me,
you want to go on. You've already killed your horse. Isn't that enough?'
'I didn't-'
'Then why in the hell did you fly so close?'
'I took a chance, okay? And it wasn't a horse, it was Astriphie, my hippogriff. Astriphie's dead, and I didn't want that!' Martine shouted back, shivering with cold and fury. The wind caught the tears as they welled in her eyes and blew them across her cheeks. Biting back her words, Martine blindly stumbled past the man. 'Go home if you want to. I'm staying here.'
The Harper cursed Vil, cursed the ice, cursed herself. The man was right, of course. She should not have pushed Astriphie so close to the rift. Her eagerness to finish the mission quickly meant everything was in ruins. All she could do was try to continue, even if that meant risking her own life. Pulling up the hood of her parka, she hid her face against the cold.
The snow crackled with Vil's steady pursuit. 'I'm sorry I lost my temper,' he shouted over the gusts.
The Harper nodded a bitter acceptance. 'We cannot stay.'
'I must' She did not break her short, struggling strides. 'Is your mission that important?'
'It is to me.'
'You could die out here.'
'I won't' Words of false confidence, she thought bitterly. 'What are you doing here, anyway?' The man would not relent. 'What are you hiding?'
'Nothing! My business is my own, that's all.' Martine stepped back warily from the man as his tone became increasingly demanding.
The woodsman stopped her with a mittened hand on her sleeve. A swordsman's suspicion filled his face. 'Who are you? Someone I should fear?' The honed words sliced through the defenses of polite trust between the two. The tenseness of his body and the hand hovering close to the sword were signs of his nervous state.
'You think I'm evil?' Her own body slipped into fighting tension to match his, a dog and a cat sizing each other up. 'I don't know. Tell me otherwise.'
With the pair of them alone in a world of arctic white, Martine knew the truth was her only defense.
'I'm a Harper,' she stated in flat, cold tones that matched their surroundings. 'Sort of, anyway. I've come up here to close that fissure.' She slowly pointed toward the turmoil overhead.
'A Harper?' Vil echoed doubtfully, though his body eased somewhat.
'Yes. You know, agents of good and-'
'I know what Harpers are. I just didn't expect to find one here.'
Martine was growing increasingly testy, having bared her secret only to be met by doubt. 'I didn't choose to come here. I was sent.' She beat her arms together for warmth. 'I'm supposed to close that that thing before something unpleasant happens.'
Vil looked away. 'Torm's eyes,' he swore softly, 'a Harper.' Dropping his hands away from his weapons, he turned back to face her. 'Why didn't you say something? I was ready to kill you.'
'Don't worry. I wouldn't have let you,' she said as she started toward Astriphie. 'Harpers are supposed to keep their activities secret. That's why I didn't tell you. Now that you know, will you help me?'
Vil fell in beside her, his suspicions gone, and the two trudged back to the hippogriff's corpse, quietly listening to the sounds of the glacier as it cracked and rumbled beneath their feet. Already the hippogriff's body was cool, and the bloody carcass had begun to freeze over. Ice and feathers
cracked as the two humans set to the grim business of recovering their supplies.
What they recovered wasn't promising several blankets iced up with blood and a little food that hadn't been scattered in the crash. 'It's not enough,' Vil announced. 'We need more food.' He drew his thick-bladed skinning knife and gestured toward Astriphie's carcass. 'It must be done. You can keep watch.'
Up here there was nothing to watch for but stinging snow, yet Martine gratefully accepted Vil's excuse not to help as the woodsman, with the cold practicality that matched the terrain, sliced strips from Astriphie's haunch. Bloody meat plopped onto the snow as he sawed at the carcass. Finally, the work finished, Vil skewered the meat on arrows and jabbed them into the snow, leaving the meat to dry in the breeze.
'Still not enough,' he muttered as he turned away from the bloody task.
'How so?' breathed Martine from where she crouched close to the ground, as if the ice held warmth.
'We cannot both live on the food we have. Not up here, at least. One of us could, but there isn't enough for two. One of us must go back for supplies.'
The Harper cast a shivering glance at the meat weighted stakes. 'And?'
The woodsman was already loading one of the salvaged saddlebags with supplies. 'Since you will not leave, I must. I'll take a little food and hunt for whatever else I need on the way.'
The glacier rocked under their feet as the geyser shot up another of its massive plumes. Martine looked to the sky, knowing that soon they would be showered with a flurry of ice crystals too large to be snow, yet too small to be hail. She pulled one of the stiff blankets closer about her shoulders and began chipping at the frozen ground with her dagger.
Now it was Martine's turn to be suspicious as she looked up at the woodsman. 'And why should I trust you to come back?'
Vilheim snorted, amused by something Martine did not understand. The Harper couldn't judge his reaction at all. His mouth was drawn tight, and his eyes were lost in the distance. At last he spoke in an almost perfect monotone, unconsciously beating mittened fist to mittened palm. He had all the air of a man giving testimony at an inquest.
'I am… was… a paladin of Torm.'
Martine blinked, so stupefied by the admission that it overcame her thoughts even of the cold, then waited for Vilheim to continue. He waited, perhaps expecting more of — a reaction, and the two stared at each while the wind whistled across the icy plain.
'You were a paladin of Torm?' Martine finally echoed, thrusting her dagger deep into the ice.
His reply was fierce, filled with passion that she should doubt his word. 'Yes… Torm the True, Torm the Brave, Torm the Binder of Oaths… We… they… hold his faith in trust'
Martine quickly thought back to everything she knew about paladins, which was mostly hearsay and opinion. The few she had met were stiff-necked, self-righteous, and unlikable swordsmen who were supposed to be austerely virtuous, lightened only by the glory of their god.
'A paladin? All that business about honor, truth, goodness, purging wickedness?'
Vil broke into a genuine smile, amused by the description. 'Something like that. We were taught to keep our word. But it does not matter anymore. I am no longer a paladin.'
The words stirred sudden concern in Martine. What had prompted Vilheim's fall from grace? She caught her breath as she waited for some sinister revelation to follow, her
gaze flicking from the bloody knife Vilheim held to Astriphie's ice-whitened remains. 'So I'm supposed to trust you because you aren't a paladin anymore?' she breathed, the words forming ice crystals in the air.
'I woke up one day and my god was gone. I did not sin, if that is what you are thinking.' The man carefully cleaned his knife and slipped it back in its sheath, defensively aware of her unwavering gaze. 'It was during the Time of Troubles. One morning I woke up and Torm was no longer there. Before that day, I could always sense Torm's purpose in everything. That day the feeling was gone. Torm had disappeared, as a good many of the gods did.'
Martine only remembered the Time of Troubles somewhat vaguely. She had been young and had not yet taken up the adventuring life. For her, the gods and their turmoils had seemed distant compared to Giles, the prefect's son, who lived just down the lane.
'Torm came back, though. You could still be a paladin.' Vil spoke softly but resonantly, his voice carrying force across the frozen gap. 'Life is never simple. When Torm left me, I was suddenly on my own for the first time in my life, and I liked it. You could not know the freedom I felt.'
And now you want me to trust you? Martine thought. Perhaps it was a raised eyebrow or a quirk in her face that prompted Vil to speak. 'I give you my word I will return. I am still an honest man, Martine of Sembia. A lifetime of training does not evaporate into thin air overnight.' The man rose with firm resolution, shouldering the saddlebag to go. 'Besides, there is no choice. You will not leave, and two cannot stay. I will find you here in four days. Take
