Winter Be My Shield (3 page)

‘Issey …' Rhia began again. Isidro smiled faintly. She was as protective as a tiger of her cub when it came to her patients, but he was in no mood to be mothered. Since he'd finally found his way back to consciousness he'd spent a week lying in his furs, too ill to get up but in too much pain to escape into sleep. This was the longest he'd spent outside since the day he'd been captured.

‘Cam will be back soon, whether you watch for him or not,' Rhia said. ‘You will only make yourself ill again by waiting out here.'

‘Where did he say he was going?' He turned to face her, and that shift of weight was enough to set his right arm to throbbing again. Isidro laid his left hand gingerly over the limb, held in a sling across his chest beneath his coat. It had woken him again in the middle of the night and Rhia had given him a dose of poppy to let him sleep. Cam had set out before he'd woken.

‘He went to check his snares,' Rhia said, showing no impatience, even though she'd already answered the question several times.

‘It shouldn't be taking him this long.' Isidro winced at the petulance in his voice.
He's probably just taking the chance to get out on his own for a while
, he told himself.
With the way he and Brekan have been at each other's throats, I can't blame him.
Eloba and Lakua, the sisters who shared Brekan as their husband, had just taken their tent down for repairs when
the weather worsened, so all seven of them had been crammed into a single tent while the storm howled around them.

It was dangerous for a traveller to be out alone after dark, and not just because of the threatening war. Aside from the soldiers, the Mesentreians still hunting the fugitive prince and his tiny band, and the Slavers striking from the west, wolves, leopards and tigers roamed these hills. With their normal prey frightened away or hunted out by foragers, they might be desperate enough to stalk one man alone.

‘If he cannot return safely, Cam will take shelter for the night and find us in the morning,' Rhia said. ‘The weather is good and he knows how to stay out of sight and cover his tracks if there is danger. He will be fine.'

She was soothing him like a fractious child. Isidro drew breath to reply, but he inhaled just a little too deeply. The cold air hit his lungs and a spasm clenched like a fist in his chest and doubled him over in a fit of coughing.

Rhia drew his good arm over her shoulder and turned him back towards the tent. ‘Inside, quickly. You need warm air.'

The fit of coughing was so severe that he couldn't draw breath. With his head swimming and bright spots dancing before his eyes, Isidro didn't resist as she propelled him towards the larger of the two tents, the sisters having set theirs up again at first light.

Garzen appeared in the doorway just as he and Rhia reached it. With the lamplight behind him and thick black lines of mourning tattoos carved into his face, he would be a fearsome sight to anyone who didn't know him. He held the flap open with one hand and steadied Isidro's shoulder with the other as he stumbled through the doorway and into the spruce-scented warmth of the tent. Garzen started to let the flap fall behind him, but then stiffened and raised it again. ‘Who's that?'

Isidro turned, but his vision was too blurred to see.

‘It must be Cam,' Rhia said, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice.

His face grim, Garzen ducked out through the doorway, snatching up one of the spears driven into the snow outside as he went.

‘What's wrong?' Isidro wheezed, still out of breath.

‘Cam left on foot,' Rhia said, peering after Garzen with a frown creasing her brow. ‘Someone approaches leading a horse.'

 

Cam ducked through the doorway with the limp figure slung over his shoulder.

‘Set her down here,' Rhia commanded, spreading her own furs out to receive the girl.

‘She was alive when I found her, but that was hours ago,' Cam said. ‘I didn't want to take the time to stop and check on her again.'

Rhia eased off the girl's cap and cowl, lifting them carefully away from nose and ears that might be damaged by frostbite. ‘We shall see. Where are the hot stones? I need them now!'

‘Just wrapping them up,' Eloba said from the stove. She and Lakua had answered Rhia's shout for help without needing to be told what to do — every Ricalani knew the procedure when someone was brought in unresponsive from the cold. Smooth, round pebbles of soapstone were kept in the stove for just this purpose. Lakua lifted them from the coals with a pair of bone tongs and Eloba wrapped them carefully in scraps of cloth and fur.

