Rebel Ice Read Free Page B

protest, but Daneeb jerked her to her feet and hauled her away from the skimmers. I kept pace with them, desperately trying to think of how to stop this. "She did not know, or think, Skrie.
    Her first time in the fields—I did not anticipate that she would—I am the one to be punished, not—" "No more words, Skjæera." She gave me a furious look. "He had just cause to put us all to the ice." Daneeb ordered the others to gather at a clear spot beside the fuselage. Someone gave her two of the
    jagged stakes we used to fix things in place, and then the headwoman threw Enafa down on the ice and
    drove the stakes through the palms of her mitts. My apprentice screamed with pain as her blood spilled on the ice. "No! What did I do? Why do you do this?"
    Galla came to watch. "You have offended the God of the living, and contaminated the ears of the faithful, newling." She smiled. "For that, you die." "Skjæera!" Enafa turned her face toward me. "Please! Stop them! I don't want to die!"
    Daneeb came to me. "Your blade, Skjæera." I removed it from my hip and stared at it. The blade had been given to me for one reason. One for which I had not yet been made to use it. "I cannot."
    I looked over my shoulder. The gjenvin had their crossbows loaded and pointed at us. If the chief gave the order to fire, every skela on the ice would be shot and killed. Which he would, if the transgressor was not punished.
    I did not have to rudely count faces to know it was one life or twenty-six.
    The chief gjenvin shouted something, and a crossbow twanged. Galla shrieked, clutching the bolt in her chest, and then fell over into the snow.
    I could not walk to her under my own power. Tears froze on my cheeks as Daneeb guided me over to Enafa and made me straddle her body. The child stopped screaming and her eyes went wide as Daneeb seized my wrist and hoisted the blade over her chest.
    "Jarn," Daneeb said against my ear, her voice low and urgent as she used the name I had not been called since my once-life. "You cannot save her, but you can save her suffering. Guide my hand."
    It was not Daneeb's duty to do this. It was mine. Unlike the other skela, I was meant to do more than drag the dead from the wrecks of their ships and strip the faces from their skulls. I was special among the skela, for my knowledge of the living body, and for knowing precisely how to remove life from it as quickly and efficiently as possible.
    I was Skjæera, the Death Bringer.
    Enafa did not scream when the blade came down, thrust through her heart, and pinned her body to the ice. She gurgled my name, and then went limp.
    In the distance, the gjenvin lowered their bows.
    Daneeb jerked the blade free, and made me rise with her. No one looked at us. Since Enafa was skela, no one came to take her face. As Galla was dead, one of the sisters released two of the jlorra, who rose and lazily padded over to us.
    Daneeb used her body then to block the sight of the snow tigers. Her gaze was hard on my face. "God's work must be done. Take the ensleg." She slapped the gjenvin's weapon in my left hand. When I did not move, she added, "You are no longer a body healer, Skjæera. You are a dead handler. Take payment for Enafa's life."
    Slowly I walked back to where the ensleg lay, still groping the air with its ruined fingers. It could not survive such injuries, I knew that. Enafa's terrible mistake was not in thinking I could save it, or trying to plead for its life. ' •
    She had touched it with her hands. Touched the living.
    I tucked the weapon under my arm and shook the mitt from my left hand, which I wrapped around one of the ensleg's. I no longer cared if any of the skela or gjenvin saw me. If this be offensive to God or D ? vena, let them stake me out beside her .
    The ensleg's eyes were open in the frozen red mask of its face. Blood rimmed those dark eyes, and suffering filled them. Then it gently curled its battered fingers around mine. Tears, not blood, inched down the frozen gore over