the midst of her sorrow? Yet I had to insist. I didn’t know how else I was going to find them.
‘They’re not far. You will see them.’
We drank from the trickles of water which ran from the end of the frozen river. The ice was as wrinkled as the skin of an old crone who has lived for a thousand years, and scored by dozens of cracks and crevices. When we had drunk our fill, Heidrun climbed gracefully up on to the ice shelf, holding out a warm hand to help me scramble up. Seeing her walk on it with such practised ease, I hadn’t realized how slippery it was, and I would have come crashing down had she not continued to steady me. Marcos clambered up too and almost slid straight off again.
Holding both our hands, Heidrun led us up the frozen river. Once we were away from the edge that was wet and smooth with melting water, the surface became harder and rougher, easier to find a foothold without your shoe slipping out from under you.
The coldness rose up from the ice and enveloped us. Our breath hung about in puffs of white. Although I longed to look up to see the vast expanse of ice towering above, the moment I raised my eyes, I would trip over the frozen peaks or stumble as my foot slipped into the cracks. The further we walked, the broader the crevices became until they were wide enough for a man to fall into and so deep that he would never be able to clamber up the glass walls. Follow one line of solid ice, and you could suddenly find yourself stranded with deep ravines on three sides of you and no way across. But Heidrun seemed to be able to pick her way round this maze of crevasses, as if following a track, though there was nothing that I could see that marked the way.
Finally, as we reached the place where the ice-river angled sharply upwards, she stopped. We found ourselves facing an oval hole in the ice like the entrance to a cave, easily big enough to enter.
‘Come,’ Heidrun said. ‘Eydis is inside.’
I had spent enough time in a cave in the past few days never to want to enter one again. Even to look at it brought panic surging up into my throat, the terror of being trapped down in the mountain. Standing there alone in the darkness, sure that the entrance had been sealed and there was no way out for me, then finally the relief of seeing that tiny pinpoint of light, a single star showing the gap was still there. Then climbing up and up and that awful moment of despair again when I realized I could not reach the world outside. Groping over the surface of the walls, desperate to find a hole, a stone jutting out, the smallest thing I could use to stand on, terrified to reach too far in case I slipped and went crashing down, perhaps to lie there mangled but still alive at the bottom.
I saw Marcos watching me, and knew my face must be revealing the horror I felt when I looked at that ice cave.
‘You don’t have to go in,’ he said. ‘I’ll find her and bring her out to you.’
But Heidrun said softly, ‘You must go in to her, if you want to find the white falcons. It is the only way.’
She turned, as if she expected me to follow, and ducking her head, went inside.
‘You don’t have to,’ Marcos whispered.
But I knew that I did. Trying to fight down the desire to turn and run, I too ducked into the ice cave. But it was not like the first cave at all. It was shallow, almost egg-shaped inside. I had thought it would be dark, but I found myself bathed in an iridescent blue light, brighter and more intense than a hundred lamps burning together. It was as if all the rays of sunlight outside were being sucked through the ice and concentrated in that cave. When I moved my head even slightly, the colours of every rainbow that had ever arched through the skies rippled through those walls of ice.
‘Eydis is here,’ Heidrun said.
Her voice startled me. I’d almost forgotten why I was in the cave. She drew to one side, so that I could see. A long low ledge of ice ran along the back of the cave. Eydis and Valdis were lying on