Ice Country (15 page)

Jolie. Are you okay? Has Goff hurt you? Are
you a slave, carrying around buckets of soap water, scrubbing the
palace floors, brown-skinned Heater children doing the same beside
you? Have you made friends with them?

Right when I stop thinking about the question
and focus on who I’m asking it for, an idea hits me. And not a bad
one either.

“We’ve got to talk to Abe,” I say.

~~~

“Not in a million years,” Abe says. “I’d just
as soon be skinned and boiled by a Yag than cross the king.”

I’m alone with Abe, a good ways down the
mountain—he wouldn’t talk to me any other way. Sleepy snowflakes
flutter this way and that way in the wind, seeming to never reach
the ground. “You owe me,” I say.

“Ha!” Abe scoffs. “How do you figger? The
last time I saw you, you disobeyed a direct order and shoved
me.”

“I did,” I admit. “But I was desperate. Don’t
you get it? My sister’s in there. Goff’s got my sister. What am I
supposed to do, just forget about it, let it go?” My voice rises
over the last few words.

“That’s exactly what yer s’posed to do,” Abe
says. “Just like me, you shouldn’t cross the king, especially when
he’s got your loved one chained up somewhere.”

What does he mean by
Just like me
? I
shake off the thought, continue to work on him.

“I’m not asking you to cross him,” I say.
“Just help him make a hiring decision. He won’t hire me or Buff,
not with our shoddy records, not for any jobs inside the palace
anyway, but Wes, he’s a golden child, been nothing but a good
worker everywhere he’s been.”

“Ferget it,” Abe says, folding his arms
defiantly.

“What if it were your sister?” I say,
changing tactics.

“I don’t have a sister,” Abe says smugly.

“A brother?”

His face changes, softens somewhat. “I’d do
anything for Hightower,” he says.

Huh? “Tower’s your brother?”

“Yah. So?”

“Uh, nothing. That’s great.” I try to keep my
face expressionless even though I want to ask him what in Heart’s
name is wrong with his brother. “Okay. So if Tower was a prisoner
somewhere, what would you do?”

“I’d freezin’ bust him out and mangle the
face of whoever put him there in the first place.” He stops,
wrinkles his face. “Oh,” he says, seeing my point.

“Please,” I say. “Just do this one thing and
I’ll never bother you again.”

Abe cringes, looks like he’s screaming but no
sound comes out, punches his fist into his palm. “Heart-ice it!
Why’d I ever hafta meet an ice-sucker like you?”

I don’t think he means for me to answer him,
but I do anyway. “Because this ice-sucker sucks royal ice at high
stakes boulders-’n-avalanches,” I say. “So you’ll do it?”

“Yah. And then you’ll never talk to me
again.”

“Deal,” I say, grinning.

~~~

We’re conspiring at Fro-Yo’s. Like we
suspected he might eventually, Yo bent a little and let us back in
the pub with the promise we’d pay him the last few sickles we owe
him as soon as we can. He even cleared the place out so we could
hold our secret meeting here. He said he’d add the lost business to
our tab.

Four tinnys sit on a round wooden table,
similar to the one we broke the last time we were here. They’re
empty so Yo clears them away and replaces them with fresh ones,
amber liquid frothing over the sides.

Abe leads the first part of the meeting. “Yer
not Wes anymore,” he says to Wes. “Yer Buck, son of Huck.”

“Can I choose a different name?” Wes
says.

“Nay,” Abe says, settling the matter.

“You already got him the job?” I ask,
surprised.

Abe lifts the edge of his lip, the closest
thing to a smile we’ll get from him tonight. “Course. I told you a
million times, I got power in the palace. But I didn’t know what he
could do, so they couldn’t place him. All you gotta do is tell me
what yer good at.”

“Uh,” Wes says.

“He’s good at digging up rocks,” I joke,
earning a sharp look from my brother.

“There ain’t much rock-diggin’ in the
palace,” Abe says seriously, not getting the joke. “But there’s
plenny of other stuff. Has he got any other skills?” He directs the
question at me, as if I’ve suddenly become the authority on Wes’s
abilities.

“I can cook,” Wes says, pulling Abe’s gaze
back to him.

“Perfect,” Abe says. “The king’s near always
lookin’ for kitchen workers, on account of him killin’ most of ’em
off when his supper doesn’t agree with him.”

