When Thalia awoke the next morning, the landscape was silver with frost.
Marith had tried to explain it to her, in the desert outside Sorlost, his eyes closed as he spoke. Trying to shape into words the beauty of it, the breath-taking sense of purity and hope and pain it brought. She had not been able to comprehend it, she who had lived all her life in the walls of her Temple, in the heat. The dawn in the desert had been astonishing, joyous, perfect with life. This was different, more terrifying, so beautiful it tore her heart from her breast, so remorseless it brought tears to her eyes. The trees furred thick with ice, ice crusting the ground, picking out every blade of grass, turning it into something like nothing she could imagine, a world made of glass and diamond where nothing could live. In the strange pale light the bare trees were even darker, against the new whiteness of the ground. A stream showed black and gold, reflecting the first sun, a gaping scar of light, heavy and solid as skin. And cold. Cold as the Small Chamber. Cold as Marith’s eyes.
God is here, she thought, looking at the frost. God is here in this place, but not my God. Not Great Tanis, who is the Lord of Living and Dying, who is hungry and fierce and loving and strong and burns with light and dark. Other gods, gods of silence. Gods like the taste of cold salt water. Gods of the living world. No power, save the power to astonish and make one weep at the beauty of them, and the knowledge that they are deadly and terrible and beautiful and nothing, and have no care for man or sunlight or hope or despair. Gods that simply are.
A bird broke the stillness, its wings beating up, loud as trumpets in the frozen air. The spell was broken: the people around her began moving about, talking, tending the fire. So futile, their actions seemed, against the frozen world.
They had camped in a small stone hut built low down in a valley nestled between the sweep of the moors. Very old and tumbledown, one side open to the air and looking out over mossy grass, a hearth in one corner and stone shelf beds raised up from a stone floor. Birds had nested in the roof, but were flown for the winter, leaving only thick trails of green-white filth down the walls and onto the floor.
Not a good place. Thalia felt it with a shudder as she entered. A smell of blood, old and faint. But not the blood of dying. She saw Marith twitch as he crossed the threshold, his face lit for a moment. He shook his head, wearily, as she had seen him do once or twice when he had been drinking and a shadow came over him and made him sigh. He sat down quietly in the corner, the rope still around his neck, wrapped her in his arms as she sat beside him. Landra sat in the further corner from them, by the hearth, as Mandle began to build up a fire and prepare a camp. All she had known, Thalia thought, of life beyond the walls of the Temple: campfires and camp cookery and hard-faced men who set about their work whilst looking at her with bitter eyes.
She was left free, but with wrists bound behind her back. Marith, Mandle bound hand and foot, then tied the rope to a stone standing just outside the threshold of the hut.
‘I swore I wouldn’t run,’ Marith said, the first words he had spoken since he had knelt on the ground at Landra’s feet. ‘I swore, and I do still swear.’
‘You’ve lied and you do still lie,’ Landra said shortly. Marith laughed. The fire sputtered into life with a crackle and a pungent burst of smoke.
‘Let’s get the tea on, then,’ Mandle said. ‘Bloody freezing, I am.’
In the light from the fire the night outside was suddenly darker, the stone at the entranceway more clearly picked out. Not a good thing, it was, squatting there, god-charmed and blood-reeking, half as tall as a man and with the look of a man to it. It did not seem well omened, that Marith was bound to it.
‘What is this place?’ she asked him, taken with fear.
‘A way house,’ he answered, before Mandle jerked the rope and shouted, ‘No talking.’ And then they unbound her to eat, and bound her again, and she was asleep huddled next to Marith in the cold, shivering even as she slept but too exhausted not to sleep dreamlessly and wake wishing she could sleep longer. And the frost was there before her, cruel and beautiful and utterly unknown to her, like a language she had never before heard chanting out a song of prayer.
Marith whimpered in his sleep beside her, his body twitching. Pity, it moved her to. Why, she thought, why could he find no peace? She’d thought herself so much more worn down than him, so much more broken and driven to exhaustion and pain. But she saw now that he had been living on nothing, going on and going on crushed down to dust. She watched him wake as weary as he had been before he slept, eat hard bread and hot tea in the ice-cold morning light, his hair rumpled, his face pinched with a look of pain now always around his eyes. He gasped with relief when they unbound his hands, rubbed madly at his face. He must be in agony, she realized, unable to claw at the itching that ate at him.
‘Come on then. Up.’ Mandle jerked her roughly to her feet, then took up the rope that haltered Marith like an animal. Landra looked worn out, tired and pained, dirty and crumpled, but her face was set with grim determination. She seemed so endlessly resolved to torture them. Were they all like this, in the east? Hard and remorseless and cruel? Savage, Thalia thought. Savages. Her own body felt exhausted beyond exhaustion, the cold so deep in her bones she would surely never be warm again. No gain could come of this, no benefit to Landra or her kin, only more grief. No joy. No purpose.
Their footsteps crunched on the icy grass, still almost the only sound; their breath puffed out in white clouds. Thalia thought again of the dragon, breathing smoke and steam. She had seen her breath condense like this in the desert, in the night and the dawn; yet it was different here, in full morning sunlight, in a white silent world. She could see why Marith had spoken of it with yearning.
They walked for hours. The sun melted the frost. The road took them over a great high curve of barren hillside, brown with dry heather, down a steep incline into a narrow pass verdant with grass and moss. Pebbles slipped and clattered underfoot, very loud in the silence of the place. The walls closed in, grey stone rearing up out of the green earth. A stream coursed down the rocks, staining them black, running off across the ground clear as bright glass. The pebbles of the path gleamed brown beneath the water when they crossed.
Then up again, the land rising back up to tawny moorland and great outcroppings of dark rock. No one else walked the path, they saw nothing living. An empty land, as empty as the sea. And yet beautiful. Marith’s face shone as he looked around him.
Ansikanderakesis, she thought. A king in his kingdom indeed.
Mandle stopped suddenly, holding up his hand.