Goh Gam Gar was sitting just outside the cavern, his thick, yellowed pelt his only protection from the bitingly cold winds. “If you two are going out to rut,” the giant said pleasantly to Nezeru, “you had better dig a hole in the snow. It will serve you for a nest, too, should you bear offspring. Still, they will be thin-blooded, mostly mortal whelps with such a father. I doubt they will survive. But perhaps it is only the rut itself you seek, eh, Sacrifice?”
Nezeru stepped around him, mindful as always of the giant’s long, powerful arms. “Silence, monster,” she said, but she could feel a burning in her cheeks and was sure her half-mortal skin betrayed her. “You lie to sow distrust. You accuse others of what you want for yourself.”
The giant laughed and the icicles shivered above the cavern entrance. “Oh, fear not—you are safe enough from me. Goh Gam Gar would split you like a skinned rabbit on too large a stick.”
She set her jaw and marched away. Jarnulf was waiting a dozen paces ahead, gazing out across the uneven peaks and the deep valleys, all covered in snow. “Such helpful traveling companions,” was all he said. “We are fortunate.”
Nezeru thought it would be a good idea to go back down the mountain, to places where they had seen stands of evergreens which might hide game, but Jarnulf only shook his head. “And what if we kill something large? I do not think much of having to carry it back up the mountain to the cave. No, we should go upward. We will scout a little of tomorrow’s journey, and if we find anything to shoot, we can drag it back down instead of bowing our backs.”
So they clambered up, trying to find the best footing they could but not always succeeding. Once Jarnulf stepped onto snow that gave way beneath him; he disappeared into a crevice so quickly he did not even have time to cry out. For a brief instant Nezeru thought him lost, but when she clambered as close as she dared to where the crust had given way, she found that he had only slipped down a few feet below the surface. She slid her pack out until he could grab it by the strap. After much slipping and sawing, he at last managed to scramble out of the hole.
“My thanks,” he said, and once more displayed the expression she could not imagine from any Hikeda’ya, a broad grin. “That might have been unpleasant.”
How did the giant sense my complicated feelings about this mortal? Nezeru wondered. Not that it is lust I feel, as the beast suggested. Nothing so obvious. But I must be more careful around the others.
At last she and Jarnulf reached a flat stone plateau at the edge of a scarp. It fell away so severely that Nezeru could see no bottom to it, only an increasingly muddled view of shadows on snow. The rest of the plateau stood on the other side of the abyss, some three dozen paces away across empty space.
Movement on the far side of the drop caught Nezeru’s attention. She held her hand out to stop Jarnulf when he came up behind her, then made the signal for silence when he started to speak. She had spotted a huge mountain goat standing on the farther plateau.
“Nezeru,” her companion said, slightly louder this time, but she signaled him even more violently to be quiet. In what seemed one smooth gesture, she flicked her bow from over her shoulder, raised it, nocked an arrow, and released. The shaft flew across the chasm like a beam of light and struck the goat in its side. The animal took a stumbling step, then slumped down onto the edge of the plateau, its head dangling over nothingness. It tried to lift itself a few times, as if to die on its feet, but the arrow had gone too deep and within moments it had gone still.
“I admire your eye and your aim,” said Jarnulf as he looked at the dead mountain goat, its long hair set a-flutter by the stiff wind.
“You are not the only one who can hit a target,” she said.
“Yes, but neither of us has wings. How do you propose we retrieve it?”
She bit back an angry response when she realized he was right—the two sides of the plateau did not join, so there was no way across the chasm to retrieve her prize. For a moment Nezeru almost felt as if she might weep like a mortal, like her own mother, great useless tears of humiliation. “I am a fool,” she said at last. Between the earlier jibes of the giant and her own reactions, she had failed to make certain they could get to the other side before she shot.
“There is always more to killing than simply killing,” said Jarnulf as he stared out across the gulf.
“Do not tell the others,” she pleaded. “Please, say nothing.”
