Page 50

For several minutes, as the two strange goblins led Gytha through shadowy hallways of ice and snow, she dared hope that everything would work out well. Her face was frozen, her stomach had been empty for so long she had almost forgotten she was hungry, and she was lost beyond the north end of the world.

But how hard could it be to convince a man to marry her, a kind-hearted, well-intentioned girl, rather than to marry the evil ice goblin queen who had imprisoned and tormented him for centuries?

It was not a difficult decision.

It should not have been a difficult decision.

Yet even this simple choice required that the man be awake to make it.

When they found the right door, there were guards in front of it. These halls were darker than the ones they had walked before meeting the queen, and Gytha could not see the faces of the guards clearly. The guards did not protest Gytha’s entrance, but they did not allow Wirkelshen or Iphreshken in with her.

No matter; Alexander probably did not know or trust them anyway.

She stepped into the room alone.

The space was as dark as the underground palace, or prison, in which she had spent that strange year. No hint of light came through the walls nor any windows; perhaps it had no windows. There was no fireplace and no glowing embers from which to light a lamp.

She said softly, “Alexander?”

There was no answer.

“Alexander!” She raised her voice cautiously.

Still, only silence met her ears. The room was frigid. Gytha fumbled in her pocket for the packet Arenenak had given her. The thin sticks were made of stone, not wood, but the solidified droplets on the end would catch fire with friction much like matches would. The goblin had called themjafliggi.

Gytha felt around the room for some minutes before she found a low table with a lantern on it. She tried to light the jafliggi with her gloves on, but could not keep a good enough grip to get the thing to light. So she pulled off her gloves and lit the jafliggi quickly and carefully, feeling the cold numbing her fingers with every second that passed. She tried to keep her fingers steady as she held the tiny flame to the lantern wick. Fortunately the lamp was full of oil, and she turned it up as high as it would go before hurriedly pulling on her gloves.

The light made the situation all too clear. The room was windowless and nearly empty but for a pile of furs and blankets on the floor in one corner. Gytha carried the lamp closer and set it down on the floor.

“Alexander,” she said, her voice soft. “Can you wake up?”

There was no movement from the pile of blankets. Gytha found what she thought was his shoulder and patted him softly, and then more vigorously as he did not move.

She pulled back one layer of fur and blankets, and then more, until he lay with only a thin, bloodstained shirt and ragged trousers between his skin and the terrible cold. These were not the clothes she had made him of his bear’s fur.

Even now, at the cold air upon him, he did not wake. His face was turned upward, so that the scar down his nose was clearly visible, faded now with time and his overall pallor. His dark hair was long and messy.

“Alexander!” She shook his shoulder again with one gloved hand, and he gave no reaction at all.

He was not stiff enough to be dead, but otherwise there was very little sign of life. Gytha held up the lantern to see if his chest moved, and she sighed in relief when she saw that he did breathe after all, albeit far too slowly.

Perhaps he was too badly injured to wake. Fear tugged at her, and she pulled up his shirt to examine his injuries. There were more wounds than she had expected, and she winced in sympathy, feeling slightly queasy. The worst one was low on his left side, deep and still bleeding sluggishly. None of his wounds had been dressed or treated as far as she could tell. He was frightfully thin, and something about this made him look younger and more fragile than he must truly be. The voice she remembered, the bear’s voice, was deep and strong.

She took off her gloves again and put her palms on his cheeks, feeling the icy chill of his skin sink into her palms. Sheleaned close and said loudly, “Alexander! Wake up!”

His eyelids did not even flicker. If anything, she grew more frightened. This was no natural sleep, and he was not comfortably warm beneath his covers. If she left him with the blankets off, he would freeze solid and die without ever waking.

She pulled his shirt back down and patted his shoulder, as if she could somehow comfort him. He had offered her comfort when he could not talk, and she wished he could feel her compassion now, when he could not hear. But he slept through this too without even a shift in his breathing.

Gytha pulled the blanket up over his shoulders and adjusted another fur so that it covered most of his head, leaving him a hole through which he could breathe without suffocating. Not that he was breathing much. Then she sat back on her heels and studied what she could see of his face.

She shouted at him several more times, despite her growing conviction that his sleep was magically maintained, and he would not wake. “What shall I do for you, Alexander? How can I help you?”

The cold pressed upon her like a weight, and the darkness in the corners of the room crept closer, like the quiet winter death that everyone in the north knew and feared. The cold slipped into a man’s lungs and his mind. Gytha had even heard of men, lost in the snowy woods, who stripped down to their underclothes, for the death of cold was so deceptive that as their bodies chilled, they felt the snow upon their frostbitten faces as heat. They felt they were hot instead of cold, and with their minds muddled by the languor and delusion of hypothermia, hastened their own deaths. Her father had found one of these unfortunate souls after a long search for a missing man from a neighboring village. Ivarr had impressed upon his family most gravely the importance of not believing the delusion of warmth, no matter how convincing it seemed.

Gytha put her hand on Alexander’s shoulder and took a trembling breath, letting the cold sting her lungs. She would not give up on him.

Someone knocked on the door and said, “Come out now.”