North! Or Be Eaten (41 page)

The sun sailed across the clear sky and slipped behind a mountain.

At last the canyon was behind them, and they zigzagged up the face of the Witch’s Nose. Even Gammon was winded, and he stopped every few minutes to allow the children to catch up and find their breath. The trail was littered with shale and pebbles, and the higher they climbed, the more snow was piled above and below.

“We have to…hurry,” Gammon said between breaths. “It’s not far now.” He pointed to a cluster of boulders above and to the right. “We just have to make it to
there; then we circle the mountain and…well, you’ll see. I think you’ll enjoy the last bit of our journey. Quick now! The sun descends!”

There it is again
, Janner thought.
That tickle of recognition
. He knew he had seen Gammon before—but where?

Gammon sprang up the face of the mountain toward the boulders. Pebbles clicked and tumbled into snowdrifts below. Janner took a deep breath and followed, Maraly close at his heels. The air was thin, the wind biting, and the first stars shimmered in the air above the great peak.

At last they reached the boulders. A well-used trail wound between them, and Janner found Gammon resting inside. The rocks provided a buffer from the wind, and after so much time in the great openness of the range, the cleft was a nest of safety.

“It’s dark, lad. The snickbuzzards will be wheeling.”

Janner’s face fell. Maraly drew her dagger and clenched her jaw. Gammon nodded at her with admiration. Janner fumbled to find his sword and with a great commotion managed to draw it from the skins draped over his backpack.

“What do we do?” he asked, hating how frightened he sounded.

“The dusk isn’t gone just yet, so we might get lucky and only see a few birds. Listen close.” Gammon bent over and looked the children in the eye. “Keep as close to me as you can, clear around the mountain. It’s not a short distance, but it’s not too far to run without a rest. Can you keep up?”

“Yes sir,” said Janner. Maraly nodded and spat again.

“Once we’re on the east side of the mountain, we’re all but home. We just have to mount the boggan and slide to safety. But as I said, the buzzards will be wheeling. If I were alone, I’d sleep here for the night and press on in the morning. But time is precious, and with you two warriors on guard, I think we’ll make it without a scratch. All clear?”

“Er,” said Janner, “what’s a boggan?”

Gammon laughed. “Don’t worry about that. You’ll see soon enough. Get behind me and have your blades drawn. When the snickbuzzards swoop, hack away.”

“Hack away,” Janner said with a gulp.

“Hack away,” Gammon repeated, clapping Janner on the shoulder. “You ready, little lady?”

Maraly narrowed her eyes. “Aye, I’m ready. Killed more snickbuzzards than you, old man. Eaten more too, I’d bet.”

Gammon straightened with a chuckle. “That you have, lass. I’m certain of it.” He led them through the corridor between the boulders and halted at the exit. “You two
ready to run? If we’re lucky, they’ll have soup on the stove for us. There’s always a grand welcome for Skreeans in Kimera.”

“Ready,” Janner and Maraly said.

“Now!” Gammon cried, and they burst from their cover.

They ran through the snow across the face of the mountain for so long that Janner’s chest burned like he had swallowed hot coals. His throat narrowed, and he wheezed like an old man. Maraly passed him just like Tink would have done, and Janner cursed his slow, lanky legs as his two companions raced ahead.

All that remained of the daylight was a smudge of pale yellow at their backs. Before them, beyond the mountain, stars shone like diamonds, and it was a long time before Janner realized the sky wasn’t obstructed by more mountains. As they rounded Mog-Balgrik, the moon came into view, yellow as a wolf’s eye and casting a rich light over the vast sweep of the Ice Prairies.

Janner’s vision blurred and his legs trembled. He couldn’t run much longer. He would have to stop for air, and if the snickbuzzards came for him, so be it. Moments before his will was snuffed, he crashed into Maraly and they tumbled into the snow. They came up sputtering, covered with snow and slush.

“Get up!” Gammon cried. “They’re coming!”

Janner pushed himself to his feet and pulled Maraly with him. Gammon struggled with an object buried in snow, casting nervous glances at the sky. Janner craned his neck and saw, silhouetted against the blue-black sky, blotting out star after star, a descending cloud of snickbuzzards.

