Chapter 8
Eight
“Why do that?” I turned back to Tallu, his expression frozen in a frown.
“I have no love for him. For any of these humans. It costs me nothing for him to spend a night in agony. I still get the training from you that I want, no matter his state.” Na?’s words were no less of a threat said in her young voice, her small face twisted up in amusement.
“That is cruel.” I couldn’t look away from Tallu, his expression twisted. The idea of leaving him in torment was impossible. “He has fed you and cared for you. And you made a show of choosing him at the celebration.”
“I am the last ice dragon because of his house,” Na? said. “You take the gift of training I have given you and demand more largesse.”
“It would take too much magic for me to free him. I don’t have that much yet.” I dragged my gaze away from Tallu, focusing on her.
“When you speak to animals, does it take too much magic to speak to a whale, leaving you unable to speak to birds?” She pointed at me, her fingertip sharpening into a talon.
“That’s different. Speaking to animals is just…
communicating. I see how difficult it is for the electro mages to do their magic.
It tires them out. They run out of power.
” I thought about Commander Fimo, careless in his overuse of his electro magic, so confident that no one would ever be able to best him as long as he used it before they could strike a blow.
“You still do not believe me when I tell you how to perform ice magic. This will show you.” Her long, taloned finger, scaled like her fully formed body, pointed to Tallu. “Wake him or suffer the consequences.”
I gaped, my jaw working for a moment, before I turned to Tallu. Helplessly, I thought of the handful of snow I had been able to make. That was not enough. That level of magic was not enough.
“Ice is its own language. Call to it, animal speaker.” Na? crossed her legs, leaning forward over her knees, her eyes fixed on me.
Swallowing, I turned back to Tallu, then closed my eyes. I couldn’t do this with the guilt beating in my heart, the anxiety running through my veins.
Fine. I would try. And when I failed, I would make her fix it.
“Let him go,” I said. My voice was desperate, and I thought about how I would talk to Asahi or Sagam or even Nohe. Sharper, more of an order. “Let him go.”
The sharp increase in cold showed what the ice thought of my orders.
Na? had said that cold was a friend I could call on when I needed help, a friend whose call I would answer, but whose call would I answer now? Who did I trust in this place where I couldn’t even trust myself?
An image of my sister came into my head. If Eona? called me now, I would go to her in an instant. As soon as I thought that, I knew it was a lie.
My eyes strayed to Tallu, lying next to me, his frozen body so still. If Eona?, the only person who knew me better than myself, came to me right now and said she needed me to come with her, I could not leave Tallu alone. I could not abandon him to the fate we’d agreed to end together.
Angrily, I turned away, glaring at Na?. “Let him go.”
“Make me.” Her words were implacable, as unyielding as the ice. In the north, a stray chunk of ice floating in the water could destroy a ship, could kill men before they could even breathe to scream. That was what Na? was, inside the body of a child.
No wonder my mother had said the north didn’t cry when the last ice dragon died. No wonder she had gifted me the last egg, hoping to unleash such a cold enemy on the Southern Imperium.
“Treat it like a friend. A friend you have made here, one you must always keep your eye on for fear that it will stab you in the back.” Her eyes drew me in, and when she reached out, I opened my hand to accept her small palm.
It was frozen cold, and I wrapped my fingers around hers. She glared at me. “Take it.”
I found myself holding a small nugget of ice, prismatic and glistening, and completely unmelting in my hand.
When I closed my hands around it, I could hear a thrum, a vibration, and I gasped.
It was the same feeling I got when I could hear electro magic or when I had witnessed Miksha using her blood magic.
Those were not real voices, not separate beings, but the echo of their users’ intentions, the magic the tool they were using, as a leatherworker chose the right needle, the right awl for the pelt she was given.
“But it’s not… it’s not real,” I said, suddenly understanding. “It’s not a person. It’s me.”
“Yes,” Na? said, delighted. “Yes! It’s you, an extension of you, an unused third arm, but one you must be careful of because it is dangerous.”
An iceberg was so large, so lethal, and so beautiful, that I realized why the great northern bear’s son might have fallen in love with it. After all, I had fallen in love with Tallu.
