A Nest of Frost and Steel

Listen, how the wind howls! How it plucks at my numb flesh with swarming ghost pincers. There is no escape in this white plain. The cold seeps into my flesh, ounce by ounce, choking the veins, drowning the muscles in ice and bitter frost.

I will die here, upon these ice flats, my corpse preserved in whatever final repose my broken body may deign to assume. It will not be a gallant one, however. My sword and shield are far behind me. I held them long past their purpose. Not for fear of enemies. No, for fear of something far greater.

For fear of remembering.

Good steel in your right hand is a kind of a madness. A useful madness, I suppose. The kind that conquers enemies. The kind that blots out the horror of tattered bodies and turns the scent of blood into an aphrodisiac. But it is madness, all the same. A madness few escape while still alive.

My father and brothers died mad. And proud. And, I suppose, alight with something like joy in their hearts. I saw their faces on the battlefield. Their eyes were already dim. Only the final wounds still bled; the rest had turned to dark red lines of ice. But their faces were open. Rapturous.

For some, I suppose, the madness can never be cast off – not even in death.

But they were born with steel in their teeth and fire in their bellies. I was not. I was never like them. Before my father forced the steel into my right hand, I was someone else…

A coward. That’s what Durun would call me. A fay, idle coward. More in love with songs and storytelling than the filthy work of living. And there was truth to that, I admit.

I am the last of Durun Forger’s seven children. Last and least, to hear my father tell it. My brothers were thick-necked and even thicker witted, but they held only physical pursuits in any regards, and in this they were superior to most. Reckless, wild, and uncommonly strong, my five brothers caught the eye of King Ulnar’s Man-at-Arms, who brought all five into service as civil warriors. They served the King directly as appointed peacekeepers with great distinction…until Gaya died.

Gaya was my sister. She was the youngest until I was born, and where I served as an unwanted spare from the moment I arrived, she was the apple of everyone’s eye. And rightfully so. She was a beauty beyond imagining, an outcome far greater than the sum of her ancestral parts. And where many saw beauty as a defining virtue unto itself, Gaya was above all kind and thoughtful. None spoke ill of her, for what complaint could there be?

Beauty, however, is a gem with sharp edges. While returning home from the Keystone Mill, Gaya met a stranger on the road. Here I admit my cowardice, because I have never sought to know the full extent of what happened to my beloved sister that day. It is enough to say she died.

I do not say with derision that my brothers were incapable of knowing sorrow. That is simply fact. My father and brothers all were possessed of an exceedingly narrow breadth of feeling. What they could feel, however, they felt with a dagger’s keenness. When they discovered Gaya’s body, they did not fall to sorrow. They fell to rage. Even here, lost in the ice, I still pray that the world may never know another rage so great.

In the end, the man was found and tortured and killed. But not before my brothers nearly brought our entire village to ruin in the pursuit. The King was understanding, but my brothers could not keep their royal appointments. They became millers and coopers and smiths, instead. They worked hard and even started their own families, but they were changed men. Something bitter and dark lived within them. A single man had so easily stripped them of their greatest treasures. What strength could defend against that?

But aye…what was that? That howl was not the wind. I do not know this land. I do not know what lives in this frozen abyss. I had assumed the cold would claim me, but perhaps not. Perhaps not.

The boots Freda made me are sturdy and as long as they hold, so shall I. That is the best I can do, I suppose. Forward, forward. Where the sun sets – that’s where I may rest. But no sooner. Freda made boots that would not fail me. I will not fail them in kind.

Freda…

As it was with all things, I took Gaya’s death much differently than my brothers. They could see only their own weakness and failure, while I…I mourned for what Gaya might have been. A maiden. A mother. A queen, perhaps. My sister had lived effortlessly. Not lazily, but at peace with herself and her choices. I admired that above all of her superlative qualities. She did what she felt she ought to do with no worries. No fears.

I sometimes imagine how that same openness may have doomed her that day she met a stranger walking on the road. But that is the cost of a life lived freely. It is, I believe, an acceptable cost to be as Gaya was – happy.

And so, to be as the sister I cherished, I pursued my happiness.

I began singing in the taverns in the evening. When I was a child, Durun and my brothers had often caught me singing in the forest as I collected wood for the fire. The toll was always the same – gales of laughter and a punch in the stomach.

“Women sing,” my father was fond of saying. “A man who uses his voice for singing isn’t worth listening to.”

