²Olden Crown, heroes of olympus

020.

OLDEN CROWN
━━ chapter twenty

━━ HAZEL NEVER FELT truly free until she rode Arion. She felt powerful, unstoppable, and absolutely in control—a perfect combination of horse and human. She always felt bogged down by the earth, by her gift to control riches, and to find a horse who could travel faster than anything and eat gold—it was perfect. If Fate hadn't been so cruel before, she almost would've thanked it for bringing her Arion.

The boat captains in Seward had warned her it was three hundred nautical miles to the Hubbard Glacier, a hard and dangerous journey, but Arion had no trouble. He raced over the water at the speed of sound, heating the air around them so that Hazel didn't even feel the cold. On foot, she never would have felt so brave. On horseback, she couldn't wait to charge into battle.

Frank, Abilene, and Percy didn't look so happy. When Hazel glanced back, their teeth were clenched and their eyeballs were bouncing around in their heads. Percy sat in back, hanging on tight, desperately trying not to slip off the horse's rear. Hazel hoped that didn't happen. The way Arion was moving, she might not notice he was gone for fifty or sixty miles.

They raced through icy straits, past blue fjords and cliffs with waterfalls spilling into the sea. Arion jumped over a breaching humpback whale and kept galloping, startling a pack of seals off an iceberg. She heard Abilene shriek with shock. It seemed like only minutes before they zipped into a narrow bay. The water turned the consistency of shaved ice into blue sticky syrup. Arion came to a halt on a frozen turquoise slab.

A half a mile away stood Hubbard Glacier. Even Hazel, who'd seen glaciers before, couldn't quite process what she was looking at. Purple snowcapped mountains marched off in either direction, with clouds floating around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was blue and white with streaks of black, so it looked like a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large.

As soon as Arion stopped, Hazel felt the temperature drop. All that ice was sending off waves of cold, turning the bay into the world's largest refrigerator. The eeriest thing was a sound like thunder that rolled across the water.

"What is that?" Frank gazed at the clouds above the glacier. "A storm?"

"No." Hazel shook her head. "Ice cracking and shifting. Millions of tons of ice."

Abilene squinted at the scene. "You mean ... it's breaking apart?"

As if on cue, a sheet of ice silently calved off the side of the glacier and crashed into the sea, spraying water and frozen shrapnel several stories high. A millisecond later the sound hit them—a BOOM almost as jarring as Arion hitting the sound barrier.

"We can't get close to that thing!" Frank said.

"We have to," Percy countered. "The giant is at the top."

Arion nickered.

"Jeez, Hazel," Percy grumbled, "tell your horse to watch his language."

Hazel tried not to laugh. "What did he say?"

"With the cussing removed? He said he can get us to the top."

Frank looked incredulous. "I thought the horse couldn't fly!"

This time Arion whinnied so angrily that even Hazel could guess he was cursing.