Princeps' fury (41 page)

Aria shook her head. “I think you’re exaggerating the fact that—”

“That you nearly assaulted Doroga, an ally who was there to help us and who had offered us no harm?” Isana interrupted gently. “I was there, Aria. I felt it with you. It was not at all in character for you.”

Isana shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps there’s some kind of resonance with their own emotions. They seem to be able to project them to one another in some fashion. Perhaps we’re experiencing some of their reaction to us.”

Araris shrugged. “From a strictly logical standpoint, it’s possible. The Icemen follow the heaviest storms down from the north, so it’s always coldest when they meet
legionares
. It stands to reason that nearly everyone would be using the warmth crafting.”

“And no one was looking for that kind of influence,” Isana said. “Why would they think intense anger at one of Alera’s enemies was strange?”

Aria shook her head. “Centuries of conflict over some sort of hypothetical furycrafting side effect?”

“Only needs to happen for a few minutes at the wrong time,” Doroga interjected from several yards away.

Everyone turned to regard the barbarian, who stood beside his huge gargant, leaning his shoulders against Walker’s tree trunk of a leg.

“Three hundred years,” Doroga said, idly kicking at the snow. “Not over territory. Not over hunting grounds. No one gains anything. You’re just killing each other.”

Aria considered that for a moment and shrugged. “It does seem a bit irrational, I suppose. But after so much killing, so much death . . . it takes on a momentum of its own.”

The chieftain considered for a moment with pursed lips. “Be my guess that your folk never even considered that you might have it backward.”

“Backward?” Lady Placida asked.

Doroga nodded. “Backward. Icemen don’t follow the storms when they attack, Your Grace.” He gave Aria a shrewd look as a particularly cold gust of wind threw up a brief, blinding curtain of snow. “The storms,” he called, “follow
them
!”

The snow kept Isana from seeing Aria’s face, but she clearly felt the startled little flicker of surprise—and concern—that suddenly permeated the woman’s emotions.

The wind died away, and as suddenly as that, nine Icemen stood in a loose circle around them.

Isana felt Araris and Aria immediately touch shoulders with her and with each other, forming an outward-facing triangle. Araris exuded nothing—no tension, no discomfort, no fear: She sensed nothing but the steady confidence and detachment of a master metalcrafter withdrawn into communion with his furies, ignoring all emotion and discomfort to stand ready against a threat. That presence bolstered Isana, granted her confidence she badly needed, and she studied the newly appeared Icemen closely.

There were differences in them, Isana saw at once. Instead of bearing similar styles of weaponry and adornment, as the group with Big Shoulders had, each of the nine was perfectly distinctive.

Big Shoulders was there again, fur and leathers and a handmade but obviously functional spear in his hands. But the Iceman beside him was at least a foot taller and far thinner, with a barely perceptible orange tint to his white fur. He carried a large club made out of what looked like the leg bone of some enormous animal, though Isana had no idea what could possibly grow femurs six and a half feet long. The fur around his head was threaded with seashells, a hole bored through each of them to make them into beads.

The Iceman on the other side of Big Shoulders was shorter than Isana, and probably weighed three or four of her. He was clad in a mantle and breastplate of what looked like sharkskin, and carried in one hand a broad-headed, barbed harpoon carved from some kind of bone, and wore over his shoulder a quiver of what looked like smaller versions of the weapon.

Walker let out a low, trumpeting huff that was equally a greeting and a warning, and Doroga nodded to Big Shoulders. “Morning.”

“Friend Doroga,” Big Shoulders said. He gestured to the orange-tinted Iceman beside him, and said, “Sunset.” He made a similar gesture to the harpoon-bearing Iceman on his other side, and said, “Red Water.”

Doroga nodded to each of them, then said, to Isana, “Sunset is the eldest of the peace-chiefs. Red Water is the eldest war-chief.”

Isana frowned. “They have different leaders, then?”

“Divide areas of authority between tasks of peace and tasks of war,” Doroga corrected her.

The presence of both the head peace leader and senior war leader was a statement, then, Isana realized. The Icemen were equally disposed toward either outcome. It might mean that they did not want her to sense that they would be reluctant to fight—or they might genuinely
want
to sabotage any possible talk of truce in favor of ongoing hostilities. Then again, perhaps they were simply being sincere.

Isana let out a slow breath, and lowered the defenses with which she habitually shielded herself from the overwhelming emotions of others. She wanted every scrap of insight she could get about the Icemen.

Lady Aria’s faint, tightly controlled anxiety became a painful rasp against Amara’s senses, as did Doroga’s low-key, abiding worry for his daughter. Behind her, very faintly, she could literally sense the presence of Alerans on the Shieldwall, cloaked in their gentle firecraftings against the cold. The wall hummed with a sensation of constant, quiet, long-term emotion that might or might not have stopped short of the line between anger and hatred.

