Page 62 of Smoke & Ashes
Then a naked elderly woman tugged at my leg, and I turned. The dowager swam quickly away from me—for somebody of her advanced years she had impressive lung capacity, but then I guess werewolves aged well. We swam to Tara, who was already hauling herself up through a narrow hole in the ice—I say hole, it was more a crack, barely big enough for a relatively svelte person to wriggle through with significant effort. That was fine for Tara, and the dowager was basically a skeleton covered in skin and gristle, but I wasn’t quite so physically suited to slipping through narrow fissures as they were, and while I managed to get my head above water, the rest was tough. I abandoned my jacket as a bad job and with two werewolves yanking me from above combined with the—for the moment at least— convenient tendency of ice to slip, melt, and give way under pressure I managed to emerge at last, panting and freezing and soaking and fantastically pissed about the whole broken arm thing, onto the surface of a frozen lake deep in the Cold and Dark.
“Whose stupid idea was this?” I asked nobody in particular, lying on my back on the ice and staring up into frigid, alien stars.
To her credit, Tara didn’t take the obvious bait and remind me that it had been mine. “I’d rather not talk long,” she said. “I’ll be much warmer as a wolf. We should be able to track the pack from here. You follow.” Then she shifted, along with her grandmother, and I was shivering in an unnatural winter beside two great wolves, one gold and the other silver. The pair of them set off at once and I did my best to follow. They were fairly good at keeping to a deal-withable pace, especially since tracking by scent across this much snow and ice couldn’t have been easy. Still they seemed to have a good idea of where they were going—family called out to you, it seemed—and it wasn’t long before we found the woods clearing and saw a glittering black-and-white castle in a valley between two hills.
That looked worryingly heart-of-the-realm-like. I’d hoped that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had left his-her wolves in Yelena’s custody, meaning if we were lucky we’d be able to kill two birds with one stone. Instead it looked like he-she was keeping them close. I suppose there had been no good options here—either we faced a faery lord, an evil vampire lady who was obsessed with my ex, or an evil vampire dude who was obsessed with destroying me in the most personal way possible, or some combination of the three. That was, like, a textbook lose-lose-lose.
We hunkered down on the edge of the woods and did whatever the more mystical version of casing the joint was. The palace had this impossible delicacy about it that you might reasonably expect from a place built out of ice, shadows, and metaphors. I couldn’t see any guards, but then we were still a fair way away and to say things in faerie weren’t always what they seemed would be a bit like saying the sun wasn’t always dark. I was nervous about drawing on my mother’s power while we were here, because as best I could understand that would be the equivalent of sending up a flare to the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter saying “hey, we’re here, come and turn the full might of your realm against us.” But that meant I was stuck relying on my regular human eyes. And it turned out regular human eyes sucked.
Tara went bipedal a moment. “They’re in there. I can smell them, even from here. Wolf, but not wolf. There are other creatures too, creatures made of frost and the night.”
Not the most comforting thing to hear. “Could you say howmanycreatures?”
“Everything here is one. It’s hard to say exactly where the King-Queen ends and his-her realm begins.”
That figured. I didn’t have a clear sense of how my mum’s power worked but from everything I’d experienced it was clear shewasthe Deepwild in a fundamental sense. She was the hunter and the prey and the woods the hunt ran through, she was the rivers and the rain. Yeah, I was beginning to think that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter wasn’t something we couldfight. It’d be like trying to fight an idea.
Then again, fighting ideas was what I’d spent a good chunk of the last few years doing while I was sort-of-kind-of-okay-basically-definitely working for Nimue’s court, so maybe it wasn’t as outlandish a concept as all that.
The wolves became wolves again and we slunk down into the valley. We were downwind of the castle, which would help warn Tara and the dowager of anything that might be coming for us and which might have also given us the element of surprise. But the whole I-am-the-land thing made that fairly unlikely.
The run-up to the palace was an open expanse of clear, glittering snow, and there wasn’t much we could do to stop ourselves standing out against it like soup stains on formalwear. As we drew closer to the vast, sweeping staircase that led up to the main gate, we saw that the land around us was dotted with ice sculptures. Frighteningly lifelike ice sculptures, most of them showing people in various postures of distress or despair. The Merchant of Dreams had once described a different part of this place as adebtor’s prison.I was beginning to suspect that this was another one.
Faeries could officially go fuck themeslves.
We proceeded cautiously, because anything that looked vaguely humanoid in a faery realm, and most things that didn’t look vaguely humanoid, were very likely to come alive and attack you. To my tremendous relief, the statues stayed resolutely statues. There was still a good chance they werepeople, of course, but at least they were people who I wasn’t going to have to smash into tiny splintery pieces.
