Page 5 of The Cradle of Ice

“Nyx…”

She shook her head, knowing a good portion of Graylin’s restraint was born of concern for her. Pain shone in his eyes. While she might not be his daughter, she was still the child of the woman he had once loved. Graylin had long believed Nyx had died in the Mýr swamps, only to have her miraculously resurrected and returned to him. He clearly did not intend to lose her again.

But she dismissed his concerns. They did not matter.

Instead, Nyx pictured the shimmering mirage of their world cast forth by Shiya’s crystal cube. An emerald marker had glowed deep in the Frozen Wastes. That was their destination, though little was known about it. Not even Shiya could guess what lay out there, only that the site was important. For any hope of stopping the moon from crashing into the Urth, they had to set their world to turning again, as it had countless millennia ago. Somehow that glowing marker was vital to accomplishing that seemingly impossible task.

“We don’t know what we’ll find out there,” Nyx warned. “Or how long it will take to pry answers from that mystery. We can’t risk any further delays. For as much as we know, we may already be too late.”

She kept her face fixed, both to show her determination and to hide the deeper part of her that hoped they were too late. If they set the Urth to spinning again—something that still seemed incomprehensible to her—it would herald its own catastrophe. The world would be ravaged in that turning tide. Shiya had shown them this, too. The massive floods, the quakes, the storms that would rip around the planet. Millions upon millions would die.

Nyx understood this fate was far better than the eradication of all life should moonfall occur. Yet, in her heart, she could not dismiss the untold suffering that would result if they were successful. She knew it was necessary, but she kept a secret hope guarded close to her heart.

Let those deaths not be by my own hand.

“The lass is right,” Darant said. “If we turn around, we may never make it back out here again. War is brewing across the Crown. Back when we left, the skirmishes between Hálendii and the Southern Klashe had been worsening. Coastal villages raided and burned. Sabotage and assassinations. On both sides of the Breath. Who knows what we’ll discover if we return? We could become trapped and embroiled by the fighting. And don’t forget your old friend King Toranth, and his Iflelen dogs. They’re still hunting us. Best not we give them another chance to close that noose.”

“Still, those arguments don’t take into account what lies ahead of us.” Graylin pointed at Darant. “Even before the explosion, you had me summon everyone to the wheelhouse because you were already worried about the path of our flight from here.”

Nyx glanced to Jace. She had forgotten how Graylin had ordered everyone to gather here. The explosion and mayhem had diverted all attention.

“What’s wrong?” Nyx asked. “What lies ahead?”

“See for yourself.” Graylin led them toward the arc of windows fronting the wheelhouse. The view looked out across the moonlit fields of broken ice. “The navigator, Fenn, spotted the danger earlier through the ship’s farscopes. But you can see it plainly enough now that we’ve sailed closer.”

The group spread out across the bay of windows. Nyx searched below the ship, but the view looked the same as it had for months. The full moon’s brightness reflected off the ice, casting the world in shades of silver and blue. Huge swaths of is’veppir moss, aglow in hues of crimson and emerald, etched the frozen landscape. As she squinted, she made out swaths of darker dots. Martoks, she realized. They gathered into vast herds, sharing warmth, moving slowly.

Nyx frowned. “I don’t see what—”

Jace gasped next to her. “Look to the horizon.”

She shifted her gaze out farther. The ice spread all the way to the night sky, dappled in bright stars. She shook her head, still not seeing anything. Then she realized that the stars did not reach the ice. They vanished high above the horizon line. Her vision shifted, or maybe a drift of cloud cleared the moon. Then she saw it, too. The world ended at a line of jagged peaks, blocking the stars and their path ahead. The range of mountains, all black and sharp-edged, thrust high out of the ice, forming a shattered rampart.

“That must be Dragoncryst,” Jace said. “The peaks were named by Rega sy Noor in his Kronicles. During his first overland expedition two centuries ago, the explorer sighted them from a distance but couldn’t reach them. He named the range because the mountains looked like the crested back of a great sea creature bursting through the ice.”

“He’s not wrong about that,” Darant grumbled. “But this beast may prove more troublesome.”

“Why?” Nyx asked.

Graylin answered, not turning from the window, “The peaks don’t just breach the ice, but also block both sky-rivers.”

Nyx pictured the high warm winds driving them westward and the colder flow running eastward, hugging closer to the ice.

Darant turned to the ship’s navigator, who was bent over the eyepiece of the Sparrowhawk’s farscope. “How’s it look, Fenn?”

The navigator straightened and turned to face them. He was young, likely only seven or eight years older than Nyx. He was lithe of limb, with white-blond locks and green eyes that suggested he might have some Bhestyan blood, a people who dwelled on the far side of the Crown—though he refused to talk about his past. Still, he was also the least dire of the crew. He always had a ready smile and a boundless well of jokes.

That smile was gone now. “It’s worse than I thought,” Fenn said. “The skies are roiled into a huge storm that sits atop those peaks. I wager that tempest never subsides, forever powered by the war of those contrary winds.”

“Can we cross through it?” Graylin asked. “Especially with one of our maneuvering forges gone?”

Fenn glanced at Darant, who nodded for the navigator to speak his mind. Fenn sighed and shrugged. “Only one way to find out. No one’s ever sailed over those peaks. We’ll be the first.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” Jace corrected.

Everybody turned to him.

Jace explained, “Rega—the explorer knight who named those mountains—set off on a second expedition, intent to cross the Dragoncryst, only this time he traveled by air, in a ship called the Fyredragon, named after those peaks.”