Page 82 of Echo North
“Two weeks,” he adds. “Since we left Isidor and Satu.”
“It feels like an age.”
Ivan smiles. “Or three.”
It’s the most we’ve spoken since our first couple of nights, and the sound of his speech comforts me.
“Have you heard the tale of the Four Winds?” His voice catches up the thread of a story.
“Part of it,” I answer, thinking of the wolf’s words to me in the temple, of visiting the Palace of the Sun in the books with Hal. “But I want to hear it all.”
“They were brothers, the only children of the Sun and the Moon. East was the eldest, and he favored his father the Sun, with bronze skin and hair the color of fire. He was a hunter, and roamed far and wide slaying terrifying beasts and winning great renown.
“West and South were the second and third born, and they too favored the Sun, though not with such magnificence as East. They were always quarreling, trying to outdo each other with feats of strength so that they might rise in their father’s eyes to the status of East. But North was the youngest, and favored his mother the Moon, with eyes like stars and hair of silver and skin pale as snow. He was lonely, for his brothers scarcely regarded him, and when they did take notice, mocked him for his quiet voice and meek spirit, which they mistook for weakness.
“But North had within him great power: to stop time, to still hearts, to turn warmth to coldness and light to dark. He could have killed his brothers if he chose, but he didn’t. Instead he allied himself with the Wolf Queen.”
I peer at Ivan across the fire. That wasn’t quite what the wolf and the Winds in the book-mirror had told me. “Allied himself?”
His voice picks up an odd note. “She tricked him. Stole his power for her own. It’s why she can bend time to her will.”
My heart tugs and I shut my eyes and see Hal. “I thought the North Wind traded his power for the love of a woman.”
“That is why he went to the Wolf Queen in the first place.”
I think of the gatekeeper in the wolf’s house, all malice and power. “Do you know what became of them?”
Ivan’s eyes glint orange in the light of the fire. “The stories do not say.”
In the morning, the landscape begins, at long, long last, to change. Glaciers jut out of the ground, jagged formations of ice skewering the sky. We wander into a maze of them and have to wend our way through, our snowshoes leaving crisscrossed patterns behind us. The wind whistles between the splintered walls of ice, ringing loud with the Wolf Queen’s laughter, and the weary ponies droop their heads and drag their hooves.
“There must be a body of water,” says Ivan ahead of me. “Somewhere near.”
The glaciers stretch on and on, growing larger and more magnificent as we walk. They soar over our heads, sending ice-blue shadows across the snow. Hunger gnaws tight in my belly.
All day we wander through the ice maze, no end in sight. When we make camp, we shelter beneath one of the glaciers and eat the last of our food.
Ivan builds a fire. “The North Wind himself would be hard pressed to go any farther,” he says. He seems to be making a joke, but I don’t understand and he doesn’t explain.
I am weary and sick of heart, and Ivan can sense it. He tells me a nonsensical story about an old lady and a magical spoon, and I fall into my dreams with a smile on my lips.
The next day, Ivan kills the ponies.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE FIELD OF GLACIERS LEADS USto the edge of a frozen lake, so vast it might as well be the ocean. But Ivan is equipped with small spikes to attach to the bottoms of our boots so we’ll have purchase over the ice.
I cried about the ponies—Ivan did, too, and he wasn’t ashamed. “They served us well, lass. Now they help us one last time. But I am sorry they must end this way.”
We start off across the lake, the spikes on our boots digging into the ice, crunching with every step. It hasn’t snowed for days, but the sky is hazy and little sunlight shows through. The cold bites deep, and yet I see beauty spread out all around, and it humbles me.
The ice is strong and impossibly thick, surface cracks splintering out like the threads of some giant spiderweb. We hear it shifting sometimes, great thundering groans as, far beneath our feet, it cracks or moves or shudders.
“The ice is singing to us,” says Ivan, and he lets the ice sing instead of him.
I grow used to it after a while and it ceases to frighten me, the ancient music of this strange scarred land.
The ice seems endless. We camp on the frozen lake as the sun slips to its rest behind the clouds, and I can see nothing but ice in every direction. The clouds are knitting tighter, the wind whipping wild.
