Her port wing was a wreckage of fractured shafts and feathers. The flight feathers on it were gone, the secondaries almost demolished.
Myrrthe immediately sprang into action. She had to stop that bleeding. So taking talonsful of snow and ice, she packed Siv’s wound.
“That feels good,” Siv said. “But do you think I’ll ever fly again?”
“Of course, milady. Just think of this as a violent molt.”
If Siv hadn’t been in such excruciating pain, she might have laughed. “More snow, Myrrthe. It numbs the pain.”
“Yes, dear, I know. And ice will even be better.”
The ice did begin to relieve the agony. The bleeding stopped. “Do you remember your first molt, Myrrthe?” Siv asked.
“My first molt. Oh, my goodness, milady. I am so old. How could I ever remember back that far?”
“But it must be interesting for a Snowy because you might not even notice it, what with all your white feathers and all the snow and ice of the N’yrthghar.” Siv’s voice was growing thick.
“You forget, madam, that when we are hatchlings, we are not yet pure white. We’re rather sooty in appearance, if anything.”
“I remember my first real molt.” Siv’s speech was slow and dreamy. “I don’t count the ones when my down fell off. I was barely old enough to remember. But the first real one—Great Glaux, I was so shocked. Here, I had just fledged and really mastered flight. I felt so grown up after months of being a hatchling with all that patchy fluff. I had just begun to enjoy my plummels, primaries, secondaries, and my lovely lulus, when all of a sudden, there was a gorgeous tawny brown feather on the ground.” Siv’s speech slurred a bit.
“Time to rest, dear. You must rest.”
“Yes…I must rest.”
“Remember your great-aunt Agatha. She got better, didn’t she?”
“Yes, Aunt Agatha, of course.”
Siv hadn’t thought of her aunt Agatha in years, but her great-aunt had been terribly wounded in a catastrophic encounter with hagsfiends long ago in the Bitter Sea. During this battle, not one but both of her wings had been horribly maimed. She had been a superb warrior, but she never could fly the position of first ice sliver again. Nonetheless, she had recovered enough to fly in combat. This time as strategic commander of the Ice Scimitar Brigade. She had developed a superb talon technique with the reverse ice scimitar, a very oddly shaped weapon that was perfectly suited for her peculiar wing configurations. Aunt Agatha’s amazing courage and determination had been the source of that most famous Krakish motto: “Cintura Vrulcrum, Niykah Kronig,” which roughly translates to “Every wound a new opportunity, every curse a new challenge.”
Siv drifted off to sleep with one thought. I must heal. I must heal. I must heal. So much to be done.
“I need fish!” Siv said when she awoke. Myrrthe greeted this news with mixed emotions. She was overjoyed that her dear lady was hungry. This was a good sign. But at the same time she felt her gizzard crinkle. She needs fish! Myrrthe thought. What she needs is a Fish Owl!
“Yes, milady, fish oil is the best remedy for rebuilding splintered feather shafts.”
“Can you get on with it?” Siv pressed. But she immediately felt guilty for being so peremptory with her dear servant. Although her port wing sent ripples of pain through her body, she knew that this was no cause for rudeness. “I’m sorry. So sorry, Myrrthe. How insensitive of me. I know no more about catching fish than you do. Forgive my rudeness.”
“No need, milady. Just let me think a moment.”
“Take all the time you need, Myrrthe.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Polar Bear Named Svenka
In her day, Myrrthe had seen a few Fish Owls, and now she tried to remember how they performed the complex feat of plunging through the water’s surface and coming back up with a nice fat fish. She was fairly sure that one had to begin the dive from very high up and come in on a fairly steep angle. She thought about it several more minutes and then perched herself at the edge of the cavern and peered down into the water. She supposed she would have to keep her eyes open under the water. Not a pleasant thought!
“All right, milady. I’ll give it a go.”
“Good luck, Myrrthe,” Siv said.
But Myrrthe was already spiraling upward in flight.
