Page 82 of Beyond the Shadowed Earth

Tainir got up and paced toward the ice wall; the thread of her song whispered back to them on the wind.

“The gods wouldn’t have brought us all this way only to fail now,” said Morin after a while.

“Yes they would,” said Eda bitterly. “They’ve done worse.”

Morin regarded her with a sudden intensity that made her uncomfortable. “Have you ever wondered if you’ve been looking at it all wrong? If it isn’t the gods who have done all of this to you?”

“But the deal I made—”

“Maybe it was never about that. Maybe your deal meant something different than you thought it did. Maybe it’s just been about you and the gods all along.Justyou. No one and nothing else.”

The thought shattered her, terrified her. She thought maybe he was right, and she didn’t know how to answer him.

She watched Tainir walk back and forth in front of the ice wall, glittering gold pouring from her lips.

“I can’t let go of my anger,” Eda said at last. “I–I don’t even want to.”

He nodded. “I know.”

“And you don’t … think less of me for it?”

A smile touched Morin’s lips. “You don’t strike me as the kind of person who cares what other people think.”

“But I do.” She realized as she said it howmuchshe cared. How much she had always cared. She’d never stopped being that nine-year-old child, screaming for a place in the world after her parents’ deaths. Longing for affection and meaning and simply to be noticed. Making a deal with the gods and clawing her way onto the throne, just so she could feel wanted. Needed. Necessary to others’ lives. And then it had become about control and she was always grasping to hold on to it, grasping and failing because it had never really been hers. All that she’d had was an illusion. An illusion she didn’t know if she could ever get back, even if she succeeded in plunging a mythical knife into Tuer’s heart.

Morin studied her, reading more in her face than she could ever express. He reached out for her hand and she let him take it, let him clasp it so tightly in hers she could feel the faint echo of his pulse. This time, she didn’t pull away.

“I feel like we’ve come to the end,” he said. “That whatever happens tomorrow will be the last thing that ever happens.”

She looked back at Tainir, still singing to the ice wall. Suddenly she saw Niren’s face, pressed up behind the ice, all awful gray shadow and haunted dead eyes.

Eda shuddered. “Morning can’t come soon enough.”

Morin rubbed his thumb over her fingers. “Yet as long as it’s night, the end isn’t here. And no.” His eyes found hers. “I don’t think less of you. How could I? The gods called you, same as they called me. We’re both wrapped up in things beyond … well, beyond this Circle of the world.”

Another tremor passed through her, and she laid her head on Morin’s shoulder, almost without meaning to. She fell asleep that way, her head tucked under his chin, their hands clasped tight together.

In the morning, they tried to break through the ice.

Weak, watery sunlight illuminated the peak, the ice wall shimmering and shining as it hadn’t done in the dark. It stretched out of sight to the right and the left, following the slope of the mountain, and up into the sky, never ending. It was massively thick, and its surface had dips and ripples, as if once it had been a flowing curtain of water that had frozen in an instant. It smelled, strangely, of roses and smoke.

They battered at the wall with their climbing spikes and hammers, throwing all their strength into it.

But nothing happened, not a chip, not a dent.

They couldn’t climb it without footholds; they couldn’t go around it. For a while they tried digging under it, but no matter how deep they went, the ice was still there, as if it ran all the way through the mountain.

They went back to trying to break through it.

Sweat pricked Eda’s shoulders and poured down her face. She cursed and threw her dagger; it hit the ice and bounced back, slicing her cheek. She touched the cut and her fingers came away sticky, red.

Tainir and Morin stopped their own assault on the wall, looking over at her.

Eda wiped the blood off and onto her trousers. “Is this it, then? How it ends? The gods mocking us so close to our goal?”

Morin paced up to her, brushing one hesitant finger along Eda’s brow. Eda felt again that faint pulse of heat in her forehead.

“Maybe you should appeal to Tuer,” Morin said. “You are gods-touched, after all. Maybe he’ll let you in, if you ask.”

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