Coldsnap
by Lindsey DuncanCatori stood at the edge of the Snowqueen's Veil, the inland sea that never melted even during the four weeks of nightless summer. She had thrown off her sealskin coat, dropped hat and oiled leather gloves behind her. A breadcrumb trail: let no one wonder where the child of spirits had gone. They could find another holy child to sell.
She uncoiled the fur wrapping around her neck. She stripped down to a thin tunic with the heavy star-metal talisman burning blue marks where it lay.
She tossed the satchel down and removed from it a pair of ice-gliders, stripped-down shoes with a blade of metal honed along the sole. The good ones, not the cheap imitations peddled off to outsiders who could never run ice the way a native would. Catori had made a few runs with messengers and even trade teams; she knew the routes.
The winds blustered and roared, but furious though they were, they did not touch her. Weather here was a force, primal spirits that lost their power when they went too far south. In other parts of the world, they became positively inanimate, mere shadows...
Here, she could feel the malice.
She straightened as she finished lacing the gliders and smiled into the storm. "I have had the worst three moons of my life, winds," she said. "You don't want to play with me."
One foot crunched in the snow as she shifted onto the ice, then a snick of the other. Catori took a deep breath, felt warmth swell up to her as if summer itself curled around her shoulders. She had always taken her heritage for granted. What if it was nothing more than this?
She shoved the doubt of the question away and began to stroke down the ice to the distant fires of the horizon. North until north could no longer be, through the frozen expanse of waterfalls that never ran, and into the arms of the queen of the Ai-shal, the spirits of growth and energy.
Catori's body fell without effort into the rhythm, slow and steady. Every child in the Nanari Rim began to skate mere days after they learned to walk. That she could do this did not make her exceptional. What supposedly did was the fact that she had been found stretched in the arms of the statue of goddess Tirshona when no one could have climbed the ridge unseen; but what if she was not her daughter?
If there had been some mistake, if the prayers and expectations that had weighted her down since infancy were false, then she was heading to her death. And when the outsiders saw there was no power to her, that they hadn't been cheated of a sacred bride, things would - things would go on. Her heart, cold and tight, didn't have the strength to think of how.
She was not alone on the ice; travelers with light-globes skimmed around her on their way to friendly destinations. But as white-on-white blur, no one clearly saw her - certainly, she didn't allow anyone to come close enough to see her. The medallion at her throat was the only speck of color to her save her eyes; unnatural eyes, queen Savara said, green like thorn-trees.
The queen of the Nanari Rim had been her mentor in matters of politics and protocol. "You are a symbol, Catori," Savara had said. "That gives you a duty as well as privileges. Your marriage will make us equal amongst the lands of the south." The civilized lands, as the south deemed themselves.
Catori straightened, drawing the ice and the snow into herself with every breath. She could hear it like a heartbeat: the subtle bubble of subterranean water, the chatter of snowflakes en route from here to everywhere. Sometimes she could make out their language, for the priests had taught her, a matter of training as much as talent. How could they ask her to abandon this?
She lost track of time, did not even stop to eat. She opened the pouch at her side and snacked, another sprinkling of crumbs left for a search party to find. She leaned into her strokes and let her speed build, whispering prayers now. The power of the Rim rose up to meet her, filling her lungs and limbs with fresh, untainted air. By the time they started looking for her, it would too late. They had to rest. She didn't.
It was not the first time Catori had attempted this journey. Before, her dearest friend and lover Halen had come with her.
"Are you sure about this?" He chafed his hands, trying to hide the stiffness. The Var-shal, the darker spirits, howled at them, and he was taking the worst of it. A fleck of blood froze at the corner of one blonde eyebrow. "The south may be strange, but its people are still human."
"Maybe I'm not." She avoided his eyes.
"You are in whatever way counts." Halen let her have silence without letting go; they moved in an easy tandem, mostly unmeasured, mostly felt.
"Don't you think, if I wasn't Tirshona's daughter, that she would have denounced the priests for their blasphemy?" It was not a new conversation, but the stillness from the divine mother brought fresh frustrations each time.