The three of them stood on the great mountain at the height of the world, knee-deep in snow, blades aglow in the moonlight, and waited for the birds to strike. Janner had one thought as the first snickbuzzard swooped within reach of his blade:
What in Aerwiar is a boggan?

T
hunk!

The bird split cleanly in two and
poofed
into the drift beside Janner in a spray of snow and feather. Maraly hissed and flung her dagger at the next snickbuzzard when it was still fifteen feet above them. The bird squawked and tumbled to her feet. She snatched her dagger from its breast and braced herself for the next attack.

Janner saw buzzard after buzzard wheeling in the sky, black swaths against midnight blue. Except for the sound they made when the children struck, the birds were eerily silent as they circled.

When the next snickbuzzard dove at Janner, he swung too late. He killed the bird, but its talons found his shoulder and tore through his covering of skins like a knife through paper. He pushed the pain away and readied himself for the next attack, trying not to pay attention to the way his left arm trembled.

Maraly killed another bird and screamed, “Hurry it up, Gammon!”

“Got it!” he cried before she finished her sentence. “Get on! Quick!”

Janner tore his eyes from the sky to find Gammon kneeling at the front of a sort of sled. It was long and flat with no sides, but ropes ran from the rear of the boggan, looping through pulleys and into holes in the curved nose to form what must have been some kind of steering mechanism. Gammon held the ends of the two ropes in one hand and waved the children on with the other.

Janner halved another snickbuzzard and leapt after Maraly onto the boggan. Maraly knelt behind Gammon, and Janner took the rear.

“Janner! Pull the anchor!”

“What? Where?”

“Hurry!”

Maraly hissed again, and Janner knew without looking that she had flung her dagger. A dead snickbuzzard crashed into Janner and sent him sprawling. From beneath the smelly pile of feathers, he saw Gammon leap to the rear of the boggan and pull a stick from a hole in the deck. Immediately, the boggan slid forward.

Janner heaved the dead bird off himself and raised his sword as another bird swooped. A heartbeat later the boggan was carrying Gammon and the children down the slope so fast that snickbuzzards no longer swooped at them but glided right beside the sled. Janner saw by the light of the moon their black eyes set in fleshy sockets; the hard, curved beaks; the featherless necks; the batlike wings. A string of the birds flapped behind the boggan like feathery smoke so that whenever Janner or Maraly killed one, another took its place. Every moment the boggan picked up speed and the snickbuzzards became less interested in their quarry, until finally the birds were gone.

Janner and Maraly whooped in spite of their exhaustion. They hugged and laughed along with Gammon as the boggan zoomed down the long slope.

“Well done, little warriors!” he cried.

Janner and Maraly sheathed their blades and looked out at the Ice Prairies for the first time. Mog-Balgrik’s western slope was formidable, a steep sentinel warning travelers weak of spirit to keep their distance, but if the traveler braved her icy face, the reward was sweet. A long, smooth descent to the frozen desert of the Ice Prairies lay at her back, and to those like Gammon who knew where to find them, boggans hid in the snow to bear them home.

Janner’s eyes watered, and the wind of their passage deafened him, but he smiled so wide that the muscles in his cheeks throbbed. The moon cooled to white as it climbed, and it lit the ice fields so that Janner could see as clearly as if it were day. For hours the three of them glided down from the mountains, faster than the fastest horse, with a plume of snow arcing behind them like a spray of water. Moonlight caught the flying snow, flashing prisms of color on the prairie surface as they passed. White mice and snow foxes, burrowed beneath the snow for the night, twitched their ears when the boggan zoomed by, thinking that perhaps the Maker had bent low to the earth and whispered,
“Shh.”

Janner slept for a while, and when he woke, the moon looked straight down at him. When he didn’t see Maraly, he gasped and sat up, thinking she had fallen off sometime in the night. Then he heard murmurs from the front of the sled. She knelt next to Gammon and held the ropes as he instructed her in a quiet voice.

“Don’t pull too hard, now,” he said. “That’s it. See the bank up ahead? Swing us wide around the left side. Good.”

“Are we close?” Janner asked with a wince. His wounded arm was stiff and stung when he moved. Gammon and Maraly turned, and Janner was surprised to see her smiling.

