make sense of the shifting colors and shadows, the glasslike shadings and hidden crevices. It was not a territory meant for humans, a landscape that in no way acknowledged the possibility of people traversing it. Elya despised the place. She did not even like landing among it. When Mena forced her to touch down, her feet slid, skittish and unwilling to settle, her wings flapping. Mena had to resign herself to shouting her encouragement from the air.
Throughout her flights, Mena saw no sign of the Scav group at all, but on one flight north she spotted the coming army, rolling and marching, torches burning against the coming night. Their flying beasts saw her as well. Several of the winged creatures flew toward her. In response she and Elya rose high, circled away in a manner just leisurely enough to show no fear.
Of course, Mena did feel fear. For the first time in weeks she realized she had not thought of protecting Elya from all this. Hadn’t she always said Elya would never see war? What happened to the resolve with which she had spoken to Corinn? She had meant it, but instead of staying true to it, she had taken Elya into danger, far from Acacia, a world away from the Talayan grassland on which Mena had found her. What right did she have to do that?
The worst of it was that she had taken Elya away from her children. She did not even know what Elya thought of that. If she thought anything of them, she kept it hidden, no trace of what emotion she might feel in her mind. That, more than anything, made Mena believe that Elya was hiding her thoughts from her selfish mistress, she who was too afraid to face death alone. Mena thought all these things, but she did nothing to change it. This is how we are with the ones we love, she thought. Too afraid to set them free.
She hovered at the edge of the flat ice, waiting for her army to join her, watching the enemy emerge into reality. They rose out of the ice on feet and hooves and wheels, leaping into the air, winged. She whispered a prayer to the Giver, hoping that the plan she had come up with might work, might even save some of her soldiers’ lives.
That evening, once the army was through the ice maze and settling in to camp, Mena called her officers to council. Inside a tent flapping and loud from the wind that had kicked up, she said this: “I thought it necessary that each soldier come here of his own free will, and that each of them face death as a foregone conclusion. I will never be able to explain how proud I am of every one of our soldiers.”
“You don’t have to explain it,” Perrin said. “We feel it, too.”
“Then you won’t be surprised that I am not willing to send them all to their deaths.” She let that sink in. Her eyes drifted from one face to the next. The candlelight they huddled around made them look like somber participants at some arcane ritual. It will not, she thought, be a blood sacrifice. “I’ve been trying hard to find a way that some of them might live while also doing what we can to hurt the Auldek. I think I have such a plan. It will require treachery, deceit. It will not be entirely honorable, certainly not in keeping with the Old Codes.”
“I’m liking the sound of this,” Gandrel said. His creviced face was one of the most frightening in the light, no less because he was smiling. “Never had much use for the Codes anyway, and treachery and deceit are underrated.” The others laughed.
“It will also require you to trust the Scav,” Mena said. This was not met with quite the same joviality. “Haleeven, explain to them what we’ve worked out with Kant and his people.”
As the old warrior began to speak, Mena withdrew to watch the unsteady light play across the men’s faces. It was a lot to ask of them, she knew. To hear the scheme from the mouth of one of the empire’s recent enemies and to learn that it involved depending on a ragged people that scrounged a living out of frozen waste so far to the edge of the world that they lived on unmapped terrain. Strange, indeed, but it felt right, necessary. If they were to win this war, they would have to remake how their society worked in the process.
That might as well begin here, she thought, with us.
CHAPTER FORTY
As they came down from the mountainous wave peaks of the Range, when they caught their first glimpse of the barrier islands of the Other Lands, and when shore birds darted out to greet them, Melio decided that he might not die on this voyage after all. It would not make sense to die now, not after getting this far, not after seeing so much, and especially not after what happened that night on the Slipfin . One doesn’t have such moments without reason.
The night that Kartholome called them out of the cabin into the glowing, slithering motion was the strangest Melio had ever experienced. All around them-where there had been calm water for days-shapes rose and fell and rolled, like enormous chunks of luminous, writhing, and somehow living ice. The ocean was these creatures. They pressed so thick around them that the boat shimmied and rocked with the pressure of their bodies brushing against the ship’s hull. They were silent save the wet sounds of their motions and an occasional expulsion of salt-rich vapor from slits along their bodies.
For all the terrified beating of his heart, Melio could not move. None of them could.
“We shouldn’t have spoken of them,” Clytus whispered. “These are sea wolves. Be calm, lads. Calm for the moment.”
“They’re nothing like wolves,” Melio said. They did not look as they were depicted on the mural inside, but, then again, in all the slurping, seething of their bodies, Melio could make no sense of their forms. Whitish hulks, yes. Tentacles and rippling ridges and flat, circular eyes, yes. But he had no feeling for the whole of any one of them. It just felt that the sea had been revealed for what it really was-a mass tangle of slippery, sentient life.
Geena brushed his shoulder. “I don’t think you’re the first to notice that.”
“Stop joking,” Kartholome said. “They’ll swarm us in a moment.” He moved over to a pile of spears. He began untying the ropes that held them in place. Clytus, seeing what he was about, joined him. They moved on tiptoe, with stealth that Melio thought absurd considering the massive, round eyes that watched every move as they rose and fell and slid along above the railing.
Melio still did not move. It was not fear that held him immobile, though fear did pump through him with every pulse of his heart. Something else froze him and kept him staring. He could not help but notice that the creatures seemed to be caressing the Slipfin, searching it, learning its contours. He could not shake the feeling that the eyes paid even more attention to him than they did the men lifting weapons to hurl into them. A tentacle slipped over the railing, slid across the deck, and then withdrew. He knew what he should think. That was a probe, searching for victims. There would be another, and then another. And then they would tear the ship apart and consume them in a savage swarm. Of course they would.
Kartholome said something and jerked at his arm. Melio looked down to find a harpoon in his hands. It was old, worn, a discard bought cheaply in Bleem. Kartholome had spent days sharpening the blade. The iron barb of its point was deadly enough.
When Melio raised his head, he was eye to eye with one of the creatures. Its orb rose above the railing as the leviathan slipped along the ship’s side, plastered by the pressure of the wolves behind it. The lid closed, a strange circular motion to it, nothing like the workings of a human eyelid.
Melio lifted the harpoon into throwing position. There was a target, if ever he saw one. He watched the vague outline of himself and his companions reflected in the eye, warped by its shape and the moisture dripping down it. Instead of sinking the harpoon into it-as he knew the others were preparing to do-he wondered just what the creature saw looking at him. He had never questioned such things when looking into the eyes of the foulthings. He had felt only their abhorrence, the awful war with life that raged within them. This eye contained none of that. This eye saw him. It knew him, and it…
He found his tongue just when Kartholome pulled back his arm, harpoon high in it. “No!” he whispered. He wanted to scream it, but feared raising his voice. “No!”
Kartholome heard him. Weapon still raised, he snapped his head toward him. His face savage with questions, impatient.
“Don’t,” was all Melio could say in answer. How could he begin to explain what he himself could not believe? That the creatures meant them no harm, and that they would do harm only if they were attacked? “Don’t.”
If he had not shared the experience that followed with the others, he would have thought it a dream, a vision conjured up from the eerie stillness. He bent over and set his harpoon on the deck. Stepping forward, he raised a hand and held it near the creature’s slick skin. Its eye watched him, completely still now. He touched just beside it.