The three of us just stare at Abe, shocked by
his statement.

His lip curls again. “Jokin’,” he says,
smacking his leg. We all breathe out at the same time, like we’ve
been collectively holding our breath. “Kitchen it is. You start
tomorrow morning. Just go to the back gates and give them this.” He
hands Wes a type of gold coin I’ve never seen before. “Any
questions?”

Wes shakes his head. “Good. Then it’s been
terrible knowin’ you all. Try not to git yerselves killed doin’
whatever it is yer doin’. An’ don’t ferget: yer name’s Buck now.”
He grabs his tinny and chugs what’s left of it, wiping his mouth
with the back of his hand when he finishes.

“Yah, yah, son of Huck. I got it,” Wes
says.

“Thanks, Abe,” I say, just before the door
slams.

“I hope I never see the likes of him again,”
Buff says after he’s gone.

“You and me both,” I say, wondering whether I
mean it as I take another sip of ’quiddy.

Wes slaps the gold coin on the table. “Right.
I’m in. Now what’s the rest of the plan, or am I supposed to get
Joles out all by myself?”

“Yah. That’s pretty much it,” I say.

Wes stares at me. “What?”

“Jokin’,” I say, imitating Abe’s voice.

“Very funny,” Wes says.

“Really? I thought it was an icin’ dumb
joke,” Buff says.

“Right,” I say. “The real plan. Me and Buff,
we just have to do what we do best.”

Buff cocks an eyebrow. “And what’s that?” he
says.

I grin. “Fight.”

W
e watch Wes from
the morning shadows of the forest. He gets in without a hitch, the
gold coin Abe gave him doing the trick.

So Wes is in. My mother’s taken care of, with
Clint and Looza looking after her. All that’s left is us.

It’s our turn to get in. And it’s not the
easy way.

We wait an hour before making our move, so
that no one links us to Buck—I mean, Wes.

When we stomp into Yo’s pub, every head in
the place turns our way. The door slams off the inside wall.

It only takes a moment for us to locate our
quarry. Coker and the other stonecutters sit at the end of the bar
in their usual spot, sipping on ’quiddy.

This will feel good
, I think, cracking
my knuckles. Nothing like a good pub brawl to get the blood
flowing. And with Yo’s agreement to press charges, we’ll surely end
up in the dungeons.

When I take a step forward, the door thunders
shut behind us. I look back, wondering why Buff closed it so hard.
Five heavily armed castle guardsmen stand just inside the
entrance.

“By the order of the king, you’re under
arrest,” one of them says. I immediately recognize him as Burly
Guard A.

Burly Guard B says, “Any resistance will be
met with violence.”

Then they grab us and bind our arms, leaving
Buff and I staring at each other in wonderment as to what just
happened. Did Abe turn us in? Or did my constant rule-breaking
finally catch up with me? In either case, we’re getting exactly
what we wanted: imprisonment.

