Tusk Carvers of Khuitan

They say the glaciers are withdrawing to escape mankind. Though the ice floes once came down to the Chigaree Straight on the edge of the Xapian sea, a person must now walk north from that harbor for an entire day to see the shining walls of blue and white. It takes a grandparent to recall a time when a sleeping man anywhere in the land of Tasas might hear the nighttime whispers of the spirits who dwell in the ice.

And the spirits are worth listening to. If a man attracts the affections of such a one, he might wake holding the knowledge of a secret. He might let this knowledge guide him onto the ice fields. He might begin to dig. In his digging, he might unearth a sayoo—tusk of the long-extinct dalain, creature of magic and might. He might carry this tusk home and take up his carving tools. He might work for days or weeks or months or even years. He might score and polish and sculpt until he finds the true shape trapped in they sayoo’s heart. In unlocking this, he will woo the spirit and become the vessel for its power.

In Khuitan, the closest village to the retreating ice, it still sometimes happens that the spirits drift close enough to whisper to the sleeping inhabitants. But few wake from true dreams these days. The spirits are not happy with what men have chosen to do with their power. The emperor requires magi to serve for fifteen years in his endless war over the Gap of Ondor, where the horsemen of Ovasana refuse to cede control of the pass and the wealth of its trade. Generations ago, the spirits changed their ways and began whispering only to girls. But the emperor, who is immortal, changed his ways too. He began calling even girls to his war.

#

It is evening in Khuitan. The streets are empty, but windows glow along the snow-filled lanes. In one house—a stout rectangle with eaves that reach the ground—a man named Dremtin is seated at his work bench carving a drinking horn as the roof creaks under the weight of the snow. Dremtin is a man of minimal tastes, few words, and many thoughts. He is thinking about his sweetheart. Her name is Aldsa, and she is one who heard the whisper of a spirit. He feared for her when she went out to the base of the glacier. But she returned with a sayoo longer than her forearm, curved like a leaping fish. The work of carving it took her only three months, for she did not cease once she began. When she was finished, the emperor called her way.

Fourteen years have passed since then. Dremtin has had no news of Aldsa. But he thinks of her when his hands are busy and when they are idle. He does not know if she will return and who she will be if she does.

Down the street, in another house, a woman named Harka is combing the down of a yak’s undercoat in preparation for spinning. Her eaves are also thick with snow. But where Dremtin’s house is hard and spare, hers is soft and colorful. Woven blankets occupy every plane. They are laid out on the floor, set upon benches, draped over chairs. Harka is not thinking of the past while she works. She’s singing to herself and anticipating the fish she will fry for supper.

A few miles north, the glaciers whisper and shrink. At their edge, the spirit inside a sayoo stirs, feeling a shift in the cold that has held it locked in statis for centuries. The sayoo is small—only four inches long. It once belonged to a young dalain who lived a life of carefree pleasure before meeting a violent but speedy end.

The little tusk holds an echo of this dead creature. Happily, the spirit does not remember what killed him. His impressions from his brief life are sweet. The sparkle of sun on water. The creak and crunch of shifting ice. The bite of cold on his flippers. The jostle of the herd. The dense warmth of his mother’s body against his side. He is a carefree presence. He has been alone for a long time.

Something has freed him. The sayoo’s spirit finds he can roam. He leaves the tusk and slips into the ice, seeking. He spends hours exploring but finds nothing to engage him. The other spirits he encounters are crotchety. He does not listen to their groaning.

He slides from ice to snow. The snow is not as smooth to move through. But he doesn’t mind. He keeps going. He’s drawn by a light in a window, a man standing from his bench and placing his carving knives in their rack before dousing his lamp and easing under the heavy blankets of his bed. The spirit of the sayoo circles, enchanted. And when the man slides into sleep, the spirit whispers in his ear.

