Ice Shards - By Yasmine Galenorn Page 0,21

when they’d come along just for me? As my irritation grew, I found myself focusing on the spiders that were now scuttling down to the ground as Smoky and Roz sought to keep them from reaching Camille without getting bitten themselves in the process.

And just like that, I felt it well up—the same energy that had come rolling through when we’d faced the Tregarts who had killed Henry. The same energy that—

Before I could capture the memory, the rolling wave hit and I forced them into the stream of energy that poured forth from my outstretched hands.

With a little shriek, the spiders appeared to explode, but at second look, they were simply reversed. Turned inside out like a cast-off shirt. Torn to shreds.

I gasped. Once again, I hadn’t realized what I’d been doing, although I knew I’d been driven to do something to protect my friends.

Smoky and Rozurial stared at the two bloody bodies, and then, together with Camille, they looked at me.

“Iris,” Camille whispered. “You did it again. You . . . They’re . . .”

“Yes, I can see,” I said, not sure of what to think. “I thought once it might be a fluke, but twice . . .” I’d had this power when I was in training to be High Priestess and thought it stripped away from me, but now twice it had come flooding back, when I felt weak and angry and helpless.

I glanced up at them. “I was capable of much more than this when I was in my training. I could have so easily torn Vikkommin from his body and thrust him into shadow. So the question is, did I?”

“No,” Howl said. “The question is, shall we remove ourselves from the White Forest before the rest of their eightlegged brethren come to capture us?” He nodded to the webs where the spiders looked to be amassing.

“Fuck! Run!” Camille said, grabbing my hand and struggling toward the entrance. “I have no desire to be lunch to a bunch of spiders.”

Smoky grabbed the both of us up and, tossing us over his shoulders, ran with long leaping strides through the snow. Five minutes and we stood on the edge of the Skirts of Hel. The edge of the world.

Howl and Roz joined us as we silently gazed up at the towering mountain of ice that stood before us. The White Forest marked the end of the tree line. Above here existed ice and snow and, for the brief summer, scattered fields of wildflowers and scrub brush that were as fleeting as a distant dream. The path, still compact snow, led ever upward, skirting the plains of ice, winding through the windswept trees that lay nearly sideways from the constant storms that buffeted the mountain peaks.

Camille gazed at the panorama of jagged peaks and frozen sheets of ice. “Where’s your temple?” she whispered, as if afraid of setting off an avalanche.

“See the bend that winds to the left, near the stand of scrub there?” I pointed to a small thicket of scrub brush in the distance. “When you turn left, you pass behind a tall ridge and then curve back to the right. You can’t see from here, but there’s a fork in the road at that point. The path leads higher, the fork takes you on to the Order of Undutar. I haven’t been this close to the temple in . . . six hundred years.”

And then it hit me that I was on the way home—but to a home that had cast me out, that had branded me pariah. I’d spent so many centuries writing them out of my life, hiding behind half-truths and truths unknown. And now I had returned, to discover once and for all what the truth of my life was.

Would I like the answer when I found it? I didn’t know, but whatever happened, I would know, forever, if I was a murderer.

FIVE

“WE’RE CLOSE TO SUNSET AND THE NIGHT winds will be howling down the mountain any moment. We have to reach my Pack.” Howl motioned off the trail toward one of the nearest skirts of ice that stretched down from the glacial peak.

Most people didn’t understand that glaciers weren’t the mountains themselves but rather the ice that covered the mountain in large patches and sheets. Some glaciers melted during the summer—there were areas here that did, but unlike back in the Cascades near Seattle, the Northlands were not subject to global warming. During summers here, the temperature occasionally reached sixty