Cold crept like a full moon into midday sky under the thick layers of bear furs and leather into the very marrow of his bones. As a son of the North, cold had been a constant. The descendants of giants decreed it a reminder of the brutality of life, a necessity for the forging of their twisted warriors. Its stinging bite was not just from the thin air’s chill of the Winnowing Peaks that granted the breath of dragons; it was the obsidian glass and stone walls of his home, the vacant eyes of his mother, the cruel games of his cousin, the unbridled rage of his brothers, and the shadow of his lord father’s hand over all in Grimstone Crage. Aye, he had known such coldness like a lover. Learned what sated her and softened her biting edge through pain and violence. But this cold was different. This was one of the nine layers of the Stranger’s hells.

  The bitter environment Montayne found himself in brought with it searing pain slicing through the scars carved into his back. Every ridge of the rippled pink tissue that formed the sigil of his house burned hot against him, from the peaks of the storm-wracked mountain pierced by a blue sword, to the crescent moon beneath it. The hateful words of his brother and the taunting sneer of his cousin blared in his mind each time he felt its sting. It was not long after that terrible night that they had discovered the forbidden flame that had blossomed in their house of ice.

  Fifteen days he had been adrift in the winding snow-drowned passes of the Winnowing Peaks. Sixteen since her death, and all that had transpired in its wake. Embyr’s blood still crusted his hands under the cover of moleskin gloves. It stiffened the tunic that sat against his chest and stained the wool of his trousers where he had knelt in the tepid crimson puddle of her life. He ached to be rid of it all, to wash away the evidence of this new reality where the fiery sunshine of the Black Dune Sea no longer imparted her spirited warmth into the frostbitten land of snow and ice. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to part with it either. The stain of her blood fueled his purpose while he lay frozen and aching and in the bitter frost of the wilds.

  He must live. To avenge her and cleanse the North of the plague that was his house.

  Wrath would have to keep him warm in the absence of an ember of hope.

  No songs or warbles of birds called out to him from the powdery pine-needled trees he passed. What creatures there may be in the wintry forest prowled with an agile stealth that he did not possess. This area of the mountain was quiet and still under the blanket of true winter, and the unmarred snow crunched loudly under his leather boots as he trudged forward through the knee-deep snow drifts of the pass. Scouts and patrols and bloodthirsty hounds hunting for the second son of House Fiuress had driven him from the well-traveled roads leading out of the mountains, his injured leg all but ensuring he would be caught in his labored, ragged state. But he had chosen his path poorly. He had no weapon nor food, and now found himself at the border of the deadliest region in the North: the Rip Jaw’s territory, The Maw.

  This was a place where no man dared tread, even the giant-blooded House Fiuress. No map dared mark it, for none wished to find it. He recalled from his young mind’s reading that the Maw was marked first by the presence of bone chimes hanging from skeletal trees. And ten feet before him, leading into the jagged glacial valley of the Winnowing Peaks, was an ivory tree smothered in ash, its twisting and gnarled bare limbs shot out from it like a lightning bolt, all adorned with various bones plinking softly in the light wind before it picked up speed in force and howled through the valley as a rabid wolf. The sensation that he was being watched trickled down his spine like flakes of ice, and he peered into the belly of the Maw for signs of life.

  Behind him, a light, melodic whistle cut through the howl of the valley and drew him into a crouch in the snow.

  Montayne drew the white fur of his bear pelt cloak around him and shifted to get a visual of the creature who dared announce themselves in such a region of the peaks. The snowfall was dense as a white curtain now, and the winds increased its speed. His eyes darted back and forth across the glittering white landscape. Nothing seemed amiss. He errantly reached to his side for his grimcleaver and cursed under his breath at his hand grasping empty air. His heartbeat pounded in his ears.

  “Come out, lone wanderer,” a honeyed voice sang, and echoed through the canyon. “You must be desperate if you think to step into the maneater’s Maw. I have fresh bread and hunter’s stew, and a hearth to thaw the frost’s bite. Come out, little bear, and be warm.”

  The rate of his heartbeat gradually slowed in his chest. She sounded so lovely, so kind. Warm. His insides constricted with hunger as if on cue. He was hungry. Starving. When had he eaten last?

  “Let us break bread, dear wanderer. Let us sing and be merry in the comfort of my cottage.”

  “Where are you, maiden?” he called out in desperate yearning. He removed the cloak of his pelt from his head and raked the forest with his eyes.

