Chapter 24
Fern stared at the elf’s prone form in dull shock as snow skirled around her knees and Tullah shouted something across the gap.
Astryx lay half obscured and unmoving in a drift that slowly pinked at her side, her hair riffling in the wind.
Fern was dimly aware of Nigel’s frantic cries from beneath the snow, and panicked noises coming from Breadlee. Zyll waded to Astryx and began tugging at one of her arms, to little effect.
These were things Fern registered as a distant observer, floating back and away and up into the silver sky.
A puff of vapor from Astryx’s lips broke the spell.
The Oathmaiden was alive, but the weather would surely kill them all if their enemies didn’t find a way to do it first.
“We have to get her out of here,” mumbled Fern, dropping her satchel and struggling forward to join Zyll, seizing the other arm.
“Must be turn-ling over,” said Zyll, her grin nowhere to be found.
Fern nodded and looped both forearms under Astryx’s left shoulder, groaning as she heaved.
The elf was hardly bulky, but she was twice Fern’s weight, at least, and the sheath on her back fought them the whole way.
Zyll dragged Astryx’s other arm across her body, and with much puffing and struggling, they managed to roll her face up.
“Be gentle! Oh, my lady, would that I had hands!” cried Nigel, his voice muffled by the snow that hid him.
The elf’s chest rose and fell erratically, her closed eyes like bruises in the bloodless flesh of her face.
Sparing a look across the bridge, Fern saw Tullah watching, fists on hips, braided hair whipping in the wind.
“Like a fucking vulture,” she muttered.
Gingerly inspecting Astryx’s side, she peeled away the cloth of her tunic to reveal a long, clean gash that immediately over-spilled with blood.
Fern’s knees went wobbly. “Godsdammit.” She spun to face Zyll.
“You have something in that coat of yours for this, don’t you? In one of those pockets? You have to.”
The goblin was already rummaging through them, pointed tongue out in concentration. Her hands emerged with a bundle of linen in one fist and Breadlee in the other. With a quick slice she hacked off a wad of the fabric and tossed it to Fern, who, amazingly, managed to catch it.
“Ugh, I’m still vibrating,” said the knife. “Stop waving me around!”
“Holding here,” said Zyll, indicating Astryx’s wound with Breadlee.
With a nod, Fern first unbuckled Astryx’s baldric and, with great effort, slid the sheath out from under her back.
Then she pressed the wad of linen against the wound, where it immediately blossomed red.
The goblin straddled the elf’s chest, passing one end of the remaining strip of cloth to Fern.
With one paw occupied stanching the wound, she used the other to assist Zyll in another awkward maneuver to lift and pass the wrapping under Astryx’s back.
The elf moaned and muttered something unintelligible as they cinched the bandage tight across her chest and tied an ugly knot to keep it in place.
“Be careful!” pleaded Nigel.
Fur clumped with sweat, Fern panted and took a step back, overheated despite the frigid snow burying her paws.
She stared from the fallen warrior to Bucket, who stamped nervously nearby, ducking his head toward the elf in clear anxiety. Any satisfaction at sort-of dressing Astryx’s wound vanished immediately at the impossibility of getting her up onto the horse’s back.
“There’s no way in all eight hells,” she whispered, despair threatening to choke her.
“Help me . . . up,” came a weak voice.
Fern turned to find Astryx’s ghostlight eyes burning into her own.
The elf had struggled to one elbow, trembling with cold or effort or shock.
Her wound had already leaked through the dressing and was dribbling into the snow again.
Zyll crouched at her other shoulder, providing grim support to keep her upright.
Fern’s impulse was to protest, to insist that there was no way the Oathmaiden should in any way move, much less scramble atop a horse.
But that was stupid, because if she didn’t, they were absolutely all going to die.
“Here, you can help,” she said to Nigel as she slogged over to drag him from his snowbank.
She’d expected him to be heavy, but her estimate was woefully short of the truth.
His point trailed through the snow in a wavering line as she lugged him the short distance to Astryx, who wavered almost as much. Fern wasn’t tall enough to stand him vertically with her paws on his hilt, so she gingerly grasped his blade and managed to arrange him pommel-up.
With a sharp intake of breath, Astryx wrapped one hand around his crosspiece, gathering her strength before hiking a knee and getting a foot underneath herself.
