56. Chapter 56
S now leapt from the ground. Wind returned all at once, lashing them with claws of powder. Ren’s hood snapped back; ice-crystals pricked her lips and eyes. She threw an arm up, but the world vanished anyway, engulfed in a whirl of white.
“ Lucan !” Her voice was devoured.
His hand found hers. It latched onto her glove with a grip that hurt. “Here!” he shouted. “ Don’t let go .”
Ren could only hear a booming howl. The storm pressed on her from every direction at once, collapsing space until up and down swapped. Air thinned. Her lungs took in cold and got nothing for it.
The bells danced closer, sweet and coaxing, and under them, humming.
A lullaby.
“Not that way!” Lucan hauled her left, then slammed her back against rock. The sudden solidity saved her; her knees buckled in relief. “The edge is – ”
The wind stole the rest.
Something brushed her cheek, feather-soft, warm. A woman’s caress, her mind supplied, desperately trying to make sense of the senseless. The caress lingered, tender as a mother waking a child .
The pouch snarled at Ren’s hip, “ Do not listen. Do not listen .”
Ren clenched her teeth until she tasted iron. Move . The command in her head was hers and not hers. She shoved off the wall, fingers welded to Lucan’s. They staggered together. The gale became a body, a thing that wanted them elsewhere – off the path, over the drop, into the throat of the vale.
A shape flickered in the storm revealing a silhouette of a woman’s outline, blurred by snow. It lifted a hand. “Lucan,” it said in a voice like summer fields.
He lurched. Ren yanked him back hard. “It’s not her!”
Lucan’s jaw worked, eyes blazing and lost all at once, and she realized the thing’s voice had been a memory.
“Left!” he barked, as if reminding himself how to live. He dragged her into a narrow crease in the rock where the wind skated over instead of through. It gave them a breath of almost-quiet. “Snow wisp,” he rasped. “Funnel-storms in the vale. Lures with what you desire most.”
Ren couldn’t feel her face. Her eyelashes had frozen together; she pried them apart with gloved fingers and saw nothing but white. “How do we kill it?”
“Heat,” the pouch snapped. “Burn the air from its throat. If the human can manage anything more than shivering.”
“ Sir Buttercup ,” Ren hissed through chattering teeth, “is about to meet a snowbank.” But her hands were shaking too hard to lift. The cold had gnawed its way under her skin and chewed at the joints. Her breath came short.
“Ren.” Lucan squeezed her fingers. “Stay with me.” He let go only long enough to press his palm to her cheek. “With me . We move on my count. If I stop, you keep moving.”
“I won’t l-l-leave you.”
His thumb brushed a line of frost from her jaw, his mouth quirking. “You’re stubborn enough to argue until the end, Harper. I’m counting on it.” The wind howled. His eyes held hers. “But if I tell you to run, you run . Deal? I’d rather not face Kaelin’s wrath if I return without you.”
She nodded because she didn’t trust her mouth.
The storm inhaled like a beast and came for them.
They ran .
They shoved against the storm, and it shoved back, and each step was a bargain struck between gravity and will.
Bells flitted at the edges of hearing, sneaking closer, until there were a dozen memories calling, a chorus of almost-loves whispering this way.
Ren bit her tongue hard enough to steady herself with pain.
A shadow loomed belonging to an outthrust of rock. Lucan shouldered her behind it. He jabbed a finger at his eyes, then at the white. Watch .
When the wisp showed itself, it was not a thing so much as a place where the storm failed to stick. It was a negative space, a ripple in the air shaped like a woman, hair streaming into snow. Bells hung from her throat in a collar of frost.
Lucan slid away from the rock and drew steel. The blade looked dull and wrong in this light, already rimed with white.
The wisp moved without moving. It unfolded sideways and was suddenly right of Lucan, bells ringing all around them, voice a breath in Ren’s ear.
You’re tired, little ember. Lay down.
Ren gritted her teeth and swung on instinct. Her fist met air. The impact spun her. She slid, boots losing purchase, until her heel found the edge of a cliff and skittered.
Lucan’s hand clamped her forearm and wrenched her back so hard the world went black for a blink. They crashed together into the rock, and he grunted, blade scraping stone. “Stay with me!”
“Trying!” She didn’t mean the shriek in it.
The wisp sang. Snow heaved. The world narrowed again to a pinpoint of heat under Ren’s ribs that refused to simmer. It flared now as the storm pressed, as fear tried to make her smaller.
No.
She opened her mouth and let the heat climb her throat. It came raw, all scrape and spark, but it came.
“Now!” Lucan shouted, already moving. He went wide, drawing the wisp’s drift with the arc of his steel, taunting it into following the gleam. The bells tracked him. They loved him.
They wanted his throat .
Ren planted her feet. For some reason, she remembered Kaelin’s voice saying I will keep you safe , and Ren’s own voice answering: then burn it all.
Her fire answered.