“Yes,” Gammon said. “Very close, in fact. See that rise in the distance? Over to the right, just below Tirium?”

“What’s Tirium?” Janner asked. He could only see moonlit prairie stretching away forever.

“It’s a constellation, just above the horizon. It makes a triangle—see it?”

Janner did. Three bright stars, a perfect triangle tilted and slipping into the horizon, and just below them a gentle slope in the snow.

“I see it. Is that Kimera?” asked Maraly. Her voice had lost some of its edge. She sounded more like an ordinary girl than a dagger-throwing Strander.

“That’s Kimera,” Gammon said.

Janner could hardly contain himself. He was hungry and cold and tired, and he missed his family so much that he felt like he might cry.

At last Gammon took the ropes and pulled back on them like he was reining up a horse. Something at the back of the boggan shifted, and the sled slowed gently to a stop, just at the foot of the rise Gammon had pointed out.

“Here we are,” he said with a smile. “Kimera.”

Janner leapt from the boggan into ankle-deep snow. He expected to see a village, smoke rising from chimneys, yellow lamplight pouring from windows, but he saw nothing but snow. Everywhere he turned was snow, from horizon to horizon. Not even the mountains were visible anymore. Was this a trick? Was that the shadow that had passed across Gammon’s face, that there was no Kimera after all? What if it had been a lie that Podo, Nia, Leeli, and Oskar had found Kimera? Janner couldn’t believe he had allowed himself to believe anything good might happen to him, that anyone might be worthy of his trust. He felt hot tears rise in his chest. He was certain he would never see his family again and that Gammon had planned to turn him over to the Fangs all along.

“Janner?” said a voice.

Janner froze.

“Son?”

He turned slowly around.

A wide trapdoor rose from the bed of snow. Yellow light streamed out of the hole, and a figure ascended a long, curved stairway. It was Nia. She wore a green, long-sleeved gown, her wrists and collar adorned with fine white fur, and a gold necklace hung at her neck. After so many hours beneath the cold white stars, sailing on a blanket of blue-white snow, the yellow and gold that surrounded his mother was the most magical color Janner had ever seen. And his mother! She was clean. Her hair was
braided into fine, intricate loops that cascaded around her shoulders like a gilded waterfall. She
was
a queen. If ever Janner had doubted it, now he knew.

“Mama?” Janner breathed.

Nia’s breath caught in her throat, and a hand went to her mouth.

A moment later the two of them rushed forward—a boy wrapped in animal skins, wounded and sore, skinny as a tree branch, and the Queen of Anniera, wrapped in gold and light. They embraced, and Janner all but melted with joy.

F
or days Artham drifted in and out of sanity. He lay on his back in the cage with a shine of drool slipping toward his ear from the corner of his mouth. He stared at the stone ceiling and gibbered words that had no meaning. But at times he sat bolt upright as if he had just awoken from a nightmare, and he knew himself and where he was.

All the while he ached to abandon himself, to agree to the Stone Keeper’s offer and allow her to turn him into a winged beast. It would be so easy to sing the song and know no more. He had much he wanted to forget. He had broken his deepest oath, and even in his sanest moments he was unable to think on that fact without trembling.

I left him!

His mind had screamed these words so many times over the years that they were burned into his core. No matter how he tried, he could not escape that one fact, that one decision that had haunted him all these years. No matter how he ran, no matter how he fought to protect the jewels, Peet’s deepest heart was rotten and dying from those three brutal words.

All he had to do was give up and it would all be over. He could wave at the Grey Fang in the window, and the Stone Keeper would take his hand and trade his sorrow for the mindless nothing of the iron box. The red light would flash, and all that was left of Artham Wingfeather would disappear.

For days the Grey Fangs delivered more of the frightened children to the Stone Keeper, and she calmed them and welcomed them and killed them.

That’s right
, thought Artham,
killed them
. She took away their lives. Still, he felt a stab of guilt for the Fangs he had slain—had they been children like these?

No, these Fangs were no more men than an ax handle was a tree. It was
Gnag
who had done the killing. He had killed the living thing and made something different
from it, given it a half-life. That was why the Fangs turned to dust and blew away when they died.

Artham was so tired and lonely and full of regret that all he wanted in the world was to turn to dust and blow away.