#

In the morning, Dremtin goes out seeking the material of his craft. He works in the shed antlers of the khandai, a species of white elk so enormous not even polar bears hunt them. From the points, Dremtin crafts pipes and drinking horns. From the narrows, he crafts rings and bracelets. From the flats, if he has the time, he crafts sculptures in bas relief. The drinking horns and pipes sell well enough. The rings and bracelets sell sometimes. And although Dremtin’s heart delights in making the sculptures, these rarely sell at all.

Today, the wind is from the south and the sky is clear. It’s a good day for seeking sheds. Dremtin hitches his sled to his yak and goes out. He has spent decades at this work. He knows where the herds roam. And yet today, he strays west. He walks for hours, drawing closer to both the slate blue ocean and the cerulean ice. At an unmarked point where the remnants of the glacier lie thin upon the ground—evaporating a hair’s width each day—he kneels and digs. It’s only when he unearths the blunt end of the sayoo that he understands what he is doing.

The spirit of the young dalain is ecstatic. But Dremtin is horrified. He pushes onto his heels, thoughts of Aldsa making his heart groan like the eaves of his house. If there is one thing Dremtin does not want, it’s a sayoo. He takes up the lead of his yak and trudges away.

#

He is unloading antlers in the fading day when he finds the tusk on his sled. It sits there with an air of innocence, as if he had not left it half-buried in a glacier.

Dremtin ignores the tusk. He is exhausted, his hands numb with the work of sawing antlers into chunks and heaving them onto his sled. Ten minutes later, inside but still cold, he lights a lamp to beat back the gathering dark. The tusk is on his work bench, artlessly arranged beside his favorite carving blade.

#

Two days later, we find Harka in the tavern flirting with the man she hopes to take to her bed that night. He is handsome, with a spirit not yet crushed by toil and no fingers lost to frostbite. Although Harka has many lovers, she takes care never to favor one over another. She abhors having a man in her house but enjoys having one between her sheets. This is the primary conundrum of her life.

It’s an inky evening with a wind that carries soft snow so that it swirls rather than falls. There’s a wedgestove in the corner, its fire burning low and hot. The vodka is Harka’s belly provides a slow burn as well. The young man beside her is warming to her notice of him, his eyes beginning to catch hers, drift to her throat, linger on her lips.

The door opens, letting in a blasts of cold. When Harka sees Dremtin, she accepts that her evening will not go as planned. Seeing the shift in her attention, the young man turns. “Dremtin the antler carver,” he says. “That one’s as rigid as a smoked fish.”

His eyes cut to her as he speaks. But Harka is already sliding off her stool. “He has a girl in the war,” she says. “He has a frozen heart.”

The young man gives her his shoulder and calls for another vodka. Harka goes to Dremtin. When she sees his face, her heart leaps with hope and fear. “Aldsa?” she says. “You’ve had news?”

Dremtin pulls off his fur-lined felt hat and knocks snow onto the floor. “No news,” he says. “I have something to show you.”

Harka tosses back her vodka and they move towards the door, ignoring the resentful look from the young man on the stool. They walk together up the street. The night is blue with darkness except where golden lamplight turns it orange. In Dremtin’s house, it takes only a heartbeat for Harka to notice what has changed.

The partially-carved tusk is already a masterpiece. It sits on the workbench, glowing under the lamp with the smug air of a thing that knows it is breathtaking. “I found it,” Dremtin says, shrugging out of his yak skin and taking hers to hang by the door. “I left it in the ice. But the tales are true. It followed me home. It will not be denied.”

Harka feels something hollow and cold form in her normally warm interior. She tries to remain calm. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “But Dremtin, it’s so small. You shall have hardly any power at all.”

They are both thinking of Aldsa’s tusk—the sweeping length, the detailed depth of the seventeen swimming seals she carved into the gentle arc of its interior. Although the war is far away, tales reach them even here. If a mage survives the fifteen years of mandatory service, she returns home. These weary women speak of balls of metal lobbed by hollow sticks that crack like deep ice when it splits. They speak of standing beside friends who are whole one moment and bleeding corpses a heartbeat later. They speak of skies that weep fire and men whose minds buckle under the weight of the horrors their bodies survive.

