Ice (25 page)

An hour later, the slope steepened. Continuing to climb, she jammed her fingers into a crack.

Searching with her foot, she found a foothold. She pulled herself up. Feet braced, she reached for the outcropping. She stained the rocks with specks of blood from her scraped fingers. Swinging her leg up, she beached herself onto the ledge. Cassie leaned against the mountainside and panted.

Below her, the trees were pick-up sticks and the wild sheep were dots on distant rocks.

High enough, she decided.

Back pressed against the mountain, Cassie got to her feet on the ledge. Wind whipped her hair into her face. She pushed it behind her ears, and she looked across the landscape. The height made her head spin. She could see hundreds of miles of forest. It stretched into the horizon. A flock of Canada geese flew beneath her. Pressing one hand on her stomach, she breathed deeply. She bet her baby would be born loving heights. Or with a deep-seated fear of them.

She closed her eyes to stop the dizziness. Time to see if it had been worth all the effort. Filling her lungs with wind, Cassie shouted, “North Wind! Grandfather!” She felt wind on her face. It did not speak.

She shouted again: “I am Gail’s daughter! I need to talk to you!” He was out there somewhere, she was certain. But where? Was he all the wind, or only a piece of it?

She wished she’d asked Gail about her family. She knew nothing about the wind munaqsri, except the fact that they were her family and they oversaw the munaqsri of the air. She hoped that was enough. It had to be. “I’m your granddaughter! Please, answer me! Grandfather! Uncles! Wind!” Cassie shouted until her throat was raw. “Answer me! Please!” She could feel the wind—her hair and skirt flapped, and snow and gravel tumbled down the mountain—so why didn’t he answer her?

“Grandfather! Uncles! Munaqsri! I know you exist! Talk to me!” Rock cracked. It split from the mountainside. She swallowed her scream as a chunk of rock collapsed inches from her outcropping. It tumbled, stirring other rocks. A mini-avalanche crashed down the side of the mountain. Shaken, she looked at where the rock had split.

A single eye stared at her.

It was an enormous eye. It looked like a curved, yellow mirror embedded in the rock. She saw her reflection, covered in dirt and blood, stomach bulging like a fun house distortion. She stared, transfixed. The eye blinked with an eyelid of granite that slid down like an avalanche and then up again. It was part of the mountain. Rocks were scales. Boulders were nostrils. She looked at the ledge behind her. She was clinging to its claws.

Open, the dragon’s mouth was a cavern. If he yawned, peaks would crumble. Dirt plumed as he spoke. “You called for a munaqsri.”

“I, uh, meant to call the wind munaqsri,” Cassie said. Judging from his six-foot eye, this munaqsri could have crushed the bowhead whale.

“You are wasting your breath shouting for my wind cousins,” he said. “They will not hear you. You are too earthbound to catch their interest.”

Now she learned this? After that climb? “What do I do?”

“Whatever you want.” The dragon shrugged. Snow and rocks sloughed off the slope. With a thunderous sound, the mass slid down the mountain. Cassie watched it cascade beneath her in a billowing cloud. Below, trees snapped like toothpicks.

Cassie swallowed. “Can you help me?”

His rock eyelid slid over his eye. She waited, but it did not reopen. It looked indistinguishable from the other rock faces again. “Um, excuse me?” Cassie said politely.

He did not answer.

“Mr. Mountain?”

No answer. She pressed her lips together. She had not come this far to be intimidated by a bunch of rocks with eyes . . . even very large dragon eyes. She—correction, they: Cassie and her baby—were not going to be dissuaded. She wasn’t alone in this. She drew courage from that. Steeling herself, Cassie thumped on his claw. “Answer me. Please. How do I get the winds’ attention?” He opened one eye and regarded her with his giant pupil. “There is one way.”

“Tell me,” she said.

The dragon laughed. Rocks danced off the mountain. She flattened herself against the slope and covered her ears as the rocks crashed. “You won’t like it,” he said.

“Tell me how! I am not afraid!” She pounded his claw with her fist. “Tell me, dammit!” He fixed his great eye on her and said one word:

“Fall.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Latitude 63° 26’ 00” N

Longitude 130° 19’ 53” W

Altitude 4325 ft.