Supported by the goblin and rattkin, and using a blubbering Nigel as a walking stick, the elf squared herself with Bucket’s side.
Afterward, Fern would have had a hard time articulating how the three of them managed to get the Oathmaiden astride her horse. The blood that painted his side was evidence enough of the battle.
With increasingly numb fingers, Fern and Zyll got Nigel into his sheath, then slid it through one of Bucket’s girth straps. When Fern looked up from securing him with one of the dangling bits of leather, Astryx was unconscious and sprawled across the horse’s neck.
“We have to get the hells out of this snow,” she muttered, casting about for any sign of the road that had been buried in drifting white. She blinked. “The bells—where are the bells?”
Zyll seized a fistful of Fern’s cloak. She cocked one of her enormous ears into the wind, then pointed upslope. “To be following. Bring Buckley-boy.”
Fern couldn’t hear anything but wind moaning through the crags.
Then the goblin began to forge her way in the direction she’d indicated. Fern retrieved her satchel and slung it over a shoulder, then stood on tiptoe to grab the side of Bucket’s bridle. He obligingly dipped his head lower so she could reach it, and she led him after Zyll.
But not before turning back to holler at Tullah—
“I hope you fucking freeze!”
The orc probably couldn’t hear her, but Fern didn’t give a shit.
Fern had never trudged so thoroughly in her life.
The keenness of Zyll’s hearing was confirmed as they came upon another low wall of bells. Even in high wind, the weight of metal and the windbreak of their stone housings meant they only occasionally rang, their silvery voices easily lost amongst the mountains.
They stumbled along seemingly forever. There was little room for thought, only relentless forward motion.
Their passage reminded Fern dimly of a rolling theater she’d once seen in a shop in Murk’s fortress town, cleverly painted on the outside of a cylinder of thick paper.
The illustrated landscape unspooled in ceaseless repetition, lit by an interior lantern.
This was altogether less interesting, though. The terrain never changed, a world in black and white that drifted unendingly, marked only by the rise and fall of the shivering chime of bells.
Zyll’s patchwork coat seemed the only scrap of color for a thousand leagues.
Occasionally, Fern would remember to look back at Bucket’s passenger to make sure that she hadn’t slid off his side and been lost to a bank of snow, but it was an increasingly dull and distracted observation. She couldn’t hold on to dread or fear or any other sharp emotion for long.
As the light dwindled, the density and size of the flakes increased, and the temperature dropped further.
“Where the hells is this monastery?” mumbled Fern through frozen lips. Her whiskers drooped with ice. The satchel thumped against her hip, which ached at every impact.
Then, resolving from the ghostly gray, a dark, regular shape.
Her hope rose, then just as suddenly subsided as the relatively small size of the thing became apparent.
“What is it?” she shouted to Zyll.
The goblin looked back. “Camp-ling!” she cried, and made directly for it.
The structure was some sort of Tarimite way station for penitents, constructed of the same stone from which the ill-fated bridge had been quarried.
Its walls curved inward halfway up, tapering to a blunted point at its apex.
An arched portal flanked by a pair of bells led to a dark and icy interior.
Fern dropped Bucket’s halter and hustled inside after Zyll.
A precisely shaped stone brazier marked the center of the building, scooped out into a charred bowl that the goblin was already inspecting.
Flakes drifted down from an oculus in the curved ceiling, ringed with carvings of tentacles.
Four severe and unwelcoming benches circled the firepit, and alcoves in the wall looked as though they had once housed statues or offerings.
“Oh, thank hells,” breathed Fern as she spied a neatly stacked pile of wood and kindling in one corner, dusted with snow.
A snort and the sharp ring of a hoof on stone drew her attention to Bucket’s head peering in the doorway.
Like a specter swimming out of twilight, Astryx appeared beside him, one forearm against his neck for support.
A wan smile.
“I guess you can finally figure out how to start that fire now,” she mumbled, before tottering to one of the benches, slowly easing herself down onto it and carefully lying back. Her eyes drifted closed. The Oathmaiden’s breath came in shallow, whistling gasps that Fern didn’t like at all.
Bucket snorted again, squeezing through the arch, then with much stamping, arranged himself alongside Astryx’s bench. Nigel sagged in his scabbard amidst the tangle of leather on the horse’s side.