Then the wolves stopped dead, their fur bristling and their eyes bright. Something was moving white against the white of the snow. Four pale beasts, shards of glass gleaming in their eyes. There was no way they hadn’t seen us.
What came next was a strange, animal dance. Swift-moving hunters fanning out across the frozen ground in an effort to outflank their enemies. Maths was against us here, because four would always be able to cover more ground than three. Tara and the dowager seemed to realise this, because they quickly moved into a more defensive formation, all of us back to back to back inching forward while the stolen wolves closed in on all sides.
I was wearing a wet shirt in the snow with a broken arm and about to get jumped on by an average of one and one third werewolves. There was no world in which this ended well. Calling on my mother was a bad idea for so many reasons. Then again, this was looking an awful lot like an “or die” kinda deal.
The wolves sprang. And two hundred and fifty pounds of slavering shapeshifter bearing down on me got rid of basically all my misgivings. I reached. And I got nothing. Fuck. This close to the heart of the Cold and Dark, the Deepwild was further away than I’d counted on it being. Where there should have been the free, rushing pulse of my mother’s realm there was only the chill and the shade of shadows and winter.
I fell under a weight of fur and claws and breath like a blizzard. Covering my face with my broken arm was the least bad option I had available, since it freed up my other hand to stab with the iron dagger I’d retrieved from the grounds of Safernoc and somehow managed to keep with me through all the ice and the nearly drowning and the failed attempts at being sneaky. Iron did jack shit to werewolves, but a spike was a spike and I was vaguely hoping that it would neutralise some of the King-Queen’s power, like it had when I stuck Sebastian Douglas.
Bringing the weapon up as hard as I could, I rammed it into the wolf’s collarbone just as it was doing its best to turn my injured arm into a missing one. Its blood sprayed across me still warm, unlike its breath. Out of some frankly yicky instinct that I entirely blamed on my heritage, I licked it from my lips, and tasted power. The King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had said the werewolves once belonged to my mother. On some primal level they were of the wild, as I was. I rode the taste of blood down hunter’s trails and wolf-dens into the very depths of the forest and I found a strength that came from hunger and passion and the chase.
Letting go of the dagger, I took the wolf by the back of its head and moved my arm deeper into its jaws, making it snarl and twist away. The way of the wild was pure. You were hunter or you were prey. The little lord-lady of this place did not understand, with his-her contracts and bargains, oaths and promises. But some rights could never be signed away, some compacts never broken. There was one law that mattered, and it was red and sharp and bold.
I stood in the red-spattered snow and the beast cowered before me.
“Submit.” My voice was my own in part, but not in whole. Somewhere, far away, through the screaming and the wind, through the nightmares and the chill of the dark, my mother laughed on a bed of bones.
To my very real surprise and my mother’s joy, the wolf shrank back on its haunches, and then transformed into a woman with glass in her eyes and blood on her cheeks. She sat on her knees with her head bowed. There was something strange about the scent of her—her mind was still not her own, but her blood responded to the old laws. My mother’s voice told me to kill her. As an example to the others. For having the temerity to oppose us. For her weakness. Another and thankfully louder voice said that this was a person with a name—looking at her I thought it was the other half of Tuffy and Smudge—who we were here to rescue. It wasn’t what my mother wanted, but since she was close to being objectively evil, that didn’t especially bother me.
That still left three more wolves—scratch that, two more. Tara and her granny had double-teamed one as she came in—umm, in a violence way, not in a sex way—and were now turning to the ones that remained. Watching werewolves fight in a group was always a spooky experience. I’d never been one for teamwork of any kind, being very much a do my own thing, blaze my own trail, get all my friends brutally murdered, kind of girl. Still, watching the wolves move, watching them read each other’s movements and anticipate each other’s needs like they were one mind in two bodies made me almost wish I’d learned to be better at sharing. If I hadn’t been looking at my sort-of girlfriend and her grandma, I’d have wondered what it was like when two of them fucked.
The downed wolf was stirring. The problem fighting supernatural beings was that they were often impossible to permanently disable unless you happened to know their one outlandishly specific weakness. Well that or chop them up into little bits, which worked on most things. I strode towards it with more confidence than I probably should have had and caught it by the scruff of the neck. Fortunately for operation don’t get horribly mauled, whatever echoes of the Deepwild I’d tapped into with Smudge’s blood were still with me, and I could bear her to the ground with—well, not with ease, but without getting too badly shredded.
“Submit,” I told her. And she did. Okay, that was getting spooky. I turned back to the melee, where Tara and the dowager were still two-on-two with the remaining wolves. I pounced on one and managed to hold her back for long enough that the two of them were able to bring down the other. With all four of the rescuees subdued, I made the titanic error of starting to feel good about our chances.
Which was when the wind started to howl, the snow started to come down in buckets, and the fucking ice statues started moving.
28
Running & Standing
