The First Collier (14 page)

You see, Dear Owl, just as I had come to know that from this egg would hatch a chick with special powers, the hagsfiends, with their own peculiar instincts, had sensed that it was special, too.

Lord Arrin asked again if the egg was near hatching.

Siv looked at the Snowy. What a vain creature he was. She could tell by the way he held himself and continued to preen when speaking to her. The cock of his head, the set of his beak, all betrayed vanity and arrogance. She sighed as if speaking to a small child and not a lord. “These things happen in their own time, Lord Arrin. You certainly must know that. They hatch when they hatch.”

“But no signs yet?” he asked.

“Why should this concern you?” Siv said.

“I was only thinking, milady, how difficult it will be for you to fend for that hatchling alone, without a mate.”

Thanks to you,
she thought.

“You know how constantly hungry they are. You shall have to leave him to go hunting all the time.”

“That is really my concern. I’ll find a way, rest assured.”

“I thought for your own sake, and for the safety of the chick, that you might consider some kind of a union with me, milady.”

Siv was stunned. “You conveniently got rid of King H’rath, did you not? Now you propose a union with the murderer of my mate? Really, Lord Arrin!”

“It’s not murder when it happens in the midst of war.”

“It was murder, Lord Arrin, and you know it.”

“You’ll need someone, milady. You can’t do it all by yourself.”

Siv would not dignify his words with an answer. She simply turned away and walked back through the ice channel of the berg that led to her cave.

Siv would not come out of her cave for some time and when she did, she could not find Svenka. Instead she found a large pile of herring. She looked down at the gleaming
fish.
Svenka’s time must have come,
she thought. Svenka had prepared Siv for her own confinement, telling her that she would have to be gone for a few days. She had told Siv that she would need to be completely by herself, but she would leave enough fish for Siv so she wouldn’t go hungry. She had explained to Siv how to dry them during that sliver of daylight between the long nights. So Siv kept herself busy laying out the small fish just as Svenka had instructed, and by practicing flying short flights. Her wing was getting stronger, there were signs of new feathers budding. And although her wing was a completely different shape, she was learning new ways to compensate for these differences through minute adjustments as she flew.

But for Siv, these nights pierced briefly by the shortest of days were the saddest time in her whole life. It was wrong, she knew, to be jealous of dear Svenka, but how could she not envy the polar bear who was about to become a mother when she herself was so far away from her own young’un?
Has he hatched yet?
she wondered. How would she ever know? And all around her, she sensed that there were other creatures giving birth, new young’uns were squirming into the world one way or another. She knew that some, like fish, hardly spent any time at all with their mothers, but others spent a great deal of time. One
day, she caught a glimpse of an iceberg streaked with blood and spiraled down to see what had happened, thinking that something had been killed that would offer meat. Instead she saw a mother seal who had just given birth and was licking the filmy birth membrane off her new pups. Siv flew off immediately. She knew that they must be left alone. But her heart and gizzard were wrenching. She felt none of the joy that she knew she should have felt at seeing a new creature coming into the world. This was life, not death, and yet Siv felt only despair.

When she returned to her cave in the iceberg, she began to wonder about the blood. Why, she thought, are some animals born in a flow of blood while others are not? For Siv, it seemed very unnatural that blood should accompany the birth of anything, and she was glad it was not this way when birds hatched.
But on the other hand,
she thought,
how lovely to have your young always within you before they are even born. To feel them growing inside of you.
There was something almost miraculous about that.

Siv had much time to think during the nights and days when Svenka had gone to her birthing den. She thought about many things—the blood of birth, the transit of the stars across the sky and why they moved when they did, and why the one called Never Moves never did move. She thought a great deal about me, she said. She had known
me practically her entire life. And she knew that although I possessed a certain aptitude for magic, a magic that was so different from that of the hagsfiends, at the same time I was a deep believer in reason and in what I thought of as science. She knew of my intense exploration and study of fire and flames.