Isidro sat cross-legged on his bed, trying to stay out of the way. Rhia always slept near him in case he needed her during the night, so the girl's head lay only a foot away from his own pillow, with frost melting in her hair and her lips a pale and bloodless blue.

Rhia opened the girl's coat. Beneath it, her clothes were Mesentreian, fastening up the middle with a row of silver buttons. Rhia ripped them open without ceremony and packed the hot stones around her torso, testing each one against her lips first to make sure it wouldn't burn. One of the buttons rolled over to Isidro's blankets and he picked it up with his good hand to examine the crest stamped into the metal.

Once all the stones were packed around her body, Rhia covered her with a pile of furs. Then, while she gently pulled off the girl's mittens and gloves, Lakua did the same with her boots and boot liners and pressed the girl's bare feet against her belly to warm them.

Cam had shrugged off his coat and stood in the cool spot by the doorway as he gulped down a bowl of lukewarm tea. Isidro tried to speak to him, but barely got the first word out before the cough took him over again. Each racking spasm sent searing needles stabbing through his shattered arm. Rhia glanced at him over her shoulder and said, ‘Eloba, brew tea for Isidro —'

‘I'll do it,' said Cam, crossing the tent to the stove and the low table behind it, where the medicines Rhia had ground and mixed were waiting in a bowl ready to be steeped. Cam filled it from the kettle on the stove, added a generous dollop each of butter and honey and brought it to Isidro, who was still struggling to catch his breath. Cam tried to hide it, but Isidro could see the worry in his face.

‘Go ahead and say it,' he rasped. ‘I look like crap.'

‘You look as bad as she does,' Cam said, nodding to the patient in Rhia's furs. ‘She has an excuse. I thought you were getting better.'

‘He was out in the cold waiting for you,' Rhia said without looking around. ‘I tell him to go in, but your brother is more stubborn than any mule.' She was still not quite fluent in Ricalani and her grasp of the language always suffered when she was under stress. Cam and Isidro both spoke Mesentreian, her preferred language, but the others did not, and the language of their enemies made them uneasy.

‘Any sign of danger out there?' Isidro said as he sipped the brew.

Cam shook his head.

‘Where did you find her?' Isidro nodded towards the woman.

‘I tracked her to her camp after she raided one of my snares,' Cam said. ‘But where she came from?' He shrugged. ‘She had a Ricalani pony, but she was wearing a Mesentreian uniform under that coat.'

‘Not just any uniform,' Isidro said, and nodded at the button lying on his furs.

Cam raised one eyebrow and then leaned across him to pick it up. The silver button was stamped with the sigil of a flaming torch. ‘The Angessovar crest,' he said, rolling it between his fingers. ‘That's odd.' Only someone attached to the royal household would wear that crest.

The inner clothes she had worn were made of the soft black wool used by the king's household guard, but it lacked the frogging and insignia Isidro remembered from his time at court.

‘Interesting,' said Cam, and tucked the button away into his sash. ‘So what do you think? She could be a concubine who took advantage of the bad weather to slip away.'

‘Maybe,' Isidro said. The coughing fit had left him exhausted, and the soporific in Rhia's brew was taking effect. He was finding it hard to focus on the girl's face — it wavered and blurred before his eyes. ‘Whoever she is, she must have been desperate, to leave without shelter or supplies.'

‘Hmm,' Cam said. ‘Well, I hope she can give us some word of what's going on out there.'

Rhia twisted around to face them. ‘If she wakes, you may ask her,' she said, and levelled one finger at Isidro. ‘You rest now. Cam, I want more wood for the fire. She must be kept warm.'

‘As you command,' Cam said with a mocking bow. He took Isidro's empty bowl away with him as he left.

‘Lie down,' Rhia said to Isidro, and began to pull off his boots.

‘I can do that,' he protested, but she ignored him, setting the boots neatly at the foot of his bed and then twitching the furs up to cover him. ‘Do not argue,' she said, and pressed her hand against his forehead. He closed his eyes against the coolness. ‘You are feverish again, Isidro. Rest. Your curiosity will wait until you wake.'

‘Will it?' he said. ‘Will she live?'