"Not her way to shout. Just to make herself known in little things." He squeezed her hand. "Like this. I believe if we hadn't been meant to make the journey -"
"Hush!" They were too far away to be certain. He opened his mouth to protest, but then the ice came in, and they huddled, for warmth - his, not hers - and for comfort - hers, not his.
The Var-shal retaliated now as they had before, coiling around her, skipping through the ice and cutting gouges in her path. She curved sharply, sometimes fishtailing around them; she refused to let the obstacle course slow her momentum. "Childish!" she snapped. "Don't even waste my time if that's all you're going to do." She knew she was challenging them, but they would know where she was headed soon enough. Let them spend themselves early. Bile and rage never won out on the Rim. You had to follow the floes.
"This is our chance, Catori." The voice they carried out of the past was Savara's, luminescent, triumphant. "At last, Nanari can be counted with the nations of the world."
"The southern air made her sunsick," Catori said. The words were technically treason, but that was nothing to spirits of anarchy. "We don't need them."
"No wars. No strife. Southern technology, southern medicine..."
The voice fractured, taking on the timbre of a half dozen advisors and twice as many priests. Catori growled, trying to ignore them this time, but she couldn't. She rapped out the same responses by rote, the slap of the blades on ice accompanying each guttural statement.
"They don't fight with us anyway. It's easier to trade for what little they want. It's too cold for their machines. It's too cold for their diseases. Their fashions are ridiculous. I want no part of it."
Catori slowed, mopping at the back of her neck. Ignore them. She had been over this in her head, and it was simple. No matter what the south had, she would die without the voices in her veins.
The Ai-shal were so quiet, driven away by the carping of the winds, that she had almost forgotten them, but they came back in the silence between strokes, telling tales of things they had seen in a dozen small villages along the Veil. Past and present mixed with no particular concern; strange that they, the more ordered of the two, could never tell time.
"I can't leave here," she murmured.
"Why?"
One blade snicked behind the other in a cross as she pulled to a halt. Beneath her, five feet under the ice, lay the metal-blue lines of a warding sigil, a silent notice to anyone who came so far that the Veil past that point belonged wholly to the spirits.
She had made it no further than this the last time, with Halen. She remembered clutching him tight, milking his strength; their skates stroked in time, occasionally stumbling. A vast gust of wind tripped her up; she slipped backwards, and cried out as her shoulders smacked into the ice.
"Catori!" He stood over her, body braced; he winced when the wind cracked into him, but remained steady. "Are you all right?"
"We have to keep going." She pushed herself up, teeth set. She refused to whimper, as much as it stung. "Get to the other side - "
Halen pulled her up, but his hands were trembling - the cold, the uncertainty. "She never answers you, does she? Have you ever heard her?"
Catori shook her head, too tired to snap. "I know - "
He swiveled about to face her, holding her arms lightly. "Catori," he said, "what are we heading into? When you said we would find Tirshona..."
She jerked away, backstroking along the ice. "You of all people should believe me. Can't you - "
The words became unimportant as the voices - Var-shal and Ai-shal alike - begin to whisper with anticipation. Something quivered down her spine, a sense of some half-formed memory; but it was swept away by the sharp and ominous crack of the ice.
Ice didn't break that fast, not deep and primordial ice, not the Snowqueen's Veil frozen since time unknown - but shatter it did, blossoming about the spot where Halen stood. She remembered shouting; she tried to reach him; but her body would not move, not until the ice had closed over without a trace.
Catori remained, numb, soaking up the cold. Not the Var-shal, she knew from the voices around her. It was an answer to the prayers of the priests. They had done this -
Now that "why?" echoed back to her, carried in a halo of ice.
"Halen," she said.
And bending her knees into the gliders, she pushed off again.