So, Dear Owl, although it might seem odd, it was Siv’s reflections on science and rational thought that led her to even deeper reflections on magic—not my kind of magic but the nachtmagen of the hagsfiends. What Siv began to understand about nachtmagen was far greater than any scientific discovery that I would make about fire, or Theo would make about metal.

Siv began thinking back on her own experience with the hagsfiends and how they had almost completely destroyed her. That strange paralysis that had set in; that feeling that her will was slipping away, that her gizzard had become frozen and the amazement of it all. Yes, that was the overriding emotion she had felt. Not fear, not horror, not even weakness—but amazement. And hadn’t Svenka herself described that same feeling of amazement when she had looked up at the sky and seen the ragged shadows of the hagsfiends printed against the moon?
How strange,
Siv thought. She replayed in her head each minute of her own experience and compared it with much of
what Svenka had described of that night when Myrrthe had been murdered.

In her own experience with the hagsfiends, she tried to recall exactly how she had first become aware of that yellow glare. Had it really flashed or had it seeped into the Ice Cliff Palace? She recalled now seeing a first dim glow looming within one of the tunnels just outside of where she and Grank had been perched by the schneddenfyrr. What she had first thought of she now realized had been distraction. Distraction, she began to think, might be the opening gambit, the first ploy of the hagsfiends. It might be the fulcrum upon which all their magic rested.

Yes! She had been distracted. That is what allowed them to ambush her and Grank so nearly fatally. But they had both escaped this first ambush. How had she done it? “Distraction!” she whispered to herself. “I distracted
them
,” She had grabbed H’rath’s scimitar. They had not expected this—not from an egg-sitting mother owl. But how, she wondered—it was as if she were pushing her brain to its limits—how had they disabled her when she was pinned up against the ice wall, awash in that harsh yellow glare? And even more interesting, how had she broken through the strange powerlessness that had engulfed her?

She closed her eyes as she tried to remember those terrible endless seconds. She had felt herself going yeep.
She had felt the snow egg begin to slip and worse, she felt a kind of haggishness plucking at her gizzard. How could she, the queen of the N’yrthghar, holding the scimitar of her king and beloved mate, allow hagsfiends to tug at her gizzard, attempting to transform her into one of them? Her mind had been flooded with those thoughts. She had concentrated on those images of H’rath, she now realized. She had focused intensely on H’rath raising this scimitar in battle until those visions of him were engraved not just in her mind’s eye but in her very own gizzard. It was this concentration that had made her invulnerable to their distractions. The hagsfiends had ceased to amaze her. And as they ceased to amaze her, they became ordinary and she felt her gizzard unlock. Once she could not be distracted or amazed, she was no longer theirs. Yes, it took imagination and concentration to distract them. And the odd thing was that these powers were not magical at all. They were powers that any intelligent owl might possess and might use if it dared to.

Although I agreed with Siv that her powers were not magical, I did think they were not quite as ordinary as she made them out to be. I did not believe that “any intelligent owl” could do what she had done. I felt she had Ga’ deep within her gizzard. I believed that Siv was indeed a great spirit. And that great spirit was soon to be put to the
test once again. Siv knew that Lord Arrin would be back, just as soon as the firthkin had frozen over. The longest night of the year was fast approaching. The day that had been merely a notch in the long night was but a sliver now. A sliver for the sunlight to pour through, hardly enough to keep the firthkin free of ice, and the warm current at this time of year swept away from Siv’s iceberg in a more westerly direction, as if it were chasing the last rays of the setting sun. With the firthkin frozen solid and nary a strip of free seawater to be spied, Siv knew that Lord Arrin would return—this time with a pack of hagsfiends flying through the darkness like winged sky hounds, their fangs bared, the horrible yellow light known as the fyngrot streaming from their eyes.

S
iv had no choice but to remain where she was. She knew that she was not yet strong enough to fly any great distance. But would she be strong enough to fend off the hagsfiends when they came? It took a different kind of strength to escape the yellow snare of the hagsfiends’ nachtmagen. There had been no sign of Svenka for days. Siv had not really expected any. Svenka had told her that a mother polar bear must remain in the den with her cubs for a very long time to feed the cubs the strange liquid called milk and to share her heat with her babies who were born almost furless.

