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Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

A DREAM OF ICE

Also by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

A Vision of Fire

PROLOGUE

Exile.

The word stuck in Azha’s memory like an angry barb. The only thing that stung more was the name and face of the traitor, that serene lunatic who had assumed rights and powers no Galderkhaani should ever possess.

We trusted each other with everything, she thought angrily, but now I alone pay for his sins.

Wisps of wet cloud and red hair whipped across Azha’s face as her airship glided east, hundreds of feet above the white, icy surface. Balanced on the rigging with several dogbane-fiber ropes looped over her forearms in case she lost her footing, the former Cirrus Farm commander sidled along while completing her scan of the enormous inflated hortatur skin above her. She did not like what she saw.

Cursing it all—but at this moment, mostly the ship—she climbed down to the gondola as carelessly as she dared, her movements as natural and familiar to her as breathing. She dropped the last few feet. The seventy-foot-long, wicker-ribbed basin was empty but for two other people: Dovit, her man with black dreadlocks to his waist and touches of gray at his temples, and Azha’s younger sister, Enzo, her short-cropped hair black as coal.

As Azha leaped the last few feet into the gondola, she cursed again in frustration.

“I couldn’t see any leaks so there must be one higher up,” she groaned. “Naturally, the bastards gave me the oldest ship in the fleet. ”

“Exile was not designed for comfort,” the man remarked.

“And these ships were not designed for this much travel over land,” Enzo added cautiously. “It dries the fabric. The ocean’s thermal updrafts are what really keep them aloft—”

“Enough!” Azha slammed her hand down hard on the console. “What I need are solutions, not a discourse in cloud farming. ” She glared at Dovit and then her sister. “I don’t even know why you came! You had your own life, your own—people.

“Because I couldn’t let you face this alone!” Enzo said.

“Neither of us could,” Dovit said, putting a hand on Azha’s arm. “And my ‘people,’ as you call them, supported me in my love for you. ”

“Love,” she said, pushing his fingers off. “Is that all?”

“What more?” Dovit asked.

“Nothing,” Azha said, glaring at her sister again, her red hair rising and twisting in the wind like slender serpents. “This is my doing, my choice, but it’s a sign of how perverse our society has become. I’m banished for trying to stop someone from committing genocide. ”

“You were banished for trying to enter the Technologist Inner Quarter with a spear, two knives, and a grapnel,” Dovit said, correcting her. “There are far more legal and far less dramatic ways to express dissent. ”

“Dissent,” Azha muttered, glancing up at the swaying balloon. “It wasn’t about ‘dissent,’ Dovit. It was—an impulse. I learned the facts and had to do something. ”

“A legitimate reaction,” Dovit agreed. “But, as I said, there are legitimate forms of redress. ”

“None that would have worked in time,” Azha said.