They’d told her if she lost it, she’d be broken forever. . .
“They will come for you. One cannot choose suicide!”
“How many lives have been lost, Dragandrea? How will you pay for those?”
“Think twice before you let anything draw you to your death. . . shouldn’t let you go!”
Alandis could hear the voices swirling in her mind like the snowflakes whirling on the wind. She shivered, drawing the pearly, mink-lined velvet cloak closer. She had clasped it with a dove-shaped brooch that Solavier had carved for her, but it clacked against the amber that alone seemed to remain warm in the chill.
Crossing the snowy plateaus, Alandis had left Tryshek now and traversed Nvilna, making camp twice. The northern territory was unfamiliar to her, except by hearsay. She had no idea whether there were ice dragons, too, and jumped at every shifting shape of snow. She shook her head at her imagination.
The voices in the wind and snow were surely her imagination also. Echoes of warnings, they reminded her that somehow she’d escaped damage to the amber, but would she remain so lucky?
She remembered, too, the haunted gaze Sol had held every time he worried about her departure.
“Maia! Help me keep my promise?”
Alandis cracked open the diptych she’d carried in her purse and prayed that she wouldn’t hurt Solavier worse than she had hurt Trys.
How was Solavier faring? Was her hunch of the dragons correct, and his hands were only full with holding back Dlam?
Once she had thrown a glance over her shoulder and thought she spied a dark figure on horseback in the distance, watching, but it was only a speck against the whiteness and she couldn’t be sure. Besides, while this was not the most hospitable place to be traveling in the winter, there would be plenty of others on the roads.
Alandis pressed onward and rounded the glacial bay of Tèsseré. A glacier, dripping blue-gold in the morning, slipped down the mountains to the west. She could hear the cracking as the calvings come raining down into the water.
There was no sight of the Vanaile, but she had a creeping feeling that this was, in fact, where she was headed.
Leaving Sissi, Alandis alternately slid and crunched her way across the frost-encased foliage to the water’s edge.
A large iceberg, seemingly rooted to the center of the bay, dominated the horizon. With color shifts from white to crystal blue and turquoise, the dome of the iceberg was shattered into sharp pinnacles like a scream, deceptively showered by the recent snow. Archways and grand, mawing corridors led inside, the misted sunlight reverberating like phosphorescence. The outer walls were carved and scratched in vibrant blue stripes, eerily claw-like.
Smaller ice floes and growlers bumped around its foot, until the bay appeared like chips of ice slushed together with the blue of pansies, forget-me-nots, cornflowers, and starflowers, which was a favored delicacy in these northern regions. Now Alandis could see where the inspiration had come from.
With no sign of dragon or destruction, Alandis rested her eyes on the water peacefully lapping at her feet, thinking heavily of the damaged ships – of all the dragons – of home.
“Where are you,” she sighed. “Deo. . . I’m so tired.”
As she picked out the glassy stones littering the shallows, she began to realize that there was something else hiding in her reflection. A shock sent her nerves shrieking when it hit her that the eyes staring back at her were not her own, but the ghostly white of the Vanaile.
She stumbled backwards, thinking she was now seeing things again, but no, the water foamed and shapeshifted, yet rather than dragging her in, as if sensing her change of thought, rocketed through the water towards the iceberg.
“Wait!”
Alandis followed as best as she could, hopping across the ice floes. There were many tunnels driving their way into the ice. One, two, three, were only shallow and abruptly curved around to the entrance.
Was there an entrance underwater? That must have been how the Vanaile entered. She hesitated, debating the danger of trying to find it in freezing water, versus not stopping the Vanaile. She knew what Sol would say, and flinched, remembering her promise.
Momentarily helpless, she held her breath to think. No, there had to be a way in from the outside, but it would be as difficult as a frozen dive.
Her hair, having been loosely netted by a weave of slender braids to lay warmly against her neck, she now caught up into a ponytail. Setting her seica to the ice, she began to claw her way up the iceberg, using the scraped lines and her seica to find footholds. Near the summit, hidden by crystal talons and spires, was a fifty-degree slope down into the iceberg’s depths – or so she hoped.
Or did she hope?
The chill was biting at her, despite the amber’s warmth.
Don’t do it, she seemed to hear Sol say, but could it be helped?
She perched there for some time, staring at the sunrise. All the things she had done – all the times she had sustained some injury – paled in comparison to her reckless facing of the Vanaile the first time.
Was she in full control? She had been seeing things already; how did she know she hadn’t built a wall to tell herself this was right?
She felt that she was wobbling back and forth over an edge, trying to draw on two reins that pulled her back from the thoughts she was plunging into, but her strength was too far gone.
She saw herself within the heart of a vortex, with no knowledge of where to turn, for everything was spinning: everything was there, and nothing was.