Rhia turned back to the slight figure occupying her furs. ‘I think so. But we shall see.'

Sweat prickled on his skin and stung like acid on the searing wounds on his back. The burns reached from the nape of his neck down to his buttocks. Naked, he knelt on a blood-splattered carpet of spruce with his hands tied behind his back and the end of the cord that bound them thrown over a beam overhead and pulled tight. All the weight of his torso rested upon his shoulders, twisted as far as they could go: they felt as though they were slowly tearing free. Blood dripped from his mouth to the spruce beneath him. He'd bitten his lip to keep from screaming.

Rasten held the poker beside his face. Wisps of smoke wafted from the  scraps of charred skin encrusting the iron. The heat of it dried the sweat on his cheek and Isidro closed his eyes to keep from flinching until it touched.

‘Rasten,' a soft voice said from across the tent and a moment later the heat was gone. Isidro turned his head and could just see the two men standing with heads together, talking in low voices.

Another figure knelt at Kell's feet, her bound hands fastened to a block of lead too large for one man to lift. For a moment, Isidro caught sight of her face between strands of black hair that clung to her sweating skin, like the heavy black lines of mourning tattoos. He met her eyes for only an instant before she looked away.

‘But the queen wants him whole.' Rasten's voice drifted across the tent.

‘She wants to watch him die, like she did his father,' Kell said. ‘But we progress too slowly. Much longer and the prince will be beyond our reach. Do as I say, boy.'

From the corner of his eye Isidro saw Rasten take a serrated knife and a bowl of liquid from the row of implements laid out on the table. The girl at Kell's feet huddled closer to the ground, as though willing herself to sink into it and vanish. Isidro steeled himself as Rasten came to his side again.

Rasten threw the knife into the ground, where it lodged point first, and hunkered down by Isidro's head. ‘Do you know what this is?' He dipped his thumb in the liquid and wiped it across Isidro's bitten lip. The salt-laden water bit like barbed needles and Rasten laughed at Isidro's grunt of pain.

Then he tipped the bowl over the ravaged skin of his back.

Isidro kicked the covers off and sat up, too quickly. It set his head spinning and he had to swallow hard against the gorge that rose in his throat. The beast in his arm flexed its claws.

Drenched with sweat, Isidro reached for the collar of his shirt and peeled it away from his skin, letting the cooler air flood in. The scars on his back prickled. When his fingertips brushed against one he flinched reflexively, even though all but the worst of them were healed. The burns had been the least of his troubles.

Rhia had strung an old blanket across his bed to keep the light from disturbing him, but it also isolated him from the radiant heat of the stove. The cool air chilled his skin and soon turned his damp shirt cold and clammy. Isidro pulled the furs up around his shoulders again and lay back until the world remained still once more.

His arm rested in its sling over his chest, a heavy and awkward weight across his ribs. Isidro gingerly slipped his good hand under it to move it to a better position. No matter how careful he was, any movement sent ripples of fire through the limb. The bones were broken in too many places for anything as simple as splints and birch bark to hold them in place. If he hadn't been so cursed sick for the last few weeks, Isidro knew Rhia would have cut it off.

At first, he'd tried to convince himself it would heal and that eventually he would be able to use his hand again. Over the last few days, though, as he had recovered enough to remain awake for a few hours at a time, he had come to understand how bad the damage was. His arm was beyond repair, a useless extremity of battered flesh and ragged bone.

Isidro hadn't imagined for a moment that he would survive Kell's treatment. His only goal had been to hold out long enough to allow Cam and the others to get away. It was past sunset when they finally broke him. Rasten had nailed his hand to a log and then set about breaking every bone from wrist to forearm. Once it was done, Rasten explained that they could start the whole process over again with his left arm. He'd run his fingertips over the ruined limb and murmured in Isidro's ear what
lay in store for him. He was to be taken to Lathayan for his execution, to be cut apart and slaughtered on the palace steps like his father before him. A man could survive the journey with one shattered limb, so long as he had the Blood-Drinker's enchantments to keep the wounds from turning septic. Any more and even Kell's powers wouldn't help him survive the journey — after each limb was shattered, they would have to cut it off and cauterise the stump. Rasten gave Isidro a choice — he could walk to his execution like a man, or be carried to the palace steps as a limbless, sexless lump. Worn down by pain and exhaustion, Isidro had surrendered, and told them where to find Cam's camp.

