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By Root 2972 0

frost, grown stronger and stronger, was an antagonist to be studied and countered, like a runagate thief with a knife. Stepping from the sledge, Chancellor pulled off his gloves and rubbed fresh snow on his nose and his fingers and cheekbones, and beat out the stiff, frozen mass of his beard. The rank airless heat of the church by contrast sent the thawed nerves flaring and the skin of his face felt like tallow inflamed: he knew from experience that his nose was haplessly running. He dried it, and began to pull off the shaggy, snow-powdered coat from his shoulders. Lymond, appearing suddenly said, ‘They tell of a stallion which went for a trot one cold day in Sslobodka and came back to its stable a gelding. They don’t say what became of the rider. Are you all right?’

Chancellor nodded.

‘I have three cases of frost-bite. The monks say we can remain for the night, and I think we should do so. I shall send a man to warn the Governor of Kholmogory and your friend Grey to expect us tomorrow. Will your business take long?’

Speed, and always more speed; because there was a campaign in the south, in the spring. Chancellor wondered which of the soldiers had suffered, and if it was serious. Not, to do him justice, that the Voevoda had travelled as he had, cushioned and canopied, with the warmth and bulk of the horses between him and the searing air from the north. Free of the forests, he had watched Lymond fly Slata Baba at her proper prey, as the Turkestan hunters did; or the Tartars who killed wild horses with hawks, lured to seize mane and neck with their talons, and with wing and claw, to terrify and blind and exhaust.

In the same way, Slata Baba took deer, blinding with her powerful wings; sinking through eye and muscle and nerve with her razor-sharp talons, until the huntsman, with bow or spear, could ride to the kill. Diccon saw her swoop once, with her great, sooty brown pinions, and lift a calf from the ground, transfixed like rotten fruit, in passing.

He could tell the sound of her dive, with its swishing moan of twice-compressed air, and the tranquil flight, beating slow as the waves of the sea, and the silly, weak chirrup, which was the only song she possessed. Seen from behind, her golden-tipped ruff pricked in cold, or anger, or preening, she looked like a ringleted girl-child. Then the pretty wigged shoulders would swivel, and there was the tearing beak, hooked below the soul-piercing stare. To hold her, Lymond had his arm gloved to the elbow, and even he, Chancellor saw, turned his head when the bird came to land. Then she was chained to her travelling post, since no man’s arm could bear the weight of a full-grown golden eagle, unsupported.

Hunting, he supposed, was Lymond’s private pleasure: it gave them also fresh meat most days to cook. For the rest, the Voevoda had found business to do in each of the towns they had passed through; and when they were no longer near habitations, he would leave the train and disappear sometimes to follow some small beaten highway, taking no more than two or three of his men and using the light sleighs, which could take a man four hundred miles in three days drawn by a single fast horse, small and broad-chested and wild, with fox and wolf tails, grey and red and black, hoared with frost decking its neck.

Sitting fidgeting under his bearskins, Chancellor watched him disappear on these explorations with increasing spasms of jealousy. With the winter’s hard training he lacked, Lymond could steer his sledge by bodily balance like a canoeist, the reins in his left hand and a spiked staff in his right, sparingly used, to hold the rocking sleigh steady.

He also travelled with his feet strapped into artach, the slender pattens of wood nearly six palms in length which Chancellor had seen twice before, worn by Permians, but not like this, slicing free down the blue, hollow slopes, with the snow rising like steam in the sky. The Voevoda held a class once or twice, for his cavalry, and Chancellor, safely ensconced in his tent or his sledge or his chamber heard the distant commands and