She tried once, twice, then three and four times. She was keeping her eyes open underwater but she never saw anything. She hated the rush of bubbles and the deafening sound of the water roaring by her ear slits.
On her fifth try, a single word rang out in this isolated firthkin:
“WRONG!”
Myrrthe pulled out of the spiraling plunge and lighted on top of the iceberg.
“Who said that?” She looked around and saw nothing but another iceberg floating by. But suddenly, part of the iceberg rose up and a furry, clawed paw poked at the sky. Myrrthe blinked.
“You’re starting too high.” It was a polar bear. Myrrthe had seen them many times from a distance but never had met, let alone spoken, to one. In the N’yrthghar there was very little exchange or communication among species. The bear swam up to the edge of the berg and, resting both paws, peered up at Myrrthe with its small close-set dark brown eyes. The iceberg tipped, the edge now buried in the water. Myrrthe began to slide and gripped the ice with her talons.
She had never seen such hugeness, such enormity, such byggenbrocken. Every word for “gigantic” flooded through Myrrthe’s head, but then she realized with a start that she was not even seeing half of this bear. Its coat was thick and creamy in color and, although the fur was tightly packed, Myrrthe could see very black skin beneath it where the coat creased as the bear’s paws spread on the iceberg. Its shoulders and neck had a bunched look, and Myrrthe bet that, if swimming at full speed, this bear could ram an iceberg in half. Its ears, round and stubby, were rather adorable. “Look,” the bear said, “when you’re finished staring at me I’ll give you some tips on fishing.”
“Oh, sorry, so sorry. How rude of me!” Myrrthe said.
“You’ve never seen one of us close up?”
“Not this close.”
“Well, your loss,” the bear said blithely. Then in a more companionable manner, she said, “Might I offer some suggestions on where you are going wrong in your fishing attempts?”
“Please do.”
“It’s simple,” the bear explained. “You’re coming in too steep. Face it, you don’t have the power or the bulk to go really deep for the larger fish. You have to stick to the surface ones—the herring, the silver slips, the bluescales.” With one large paw, the bear swept the water and deposited a small mound of squirming tiny bluish fish on the iceberg. Myrrthe gasped.
“Bluescales,” said the bear, nosing them up higher so they wouldn’t slip off. “They’re running now. They’ll help your queen.”
“Great Glaux, you know?”
“Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. And as you might have noticed, this firthkin is rather desolate, few creatures about. Just me, really.”
“And who are you? How do you call yourself?”
“Oh, how quaint! How do you call yourself! I love it. You owls give such a nice twist to Krakish,” the bear said in a friendly way. “My name is Svenka. And yours?”
“Myrrthe. I have served the queen from the time before she was queen. I was her nursemaid, then her governess.”
“And the king, I understand, has been killed.”
“Yes.” Myrrthe did not mention anything about the egg. The less said about that, the better. “Have you heard anything of the wars?”
“Very little. King H’rath is dead. Lord Arrin has gained new territory on the Hrath’ghar glacier. They say that his scouts go out and press young owls into his army. But as I said, I hear very little. I spend most of my time alone and away from all that.” Svenka waved a paw dismissively as if to say that the owls’ world was no concern of hers.
“But why are you here alone?” Myrrthe asked.
> “That is the nature of polar bears. We are solitary creatures. We come together during mating season. And then we part. If we are lucky and have cubs, they stay with us until they can go out on their own.”
“Do you have cubs?”
“Not yet, but soon.” Svenka pushed off from the iceberg and rolled onto her back. She patted her stomach. “Two, possibly three.”
“In there?” Myrrthe said.
“We’re not birds, my dear. We don’t lay eggs. Our young don’t hatch. They get born. We give birth.”
Myrrthe blinked and cocked her head thoughtfully. “It’s a good system. Convenient. No nest building. No guarding the nest. They’re just with you all the time. Better than our way, I think. One might almost wish…”
“Don’t even think of it, Myrrthe. You’re a bird. Birds are birds, bears are bears. Glaux, as you call the great spirit, knows what is best for each creature.”
