Zyll leapt to her feet and produced fistfuls of gleaming cutlery. “More shanklings!”
And then the conversation-turned-argument went careening off a bluff and shattered to matchwood on the metaphorical rocks below.
When the Elder Blades had at last been silenced—Nigel in his sheath and Breadlee at the bottom of Fern’s satchel—Astryx glanced around their tiny camp with both hands on her hips, as though looking for something else to set right.
“I think that’s enough conversation for one night,” she said.
Fern sighed and prodded the coals, filled with a foggy regret she couldn’t put a paw on. “I’m sorry.”
Astryx surprised her a third time. “Don’t be. It’s . . . Perhaps we’ll talk about it . . . another time.”
Zyll’s head rose sleepily from the patchwork nest of her coat. “Daylight words.”
She commenced snoring immediately.
22
They didn’t exchange many words in the next day’s light, however.
It was just too damn cold.
When they awoke, it was to frost furring the grass and glazing the mud of the night before. The rain had stopped, only to be replaced with intermittent flakes of snow. Above them, the basalt overhang dripped steadily from the melt their combined body heat and the dregs of the fire produced.
Fern’s brain itself had frozen over, unable to muster any thought not related to her next movement or staving off the chill that penetrated her fur. Her head was too muzzy and her paws too stiff to even properly bemoan the warm bed she’d left leagues behind.
There was little to pack. After hastily breaking their fast with cheese and water for them and a pail of oats for Bucket, Astryx rehitched him to the cart. All three of them bundled themselves onto the wagon, Fern wrapped in a patched blanket and Astryx in her oilskin cloak. The frosted tarpaulin creaked and popped as ice shattered. Bucket’s hooves cracked through the scrim of ice on the muddy road as he plodded onward, chuffing and blowing in an aggrieved way.
The temperature steadily plummeted until the ice no longer broke so readily beneath every hoofbeat, and the sound changed to a dull clunking that echoed eerily between the snow-sugared birches and bastion oak. Gradually, the grade increased as the road rose in a sinuous curve up the skirts of a prodigious mountain range. The snow line drew closer, a pearlescent white sometimes invisibly blending with the overcast sky.
Last night’s conversation resurfaced when Astryx glanced at Fern, her lips blue and her breath a frosty plume. “Are you sure?” she asked, tossing her head to indicate the frigid ascent before them. “I know why I’m here. You didn’t like my answer, but I didn’t get one from you at all. Is your reason good enough for this?”
Drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders, Fern replied, “Maybe my reason is just that I’m stubborn. Besides, it’s a little late for second thoughts now, isn’t it? I’m not walking back through this mess unless you toss me off the back of the cart and roll me down the hill.”
Astryx glanced back the way they had come, calculating.
With some astonishment, Fern realized that Astryx was considering backtracking. She hadn’t entertained that for a second when she’d first discovered Fern in the back of her wagon.
“It’s definitely stubbornness,” said Fern, tingling with bashful gratification.
The elf faced forward again, and they both shut up for a while, consumed with the business of being cold on a wooden bench.
Even Zyll had withdrawn mostly into her coat, with only a wedge of forehead and her eyes peeking from above her pocket-lined collar. Fern decided there was something satisfying about the fact that the goblin wasn’t immune to the cold.
The road wended ever onward, although now in many places it was blown over with powdery snow that Bucket trudged through in misty fountains of white. Thankfully, it wasn’t actively snowing, although flurries were sometimes borne on the wind that sighed and whistled down upon them from the peaks. It also brought with it a peculiar and intermittent, keening chime that Fern only gradually became aware of.
“What is that?” she mumbled through painfully chapped lips.
Before Astryx could answer, one of Zyll’s hands appeared from within a sleeve and pointed into the snow.
Fern wasn’t sure what she was indicating at first, although she saw what looked like a pair of low, stony walls studded with short capstones lining the road ahead. As they drew closer, however, she saw that the capstones were actually something like tiny bell towers, each with a brass bell suspended within, gently blowing in the gusts. Occasionally, a clapper would graze its bell, or even strike it more directly, and the chimes and shivery whines were issuing from them.
“Monks,” explained Astryx, pointing up the slope. “There’s a Tarimite monastery on the other side of that peak. The membership is all rattkin, if I recall.”
Nigel, bared an inch, cleared his throat and adopted a lecturing tone. “Indeed, a rather curious circumstance, all of them worshippers of Tarim, the Sixth God, he of the One and the Many, ineffable and insatiable. Mm, did you know, each of his limbs has aname,inscribed upon every one of the bells the Tarimites tend. The brass itself is very particularly cast, what with—”
“Please stop,” begged Breadlee.
Fern made a face. “Penitents,” she said, with distaste.
