Ice Country (11 page)

He doesn’t acknowledge my arrival. Not even
when I slam the door much harder than is necessary. I hate going
home these days.

“I knocked about a hundred doors in the Blue
District,” I announce. Wes flinches, as if I’ve pulled him out of a
daze, but doesn’t turn or say anything. “No one was really in the
talking mood.”

Wes just stares at the fire. He’s beginning
to scare me. He’s always been the strong, responsible one—the
replacement for my father. Mother could never cope, could never be
the one to provide for us, but Wes was stalwart, unflappable. “Get
on with what has to be done,” he would always say, mimicking one of
my father’s favorite expressions and sounding a chill of a lot like
him. But now, ever since Jolie…

Well, he’s still out of work. And it’s not
like he’s just been sitting at home staring at the fire. He’s tried
to find a job, but things are tight right now, and nothing’s
available. Nothing respectable anyway. Luckily I’m making enough to
support us—barely. I think that’s what hurts him the most, feeling
like he’s relying on someone else, like he can’t stand on his own
two feet.

I hate seeing him like this.

“You should get some sleep,” I say. Wes nods.
“Are you gonna be okay?” He nods again. “Goodnight.”

My mother shifts in her sleep, murmurs, “Your
hair is all a mess, Joles, let me braid it for you.”

Wes’s shoulders shake as he cries.

I go to bed, crying on the inside.

T
oday’s the day. The
special cargo delivery from fire country. Regardless of whether
Nebo would answer our questions, we’ll find out soon enough what
we’ll be collecting. As usual, it’ll be a night job, so Buff and I
have got the whole day to kill.

Neither of us can take another day of
knocking doors and getting them slammed in our faces, so we decide
to go sliding for fun. It feels like forever since we’ve felt the
freedom of the mountain without Abe and his gang surrounding us as
part of a job.

We tackle the west slopes, where the pines
thin out and leave a relatively unobstructed path of fresh powder.
It’s not as cold as it was even yesterday, a clear sign that spring
is here to stay. The snow might melt off in a few months, if it
does at all, but today it’s as thick as Looza’s stew—perfect for
sliding.

We trudge to the top of a steep hill, panting
heavily by the time we reach the crest. Sitting next to each other,
we grin like a couple of well-fed dogs as we strap our sliders to
our feet. For a moment I feel like a child again, back when things
were simpler, and my only responsibilities were having fun and
getting in trouble. Although I still seem to have the trouble part
down pat.

“Ready?” I say, as we push to our feet.

“Chill yah,” Buff says, still grinning.

“Go!” I yell, and we slip over the edge,
letting gravity do all the work, practically sucking us down the
mountainside.

“Woohooo!” we cry, giddy as schoolboys.

The cold wind whips against my face, bright
and fresh and alive, and I’m glad I didn’t wear a slider’s mask. A
small patch of pines runs toward us, like they’ve got feet and
they’re the ones moving, not us. I cut hard to the right, carving a
curving line in the snow, while Buff goes left.

We whip around the trees and then come
together on the other side. I lean forward to gain speed, edging in
front of Buff, and then angle across his path, switching sides. The
game is on, cat and mouse we used to call it, and Buff passes me,
swapping sides. Again and again we trade places, ripping a
continuous zigzag down the slope.

The hill begins to flatten out, to a perfect
landing area for this particular run, but I’m not ready to stop,
not ready for the distraction from real life to end, so I lead Buff
across a swatch of ice that gives us enough momentum to get to
another slope, one that slices through the forest. It’s not
intended for sliding, but I feel invincible, like I could slide
right through a tree or boulder or anything else that tries to get
in my way.

With a whoop, I lift the tip of my slide up
and over the edge of the next hill. I’m forced to
half-skid/half-turn hard to the right when a sharp gray boulder
rises up directly in our path. Powdery snow sprays all around me as
I hit a soft patch, cutting back to the left to avoid the edge of
the trees on the right hand side.

The challenging natural course doesn’t get
any easier from there. A couple of times I think I’m freezed when
the slope narrows and trees and rocks close in on all sides and
sometimes right in front of me, but I always barely manage to
squeeze through even the tiniest gaps. I can still hear the scrape
and
whoomp
of Buff’s slider behind me, so I know he’s
managed to follow in my wake so far.

