Ice Country (20 page)

Siena laughs and it reminds me of Skye, which
sends a bit of energy zinging down my arms. “Nobody’s perfect,”
Siena says. “Everyone knows that, but I guess with me and Circ it
was something like fate of the gods I s’pose. Everything tried to
stop us from being together—once I even thought, really truly
believed, he was dead—but then some power greater’n anything us
humans have, pulled us right quick back t’gether. And we ain’t
letting go. Never again.”

She pauses, and I don’t have any more
questions, but I feel like she’s got more to say so I just wait,
looking off at one of the torches burning from its fixture on the
wall.

“I guess you know when you’ve found your true
Call when everything else just melts away and it’s you and them and
them and you, and you want nothing more’n to stay like that forever
and ever. And then time stops even though it can’t, can’t possibly,
’cause no one can stop time, but it does, it really stops. You look
at them and you see yourself, your past, your future, all at once.
And it’s enough—no, more’n enough. And everyone acts like it was a
choice—and you were so brave for making that choice—but it was
never a choice, not really.”

I stare at her, shocked, not expecting to
hear all that. It’s a lot to take in. I haven’t ever felt like that
around anyone, although Skye’s definitely changed my perspective on
women and relationships.

There’s something about being around Skye
that’s so icin’ energizing. She could just as well punch me in the
face as kiss me, and I suspect the effect would be shockingly
similar. A jarring so deep it shakes my very soul. She’s got a
toughness in her you can’t teach. You’re either born with it or
not. She’s got something special in her, that’s for sure.

But with everything that’s happened, first
with the notorious cheating witch, to losing all my silver, to
seeing what I’ve seen, to losing Jolie, and now to meeting Skye,
maybe my heart’s ready to heal. I need to get back on the
figurative snow angel, so to speak.

For the first time in a while, everything
seems okay, even when I know it’s not. But at least now I know it
can be. I have hope.

Abruptly, the dungeon door is thrown open. We
both look in its direction, expecting to find Big carrying our
evening meals of unidentifiable slop. Big’s there alright, but not
with dinner.

He pushes Wes through the door in front of
him.

He’s got chains on his hands and feet.

F
rom the beginning,
it was my plan, and mine alone. An arrogant plan, one that’s doomed
us all. My best friend. My brother. Jolie. And these fine people
from fire country. Well, mostly fine. Feve’s been giving me the
death stare from the time Big shoved Wes into the cell next to him,
across from me.

“No funny business,” Big hollers to Wes,
before leaving him to stare across at me.

“What happened?” I say, wondering whether it
really matters.

“I got caught,” Wes says, managing a tight
smile. A bad joke, especially under the circumstances.

Everyone’s awake from their naps now, poking
their heads between their cell bars. “Who’s that?” Skye says. I dip
my head, hating to have to tell her. Then she says, “Wait just one
Cotee-nibblin’ moment. That’s yer brother, ain’t it? He’s the
tugblazin’ spittin’ image of you, ’cept not so rough-lookin’.”

“Everyone, this is Wes, my brother. Wes, meet
the people of fire country, the ones you tracked to the
palace.”

“Hi people of fire country,” Wes says.

“Hi, Wes,” Buff says.

“Hey, Buff.”

“How’d you get caught, Icer, brother of
bad-plan-maker?” Feve says without a smile.

I stare at the ground, feeling
fire-country-hot all of a sudden.

“It was my own stupidity,” Wes says. “This
isn’t Dazz’s fault.”

I look up. “It’s all my fault,” I say, not
letting my older brother take my blame away. None of us would be
here if not for me.

Wes continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “No one
really paid me any attention, letting me move about the palace
pretty much as I chose, so long as I was there to prepare the meals
on schedule. I got too confident, started sneaking places I
shouldn’t have. Most doors were open or unlocked, and I
investigated them all, but they were all just rooms for normal
palace activities, like dining or meeting or preparing. Nothing
unusual. This was all on the first day, mind you.

“Today I got bolder, seeking out the darkest
and the least-traveled places in the palace. After the lunch
preparations and cleanup were over, I found a staircase that seemed
to lead to nowhere. It spiraled round and round and up and up and
into one of the towers, only at the top there was no way in. Just a
stone wall and pair of gleaming brass mountain lion heads, mounted
on the wall, mouths open in a perpetual growl.”