But one afternoon as the seconds peeled from the scant minutes of sunlight that remained, Siv was awakened by the sounds of cracking ice. She knew almost instantly that it was Svenka and rushed out of her hollow in the berg. There she was! Magnificent as she plowed through the ice swimming in her usual unhurried way, leaving a jagged path of open water behind her.

“Svenka! What are you doing here?”

“I have only come for a very short time.”

“How are the cubs? How many? Male or female?” Siv was almost hopping up and down with the questions that came bursting out of her. “Tell me—what do they look like? Do they favor you?”

“Yes, I suppose so, though I can hardly remember their father.” The casualness with which Svenka discussed this father—whoever he was—always disturbed Siv. But she knew that this was the way of polar bears. They did not mate for life as owls did.

“There were three—one died.”

“Dear Glaux, how sad,” Siv said.

“Not really.”

Siv looked at Svenka, perplexed.

“You have to understand,” Svenka continued. “Usually we give birth to just two. If there are three, there is always the risk that one will be weak and not survive. It is only because the third one died that I was able to leave for this brief time.”

“How is it that you could leave?”

“I tucked First and Second around Third’s body. He was still warm—warm enough to keep them warm.”

“Oh.” Siv paused. “First, Second, Third? Is that what you call them?”

“For now.”

“Why?”

“We never name them until they have survived three moons. It makes them less…less…I don’t know…”

“Less lovable?” Siv asked.

“I guess,” Svenka said softly. “But Siv, they are so cute. It’s impossible not to love them. You should see Second—she has this adorable little snubby nose, and First is a curious little fellow. That’s why I must get back. They can’t swim or walk. But that little fellow can still get into trouble. It’s amazing. I just came to check on you.”

So Siv caught her up and told her in greater detail about what she thought were Lord Arrin’s plans as well as her own thoughts about magic.

Resting her elbows on the edge of the berg, Svenka took all this in and then was quiet for a long time.

“What you say about the nachtmagen is very interesting. When you describe how you were distracted and then amazed, it was very much the same with me. And you are right. Once you let them distract and then amaze you, you are theirs.” Siv nodded. “And you are sure they are coming?”

“The firthkin is freezing up. When it is completely frozen, there will be no danger for the hagsfiends.”

“Well, we must not permit that to happen,” Svenka replied abruptly.

“How can we do that?”

“Like this!” Svenka said, and gave a mighty push away from the berg, flopped onto her back, and began wheeling her arms around. Soon there were great sounds of cracking and rumbling as the immense field of ice surrounding the berg began to split apart. She swam rapidly around the berg itself until a wide swath of open water lapped its edges. For the first time in days, Siv felt the gentle rocking motion of the iceberg floating on the billowing waters of the firthkin.

“Svenka,” she said as the polar bear clambered up onto the berg. “This is wonderful. But you know how quickly it will freeze again. Perhaps the night after this when there will be no sun at all.”

“I’ll come back as often as I can.”

“You can’t leave the cubs. It’s not fair to them. They are getting older and will be into more mischief.”

“Indeed!” Svenka sighed. “Somehow, I’ll figure out a way.”

Siv sighed and felt the wonder of her Glaux-blessed life. True, she had lost her dear mate and possibly her young’un, but had she not been blessed with the most
wonderful friends on earth—Myrrthe and Grank, and now Svenka?

But she counted on nothing. She knew that Svenka’s first duty was to her cubs. There was no way that she could keep this region of the firthkin ice free and nurse her young’uns. Siv would have to fend for herself. As the night grew darker and darker, she watched the water grow still, until a thin coating just skimmed the surface. That coat thickened and grew silvery. The wind had died. Not a breeze riffled the surface of the firthkin’s water. Indeed, it was as if everything conspired to make a pathway through these far reaches of the N’yrthghar for the hagsfiends to come directly to her. So she watched and she waited.