Cold Steel

“Open your eyes, selfish girl. It isn’t about you. There are greater battles awakening in the world. Those who have developed a thirst for blood cannot easily be turned aside from their insatiable appetites, no matter whom they harm. The old ones move slowly, but they fight to protect their young.”

“You speak in riddles,” Bee said. “What does that all mean?”

I slid into the fog of dreams as if in the belly of Leviathan I, too, became a dragon dreamer. Streaming rivers of mist welled up from the deep, currents flowing in vast circles that penetrated close to the gleaming surface before pouring away into darker, smokier depths. Swimming shapes brushed me, hot and cold by turns, rough to the touch and then slickly smooth like eels slithering in coils around and around me.

I startled awake, shuddering, to find myself lying in Vai’s arms on the bed he had built for us. His embrace was so strong and comforting that I could have reclined in its orbit forever and not missed the world.

“Catherine,” he murmured in a drowsy, contented voice. “You were dreaming and mumbling. It sounded like ‘There are greater battles awakening in the world.’ What is it, love?”

The feel of his body stretched the length of mine, his skin to my skin, made me want to purr with simple pleasure. “I dreamed I was swallowed by a dragon. And now I have to pee. Do you think those two things are related?”

Chuckling, he kissed me on the lips. After stroking a hand along the length of my torso, he kissed me again, and then longer and with more concentration, until I really did have to get up even though he clearly had other activities on his mind. He rose with me.

“We’ll go the washroom,” he said, swinging me up into his arms. My hip pressed against his belly. “We both need a wash.”

I giggled, for the night was warm and the room stuffy despite an open window, and we were both sweaty. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“All the better. No one to disturb us.” A pinch of light sparked into existence. Cold fire swelled to a fist-size bubble whose light dappled the clothes strewn over the floor beside the bed.

I brushed my cheek against his short-shorn beard, the hair just long enough to tickle instead of scratch. “You must spend hours getting your beard to look just this decorative way.”

When he looked at me with a smile of tenderness and mischief mixed so sweetly, I could scarcely breathe, much less think. “Why, Catherine, you were watching me all that time, weren’t you?”

The currents ripped me away from him just as I realized I was dreaming the night we had consummated our marriage. I flailed and kicked, for I was determined to get back to him, but a whirlpool dragged me down into the crushing abyssal deeps.

Like a gull hovering in the wind, I floated over a rocky path strewn with boulders and pocked with ice. A towering cliff of ice studded with rocks filled the horizon: It was the wall of a vast ice shelf. A gray sea lapped a narrow strand of stony beach. In the shelter of a shallow cave, two longboats had been overturned out of reach of the waves and covered with canvas staked to the earth. Three men with ragged gloves fumbled with stakes and canvas, uncovering one of the beached boats and its treasure of oars and oilcloth. The wind was coarse and unforgivingly cold. They worked frantically as the howls of approaching wolves grew in volume.

On the path that led up a steep incline to the crumbling foot of the glacial shelf stood a hatless woman. She wore a rumpled, dirty uniform and grasped a bloody falcata in her gloved left hand. Her dark red hair was pulled back into a braid and pinned in a coil at the back of her head. Fresh red welts marked a sun-weathered face brushed with freckles. Blood oozed down her cheek and neck. Someone else’s blood was splashed across the front of her uniform coat, and drying blood soaked her knees, as if she’d knelt in blood. Her right sleeve was torn to ribbons, exposing a bleeding shoulder and arm. Her ragged breath came in gouts of mist in the freezing air.

Behind her a man with curly black hair as lush and thick as Bee’s knelt to crank back the ratchet of a crossbow. He had two bolts remaining in his quiver but no other visible weapon. Four dead dire wolves littered the path, marking the trail of a pursuit. About fifty steps above lay a dead man in a soldier’s kit. His corpse was mottled crimson, his belly slashed open and spilling guts. A dying wolf twitched beside him, pink spume riming its muzzle. A falcata had been thrust up to the hilt into its right eye, the tip sticking out through the back of its neck.

High up on the path, three shaggy wolves nosed into view, sniffing the air.

The woman spoke. “More are coming.”