Ice Country (25 page)

They usher us beyond the desk, through a
door, and into a large room, full of beds. As it turns out, the
place isn’t even close to “full up”, as Maddy said, and nearly
every bed is empty. There are only two fellas being treated, each
with similar looking head wounds that look suspiciously like what
you might expect a gash from a shattered bottle over the head to
look like. The way they’re glaring at each other, I suspect they
hit each other at about exactly the same time. Well, Maddy tells
them to get the chill out, and they do, pushing and shoving each
other the whole way.

The rest of us get a bed. Hightower gets
three, two side by side to accommodate his width, and one sideways
along the bottom for his length. His feet still stick off the end.
He wiggles his toes and grunts. The three healers that surround him
are scratching their heads and wondering aloud at how they’re going
to treat his many wounds. I also hear them say something about
whether Tower might be descended from the Yags.

Abe’s in a bed of his own, yelling orders and
curses at the two healers that look scared to be treating him.

Siena opts out of her bed, standing by Circ’s
side, holding his hand, saying something that makes him laugh and
then wince when one of the healers does something to his injured
leg.

Feve skips the bed, too, standing by the
door, his eyes dark, as if the king himself might come through.
Mountain Heart help Goff if he does.

Buff, now naked from the waist up, sits next
to Wilde, chattering away as a healer looks at a dark and mottled
bruise that covers half his abdomen. She looks amused, but her eyes
keep flicking around at the others, like she’s concerned for them
too, while another healer bandages her head.

Skye and I stand across the foot of the last
bed, where Wes lies twitching in a fitful sleep. Every few minutes
he moans.

“How’d this happen?” Maddy asks, breaking her
own number one rule: don’t ask questions. But this is a night for
rule-breaking.

“I don’t know,” I say. “One minute he was
there, fighting alongside us, and the next he was missing. And when
we found him he was like this. Did you see anything, Skye?”

Skye shakes her head and Maddy stares at her
for a good, long while, so long that Skye flashes her a warning
frown. “I’m sorry,” Maddy says. “I’ve just never seen anyone
from…”

“From fire country,” Skye finishes. “Well,
truth be told, until a few days past, most of us ain’t never seen
any of yer kind either.”

“Please, Mads. Can you just focus on my
brother?” I plead.

The other two healers are using small knives
to cut away Wes’s shirt. At least their instruments look clean and
rust-free, I think.

When they peel away the fabric, I feel a
shockwave of fear lock my bones up tight. There’s so much blood
that we can’t even see the wound. Despite the snow, which is red
and melting, the blood’s pouring outta him like a bubbling spring,
soaking his pants and the bed and the healers’ hands, which are
dabbing at his stomach with thick cloths that fill up with blood in
an instant.

“Pressure!” Maddy says and one of the healers
starts pushing on his gut with both hands, while Maddy and the
other healer finish cleaning up the blood. “We need more hands!”
she says, and one of the healers who was helping Buff rushes over.
“Get anesthetic, pain killers, a sewing kit, and more freezin’
cloths,” she orders. “The good stuff. Only the good stuff,” she
adds.

The healer runs to a cabinet and flings the
door open, scattering vials of liquids, which shatter like crystal
on the floor, spilling their contents. She ignores the broken
glass, rummages through the box, gathers the desired items and
brings them back over, setting them on a table next to the bed.

When Maddy says “More hands!” again, Feve
wanders over.

“I can help,” he says.

“You know about healing?” Maddy asks.

“Yes. I have herbs,” he says. “They’ll help
with infection and pain.”

“Whatever you’ve got, we’ll take it,” she
says.

Feve reaches inside his thick coat and
extracts a small sachet.

At the same time, the assistant healer grabs
the cloths and helps to wipe away the blood, while Maddy uncorks a
vial of a clear liquid, tilts my brother’s head, and forces it down
his throat. He chokes, gasps, but she holds his head back, pinches
his nose, and the liquid goes down. Then she opens another glass
bottle, selects a needle and thread from a small box, and wedges
herself between two of the other three healers.

“Herbs,” Maddy says.

