“I am desperately grateful he has chosen to love me in spite of what I did. Because I feel as if I have to prove myself to him, I cannot now refuse to do this unprecedented thing he asks of me. To risk the host I worked so hard to acquire in order to free a race of slaves. Do you not see the symmetry? Does punishment only count when it is motivated by a desire to hurt? It is precisely what I deserve. I acquiesce because I need to know his forgiveness has not just been given but earned. It is rare that I find a host who understands me so well.”

Kebbal fell silent again, and although Havec didn’t feel as if he was forming thoughts with the usual coherence in his detached state, his supernatural friend could hear him loud and clear. “He is trying to claim I have read too much into a whim. I do not believe this is the case. He has been dwelling on the little frozen people since we encountered the first one on the road, and now I know why. In freeing them, I will free myself from my crime.”

***

They spent the night in the castle because it was already getting late and no one thought it was a good idea to undertake a battle against a god of cold without the assistance of the sun. Qanath tossed and turned for hours. When she wasn’t worrying that her mother had been involved in all of this, she was worrying the plan would fail.

She did manage to drift off but awoke with a start to the sound of the wind battering the shutters some hours before dawn. The layers of heavy quilts made a cozy nest, but the air beyond her blankets was icy in spite of the fire still burning in the grate. She closed her eyes, but they sprung open again.

Heaving a sigh, she tossed the covers back, then wished she hadn’t. It had been far too long since last she’d had a bath but she didn’t even consider looking into it. She struggled into her trousers so fast she staggered and almost fell, slipped her bra on under the shirt she had worn to bed, then pulled another layer atop the soiled shirt. Once she had her shoes on, she left the room.

She had thought she would wander, but the castle was so still and quiet that it turned out to be very easy to home in on the one source of light and noise. She stopped in the doorway to what turned out to be the kitchen, gazing upon the unwelcome sight of Amril and the Moritian shaman seated on either side of a simple, gouged-top table, heads bent together conspiratorially. Between them was a tiny black kitten. She felt her skin flash hot then icy cold as she thought to wonder if he used the shyin to strike up conversations with every woman he met.

By this point, they had noticed her. With a suddenness that made them both jerk back, the kitten erupted into a young man right on the tabletop. Hopping onto the flagstone floor, he hurried forward, seizing Qanath around the middle and hoisting her. When he set her down an instant later, it was to complain, “I wanted to hug you hours ago, but he told me no.”

“People need to sleep, Ara,” his master said patiently.

“I could have put her back to sleep after I woke her up,” the shyin reminded him. He shrank back into a kitten, which mewled and pawed at the cuffs of her trousers until she picked it up.

The foreign beauty with her green eyes and mane of snowy hair stood at this point and made for the hearth, giving Qanath nothing more than a nod. She was reminded that the woman didn’t speak their language. She went to join the other Tabbaqeran at the table, not sure she wanted to. He was watching her in a penetrating way that made her feel defensive.

“I have never known him to take such interest in someone. He’s rarely willing to speak to anyone but me, even when they address their words directly to him.”

“Havec,” she protested.

He shrugged that off with less acrimony than she might have thought. “He seems to be as intrigued by Kebbal, and given that he can see the thing, that strikes me as reasonable.”

“I don’t expect him to be human,” she pointed out, settling in a vacant chair with the kitten cupped against her chest. “No one likes it when people make assumptions about them.”

“People don’t. I’ve never noticed Ara cares. I almost wonder—” He fell silent. “I almost wonder if he’s interested in you because I am.”

She felt her face grow hot again and busied herself with scratching behind the kitten’s ears.

“We never finished our conversation. About your mother’s plans.”

“My fear that she conspired with Havec’s mother to conquer his homeland? Or Havec’s suspicion that she orchestrated Xar anKebbal’s death so I could be instrumental in caging the Archetype of War that was supposed to be set loose?”

“Her plans regarding us.”

The only sounds were the soft rustling of the fire in the hearth, the swishing of the shaman’s woolen clothing as she moved sedately by the fire. Qanath cleared her throat, and it seemed to her to echo about the room. “Havec pointed out that there’s no reason we can’t move against her, as easily as with her approval.”

“You want to punish her for using you.”

She forced herself to meet his eyes, although her voice was unsteady. “You made this deal once already. Would you consent to the same terms from a different buyer?”

His breath caught, and they stared at each other for another long, still interval. When he spoke, he sounded distant, as if he were partially asleep. “If I want to adjust the terms?”

“How?”

“That we stop referring to it that way. Can’t we just join forces because we’re two talented, ambitious people who want something similar and are sick of asking rich, important people to give it to us please?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but other people were entering the room. Servants, who swiftly herded them away. They found themselves installed in the office where they had spoken the previous afternoon. The fire had only just been built and the room was frigid, the wailing of the wind outdoors louder.

The room had warmed up only slightly when traces of grey began appearing in the sky. The other shaman appeared, Havec’s uncle on his heels. The three Moritians engaged in a brief conversation in their own tongue before Havec’s uncle told them the shamans didn’t feel like waiting for the sun to climb to its noontime peak was wise: the snow was coming down too hard and they feared they wouldn’t make it to their destination if they delayed. It was with a heavy heart that Qanath consented: she didn’t feel ready.