Harka has never been one for taking on the problems of others, but she feels a sense of foreboding as she stares at the tusk. Dremtin picks it up and runs a worn thumb along the profile of a yak emerging from the ivory like a swimmer about to breach the surface of the ocean. “It’s already in me,” he says. “The magic.”

Harka closes her eyes. She knows what must happen. There is no escape from the emperor when he calls. He is immortal because he’s one of those rare few who found not one sayoo, but two. He carved the pair into intricate battle scenes where men and horses seethe against each other like swarming salmon. His magic allows him to feel the magic of others. He will send for Dremtin. It is inevitable.

“You could apply for an artistic dispensation,” Harka says. She’s looking at the drinking horns and pipes. They are more finely wrought than they need be.

Dremtin’s eyes fly not to his practical wares but to the sculptures that never sell. He prickles, guarding his soft interior with brusqueness. “For that,” he says, “I would have to be an artist who makes something of value.”

#

In the morning, Dremtin’s brother comes by. Anchin bangs his fist on the door, causing snow to slide off the roof. He’s a large man with a neck as thick as a baby seal’s. “Brother!” he booms, letting himself in and stomping ice off his boots. “I need a drinking horn. I smashed mine against that bastard Choni’s thick chin last night, and it cracked.” He grins. “Waste of good ale.”

Dremtin sets down his engraving blade and moves an uncarved antler flat to conceal the sayoo. He needn’t have. Though Anchin is a hunter of great renown, he’s less perceptive than a blind yak when it comes to his brother. His wife has given him four healthy boys who are destined to become hunters also. Secure in both his prowess and his legacy, he is happy with his uncomplicated worldview.

Anchin goes through drinking horns at a pace that would bankrupt a less successful man. He rubs his chin as he considers his options. “I hear you stole Harka out from under young Takhin’s nose last night and kept her in your bed until dawn.”

Dremtin closes his eyes. He responds in a measured tone, as if this will imbue his words with the ability to penetrate. “I did not bed Harka last night,” he says. “I do not want to bed Harka.”

His brother picks the largest horn off the shelf and peers inside as if to ensure there are no holes in the bottom. Satisfied, he tucks it under his arm. He seems to have forgotten he’s not in a rowdy hunting lodge. He bellows at a volume that makes Dremtin wince. “Of course, you want to bed her! No one would blame you, after so long. And that one is not stingy with her affections, bless her warm heart. But if you’re not fucking the woman, what do you get up to, alone in your house or hers all the time?”

Dremtin feels the old, familiar blend of rage and exhaustion. He knows his brother will not hear anything he says, but he cannot seem to stop trying. “We talk,” he says without hope. “She’s an excellent conversationalist.”

His brother barks a laugh. “I hear she is excellent at other things also. You talk. Of course, you talk. Women love it when you talk to them and pleasure them at the same time.”

It is futile for the two men to attempt to communicate. They do not speak the same language. Dremtin falls back on his best strategy. He takes to responding to everything his brother says in monosyllabic grunts. To Anchin, this a signal that all is well between them. After he has oppressed Dremtin with a recounting of a recent hunt and the hilarious tale of a man running home without his trousers, Anchin turns and wrenches open the door, holding the horn over his head. “Many thanks, little brother. I will send a tenderloin in payment.”

And he will. Whatever Anchin’s faults, he never takes without giving. This is why the great hunter breaks his drinking horns so often. He does it to ensure his backwards brother always has enough meat.

Just before he slams the door, Anchin hesitates. He’s a huge shape on the threshold, the silver light soft on the shoulders of his shaggy coat. “Any news?” His tone is very unlike his usual one. “Of your girl, I mean?”

Dremtin manages not to look at the sayoo. “No news,” he says.

#

That night, Dremtin dreams the dreams of a baby dalain with tusks so short they do not yet hang below his whiskery cheeks. He dreams of plunging into cold water, of probing the ocean floor in search of mollusks as refracted sunbeams dance on the water above. He wakes and lies in the dark, his blood soaked with a sensation of latent potential. He stands, drapes a blanket around his shoulders, and fumbles to light a lamp in the dark. He goes to his work bench where the tusk is waiting. But it’s not the sayoo he takes up and turns in his hands. It’s the antler flat he shifted when his brother came in.