The storm howled and shrieked around her, shaking the sky until pacific snowflakes were cut free from their idle drift and whirled about her. Wordless, inhuman voices bickered as they tumbled into each other, and Catori was at the center. She hunched over, untouched by the direct impact of the spirits, but blinded by the white and now feeling the cold as it overcame a weathered body and crystallized in her veins. No one came this far without bundles and layers of fur; no one but the children of spirits.
It was madness, maybe, that she had shed all protection but the thinnest layer, but she sensed she could not reach the end of her journey if she clung to her humanity now. She followed the ice by feel, barely sensing the faint variation in color and light beyond the snow. She drew energy from the ice and the slow-churning tide, felt the subliminal passage of deep-dwellers that never surfaced.
She lost track of all time in the blizzard, numb to any sensation but the heat of her thoughts. The burning of the starmetal seemed to twine its aegis out to her hands, to swell up her throat until she forgot how to swallow or speak. If she ever came to the end of this, there would be few words for her -
Catori knew that in a place of spirits, she would not need them.
The last gusts cleared suddenly, surrendering the path ahead of her. Before her lay immense cliffs, chasms created of waterfalls and droplets of spray that were suspended permanently on frigid air. Her heart thumped so hard at the sight of it that she could practically feel the metal leaping off her chest. It was, quite simply, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
It was the doorway to home.
She passed under the first still arches, staring up at the cascades caught in perpetual motion. When had these rivers run, when had they frozen? Surely before any man or woman of the Rim had been born; far back enough that the spirits had a hard time remembering. Perhaps Tirshona had bent to drink from the streams when they flowed as water.
The winds whirred high overhead, darting through narrow straits. A low and mournful tune greeted their passage, as if played on a massive flute. Catori thought she recognized the song, and hummed under her breath.
She almost relaxed, but then the flowing melody became the wild tempo of a reel, and it caused the ice above her to dance. She tensed her shoulders, ducking lower and brushing one hand to the ice to steady herself.
Catori straightened just in time to see an immobile waterspout break off and plunge towards her. With an unvoiced oath, she swung one foot around the other and pushed off into a sudden curve. The spout hit the lake surface and shattered, spraying in all directions. A chunk smacked into her back.
She stumbled, shoulderblades jerking with the blistering pain, but managed to keep her momentum. She performed an ungainly hop over another shard and stroked towards an open corridor.
Ice blew over her in sideways hail, clinging to her tunic, twining in her hair, and most perilously, creeping down the fabric of the gliders towards the blades. She kicked and stamped when she could, scattering a thin film of slush. She was so focused on just moving forward, on just passing through the falls to her destination, that her eyes only registered what she was moving into when it was too late to turn aside: an ice-bridge spanned over her gliding path, and it bristled with icicles.
They exploded downwards as her foot slid under the first row. Catori dropped her head and drew her arms tight, her back braced, but it wasn't enough as honed spars plunged down around her. She ignored the spasms of pain and kept herself in line; the less she jerked, the faster she moved, the quicker she made it out of the tunnel.
She could not do it alone. Prayers to the spirits poured off her chapped lips, not formal but ripped from the top of her thoughts. One of the icicles cut her back like a knife.
She skidded free, the serrated pick on the edge of the glider catching the ice. She tripped, fell forward, and came down on her right knee hard enough to hear something crack. Her hands clasped the other limb by instinct, and she spun gently on the ice.
Maybe she cried; she couldn't be sure. Her body throbbed, the loss of momentum carrying waves of cold up over her. Her fingers scrabbled by instinct for the pouch at the side and couldn't get it open, but it didn't matter. What crumbs were left weren't enough.
She remembered taking shelter behind statues of Tirshona, hiding from her guardians as a child - they never seemed to find her there, and the snow-specked eyes; did they smile? Had she imagined it all this time, the gentleness that cracked stone and ice?
It hit her like a sledgehammer to the gut, worse than the icicles, worse than the spraying hail. Her head came up with a snap. "Where are you?" she snarled to the Ai-shal who had let her run the gauntlet on her own, who had abandoned her in the very heart of their territory. "Are you too frightened to defend me?" She pulled herself up, shaking. She couldn't feel her right leg, but the heat rushing through her furious mind felt like a glorious steam bath. "I'm coming. You'd better be ready."