By the time they'd reached it, Cam was gone. In the days afterwards, while Duke Osebian and the king's men searched for the prince, Kell and Rasten had set about punishing Isidro for costing them their prize. Isidro remembered little of it, only snatches viewed through a fevered haze. He had escaped further maiming, probably because Kell didn't want to anger the queen by denying her the chance to witness the torture herself, but that still left a whole world of torment within his reach.

Isidro never imagined that he would survive the ordeal. He'd given himself up for dead the moment the soldiers closed around him in the village. Ever since he and Cam had fled the palace nearly ten years ago, they'd been well aware of the likelihood that one or both of them would be captured and brought back to face Valeria's wrath. It had never occurred to Isidro that one of them could be left crippled, unable to fight or fend for himself. Now he was a millstone around Cam's neck, an unbearable burden that could not be laid down. They were still here in the shadow of the army and the invasion because he was too weak to leave, Isidro knew. If he'd died in Kell's chains, or never awakened after sinking under the black water, they'd all be safely away from here. If they fell afoul of the Mesentreian soldiers, or were captured and enslaved by the Akharians, it would be because of him.

Murmuring voices reached him through the curtain and Isidro sat up again, suddenly craving company and conversation, anything to distract him from the memories and the despair. He kicked the covers back and ducked under the rough curtain, crawling awkwardly with one arm and blinking in the sudden light.

Rhia and Garzen were both kneeling beside the girl's bed, their heads bent over one of her small hands. A golden bracelet set with
red stones encircled her wrist and beneath it was a wide burn, raw and weeping. It cut across the kinship tattoo graven into the delicate skin of her inner wrist. The blistered and scorched skin was so badly damaged he couldn't make out the symbol identifying her lineage and her clan. The sight of the burns made his stomach twist and he had to look away.

Rhia looked up, and read his distress in a glance. ‘Isidro —'

‘She's alive, then,' Isidro said, and forced himself to look at the wound. ‘What's happened there?'

Garzen answered after a moment's hesitation. ‘She needs the bracelets off to treat the burns, but there's no clasp. Can't pry the links open. Looks like pure gold, but it ain't. Not soft enough, see? We'll have to cut it, and hope we don't do more damage than we have to.' He gestured at his leather tool roll laid out beside him, a haphazard collection of scavenged equipment.

‘There's a small chisel in my old carving set that will do it,' Isidro said. His gaze fell on the girl's face — her lips were pink now, but most of her face was hidden beneath a cowl Rhia had folded over and pulled down to cover her eyes. What little of her face he could see was puffy and swollen. ‘Snow blindness?' he said.

‘Yep,' said Garzen. ‘Got herself frosted, too, but it don't look like it'll go to frostbite.'

‘Lucky,' Isidro said. Frosting was the mild stage of frostbite, where ice crystals formed in the skin, but didn't do enough damage to turn it black and necrotic.

Isidro swayed and had to put his left hand out to catch himself. ‘The tools are in my kitbag; would you mind finding them yourself?'

Garzen looked him up and down and nodded. ‘I'll see to it. You sit yourself down, lad.'

Cam was sitting beside the stove with an empty satchel and an odd selection of gear spread out around him. He half rose when Isidro settled clumsily beside him. ‘Are you hungry? We kept a bowl for you.' He picked it up from where it had been keeping warm beside the stove — fish fried in butter with yesterday's soggy beans. ‘Garzen and Eloba had more luck with their lines than I did with mine.'

Isidro looked at the greasy mess and shuddered. ‘Later, maybe,' he said and put it out of sight. ‘Any sign of soldiers out there?'

‘None, either southern or Slaver. I heard an avalanche and thought it was the cursed sorcerer for a moment …' Cam shook his head with a wry grin. ‘The hills are quiet as a tomb and the only sign of people I found was her.' He nodded to the sleeping figure. ‘This is her gear. I'm trying to work out where she's come from.'