Antler as a medium has never felt satisfactory to Dremtin. The outer shell is inclined to splinter and the soft center falls to dust if disturbed. The ivory tusk is different. Dense yet soft, it will hold the finest detail his knife’s edge will allow. The experience of working on the tusk has already changed his sense of what is possible.

Dremtin wants to experiment—to explore the potential of carving in ivory. While he has only one tusk, he has a new resource at his disposal. He is vibrating with magic. It burns in his mind like vodka burns in the belly. He cannot put aside the idea of using it.

Outside, a wind whips down the glacier and pries at the eaves of the house. Dremtin runs his palm over the antler flat once, twice, three times. With each pass, he reaches into the material to change the nature of its fibers. He presses into the antler’s depths, drawing the layers together, coaxing the marrow from porous powder into smooth strands. The antler draws in on itself, becoming more compact. It takes several dozen passes before it’s as dense as ivory.

This takes over an hour. The house is so cold, Dremtin’s breath steams. He doesn’t notice. The world beyond the edges of the lamplight has faded to the echo of a dream.

He passes a palm over the antler flat again and feels that it is ready. His heart is thumping when he picks up his blade. It will be several hours before he sets it down again. By then, his eyes will be gritty with fatigue, his bones aching with cold. But the sculpture emerging from the flat will excite him so much, he will be unable to stop thinking of it even when he rises to tend to the needs of his body. He will chew down a stick of khandai jerky and collapse for a few hours of sleep. He will dream again of life as a young dalain. It will be five days before Harka comes looking for him and sees what he has made.

#

The same day Dremtin finishes his first antler carving, a woman in the south dreams of snow. Her name is Aldsa. She wakes disoriented. She has been in the south for so long she has all but forgotten the winters of her youth. She lies still for a moment, wishing the dream might linger. But her waking mind is intractable. It reaches for the concerns of the present. Formation deployment, unit rotation, the endless task of distributing food and disposing of waste. It would amuse her if she knew the people of Khuitan still refer to her as Dremtin’s girl. Here, she is Aldsa the Obdurate. She is the most feared of the army’s magi, second in power only to the emperor himself. There is a scar on her chin from a bullet that grazed her and six more on her arms and hands she has forgotten how she came by. Beneath her robes, the skin over her right hip is rippled like ice that melted and flowed and froze again. This is the memento of an event that almost killed her during her first year of service, when she got hit by the offensive spell of another mage.

Since then, Aldsa has learned to guard herself. She’s gotten used to both killing and surviving, but there are more scars on her heart than her body. Sometimes, she longs for the simple landscape of her childhood. The cold was always there—a persistent and implacable threat. But there was warmth as well. Warmth in putting on a heavy fur and chopping through the ice on the water troughs. Warmth in the snug houses with their glowing windows. Warmth in the hearts of the people who survive in that harsh place. It is different here. The weather is fair but there is no escaping the war. The struggle for control of the pass has twisted the lives of everyone in the region, trauma passing from parent to child and new horrors piling atop old with every skirmish.

This battle-scarred woman in her late-thirties is nothing like the girl Dremtin sees in his mind’s eye when he recalls his lost betrothed. She has survived these fourteen years, but sometimes she wishes she had not.

When she gives up and lets the dream depart, Aldsa rises from her bed. Her page has already delivered the morning’s messages. Leafing through them, she goes still when she encounters a missive containing names that leap off the page.

Khuitan. Sayoo. A new mage. Dremtin, the man who once asked a shy girl whose worth most people overlooked to marry him, will be called to the front.

#

The imperial messenger who comes to Khuitan does not deign to stay the night. He rides in on a lathered horse, his spare mount tied behind. He does not step down from the saddle. He hands a scroll to Anchin, who has come into the street to meet this messenger because he is the most formidable hunter in town. If the rider is impressed by the other man’s wide shoulders and khandai jacket, it doesn’t show. “See this reaches its recipient.” The man’s eyes are small and flat with the annoyance he feels at having been tasked to ride such a long way from anything comfortable or interesting. He turns his horse and trots off without waiting for a reply.