My only regret: I didn’t get to break Coker’s
nose in the process.

~~~

The guards’ took more than a few shots at us
as they dragged us along, and now my whole body feels like I slid
into a tree. Buff didn’t fare much better than me. His face looks
like he got mauled by a bear and he’s all hunched over as he
staggers along beside me, dragging chained feet.

But we’re in, although I’m not sure what
we’re going to do now. The plan only went so far as getting us
inside the palace and Wes figuring out a way to break us out of the
dungeons. For all we know, he’ll never make it down there and we’ll
be left to rot with the mice and creepy-crawlies.

“When will the king sentence us?” I slur to
the guard who’s prodding us along with some sharp instrument from
behind. A raunchy joke comes to mind, but I swallow it down with a
wad of spit.

“Consider yerself sentenced,” the guard
says.

I guess it was too much to hope that the king
would personally attend to a couple of lowly tradesmen, but I
figured it was worth a shot.

Through vision obscured by swollen eyes, I
observe the palace. Despite his condition, I can tell Buff’s doing
the same. We’ll compare notes later.

The guard marches us through a high archway,
made of a kind of white stone that seems to glitter pink under the
barest hint of summer sunlight infiltrating the cloud cover. The
hallway beyond is grand, adorned with all manner of white and blue
tapestries, which hang proudly along the walls, threaded with
delicate scenes from ice country. Here a snowy slope, dotted with
soft pines. There a mountain peak, blanketed with clouds. On my
right a town teeming with people. Houses burning? People fleeing?
Dark men on black horses chasing them, cutting them down with sharp
swords. Men from bedtime stories.

I glance to the left and find a similar
scene, except this one’s not in ice country, it’s in a land I’ve
only heard tales about, a land far, far away, where they say the
sun’s bigger than here. A land of endless water and deserts that go
all the way to the sea. In the tapestry there’s a giant wooden
vessel—they call them
ships
in the stories—bobbing on a wide
splash of water, tied to a tree that looks curved and funny on the
shore. Men are rushing from the ship, brandishing swords and
torches, charging into an army of dark warriors on black horses,
who are galloping toward them, legions of dark clouds and flashing
lightning at their backs.

We trudge on and the tapestries are behind
us, leaving only a burning memory.

I glance at Buff and he glances back, raising
a bruised eyebrow.

(Yah, you can bruise your eyebrow, Buff
proved it.)

He saw the depictions too. The violence. He
remembers the stories told around warm hearths. Of the Stormers. A
bloodthirsty people who conquer lands for one reason and one reason
alone: to kill. To drink the blood of those who would oppose them.
To ravage the women and enslave the children.

Riding crazed horses that live for the thrill
of the battle, they’ve fought the water people, the Soakers, for
many years, trying to destroy them and take control of the Big
Waters.

But they’re not real, right? Just stories.
The king’s walls are just an artist’s depiction of the stories.
Surely.

We pass under a smaller multi-colored stone
archway, and into an even larger corridor, wider than ten men and
taller than five. There’s a voice booming from an open doorway on
the right. “The
oldest
bottle I said!” the voice erupts.
“This is the second oldest. Go back to the cellars! NOW!”

As we step by the opening, I look inside the
room. It’s like no room I’ve ever seen before. Constructed on white
marble pillars, the room’s so big it could fit a hundred of my
houses. Two hundred of Buff’s. A long blue carpet extends like a
ribbon from the entranceway, all the way across the sparkling
floor, where it reaches a seat. Nay, not a seat—a throne. With
clawed paws like a bear, the granite throne looms upward, big
enough to seat a family of Icers. But in it, basking in the
exuberant daylight streaming through a dozen massive windows, is
one man. Although I’ve never seen him before, he can be only one
person: the king!

I stop, feeling the sharp prick of the
guard’s sword on my back.

Why would they take a common criminal past
the throne room on the way to the dungeons? I ask myself. It makes
no sense.

The king is a big man, old, maybe forty,
maybe older, with a shaved bald head and a thin, neatly trimmed
graying beard. He looks even bigger sitting on the raised
throne.

A thin, white-clothed man scuttles down the
blue carpet, away from the king and his booming voice, gone to
fetch the oldest bottle of whatever drink the king desires. For a
moment King Goff watches after him, almost amused, but then he
looks past his servant, to where I stand. Our eyes meet and—

“Move along!” the guard barks, jabbing me
harder. Unconsciously, my feet move forward, one after the other,
like they have all my life, but my head is back in the throne room,
facing Goff, the man who stole my sister. I’m so close.

Moments later, we descend into the dungeons.
The air thickens and moistens and a nasty smell tickles my nose.
Something’s died down here. Or someone. Many maybe.

The guard plucks a torch from a wall fixture
and waves it near my face, burning me. I flinch away but don’t cry
out. He laughs.

Sword at my back once more, he forces me
forwards into an alcove. Seated on a squat wooden chair with a
broken leg is a giant of a man, wearing a black mask with only
mouth and eyeholes cut out. Across his lap rests a double-sided,
double-edged battle axe. All four of its razor-sharp edges gleam
under the firelight.

He stands, his girth filling half the small
space. We’re crammed in the other half with the guard. Wafting from
his armpits is an odor that smells like what I imagine death would
smell like. As I try to get a hold of my rebellious stomach, I
consider yelling “I surrender!” and impaling myself on his axe, but
I manage to close off my nostrils enough to regain control.

“Ain’t you a couple of tasty morsels,” he
bellows, laughing before he’s even finished saying it, a growling
echoing chortle that spouts a stream of rotten breath, proving that
this dungeon master is more than just a one-smell act.