  As if by the forgotten magic, a cottage appeared at the base of the eastern cliff side before him in a clearing that had been bare only a moment before. She stepped from the doorway like a shadow gliding over glass. A gown of stitched-together raven feathers and silver thread hugged her supple frame, her skin as pale as the underbelly of a winter moon with blood-red lips formed in a welcoming smile. Her hair was frost-white, braided with strange silver pendants running throughout the plaits. Her eyes, however, were not cold.

  They were ancient.

  “Linger not in the storm, brave heart,” she said to him, voice as soft as snowfall. “Lay down the weariness of your soul at my fire.”

  His feet were moving without thought, wading through the deep snow towards her of their own accord. Had he his mind free, he would have turned and fled. But he found himself stepping through her door, blinded by the prospect of food and warmth and care.

  The cottage was larger from within than without, warm and close and dense with herbs and glimmering jars. Runes crawled along the ashtree floor with charcoal, the wild glyphs of ancient tongues and creatures appeared to pulse with life in the wood beneath him. Fire roared its heat from the large hearth that sat nestled in the right corner of the cottage, and his skin tingled with the return of feelings to his limbs and digits from the blaze of the cottage. His shoulders sagged from the release of wound tension held for weeks in the cold. Had she not wrapped an arm about him, he may have melted to mix with the queer runes at his feet.

  The graceful woman stood only to his waist in height, yet bore a great strength while she led him to a wooden chair at a small rectangular table in the middle of the room. Her hands were gentle as they stripped him of his wet and blood-crusted clothing slowly, one by one, humming sweetly through the activity. His lids were small mountains atop his eyes, too heavy to keep open under the peace of a tender woman’s care and the warmth of a lively hearth. She tapped him softly in a silent request to lift his arms and slid his tunic off him from behind. A fell hiss in his ear jolted him from his doze.

  “Fuiress.” His name on her tongue was a scorched curse. She moved with a feral grace to face him, her milky eyes marked dark and impending under sharply angled brows. “Who are you, wanderer?”

  A sudden feeling of falling back into his own body crashed upon him. As though he had been smothered under a smoky cloud and an ice wind had arrived to blow it from him. She repeated her question with fury. “I am Montayne. Once of House Fuiress.”

  The nearly invisible white hairs of her left brow cocked. “Once? The mark on your flesh speaks without riddle.”

  He closed his eyes and put his elbows to his knees in exhaustion. “Aye. No longer.”

  “One does not simply stop subsisting of their blood,” she snarled. “I should have known at the size of you. The blood of giants runs strong in you.”

  Her once mythical air felt at once so eerily human. Her eyes no longer ancient, only searching his face and body with disgust. “I know your house, son of malice. It is a curse upon my tongue. A matriarch of your line, Vyra Fiuress, darkened my doorstep decades past, pleading for my aid to ripen her womb. I pledged long ago to the gods of this mountain that I would not interfere in the lives of men, and thus told her. A fortnight passed, and she returned bearing gifts and promises of trade and kinship—for the life of a secreted mage is lonely and wanting of company.” The woman tore open her dress and lay herself bare before Montayne. His eyes roved over the milky white skin of her breasts and traveled down to the warped, jagged, disfigured flesh of her abdomen. The firelight of the hearth seemed alive inside the white of her eyes. “This was her blackened gift. She ripped it from me. My womb. My flesh. Its magic. To give unto your vile, depraved line so that you may ravage the realm in strength for centuries.

  “So tell me, how is it that you came to fall at my doorstep in the dead of winter, lord Fuiress?”

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  “Please,” he said with conviction. “Do not sour me with such a name or titles. I am no longer a noble son of the North. Nor any kingdom. I mean you no ill will.”

  The woman stooped in front of him, now only a foot from his face, where she searched his eyes, her arms straddling either side of his shoulder on the chair’s back. A light breath spewed from flared nostrils, and she stood up, never taking her gaze from him. Dread crept up his chest like an unwelcome inky ghost. Montayne saw vengeance written in the red lines of her eyes in her scouring of his soul.

  “You will eat, then you will talk, forsaken son. Think twice before weaving falsehoods.” She turned and disappeared into a small adjoining room as the final words left her lips.