Anchin isn’t much a reader. But he recognizes his brother’s name. He storms to the north side of town, aware of the town’s held breath. He bangs into Dremtin’s house, strides across the floor, and flings the scroll onto the work bench. He picks up the little sayoo, knocking over the antler stand Dremtin has crafted to hold it. “Brother!” he cries. “What do you mean by this? I am your only living family and yet it takes an imperial messenger to tell me you’ve become a mage.” Anchin’s face is red, both with the embarrassment of being surprised and the sting of being left out on a secret.

Dremtin rights the tipped-over stand. He thinks of all the times he’s tried to speak to his brother, all the times his carefully-chosen words have failed to convey meaning. The sayoo is nowhere near fully carved. It will be months or years before Dremtin finds the true shape of its heart. He has now made three sculptures of condensed khandai antler. They sit on a shelf to the left—three works of art that will one day travel far from this place. One will end up in a museum, one in the home of a wealthy collector, and one will belong to the emperor himself until it is stolen on the night of his assassination.

Anchin doesn’t see them. He’s staring into his brother’s upturned face. When Dremtin says, “I was going to,” in a voice nearly too low to hear, Anchin slams the sayoo down, making Dremtin wince. “You are not made for war,” he says. “You should have left it in the ice, you fool.” He turns and strides out, leaving Dremtin with no opportunity to tell him that’s exactly what he did.

#

Dremtin goes to Harka. She is waiting, for Khuitan is too small a town for her not to have heard about the imperial messenger and Anchin’s angry face. She opens the door before he knocks and pulls him into a hug. She coaxes him to sit before her on a pile of woven blankets. He sets his head in her hands, feeling the warmth of her palms, the undemanding affection in her touch. “Your brother is a pile of dung,” she says when he tells her what happened. “He means no harm but he stinks up every place he goes. How long do you have to answer the summons?”

Dremtin thinks of the message, which was terse and precise. “As long as it takes to finish carving the sayoo and two more weeks besides.”

Harka considers this. “So, never finish carving?” It seems a simple solution to her.

Dremtin closes his eyes and leans against her. “I must release the shape as it reveals itself.”

It’s not the first time he’s said something Harka cannot understand. She doesn’t miss a beat. “Then you go to the city of Khot,” she says. “They say the sun rises every day there, all year round. Even in winter you can go outside with only a quilted jacket on. Artisans are revered above hunters. You can find a patron. You can apply for artistic dispensation and avoid the war.”

Dremtin cannot deny this is a good plan. But he also knows he cannot leave. He needs the dark days of winter, the cold wall of the glaciers blocking the view to the north. He needs the numbing bite of cold in his fingers—the contrast between the frozen world outside and the hospitable warmth of his studio. And he needs this—Harka—the one person in the world he can talk to.

“I can’t,” he says. And she says nothing more. He sits with her until she offers him dinner. He declines and walks home, his frozen heart heavy in his chest.

#

That night, Dremtin dreams again of the baby dalain. He wakes and waits for dawn, quivering with a need he’s felt once before. When the sky is ethereal with first light, he goes to Harka. “The second tusk,” he says. “It’s calling for me.”

She wants to go with him. He says he’ll be faster alone. She watches him trudge away—a dark shape against the flat white street. She goes to work on pounding the coarse outer hairs of a yak’s coat into felt. A few hours later, a fitful snow begins to fall. Harka walks to Dremtin’s house, a keen wind stinging her cheeks. The place is empty. She stirs up the embers in the wedgestove and picks up the sayoo. She turns it in her hands, sets it back on its stand, and goes to the window. The snow is thick now, swirling on the air, making the nearest house look fuzzy and dim. Her heart struggles to beat under the weight of her foreboding.

