Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 13 of 22

The center passage rose in a narrow shaft of stone, steeper than Elaria had guessed from the arch. She set her hand on the first hold and felt the bite at once. Frost coated every surface, fine and hard, and it stung her palms through to the bone. She climbed two body-lengths before her fingers began to slip. The sprite shifted in the cradle against her chest. Elaria stopped on a thin ledge and pressed her back to the wall to think. She could not climb this. Her bare hands lost grip with each pull. The ice in her blood did not help her here; the frost on the stone was the same cold as her skin, and the stone gave her nothing to hold. If she pushed on, she would fall, and the cradle would crush the sprite beneath her. Elaria lowered herself back to the floor of the arch. She set the sprite down on the smooth lip of stone. The lip was flat but cold enough to harm even Lia in time. Elaria scraped loose snow from a drift at the base of the wall and shaped it with her gloved hands. She mounded the edges and pressed a hollow in the center until it held its form. She lifted the sprite into the snow bowl. Lia settled in and folded her wings. "Wait here," Elaria said. "I will come back down for you." She needed a hold the frost could not strip. She opened her pack and turned out what was left. The chain. A coil of cord. A wrapped shard she had carried since the valley, taken from a vein of clear ice that had shone with strange color in the sun. She unwrapped it now. The shard fit her palm. Its facets caught the dim light and threw back faint bands of red and gold. When she pressed it against the frosted wall, the frost under it melted in a clean ring and did not return. Elaria fixed the shard to her right palm with strips of cord, points outward. She tied the chain to her belt and let it trail. Then she climbed again. The shard bit the stone where her bare hand had slipped. Each grip held. She worked up the shaft hand over hand, planting the shard, pulling, finding a foot ledge, planting again. Her left hand burned on the frost, but her right hand carried her. She counted thirty pulls before her head cleared the top of the shaft and she rolled onto a flat landing of dry stone. She lay still one breath, then drew the chain up after her. She lowered it back down the shaft to the arch below. The sprite climbed onto the bottom link and Elaria pulled, hand over hand, until the cradle was at her chest again. Ahead, a low tunnel ran on into the dark. The shard in her palm was half the size it had been at the bottom.