Chapter 85: Rimewolf

The Empire began with a sign nailed to a dead tree.

It stood at the bottom of the north side of the pass, where the smugglers’ path finally joined a real road: black iron letters on a black iron plate, half buried in snow.

THE IRON THRONE. IRON ANSWERS MERIT.

’What a friendly place!’

Aren walked past it and kept walking.

It took him four days to come down out of the mountains. He slept during the day, in cracks in the rock and once in an empty shepherd’s hut, and walked at night, because a boy alone on an Imperial road in the first week of a war was a boy who got asked questions. He ate what was in his pack, then less, and on the third night there was nothing left in it at all.

The Familiar was even hungrier than he was.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 31% → 48%.]

He could feel it under his ribs, restless, turning eagerly toward every living thing it sensed in the dark: a fox, an owl, and once, very far off, something big moving through the trees on the other side of a frozen river. It wanted all of them.

’You and me both, friend, you and me both.’

On the fourth night, the big thing found him.

He heard it before he saw it, a low, wet clicking, coming down the slope behind him. When he turned, it was standing between two pines in the moonlight, something like a wolf, if a wolf had been carved out of a glacier. Its fur was white frost, hard and spiked, and its eyes were pale blue holes. Every breath it let out froze in front of its jaws and fell to the ground as powder.

[Rimewolf (Beast, Rank D).][Hostility: 100%.]

It was alone and it was hungry too, and it came at him without a sound.

A month ago, he would have run.

Instead he stepped straight into it. Moonlit Step put him inside its leap before its paws even left the ground, and he drove his shoulder up under its chest, exactly as Varro’s stick had taught him, close and inside the reach where the jaws couldn’t turn. Four hundred and thirteen points of strength went into that blow. The wolf flew over him and hit the snow on its back, and he heard ice crack somewhere inside it.

It came up again, faster this time, and the jaws found his forearm and closed.

It hurt, because the teeth were cold enough to burn, but they didn’t go through. They stopped against muscle that had been through four temperings, and the wolf shook its head furiously, trying to tear, and couldn’t. Aren looked into its pale blue eyes from a hand’s width away.

’Right. Let’s see what this body can really do.’

He deliberately left New Moon and Zero alone. He wanted to know what his own body could do on its own.

He took the wolf by the jaw with his free hand and slowly opened it. The frost-hard muscles fought him, and then they gave. He pulled his arm out of its mouth, and while it was still trying to understand what had happened, he hit it under the ear, once, with absolutely everything he had.

It lay down in the snow and stayed down.

He stood over it, breathing hard, his arm bleeding into the snow from a ring of shallow punctures, and he watched them close. By the time he had counted to two hundred, there was nothing left but faint marks.

[Street Fighter’s Instinct. Mastery: 74% → 76%.]

’Varro would grunt at that, and he might even grunt twice!’

The Familiar was now pulling so hard against his ribs that he could barely stand.

"All right," he told it, "go on, then."

He pointed, and the cold slid out of his side along its thread, low across the snow, and opened over the frozen body. It didn’t eat the meat. It ate whatever had made the wolf cold, whatever had lived inside it, and the white frost fur went grey and soft and ordinary, and the pale eyes went dark.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.][Hunger: 48% → 22%.][Ledger entry added: Rimewolf, the cold of.]

He felt it come back along the thread and settle under his ribs, heavy and content and much colder than before. For a few breaths, his breath actually came out white, even though the night wasn’t nearly that cold.

Feed it well, in the cold places. He was finally starting to understand exactly what the merchant had meant.

He skinned the wolf with the eel blade and ate what he could of it, half raw, over a fire too small to be seen from the road. Then he slept in the shelter of the pines with its grey pelt over him, warmer than he had been in a week.

The town at the bottom of the valley was called Frostgate, and it was full of soldiers.

He saw them from the hillside at dawn: black coats in the market square, black coats at the gate, and a long line of young men in ordinary clothes standing in the snow outside a building with an iron banner hanging from its window, while an officer at a table wrote down names.

The war was one week old, and the Empire was counting its men.

He couldn’t possibly walk through that gate. A boy his age with no papers and an accent from the wrong side of the mountains would be standing in that line before noon, or sitting in a cell.

’Think! There’s always a side door somewhere.’

He was still on the hillside, turning it over, when he noticed the wagons.

There were four of them, parked in a field outside the town wall and painted in colors that had once been bright, with a big tent of patched canvas sagging between them and smoke curling from a tin chimney. Somebody had hung washing on a rope between two wagon wheels, and the washing was mostly costumes, gold and checkered and dyed colors he could no longer tell apart, flapping stiffly with frost.

It was a troupe of players, the kind that went from town to town in spring, set up in a field, and did tricks for copper.

And outside the biggest wagon an old woman stood with her fists on her hips, shouting at two soldiers who were leading a young man away.

Aren went down the hill without really deciding to.

Instead of approaching them directly, he came quietly around the back of the wagons, among the washing, and stood where he could hear.

"...my strongman AND my fool in one week!" the old woman was shouting. She was short and wide and wrapped in three shawls, with a wrinkled brown face and a voice like a trumpet. "How am I supposed to play the capital with no strongman and no fool? What am I supposed to do, juggle the horse?"

"Iron answers merit, mother," one of the soldiers answered, almost apologetically. "The Throne needs men. He’s eighteen and he’s fit."

"He’s an idiot!"

"There are plenty of idiots in the army," the other soldier pointed out. They led the young man away toward the town gate, and he looked back over his shoulder at the wagons, waved sadly, and was gone.

The old woman said a word Aren had only ever heard in the lower city. Then she turned around and saw him standing in her washing.

She looked him over carefully, from his boots to his hair, the wolf pelt over his shoulders, and his face.

"No," she snapped. "Whatever you’re selling, no."

"I’m not selling anything."

"Then what exactly are you doing in my costumes?"

Aren pushed a pair of frozen striped trousers out of his face.

"You need a fool," he said.