Daggers of Ice

Chapter 13

1010.

The Tenth Year of the Golden Age.

Peter.

The smell hit first.

Thick, greasy smoke clung to everything – to the trees, to the armour at Peter's shoulders, to the back of his throat until it burned. The village lay in ruin below the ridge, a sprawl of blackened wood and half-collapsed roofs. Embers still pulsed faintly among the wreckage, the ground beneath them hissing with heat.

Asura stood beside him, her jaw tight, eyes reflecting the last dull glow of fire. "Only a coward fights with fire," she said, her voice flat – too calm to be anything but rage barely held in check.

Peter glanced at her, brow lifting despite the weight in his chest. "Obviously a naiad would say that."

A faint sound left her, something between a scoff and a snarl. "It opposes what we are. We are meant to nurture. To heal. Fire consumes until there's nothing left." Her gaze swept the destruction below, and for a moment, the icy veneer cracked. "They didn't even take the food."

She was right. The storehouses were untouched – barrels intact, baskets of grain only singed. Whoever had done this hadn't come to raid. They'd come to destroy.

Peter guided his horse down the slope. The hooves sank into charred mud; the smell of wet ash mixed with the sweet rot of death. Smoke drifted low, curling around them like something alive.

He dismounted at what had once been the village square. A single tree stood there, blackened but still upright, its branches skeletal against the pale northern sky.

Beneath it: the bodies.

Men, women, children. Some curled as if they'd tried to shield one another from the heat. Others lay where they'd fallen, swords still clutched in their hands. Peter's boots crunched on burnt earth, and each sound felt like an intrusion.

Asura moved through the wreckage, her hands trembling slightly though she kept her chin high. "They used oil," she murmured, crouching by the remains of a hut. "Poured it into the thatch before they struck." Her voice dropped lower, bitter. "Coward's work."

Peter knelt beside her, brushing ash from a broken threshold. "Whoever it was, they knew what they were doing. No ordinary bandits could move through the northern wilds and vanish like this."

She lifted her head sharply. "Then we hunt."

Peter rose, looking out over the scorched plain, where the snow melted into rivulets that steamed against the char. "Aye," he said quietly. "We hunt them."

He stepped forward, past the line of ruined huts. The silence was wrong: not the heavy quiet of aftermath, but a watchful one, as though the air itself remembered the screams and was waiting for more.

Something glinted beneath the soot near his boot. Peter crouched and brushed it free – a fragment of blackened metal, jagged and curved. He turned it over in his hand. It was the head of a weapon – short, thick, forged for brute strength rather than grace.

A minotaur's axe-blade, cleaved clean from its haft.

His stomach sank.

The White Witch.

The wind shifted, driving smoke through the square. It carried the faintest sound – the creak of something strained past breaking. Peter followed it toward a collapsed barn. The structure leaned on what was left of its supports, its roof caved in. He gestured for Asura to stay back and pushed through the debris.

Inside, the air was heavier, choked with soot. Shapes loomed in the dimness – charred timbers, the skeletal remains of livestock. And then – movement.