‘Leave it be,' Garzen said from across the tent. ‘It's cursed rude to go through a stranger's gear — and her a guest at that.'

‘Well, of course it sounds bad if you put it like that,' Cam said. ‘It might be days before she can talk. We know she's on the run and we've taken a risk by taking her in. We've got every right to find out who she is and what she's running from.'

Garzen looked unhappy, but he didn't argue.

‘Well, Issey, what do you make of this?'

The bag itself was nothing more than a scrap of blanket cinched into a pouch by the carrying strap. Cam had spread the contents out beside it — an empty water-skin and a tinderbox with a few charred scraps of birch bark that looked as if they might once have wrapped bars of pemmican. It grew stranger after that — two mismatched daggers, a pair of bracelets set with ugly green stones wrapped in a bit of rag, a book held closed with tooled leather straps, and two swords in their scabbards, an awkward shape and bulk to be carried easily in the bag.

‘Loot, maybe?' Isidro suggested as Cam picked up one of the swords and slid it out of the sheath.

‘Difficult to sell,' Cam said, examining the blade by the light of the stove. ‘It's good Mesentreian steel, hard to come by out here. You'd get some awkward questions when you tried to get rid of it. What do you make of the pommel stones?' He turned the hilt with its polished cabochon towards Isidro and raised one eyebrow in a silent question.

Isidro glanced around to make sure no one was watching and pressed his palm against the stone, closing his eyes to block out any distractions.

It was no secret that he carried the taint of power; it was a matter of public record. His name and lineage were inscribed alongside those of other tainted children in the records of the temple where he'd been tested as a boy, there for anyone who cared to seek out the information. He preferred not to advertise the fact. Cam knew, and so did Rhia, but they would no sooner mention it than they would bring up any other shameful episode from a friend's past. The others tended towards
superstition and Isidro was far from sure they would treat the matter with the same discretion. Especially now that it seemed bad luck dogged their every step.

Isidro dismissed those thoughts and emptied his mind. There was a tiny pool of energy within the stone: it fluttered and prickled against his palm, like a moth cupped in his hands. The dull grey stone flickered with minute iridescence at his touch. ‘This one's a witch-stone,' he said. It was a common enchantment, meant to detect folk like him. He leaned over to touch the other, and found it cold and dead. ‘The other's a fake.'

Cam held the two side by side and examined them closely in the meagre light. ‘I'll never understand how you can tell. They look the same to me.'

Isidro shrugged. ‘It's probably just as well. If you'd shown the taint, Valeria would have had you drowned like an unwanted pup.'

‘No doubt you're right,' Cam said. He set the swords aside and picked up the book. ‘Now this is odd. If you're escaping from a Mesentreian camp into the worst blow we've seen this winter, why would you pick up something like this? It's too cursed heavy to carry far, if nothing else.' The book was as long as his forearm and as thick as the breadth of a man's palm. The spine and cover were unmarked and it was closed with leather straps and clasps that wouldn't come loose, no matter how Cam pried at them. That was a disappointment: he would have welcomed the distraction of a book — or anything, really, to pass the time.

As Cam gave up and set the book aside, Isidro looked over the rest of the gear and picked up the bracelets. The dull green stones were set in gold in the Mesentreian style, with stylised leaves forming the settings and the links. They were jade, and good quality despite their murky colour.

The stones were lens-shaped and the setting left the reverse faces uncovered, so the gems would always be in contact with the wearer's skin. Isidro turned the bracelet over in his hand and the polished surface of the stone brushed against his palm. It stung like a fly-bite and he dropped it, biting back a curse.

Across the tent, Rhia glanced up from tending to the girl's burns and frowned with concern. His hand numb from the shock of contact, Isidro shook his head and waved her back to her patient.

Cam had seen it all. Cautiously, he picked up the other bracelet and turned it over in his hands, looking from Isidro to the links and back again. ‘What is it?'

‘Warding-stones,' Isidro murmured. ‘Cursed strong ones, too.'