My mother’s hand flashes out so fast I don’t even have time to flinch before it snaps across my face. My head jolts to the side and I grimace, but don’t cry out. Showing pain is weakness.
Slowly—ever so slowly—I turn back to face my mother. My cheek stings and my pride feels bruised, but I don’t cry, don’t so much as let my eyes water.
There’s hurt in her eyes, but I know it’s not regret at having slapped me, because I can still see the anger in her pursed lips. Anger at me. For not thinking very much of my father, the so-called Man of Wisdom.
I pretend like I don’t see the hurt or the anger. “What sort of battle?” I ask grudgingly.
My father’s eyes flash open and he smiles thinly.
“One where…” He pauses, as if searching for the words. There’s blood, and lots of people die, and the world as we know it is destroyed, I think, regurgitating my father’s usual predictions. “…you will have a choice to make,” he finishes.
My eyes narrow. “Me?” I say. “I’ll be stuck here with you.” I don’t mean for it to sound so angry, but I guess lately that’s what I am.
Father nods, but doesn’t elaborate, which means that’s all he wants to tell me. Is it a trick? A way for him to convince me to stay in the tent the next time there’s a battle?
“Tell her the rest,” Mother urges.
Father looks down, clasps his hands in his lap, runs his thumb over his forefinger. Sighs. Slumps his shoulders. Why does he look so…is it sadness? Exhaustion? No, it’s not one or the other—it’s both. He looks defeated.
“Father?” I say, allowing a hint of compassion to creep into my voice. Just a hint.
He lifts his head but his eyes are closed and he doesn’t stop at eye-level. His chin keeps tilting until he’s facing the tent roof, and only then does he open his eyes. Almost as if he can’t look at me when he says whatever it is my mother wants him to say. And in his eyes…
There’s defeat.
And I realize he’s not looking at the tent roof. No, he’s looking well beyond it, seeing something that we can’t—the moon or the stars or the black-cloud-riddled sky. Something beyond.
“It’s time to ride against the Icers,” he says to the heavens, and for a moment I don’t comprehend any of his words, because how can I? They’re so unexpected and make so little sense that I have to close one eye to even get my brain headed in the right direction.
“This must not make much sense to you,” my mother says. It doesn’t take a Man of Wisdom to read my face. I shake my head. “Reason it out,” she says, like she has so many times before.
I used to get so excited when my mother would say those words—that she had so much confidence that I could puzzle through a problem and figure it out on my own. But now her challenge just frustrates me, because I want to know right now. Why the Riders would go to the Icers; why my mother seems more intense than she normally does, so focused on my father’s vision that she’d slap me; why my father refuses to lower his gaze from the stars, invisible behind the cloth of our tent.
From experience, however, I know: she won’t tell me the answer.
So I think about everything I know about the Icers. They live in ice country, obviously. It’s really cold there, colder than when it’s been raining in storm country for two months straight, the wind lashing the rainwater to our clothes, to our skin, chilling us to the bone. From what I’ve been told, the Icers are a private people, preferring the solitude of their strongholds in the mountains. They’ve never tried to trade with us.
And they have a secret.
Only we know about it, because our scouts witnessed something they weren’t supposed to. A band of men, pale-white skinned and heavily armored, carrying razor-sharp axes and long-hilted swords, driving a group of brown-skinned children to the sea. They were met by a landing party from the jewel of the Soakers’ fleet, The Merman’s Daughter. The children, who we assume were Heaters from fire country, were forced onto a boat and sent to the ships. We can only assume they’re being used as slaves.
In exchange, the Soakers gave the Icers large sacks that looked heavy, but which could be easily lifted and carried by the ice country soldiers. When our scouts examined the area where the trade had taken place, they found prints of heavy boots and small bare feet. The prints were littered with fragments of dried plants, the kind that sometimes wash up on our shores, green at first, but turning brown over time. Weeds of the sea.
Why would the Icers trade children for dried plants that are as readily attainable as blades of grass or leaves on trees? And how did the Icers get the Heater children in the first place? Did the Heaters sell their own offspring to the Icer King, the man they call Goff, or did the Icers steal them away?
Not even my father knows the answers to these questions, but ever since the scouts learned of the child slave-trade, the tension between us and the Soakers has escalated. Although some say the Soakers’ trade with other countries is not our concern, the majority would have us put an end to it. My mother’s voice has been one of the strongest in this regard.
“We cannot sit on our hands while great injustice is carried out on the borders of storm country,” I murmur, remembering my mother’s words from a speech she made to the camp a day after the scouts returned with their account of the Soakers’ treachery.
“Yes,” my mother says.
“It is time?” I say.
“It is,” Mother says. And suddenly I know why my mother is so serious and my father so sad:
The Riders are going to war with the Icers.
And it’s my father who’s sending them.
~~~
I rise early because I can’t sleep. My father’s still in bed, snoring, as I dress in my training gear: dark pants, my thin, light boots, and a light black shirt that will allow my skin to breathe if I sweat. Training almost always means sweat, especially when my mother’s involved.
We didn’t schedule training for today, but given the fact that my mother’s not in the tent, an impromptu early morning session is a good bet.
I step out into a dark, brooding morning, intent on finding her.
Fog rises from the ground in cloud-like waves, as if the rain from yesterday is returning to its sky masters high above the earth. There’s a chill in the air, and for a moment I stop and consider dressing in something warmer. I shake my head to myself. Regardless of the temperature or what I’m wearing, at the end of a training session with my mother I’m always hot and wishing I was wearing less.
This early, the camp is quiet. There’s activity, yes—a few cook fires glow warmly, shining off black pots hovering over them, emitting the mouthwatering smell of cooked coney; a black-robed rider strides across the camp on his way to the stables; one of the fire-tenders carries a bundle of wood to the Big Fire, which has dwindled to a few crackling flames—but it’s quiet activity. If anyone speaks, it’s in dull murmurs or low whispers. Until sunup, we respect those sleeping.
My mother will likely be one of three places: the stables; beyond the northern edge of the camp, doing her own training while she waits for me to join her; or on the seaside, waiting for the sun to rise. She says the sunrise is Mother Earth’s most beautiful gift to us.
But today it’s too foggy for a good sunrise. That leaves the stables or training grounds. I head for the stables, where I can at least see Shadow, even if Mother’s already passed through.
I move across the dark camp, careful not to step on anything that could turn my ankle, a rock or a stick or a swathe of uneven ground. Every step must be perfect. The feet are the key to a fight. Two of my mother’s favorite sayings, hammered into my skull so that even a normal walk across camp turns into training. When I realize, I groan inwardly and try to relax.
As I walk toward the Big Fire—which is growing already as the fire-tender adds sticks of wood one at a time, positioning each one carefully, delicately, like the placement is a matter of life or death—I admire the symmetry of the camp. Everything is ordered, even, mirror images of each other. From the fire, the tents radiate outward in concentric circles, each successive ring growing larger and containing more tents. The tents of the Riders and the Men of Wisdom, of whom my father is head, make up the innermost circle, while the circle furthest from the fire is for the camp watchmen, those with keen eyes and stout hearts. There are ten rings in all, over two thousand Stormers.