Sunset stared at Doroga for a time. "What have your folk decided?"
"To let the Alerans fight," Doroga said. "My people cannot defeat the Vord-not now. They are too many, too strong. You know that my people have no love for the Alerans. But we will not attack them while the Vord are abroad."
Red Waters spat, "So we should let their warriors leave, but not drive their peoples from these lands? So that when the battle is done, their warriors return and take up their arms again?"
Sunset sighed. He looked from Red Waters to Isana. "He has a point."
Isana frowned and looked at Red Waters, searching for the right words.
Araris stepped up beside her and bowed slightly to Sunset, then to Red Waters. "My people have a saying," he said. "Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't."
Red Waters stared hard at Araris for a moment. Then Big Shoulders let out a bark of laughter that was startling in how human it sounded. It spread around the circle of Icemen until even Red Waters shook his head, his rigid demeanor relaxing somewhat.
"Our warriors have that saying as well," Red Waters admitted. He nodded at the blood, now freezing into scarlet crystals, on the tip of his harpoon. "But what peace-chiefs say is not always what war-chiefs do. Let us see your warriors depart. Then we will speak again of peace."
"Antillus and Phrygia will never agree to that," Lady Placida murmured. "Never."
"You come to us asking us for peace," Red Waters said. "But you offer us nothing."
Isana met Red Waters's eyes. "It seems to me that peace is not a gift one can give away. It can only be exchanged in kind."
A sharp pulse of approval came from Sunset.
Red Waters answered him with a surge of sadness and caution.
Sunset sighed and nodded. He turned back to Isana, and murmured, "As I said. It will not be easy."
"Too much anger," Isana said. "Too much blood."
"On both sides," Sunset agreed.
He was right, Isana thought. Certainly, Lord Antillus had been less than willing to accept the possibility of peace. The most he'd been willing to believe possible was that he could shake the Icemen up, disrupt them enough to send a single Legion south-
The steady, buzzing hostility of the Shieldwall hummed against Isana's senses.
She had a sudden, horrible suspicion and every Iceman in the circle around her suddenly became more alert.
"Lady Placida," she said quietly. "Can you tell me if there are any Knights Aeris aloft?"
Aria arched a pale copper eyebrow. Then she nodded, closed her eyes, and lifted her face to the snowy skies. A moment later, she drew in a sharp breath. "Furies. More than a hundred. Every Knight Aeris under Antillus's command. But why..." She opened her eyes wide, suddenly, staring around at the assembled chieftains of the Icemen.
"Sunset," Isana said, "you must leave. You and your people are in danger."
"Why?"
"Because what peace-chiefs say is not always what war-chiefs do."
Thunder rumbled suddenly overhead.
Red Waters snarled and made a swift, sharp gesture. The chieftains gathered around him and Sunset. Big Shoulders wordlessly handed Sunset's bone club back to him. Sunset glanced at Isana and sent out a surge of regret. Then he grasped the weapon in his hands and turned to begin shambling away through the snow, the other chieftains gathering around him as the wind began to rise again.
"Too late," Aria hissed.
Thunder rolled louder and the clouds whirled in a wide circle and parted, revealing a wheel of Knights Aeris aloft, tiny black shapes against the grey clouds with a circle of blue sky far above. Lightning danced from cloud to cloud and gathered into a wide circle, dancing between the Knights like the spokes of an enormous wagon wheel. Isana could feel the power gathering as the lightning prepared to fall on the retreating chieftains.
Aria cursed under her breath and threw herself aloft, wind rising in a roar to lift her into the skies-but even as she did, lightning burned a searing streak across Isana's vision and struck the ground several yards behind the Iceman chieftains. The wheel of Knights above shifted, and the lightning burned its way toward the Icemen, digging an enormous furrow in the earth as it went.
Isana watched in horror, helpless and furious, searching desperately in her thoughts for some solution. But there was nothing there for the Icemen. Words and good intentions meant less than nothing in this harsh land of stone walls and steel men, covered in ice and...
Snow.
Isana tore off her glove and thrust her hand into the snow, calling upon Rill as she did. The snow was, after all, water. And she had learned, during the desperate battle at sea the previous year, that she was capable of far more than she had ever believed. There had never been, upon her steadholt, a cause to push her abilities to their limits, except in healing-and she had never failed. When she had needed a flood to save Tavi's life, she had managed one, though at the time she had believed it merely the result of her familiarity with the local furies.
But in the ocean, she had learned differently. The limits she had known before had never been imposed upon her by Alera. They had been assumptions within her own mind. Everyone knew that holders were never truly powerful, even in the wilds of a place like Calderon, and she had let that unconscious assumption shape her self-perception. There, immersed in the limitless immensity of the sea, she had found that she was capable of far more than she'd ever believed.
Snow was water. Why not command it as she would any other wave?
She was the First Lady of Alera, by the Great Furies, and she would not allow this to happen.
Isana cried out, and the vast snowfield around the Icemen surged like a living sea, responding to her determination and will. She lifted her arm, feeling a phantom strain around her shoulders as the snow surged around the Icemen and piled up into a vast mound behind them. The lightning surged into that sea of snow, throwing out enormous billows of steam, its heat drowning before it could do harm.
Isana felt it when the sky above them suddenly changed, lightning flowing in from everywhere, surging from over the horizon in every direction to center itself in the whirling eye of the vortex above, its color shifting, changing from blue-white to bright gold-green. The burning shaft thickened and intensified, and Isana felt the surge in power behind it as some other enormous will added its power to the strike.
"Antillus," she heard herself gasp.
The weight settling on her pressed on her chest and drove her to one knee-but she did not yield. She cried out again, lifting her hand, and the snow and steam and ice that continued to shield the retreating Icemen washed and flowed into shape to mirror her fingers, her hand lifted in a gesture of defiant denial. The endless cold of the north clashed with the fire of the southern skies, and steam began to spread from the clash, blanketing the countryside.