“Sunborn,” one of them calls in their sluggish dialect as she rushes to the side of their silent leader.
The speaker strips her helmet to reveal a brutish face thick with scars and piercings before falling to her knee and touching her forehead with a gloved palm in a sign of respect. A blue handprint covers her face. “We saw the flame in the sky….” Her voice falters when she sees my slingBlade.
The other riders strip their helms, dismounting in a rush as they see our hair and eyes. Not a rider among them is a man. The women’s faces are painted with huge sky-blue handprints, a little eye drawn in the center of each. White hair flows in long braids down their backs. Black eyes peer from hooded lids. Iron and bone piercings bridge noses and hook lips and notch ears. Only the lead rider has yet to remove her helmet or kneel. She steps toward us, in a trance.
“Sister,” Ragnar manages. “My sister.”
“Sefi?” Mustang repeats, eying the black human tongues on the prize-hook on the Obsidian’s left
hip. She wears no gloves. The backs of her hands are tattooed with glyphs.
“Do you know me?” Ragnar rasps. A tentative smile on quivering lips as the rider approaches.
“You must.” The rider catalogues his scars from behind her mask. Eyes dark and wide. “I know you,” Ragnar continues. “I would know you if the world were dark and we were withered and old.” He shudders in pain. “If the ice was melted and the wind quiet.” She drifts forward, step by step. “I taught you the forty-nine names of the ice…the thirty-four breaths of the wind.” He smiles. “Though you could only ever remember thirty-two.”
She gives him nothing, but the other riders are already whispering his name, and looking at us as if by accompanying him and possessing a curved blade they’ve pieced together who I am. Ragnar continues, voice carrying the last of his strength.
“I carried you on my shoulders to watch five Breakings. And let you braid my hair with your
ribbons. And played with the dolls you made from seal leather and threw balls of ice at old Proudfoot. I am your brother. And when the men of the Weeping Sun took me and a harvest of
our kin to the Chained Lands, do you remember what I told you?”
Despite his wound, the man reeks of power. This is his land. This is his home. And he is as vast here as I was upon my clawDrill. The gravity of him draws Sefi closer. She collapses to her knees and strips away her bone helmet.
Sefi the Quiet, famed daughter of Alia Snowsparrow, is raw and majestic. Face severe. Angled like
a crow’s. Her eyes too small, too close together. Her lips thin, purple in the cold, and permanently pursed in thought. White hair shaved down the left side, braided and falling to the waist on the right. A wing tattoo encircled by astral runes is livid blue on the left side of her pale skull. But what makes her
unique among the Obsidians, and the object of their admiration, is that her skin is without pocks or scars. The only ornament she wears is a single iron bar through her nose. And when she blinks down at Ragnar ’s wound, the blue eyes tattooed on the back of her eyelids pierce through me.
She extends a hand to her brother, not to touch him, but to feel the breath steam before his mouth and nose. It is not enough for Ragnar. He seizes her hand and presses it fiercely to his chest so she can feel his fading heartbeat. Tears of joy gather in his eyes. And when they spill from Sefi’s down her cheeks to carve paths through her blue warpaint, his voice cracks. “I told you I would return.”
Her eyes leave him to follow Aja’s tracks into the crevasse. She clicks her tongue and four Valkyrie stake ropes into the snow and rappel down into the darkness to seek out Aja. The rest guard their warleader and watch the hills, elegant recurve bows at the ready. “We have to fly him to the Spires,” I say in their language. “To your shaman.”
Sefi does not look at me. “It is too late.” Snow gathers on Ragnar ’s white beard. “Let me die here.
On the ice. Under the wild sky.”
“No,” I mumble. “We can save you.”
The world feels very distant and unimportant. His blood continues to leave him, but there is no more sadness in my friend. Sefi has chased it away.
“It is no great thing to die,” he says to me, though I know he doesn’t mean it as deeply as he wants to. “Not when one has lived.” He smiles, trying to comfort me even now. But he wears the unjustness of his life and death upon his face. “I owe that to you. But…there is much undone. Sefi.”