“You think I would sell your mistake to try to gain favor with your companions?” His expression was as flatly empty as any Hikeda’ya’s. “I think you do not know either them or myself very well, Sacrifice Nezeru.”
Chastened and furious with herself, she now let him set the pace. Her thoughts remained tangled, but as time passed and Jarnulf said nothing, she managed to clear her mind enough to concentrate once more on the hunt. At last, they found another goat, this one in a place they could reach. Nezeru again took the shot—Jarnulf insisted—and again it struck home. A short time later, they had retrieved their kill and stood once more on relatively flat ground. Nezeru thought the huge mountains seemed to be watching them, like cloaked gods against the gray sky—perhaps wondering why such strange, tiny creatures trespassed in their domain.
“There are dark clouds on the northeastern horizon,” she said. “A storm is coming.”
“Right you are,” Jarnulf said. “And this would be a bad place to be caught. I had hoped we might bring down a second goat to keep the giant sweet, but he will have to share with the rest of us.”
Nezeru and the mortal took turns carrying their kill across their shoulders as they made their way down the mountain, but the beast was heavy and the footing became increasingly treacherous as the winds rose. Jarnulf at last dropped the carcass to the ground and began to drag it behind them, leaving a blood-tinged rut in the snow. “And now you see why we went uphill, not down,” he said.
“You have made your point, mortal,” Nezeru told him. “You are a better hunter than this Hikeda’ya.”
“No, I am the more practiced hunter,” he said. “You have a keen eye and light feet, and your aim is nearly faultless. But I have been keeping myself alive in the wild with only my own wits and my own weapons for many years. Even Makho, I think, has not had to do that.”
After long moments, silent but for the swish of the carcass dragging across the snow, Nezeru abruptly said, “You still have not told me all the truth.”
Jarnulf didn’t answer immediately, which might have been because he was negotiating a difficult stretch of downhill climb, trying to keep the sliding weight of the mountain goat from dragging him over the edge. “Do you mean to ask why am I still here?” he asked at last. “I gave your chieftain an answer to that days ago, whether you heard it or not—whether any of you believed it or not.”
So the slow game still continues, she thought. “Do not treat me like a fool, Rimmersman. That was no answer and you know it. Why did you save us and why are you with us? Why did that bandit of the Skalijar recognize you?”
“What do you wish me to say, woman of Sacrifice? That you have plumbed my deepest secrets? That I left my task as Queen’s Huntsman, risking punishment, so I could travel with your Hand into the eastern wilderness? And why would that be? To enrich myself somehow? How would that work, pray tell?”
“I don’t know. But I do know that you have not told the whole truth. You recognized that bandit, the one with but one eye, and he recognized you. I saw. Do you deny it?”
Jarnulf stopped. The dead mountain goat slid a little way farther down the slope. Its eyes were filmy, and its swollen tongue protruded from its mouth as though the creature’s downhill journey had exhausted it. “Why should I? Yes. Yes, I knew him. His name was Dyrmundur. We were companions for a while, when I was young.”
Her heart sped with triumph and sudden alarm. “How can that be? You grew up in the slave barracks of Nakkiga—or at least that is what you claimed.”
He shook his head. “I did not lie about that, or anything else important. Yes, I grew up in a slave barn. And when I first became a queen’s huntsman, I used that opportunity to escape. Would you have done differently? Well, perhaps you would have. For a while after, I lived with the Skalijar, but their anger was not mine, nor was their fight.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember, please, that we are trying to outpace a storm, Sacrifice Nezeru. If we stand here until I answer all your questions, we will die. Surely they taught you that, whatever you may think, even the queen herself does not rule the snow and wind, not here.” He began to make his way down the slope, forcing her to follow him to hear what he said. “The only one who could bespell the weather is gone, sent back to perdition at Asu’a.” He smirked. “Do not look so surprised. Yes, I know of Asu’a. In fact, I have seen it, if only from a distance, which is more than I think you can say.”