It seemed to take an interminable amount of time to build speed again, with her right leg bent at an awkward angle and her ribs throbbing at every odd move, but she managed it through sheer bloodymindedness. Stop? There was no way she would do that now.
The scenery grew denser, the colorless blue of the depths closing in on all sides. Catori flinched instinctively, but the massive tunnel that formed before her was as smooth as a mirror. There was no purchase for cracks or flying shards here, though the winds accompanied her in a stubborn fracas. They still remembered the voices of the people she had turned her back on, but those sounds were faint and distant now. She had come too far from the Rim to be easily removed.
She was so used to the mindless cold that at first, she didn't notice when it lapsed. Then a snap of pain worse than the icicles as feeling crept back into her bones, crackling and shivering. She grimaced, squinting ahead of her. Why would it be warmer here?
Light breezes spun around her, soft, balmy and completely unfamiliar. Catori narrowed her eyes; she could hear the underlying discord, and knew they were Var-shal. What were they doing?
Surprise nearly pitched her forward onto the ice. She fishtailed around the obstruction, and almost forgot herself staring back at it. A puddle! Here, of all places, where man never broke the cold. It could only mean...
She smiled to herself; then she laughed. "You're getting desperate, aren't you?"
An ominous rumble carried down the passage, followed by a spurt of sultry heat. Catori pushed forward, avoiding the wet patches until her blades started to sink in the slush. Even then, she trudged on, sensing the slightest dip in the tunnel. It had to be close.
Finally, she stopped and craned one foot up, wincing as she had to balance on the injured knee. A few seconds to detach one blade, then the other.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm here to stay."
It was sticky, damp, unpleasant walking, but the gradual incline increased even as the tunnel turned on itself, spiraling down and in. She heard, as a distant murmur in another room, the converse of spirits, and her blood quickened.
Opal light reflected up the passage, bouncing off the smooth, immense walls. Rainbows refracted in all directions, blunted by cold and lacquered in ice. Catori barely noticed that the Ver-shal had given up. She broke into a run, and so even as the slant of the tunnel turned more acute, she made a mistake that would have killed her at the beginning.
Her foot went out from underneath her. She landed on her tailbone, but the slope was enough to carry her around and down. A blinding flare of light had her crying out and covering her eyes; she thus missed the snowbank until she crashed into it.
She was no longer cold, nor hurting, nor hungry, nor even winded, and the star-metal amulet burned like a hearth. Startled, she pulled her arm away from her eyes.
The light here was gold and silver and the all-color reflection that came from sun off pure snow. Snowbound hills rolled away in all directions, but the snow was not uniform: it was hinted blue, it was slightly rose, it was kissed by saffron. A thriving forest surrounded her, hardy evergreens and artic foliage, all coated in a protective shell of ice.
And she was not alone.
For the first time, she saw, truly saw the spirits that were said to be her kin. Shaped of idea more than definition, they existed as wind-spirals of snow, as tree branches arranged just so, as echoes of the sun off the ice. They changed places and attributes as if neither mattered: Ai-shal and Var-shal both, she realized, as if this were neutral ground.
Catori stood, brushing snow off her tunic. Her initial elation was muted by the sudden knowledge that she had no idea what to do now that she was here. She scanned the horizon, looking for something vaguely familiar, and spotted a grotto of honed ice spires. Stamping her feet a bit to get the blood flowing, she headed towards it.
The spirits slid without sound out of her way as she reached the nearest gap. Standing in the center of the circle was a human figure, her skin luminous, the hair down her back a shade lighter than Catori's. She wore a slim tiara of fishscales and a gown of ivory fur.
Catori closed her lips on the greeting, her face pale. She couldn't even make the proper gestures of respect. "Great lady."
Tirshona, Snowqueen, matriarch of the Ai-shal and guardian of the Rim, turned slowly to face her. On her lips was etched a rueful smile. "Why did you come this far, my daughter?"