“Sounds like a dead end,” Circ says from down
the row.

“That’s what I thought, but when I went to
inspect the lions, there were faint cracks running from above and
below them, like someone had torn away the rocks at one time, and
then put them back together piece by piece, so perfectly you could
barely tell they’d been pulled away.

“So I pushed on the lions, hard, with all my
might, and guess what? They pressed into the wall.”

“Into the wall, Icer?” Feve says.

“Yah. Right in, like there was nothing behind
them. But that’s not the strangest thing. As soon as the brass
lions disappeared, there was the sound of chains pulling, clinking
through a pulley. The door started to rise.”

“Holy blaze!” Skye says. “A secret room.”

“More than that,” Wes says, jamming his eyes
shut as if they’re stinging. When they flash open, there’s hurt in
them. “A prison,” he says. “A child prison. Past the door were
little bodies, brown-skinned and every one of them shrinking back
from me as if I might hit them, or do worse. I just stood there for
a minute, shell-shocked, searching the faces, wishing beyond wishes
that she’d be there. Jolie, that is. Do they know about Jolie?”

I nod, my eyes never leaving Wes’s face,
urging him silently to continue, to tell me the part where he finds
Jolie, where he tries to escape with her, where he gets caught and
they take her away again. The part where at least she’s still
alive.

“She wasn’t there,” he says, and my heart
sinks into my empty stomach, beating dully, thumping a hole in my
gut.

“Maybe you just didn’t see her?” Buff
says.

“Maybe,” he says. “Before I could go in,
really look at them all, someone grabbed me from behind, threw a
bag over my head, and dragged me down here.”

His words are still hitting my ears, but I’m
not really hearing them, because I’m back at how he didn’t see
Jolie, how she wasn’t there, how for all we know she’s been planted
in the ground somewhere, having outgrown her usefulness to the
king.

“Any of them children you saw older?” Skye
asks, and I want to bang my head against the wall for not thinking
to ask it myself. She probably thinks I’m all selfishness and no
caring. Always focused on my own problems and no one else’s. She’s
lost a sister, too. We’ve got that in common, which is what I gotta
get through my freeze-brained head.

Wes shakes his head. “They all looked to be
seven, eight years old. Nine at the most. No older than that.
Why?”

Skye just slaps a fist in her palm, so I tell
him what Skye and Siena told me about their sister.

“This whole thing is icin’ sick,” Wes says
when I finish.

“We’re knocked,” Siena says. “There ain’t no
way out now. Not unless the sun goddess decides to shine down on
us.”

I grab the bars, slump against them. The
sheet of gray clouds covering ice country will prevent the sun
goddess or any other goddess from seeing any of what’s happening
here.

No one says anything after that.

~~~

I don’t even bother with the gruel. It’s
tasteless and unsatisfying anyway. My stomach rumbles, but I ignore
it. The others eat theirs and keep up a healthy chatter, all about
how else they can escape, whether there’s any other way now that
our inside man’s a little too far on the inside.

I ignore that, too, throwing all my thoughts
into beating on myself, what a failure I am. Everything I’ve done
over the last year has been a complete and utter disaster.
Nothing’s gone right, nothing’s felt right, nothing’s been right.
Every move’s been a mistake, picking apart my life piece by
ice-sucking piece.

I’m about to see if I’m flexible enough to
kick my own arse, when there’s a “Psst!” from beside me. I look
over. It’s Skye, because, of course, who else would it be? There’s
no one else over there.

I glance around. The others are still
talking, even Wes, passing thoughts back and forth with Siena, Feve
and Circ, like he’s known them his whole life. That’s Wes’s way.
He’s a fitter-inner, always has been.

Surprised, I scoot over to Skye, close enough
that if I reached out like Siena and Circ always do, and if she did
the same, then we could touch through the bars.

“Ready to stop feelin’ burnin’ sorry for
yerself?” she asks.

I don’t know what I expected her to say, but
not that. “I freezed everything up,” I say.

“You tried,” Skye says. “That’s all you can
do in this sun goddess searin’ life.”

I look at her and she looks at me and I get
lost so quick it’s like I’m in another place and maybe there are no
bars and no walls and nothing at all separating us. Her hand
reaches out into the empty space between us. I stare at it,
sun-kissed and full of strength. Strength I’m missing, ever since
Wes was pushed through the dungeon door. Strength I need.

I reach out and take it.

It’s an icin’ good feeling, her hand touching
mine, made up of something more solid and realer than the few other
womanly touches I’ve felt since I became a man. Holding her hand
for just those few short seconds makes those three other girls seem
like distant memories.

She lets go, a smile on her face as she pulls
away. “I like you,” she says. “Even better when you’re like this.
Alive.”