#

Out near the foot of the glacier, Dremtin is digging. He’s aware of the whipping wind and falling temperature, but his need to find the second tusk is too great to heed these warnings. This sayoo is buried deeper than the first. He has brought a pick, but the going is slow. He’s spent his life wielding tools of precision, not of brute force. His swings are ineffectual, his grip weak in his mittens. By the time he pauses to rub some life into his frozen hands, it is too late. He cannot see the glacier. His yak has gone off home and her tracks have filled with snow.

Dremtin is alone in a world of white. He doesn’t know which way Khuitan lies, and he knows better than to wander. He decides the only thing he can do is keep digging.

He swings the pick again and again. He digs until he can’t see. He spends a few minutes heaping snow into a mound to huddle against, but he’s more exhausted than he realized. The sweat of his labor is freezing inside his clothes. He has miscalculated. He understands this. The spirit of the dalain is frantic, but Dremtin’s new magic is too weak to be of use. He lies down and curls in on himself. It’s not long before his consciousness begins to drift. When he stops feeling the cold, he knows the end is near. He finds it comforting to realize he will never have to leave his beloved north.

#

 Dremtin wakes to a sensation of painful prickling. He gasps and struggles against a heavy weight. He begins to panic, thinking he’s buried in snow. But the weight slides off. It’s only a khandai skin. He pushes his fingers into the plush depths of the shaggy coat. He is on a wide bed in a snug room. He can hear voices. They are coming from beyond an open door. His brother’s house is one of the few in town that has more than one room. “Anchin,” he mumbles. He remembers swinging the pick, the blizzard, the muffling cold. He looks at his hands. They are covered in blisters and bright patches of frostbite. He lies back, relieved. He will not lose any fingers to his folly.

A shape appears in the doorway. “Brother!” Anchin crosses the floor and thumps himself onto the foot of the bed. “You are a fool. That Harka made me take my dogs out as soon as the snowfall slowed. I told her idiots deserve their deaths, but she wouldn’t leave me alone. Even with so many lovers—all of them better-looking and more interesting than you—she could not stand by and let nature takes its course.”

His voice is overloud, his body so bulky Dremtin worries the bed will collapse. But his grin is huge. His voice is full of an affection Dremtin feels he does not deserve. Dremtin finds himself smiling. “Thank you,” he says. “I made a mistake.”

But Anchin is already striding out of the room. There is a commotion beyond the threshold. The slam of a door. The piping voices of Dremtin’s nephews. A moment later, Harka is there. She sits besides him on the bed, takes his tender hand, and presses an uncarved sayoo against his palm. “You reached it,” she said. “It was too dark for you to see.”

Dremtin closes his eyes and leans his head against her shoulder, feeling the soft bristle of her yak-yarn sweater against his cheek.

His brother makes him eat an enormous steak before he’ll let him leave. Dremtin returns to his house and is relived see his yak in her shed. He goes inside. He sets the second sayoo on his workbench. He falls into bed. When he wakes, it has disappeared.

#

Harka brings they sayoo back to him at first light. “It was on my bed. Right on top of the blanket.” She is agitated, blowing on her fingers because she hurried out without mittens. “It must have gotten confused,” she says. “I’m no carver. I work in hair and yarn and felt. Not bone. Never bone.” But when she gets home, the sayoo is already there, waiting on the stool before her loom.

She takes it straight back to Dremtin, who shakes his head. “It has chosen you.”

She presses her lips together. “What if I refuse to have anything to do with it? What if I throw it into the snow every time I find it in my house?”

Dremtin shrugs. “One way or another, it will have its way. When you’re ready, let me know. I’ll give you a sharp blade and some material to practice on. We’ll take it slow.”

She considers him, her eyes calculating. “Fine.” She has never been one to fight a losing battle. “I’ll let you teach me how to carve if you apply for artistic dispensation. Send that.” She points at the finest of the three carvings. It’s the one that will be stolen from the emperor’s palace one day. “If that doesn’t convince him you shouldn’t die in a pointless war, there’s no hope anyway.”

