The noise hadn’t come from this gaunt figure, but from a small, fluffy monkey it led on a leash, the jaundiced hue of tea-stained teeth. The monkey let forth another blood-curdling shout, but its master held silent, watching them with neither fear nor anger. Havec knew what it was: however long he’d been away from home, some things were just too terrible to forget.
“Stay away from it!” he screamed as he scrambled to get his feet under him.
The soldier had only just drawn up from his charge and was turning around to ride back. Havec couldn’t make out the expression on his face from this distance through the ongoing flurries of snow, but he didn’t draw rein. He was riding right back toward the droghos as if he hadn’t heard the warning and intended to engage it with his sword.
The others were still sitting their mounts where Hot Priest left them; the two horses that had held Havec’s sling had only gone about thirty yards down the road before they stopped. Far enough to be well away from the droghos without losing sight of their humans. Hot Priest was hefting his sword speculatively.
“Farait,” he shouted, too urgent at this moment to be intimidated. “If that thing touches you, you will die. Just ride around and leave it be.”
The man drew up, and now he was studying Havec, face set. He had no idea why the fool was so reluctant to take his word for this, but after a breathless moment when only the wind and the waves dared to speak, he finally gave his reins a flick. He steered around the creature still standing in the middle of the road watching them with its dead eyes, so small and skinny you might be tempted to wonder what harm it could do. Havec didn’t breathe again until Hot Priest was well away from it. Then, releasing a shuddering breath, he turned away and proceeded down the road in pursuit of the horses.
He was gathering up the first of them, a handsome chestnut fellow with white socks who wasn’t prepared to take Havec’s word that the danger was past, by the time the others rejoined him. His mother looked shaken and made no attempt to criticize his handling of the situation. Hot Priest, on the other hand, was pissed. “You do realize I’m a soldier? I may not have your skill, Avat, but the uniform isn’t honorary. I don’t appreciate you constantly keeping me to the rear like some foolish noncombatant who can’t be trusted near anything with an edge. I won the lists two seasons running in my weight class in my regiment. Maybe I can’t hold my own against you with a weapon but there is no way you can beat me wrestling!”
Havec was too rattled by the droghos to match the man’s temper with anger of his own. And he felt funny, off-kilter, unsteady on his feet. As if it was taking a while for his will to reassert its command of his flesh. “It’s not a judgment on you,” he said wearily, stroking the distressed horse along the jaw with the hand not wrapped in its reins. “I’m not going to fight it either. No rational person gets near the things. If it touches your skin, you’ll freeze to death. Period. I could set you on fire, it wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Oh.” Hot Priest sounded nonplussed. “I have a bow…”
Shaking his head, Havec moved around to the animal’s side and climbed into the saddle. “Just leave it alone. It won’t mess with you unless you get within arms’ length, so don’t.” With a quiet word to the horse, he set off across the road in pursuit of its partner.
“You don’t want me to hurt it,” the Tabbaqeran said to his back, sounding as though he wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“The droghos were people once,” he told his companions, not looking at them. “In the age before man, they hunted the great plains to the north. Then winter came and lingered for too long. All of them died, the adults and the children, the babies and the ancients, and now they’re winter’s slaves. They go where the cold goes, hanging icicles from eaves and shaping the snow into drifts. They don’t mean any harm, and the right way to deal with them is stay away.”
He would never know how Hot Priest might have responded to this: at this moment, Hib said hesitantly, “Avat? Zaresh?”
When Havec glanced at him, the boy’s face was slack, eyes wide. He twisted in the saddle and found that two more of the little cold-bleached people had joined the first. While he looked at them uneasily, trying to recollect whether he had ever heard that someone witnessed more than one droghos gathered together in one place, a fourth emerged from amongst the trees, stepping out onto the road.
“Avat?” Farait prompted, waiting for his cue.
Havec held still, watching the things that stood now in a cluster in the center of the treeless stripe of snow that was the coastal road. They weren’t facing one another as though communicating; rather, strung out in a row, they were studying him. ‘Unsettling’ seemed too mild a word. Decided, he turned his horse’s head south. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but I think we shouldn’t hang around to find out.”
***
The bewildered Moritian who had come in response to their knocking didn’t appear to speak their tongue. In marked contrast to most of the people Qanath had encountered in this country, he seemed more confused than hostile. Rather than slam the door in their faces, he summoned someone to tend to their horses and indicated by gestures that he was inviting them inside. Then he didn’t step back from the door and let them in, standing stock-still with his eyes fixed on the shyin. She had no idea whether Ara was aware of his scrutiny, let alone whether he was affected by it, but he turned promptly into a raven and flew up to perch on his master’s shoulder. This impressed their guide deeply, and he dropped them a bow as he finally stepped back from the door and let them in.
