Elaria Silverstan's Arc

Chapter 9 of 22

The archway stood open, but Elaria did not step through. The sprite hovered a hand's width from her shoulder, and even at that distance Elaria felt the wrong kind of cold sliding off her skin — a cold that bit through her own ice-blooded calm. The ruins beyond the arch were a broken field of fallen walls, ice-slick stones, and gaps where the snow hid drops. A grown woman would struggle alone. A creature the size of a sparrow, with wings like glass, would not last an hour. "You can't fly that far," Elaria said. The sprite tilted her head. "And I can't carry you. Your skin burns mine. Mine burns yours." She held up her bare hand. A thin frost was already crawling across the sprite's wingtip from the nearness of it. The sprite pulled back. So. Two problems, one shape. Elaria knelt in the snow and opened her pack. She took out the journal first and set it on a flat stone. Inside the back cover she had folded a sheet of notes — her own routes, her own measures of the cold. She tore a clean page and sketched the ruins ahead as best she could remember from the ridge: three collapsed halls, a sunken courtyard, a second arch at the far end. A maze. She marked the gaps she could not see around with question marks and decided she would test each one with the haft of her axe before she trusted her weight to it. Then she packed the journal away and pulled out the cradle. She had built it two nights back from bent willow, wire, and a lining of frostcloth — a small swinging basket meant to hang from a strap across her chest. The frostcloth held cold without passing it. She had not been sure it would work. She set the cradle in the snow and stepped back. "Try it." The sprite drifted down and settled into the lined bowl. She touched the cloth with one finger. Nothing flared. Nothing melted. Elaria pressed her own palm to the outside of the basket and felt only the faintest chill through the weave. She let out a breath she had been holding since the archway opened. She fastened the strap over her shoulder so the cradle hung at her ribs, light as a loaf of bread. The sprite curled inside and watched her face. Elaria lifted her axe, stepped through the arch, and tapped the first stone. It held. She tapped the second. It held. She began to pick her way into the ruins, the small weight at her chest steady, her map in her head, her hands free. The path through was still a maze, and she still did not know what waited at its far end — but for the first time since the glacier sealed behind her, she was not crossing it alone.