The spruce-trunk palisade of Osk-Vallen groaned under three fathoms of packed powder. Varnok scaled the drift where the avalanche had banked against the northern watch-gate, his boots biting crust that felt hard as pig iron.
No horn sounded from the catwalk. The watchman’s brazier hung dark, stuffed with dry needles that had never been lit. When Varnok dropped into the alley behind the salt-house, the sheer drop of the mercury struck his throat like crushed quartz. Ordinary air bit; this air had teeth that sought marrow. It tasted of old moss and wet copper.
Down the lane of split-log cabins, not a dog barked. Frost clung three inches deep to the cedar shingles, furred white and prickly. From four chimneys along the lane, the oily, jade-tinted vapor crawled downward instead of rising, heavy as grease, pooling in the gutters before sliding beneath doorsills. The stench made his stomach churn—a sweet, rancid tang, like hemlock sap boiled in lard.
A rhythmic, dull thud broke the stillness.
*Chonk. Chonk. Crunch.*
Varnok drew the heavy iron spud from his belt. He stepped through the calf-deep drift, keeping his heels quiet against the crust. Ahead, where the lane opened toward the communal meat-rack, a bulky figure in boiled hide hacked at the cross-braced oak door of an outbuilding. The man’s movements were spastic, frantic. Every swing skewed left, chipping grey bark from the frame rather than biting the iron lock.
"The latch is inside, Jorik," Varnok said, his voice level.
The marksman spun around. The axe slipped instantly from his mitts, tumbling into the snow with a dull thud. Jorik scrambled backward on his haunches, his back striking the frosted door. Over his head, three wolf-pelts were pulled tight, but his face was slick with sweat despite thirty degrees of frost.
"Get off!" Jorik clawed at his belt for a skinning knife, his mittens clumsy as hams. "Torvak’s men took the stores! There's nothing in here—just dry salt!"
"I want none of your lard." Varnok planted the iron spud in the crust between them, resting his weight on its pitted ash handle. "I want to know why the chimney at the Great Hall is vomiting bile."
Jorik froze. Recognition flickered through his red-rimmed eyes, muddied by exhaust. "Varnok? The lake-dog? You... you survived the ridge coming down?"
"The ridge missed the lake. It buried you." Varnok studied the man's hands. Jorik wore bull-hide gauntlets, double-layered, bound tight at the wrists with thick rawhide thongs. Even under the stiff leather, the palms bulged unnaturally, rigid and square, unable to close into a proper grip. "Pick your axe up. Your grip won't close around the haft, will it?"
"Leave it be," Jorik hissed, pulling his hands back against his ribs. "Go back out on the ice. The Baron has three dozen crossbows at the manor. If he sees you in the compound, he'll nail your boots to the floor."
"The Baron's men aren't watching the perimeter. One of his timber-skidders is already rooted into the lake road, growing quills out of his skull." Varnok took two steps forward, his frame lean and wolfish against the pale daylight. "Strip the left glove."
"No."
Varnok lunged without warning. He hooked the curved spur of the ice spud behind Jorik’s knee, yanking him flat onto his back. Before Jorik could scream, Varnok brought his knee down across the man's breastbone, pinning him into the drift. With his free hand, he drew his skinning blade and severed the rawhide cord wrapping Jorik’s left wrist.
"Stop—by the hearth, stop, it tears!" Jorik thridded, thrashing his boots.
Varnok peeled the stiff hide back. The liner was soaked through with dark, amber-colored fluid that smelled like boiled pitch.
What came out was no longer human flesh.
The skin had split from knuckle to cuticle, dried back into curling flakes like birch rind. Beneath it, the metacarpals had fused into a single block of dark, dense ironwood. The index and middle digits had stretched into two jagged, pronged twigs, complete with pale grey nodes where buds were pushing through the torn flesh. The nails had turned into flat, serrated scales of dark wood, oozing a sticky sap that froze into amber beads the moment the exterior air struck it.
Varnok let go of the glove. The sight did not shock him; it merely confirmed the sour rot settled in his own gut. "The Deep-Frost Pact," Varnok said softly. "You went beyond the boundary stone."
Jorik rolled onto his side, cradling the ruined hand against his stomach, dry sobs shuddering through his chest. "The Baron said the timber was rotting on our side. He said the deep groves had heart-wood worth fifty silvers a span in the south. We took the broadaxes into the Silent Hollow."
"And the Shroud-Elk found you."
"It never charged!" Jorik’s voice broke into a high, cracked whine. "It just stood in the clearing, between the roots of the grand elder-spruce. Its antlers touched the clouds, Varnok. White moss hung from them like burial linen. It breathed, and the needle-frost fell like glass. Torvak... Torvak handed me the black yew bow. He held a cleaver to my cousin’s neck and told me to draw."
A tear spilled down Jorik’s frost-caked cheek, freezing into a white pellet before it hit his collar.
"I aimed behind the shoulder," Jorik whispered, staring at his wooden claws. "I loosed it. The iron broadhead hit bone. It bled no red. It bled green water. And then Torvak and six men with logging chains swarmed it. They beat it down with iron mall-heads until the skull broke. They quartered it, Varnok. They hauled the brisket and the antlers into the Great Hall on three sledges."
"And that night, the mountain fell," Varnok finished. He looked up at the sky. The mists were thickening, turning from dull grey to the bruised hue of a drowned man's skin. "You ate the meat."
"The cold came so fast. Torvak told us the flesh had warmth in it that normal wood couldn't match. He fed it to the garrison. He gave Syla three haunches for the children at the lower cabins..."
"Syla burns it," Varnok cut in, his teeth grating. "She’s burning the timber to keep her babes warm. I saw the green plumes from the ice."
"She knows nothing!" Jorik scrambled up on his knees, clutching at Varnok’s greaves with monstrous, hardened digits. The wood gouged deep trenches in the cured calf-leather of Varnok’s boots. "She thinks it’s just cured spruce Torvak gave her! The smoke stays in the low rooms. The children are coughing up needle-dust, but they aren't shivering. Nobody shivers while the green wood burns. But when it goes out... you freeze from the inside out in ten breaths!"
Jorik looked up, his face twisted in desperate pleading. "Help me reach the river gate. The ice-saws on the lower rack—we can cut through the sluice before the dark falls. If I reach the low valley, a chirurgeon can saw this off—"
"No saw bites deep enough for this," Varnok said, his voice flat as pond ice. "The root doesn't start in the fingers, Jorik. It starts behind your breastbone, where you swallowed the meat."
Jorik opened his mouth to protest, but the sound died in a strangled rattle.
A dry, wooden wheeze tore from his throat. The archer dropped to his hands and knees, clawing at his throat with his right mitt. His back arched so severely that the seam of his heavy tunic split from neck to tail, revealing the pale skin of his spine. Beneath the white flesh, dark knots were shifting, moving like beetles under canvas.
He gagged, spitting a mouthful of frothy bile into the drift.
Varnok stepped back, raising his iron spud.
With a wet, tearing cough, Jorik expelled a hard lump into the snow. It bounced once and came to rest near Varnok’s boot.
It was an acorn, large as a fist. But its shell was not brown. It was jet-black, veins of living crimson pulsing across its surface, slick with Jorik's blood. As the freezing air struck the shell, two tiny, pale roots broke through the husk, twitching in the snow like the legs of a dying spider.