They hadn’t been able to get a look at the building’s exterior thanks to the storm, but now they were inside, it was obvious they were in a fortress. She had read enough history in school to recognize the trappings of siege-craft, the thick stone walls, the tightly-spiraling staircases. At one point, they were forced to cross an interior courtyard already humped high with growing drifts of snow, and she looked up, searching for and finding narrow windows on every face of the building’s second story, looking down upon the exposed space.
Then they were back indoors and moving on. The rugs were thickly layered upon the floor and even hanging from the walls. She had the sense that money and effort had been invested in the décor; here and there, she saw pieces of statuary and the ubiquitous weavings were intricate.
There were people absolutely everywhere, stopped in the midst of their chores to gawk. Havec’s homeland had seemed almost deserted, but there were more people crammed into this building than felt reasonable. The overwhelming impression Qanath was getting from them was uncertainty shading into fear. They displayed none of the anger she had encountered elsewhere.
Eventually, their guide left them in a cozy space, a rather small room on the first floor. Somewhere toward the northeastern end of the building, unless she had gotten turned back-to-front. Two tiny windows high on the walls of the northern face were hidden by snow piling up on the sills. Everything about this room was comforting to her, from the fire roaring in the fireplace of rounded rocks to the soothing blues and greens of the rug they were dripping on. The rows upon rows of books shelved in its walls.
A girl several years her junior arrived bearing a tea tray in her trembling hands and left again immediately. The stiffness of her gait suggested it was a struggle not to run. A much older man appeared on her heels, tall and thin, his beard trimmed short. He gave them a bow, then held silent, studying them thoughtfully.
If this was Havec’s uncle, he had very little of his nephew or his brother in him. His face was narrow and intelligent, and he had the bearing more of a scholar or theologian, calm and introspective. His eyes were Havec’s; gray and not blue, but widely-spaced and deeply-set. It was a moment before he said, “Greetings,” and his voice was deeper than she anticipated.
Both of them bowed.
“My name is Jonet, I understand you were asking after me? I’m afraid Mattew doesn’t speak your tongue.” He had the ring in hand, Qanath saw. The way he fingered it betrayed his uneasiness.
“I come with a warning from your nephew.”
“What?” he demanded before she could go on. His voice was sharp, and there was no doubt he’d understood her.
“I’m friends with your nephew. Havec—”
He had raised the ring toward her like a weapon, snarling, “Gheara sent you here to torment me? I don’t know what she’s plotting with her vile hedge-witches—Yes, I know about them,” he interjected with a bitter triumph it was uncomfortable to witness, “—but I would have thought even she was above such ugly games.”
“Look, I’m sorry about your son--”
Again he interrupted her. “What has she done with him?”
Amril placed a hand on her shoulder. “He didn’t know. How could he? He’s upset about the nephew he thought he lost, not the son he did.”
The Moritian neither confirmed nor denied this, looking back and forth between them from behind the mask he had hefted back in place. Qanath started when he turned away, but he only went to the tea tray sitting on the low table before the hearth. “Please, take your coats off and refresh yourselves before the fire, you can’t be accustomed to this wretched cold.”
She saw him twitch when he turned around to find a fourth person in the room, but he didn’t comment on it; the soldier who first answered the door would certainly have told him one member of their party could be a man or a bird and was probably neither of those things. He waited politely until they had moved around to the chairs drawn up before the fire before seating himself, then busied himself pouring tea. He offered to send for an extra cup, but Arandgwail had already flopped down on the rug in front of the fire and wasn’t interested in their boring human rituals.
If their host was being more mannered, he definitely wasn’t more friendly. As soon as each of them had a drink in hand, he demanded, “Explain.”
The proper place to start was to state their allegiance clearly. “We aren’t allies of the queen, we pulled that ring off her hand.”
“Living or dead?”
She was startled he could ask this so coolly – as if Qanath looked like the kind of person who went around killing people and stripping their corpses of tokens afterward – but she had seen for herself how judgmental Havec’s people were. How keen to leap upon any perceived frailty. All of that had been directed toward him previously, but now he wasn’t here to handle the attention, she was the one who would be on the scales. She could already guess that, if they judged her weak and lacking in will, they would feel no need to listen to her.
She took a sip of tea to give herself time in which to make sure her voice was under control. “Alive but in custody. Her son intends to hand her over to the Empire to account for her crimes.”
