Chapter 90: Arriving in The High Pass
After saying ’goodnight’ to Nyrielle, Ashlynn clutched her fur-trimmed cloak tightly around her shoulders, shivering slightly as a sudden gust tugged at her cloak, threatening to rip it from her shoulders and piercing through the fabric of her dress like icy knives.
Today, the air was even more chill and Ashlynn had to ask Heila to bring in a small oil burning heater for the carriage to ward off the persistent chill that seeped in from outside. Snow lay in large drifts to the side of the ancient roadway and there were no longer any plants growing on the cold, rocky ground.
Whenever the road was exposed to the winds, fierce gusts shook the carriage and in one instance, the group had to stop when one of the wagons carrying supplies for Captain Lennart’s men was blown into the deep gutter that ran alongside the roadway. Ashlynn herself volunteered to help pull the carriage free, using strength that would have stunned anyone who knew her as a shut-in who rarely left the library at home.
As the sun began to set, however, the train of carriages and wagons rounded the final bend of the ancient roadway before turning off the road and taking a steeper one that led to an imposing fortress overlooking the pass.
When she saw it, Lord Ritchel’s castle immediately took Ashlynn’s breath away. All thoughts about the cold and the treacherous mountain road were driven from her mind as she looked at the towering fortress that had either been carved directly into the face of the mountain or shaped from ice that refused to melt even in direct sunlight.
Some elements of the fortress were familiar to her. A deep trench had been carved outside a towering curtain wall and a long bridge crossed high over the trench to enter the fortress itself. All along the wall, thick spikes of ice jutted out from the wall like icy nails ready to impale anyone who dared to scale the walls.
Human fortresses that used the concept would have used iron spikes but such works were prohibitively expensive and rarely seen. Here, however, it seemed so natural that Ashlynn found it hard to imagine the Frost Walkers creating a fortress without cladding it in an armor of icy spears.
Other elements of the fortress, however, were much stranger, serving no purpose that Ashlynn could understand. In several places, long platforms jutted out from the fortress, like icy fingers stretching out to grasp intruders or half-finished bridges to nowhere, glittering in the fading light with their own icy blue aura of dormant sorcery.
At the moment, more than twenty of those long platforms were lined with the bulky shapes of Frost Walkers, each of them holding a burning torch aloft in the growing gloom of the approaching night. Their crystalline horns caught the torchlight, reflecting and refracting it into hundreds of motes of glittering light.