~~~

The others aren’t giving up and neither am I.
There’s too much at stake, for all of us.

We’ve got a simple plan, but it might just
work. It has to. The only thing left to decide is who—

“I once wrestled a bear with my bare hands,”
Buff says.

“It was a very hairy, drunken man,” I say,
“and he ended up passed out on top of you.”

“What’s a bear?” Siena asks.

“He sure felt like a bear,” Buff says,
scratching his head.

“You’re not the best fighter here, Buff,” I
say, “so just let it go.”

“And you are, Icy?” Feve says, forcing me to
duck to avoid his eye darts.

“Why does he keep calling you ‘Icy’?” Wes
hisses from across the way.

I shake my head, both because I don’t know if
we’ll ever decide who’s best suited to carry out the plan, and at
my brother, because, well, there’re some things that just can’t be
explained, at least not easily. “I’m not saying anything,” I say.
“But I doubt if you’re the one either.”

Feve glares at me, and I glare right
back.

“Quiet! Everyone!” Wilde snaps. Her command
echoes once, twice, and then fades, along with all our arguments.
“Good sun goddess,” she says. “You’d think we were from different
planets rather than different countries. Let’s just take a vote and
be done with it.”

“Are we all eligible for the vote?” Buff
asks.

“Yes.” No one has anything to say to that, so
Wilde says, “We’ll go around and everyone can name who they think
is the best fighter.”

“I’ll start,” Buff says. “Dazz. I’ve seen him
take down three knife fighters with just his fists and maybe a head
butt or two.” I silently thank my friend for the vote of
confidence.

“Head and butt seem to go together all too
well for him,” Feve mumbles.

I bite back a retort. No one’s voted for him
yet so…

Wilde says, “Skye. She trains my young
warriors and she’s the best I’ve seen.” I look at Skye but there’s
no pride on her face. Just belief.

Feve says, “Circ.”

“Siena,” Circ says.

“Circ,” Siena says.

“That’s two for Circ, one for Skye, one for
Siena, and one for Dazz,” Wilde says, recapping.

Wes says, “Dazz.” I look at him, surprised,
and he says, “I know, I know, I’ve never seen you fight. But I hear
people talk, and no matter how many times I’ve had to clean up the
cuts and bruises on your face, they always say the other guy looked
ten times worse.” I nod, feeling a burst of pride in my chest. I
never realized he listened to the talk about me.

“Skye,” I say, knotting the count at two
apiece for me, Circ, and Skye.

“The decision is yours, Skye,” Wilde
says.

She doesn’t flinch, just smiles, not one
shred of doubt in her eyes. “Me,” she says.

M
orning comes with a
quick step and a dive.

There’s plenny of energy buzzing through the
dungeon. I even choke down my whole plate of cold gruel, so as to
ensure I’m ready for whatever’s coming.

As quick as the morning came, the evening
meal’s like a distant mountain, way off on the horizon, days and
weeks and months away. We do different things to pass the time:
sleep, throw Buff’s rock around (Yah. The question game again.),
talk about anything and nothing. Buff even sings a little, in his
deep baritone, making us all laugh with his comedic rendition of
“The Woman Who Made Me Cry.” He earns a bellow from Big for that
one. Out of sheer boredom, I expect, Skye tries to taunt Big into
the dungeon, but he just slams the door in all our faces, with a
final warning to shut the freezin’ chill up, or something along
those lines.