It wasn’t the neat spill of a torch. It was blue-white at the center, hotter than sense, a sudden winging of light that flared from her palms and burned the snow to hiss. Heat rolled off her in a wave that tasted like iron and summer and the first breath after drowning.
The wisp shrieked. It burst toward Ren. Lucan intercepted, steel biting the place where its throat might be. The blade didn’t cut, but the heat riding it did. He slashed through steam, and the air screamed.
“Again!” he yelled. “Ren, again !”
Her hands shook so hard she barely got them up. The flame guttered, almost went out under the hunger of the cold. But the pouch bellowed right in Ren’s ear, fury and pride braided into one impossible sound: “ Stand, girl! Burn! ”
Light exploded, and the wisp’s form tore along one edge, unraveling into blowing threads of frost that the wind snatched and flung away. It recoiled, rang its bells like teeth chattering, and lunged for Lucan’s exposed side.
Ren moved without thinking. She slammed her palm to his back and poured heat into the edge of his blade. Steel ate fire, glowed dull-red, and when he met the wisp’s rush, the sword sang. Lucan carved a hot arc through cold.
The wisp came apart in a cry that shook the mountain.
Silence collapsed. The wind fell out of the air. Snow fell straight down like a curtain dropping.
Ren staggered. The world righted by inches. The bells were gone.
Lucan leaned on his sword, chest heaving. A crust of frost rimmed the edges of his hair and chin. His cheeks were raw red; his hands shook so violently he almost dropped his blade. When he looked at her, his eyes were too bright. “You with me?”
She tried to say yes. It came out as a laugh that was half-sob. “You?”
He nodded once. Then his knees betrayed him, and he went down into the snow, catching himself on one palm. Ren fell with him because her legs decided they were done, and they knelt facing each other while the quiet gathered .
The pouch loosened against her hip, as if it also had to remember how to breathe. “Hnh,” it grunted at last. “Acceptable.”
Ren snorted and only then realized her hands burned. She stared at her palms—pinked, not blistered—steam curling faintly from her skin in the lingering cold. Under the heat, a tremor lived that wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t tell if it was fear or elation. Maybe both.
Lucan swallowed, jaw working. He blinked once, and then seemed to remember something beyond his body. “The herb,” he said hoarsely. “We didn’t come here to leave empty-handed.”
The vale had a heart where the wisp tried throwing them over.
From this far of a fall, they wouldn’t have made it alive.
Below was a basin cupped by black rock where the wind didn’t quite reach.
In it, clustered close to one another as though for warmth, grew a little patch of winter-green leaves veined with silver, each crowned by a pale blue flower.
Frost hung on their edges without touching them, a halo that never melted.
Ren had never seen anything so stubborn to live.
Somehow, they managed to make the trek down. Lucan unwrapped his scarf, hands gone white, and used the wool to pluck the flowers so his skin wouldn’t steal their heat. By the time he tucked the sprig into a leather case, his fingers had turned an alarming shade of purple.
Ren caught his wrist. “Hey, you’re – ”
“Fine,” he seethed, teeth chattering.
She cupped his frozen hands in both of hers and pressed heat into them, not the burst she’d given the wisp but a steady warmth she could hold. He hissed in pain at first, then sagged, eyes closing. When he opened them again, they were wet and grateful and a little ashamed.
“Don’t,” she said, because she couldn’t bear the look. “You showed up. That counts.”
He huffed a laugh. “You burned the sky.”
“Don’t tell anyone how clumsy I was.”
“Harper, I would never ruin your reputation.”
She rolled her eyes. The pouch made a noise suspiciously like approval.
By the time they hauled themselves upright, the sunlight had gentled to a winter pale.
The world above looked impossibly far. Ren glanced at the drop and the drop glanced back, and her stomach went light, but the panic didn’t own her this time.
She had a hand on Lucan’s elbow. He had one on her shoulder.
It made the mountain feel less like a mouth and more like a road.
They started up.
Wind rose again and combed the snow into new patterns that lay over the old. The bells did not return. Ren listened anyway, long after the storm had given them back the sound of their own steps.
At the lip of the vale, Lucan paused and lifted the leather case. Inside, the rare herb glowed with a life that wasn’t light. His fingers were mottled and ugly, but they held steady.
“Zakhar better be grateful,” Ren muttered.
The pouch sniffed. “He won’t be. But I am.”
Ren sputtered, “Are you—did you just —”
“Don’t get sentimental,” the pouch snapped. “And mind your footing. I’ve no intention of spending my afterlife tumbling down a cliff because you two decide to swoon. Truth is, I don’t remember my name. But I will surely remember yours – Ren Harper and Lucan Brightbane .”
Ren smiled despite the ache in every muscle. She set her boots carefully, felt Lucan’s steady weight at her side, and took the next step, and the next, and the next, down out of the place where the sky burned and back toward the world that needed saving.