Invincible. That’s what we are.
Indestructible.

Such are my thoughts as I cross a trail that
leads away to the east, back toward the village. That’s when
something grabs me from beneath the snow.

~~~

One second I’m invincible, a slider warrior,
and the next I’m airborne, like some icin’ snowbird, except with a
broken wing, unable to fly, flipping and spinning and going so fast
that there’s only one thing to do.

Crash!

My right shoulder hits first and it feels
like I’ve landed on sheer stone, except for the fact that it’s
white and my bones crunch through it—and I know for a fact that my
shoulder isn’t hard enough to break through rock. So it must be
snow. Well, more like a mixture of snow and ice, hard packed and
without much give to it.

Then I tumble end over end, arse over heels,
shoulders to tailbone to knees to bones and parts I don’t even know
the names of. It hurts like I’m getting a beat down from Abe all
over again.

Eventually though, the friction of my coat
and slider against the snow pinches in enough to bring me to a
stop, leaving my head spinning and my heart pounding. I stare at
the gray-covered sky, which seems to be moving a chilluva lot more
than usual. Or maybe it’s me that’s moving. Or something else
entirely.

Buff skids to a graceful stop beside me.
“Whoa, man, you all right?” he says.

I go to nod, but my neck feels stiffer than a
wood plank. “Urrr,” I say, which obviously means yah.

“What happened?” he asks

Even if I knew, I wouldn’t be able to tell
him. “Hurts,” I manage. And then, “Urrr.”

“Anything broken?”

More like
everything
broken. But I’m
just being a baby. The wind’s knocked outta me and I got a few
bruises—nothing major. I’ve had worse. “Need…a second,” I say,
whistling in breaths between puckered lips.

“What the chill?” Buff says, but this time
he’s not speaking to me. He’s looking back up the hill, back toward
where I fell, where something—I swear to the Mountain Heart I’m not
making this up—
grabbed
me. It was like it reached up from
beneath the snow and clamped down on the front of my slider.

“Urrr, what?” I say, trying to twist my sore
neck to see where he’s looking.

“I think…” Buff trails off.
I think
what?
I want to ask but it seems I’ve spent all my words. He
unclasps his slider and starts walking away, back up the hill. I
groan, meaning “wait”.

But he’s already off. Whatever’s up there, I
want to see it too, want to know what caused my fall. Burning holes
in the clouds with my eyes, I lean forward and rip off my slider,
feeling sharp pain hitting me everywhere, in places I didn’t even
know I had. I laugh because it hurts so badly and I wonder if I’m
becoming like Abe, laughing at pain.

“Holy shiverbones,” I hear Buff say as I
crawl on hands and knees to where he’s standing, looking at
something stumpy and dark, like a section of tree trunk, blotched
against the snow. I could swear it wasn’t there a minute ago.

“What is it?” I rasp as I approach him one
hand and knee at a time.

“Not
what
,” he says, not making any
sense.

The thing comes into view and I gasp.

“Who,” Buff says.

It’s Nebo. Frozen harder than a snowman and
deader than a fallen tree.

~~~

“Nebo’s dead,” I say to Abe that night.

“What?” he says, brows curled. He looks
surprised. There’s something else in his expression too, but I
can’t place it, or maybe he’s just hiding it too well.

“We found him in the woods. Looked like he
was bludgeoned to death, his head all mashed up.”

Buff’s staring at his hands. We didn’t know
what to do, so we pulled him into the woods, dug a hole in the
snow, and stuck him in it. Neither of us really liked the idea, but
if we’d brought him in, the lawkeepers would’ve had
questions—questions we might not be able to answer. Like why we
were in the Blue District knocking on Nebo’s door not a day
earlier, just before he showed up dead.

“Mountain Heart,” Abe says. There’s a twinge
of something in his voice—something not normal for how you should
sound just after hearing about someone you know having died. He’s
shocked, yah, but not as much as I’d expect him to be.

“Do you know something about this?” I say
sharply, stepping toward him.

Brock and Hightower move forward at the same
time, penning me in.

