I hopped across a narrow crevasse, my arms out at both sides for balance. Despite the eeriness of walking over a moving carpet of ice, I couldn’t deny that the icefall was beautiful. It was as if some giant had taken an ax and carved the glacier into strange and beautiful shapes. When the sunlight hit the pillars of ice that poked up from the surface, they shone like blue-green glass. Ripples and cracks in the ice reminded me of the rings of a tree stump, only there was no discernible pattern.
I tried to keep my mind off the painful scene that had unfolded with Tem, once he realized I was leaving. I had told him the plan, which was highly sensible—he and Dargye would remain at camp, to rest and stand watch over the bulk of our supplies. When River and I returned with the witch talisman, hopefully in a week or so, they would be ready with spells and medicines and anything else we needed to recover from our journey.
To say Tem wasn’t happy with this plan was an understatement.
“How can you say this is sensible?” he had yelled. It was all he managed to get out before his voice dissolved into a wracking cough. I grabbed his shoulder and forced him to sit down by the fire. He leaned against his knees, coughing until he could barely breathe. Finally, he leaned against me, spent.
“Please don’t do this,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
I felt a wrenching pain in my chest. “I have to.”
“I’m coming with you.”
I would have laughed if it weren’t so sad. “Tem. You’ll be dead before the day is out.”
“I have my magic.”
“Yes.” I leaned back to look at him. “And if you stay here and rest a few days, you might be able to use it to heal yourself and Dargye. You need to stop worrying about following me.”
“Kamzin.” Tem gazed at me. His face was so pale that I could have cried, his eyes larger in his thin face. He had lost the most weight out of all of us over the course of our journey. “Kamzin, you’re all I have. How can I stop worrying about you?”
I pressed his hand between mine, pushing the tears back. “Because I’ll be all right,” I said fiercely. “I promise. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Tem seemed about to say something, but the fight had left him. His gaze dropped to the ground. We sat there for a long moment, and the only sound was the wind whistling over the glacier, and the rustling of oilcloth. Then, Tem rose and ducked inside our tent. When he reemerged, he was carrying the kinnika.
“Take them,” he said, pressing them into my hand.
“I can’t.” I tried to give them back. But Tem stepped away, and they fell onto the rock. The black bell made no sound when it hit, but then, of its own accord, it let out a whisper. I paid it no heed—I was used to its errant murmurings by now.
“You need them.”
“Not as much as you do.” He picked up the kinnika and dropped them in my lap. “At least you’ll have fair warning if anything attacks you. And you know the protective spells. I know you do.”
I stared glumly at the chain of bells. Certainly, they would warn me that some monstrous beast was about to tear me in two, allowing me time to mull over my demise before it arrived. I could say as much to Tem, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. Magic came as easily to him as breathing, and so, naturally, he refused to accept that it couldn’t be the same for me, if not for my obstinate refusal to apply myself. I gazed into his eyes, and swallowed my arguments. If it would make him happy, I would take the kinnika. But that was the only reason.
Half an hour later, I was packed. I gave Tem one final hug good-bye, part of me hating myself as I saw the sorrow in his eyes. I knew he would spend every moment worrying until I returned. I fell into step behind River, and I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to have that image of my best friend as he grew smaller and smaller burned into my mind.
Unfortunately, my imagination supplied it anyway.
In contrast to my gloomy mood, River was in high spirits, chattering about rappelling techniques and hot-air-balloon maintenance and the last party he had attended in the Three Cities, and a dozen other things—I had a hard time keeping up with it all. He seemed relieved to be moving again, and determined to cover as much ground as possible by sundown. He paused only to hurry Azar-at, who was slithering over the ice some yards away. I wished he wouldn’t bother—I was much happier when the fire demon was out of sight.
“Are you sure you want to bring him along?” River said. He was eyeing Ragtooth, whose lithe body was slung half over my shoulder and half across my pack. He had been waiting outside my tent when River and I set off, looking as self-satisfied as it was possible for a fox to look.
“He’s coming whether I bring him or not.” In truth, I had been relieved to see Ragtooth again, so much that I had almost crushed his ribs hugging him. The fox had struggled mightily, twisting his head this way and that in a futile attempt to bite. I released him before he succeeded, and so he had to content himself with gnawing on my boot.
“There’s something unnatural about that creature,” River muttered, but he made no further complaint.
The terrain rose steadily as we left the icefall and followed a ridge that ran along the southern face of the mountain. The snow was only ankle-deep, and the going was still easy, but the terrain had steepened. We were climbing now, not hiking.
We were climbing Raksha. The thought made me shudder with a not-unpleasant fear.
Now that we were alone, with no one to wait for, River and I moved quickly. It was a wonderfully freeing feeling—I hadn’t realized, before, how much I had been holding myself back, forcing my steps to assume a slower rhythm than was natural. Lusha had once nicknamed me “the plow horse” for my dogged, tireless energy, and even I had to admit it fit. I would never be as graceful as my sister, who often seemed to float, rather than walk, across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud, but I had greater reserves of strength than anyone I knew.
I felt a pang when I thought of Lusha. I trusted Tem when he said that she and Mara had turned back—but why had they done so? Had they decided the mountain was too much for them? Or had something else, an injury perhaps, forced them to retreat?
As the sun rose higher, I estimated that we were nearly halfway to the Ngadi face, a wall of ice that connected the smaller Mount Ngadi to Raksha. Below the feature, Mingma had added a single note:
Tricky.
We stopped for an early lunch atop a knuckle of rock overlooking the glacier below. From this vantage point, it was stunningly enormous—easily a mile across when it reached the valley, a long tongue of ice nestled between Raksha and a neighboring, nameless mountain. The landscape in this part of the Aryas was little explored, and not all of the peaks had names. I felt strangely sorry for the smaller mountain, which, after all, was still much higher than those that surrounded my village.
“We should name it,” River said when I mentioned this. “Why not? Most mountains are named by explorers. Go ahead, pick something.”