I followed Dutiful as he led me toward the corner of the pit that became a tunnel scratched and scraped into the ice. It started out as taller than a man and two men wide. But it did not go far before it narrowed, and soon I was hunched over which made my shoulder ache more.
As I followed him, something Burrich had said suddenly rearranged itself in my mind. Burrich had come here to slay a dragon, if he had to, anything to bring Swift home. Nettle had told Thick that her father had gone off to kill a dragon. The two together meant that Nettle didn’t know about me being her father. I was torn between relief that I had not said anything to enlighten her and a sick foreboding that I would never really exist in her life. Suddenly the blackness and the ice and cold seemed to close in on me, and for one dizzying instant, I felt squeezed inside the glacier, trapped and wishing I could die, but unable to do even that much for myself. Shame choked me as I tried to will my own death.
Then the suffocating darkness passed and I staggered on. I set Nettle and Burrich and Molly aside, pushed away my past and looked only at the immediate thing that I needed to do: kill this dragon. I followed Dutiful deeper into the ice, telling myself that perhaps I could still save the Fool. Lying to myself.
Dutiful’s little lantern showed me nothing except the slickly gleaming walls of ice and Dutiful’s silhouette in front of me. The tunnel came to an abrupt end. Dutiful turned to face me and squatted down. ‘That’s his head, down there. We think.’ Dutiful pointed down at the scuffed ice below us.
I stared at ice he crouched on. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘With the bigger lantern and daylight behind you, you could. Just take my word for it. His head is below us.’ Awkwardly, he unshouldered his sack onto the floor in front of him. I hunkered down facing him. There would just be room for him to step over the kettle and squeeze past me once we got the fire going.
The cold had crept into my shoulder, stiffening it, and my battered face was a cold, sore mask. It didn’t matter. I had my right hand still. How hard could it be to build a fire and put a crock into it? That was something even I could do.
The hides went down first. Dutiful arranged them between us, as if we were soldiers preparing for a dice game. The hides were thick ones, one of ice bear, and one of sea cow. They both stank. I settled the kettle in the middle of them and set the flask of oil carefully aside from it. I put the crock of powder next to it. We had shaved bits of wood for tinder and some scorched linen. I made a tiny nest in the bottom of the kettle. I had struck three futile showers of sparks from the firestone into the kettle before Dutiful asked me curiously, ‘Couldn’t we just light it from the lantern?’
I lifted my eyes and gave him a baleful stare. In response, he grinned at me. The light emphasized his reddened cheeks and cracked lips. I didn’t have a smile left in me, but somehow I shaped one for him. I remembered, briefly, that his young shoulders bore burdens, too, not the least of which was that killing this dragon was a betrayal, of sorts, of his Old Blood and his Old Blood coterie. Nor would it buy him his own dream. The girl he had come to love was his only as a lure to get him to do the Pale Woman’s bidding. She had offered herself to him, not for love, not to secure an alliance, but only to buy her mother’s and sister’s death. It did not seem a promising foundation for a marriage, and yet, here we were. I rocked back onto my heels. ‘You do it,’ I told him. ‘And then get out of here. Oh. And guide Burrich away from the edge of the excavation for me. He doesn’t see well.’
‘No, really? I thought he was blind.’ It was a young man’s humour, the dark sarcasm that has no fear of ever meeting the fate he mocks. I could no longer smile about it, but perhaps Dutiful didn’t notice. He claimed a bit of the scorched linen from the kettle and offered it to the lantern’s flame. It licked it hungrily and immediately the fire took. Dutiful hastily dropped it into the kettle on top of the other tinder. It went out.
‘Nothing is ever easy for us,’ I observed after our third try had failed.
I had to turn the kettle on its side, and then Dutiful burnt his fingers poking the last bit of flaming linen under the shaved bits of wood. We held our breaths, waiting, and the tiny flame gripped and clambered over the tinder. I nursed it stronger with curls of wood, deciding that I would not turn the kettle upright and risk dislodging the heart of the fire, but would instead slide the powder into the kettle as if I were putting a loaf of bread into an oven’s mouth. I coughed in the gathering smoke from our tiny fire.
‘Time for you to go,’ I told the Prince.
‘Just do it and then we’ll both go.’
‘No.’ I would not say I wanted to be sure he was safely away before I loaded the powder. Instead, I said, ‘Burrich is very important to me. And very proud. He’ll want to wait until I’m with him before he flees. Take his arm and tell him that I’m coming, that you can see me. And get him well away from the pit. We both know that Chade’s concoctions sometimes work far better than he expects them to.’
‘You want me to lie to him?’ Dutiful was scandalized.
‘I want you to get him to safety. He has a bad knee, and he can’t move as swiftly as you or I. So get him started. I’ll give you a moment or two to do that, then I’ll load in the powder and get out of here.’
It worked. The Prince would not have left me if only his own safety had been at risk. He would for Burrich’s. I thanked Kettricken for the heart she had instilled in her son as he stepped gingerly over the hot kettle and clambered past me. I listened to his footsteps in the icy tunnel, trying to gauge when he would leave the pit, reach Burrich and escort him away. No hurry, I told myself. No need to risk anyone just yet. In a few more minutes, the dragon would be dead. And perhaps the Fool would be safe.
I lay flat on the floor of the tunnel, to avoid the smoke hanging above me and to feed my fledgling fire. I wanted a good bed of coals. Then I’d put in the powder. Reluctantly, I decided I should add the oil at that time, too, enough to coax the flames up around the side of the powder container. I opened the flask of oil and set it to hand. It would be safe. It had taken quite a long time before the powder in the flask had exploded in my hearth fire. Of course, that had been before Chade had perfected the powder.
Don’t think about that. Don’t think about dying here, burnt and crushed. No. I could be trapped and still in the ice, with cold taking me deeper and deeper into blackness, until I was finally gone. I thought of that easing into death. It almost seemed cowardly. And yet what other way was there to go? Alone, mateless, was a death by ice so cruel a fate?