“What I seek lies before me.”
Her right eye slanted to the west, while her left eye looked to the east, and the sight of it made me cringe. “Death lies before you,” she said. “Sacrifice. Misery.”
“You’re a seeress.” That was why she seemed familiar—she reminded me of the blind mystic, speaking like she knew things, saw things, that others could not. A vassal and harbinger of her gods.
“The last seeress in Iseneld,” she said, her crooked eyes straightening again. “I am the vision and the voice of the Ice Gods.”
“You live out here?” Around us was nothing but plains and hills of black sand. “In the middle of nowhere?”
“Magiskas do as we must to survive.” She tipped her chin up pridefully. “But not you. A foreign girl bearing gifts bestowed by rival gods, calling to the creatures of this land, using your abilities without asking permission. Taking a life that was not yours to take without giving thanks to the gods who created it, who shaped this island and breathed life into the souls inhabiting it. This is a grave offense to the Ice Gods. There is a price to pay for your insult. You must turn back and find a temple, make an offering, beg forgiveness of Sjaf and his kin. It will be granted, if you are sincere.”
Her clothes. They were moving. What I’d thought was fur was actually moss, full of insects and small animals, crawling all over her. “Stop speaking in riddles and tell me exactly what the cost will be if I keep going.”
“I can’t. I do not know.”
I stood, glaring down at her. “Tell your gods I’ll be off their island soon enough, but first I have a task to complete.”
“What simmers in your blood was never meant for you. There is another, a stronger vessel, who it must be passed to. In the meantime, it spreads and stains and corrupts you.” The seeress touched my arm and every vein in my body seemed to tighten.
My knife found her throat. “Keep your hands off me.”
“It may be too late for you already.” She brushed her palms together, indicating she was done with our conversation.
I kept the knife up but stepped back. “If I’m a lost cause, then why did you come?”
“That is the curse of the seeress. To know too much, and yet not enough. To be listened to, but rarely heeded, compelled to offer warnings that will only be ignored. And forgotten. That is the worst curse laid upon me by the gods, for abandoning my duties to save my own life. No one will remember me. You will forget this meeting as soon as I am gone, and the omens I shared will mean nothing more to you than a feeling, a dream. But we will see each other once more, on the other side of this choice, and you will wish you had listened. So will I.”
With that, the seeress turned in a flourish of her swirling, living cloak, stark against the dead black sand.
Quinlan rolled over and looked at me, yawning. “Are you ready to be off, then?”
I glanced to where the seeress had been, but the sand was empty. I hadn’t trusted the mystic in Glasnith, and I didn’t trust Iseneld’s seeress either, but briefly, I let in the possibility: What if she was right? Quinlan was sick, growing weaker. My gifts were nearly useless in this strange land. We could go back, seek out a village. I could make an offering at one of the Ice Gods’ temples. We could rest, wait for Quinlan to grow stronger while I practiced using my gifts. Then we could try again, later.
But we had come so far. We were so close. And I was tired of living in fear of gods, tired of begging them for favors. I wanted to end this. I needed it to be over.
I was already forgetting why I had doubted in the first place, who it was that had made me think this was the wrong choice. “Do you want to stop, Quinlan? Do you want to turn back?”
I would if he wanted. I owed him that, and more, for everything he’d done for me.
He grinned, running fingers through his sleep-mussed hair. “We were bloody daft to attempt this in the first place. We’d be completely mad not to finish what we started, don’t you think?”
Simple, sage advice from my oldest, dearest friend.
“Completely,” I agreed.
CHAPTER 24
LIRA
Spilling out between the mountains was what looked like a soft blanket of endless snow. It was a glacier covering the middle of Iseneld, an island unto itself, and the main source of the streams and rivers we’d crossed to get here. At its very center was the Mountain of Fire, the blazing heart of the Frozen Sun. It was a sacred place, and Reyker had made the trek here with his father and other villagers once to pay tribute to the Ice Gods.
Circling the glacier’s base were half-frozen rivers crowded with broken chunks of ice, floating slowly downstream, the beginning of a long journey to where the river met the sea. The crackle of melting ice, of glacial fragments scraping against each other, was the only sound.
“You’re certain you want to do this?” Quinlan asked.
We’d braved Iseneld’s hostile weather thus far, but it was nothing compared to the Highlands, where the wind brushed along the glacier, sucking up its chill, so it could tear at us with freezing claws. There were no animals to hunt here. Half the wolf meat was wrapped up in our packs, and it would keep in the cold, but once it was gone, we’d go hungry.
“It’s not about want. I’ll never be free until I do this.” I touched the crystal bracelet. It had become like the manacle on the longship, molding so tight to my wrist that it hurt. Even with Veronis’s voice muted, I could sense his impatience—a twitch under my skin, a shudder in the back of my mind. I needed to right the wrongs of Ildja and Gwylor and be rid of this burden. “But you can wait here. You don’t have to come with me.”
“Aye, I came all this way just to quit on you right before the finish,” he said.
There was no obvious path for climbing onto the glacier, only places that were less hazardous. Crossing the river risked falling through the ice sheet. The caves were unstable, and parts of them could collapse at any moment. Other spots had pools of gray leaking off the glacier where the water had weakened the sand, turning it to loose, deep mud pits that could easily swallow someone foolish enough to step in them.
I led Quinlan to a boundary where the rock and a lolling tongue of glacier met, taking a length of rope from the bag. “The snow hides cracks in the ice. We need to tie ourselves together in case one of us falls in.” That was what Reyker and his father had done.
“You won’t be able to hold me up. If I fall, I’ll pull you down with me.”
“Why do you think we lugged the ice axes all this way?” I held mine up. The staff was longer and lighter than an ordinary axe, the head small and curved. “Before we step, we anchor ourselves.”