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Ice Country(51)

By:David Estes


As they continue to hold hands, they whisper to each other, laugh, whisper some more, laugh some more. Everything seems so easy for them, like one was made for the other. Like they never had a choice. Almost like destiny. As I pull back into my cell, I’m left wondering if it’s always been that way for them.





~~~





“Psst! Skye!” I hiss through the hole in the wall.

Everything’s dark. A few hours back, Big stomped through the dungeon extinguishing all the torches. Everyone’s sleeping. I should be sleeping. But I can’t, not without clearing something up first.

“Psst!” I hiss again.

“Sun goddess sear it, Icy! This’d better be good.” I can sense her face at the hole, her lips turned into a frown that could kill.

I smile in the dark.

“I’ve got something to say,” I whisper.

“Well, out with it, Icy.”

“Dazz,” I say.

“That’s what you wanted to say? To tell me yer name agin?”

“Nay, nay, I’m just saying call me Dazz. In ice country, icy means…”

“Spit it out, Icy. I’m tired.”

“Attractive,” I say.

“And yer not?” she asks. Is she asking me? Is she saying I am…icy? What is she saying? “An icy Icy,” she whispers, floating the words off her tongue. It’s the gentlest I think I’ve ever heard her voice sound.

“Uh,” I say.

“Yer smoky, Dazz,” she says, my name sounding strange coming from her. “But that ain’t nothin’ where I come from. Not that I mind a-lookin’ sometimes.”

I almost choke on the wad of spit that’s congealing in my throat. I’ve never had a woman be so…honest with me. Not that women aren’t honest, a lot of them are, too honest sometimes, but Skye seems to say every last thought that pops into her head. It’s exhilarating in a way, although I couldn’t imagine doing the same. If I said half the things floating around in my brain right now, she’d probably never speak to me again.

“Now, are we done, or are we done?” she says. “This feather-hard floor is callin’ my name.”

“Wait,” I say. “Nay, there was something else.”

“Well then hocker it up like the lump that always seems to be in yer throat.”

Heart of the Mountain, is she reading my thoughts now, too? I gotta get control of things again, if I ever had control of them in the first place. “Look, I just wanted you to know that I’m usually a better fighter. I really was surprised when you turned around and found out you were a—”

“A woman. I know. Full of curves and a mix of hard and soft spots and all the things that guys git all wooloo over. But even if I hadn’ta been a woman, or if you weren’t surprised and all that, I’da still’ve beat you redder’n the fire country sky. You can count on that, Icy.”

My jaw drops and I try to lift it back up but it’s dead weight. I’m thankful it’s dark and she can’t see me. “Now wait just a minute, you’ve never even seen me fight. I’ve been in more scraps in the last week than you’ve probably seen your entire life.”

“I ain’t tryin’ to compete, Dazzy. I’m just sayin’ truths, which can be hard to hear sometimes. Sleep on it and you’ll feel much better in the mornin’.”

Sleep on it? You bet your cute little arse I’ll sleep on it. And I’ll prove to her one way or the other that I can hold my own in a fight. Certainly better than Feve, who’s probably who she’s comparing me to.

“G’night, icy Dazz,” she says, completely disarming me. I lay down with my own shoulder and arms as a pillow, not thinking about proving that I can fight, but about whether she meant icy with a capital or lowercase “i”, smiling like a butcher’s sled dog.





~~~





Boredom sets in pretty hard the next day. People are used to having the right to come and go as they please, so if you take that right away from them, they get bored very quickly. At least I do.

All of us seem energized after sleeping, though, and when morning comes—in the form of a pathway of torches lit by a lumbering Big, still shirtless and so meaty he looks capable of feeding a village of cannibals for a month—everyone’s ready to talk some more. Buff, being Buff, suggests a game of sorts.

“I’ve got some rocks that broke off the floor,” Buff says. “I toss one to whoever I please, and I get to ask them a question.”

“A question ’bout what?” Skye hollers down the row.

“Anything,” Buff says. “Whatever I want. And the person who’s got the rock has to answer, and when they do, they get to throw the rock to someone else and ask their own question.”