If the ice magic was an extension of me, then it was my desire, my belief that was the driving force. All the techniques in the world were useless if I didn’t actually want anything, if I didn’t have the conviction to know that the magic would work for me.
And I knew what I wanted, just as clearly as Miksha had wanted to heal Velethuil, just as passionately as Commander Fimo had intended to kill me.
I breathed out a long stream of air, then let myself truly reach for the ice.
I tried to think of it like pulling on my leather armor, like grabbing hold of an unfamiliar wolf’s claw.
Wake him up. I felt my desire echo through the magic, and it was worse and better than I had assumed. The magic didn’t simply echo my desires, it amplified them, like sunlight reflected off of mirrors and refracted through a prism.
Wake him up.
The threads of frost glimmered in the air, catching everything around us like a spiderweb. Everything else was frozen in time, except for Na? and me.
The threads around Tallu began to shake, fracturing one at a time until Tallu’s eyes snapped open.
He gasped a deep breath, sitting up and coughing. When his russet eyes met mine, both of his eyebrows went up.
“Airón?” He said my name as though that was the entirety of the question.
“Tallu.” I let myself smile, the feeling of it tremulous and hesitant but true. “I woke you up.”
Tallu frowned, looking around. He took in the lamp in the corner, its flickering light frozen, the tent flap halfway open from a chilly breeze, hanging in midair awkwardly. “I was not dreaming.”
I shook my head, feeling strangely guilty, the pang of it eating up my stomach. “No. But there was no way to tell you, not with every ear listening to our intimate conversations.”
His eyes finally landed on Na?, arms wrapped around her knees, holding them tight to her chest. She looked up at him through her pale eyelashes.
“Who is this?” But he was already searching the room, and from the way his eyes jerked back to her, he had realized that the dragon was missing. “Ice dragon.”
“At least you’re faster at it than I was. She dragged me through the forest before I figured out who she was. I’m beginning to think I’m the slower of the two of us.” But I couldn’t help the grin on my face.
I had saved him. I’d protected him when he was helpless. Moreover, now we had a way to speak with something close to the privacy we’d once used to be ourselves.
After all these days on the road, I had felt so stifled.
There had been no way to share anything honestly; I couldn’t risk the wrong person hearing it.
I had experienced a fraction of what Tallu had spent his entire life going through, and it made his strength of purpose all the more wondrous to me.
“But you woke me up.” Tallu frowned, rubbing his forehead, biting his lip as he considered the implications. He narrowed his eyes at the walls of the tent, at the frost hanging in the air. “What magic is this?”
“I’m learning ice magic,” I admitted. “Badly. Then again, who could correctly perform in less than a week a kind of magic no human has ever attempted?”
“How?” Tallu looked between me and Na?. When he turned back, he was frowning. “I thought you lost all of your magic when Commander Fimo stole it from you.”
“Well, apparently, when he tried to dig out my brain like a patch of mint growing in the garden, he left room for something else to bloom.” My lips stretched. I had heard Terror earlier. I would hold on to that fact; if I could learn ice magic, I could relearn animal speak.
“Your brain—your magic—is more to me than a patch of weeds in the garden.” Tallu reached out, and his fingertips were cold, as though they still retained some hint of the freeze I had freed him from.
“You are the garden, you are all the flowers I would ever want to see, and all the fruit I would ever want to consume.”
“Talk to me like that and you’ll find out exactly what else we can do in this frozen bubble of time,” I teased.
“We must get on with the lesson,” Na? said.
Tallu started, his eyes round, his russet gaze sharpening. “You can speak.”
“In riddles,” I muttered unhappily.
“I can speak,” Na? said. “The closer we get to the cities, the less we will be able to do this. I cannot freeze an entire town. The camp is easy enough, but anything beyond that would strain my powers.”
An idea occurred to me. “You could travel with us. In your human form. You wouldn’t need to be trapped in my satchel every day.”
“And your Dogs, who see every shadow as a possible assassin, they would not see me as a threat?” Na?’s scorn was clear in her youthful gaze, and she looked for all the world like any of the children back home when told something ridiculous and impossible by an adult they were sure was a fool.
“No more than they already do. We will have to explain it to them.” Tallu looked toward the tent flap, his eyes narrowed as he worked out the logistics of his own plan. “It helps that your human appearance is as small as a child.”