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

the ice margin, switching colors from blue to gray. Meeda felt its coldness in her mouth, stinging her gums and numbing her tongue until it felt like a piece of meat against her teeth. Underfoot the ice was black and transparent, swept clean of snow by northern winds. It ticked as Meeda’s weight came down upon it. As she stepped beyond the candle’s light, something red broke through the trees, something broken and limping and not right . Meeda braced her stick with both hands, and then recognized the bloody shape of one of her dogs. Marrow. Its rear left leg was gone, and the skin on its rump and belly had been torn away, revealing glistening muscle and coils of gut.
    Meeda feared to call to it. She knew the look of wolf- and lynx-made wounds. She knew what wolverines could do to creatures twice their size and what a coven of moon snakes was capable of when they hadn’t fed in a week. Yet this didn’t smell like wolf or cat or snake. This smelled like night.
    The dog had caught its mistress’s scent, and it dragged its lower torso across the ice to reach her, trailing blood and viscera from its great black wound. Meeda barely breathed as she waited for the creature to heel. She did not think, knew better than to think, just raised her stick to the height she needed, waited to feel the push of the dog’s snout against her leg, then drove the butt through its heart.
    “Good dog,” she said quietly, as she pulled the stick free of its ribs.
    Blood and bits of bone were already freezing to the wood by the time she turned to face the shore. “Come for me, shadows,” she said, “for I stand ready in the light of the moon.” The words were old and she did not know where they came from, yet they were Sull words and she felt something fill her as she spoke them. She thought at first it was courage, for her heart quickened and her grip tightened and something hard and excited came alive in her chest.
    Then the ice around the shore began to crack. White splinters shot up from the surface in a footstep pattern toward where she stood. Crack! Crack! Crack! The air rippled like water, and suddenly it was cold enough to turn her breath to grains of ice. Meeda’s hands ached as she adjusted her grip on her stick. Her eyes burned as she tried to see . Something glinted. Moonlight caught an edge and ran along its length. A man-shape shimmered into existence, dark and silvered, like no man at all. Its eyes were two holes that held no soul. Its hand gripped a blade that drank the light. Meeda watched as the cutting edge came up and up, saw how moonlight outlined the thing’s arm and mailed fist, yet found no purchase in the black and voided steel. It was like looking at a distilled piece of night.
    Meeda knew then that what she felt wasn’t courage. The fear was in her, twisting her bowels, speaking to her in a voice that sounded like her own, warning her to run for the thin ice at the lake’s center and find for herself an easy painless death. Yet something older stopped her.
    Not courage, she told herself; she would not lie about that. Remembrance. The old memories were coming back.
    Ice shattered and exploded as the thing came for her. Fracture lines raced along the lake’s surface like lightning branching in a storm. Meeda saw shadows and gleaming edges of light, smelled the dark odor of another world. Eyes that held nothing met her own. She braced her stick to meet that cold black blade. And then, as the sword hummed toward her, burning a mark in the air that hung there long after the blade had passed, she noticed the shadow man’s chest. Rising and falling like a living thing.
    A heart lay somewhere within the darkly weighted substance of its flesh. It was beating. And it made Meeda’s mouth water like a meal of ham and wine.
    Icewood and voided steel met with a crack that sounded the beginning of an Age. White pain shot up Meeda’s arms, and it took all she had to hold her ground. Three feet of ice bowed under the mass