A Fortress of Grey Ice (Book 2) Read Online Free Page A

like touching a living thing, and Meeda Longwalker knew some men who claimed it was better. Trappers knew little of women and a lot about whores, and a scraped and combed lynx fur had a warmth to it that couldn’t be bought in Hell’s Town for any amount of gold.
    As she watched the fur ripple beneath her horsehair mitts a cry sounded in the forest beyond the ice. Low and hollow, like the wind moving down a well shaft, it made the skin on Meeda’s shoulders pucker and shrink. The flame above the candle dimmed from yellow to red, and then twitched upon its wick as the sound passed into the ice. Meeda felt its vibrations in her old and rotted bones . . . and knew then that the creature who made it was no living thing.
    “ Raaks! ” she called. Dogs!
    A hand shot onto the ice to feel for her stick as she waited for her terriers to heel. Damn dogs. She should never have let them go after that elk cow. Yet they had smelled age and weakness and the festering of a wolf-made wound, and such scents were irresistible to any animal trained to hunt. It was either let them go or drive a stake into the ice and leash them to it. And much though Meeda Longwalker hated to admit it, her hands had trouble forming the shape needed to hold a hammer this night.
    As her fingers groped for her stick a new sound rose from the edge of the ice. Fifty years she had coursed these headlands, fifty years of setting traps, snapping necks and peeling skin, and not a day without a dog at her heels. She had heard her terriers moan and yelp in childbirth and pain, heard them scrap amongst themselves over the weeping remains of a skinned fox. Yet never until now had she heard them scream.
    High it was, high and terrible and so close to human that it might have been children instead. Meeda’s fist closed around the three feet of icewood that had been her walking stick for a hundred seasons. The wood was pale as milk, and so smooth it ran with moonlight like live steel. Icewood, from the heart of the tree; no earthly cold could warp it, and none but master Sull craftsmen could shape it to their will. It dulled saws, people said. Made bows so powerful that they defied air and wind. Only the Sull King and his mordreth , the twelve sworn men who guarded him and were known as the Walking Dead, were allowed to carry bows of its making. A single tree had to grow for a thousand years and its timber aged for fifty more before a master bowyer would dare cut a stave from the dann , the late-wood that was laid down in the sacred months of summer and late spring.
    Meeda hefted the stick across her chest, taking comfort from its familiar weight and hand. It was a hard life she had lived and chosen, and she had not reached such an age by being easily cowed. The night was alive with noises, with black lynx and horned owls, moon snakes and old ghosts, and she had long since realized that none of them liked the smell of living men. Rising to her feet, she called once more to her dogs.
    As she waited for them to respond, something crunched softly on the frozen snow beyond the shoreline. Water swelled beneath the ice. The dogs fell silent one by one.
    Meeda bit off her outer mitts, and spat them onto the ice. The sky was dark, darker than it ought to be when quarter of the moon hung there for all to see. There were no stars, or if there were they shone black like volcanic glass. Moon and night sky. No Sull prayer was complete without those words, and Meeda found herself mouthing them as she stepped toward the shore.
    Damn her eyes! Why couldn’t she see anything? Her hard old corneas were slow to focus in the biting air, and she felt the anger come to her as quick as if it had been hiding beneath her fear all along. She hated her old woman’s body with its humps and slack pouches and dry bloodless bones. Some nights she dreamed Thay Blackdragon, the Night King, came to her, offering youth in return for her soul. Sometimes she dreamed she said yes .
    Frost smoke steamed above