  No sooner had she vanished did she reemerge, a large wooden bowl filled with an ominous dark green liquid and a loaf of black bread in arm. Noting the look of hesitance on his face at the broth, she snickered without mirth and set the food before him. “If I thought to poison you, I would never have freed you from my spell at the outset. It’s merely a healing broth of the windsprig root and some other herbs for vitality and strength. Meat will not settle in your belly by the gaunt look of you. Drink,” she commanded, and brought the bowl to his lips.

  He growled at being fed like a whimpering dog. Montayne grabbed the bowl from her and took a small testing sip. It tasted of the earth and wind and rain. Like the blooms of the southron kingdoms on a bright summer day. He drank of it then eagerly, the heat of the liquid calming his insides and stoking the flames of his furious hunger. He tore wildly at the dense, grainy bread and shoved heaping chunks into his mouth and swallowed it down with the broth. More and more she brought him, and he filled himself to bursting.

  He leaned back in his chair at the table, warm and full for the first time in half a moon, and stared circumspectly at the woman who sat adjacent him, both silent. “Who are you?” he finally asked.

  Her lips twitched. “I am Yurisna of the Icewinds.”

  Montayne suppressed a choke of shock. This was the witch of northern legends told around the fires to scare children. The tales of her had terrified him as a sapling, frightened she would rob him from his bed under the hood of a moonless night to feed on his soul to extend her eternal youth. His brothers had taunted him for believing the tales, and had quickly begun to use her against him. He had only secretly continued believing she was real in hopes that someday she would take him. That she would free him from his wretched life and end him. “Bloody hells,” he said in awe. “I must be mad. This must be a dream.”

  “It is not. Tell me your tale, wanderer. I would hear it and decide what to do with you.” Kindness and warmth no longer coated her tongue or face in her vigil of her enemy’s blood.

  For the first time in his eighteen years, Montayne shared with another the pain and cruelty that was his life. Gradually, the truth spilled from him. He spoke of his memories from the moment he could walk, how he had been seen as the weakest link of the Fiuress brood—a blight of softness in a lineage that prized only cold strength. His father believed cruelty and ice to be the fire in which worthy sons were forged. But while he ruled with iron command, it was Montayne’s brothers and cousin who took it upon themselves to shape the second son.

  He told the witch of the northern keep in Grimstone Crag where there was a subchamber carved into the mountain’s side known as the Hall of Echoes, used in the times of the old gods to train wild younglings and to imprison slaves of conquered tribes. Wycell and Viktar would drag Montayne down into its depths, blindfolded and bound, and leave him alone with no food, no light, with only the haunting sounds of mysterious, echoing screams bouncing over the stone walls for company. There he would spend days on end in pitch black, listening to dripping water, rats, and imagined ghosts. How his times there had made him afraid of silence still to this day.

  Then he spoke of the game they called Red Hunt. His brothers and elder cousin, Cristayne of House Obsideros, would send him into the forest beyond the Crag’s walls at dusk, with a head start and carrying nothing but a game knife. Then they’d follow—Wycell and Viktar on horseback, Cristayne with hounds. If they caught him, they’d beat him until he would lose consciousness and leave him to stumble his way back to the castle upon waking. And he told her of when on one of the Red Hunts, Wycell had caught him and carved the sigil of their house into Montayne’s back—the very same she had used to identify him earlier—using a hunting hook, saying, “If you won't carry our name in pride, you'll carry it in flesh.”

  He told her of the ransomed southern ward of House Fiuress, how she had come to live with their family when he was nine years old and she eight, more a captive than a ward. The daughter of House Luz had been the fiery rays of a black desert sun that thawed the ice that encased his withered soul. Concealed from his tormentors and house, their bond was forged in the shadows beginning with a note passed from her poking fun at the bushy caterpillars that were Vitasan Lirzyn’s eyebrows during their maths lesson one dreary sunless morning. He shared with the witch of their times spent sneaking out of the keep at night to stargaze atop the tallest turret of the Crag, how they would dream aloud of leaving the North behind. Of Embyr sharing tales of the sun that never sets over the Stygian Wastes she called home, of the warmth and music and dancing and laughter, promising him she would bring him there to her home, that he would never feel the cold again. That he would only know warmth.

  Last, he parted with the death of Embyr at his kin’s hands, of the day that would come to be known as Starfall. With a mist in his eyes, he spoke low and grim. The witch listened with a patient ear, never interrupting when the tears choked his speech or the fires of his rage set his fists pounding. The crackles of the hearth filled the room at his story’s close, his head dipped low to his curled fists on the table.