It was the feeling that she was broken down and would never be fulfilled, nothing would prove her, nothing would hold back the dragons, everything she did was a failure - her skill with the dragons had only brought death.
Sol loved a shadow and a ghost, and that was why Trys had turned away - he had seen the shell that was the Dove, the facade behind which was nothing but fear.
“No,” she said aloud, dazedly shaking her head. Whether or not all that was true, there were two things that she did know for certain: both men would perish those thoughts from her mind, and while neither would approve of her dropping into a dragon’s lair, what else could she do?
Alandis sighed, taking out a flask to check that it was empty. She watched the last few drops of coffee sink into the snow. It had been nice to have the hot drink the first day, but now she was regretting not saving enough to wake up her chilled mind. At least Solavier had thought to give it to her, because coffee had been, unusually, the furthest thing from her mind.
Alandis groaned. There was no one else there to tell her what she was thinking, what her secret reasons were.
She watched the sliding shadows. Even in the morning light they were spectrally deep, as they had been in Isola. Was that merely her imagination, too?
The northwestern sky was still in a deep haze, deep enough that the stars peeked through; the King’s star, that of Scier, glimmered; overhead, the triangle of the archangels; and in the south, Maia’s constellation held the sky captured. Even once they vanished, they would still be there, just as they were when she never felt them.
“Help me keep my promise, end this without ending me, for Sol’s sake and my family’s!”
Alandis sheathed her seica and slipped down the slope.
Four seconds of sliding found a vertical wall of ice rushing up through the shadows to meet her dark-struck eyes – she barely turned her shoulder to it in time to save her head. Her shoulder slammed into the ice and sent shivers rattling through the nerves in her arm.
“Not my best idea,” Alandis muttered, as her vision wobbled a moment. She gained a foothold after a few near-slides and began to prowl the tunnel.
The light here was dim but spoke of the bright turquoise bands of dusk. She was grateful for the warmth and the ebb and flow of the amber’s light, though she grew hyperaware of its consistent pulse with the desire to tear it out.
She clenched her fist to keep her promise and kept moving.
Creeping through the ice and echoing off the walls was the rolling, gurgling sound of the waves that sloshed beneath her feet, groans and cracks of ice as it warmed in the sun, and the saltwater froze within its veins. The musical plinking of the occasional droplet into trapped basins beat a static pace for Alandis’ steps as she came to the first branching of the iceberg.
There was a strange peace here, leaving Alandis feeling that she could have left her breath hanging to rest. She was certain that the Vanaile was aware she had followed it. If it could shapeshift into water, it was equally likely it could shapeshift into ice. She could have been treading on its tail at that moment, for all she knew.
The thought made her hesitate to place her next step as her eyes roved around the walls. The listlessly shimmering light played further tricks on her eyes.
She shook her head and slipped to the branching-off of the corridor. The cracked ice broke into a cavern, littered with pillars. There was evidence of scale-sharpening on the far walls, and several pillars had been sliced through the abdomen, as though by a carelessly-swung tail.
Her breath shivered. The crisp crackling ran around the cavern walls behind her back, chittering like the laughing of many watching eyes.
She was going to die.
The wave of despair returned, crashing over her shoulders.
Trapped in the sinking ghost of her fears, the iceberg rested in her stomach, taking over her insides until she was more chilled inside than out, and the amber felt like fire against it. She started to pull at the implant and scarcely stopped, grasping at the ridges of ice around her instead.
Sol’s suspicions were right, she had thrown herself headfirst into that iceberg without truly discerning what she was doing.
Whether her family would have to see her blood on the ice, or Sol, or Trys -
But it wasn’t Trys she thought of first; it wasn’t the thought that always had come before, of the way Trys shielded her from the wind, and the longing for that shelter now.
It was Sol. It was Sol whom she wanted to appear at her shoulder to face the Vanaile with her.
She imagined his face, remembering the way relief had broken over it when she’d stepped from the shadows after her near-drowning; the agony, too, when they’d both realized what she had done.
She didn’t want that to be etched on his face again.
She was supposed to be the Dragandrea, not the Dove. She was asked to be the Dragandrea, and keep the Dove from flying at every thought. She wrapped her fingers around the crucifix. The iceberg inside began to melt, just a little, until it no longer froze her stomach solid.
The Vanaile was not rushing to meet her. Whether it was a trap or not, she had the time to speak.
Alandis stepped into the cavern. The crackling fell silent as she cast the amber’s voice across the room.
I have left my territory to find you, Vanaile. I am not here to harm you, but those who follow in my footsteps will hunt you for what you have done. Give your word that you will not destroy our people, and I will hold them back.
The ice seemed to fizz before her eyes like wreathing steam, until those eerie eyes were flashing into hers.
To be continued. . .
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