CASSIE PEEKED OVER THE EDGE. FALL?

On the mountainside, the rocks looked like rows of serrated knives. Automatically, her hands cradled her stomach. She’d already tumbled down a cliff once. “It’s not a vertical drop,” Cassie protested.

“I’d roll down the mountain, not fall through the air. It won’t work.”

“I can fix that,” the dragon said. He shifted his weight. Beneath her ledge, the mountain crumbled.

Avalanche! She clung to the dragon’s claw and screamed. The grinding stopped. Irritably, he said,

“Please don’t scream.”

She inched to the edge and peered over. Wind whipped her hair against her cheek. Below her, the slope was gone. The mountain went straight down for a quarter mile. Cassie scrambled back against his claw. Her heart pounded fast. She was aware of how thin her skin felt and how breakable her bones were.

What’s wrong with me? she asked herself. Only a few months ago, she had dived into the Arctic Ocean. How was this any different? Looking over the edge again, she swallowed hard. The dragon’s tail, a string of granite, curled in the air. It was different. She wrapped her arms tighter around her stomach. Everything was different.

How far would she go for Bear? Where was the limit? Was there a limit? She wasn’t risking just herself anymore.

The baby kicked against her hands, and she felt her skin roll like an ocean wave. “Are you up for this?” she asked her stomach. Another kick. It felt as if the baby were urging her onward. Cassie smiled. How far would she go to give her baby its daddy? East of the sun and west of the moon, of course. “C’mon, kiddo,” she said. “Let’s go find your daddy.” Cassie placed her toes on the lip of the ledge and looked out across the boreal forest. Wind whipped her hair so that it slapped her cheeks and forehead. She brushed it back. Her baby wouldn’t grow up like she had, missing a parent she’d never known. “Can you call the wind munaqsri?” she asked the dragon.

“You truly intend to do this?” For once, he did not sound condescending. He sounded curious. “What possible reason could you have for hurling your soft, tiny body from me?” She had a hundred reasons: because Bear had carved a statue of her in the center of the topiary garden, because she could always make him laugh, because he’d let her return to the station, because he won at chess and lost at hockey, because he ran as fast as he could to polar bear births, because he had seal breath even as a human, because his hands were soft, because he was her Bear.

“Because I want my husband back,” Cassie said. And, she added silently, because my baby deserves to know him.

“Please call the winds.”

“Very well,” he said.

And then the dragon roared to the sky. Wind whipped faster and faster around the mountain. Dust and rocks tumbled down the slope. Cassie shielded her face.

“Now!” the dragon cried.

Holding her stomach, Cassie jumped. Sound tore from her throat. “Grandfather! North Wind!” She plummeted down, spiraling through the sky. The green and gold swath of forest rushed toward her.

“Wind munaqsri!” Air rushed past her as loud as a scream.

Suddenly, wind slammed into her from two directions. Squeezed, Cassie spurted up in the air. She arched over the dragon’s mountain and spun like a stray leaf, tossed by wind. Snowcapped mountains spiraled below her. Oh, she was going to vomit. “North Wind!” she cried.

“Poor child. She doesn’t know her north from her south.” A voice swirled around her, sweeping under her and beside her. It seemed to be coming from everywhere.

Streaks of cloud whipped past her. One of Gail’s uncles? “South Wind?” Cassie called.

“Let her fall.” A second voice rushed past Cassie’s ears. “She is nothing to us.” Suddenly, she sank. She tried to scramble, to grab anything solid. Clouds slipped through her fingers as cool mist on her skin. “I’m your niece! I’m Gail’s daughter!” Below her, the Yukon River wound like a blue ribbon through the mountains—so tiny, so far down. “Please don’t drop me!” A gust rolled her, and she screamed as she tumbled through the air. Wind rushed past her ears as loud as her own scream.

“We must keep her, East,” the first voice—the South Wind—said.

Wind swept under her, and she was tossed up, up, up. “You can’t keep me!” she shouted. “You have to help me!”