  “I have waited decades for a Fiuress to come crawling back to my door,” the witch finally said.

  Montayne lifted his head and stared into the fire. “Then kill me and be done with it.”

  The Icewinds Witch leaned forward, her voice a grave whisper. “No,” she said. “Instead, I will give you a blade. One worthy of your hate.”

  ?

  For three days and three nights, the Icewinds Witch remained mostly sequestered in her mysterious cellar beneath the floorboards. His entrance was forbidden. She would rise only to feed him and apply a sticky black salve to the wound on his thigh from the arrow, and he noted that it healed much too rapidly to be natural. In the cottage as he recovered from his starvation and wounds, Montayne spent his days reading the strange spells on stray pieces of parchment littering every surface and corner of the cottage, sniffing at jars filled with queer liquids or powders, watching the fire, and laying on the cot she had made for him. He was losing his mind, he had thought. The moon was not meant to be caged.

  On the third day, she had made an alarming request.

  “I need your life force, son of malice.”

  Montayne had given her a flat look. “No.”

  The witch sighed dramatically and crossed her arms, her foot tapping on the wooden floor. “Your blood, you ogre-minded fool. For your blade.”

  “It is yours, ice witch.”

  A sliver of light-blue ice flashed into her hands at the opening of her palm, summoned from some realm beyond knowing. She gestured for his hand, grabbed it, and drew the sharpened edge of the ice against his open palm. The pale witch whispered in a foreign tongue. The air of the room chilled, and vapor blew like smoke in the air between them from their breaths. As his blood rushed to the open air it turned to mist and flowed into the sliver. The frozen shiv pulsed and cast a soft red glow in the witch’s grip, disappearing with a murmured word. The gash in his palm sealed closed, the flesh free of mark as if it had never been cut. Montayne gawked at the rapid succession of magics suddenly displayed with such cool indifference. The witch vanished back to her lair without a word, leaving Montayne to grapple with his shock and confusion alone.

  At dawn of the fourth day, Montayne woke to the severe woman rocking calmly in her chair with a raven on her shoulder. Her eyes were hard on him where he lay curled with his back to the dying fire, then a smile lit the soft edges of her face. “Take up your sword, son of vengeance.” Her ghostly eyes flicked to the table.

  Upon the ancient slab of wood lay an impossibly long, fierce form of art. The sword gleamed with a blue sheen of cold that never wavered. Its edges shimmered with frost, and a sheet of ice coated the table where it touched it. He grabbed the sword and tested its weight in his hands. The blade was perfect. Its balance faultless, the weight impossibly light for its size. It whispered in Montayne’s hands—not in words, but in hunger.

  “This blade does not forgive,” she told him. “She remembers. And so shall you.”

  Montayne swung the five-foot-long sword in his hand. The with hissed at his poor manners, though he could see the faint smile ghosting her lips. Something felt strange in his chest and he grabbed at it with his free hand, nearly dropping the sword in his startle. A second, fainter heart drummed in his chest beside his own.

  “It its her life,” she explained. “She lives through you.”

  “My blood,” he said under his breath.

  “Yes, ogre. Your blood.” She moved to the side room of the cottage, vanishing then reappearing with a familiar item in her arms.

  “How did you get that?” he snapped. “Who told you of this?”

  She offered up his Stygian wyvern scale cuirass, and he snatched it greedily from her hands. His heart cracked as he gazed upon the only gift he had ever received.

  “I am a witch,” she said coolly. He could not wrest the information from her, no matter his efforts. Alongside the cuirass she had produced a pack with provisions for a long journey. “You will grab your things and leave me. You may never return.”

  “Never?” he asked, a sudden anxiety of being alone once again gnawed at his chest.

  She gave him a remorseful smile. “Never.”

  Montayne said little as he donned the armor, his furs, and his pack she had laid for him, and finally placed his sword in his back scabbard. He stepped through the door of the mystic cottage, a gust of bitter wind rose to greet him.

  Just as he stepped out into the snow, he turned. “Why help me?”

  The witch’s eyes glittered like snow under moonlight. “Because I want to hear the screams when House Fiuress burns.”

  She shut the door.

  The warmth of an unfamiliar sun bathed him in a brilliant white light where he stood in the snow. Hale and armed and restored, Montayne set off on his journey with a silent promise to give the Icewinds Witch her wish, and to make good on his oath of vengeance.

  For one day, he would return to Grimstone Crag. And on that day, the mountain would scream with more than wind.