It seemed Sabbatha and Ganelon were finished playing games.
At first, the idea of intimacy developing between those two struck Clay as absurd. They’d said barely a word to each other during the journey and had little in common save an aptitude for violence. They’d tried to kill each other twice now. He thought back to their first encounter in Conthas, when she’d pinned Ganelon to the floor with the heel of her boot and declared she’d be the last woman he would ever love.
Okay, well, the more he thought on it the more fitting it seemed. And besides, she and Ganelon were young (or youngish in Ganelon’s case), and rushing headlong toward the brink of something terrible. Clay knew the feeling. He’d been there himself in days gone by. There was something about the night before a battle, or the anxious days before a tour of the Wyld, that brought on a feeling of … not despair, but a kind of helpless, hopeless freedom.
Ganelon’s needs were easy enough to ascertain—the man had been rock hard for nineteen years. And as for Sabbatha? Far be it from Clay to guess the mind of any woman, let alone one as complex as she. He didn’t know her past, but it was very obviously dark. There was an old saying: One look at a bowl and you can guess if a goblin made it. It meant—at least he thought it meant—that beautiful things were not made by an unkind touch, and the daeva was as warped a woman as Clay had ever met.
His own bowl was a brittle thing and would have broken long ago were it not for Ginny, whom he very suddenly missed with a longing so fierce it burned like an ember in his chest.
By the time he smothered it, the cave had grown quiet again, but for the restless wind and Matty’s droning snore, along with the occasional rasp of a turning page. Kit had no need of sleep. He sat outside the mouth of the grotto, reading one of Moog’s old books by starlight.
Clay had nearly slipped back into dream when he heard the low rumble of Ganelon’s voice.
“Again?” he asked.
“Again,” she answered.
Chapter Forty-three
The Cold Road
Clay figured that whoever gave the Cold Road its name must have had a particularly sinister sense of humor. That, or they’d been stark raving mad, which would explain why they were taking the Cold Road in the first place. It was cold, sure, but it was most certainly not a road. In fact, it was anything but a road.
It began as a steep slope of crumbling shale that slipped and slid beneath your boots and just fucking dared you to try to use your hands to help climb. By the time he reached the top Clay’s fingers were sliced near to ribbons. Matrick was limping, having turned an ankle partway up. He would have fallen if not for Ganelon, who’d held him by the collar until the old king found his feet.
When they topped the rise Matrick straightened his vest and smoothed his hair. “Thanks,” he said. “Hey, how’d you fare on the Tetrea board last night?”
Ganelon shot him a questioning glare.
“Did you win any?” Matrick asked without any apparent guile.
Satisfied, Ganelon answered. “All of them.”
The king blinked. “What?”
But the southerner was already turning. In a gesture of magnanimity as rare as, well, an owlbear itself, he was carrying Gabe’s old backpack, sparing Moog the burden of the orphaned cubs. The pair had grown mercifully quiet after the wizard fed them breakfast, though it still gave Clay a chill to recall Moog spilling porridge from his own mouth into their open beaks.
The next leg of the Cold Road was a climbing track that hugged the face of the mountain. Clay spotted a cluster of scraggly-looking goats perched on the incline above. One of them, its beard so long it reached the ground even when it raised its head, bleated to alert the others. Look at these assholes, Clay imagined it saying.
Several times their path was blocked by landslides, forcing them to stop and clear the way with their hands—a task for which the ettin was especially well suited. Gregor, with a sly wink for the others, sold it to Dane as “digging for treasure,” and though each time the search proved fruitless, Dane’s optimism remained untarnished.
“I hope we find gold,” he exclaimed. “Or silver. Which is prettier, Gregor?”
“Oh, they’re both pretty,” said his brother. “But what I really hope we find is duramantium, Emperor of Metals!”
“Durmadantum!” Dane’s mouth mangled the word, but his shattered smile bloomed as he said it. “The Emperor of Metals!”
They pressed on, and all at once rounded a corner into a blistering storm. Gabriel called a brief rest while Moog plumbed the depths of his bag for the cloaks and heavy furs that he and Kit had been tasked with buying back in Conthas. The wizard had put some thought into it, apparently. He presented Ganelon with a great black boar skin with pointed tusks sewed up the spine, and Matrick with a hooded fox-fur cloak complete with ears and a snout. “It’s fake,” Moog admitted. “And a bit tacky. And I’m fairly certain it was tailored to fit a woman.”
Matrick smirked beneath the hood. “I like it.”
Gabe’s cloak practically had a whole white wolf slung across the shoulders, and Moog himself doffed a heavy sheepskin coat matched by an appropriately ridiculous fur hat.
The wizard handed Clay a shaggy brown bearskin before looking apologetically at Sabbatha. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know we’d have company.”
Before Clay could offer up the bearskin she waved him off, enshrouding herself in a cloak of sleek blue-black plumage.
“How’s the wing?” Clay ventured.
“Better,” she answered curtly, and stalked off.
“Excellent,” he muttered at her back. “Good talk.” She and Ganelon together was starting to make a lot more sense to him now.
When they set out again Gabriel dropped back to fall in step beside Clay, who was bringing up the rear.
“Hanging in there?” he asked.
“Hanging in there,” Clay answered, his breath pluming before the chill wind could snatch it away.
“Listen, I just … wanted to say thank you.”
“For what?”
Gabe was about to reply but laughed instead. Ahead of them, Moog glanced back and frowned, as though dismayed at having missed out on a joke. “Where do I begin?” Gabriel wondered aloud. “You came after me back in Coverdale. You pulled me off my knees that first night at Kal’s place, and again outside Brycliffe. You fought a chimera for me.”
“Got my ass kicked by one, you mean,” Clay murmured.
A chuckle, puffing white in the freezing air. “Yeah, well, we all did.”
“Except Ganelon.”
“Except Ganelon,” Gabe conceded. “Ah, but you did throw my ex-wife’s new husband off a skyship …”
Clay shrugged beneath the heavy mantle of his bearskin cloak. “That’s what friends are for, right?”
“Right.” Another chuckle from Gabriel. He moved a step closer, so their shoulders brushed as they plodded side by side and he could speak without contending against the wind. “I know you didn’t want any part of this, Clay. You had a good thing going back home. When I asked you to come, you had a thousand reasons to say no.”
Just two, thought Clay, though he didn’t bother pointing that out.
His friend flashed him a tight grin. “But you came anyway. You’re here, beside me. And because of you the five of us are together again. Because of you I have a chance, however impossible it might seem, of getting my daughter back. Yesterday …” Gabriel shook his head, glanced down at his trudging boots. “The others would never have taken the Cold Road if it wasn’t for you. We’d be skulking through the Defile right now, or knee-deep in the Nightstream, weeks away from reaching Castia.”
“They would have followed you,” Clay said with a sinner’s conviction. “They’ve followed you this far.”
Gabriel looked over, squinting against the snow-flecked gale. “Followed me? Gods, you really believe that, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” Clay was trying to keep an eye on the treacherous footing below. The mountain sloped steeply on their left; a single misstep could lead to a dangerously unchecked slide. “You’re the leader,” he said.