Isana drew in a quick breath, touched Araris’s wrist to tell him to stay where he was, and stepped forward, focusing on making her emotions as plain and obvious as they could be. She stepped forward toward Sunset and offered her hand.

There was a flash of suspicious fury, and Red Waters was abruptly between them, the wickedly sharp tip of his harpoon dimpling the skin of Isana’s cheek.

Steel hissed as two swords leapt clear of their sheaths, and there was an abrupt surge of light and hot air at Isana’s back.

“Aria, no!” Isana snapped in a tone of sudden, iron authority. “You will
not
do this.” She turned—a calm, deliberate motion that nonetheless dragged the tip of Red Waters’s harpoon against her cheek in a tingling line.

Aria and Araris stood side by side, weapons in their hands. Aria’s left wrist was uplifted, and a small hunting falcon made of pure, white-hot fire perched there, wings already spread, ready to be launched skyward at a flick of her hand.

“High. Lady. Placida.” Isana spoke into the silence, putting a ringing emphasis onto each word, her voice rolling across the frozen landscape and rebounding from the distant Shieldwall. “You will put your weapon on the ground and dismiss your fury at once.”

Aria was already staring at her with rather wide eyes. It occurred to Isana that it was entirely possible that no one had spoken in such a tone to the High Lady since before her adolescence.

“We are here on a mission of peace, High Lady. You will immediately desist from your efforts to turn my introduction to the principals of a foreign nation into a bloodbath.” She lifted her chin, and said, “Dismiss. Your. Fury.”

Isana turned to find that Araris, his sword already thrust point first into the snow, was standing with a folded handkerchief at the ready. He calmly pressed it to her cheek as he said, “You’re bleeding.”

The tingling on Isana’s cheek turned to pain as the cloth touched it. She winced. She’d had no idea that the weapon had been
that
sharp. “Ah,” she said, taking the cloth and holding it against the cut. “Thank you.”

Araris nodded once and turned to offer his hand to Lady Placida, helping her up from the snow.

Isana turned back to the Icemen and walked over to face Sunset again. She calmly lowered the bloodied cloth, and felt a slow warmth spread down her cheek. She very deliberately allowed her discomfort and annoyance to show on her face and in her bearing and stared at Sunset.

The older chieftain turned his gaze on Red Waters, and Isana felt a sudden, uncomfortably sharp spike of disapproval. Red Waters evidently felt it even more intensely than Isana had. He swayed slightly under the force of it and took a step back to stand beside Big Shoulders again, radiating a mild sense of chagrin. Amusement flowed around the circle of Icemen.

The Icemen, Isana realized, had just had their own version of the scene that had played out between her and Aria. Sunset had slapped Red Waters down—and the entire time, they
never spoke
. They hardly
moved
.

On an impulse, Isana opened her cloak and spread her hands, demonstrating that she was obviously carrying no weapons.

Sunset studied her for a moment, then nodded and passed his bone club over to Big Shoulders. Then he offered her his enormous, shaggy, claw-tipped hand.

Isana laid her own into it without hesitation, exactly as she would to convey her sincerity to another watercrafter. Whatever empathic sense the Icemen used, however it was done, it was obviously just as formidable as her own abilities, even though different. She wasn’t afraid that Sunset would harm her. The level of emotional control he had exhibited in conveying his displeasure to Red Waters was humbling.

His enormous hand enfolded hers gently, the claws never touching her skin. The Iceman watched her, expressionlessly.

“I have come here to seek peace between our peoples,” Isana said, allowing her feelings to flow down her hand and into Sunset’s grasp. She felt a brief urge to giggle. It was entirely possible that the Aleran arrogance that Doroga had warned her about was in play again. What made her suppose that she would be
able
to hide her emotions from the Iceman?

Sunset took a deep breath and bowed his head. A brief tide of emotion washed over Isana, every bit of it as real to her as if it was her own; grief, mainly, a sense of loss and regret that had grown to maturity over slow years. But mixed with it was fierce exaltation, weary relief—and tiny, painfully intense sparkles of hope.

“At last,” Sunset said aloud. “Your people send a peace-chief.”

Isana felt tears washing down her face, stinging painfully as they entered the cut on her cheek. She nodded mutely.

“This will not be easy,” Sunset told her. “Too much . . .” A surge of anger hit her, Sunset’s own, though it was under his control. The gentle grasp of his hand never wavered. “Too much . . .” He flashed another emotion at her: suspicion, and more than that—the expectation of betrayal.

He nodded. “For three years, we have pressed you here, hoping that the enemy would weaken your people in the south. Force you to send your Wall-guardians there to defend your food lands and that your folk would follow and leave us in peace.”