Ice Shards - By Yasmine Galenorn Page 0,7
Winter Wolf Spirit will no doubt wish to make his own accommodations.”
I gazed at Smoky. He was well known here, that much was obvious. Hanson motioned to another man who had been standing nearby, and the man took off with a single nod.
Howl let out a low grunt. “I have a standing room at the inn. We stay one night. Tomorrow we begin the journey at daybreak. We cannot afford to be out in the mountains come evening. I would survive, and the dragon, but the women and incubus would freeze.” He swept out of the stone room without another word and we followed him.
It had been cold inside, but outside, it was brilliant and icy. The darkness ate up every light except the glow from the crusted snow beneath our feet. The sky was clear—the stars twinkling over our heads.
Camille immediately pulled her cloak in front of her face and I did the same, although I was more adapted toward these temperatures than she. It felt a good fifteen degrees below zero, and we moved silently along the trail, which had been marked by ropes on both sides and eye catchers spaced evenly along the way. If we wandered off the path and got lost, we could die.
Howl led us along the trail, nimbly striding along the packed crust. As we skirted a snowbank to the right, then a thick copse of fir and cedar to the left, a faint light began to sparkle up ahead.
Rounding a curve in the path, we found ourselves facing an inn, just right of the path, about sixty yards ahead. Lit up like a Yule tree, with eye catchers all over the outside framing the three-story building, the inn had been carved out of stone. As I gazed at it, I suddenly remembered: I’d been here before. This inn had been witness to the end of my life in the Northlands.
THE JOURNEY DOWN from the temple had been achingly hard. There had been several blank spots in my memory, then the image of a sparkling woman in the mists who had carried me across a chasm. I’d struggled through the snows, not sure if I would survive even to reach the next morning.
They’d cast me out before I fully healed from their interrogations, and every joint in my body ached. The ishonar—magical flames of ice colder than anything in nature—had stripped my back with every lash, and while there were no open wounds, the weals that the whip had raised along my back ached. But the pain of my body was nothing compared to the pain in my head. Closing my eyes, I forced myself to take a deep breath, to keep it together.
Vikkommin, Vikkommin . . . his name echoed in my head.
Did you kill Vikkommin?
No, I don’t know, I don’t know anything.
The pain of a lash slashing across my back. Did you bind his soul to a shadow?
I don’t know . . . I don’t remember anything. I loved him—I loved him with all my heart. How could I have done anything that horrendous to him?
Another lash, another hellishly cold sting of ishonar, another scream that I slowly realized was emanating from the back of my own throat.
Tell us what happened.
I don’t remember. . . There was a knock on my door. I answered to find a message from him. He had called me to his room. I went, and I remember him opening the door . . . then it’s all blank, until you found me.
A pause, and then the lashes began to fall in earnest, as if all the pain in the world could break through the wall that had formed in my memory. And I began to scream, unable to stop, as I realized I had just lost everything dear to me in the world. And at that moment, I willed myself to die.
Later, when they had done all they could to me, but could prove nothing—no truth uncovered—I stood on the edge of the temple as they administered the final punishment: With one quick lop, the High Priestess sheared off my ankle-length hair at the nape of my neck. Now everyone would know I’d been banished from the temple—at least as long as it took to grow it out again. As she threw the golden strands into a fire pit, my nose wrinkled at the smell, and I hung my head, weeping silently.
My life was shattered. My head ached from the violation my mind had suffered. My