#

Three weeks later, the emperor proposes a treaty. No one thinks this is the end of the conflict, least of all the two men who make the deal. The Aklhaha of Ovasana has generations worth of history showing him that the emperor will never stop trying to bring more of the world under he sway. And indeed, the emperor is already scheming to break the agreement.

But it’s a much-needed reprieve for those who do the fighting. Aldsa is brought off the front and offered honors for all she has done. She is staying in the palace when a page comes to her rooms in the middle of the night. The embarrassed young man bangs on her door until she answers, saying the emperor desires her company. This is not unusual. Immortality doesn’t suit the emperor and he’s often restless when his household is asleep.

Aldsa is restless too. Without the demands of active conflict, the ghosts of those she has killed infiltrate her slumber. She follows the page through three formal gardens and a maze of hallways to an atrium where a single light is burning. The emperor is wearing a robe of spun silk and staring at a sculpture standing on a table in the middle of the room.

Aldsa stops, arrested by some whisper of her magic. Her sayoo is back in her rooms. The spirit of the dalain that once bore that tusk is very different from that of the baby animal that twice coaxed Dremtin out into the cold. Aldsa’s dalain was a venerable but violent patriarch—one of the few of his species who deviated in diet from mollusks. Eschewing a life nosing along the ocean floor, he hunted and ate baby seals. This made him larger than his peers, with a grease-stained front and neck so thick even a tall man could not have encompassed it in the circle of his arms. His tusks grew too. One was straight, like most dalain tusks. But the other, the one Aldsa found, developed a sweep that made it jut to the side while the dalain lived and gave her carving its unique arced shape after his death.

Something in the carving on the emperor’s desk stirs up Aldsa’s power. Usually when the magic rises, it is violent like her dalain was violent. But this is something different. She feels attracted. She feels curious. She hovers, uncertain for the first time in years. “What is that?”

The emperor looks up. His eyes are pale gray. According to legend, they were once brown but the color faded with his humanity. “It’s from your village,” he says. “The new mage has petitioned for artistic dispensation.”

Aldsa feels her breath catch. She steps forward, her magic vibrating. She picks up the carving. At a glance, it is perhaps only spectacular to one who can appreciate the extreme fineness of the detail. It’s a simple scene rendered in relief so deep several of the characters are held in place by one small point of contact only. It’s the scene of a man and his dogs arrayed around a campfire with the packed sled nearby.

Aldsa isn’t sure why it brings tears to her eyes. There is something in the dogs—the way their ears and eyes tip towards their human companion. There is something in the man—the way his hand rests on the flank of one dog while his toes tuck against the rump of another. The sculpture is just a carving. But it is also a story. Looking at it, Aldsa feels affection and peace—the joy of connecting with other living beings despite the dark and the cold.

Something stirs in her heart. She has thought of Dremtin often since she heard of his discovery of a sayoo. She has anticipated his coming, and she has feared it. Now, she feels both relief and disappointment. “You will grant his request,” she says. It’s not a question. It’s not a request. It is merely something to be acknowledged.

“You will grant it,” the emperor says. He’s not looking at her. He has eyes for nothing but the carving. “With the war halted, you need something to do. I’m putting you in charge of the younger magi. None of them are good for much. I need you to change that before the fighting resumes. And as part of your duties, you will handle this.”

Aldsa bows and departs, her magic quiet in her breast. She writes to Dremtin, granting the dispensation. She also tells him a little of her war, of her life, of her understanding that she can never go home. Although she will never forget him and wishes him well, she releases him for their engagement.

#

When the imperial messenger returns to Khuitan, his attitude makes him unrecognizable. He asks to be directed to the home of Dremtin the artist, where he delivers Aldsa’s message and a string of saltwater pearls. The latter is from the emperor. It is payment for the carving. One pearl alone is worth more than everything Dremtin owns.

Dremtin does not want the pearls. But Harka is with him when the messenger arrives, for she has been diligent in her dedication to learning the skills that will give her the ability to unlock the hidden shape inside her sayoo. “You can’t send them back,” she hisses when she sees the direction Dremtin’s thoughts are going. “Just hide them. Tell no one they’re here.”

