“That’s where you’re wrong, Countess,” Rook said quietly. “I am.”

CHAPTER 28

Isana met the tribal chiefs of the Icemen two days later, at the same place she had spoken with Big Shoulders.

“This is ridiculous,” Lady Placida said, pacing back and forth in the new snow. She was huddled beneath layered cloaks and shivering. “Honestly, Isana. Over the centuries, don’t you think someone would have noticed if the Icemen were watercrafters?”

“Don’t let the cold make you cross,” Isana said, struggling to ignore it herself. There was a certain amount watercrafting could do to mitigate the cold, by keeping blood flowing steadily throughout her own limbs, and by convincing the snow and ice not to be quite as chilling to her flesh as it might be otherwise. Combined with a good cloak, it was enough to make her comfortable, but just barely. She doubted Aria had ever had need to practice the combination of techniques before, and despite the fact that her skills were almost certainly greater than Isana’s own, the High Lady was the one being forced to pace back and forth.

“It’s a simple bit of f-f-fieldcraft,” Aria replied, shivering. Several tendrils of red hair slipped from beneath the green of her hood and danced back and forth over her face in the chill northern wind. “So simple that every single legionare in the northern Legions can learn it. And it takes someone of your skill at watercraft to even notice it’s being used from five feet away. Surely you aren’t saying that not only are the Icemen capable of furycraft, but that they’re as skilled as Aleran Citizens, to boot?”

“I don’t believe anyone using that firecrafting to stay warm is capable of thinking very clearly when the Icemen are nearby,” Isana said calmly. “I believe there is some sort of unanticipated side effect occurring-one that caused you to be provoked quite easily at the first meeting.”

Aria shook her head. “I think you’re exaggerating the fact that-”

“That you nearly assaulted Doroga, an ally who was there to help us and who had offered us no harm?” Isana interrupted gently. “I was there, Aria. I felt it with you. It was not at all in character for you.”

The High Lady pressed her lips together, frowning. “The Icemen hadn’t yet arrived.”

“Yes, they had,” Araris put in gently. “We just didn’t know it yet.”

Aria lifted one hand in a gesture of concession. “Then why doesn’t it happen constantly? Why only when the Icemen are near?”

Isana shook her head. “I don’t know. Perhaps there’s some kind of resonance with their own emotions. They seem to be able to project them to one another in some fashion. Perhaps we’re experiencing some of their reaction to us.”

“So now you’re saying that they’re firecrafters as well?” Aria asked-but her eyes were thoughtful.

“All I’m saying is that I think we’d be wise not to assume that we know everything,” Isana said evenly.

Aria shook her head and glanced at Araris. “What do you think?”

Araris shrugged. “From a strictly logical standpoint, it’s possible. The Icemen follow the heaviest storms down from the north, so it’s always coldest when they meet legionares. It stands to reason that nearly everyone would be using the warmth crafting.”

“And no one was looking for that kind of influence,” Isana said. “Why would they think intense anger at one of Alera’s enemies was strange?”

Aria shook her head. “Centuries of conflict over some sort of hypothetical furycrafting side effect?”

“Only needs to happen for a few minutes at the wrong time,” Doroga interjected from several yards away.

Everyone turned to regard the barbarian, who stood beside his huge gargant, leaning his shoulders against Walker’s tree trunk of a leg.

“First impressions are important,” Doroga continued. “Icemen don’t look like you. That makes you people nervous.”

Araris grunted. “A bad first meeting. Tempers flare. There’s a fight. Then more encounters and more fights.”

“Happens long enough, you call that a war,” Doroga said, nodding.

Lady Placida was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It can’t possibly be that simple.”

“Of course not,” Isana said. “But a single pebble can start a rockslide.”

“Three hundred years,” Doroga said, idly kicking at the snow. “Not over territory. Not over hunting grounds. No one gains anything. You’re just killing each other.”

Aria considered that for a moment and shrugged. “It does seem a bit irrational, I suppose. But after so much killing, so much death… it takes on a momentum of its own.”

The Marat grunted. “Thought I heard someone say something about a rockslide less than a minute ago. But maybe I imagined that.”

Aria arched an imperiously exasperated eyebrow at the barbarian.

Doroga smiled.

Aria sighed and shook her head, folding her arms a little closer to her chest. “You don’t think much of us, do you, Doroga?”

The barbarian shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I like the ones I talk to. But taken as a whole, you can be pretty stupid.”

Aria smiled faintly at the barbarian. “For example?”

The chieftain considered for a moment with pursed lips. “Be my guess that your folk never even considered that you might have it backward.”

“Backward?” Lady Placida asked.

Doroga nodded. “Backward. Icemen don’t follow the storms when they attack, Your Grace.” He gave Aria a shrewd look as a particularly cold gust of wind threw up a brief, blinding curtain of snow. “The storms,” he called, “follow them!”

The snow kept Isana from seeing Aria’s face, but she clearly felt the startled little flicker of surprise-and concern-that suddenly permeated the woman’s emotions.

The wind died away, and as suddenly as that, nine Icemen stood in a loose circle around them.

Isana felt Araris and Aria immediately touch shoulders with her and with each other, forming an outward-facing triangle. Araris exuded nothing-no tension, no discomfort, no fear: She sensed nothing but the steady confidence and detachment of a master metalcrafter withdrawn into communion with his furies, ignoring all emotion and discomfort to stand ready against a threat. That presence bolstered Isana, granted her confidence she badly needed, and she studied the newly appeared Icemen closely.

There were differences in them, Isana saw at once. Instead of bearing similar styles of weaponry and adornment, as the group with Big Shoulders had, each of the nine was perfectly distinctive.

Big Shoulders was there again, fur and leathers and a handmade but obviously functional spear in his hands. But the Iceman beside him was at least a foot taller and far thinner, with a barely perceptible orange tint to his white fur. He carried a large club made out of what looked like the leg bone of some enormous animal, though Isana had no idea what could possibly grow femurs six and a half feet long. The fur around his head was threaded with seashells, a hole bored through each of them to make them into beads.

The Iceman on the other side of Big Shoulders was shorter than Isana, and probably weighed three or four of her. He was clad in a mantle and breastplate of what looked like sharkskin, and carried in one hand a broad-headed, barbed harpoon carved from some kind of bone, and wore over his shoulder a quiver of what looked like smaller versions of the weapon.

Walker let out a low, trumpeting huff that was equally a greeting and a warning, and Doroga nodded to Big Shoulders. “Morning.”

“Friend Doroga,” Big Shoulders said. He gestured to the orange-tinted Iceman beside him, and said, “Sunset.” He made a similar gesture to the harpoon-bearing Iceman on his other side, and said, “Red Water.”

Doroga nodded to each of them, then said, to Isana, “Sunset is the eldest of the peace-chiefs. Red Water is the eldest war-chief.”