turns his gaze your way it’s as if he’s uncoiling every secret you own, and where he steps the ground is left smoking. Pray the Scithrowls’ wars in the east keep the Fist on Ald’s borders rather than our own!’
Adoma had spoken on the subject of the west and of Scithrowl’s destiny to claim the coast of Marn.
Nona had seen the queen through Kettle’s eyes. A tall woman, blunt-faced, solid, conveying a sense of physical power, of barely suppressed energies. Black-haired, a frothing mass of curls contained by hoops of gold, her pale skin stained and streaked as if rubbed with fresh ink. This, the Scithrowl said, was Adoma’s sacrifice. In order to secure the strength to lead her people to victory she had dared the black ice and been marked by it.
Adoma’s enemies called her mad, blood-drunk, cruel beyond measure, ready to inflict any torture that imagination could frame. Her people called her ruthless, relentless, born to deliver the full length of the Corridor into their keeping.
When she spoke though, addressing her court in the fluid Scithrowl tongue, Kettle found her articulate and entirely reasonable.
‘If I were a Scithrowl I would follow her,’ Kettle had said. ‘She’s right. The ice is closing on us and how else are we to live but to forge east or west? The world is cruel, our choices harsh, and every alternative leads to someone’s death. The only objection I have is that it’s us that she plans to forge a path through.’
However inspiring her speeches might be, the truth of the Battle-Queen lay in the black ice, that place of horror where even Kettle had lost her way, and from where Adoma was said to gain her power. Kettle would share no memories of that darkness, only the conviction that nothing save evil could come from it.
Zole glanced at the cloud base billowing just a hundred feet above them and made to move on. ‘Come.’
‘I saw it. The devil.’ Nona hadn’t meant to speak. Maybe the sight of the black ice put it in her mind. ‘I saw it at your wrist when you climbed onto the road.’
Zole hesitated, just missing a beat, then continued her descent. ‘I did not think that I had any more left in me.’
‘Any more?’ Nona hurried after her, gritting her teeth against the shipheart’s pressure.
‘It seems that it might take a shipheart from each of the bloods to wholly purify us. Or perhaps it is just me who needs that.’
‘Purify? What are you talking—’ Nona slipped, one tired foot tangled the other, and she was falling. She clung to the moment but although she fell through treacle she still fell, her hands too far from any surface to save her.
‘Careful.’ Zole closed the gap with hunska speed and caught her wrist.
Nona shook free and wordlessly scrambled away from the shipheart, its fire burning in her blood.
‘Do you think that in all the vastness of the ice there are no more of these?’ Zole jerked her head back towards her pack. ‘None of your “shiphearts”? You think they exist only in this narrow strip of Abeth where green things still grow?’
‘Well …’ Nona hadn’t really thought about it. ‘But the ice covers …’
‘There are ways down. And the ice-tribes are the descendants of those who refused to run before its advance, peoples who walked the green face of Abeth thousands of years ago. They took their treasures up onto the ice with them.’
Zole moved on and for what seemed an age it was all Nona could do to keep up with her. The ice-triber stopped where a trickle of freezing water spilled from a crack in the rocks. ‘Drink.’ She began to fill her waterskin.
Nona found a still smaller trickle spilling from an overhang and stood with her mouth open to receive it. After a few gulps she stepped away. ‘You have a devil in you, one of those … did you call them klaulathu?’
‘You had a klaulathu under your skin, Nona Grey, an echo of the Missing. This,’ she opened her hand and the palm lay scarlet, ‘is a raulathu, it is not of the Missing. It is an echo of me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Zole narrowed her eyes, looking past Nona, up at the slopes above her. ‘The clouds did not slow them as much as I had hoped. They have found us again.’ She turned and dropped away, landing on a huge boulder twenty feet below the ledge that Nona’s stream trickled over.
Nona peered over the drop.