Memories of Ice

Strangers. She did not know what they wanted, but they were seeking her — that much was clear. Tracking her, like hunters their quarry. To sleep was to awaken exhausted, limbs trembling, chest heaving with agonized breaths.

She had been saved from the Abyss, from those countless tattered souls lost in eternal, desperate hunger. Saved, by a dragon. To what end? Leaving me in a place where I am hunted, pursued without surcease?

Time passed, punctuated by the herders' calming words to the frightened bhederin. There would be no stampede after all. Rumbles still trembled through the earth, in diminishing ripples that grew ever farther apart.

The Mhybe moaned softly to herself as the wagon rocked once more, this time to the arrival of the two Daru, Coll and Murillio.

'You've awakened,' the councillor noted. 'It's no surprise.'

'Leave me be,' she said, drawing the hides around her shivering body and curling away from the two men. It's so cold…

'Any idea what's happened up ahead?' Murillio asked Coll.

'Seems Brood lost his temper.'

'Gods! With whom? Kallor? That bastard deserves-'

'Not Kallor, friend,' Coll growled. 'Make another guess — shouldn't take you long.'

Murillio groaned. 'Kruppe.'

'Hood knows he's stretched the patience of all of us at one time or another. only none of us was capable of splitting apart half the world and throwing new mountains skyward.'

'Did the little runt get himself killed? I can't believe-'

'Word is, he's come out unscathed. Typically. Complaining of the dust. No-one else was injured, either, though the warlord himself almost got his head kicked in by an angry mule.'

'Kruppe's mule? The one that sleeps when it walks?'

'Aye, the very one.'

Sleeps. Dreams of being a horse, no doubt. Magnificent, tall, fierce.

'That beast is a strange one, indeed. Never seen a mule so … so watchful. Of everything. Queen of Dreams, that's the oddest looking range of mountains I've ever seen!'

'Aye, Murillio, it does look bigger than it really is. Twists the eye. A broken spine, like something you'd see at the very horizon, yet there it is, not half a league from us. Doesn't bear thinking about, if you ask me …'

Nothing bears thinking about. Not mountains, not mules, not Brood's temper. Souls crowd my daughter, there, within her. Two women, and a Thelomen named Skullcrusher. Two women and a man whom I've never met. yet I carried that child within me. I, a Rhivi, young, in the bloom of my life, drawn into a dream then the dream made real. Yet where, within my daughter, am 1? Where is the blood, the heart, of the Rhivi?

She has nothing of me, nothing at all. Naught but a vessel in truth — that is all I was — a vessel to hold then birth into the world a stranger.

She has no reason to see me, to visit, to take my hand and offer me comfort. My purpose is done, over. And here I lie, a discarded thing. Forgotten. A mhybe.

A hand settled gently on her shoulder.

Murillio spoke. 'I think she sleeps once more.'

'For the best,' Coll murmured.

'I remember my own youth,' the Daru went on in a quiet, introspective tone.

'I remember your own youth, too, Murillio.'

'Wild and wasteful-'

'A different widow every night, as I recall.'

'I was a lodestone indeed, and, you know, it was all so effortless-'

'We'd noticed.'

The man sighed. 'But no longer. I've aged, paid the price for my younger days-'

'Nights, you mean.'

'Whatever. New rivals have arrived. Young bloods. Marak of Paxto, tall and lithe and turning heads wherever he saunters. The smug bastard. Then there's Perryl of M'necrae-'

'Oh, really, Murillio, spare me all this.'

'The point is, it was all a stretch of years. Full years. Pleasurable ones. And, for all that I'm on the wane, at least I can look back and recall my days — all right, my nights — of glory. But here, with this poor woman…'

'Aye, I hear you. Ever notice those copper ornaments she's wearing — there, you can see the pair on her wrist. Kruppe's gifts, from Darujhistan.'

'What about them?'

'Well, as I was saying. Ever noticed them? It's a strange thing. They get brighter, shinier, when she's sleeping.'

'Do they?'

'I'd swear it on a stack of Kruppe's handkerchiefs.'

'How odd.'