.



A blustery gray sea stretched away from the shore. Across the channel, barely visible under a haze of cloud, rose the blue-dark shore of another land. But that was not the strange thing. A ship glided atop the waves, three-masted, sails unfurled but unmoving despite the stinging breeze. As I gaped, wondering why I could not see any sailors racing about on the deck or climbing the masts, one of the sails began to ripple, then the second, and then the third. Where there hadn’t been one before, a man appeared halfway up the mainmast.



It was illusion, taking form in front of my eyes as he wove cold magic with a speed and dexterity that astounded me.



“We’ve been washed back into the mortal world, love.” The ship vanished as he sat up and spat. “Gah. What I wouldn’t do for a glass of my mother’s hoarhound tea sweetened with honey. Catherine! You’re shuddering.”



He pulled me against him. I could have sworn warmth radiated from his body, although it was hard to feel anything. My wool skirt clung to my legs, the fabric crackling as if it were actually beginning to freeze.



“There’s shelter,” he said. “Walk with me.”



The shoreline was stony beach. A little peninsula of land sloped up to a cliff of ice that loomed over us like fate. There was no vegetation, nothing but rock and ice and sand. Crevices and canyons had dug staircases into the ice cliff, pocked with boulders. On the tiny peninsula, lying between ice cliff and icy sea, a deposit of huge rocks formed a low cave.



“See if there’s any driftwood to build a fire,” he said. “The cave is the sort of place it might get swept into and caught.”



“I c-c-can’t build a fire.”



“Did you pack no flint?”



“You’ll k-k-kill the fire.”



“As long as I can work cold magic, I will not freeze to death, but you will. Do you hear me, Catherine? Tell me you understand what I’m saying.”



The wind gusted out of the north, sweeping over the lip of the ice. A voice flew on that wind, dangerous and wild. A howl rose.



I staggered to a halt. “Do you hear that?”



“Come on, love. Just a little farther. We’ll see if there’s fuel for a fire and then I’ll go back and fetch our gear…”



Wolves.



We hadn’t escaped. The Hunt was after us. My sire had already found us. What did he want from me? Or was he just angry that I had rescued first my cousin and then my husband from him?



The presence of beasts stalking a person concentrates the mind wonderfully. The landscape before me settled and I knew where I was. I had reached for my mother, and somehow the connection between us had brought me to a place she had once walked. “They left the other boat in the cave. We’ve got to drag it down to the water and get out of here before the wolves come.”



His grip tightened on my arm. “Love, you’re raving. There’s no wolves, and no boat…” I curled my lips in a silent snarl that made his eyes widen. “But let’s just go see about the boat.”



We picked our way up the slope and in under the dank shadow. A huge slab of a boulder made a weighty roof, giving the cave the look of a crude shelter of stone built by a giant. I cleared debris off a hump to reveal canvas stretched taut over a rowboat. The boat had been turned over and raised off the ground on stones. Two oilcloth bundles with oars and oarlocks had been tucked along the underside of the benches, together with an unexpected bounty of a spare flint, an iron pot, and a hunter’s knife.



“Lord of All. How did you know this would be here?”



“My mother reached out to me from the past and pulled me here.” I dragged the canvas off the boat. It was big enough to seat six men, but I thought we could handle it. Howls drifted off the height. “We have to get out of here before the wolves come. Can’t you hear them?”