Winter, White and Wicked - Shannon Dittemore Page 0,69
gas. This incline is by far the steepest and it won’t take us long to reach bottom.
“The kol brought arms and legs of wayward sailors,” Hyla says. “Bodies that had been torn apart by crashing waves and shiv-sharp rock.”
It’s a learned behavior, then. The dismemberment. I haven’t thought much on the tragic circumstances that provided the Abaki with their limbs. After what happened to Drypp, it’s uncomfortable to think those hands had once belonged to someone who’d lived just as fiercely and clumsily as us. Uncomfortable to think they were torn from their own bodies and bent to Winter’s will.
“The kol could not breathe life into the dead souls, but it could make them more than they were. From the mountains above, Winter watched as her kol monsters crawled from the sea. And they were monstrous. It was Winter herself who first called them abominations, for they were nothing compared to the beautiful men and women cut from the rock of her own mountains.”
“Beautiful,” Kyn says, waggling his brows and running a finger along his stone cheekbone. “I like this version.”
“They had no thoughts of their own,” Hyla continues. “No songs. No worship to give. They could not bring her the love she so desired. But her will had crafted them. Like snow and storm, rain and sleet, hoarfrost and hail, blizzards and squalls and flurries, the kol monsters were now hers to care for. They were hers to command.”
“And so she cursed them,” I say.
A curt nod from Hyla. “From that day until this, they climb in and out of the black sea, searching for arms and legs, for their souls—which had been stolen by death—so that they can one day be the very companions Winter craves.”
The Dragon falls quiet and my anger seeps away. Her account was not so different from Mystra’s. But there’s something in it that catches at my breastbone. And it isn’t Mars’s threat that something monstrous is growing inside me.
It’s Winter’s loneliness. I’ve heard enough of her whispers to know it’s true.
“Have you seen them?” I ask Kyn.
His chin is on the corner of my seat. When he answers, his breath moves the hair on the back on my neck. “Ah, yeah. We post a lookout at Dris Mora. It’s the ones with the heads you have to watch out for.”
I swallow down the knot that won’t relinquish its hold on my tongue and I nod. “I remember.”
The forest is closing in now, the relighted headlamps casting duplicitous shadows, turning one branch into three, three branches into nine. A tree reaches out and scrapes the length of the trailer—the sound is like a screw dragging against my spine. Another branch joins in, snaps free. And then there are far too many to count, grabbing at the Dragon. Clawing and scraping away.
“Hyla,” I say, “beneath your seat is a lever. I need you to pull it.”
She leans forward and with her good arm, she reaches for the lever. Her face pales as she yanks the metal bar and engages the saws. The diamond blades whirl into view, their motors loud and laboring. These saws were made to grind away at rock with the rig rolling at a much slower clip. Our manic pace alone is enough to strain the motors, but the diamond blades aren’t ideal for iced wood, damp with impending Blys.
The branches are firm enough to damage the rig but far too pliable for the blades. At this speed, they shred instead of slicing cleanly through. And this cage is by far the woodiest. If either of the saws survive, we’ll be luckier than we ought to be.
“When we clear this last cage,” I yell over the din, “we’ll be just a few miles from the Serpentine River crossing—”
“Will we make it?” Kyn asks.
“Before the ice turns to slush?” I ask.
A noisy silence mingles while I turn it over in my mind.
Come Blys, the Serpentine is the fastest flowing river in the Kol Mountains. It never fully freezes, but throughout Ryme, the ice is several inches thick. That’s deep enough for a rig and trailer to truck it, but beneath the ice, the river rushes, crossing the Shiv Road and tumbling out over the cliffs at Crane Falls. The falling water freezes as it goes over, the ice building into glorious cascades and looking so much like the wing of a Wethyrd crane, you could imagine the entire mountain range detaching from our white world and flying away.