#

When Anchin hears about the broken engagement, he is delighted. “Don’t let it get to you,” he says, misunderstanding his brother as usual. “You haven’t seen her in fourteen years! Harka is here. Marry that one, brother. I want nephews! I want nieces! I want to see you with a family so large we’ll have to build you a bigger house. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you have all the meat you need.”

#

The next morning, Harka comes to practice carving. Dremtin lets her in. He watches her remove her jacket and settle herself onto a stool. When he does not move to join her at the work bench, she looks up at him. He notes the graceful line of her neck, the appealing upturned edges of her mouth, the disarming warmth in her eyes. He says, “Do you want to marry me?”

She tilts her head to the side, ready for the punchline. “No. Why? Do you want to marry me?”

Dremtin feels a surge of relief. He laughs. “Not at all.” He finds himself smiling a real smile—something he hasn’t done since before his engagement. He doesn’t know it yet, but his frozen heart has just begun to thaw. “I never wanted to marry Aldsa either.” He settles onto his stool and takes up his knife. “But I liked her. I thought I could make it work.”

Harka takes Dremtin’s hand. “I know,” she says. “I know.”

Silent and invisible, the spirit of the baby dalain leaps between them, filling both their hearts with joy.

#

And so, Anchin never gets his nephews. But a few years later, when one of his boys finds himself afflicted with nightmares and self-loathing after his first hunt, it’s his uncle Dremtin the lad will go to. By then, Dremtin will be the greatest artist in Tasas. His success will have changed Khuitan. People will travel to the country’s most northern village in a steady trickle to see him, but Dremtin will remain as rigid as a dried fish. Even as his fame grows, he will continue to refuse to leave his studio except to wander towards the glacier and collect the shed antlers of the great khandai.

The travelers will need to be put up somewhere. They will need to eat and be entertained while they wait for Dremtin to select the sculpture he will allow them to purchase. A new inn will be built and the young man Harka once disappointed will begin to conduct dog-sled tours. He will charge three pennies to bundle visitors in yak skins and carry them out to see the glittering cerulean wall of the retreating glacier.

Dremtin will never learn to be easy with his fame. It’s Harka who will convince him to let her sell some pearls and build a larger studio with an adjoined gallery. She will build herself a home attached to the other side. She is the one who will handle the visitors, delighting in the abundance of young men with sun-tanned cheeks and bodies in need of warming.

She will have finished carving her sayoo by then. But she will never need to apply for artistic dispensation. For the war in the south will never revive. After receiving Dremtin’s carving and spending an entire year contemplating its power, the emperor will realize that fighting and conquest hold no further interest for him. He will never beak the treaty. He will instead study the mystery of what connects a man and the dogs who pull his sled, or a woman and the orphan she takes into her care when she already has three starving children, or a battle-ruined horse and the skinny cat who seeks warmth in its stall. The emperor will see the ways in which his war has destroyed souls and also fused bonds between them. With Aldsa by his side, he will pursue the questions of why music is sweet, why tears come when one is both happy and one is sad, why a faint scent can bring back the feeling of a time long forgotten.

But back to Dremtin’s nephew. The night he seeks his uncle’s company will begin with tears and end in smiles. He will be soothed by Dremtin’s quiet but attentive sympathy. He will be enchanted by the carving knifes arranged in a rack along the wall. He will be inflamed by the idea of a craft he can apply himself to without killing anything. Dremtin will sit him down with a knife and a bit of antler. He will let the boy stab his finger, ruin several good blades, and run off home with his first badly-inscribed drinking horn to give to his father. Anchin will have lost his habit of breaking horns by then but will happily knock his off the table by accident so he can use the one his boy made instead.

Out beyond the edge of the thriving town, the glacier will slow its retreat. For although the emperor will one day be assassinated by men who have forgotten the horrors of war, this won’t happen until the peace has held for many hundreds of years. In this window of time, there will be space for people to love each other, love their work, and find the time to make art and music and light. And for the years remaining to Dremtin, the spirit of the baby dalain will know he was right about life all along.