“We cannot keep her,” the East Wind said, echoing her. “It was not right before; it is not right now.” The air began to blacken. Rain splattered on Cassie’s arm.

“But I want her!” the South Wind wailed like wind on the sea.

Cassie heard a crackle and saw a spark of white light jump from cloud to cloud. If they didn’t stop, she could be electrocuted. “Please!” Cassie shouted. “Uncles!”

“See!” the South Wind said. “Listen to her. She’s already family!”

“Yes, yes, I’m family! Gail’s daughter!” Cassie cried into the rising storm. “Stop it! Don’t storm!

Please, stop!”

Instantly, the gray dispersed, and the breeze calmed to a whistle. “Did we hurt you?” the South Wind asked. “We don’t wish to hurt you. Your mother was our favorite child. We adored her.”

“She was a mistake,” the East Wind said.

Cassie bristled. “Excuse me?”

The South Wind said soothingly, “It’s an old argument. My brother did not approve of North’s adopting your mother.”

The East Wind growled like a rumble of thunder. “It was kidnapping.”

“Adoption,” the South Wind said.

“Kidnapping.”

In a reasonable tone, the South Wind said, “If Abigail did not love us, she would not have sent her daughter to live with us.”

Twisting in the air, Cassie tried to see the source of the voices. “I’m not here to live with you! I’m here to ask you to take me east of the sun and west of the moon!” The air shuddered around her. “Oh, no, kitten. You cannot go there,” the South Wind said. “It is not a nice place. Not a nice place at all.”

“Not for living things,” the East Wind agreed.

“Besides,” the South Wind added, “it is too far. Much too far for us.” He sounded pleased. Streaks of cloud zipped past Cassie like silver minnows in a river.

“But you’re wind,” Cassie said. “Wind goes everywhere.”

“It’s beyond the ends of the world,” the East Wind said, and the sky darkened as he spoke. Deep gray stained the white clouds and spread.

Cassie felt a fat drop of rain hit her cheek. “The world is round. It doesn’t have ends,” she said.

“Besides, Grandfather made it there. Can you take me to him?”

“Oh, kitten, you do not want to see him.”

“He has a temper,” the East Wind explained.

“Once, he was so angry he scattered us into hundreds of pieces all across the globe.” The air trembled. “It took us weeks to reassemble.”

He scattered his own brothers? She shivered. And these were the creatures that her mother had grown up with, that Gail had called family. “Just take me to him.”

“Absolutely not,” the South Wind said firmly. “He’ll tear you to bits.” Cassie opened her mouth to argue, and her stomach squeezed. She clutched her stomach. Her baby!

Not yet! She was so close to Bear! “For Gail’s sake, take me to him!”

“But . . .”

Her stomach loosened, and she sucked in air. “Please! If you cared about Gail at all, take me to the North Wind!”

In answer, wind rushed around her. Her skirt whipped and twisted around her legs. As she went spinning through clouds, she cradled her stomach.

“You may want to close your eyes,” the South Wind said to Cassie. “Some find this . . . distressing to their worldview.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Cassie said. “I married a talking bear.” Enveloping her in empty air, the winds swept over the forest. She felt her stomach contract again as the two winds sandwiched her. She spun through the air like a pinwheel.

* * * * *

Clouds rocked underneath her, and she clenched her teeth, concentrating on not being sick. Faster and faster, she flew into the snow-toothed mountains. She slalomed between peaks. Veering close to one, the winds drove her toward the sheer face of the mountain glacier. “Watch it!” she yelled, and she sailed up the slope, bursting through clouds.

“We are here,” the South Wind whispered. As the winds slowed, Cassie saw a massive mountainside.

A jagged cave cut open the side of the ice-coated mountain like a wound.

Snow spewed from the mouth of the North Wind’s cave as Cassie, carried by the two winds, flew toward it. Cold slammed into Cassie, and she catapulted backward through the air. She was caught in a sweep of wind as the North Wind roared: “BLAST YOU ALL. WHAT DO YOU WANT?” Swirling around her, the South Wind whispered, “It is one of his bad days. Do you wish to leave now?” She felt the wind quivering. Tiny droplets of moisture beaded on Cassie’s skin.