He felt certain he was about to die now, as the wind howled along the cliff face, spraying the stone-which was already slick-with freezing sleet, coating the hoisting chain with clear ice, and stealing the warmth from his body with each clatter of his teeth. The thief could hardly bend the frozen fingers on his good hand, but that really did not matter, since it was trembling so hard that he would not trust it to support his weight anyway.
Avner was two links from the bottom of the hoisting chain, his body wedged through the loop and swinging in the freezing wind. He had no concept of how long he had been hanging there, for the last thing he remembered was his stomach rising toward his throat as Kol stepped off the end of the platform.
The sky had arced out of sight in a single flash, and he had found himself staring at the distant spires of the fir forest below. Then Kol's hand crashed into something hard and flew open. Avner felt rough iron scraping down his back and realized it was the chain. He twisted around, arms flaying madly, and nearly wrenched his arm out of its socket as he jammed his hand through a link.
The chain crashed into the cliff. Avner felt the bones in his wrist being mashed to powder as the chain ground his arm against the cliff. His entire body went limp; had his hand not been trapped, he would have plunged after Kol into the trees below. But his pain served him well, reminding him that he was still alive and might stay that way if he reacted quickly enough. With his good hand, the boy grabbed hold of the link and pulled himself up, wedging his body through the center as it twisted away from the wall. He banged into the granite several more times, less violently than before, then his pain washed over him like a dark, cold river, and he closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, and the chain was still swinging. The wind was howling, Avner's teeth were chattering, and the boy did not know whether the laughter spilling from his throat was caused by joy or hysteria. But he did know that he had to get off this mountain, and fast. By morning, the only thing lodged in this link would be a hunk of frozen flesh.
Avner wrapped an arm around the outside of the icy loop, then pulled himself up until he could work a leg through the opening and straddle the bottom. The link was just tall enough that he could sit hunched inside it. He tried to examine his injured arm by moonlight, but the shadows under the platform were too thick to see clearly. All he could tell for certain was that it was horribly swollen, and he could not bend it from the elbow down.
"I sure hope Brianna's still alive," he whispered, not quite certain why he was afraid to speak out loud. If there had been any giants on the platform above, he would have heard their footsteps echoing through the timbers.
Avner drew his dagger and cut the sleeve away from his injured arm, then used the cloth to bind his arm to his side. Next, he took his rope off his shoulder and tied a series of loops. By the time he finished, he had a makeshift ladder of about a dozen feet, easily twice as long as he needed to reach from one link to the next.
The boy passed the rope through the link above, pushing the line through one of the loops he had tied to secure it in place. He slipped his good arm, still trembling from the cold, into another loop and began to climb. The young thief moved quickly and efficiently, for many times he had used similar techniques to climb the exterior of some tower that supposedly could not be scaled-though he had seldom found anything inside worth the trouble. Once he had even used the method to climb from Earl Dobbin's well, after he had been forced to jump down the pit to elude a company of murderous guards.
To his surprise. Avner felt sad about the fate of the lord mayor. He was not sorry the man was dead-the earl had certainly threatened to kill him enough times- but it seemed an era had passed. For as long as the boy could remember, he had been stealing from Dobbin Manor, and Earl Dobbin had been trying to catch him in the act. It had not been a game-the consequences of the king's law were too deadly for that-but the contest had been eminently fair. Now, with the lord mayor separated not only from his property but from his own limbs as well, there no longer seemed any point to stealing from Dobbin Manor. It was even possible the boy would be forced to rethink his ambitions-providing he didn't freeze to death on the side of this mountain first.