“But what do you call your Glaux?”
“Great Ursa, but it is all the same spirit. No matter what you call it.”
“But how can that be?”
“Are you sure you want to get into this now? Shouldn’t you take these bluescales to your lady?”
“Oh, you’re right, of course.”
And so Myrrthe did take the fish to Siv, but the conversation would soon continue. It became the first of several philosophical discussions between the polar bear and the Snowy Owl—until the night that Myrrthe vanished.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Vanished!
Siv couldn’t tell me about that horrible night without breaking down. “Everything had been going so well, Grank, so well. I was healing. Myrrthe had learned to fish and then one night…” She began to sob. “I begged her not to go. Hunting lemmings on a moon-bleached night in the middle of winter when their coats had turned white. How would she ever see them? But she argued that I needed the meat now to heal completely.”
Myrrthe, you see, Dear Owl, had an expert’s knowledge of lemmings and kept track of their cycles and movements. She knew their range, and where they built their nests and tunnels in the shallow spaces between the everfrost and the surface of the tundra. Unlike many of the other non-bird creatures who hibernated during the winter, lemmings did not. They were busy foraging, eating constantly, and doing what they really did best—making babies. No animal can reproduce faster than a lemming. Myrrthe often thought how stupid this was, for, in truth, it was their undoing. About once every four years, the nests became overcrowded and, like idiots, the rodents raced to find new homes. No planning whatsoever. They would just up and leave, the entire mob, often hundreds of thousands of them. Not heeding where they were going, many fell off cliffs into the sea. And they seemed to never learn!
Myrrthe was counting on the lemmings’ stupidity and her knowledge of the range. She knew that not far in from the firthkin, on the edges of the Hrath’ghar glacier, there was a colony that had started four years earlier and was about to burst from overcrowding. “With seven litters a year and eleven babies a litter, there must be squillions of them, milady,” Myrrthe had told Siv. So off she flew one moonlit windless night when the water in the firthkin was so still that nary a ripple wrinkled its surface. Myrrthe knew lemmings in any season. And Siv, who had flown with her on many past expeditions, knew that she would look first for the puckering up of the land into the ridges and depressions created by the seasonal thawings and freezings. These ridges became the travel routes for the migrating lemmings. Myrrthe would fly over these ridges and, as she told Siv, “Bring back a nice juicy little fellow for my queen.”
Siv waited.
As dawn melted into morning the next day, there was no sign of the faithful old Snowy. But Siv did not begin to worry until that evening at tween time, those seconds between the last drop of the daylight and the first tinge of the lavender twilight. Siv had not long to wait, for these were among the very shortest days and longest nights of the year. As Siv watched the lavender deepen to purple and then the purple turn to black, she felt her gizzard begin to crumble. Something must have happened, for surely Myrrthe would not let her wait this long with no food. And not even Svenka was around. Oh, Glaux, Siv thought. This cannot be happening. My mate has been killed, my egg taken, and now my dearest and most faithful friend is gone.
Siv knew that Myrrthe was much more than her nursemaid and servant. With her dear Myrrthe gone, Siv thought she would starve to death not from lack of food but from lack of those she loved. A wing could mend, but could a broken heart and gizzard ever heal?
Two days later, there was still no sign of Myrrthe, and Siv began to seriously doubt that she herself would survive. She could not yet fly. She had no food. But oddly, she felt no hunger—except in her heart, for even Svenka had left. She was trying to imagine where the polar bear had gone when, suddenly, the immense head poked through the water just as the sun was beginning to rise. The moment Siv saw her dark lusterless eyes she knew something terrible had happened.
“Your cubs? You gave birth and they died? You lost them?”
“No.” Svenka shook her head. Siv opened her beak but not a sound came out. The words would not form. “She’s gone, Siv,” Svenka said, her voice breaking.