I took his words to heart, but that could not stop the songs that lived – bubbling like a stew – in my chest from boiling over from time to time. And it always felt good, to sing. Singing loosed an indescribable warmth within me, one that flushed away the dull ache that lay like rusted mail across my arms and legs and chest.

I sang. And I was good. After a time they began to pay me. I added storytelling. I learned juggling and certain acrobatics. I began to travel. I thought my father would rage at this, but even I did not see how far I had fallen from his favor. To be out of his sight was the greatest gift I could give him.

I traveled and eventually I met Freda. She played the flute and the fiddle. Her father had been a cobbler and she had been his apprentice for a time, learning enough to make fine leather boots when her other sources of income failed her.

We fell in love. And it did feel like falling. It felt like tumbling together through the heavens with no end in sight. Everything in me came loose. We were weightless, laughing. Shameless fools in love.

Those years of singing and dancing in strange, colorful countries are memories without equal.

I cannot stand to think of them now.

War came. Ulnar called his men. And my father called me.

Why did I answer?

Aye aye aye. I answered because he called.

There! I see one now, following behind, slipping silently from bank to bank. It is white as the snow. A winter hunter. I curse myself for letting go of the sword, and then laugh. More madness. I dropped the sword because I hadn’t the strength to drag it behind me. Even a single swing is beyond me now. For the moment I live by the grace of my silent hunter’s caution.

I was never fit to hold the steel and yet I came when Durun called me. Freda cried and begged and still I went. Why? Why? Why?

Blood is treacherous. It breeds unrequited bonds.

Durun was my father. What other answer could I give him?

Ulnar’s Army was not just. Know that. No blood was ever spilled for so unworthy a cause. But I did not know that then. All I knew was that my King called and my father asked me to come and answer the call at his side; at my brothers’ sides.

Ulnar set us forth to conquer a northern shoreland – a simple tribe of heathens who ate human flesh and murdered fishermen who drifted too close to shore.

The tribe was there and they were simple. And we slaughtered them. That they killed our fishermen or ate human flesh…no evidence was ever found.

I am not a skilled swordsman, but you do not need to be a skilled swordsman to cut down women and children cowering in the dark. I did my share of the labor that night and by morning the tide came in red with the spoils of our efforts.

Did any on their side possess swords? Good steel? I do not recall.

The tribe, of course, was merely a prologue in Ulnar’s great plan. There were mines further inland. Deep shafts below the ice. Hordes of natural crystals and gems. A treasure fit for a king.

Did Ulnar think we could just take it? Did he know anything at all about the land beyond the shore? I do not know.

If he knew anything of the men we met below the mountains, he did not say. They came on in a sudden fury of spears and studded clubs. They were massive men, cloaked in a heavy, ragged furs. None of them spoke. None of them cried out. They swung their clubs and slashed out with their spears in silence.

The silence hid their numbers.

Durun was stabbed in the back. The black shaft that claimed his life went nearly all the way through my father’s chest. I decapitated the man who had held the spear. He had been distracted – trying to retrieve the spear.

I killed others. I was stabbed in the shoulder and stumbled away. Behind me Ulnar’s men died. Then Ulnar himself.

I kept walking.

At least three of their men survived, but none sought to follow me. They knew, as I did, that the cold would kill me. And if not the cold…

It does not conceal itself anymore. From time to time I turn to look at it – white, shaggy, long-limbed with a narrow muzzle. It is waiting for me to die – to lie down among the white and be still. I nearly laugh. What patience. Why do what nature will do for you?

Wolf. I knew the name would come to me. Wolf.

What songs did we sing, Freda? I don’t remember them. They were songs like the sun. They shined. We shined. And when we sang them that light went out and covered the world. Everyone felt that warmth.

It was our gift to share.

I should have stayed on the battlefield. I could have made myself a nest of frost and steel and laid down in it and closed my eyes…

Freda? Please sing for me. I want to hear your voice.

I try to sing, but my lips are numb and I cannot get my mouth to move the right way. Can I make the right sounds? Am I making any sounds?

The wind is no longer howling. I don’t hear anything at all. There is nothing to hear anyway. I am nearly to the horizon.

These are good, sturdy boots, Freda. They did not fail me. I did not fail them. But the sun is coming down and soon I must go to sleep.

Sing another song, Freda. I don’t know that I can hear you, but it is enough to know that you are singing.

Sing.

Sing.

Please, sing.