Mostly, once he woke in their emergency camp of snow-houses southeast of the ice-blister, the Empty Lakes People didn't address the Icefalcon by name at all. But the forms of speech they used toward him all indicated that they thought he was one of their kin.
The idea offended him deeply, but not deeply enough to buy his own death by mentioning it. He noticed they addressed Ingold, Tir, and Hethya as their kin as well. Cold Death they did not appear to see at all.
Cold Death was sitting by him when he woke up again, most of her hair on one side singed off from her fight with Bektis but otherwise looking much the same.
"How is it with you, o my brother?" she asked, and offered him a flat-baked cake of honey and fried insects, a specialty among the Empty Lakes People.
He was so exhausted and so hungry he even took it. "As well as can be expected after my own sister runs away and leaves me to die."
"Has it taught you a lesson about shadow-walking?"
"Yes," retorted the Icefalcon. "Never to put you in charge of it again."
And she laughed.
Later that day she helped him stand, and they emerged from the snow-house where he had lain, and walked together along the shore of the steaming lake that now stretched for miles along the feet of the black rock mountains.
The great ice-blister still rose in its center, and steam and smoke poured from a thousand rifts and crevices in its sides. The waters of the lake churned now and then as crevasses or pockets in the underlying ice collapsed, and columns of steam would jet upward, marble-white in the hard arctic sky.
"Ingold tells me that with the magic of the mad Ancestor gone out of it, the Keep itself will collapse."
Cold Death folded her arms, a look of sadness in her button-black eyes. The day was warm, for the Ice, and the warmth rising from the lake made it more so.
Her breath barely showed when she spoke, and she'd put back her hood, the burned patches and blisters on her scalp showing through a thin stubble of new-grown hair.
If she'd escaped serious injury at Bektis' hands at all, thought the Icefalcon, she must be a far, far stronger shaman than he had ever suspected.
"The heat will burst the stones," he said. "Gil-Shalos tells me that the Keeps that were ruined-Prandhays and Black Rock and Hathyobar-were those where no Wise One surrendered life to keep the magic alive. They crumbled, as all things do with time."
"Me mother said Prandhays probably burned at one time." Hethya came over to join them, Yellow-Eyed Dog trotting at her heels. Prinyippos' illusion had begun to come to pieces-Loses His Way had said-the moment Twin Daughter's spirit-pouch was brought into his presence; it was Yellow-Eyed Dog who'd brought down the scout when he'd tried to flee.
The Icefalcon wondered if the illusion might have stood up more strongly had Bektis still had use of all his powers. Breaks Noses and his band, Loses His Way added, had never before had a warrior of the Alketch to torture; they'd prolonged the process as far as possible in a spirit of inquiry.
The Icefalcon wished he had been there to see it, though during Loses His Way's account-technical and detailed as all such accounts were among the folk of the Real World-Hethya quietly got up and left.
She seemed recovered now, though, bundled in the coat of megatherium wool and looking a little rested.
"Me mother says she found signs of burning where the stonework was repaired."
A particularly violent upheaval tossed great cakes and shards of ice to the surface of the milky waters, bubbles heaving and bursting with fog that melted imperceptibly into the miles-wide shawl of vapors covering the land.
"That has to be the Keep itself." Hethya tucked her gloved hands into her armpits for further warmth. "I imagine it'll all freeze hard again once the fires are quenched. And give all the tribes something else to talk of besides caribou tracks and megatherium dung."
"You underestimate my people, Ancestress," replied the Icefalcon gravely. "Should a chunk of rock the size of many houses fall out of the sky and make a hole in the earth, it would not hold for them such interest as a change in the seed content of musk-ox dung. Nor should it," he added. "One must, after all, know what plants grow in one's own range."
She glanced at him under her eyelashes to see if he were jesting, and he turned his face haughtily away.
The Empty Lakes People gave them provisions and sleds for their homeward journey and agreed to accompany them to the edge of the Ice. This was, the Icefalcon guessed, due to the persuasions of Loses Their Way. He saw the two clones many times, walking on either side of Breaks Noses, or sitting, talking quietly, with Beautiful Girl by the fire or at the shore of the steaming lake, Yellow-Eyed Dog lying happily at their feet.
Hethya also spent time with Beautiful Girl and seemed to get along well with her, but it was clear to the Icefalcon that Loses Their Way had no eyes for any but their wife.
"She understands that we must die soon," said Loses Their Way on the second day. "In a way I think I will be glad."
And his brother-clone nodded. They, and the Icefalcon, Hethya, and Cold Death, had gathered near the fogbound shore of the lake. It was already freezing fast, sealing in the Keep of the Shadow with all its secrets and the burned shell of an old man who had given more than he was capable of bearing.
"When we-when I-when those others-died," said Loses Their Way, "we felt it. It was-a dying. A wound that cannot be healed. We are not whole men."
"We are glad," added Loses Their Way, "at least that we helped our kin. That our names will be included in the Long Songs. And that we could see our brother Breaks Noses and our beloved Beautiful Girl, that we can die in our lands by what remains of the Night River Country with the aspens green with summer."
The Icefalcon opened his mouth to point out that the Night River Country was and always had been the range of the Talking Stars People, but he had affection for his enemy, so he did not. Instead he said, "I am glad for you, too, o my enemy. It was a good hunt."
Loses Their Way smiled like a sun god through a gold bristle of stubble. "I will tell you a secret. There is no such thing as a bad hunt, o my friend."
"Your sister tells us that the Talking Stars People have returned at last to this place," said Loses Their Way.
The Icefalcon looked sharply at Cold Death.
"They are camped on the other side of the lake, among the broken ice, near where the tunnel was," she said. "At least the mammoth I summoned for them to chase were real, and not illusion like old Pretty-Beard's."
"If you wish," said Loses Their Way, "I will linger when my people move on and go with you to their camp to tell them what I heard of Antlered Spider concerning the dream-powder given to Noon in the Summer of the White Foxes. With this evidence, even the evidence of an enemy, they must at least give you a hearing and a trial. Do you feel strong enough, my friend, to take on Blue Child in a single match?"
The Icefalcon rubbed his hands, bandaged and bruised within the marten-fur gloves, flexed the ache and the lingering weakness of fatigue in his shoulders and arms. "I have waited a long time," he said quietly,
"to meet Blue Child again."
Beneath the cold brilliance of the arctic stars he thought about Blue Child.
About Noon and Dove in the Sun.
About the Place of the Three Brown Dogs and the Valley of the Night River, the Haunted Mountain and the place called Pretty Water Creek where the Talking Stars People had their horse pens and falconries, where the white dogs of the Talking Stars People lay dozing in the ember-colored grass between the longhouses.
About the sweet taste of milk curds and mead and maple sugar, and the soul-encompassing sting of cold water after a sweat-bath, and the smell of blood and wood smoke under starlit skies.