Catori stood with ears ringing. It had not been a habitual address. "I...I want to stay here," she managed. "If I am your - if I am what they say I am."
"You are." The confirmation was gentle. Tirshona shook her head, beckoning her into the circle. "You should go back."
Catori couldn't even flinch under the shock of those words. "They want to send me away." The words coiled tight in her throat. "Far from the voices of the Ai-shal. I can't live like that." Her entire body bunched.
"Shh, shh." Tirshona soothed her like a child, came almost close enough to touch her shoulder. "You won't be without us."
"I don't understand." She hated admitting that, whatever the circumstances.
"You are spirit, blood and sinew. Wherever you travel, you take us with you." The Snowqueen fixed her with a sharp look. "You were meant to bridge the gap, not abandon it. Do you know how long we have been banished from the south? How many centuries it has been since the winds have spoken with our voices? The weather was meant to live. It was was meant to speak."
"But I don't feel - " "If the fact that you made this journey, opposed by the Var-shal, not helped by the Ai-shal, doesn't convince you, I do not have more to say." Tirshona's crystal eyes flicked with ill-hidden amusement. "For one so furious with the world, you don't give yourself much power to change it."
That was why they hadn't come to her aid. Catori started to straighten, an angry flush coming to her cheeks, but it bled away as she realized the implications. "I don't hate the world."
"You hate Savara. And the priests."
It was not a question, and so Catori remained silent and still, staring back at her benefactor and mother, if only in soul. She did not speak.
"You cannot be Var-shal forever, Catori. If you are going to help us - all of us - you must move with the floes. You know that."
She did. It had been her watchword for years - but that was about travel and livelihood, not her heart. "They killed Halen," she said slowly. "I refuse to let that go."
Tirshona smiled; it was an expression that, but for its camaraderie, would have laughed at her. "No one killed Halen. The priests asked for your safe return. Savara needed you to marry. You needed him." Catori bristled, but she couldn't deny that. "And he wanted to stay with you. So I made it be."
"Catori?"
She jumped, a tangle of limbs as she whirled. His voice was the wind, and his figure only a little more substantial, but it was him, and when she lunged, half-expecting to end up in an ungainly heap and not caring in the slightest, she thumped into a solid chest of tightly-wound lightning.
She promptly pummeled it with both fists. "You couldn't find me earlier?"
A slight but not uncomfortable shock as he caught her wrists. "I'm still adjusting to this form," he said, grinning in the face of her indignation, "I can't leave yet."
"But he can follow you when you leave for the south," Tirshona prompted.
Catori narrowed her eyes, but it was hard to keep the fury on her face. Not dead, but shown a world every Rim dweller dreamed of. The priests hadn't tried to destroy him. Savara might be short-sighted, but she would get more than she bargained for with the bride-bargain.
But there was one more problem.
"I'm supposed to marry this southern lord," she pointed out.
Tirshona lifted one fine and icy brow. "Why would that be a problem?" she inquired. "You're my daughter, Catori. You may have as many husbands as you like."
Halen burst out laughing; she silenced him with a jab. He did, indeed, still have ribs to connect with. "I wouldn't think you'd be so cheerful," she said. "You'd be sharing me."
"Catori," he replied, "believe me when I say you are far too much for one man to handle alone."
"What if," she said carefully, turning to face the Snowqueen, "I decide not to go back?"
"You have earned your place here," Tirshona said in a soft voice. "You may stay if you wish."
Catori looked around her, at this place she had fought so hard to reach. She had made it - and now what? Could she live here as an immortal, become a spirit herself? A blissful existence in snows that never changed?
She had to face it: she was no good at standing still.
"I may regret this," she said, "but I want to go back."
©Lindsey Duncan
Lindsey Duncan is a life-long writer and professional Celtic harp performer, with short fiction and poetry in several speculative fiction publications. She feels that music and language are inextricably linked. She lives and performs in Cincinnati, Ohio and is a student at Indiana University, working on a self-designed major. She can be found on the web here.