He looks at me absently, like he’s not seeing
me. “Heart, I never thought they’d…” He trails off.

“Never thought who would what?” I ask,
bumping Brock.

Abe’s murky expression clears and the fire
returns to his dark eyes. Whatever surprise or confusion is gone.
“Here’s the deal,” he says. “You’re asking too many questions,
which as you well know, is against the rules. But we’ll let it
slide this one time, just like the last time you did something
stupid by hitting me. This is it. Your last chance.”

“And Nebo?” I say, glancing at Brock’s
fingers, which are twitching wildly, like he’s hoping I go for Abe
again so he can go for me.

“He was out of chances,” Abe says, his words
cold, but his tone not. Something doesn’t make sense. Abe’s saying
all the things he’s supposed to, but there’s nothing behind
them.

He knows something.

The cold soup I ate for dinner roils in my
gut. Nebo’s frozen, bashed-in face flashes through my mind.
Everything in me is saying “Fight! Attack! Punch! Hit!” but for
once in my life, I ignore my temper. These guys are serious. Either
they killed a man or they knew someone might kill a man. At least
one that we know of. Probably more. All in the service of the king.
Bad man
, Nebo had said. I think he was referring to the
king, but his words seem to apply to everyone standing in front of
me.

“What’s the medicine for?” I say, breaking
another rule. A challenge.

“They’re just tea leaves,” Abe says, his face
blank, not reacting to my guess as to the nature of the herbs.

“It’s medicine,” I say, pushing my luck.

“Don’t do this,” Abe says.

I grin at him, filling my smile with as much
hate as I can muster. I raise a fist, flash it toward him and he
flinches back. When Brock and Tower inch forward, I laugh. “A bit
jumpy, aren’t you?” I say.

I lean down and strap on my slider, ignoring
the glares Abe’s firing in my direction. As much as I’d love to
take on all three of them, it’d be suicide, for Buff too; plus,
even though the two months are up and our debts are paid off, I
need to keep this job so I can find out what in Heart’s name is
going on.

I’ll bide my time.

I won’t forget what they did to Nebo. And I
surely won’t forgive it.

~~~

The Heaters are waiting for us when we reach
the bottom, at a place on the border we’ve never been before. The
prisoners aren’t there to meet us this time. It’s a big man, alone,
wearing more clothes than the other Heaters I’ve seen, full length
pants and a loose-fitting, V-necked shirt.

“King Goff sends his regards,” Abe says.

“And pass along mine to him,” the Heater
says.

“Where’s the cargo, Roan?” Abe’s looking all
around, like it might be scampering across fire country.
Roan!
So this is the Heater leader—they call him the Head
Greynote.

“We’ve had a slight problem,” Roan says, his
eyes darker than the night.

Abe’s eyes narrow. “What sort of
problem?”

“You have to understand, we’re under attack
from all sides. The Killers are attacking again. The Glassies seem
to want us wiped off the face of fire country. The Wildes steal
more and more of our women every year.”

“But you still have your alliance with the
Marked?” Abe says. I’m trying to keep up with the conversation, but
most of it’s going in one ear and out the other. Killers? Wildes?
Marked? At least I understand the Glassies, but why would they want
to wipe out the Heaters?

“I’d hardly call it an alliance,” Roan says.
“More like an understanding. But yes, we trade wood and food for
their services.”

“So what’s the problem?” Abe persists.

“We couldn’t get any cargo this season,” Roan
says. I want to scream out “What is the freezin’ cargo?” but I know
if I do I might end up in a snowy grave next to Nebo.

Abe shakes his head, a look of wonder
crossing his face. “You couldn’t, or you
wouldn’t
?”

Roan’s jaw goes tight and I see his hands
curl into fists. His face turns a darker shade of brown. I know
those signs. This is a man with a temper. A bad one, maybe worse
than mine, which would be saying something. And his dark expression
isn’t saying punch and wrestle and fight…it’s saying kill.

“Couldn’t,” he says through gritted teeth.
“We’ll have cargo for you at the end of spring.”

“Ha!” Abe laughs. “You expect to get your
precious herbs for a full season based on the promise of cargo in
three months’ time? Is that really what you want me to tell the
king?”