They bundled up in extra layers, furs taken from the closets and blankets borrowed off the beds. When she realized Havec’s uncle meant to come with them, she felt her anxiety increase; having a civilian with them raised the stakes. They couldn’t speak with their partners without his assistance, but he would be in danger and unable to defend himself.

The wind was a gale as they assembled in the stables, lancing through the gaps around the doors as if the doors weren’t there. They had assembled around an odd conveyance, what looked like an open carriage but with smooth wooden runners along the bottom rather than wheels. When someone rapped at the outside of the wide wooden doors, she jumped.

Hostlers hauled the doors back in their grooves, and Qanath wasn’t the only one who staggered with the force of the wind. She was alarmed when she saw the shapes looming in the snow; in her fear and in the semi-darkness, they seemed to be twice as large as they actually were. But these were just other people, bundled up against the cold.

There were other shapes behind the shamans, significantly larger, and she could make no sense of them. She would have said they were deer, but they were half again as big as the biggest deer she had ever heard of, with bull-thick necks and antlers broader than her spread arms. They shifted restlessly as the sleigh was dragged toward them, eying the hostlers uneasily, and it was the shamans who moved forward to secure the harnesses about their chests. It stole across her with a sense of incredible fragility that these awesome beasts had consented to help them but were not in actual fact domesticated.

They hitched four apiece to two sleighs before their party was able to get underway. Even these massive creatures had to strain against the force of the wind and the snow dragging at the runners, and their progress was slow. Ara wore the form of a mink again and he scrambled from his master’s shoulder onto hers, twining around her neck like a hot, silken scarf. His maker muttered, “Traitor,” but let him go.

It wasn’t a long journey. This town sat right on the verge of the sea, a thing so vast and resilient it could serve as a focus for this wrestling match they meant to wage. When they slid to a stop, it was smashing against the cliff’s foot, casting sprays of icy spume halfway to the lip where the humans huddled. Steps had been carved into the cliff, and elsewhere she saw wooden ladders lashed to the rocks. She could just make out a tortured wooden creaking from below that had to be the agonized sounds of the docks strained by storm-tossed waters.

They stood much closer to one another than they ordinarily would have. All of them were shaking with the cold and struggled to make themselves heard above the wind. “We’ll weave the bond, since we know how to do it,” Amril shouted. “All you have to do is pour heat into the sea.”

Qanath had expected more argument, but no one even commented once the command was relayed. These people were proud and accustomed to their independence, but the storm was so unbelievably intense. She joined hands with the other Tabbaqeran and closed her eyes. If she couldn’t see sorcery in the way that Ara could, she could feel it. Very clearly, now that everyone was accessing it. The shamans had begun to shuffle through the snow, tiny mincing steps that might be a dance, chanting under their breath with their heads bowed.

She felt as if she understood what Ara had been getting at the day before, because the force flowing from them felt like the wind, like water bounding down rocks, like the coiled power of a racing lion. What the two of them made between them was very different. Geometric and precise. A construct formed of shapes, four-dimensional tiles, exacting in dimensions and design, each braced against the next like counterweights. They didn’t conjure power to place into it: its purpose was to bind.

They had only just begun when a messenger found them, coming from somewhere in the town they hadn’t quit but which was completely obscured by the snow. Whatever the messenger had to say gave Havec’s uncle pause, but he chose not to convey the report to them. In Tabbaqeran, he asked, “How goes it?”

“We’ve got it built,” the older sorcerer responded, “now we just need to hope it works.”

“I still don’t understand how,” Jonet muttered, sounding frustrated.

“The two things are tied together now,” Amril told him. “Reacting to each other and nothing else. The warm thing keeps trying to warm up the cold thing but is actually just keeping itself warm.”

“While the cold thing tries to freeze the heat and just freezes itself. And we want to make this worse?”

“We’re hoping we can tire him out,” Qanath explained. “Make him spend this storm so…”

“He’s less powerful and we can kill him, provided we can figure out how.”

“You think you can actually pull this off?”

“Well we know the ocean won’t get tired,” Amril said with a hard bite of humor in his voice.

What followed was a terrible interlude where nothing appeared to be happening, an exhausting inactivity. The forces they had bound together were too vast for this facile manipulation, that much quickly became apparent. The two of them tottered back and forth through the snow, clinging to each other as they struggled to hold together their twisting, straining bridge. The shamans were staggering as much as dancing, and there was a ragged edge to their breathy chant. Jonet watched them anxiously, reaching out to steady anyone who looked like falling.

Then the wind died suddenly, dropping from a scream to a howl. The snow was no longer coming down so hard and so fast that they could scarcely see each other, and into the lull, all of them straightened. Qanath felt sick with dread and she was sure she wasn’t the only one. All of them knew they couldn’t possibly have defeated winter itself so easily.

As the wind dropped and the snow relented, he was revealed in their midst: bleached from the cold and surrounded by his misty mantle, Lofflied stood at the verge of the cliff. “A score of human sorcerers think to strongarm me? This is the best you could come up with, to generate heat?”

“It’s a little more developed than that,” a new voice called, coming from the south. Qanath would have spun to face it, so amazed was she to hear that familiar, welcome voice, but she couldn’t let Amril’s hands go; their construct was too fragile to survive without continuous support.