Feve pours out the contents of a small skin,
sprinkling black and green flecks onto my brother’s torn skin. Are
they magic from fire country?

“Would you shut up!” Maddy says sharply in my
direction. “He can’t hear you anyway.”

It’s only then that I realize that I’m
rubbing Wes’s leg, saying, “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be
okay,” over and over again, even while I’m watching them try to
save him. I stop, noticing that Skye’s not across the table
anymore, but next to me, a hand on my back, looking up at me.

“Yer right,” she says. “It’s gonna be
okay.”

B
ut neither Skye nor
I was right. We never were. Nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be
okay.

Wes died that night from an axe wound to the
stomach. They worked on him for three, four hours, dabbing away the
blood and stitching him up, both stuff on the inside and the skin
on the outside. By the end of it my legs were shaking and I could
barely feel Skye’s hand on my back, her other hand gripping
mine.

The blood was gone. He was whole again. And
then he took his last breath.

I collapsed, fighting all the way to the
floor even with Skye trying to hold me up. She lay down with me,
curled up, her arm around me, holding me, as I sobbed and
shook.

Sobbed and shook.

Now I’m all cried out, torn and broken on the
bed that Buff and Feve carried me to. Skye’s never left my side,
not once, but even her caring can’t bring my brother back. I didn’t
even get to say goodbye.

And it was my plan—my stupid freezin’
dimwitted plan that caused it.

So my head’s down, my face pressed flat
against the bed, as tight and low as I can make it. I tried to get
lower twice, attempting to throw myself off the bed and onto the
floor, but Skye wouldn’t let me. She held me up, her strength like
a rock, bearing all the weight of my body and my grief in her arms.
Then she rolled me back on, where I am now.

A few of the others, those able to walk—Buff,
Siena, Circ with Siena’s help, Wilde—have come over to offer me
words of sorrow, how they wish it hadn’t happened, how they’re
sorry. But none of that’ll make things right, or bring Wes
back.

I wish for more tears, a whole lake of them,
enough to make the sum of my sorrow worthy of my brother, of the
man that he was. But try as I might, I can’t squeeze one more out,
my eyes burning with salt and fatigue and despair.

When Skye pushes onto the bed and right up
next to me, I finally sleep.

I
need to take a
break from my brain, but every time I try to push my thoughts away,
they come roaring back all the harder, pushing against my skull
like they’re trying to burst out, flying away on wings of sadness
and winds of ache.

I’ve been awake for at least an hour, but I
haven’t moved, haven’t opened my eyes. I don’t want anyone to know
I’m awake, because I can’t take their
sorrys
and
regrets
any more than I can take the awful memories that my
brain is spinning around.

Jolie needs you.

Wes is dead.

Jolie’s not.

Wes is.

Jolie.

Oh Jolie, Jolie—are you there? Are you really
in the palace or did I dream up Goff holding you high on the
wall?

With questions lingering still in my mind, I
open my eyes to the sound of voices. Abe’s, harsh and definitive,
rises above the others.

“You can do what you want, but I fer one
ain’t goin’ back to that place,” he says. “Hightower neither. King
Goff’ll roast us alive.”

Skye, Siena, Circ, Wilde, and Feve stand in a
semicircle, watching the argument.

“They’ve got Dazz’s sister,” Buff says. “He’s
just lost his brother, if we can…if we can only get her…”

“Good luck with that,” Abe says.

“I’ll go on my own if I have to,” Buff says
and I see him cross his arms across his chest. “Is anyone else with
me?”

Silence. There are quick glances between the
people of the Tri-Tribes.

Wilde says, “We’ve talked it over…”

Skye scrapes a foot on the floor, looking
down the whole time. I notice she’s shaking her head slightly, as
if she doesn’t necessarily agree with the decision that’s been
made.

“…and we think it best to return to fire
country, to gather as many able-bodied men and women as we can, and
to come back in force.”

“Nay,” I croak. I intend it as a shout, a cry
of defiance, but it comes out all garbled and raspy. When everyone
turns to look at me, I say it again, even softer. “Nay.”

