"No," Ashlan demurred. Already, several enemy warriors perished upon his blade, but they were taken in honest combat. He'd sooner die than take the blood of an innocent.
Ashlan dressed and strode back down the steps to the first chamber with the Icewitch trailing after him. He pulled a silken sheet from his lover’s bed and gathered as much of Aryn’s ashes in it as he could.
"Go in whatever peace this cold land will grant you," the Icewitch bade him. He left saying nothing further.
Grief and guilt rushed through Ashlan's mind as he mounted his stag and rode away. He paused beside the frozen lake where the Icewitch’s tower was. For a brief summer, flowers would bloom in a rainbow of colors and the waters would flow blue and clear as the sky. Aryn would like that.
“You would have been a great warrior.” Ashlan recalled his brother’s laughing face. Lately, he’d been showing a gift for the bow. Despite his small size, Ayrn already could hit the target with his arrows as well as many of the older warriors. Perhaps his targets now would be the summer stars.
Ashlan quickly brushed tears away from his eyes, swallowing his grief down with the knot of hurts he’d stored away since birth.
He could not return to Lyrell's camp. He detested what they had done to the children, but wasn't he as bad bedding with the Icewitch?
Ashlan pointed his stag in the opposite direction of his former home, Southward where the Icewitch claimed they both hailed. He could not remain with Lyrell’s people and this cold place.
Only a few measures away was a small village who owed their protection to Lyrell. Checking his saddlebags, he realized they still contained the few fish he’d gleaned from the hunt. Guilt stabbed him for not sharing even this small bounty with his clan, but the provisions would get him away.
Outside the village, he encountered a young boy swathed in bright red. Mindless of the numbing cold, he sat in a snow bank staring ahead.
"What are you doing here, boy?” Ashlan asked. The child did not answer.
When Ashlan brought his mage light close, the child’s pupils were already huge as though he’d stared into a fire. He didn’t react as much countrymen did to the strange fire. Neither did he protest when Ashlan picked him up and placed him on the front of his saddle. Believing the child was lost, Ashlan took him back to the village.
A woman clad in mourning gray with her face covered with ash met him at the village gate, forbidding him to enter.
“Why?” Ashlan demanded.
"He has a disease of the blood. There are knots beneath his skin. First, it took his strength, then his mind. Our healer died just weeks ago. We gave him the last of our summer poppy, then left him there because there was no one to speak the rites over him," the child's mother explained to Ashlan. Her face was bleak and colorless as the landscape.
Ashlan nodded. It was custom for the camp's healer to give a quick, honorable death to those who could not do so themselves. Nature would take the child perhaps more slowly, but the family would not have the death of an innocent unprepared for the next phase of his life on their heads.
"Would you take him where you found him?" the mother tearfully pleaded. Ashlan could see that none of the villagers had the fortitude to make the return trip. The beautiful child would lie in wait until the harsh land or his bad blood claimed him.
Wordlessly, Ashlan swept the child back upon his saddle. A threnody, bitter as the cold wind, followed him back to the place where the child had lain in wait for winter to claim him.
He wasn't sure where the idea came. He was less certain whether it would work, but somehow, he had to try. Averting his eyes from the snowbank where the villagers had wanted the child to die, Ashlan purposefully rode back to the Icewitch's tower.
He found a place near the wall sheltered by the worst of the winds. He lit only the smallest of mage-lights, just enough to warm his face and hands. But as the dark hours crept by, he feared the cold would claim him as well as the child before the Icewitch left her protected tower.
Finally, he caught a glimpse of twin mage fires. Soon after the Icewitch departed, riding upon her sled which did not touch the ground.
Ashlan’s bones creaked like an old man’s as he rose from his concealed position and stole back into the warm tower. His face and the exposed palms of his hands burned with the cold, but he knew he could not remain long.
Gently, he left the child upon her bed and stole away.
With the patience of a hunter, he lay in wait after she returned. He had no idea how long it’d taken the creature to drain his brother. He forced himself to remain outside wondering what happened. Clouds hovered ominously above him in the night sky, threatening snow. Neither stars nor moon shed their light upon him nor aided him in telling the time with their journeys across the dark sky.
For a while, he slept fitfully. Visions of Ayrn’s life came back to him. Lyrell’s joyous announcement that his favorite woman had borne him another son. The smell of his mother’s birth blood and the strong liquor from the men as Ashlan held his half-brother for the first time and drank a salute to his birth.
As he grew, Ashlan realized his younger brother was someone special. He stood helpless at the sight of two-year-old Ayrn standing in the path of stampeding riding stags. No beast’s hooves even came close to the blessed child’s body. It was then Ashlan declared himself his younger brother’s protector