Page 63 of Smoke & Ashes
It was me, Tara, the dowager and four half-incapacitated, semi-faery-controlled werewolves against what I suspected was about a hundred and thirty animated ice sculptures which Ialsosuspected were real people who’d had the wrong side of a faery bargain.
Which, incidentally, was basically why I hated faeries. Vampires were evil, but they had a pretty simple MO—they vaahnt to suuuck your blaaahd and they’ll do whatever it takes to get to where they can do it. Even demons, which are probably number two on my list ofpreternatural entities the cosmos could really do without no offence, Ash, had a fundamental honesty about them that you had to respect. Their deal was clear: you get what you want now, I get to ruin your life and torture you forever. At least they didn’t pretend to be the good guy. But the fae were allooh we’re so authentic and primeval, don’t you feel like we represent a primordial innocence that’s been stripped away by a millennia of so-called progress, come dance with us and stick it to The Man.
Except, actually, they were pricks. The sorts of pricks who’d not only turn you into a statue of living ice for eternity if you pissed them off, but also press-gang you into fighting intruders.
At least the ice statues were fragile, which made them easy enough to deal with. Though when a weeping man lunged for me with hands made of hoarfrost and the tears still visibly sculpted onto his frozen face, and I reacted by slamming what was effectively an ice-pick into his head and shattering it like emergency glass, I felt fucking terrible about myself. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of thinking that was going to get me killed because it was definitely just me, Tara, and the dowager running defence here. Whatever spooky faery shit I’d done to the two werewolves, and whatever presumably equivalent pack-alpha shit Tara and the dowager had done to the others, they seemed to have enough control of themselves that they were broadly in line with being rescued, but not so much that they were any use at all in a fight.
We pushed through the mob of ice-people until we hit the treeline, and then we ran like fuck. The snow became hail and then a freezing rain that fell as water but turned at once to ice when it hit the ground or the trees or your body.
Coming at last to the edge of the lake we half, ran half slipped, half—and yes I know that’s three halves but cut me some slack here—skated across the surface looking for the way out. Except the trouble with ice is it all looks the same even when it isn’t snowing. And cracks in it freeze over even when there isn’t a malicious faery lord puppeteering the whole process like an evil Jim Henson.
The six wolves scrabbled at the ice-sheet with their claws, but it didn’t seem to be making a dent. What we really needed was a hairdryer, but wouldn’t you know it I didn’t think to bring mine with me. Or ever own one, come to think of it. I slammed the iron dagger into the surface of the lake, hoping largely in vain that since it was technically faery ice it would have faery weaknesses. And it—well—it might have helped a bit? There were a couple of chips in it now at least, but the situation was looking perilously close to fucking hopeless.
I was beginning to have the frightening suspicion that this was a job for my mother.
We were further from the heart of the Cold and Dark now, which meant there was more chance of my being able to reach the Deepwild. I focused on the wolf’s blood in my mouth, on the parts of this place that were like my mother’s realm, the trees and the earth beneath the snow, the water beneath the ice. Somewhere very far in the distance I heard a heartbeat. No power came, no strength apart from what I had already, but a taste caught on my tongue and a scent cut through the air. The land was the king and the queen was the land.
I walked a few paces away from where the wolves were scrabbling, and drew my dagger. Then I searched for that frost-and-shadow power I’d felt the first time I’d tried to reach for the Deepwild and, finding it, I plunged the blade hard into the ice at my feet.
The wind screamed. Blood oozed from the lake where the point of the weapon had cracked the surface. Somewhere, somebody was very angry. Somewhere my mother laughed. Somewhere much closer, my broken arm protested loudly at the amount of shit I was putting it through.
“Kate.” Tara had come back to her human body in an instant, and for a fraction of a second the part of me that was in a place of hunters and prey, of weak and strong, wondered if I could make her kneel the way I had the others. “What the fuck did you just do?”
I was half here and half elsewhere, half myself and half another being entirely, but I tried to answer. “Started a war.”
Ice shattered across the lake and the splintered shards resolved themselves upwards into the shape of a woman in a silver gown. There was the thinnest trace of red on her left cheek. I really hadnotdone that much damage to her.
“Does this action have your mother’s approval?” asked the Queen of Winter.
“It’s violent, reckless, and pointless. So my money’s on yes.”
She stepped closer—there were no shadows on the open lake, so chances were we wouldn’t be seeing the King any time soon. “Neither of us profit by enmity.”
“No, but my mum and I have one big personality trait in common. We both hate it when people fuck with our stuff.”
“I have not trespassed on your territory, or your mother’s.”
“Yeah, I think she disagrees. She wants her wolves back.”
For somebody with mirrors for eyes, the Queen of Winter could be surprisingly expressive. “They have not been hers for centuries.”
“Because of course you faeries arefamousfor letting shit like that go, aren’t you?”
“You tread a dangerous path.”
I couldn’t quite resist the obvious. “On thin ice, am I? Way I see it, if we don’t get out of here I’m dead anyway. I might as well go out fighting, and when I fight my mum fights, and when she fights things gethellaciouslyfucking bloody.”
For quite a long moment I thought that she wasn’t going to go for it. After all, if I fought I’d probably get killed, and killing the—as far as I knew—only daughter of the Queen of the Wild Hunt would have been a heck of a coup. Then again, I didn’t think mum would have cared that much, whereas spreading a bit of chaos in a corner of the cosmos that currently had a bit less chaos in it than it might otherwise have was right up her alley. Umm, grove.
“Very well,” she said at last. “Take the wolves and go. But do not return here. Cross me again and you will find me in less forgiving a mood.”
I had zero doubt of that. For the ruler of a land bound in perpetual snow and ice, the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had surprisingly little chill.
The Queen turned away, snow flurrying about her as she went. The ice beneath us cracked, and a paranoid part of me wondered if this was just a very elaborate way of killing us fast enough that I couldn’t, for want of a less schoolyard phrase, tell my mum. We crashed down through the rapidly unfreezing surface of the lake, and I swam as hard as I could for the wolves. The water was dark, and now the danger had passed the mix of adrenaline, endorphins and borrowed faery power was ebbing away quickly, leaving me cold and in pain and bleeding in quite a lot of places, trying to find a magic hole back to the real world alongside six werewolves, four of them still with spikes of glass in their eyes. I caught sight of Tara’s golden fur through the murk and did my best to swim towards her. Then a chill came over me and the world did that flippy down-is-up thing I was only this second remembering it’d done on the way in.
A few struggling, panting, and excruciatingly long seconds later I was under what, in autumn in Britain, passed for sunlight, flopping onto the bank of a pond on Hampstead Heath, with six large wolves beside me and a couple of teenagers filming me on their phones.
On the plus side, I was dressed. On the downside, I was wearing a very wet white shirt. Well piss.