Buff strides over. “I’m going with you,” he
says. “We’re going to get Jolie. We’ll break down the gates and
kill every one of Goff’s men, and then the king himself.”

I smile, my lips dry and chapped. “Yah. We
will,” I say, clasping his outstretched palm. “Raising chill and
kicking arse. Like always.”

“Like always,” he says.

“No,” says a voice from behind him. Buff
moves aside to reveal Skye, who’s moved within a few steps of my
bed. In my mind flashes memories: we strain through the bars,
touching each other’s arms, desperately trying to lock lips; she
brushes past me in the dungeons, so close I could touch her, if I’d
only reached out; her warmth against me, her arm around me,
providing an alternative to my grief. “You need to come with us,”
she says, and the memories come crashing down like a fallen
star.

“We’re going after my sister,” I say, my
voice strengthening. I sit up, swing my feet over the side, plant
them firmly on the floor. “With or without you.”

Our eyes lock and we’re both fighting it. The
need we felt in the dungeon. Amidst everything—all the turmoil, the
strife, the
death
—still there, pulling, pulling, banging,
crashing through everything we say, everything we do, everything we
want, like an avalanche, an unstoppable force of nature. But I
fight it and I can see in her fathomless brown eyes, she’s doing
the same. Me with thoughts of saving my sister and avenging my
brother’s death, and her with doing right by her people, both of
her sisters, one who’s alive and one who might be.

“Don’t,” she says.

I want to give her the option to come with
us, but I can’t. I can’t ask that of her when it’s suicide, when
it’s crazy. When it’s what I have to do.

“I can’t,” I say.

She turns and walks back to her people.

~~~

Buff and I know as well as anyone that we
need to let things cool down a little before we go back to the
palace.

So that leaves us to escort the others to the
border, where we’ll bid them farewell. Each of them—save for
Feve—has already promised me multiple times that they’ll return
with many warriors. Wilde even offered her own promise, and I
almost believe it coming from her. I thank them and smile, when in
my heart I know that by then it’ll probably be too late.

Abe and Hightower have the worst injuries and
will stay at Maddy’s for a while longer. Before we leave, I stand
between their beds. “Thank you,” I say to both of them, my head
bouncing back and forth. “For doing what you did.”

Abe sighs, opens his mouth, says something
I’d never expect him to say in a million years. “I hate that
bastard, King Goff.”

“But you’re his—”

“Slave?” Not what I was going to say. “Look,
kid,” Abe says, “I know you think we’re the king’s evil little
helpers and all that, but that’s not really us. We do what we’re
told because the king’s had leverage over us from the start. He had
my wife, Dazz.”

I can’t help raising my eyebrows, both
because Abe called me by my real name and because he’s not who I
thought he was. Not even close. Then I realize: He
had
my
wife.

“What happened to her?” I ask, dread creeping
into my cracking voice.

He just shakes his head. “Kid, you must think
I’m a monster. Taking all those kids, giving them to the king.” I
did think him monster-like, but not anymore. “Was my wife’s life
more important than theirs? I could only hope the king wasn’t
hurting them, was treating them okay, was using them as servants.
He said he’d kill my wife if I didn’t help him.” There’s sadness in
his voice, laced with shreds of remorse. But he still didn’t answer
my question. I don’t ask again.

Abe continues anyway. “I always said I’d make
up for the many wrongs I’d caused, but I never really believed I
would. It’s just what I told myself so I could sleep at night. But
then…” His eyes cloud and his voice turns whisper soft. “Then, last
night, when I showed up for my weekly visitation, part of my
agreement with the king, she was gone, my Liza, her chains left in
a pile in her cell, which was in one of the towers. The guard
passed along the king’s regrets, how they’d tried to save her, but
that her self-inflicted wounds were too serious to reverse. I
grabbed Tower and Brock and marched straight to the dungeons.”

I tilt my head to the side, bite my lip. Abe
could’ve fallen into a dark pit of sorrow, left us to rot in the
dungeons. But he didn’t. He didn’t. He came for us.

I grasp his hand. “I’m so sorry,” I say. “You
have more than made up for the sins of your past.”