Glacielle Frostweave's Arc

Chapter 5 of 15

By morning the drift-veil held, but Glacielle had a new problem. The scholar's answer was due in three days, and Aflred would carry it back to his cabin on the shore. From there, any route to her was a route an enforcer could watch. A letter walked to the wrong hand would name the canyon out loud. She surfaced at the shore path and went to the cabin again. Aflred was outside splitting driftwood. He set the axe down when he saw her face. "The letter," she said. "When it comes back, how do I get it from you without being followed?" He wiped his hands. "You don't come here. That's the first thing. Patrols watch this path now that the reef went quiet." "Then where." He thought. "There's a shell hut on the far spit. Fishermen built it and left it. No one goes there since the water turned. I can leave the letter inside and walk on. You take it out an hour later. Nobody sees us in the same place." She pictured the spit. Open sand. Long sight lines. "A watcher could sit on the ridge and see both of us come and go." "They could." "I need something that carries it to me. Not a person. Not a bird a patrol can shoot down." Aflred looked at her for a long moment. Then he went inside and came back with a fistful of frost in his palm. He knelt on the sand and opened his hand. The frost climbed up out of itself. It grew legs, then a spine, then a heavy head. In a minute a wolf the size of a plow horse stood on the beach, fur crusted white, scales bright along its flanks. "He runs the shore under the tide line," Aflred said. "Water breaks the scent. Patrols look up, not down at the surf. He'll carry a letter in his teeth and find you by the cold on your hands." Glacielle put her palm to the wolf's shoulder. It was solid. Its eye tracked her. "He answers to you?" "He answers to whoever set the freeze in him. That's you now, once you name him a task." She knelt. "Bring me what he gives you. Nothing else. No one else." The wolf lowered its head. She walked home along the tide line with the wolf pacing behind her in the surf. Halfway back she saw a small figure on the ridge above the beach. A penguin in a camouflage helmet, field vest buckled tight, watching the water. He held a spyglass but it hung at his side. He was looking at the dead stretch of reef. Glacielle stepped into the shallows and put her hand on the wolf's neck. The penguin lifted the spyglass. She kept walking, slow, ordinary. The wolf kept pace in the foam. The letter had a road now. Someone was already looking for the road.