“You mean—dead?” Siv asked hoarsely. Svenka nodded. “But how can you be sure?” The bear put a huge paw on the berg and ever so gently placed in front of Siv a snowy white feather from the coverts of Myrrthe’s wing. Siv blinked. “She’s molted. I’m sure. Myrrthe always molts at odd times.”
“No, Siv. I found her.”
Siv shook her head trying to understand all this. “What do you mean?” She blinked rapidly.
“She was torn apart.”
Siv blinked again. The confusion that swam in her eyes vanished. “Hagsfiends! Hagsfiends are the only ones who kill that way.” Although Siv had been wilfing seconds before, she now seemed to swell up in the classic threat display known as thronkenspeer. “Tell me. Tell me everything. Spare me nothing. I must honor her death as I did that of my beloved mate. She was no mere servant. She died for me, didn’t she?”
“Most likely. I think I arrived shortly after it had happened.”
“How did you know to go looking?”
“On the night she left, just before dawn I got a craving—as many expectant polar bear mothers do—for a bit of anchovy. I knew that the best anchovies this time of year swim near the fringe ice of the Hrath’ghar glacier. So I went.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Svenka Tells a Tale of Death
“I was gorging, I admit, on some of the best anchovies that ever swam in the Great North Waters. It disgusts me now when I think of it.”
“It shouldn’t,” Siv interrupted. “You were nourishing your unborn. What could be more noble?”
“Well, as I rolled over in the water to digest and pat my stomach with the babes inside, I was surprised to see a ragged dark patch appear overhead. At first, I thought it was a weather front coming in. But then tattered shadows began to skim across the still waters. Remember how windless it was on the night she left?” Siv nodded. “Well, there was still no wind. And the water was perfectly still and, with the full-shine moon, every shadow was printed on the water. It was an amazing sight. I had a terrible feeling deep in my gut. My babes seemed to roil within me, sensing my own fear. I knew that Myrrthe had gone for lemmings. I had heard you begging her not to go. But she was right, you did need meat.”
“No, no.” Siv shook her head in despair.
“Well, I decided I had to go a-land. So I climbed out of the firth and followed those shadows. I began to see that unmistakable silky movement across the glacier. It appeared as if the ground was pulsing. It heaved and swelled. It was the lemmings, white as the snow in their winter pelts, surging across the landscape. It is an unforgettable sight.
“And Myrrthe sailed overhead, plunging down at intervals to attack. The sea of lemmings would part, just like water as it meets an obstacle but, then mindlessly, the animals would flow back together
. They showed no panic. They seemed barely conscious that one of their own had been taken. It was as if their brains, what little they have, were fixed on one thing—movement. No destination in mind, no thought of their course, just forward. They were no longer individuals, single creatures. They were the surge, and the surge was them. It was easy pickings for Myrrthe.
“But unlike the lemmings, I could see that she was immediately aware of the danger. She veered off sharply to port. Her strategy was to get back to the water, any water at that point.”
Once again, Siv shook her head. “If only she had been diving for fish. They wouldn’t have followed her to open water.”
“Yes, indeed. They were on her so fast. I raced toward her, stomping on only Great Ursa knows how many hundreds of lemmings. I reared up in the night.”
It was Siv who told me this, Dear Owl, and it was as if she had witnessed it all herself. “You can’t imagine how it must have been, Grank.” She described this enormous white bear. “So huge, so immense,” she said, “that you felt she could pluck the moon from the sky.” Siv continued Svenka’s tale exactly as it had been told to her.
“But it was to no avail,” Svenka recounted. “For suddenly, a terrible yellow light began filtering into the moon-pale night. I saw strange shapes, like rags, streaking across the full moon. Now you must understand that we polar bears have little experience with hagsfiends. We don’t fly, and they don’t swim. I knew nothing of their ways. So although I batted at a few of them and I think injured some gravely, when that yellow glare began to envelop me, I felt completely paralyzed. I sank to the ground, crushing dozens of lemmings beneath me. And still they flowed over me, determined not to alter their course. And I, on my back, could see it all.”