“Fire,” murmured Fern, moving to step outside and search the wagon for flint and steel, before remembering that there wasn’t a wagon anymore.
No supplies.
No flint.
No food.
Her stomach hollowed out for more than one reason.
At a dull clatter behind her, she turned to find Zyll dropping an armload of wood into the stone brazier. The goblin stared at Fern expectantly.
The bookseller’s mind whirled as Astryx’s wheezing breaths acquired a troubling catch in them.
She dug a blank sheet of paper from her satchel and then shrugged it to the stone floor. Fern thrust out a paw. “Hand me the knife.”
Wordlessly, Zyll drew him from a red pocket and offered him haft first.
“Hey, I don’t trust that look,” said Breadlee as Fern snatched him and inspected his length with a critical eye. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?”
She crumpled the paper and stuffed it under the tumble of logs. Setting the flat of his blade against the lip of the brazier, she briskly drew him back with a terrible rasp of Elder steel on stone. Blue-white motes of flame sheeted into the bowl, snapping and bouncing with cold fire.
“Ow! You were thinking it! Stop that! This is . . . this is sacrilegious!” howled Breadlee.
Fern ignored him, dragging him mercilessly against the stone and shedding fountains of sparks onto the paper and cold wood.
“Come on,” she hissed. “Light, you bastard.”
As though her command had been heard by a forgotten god of campfires, a thread of smoke puffed into being amidst a sudden burst of light.
She slumped onto one of the cold benches and stared with blurred vision into the growing blaze as the first tentative fingers of heat reached out to embrace them all.
“Sacrilege,” sulked Breadlee where she held him loosely in one paw.
“Oh, hush,” she mumbled and stuffed him into the pocket in her cloak.
The flames spread, crawling along the wood with increasing hunger as smoke twirled up and out the oculus to be torn apart by the wind.
“Good for you,” whispered Astryx. “You managed after all.”
The elf’s eyes were closed, but that wan smile had returned. Fern might have imagined it, but she thought the rasp in the Oathmaiden’s breath had eased a little. Her face seemed less bloodless, too, although perhaps that was only the effect of the growing glow of the flames.
Then Astryx’s hand slipped from her chest and flopped to rest against the floor.
The bracelet of wire on her wrist loosened even as Fern watched, as though the meager heat were melting it. With a metallic pop it sprang open and clattered to the stone.
Fern gasped and struggled back to her feet to do . . . well, she wasn’t sure what.
Zyll’s voice stopped her, though. “Is still live-ly.”
And Fern could see the feeble beat of blood in Astryx’s throat.
“Is time for sleep-ling,” said the goblin, who had crowded close to the fire. Her green nose was chapped and dripping, and she held her hands with fingers splayed toward the heat. Her own bracelet was still locked tight around her wrist.
Fern dimly wondered whether Zyll would disappear in the night. Then she decided that this was a concern for a Fern who was not stranded in a desolate mountain range with a half-dead elf and no reasonable idea of how any of them would survive the following day.
Gingerly taking her seat again, Fern tucked her cloak beneath her behind, for what little good that did. The heat slowly penetrated her fur, though, which began to steam. She wanted nothing more than to sleep as her eyes unfocused, lids fluttering against exhaustion.
“Fuck,” she muttered. Fern glared at her satchel on the floor nearby.
With more grunting than was strictly necessary she climbed down from the bench, then hauled the bag back up beside her to withdraw a sheaf of paper and a pencil with fingers just beginning to prickle with returning life.
Dear Viv,
I’m sorry.
—she wrote.
And if you are reading this, there’s this fucking orc I want you to kill.
Fern hadn’t intended much more than that, but in very little time, she filled three entire sheets of paper with lines crabbed by the cold.
She jammed her letter back into the satchel, which promptly slumped over beside her as though it were just as exhausted as she. She couldn’t be bothered to right it.
A huff of a laugh escaped Fern’s lips as she glanced to her left at the pile of scrap cloth and orange hair crowded against her ribs, wheezing and whistling in its sleep.
She was dimly aware of a flitter of paper as the rising heat drew breaths of icy air through the entryway, but was already collapsing to the side as a tide of weariness rose to consume her.
Her cheek met a coat made of pockets and sank into it, and she was gone.