Chapter Fifty #2
Mother Winter started to cackle. It was a dry, raspy sound.
The sound of sandpaper on skin. The sound of broken glass scraping away at leather.
The sound of dried stalks of grain falling before a scythe.
It sent aches, real pain like I was no longer used to feeling, running through my joints and limbs, cramps and arthritis and ague all at once, and I had to fight to stay standing straight.
“Bold,” Mother Winter muttered. “Bold.”
She turned to Mab and swept into a stiff, somehow mocking bow.
“Perhaps,” she croaked, “he will do after all.”
And there was a rushing sound as Mother Winter vanished.
Just imploded. The air collapsed in on the space where she’d been like thunder, making us all stagger, making my ears pop, and drawing a cold, earthy, uneasy wind down from the tunnels above us leading to the surface, echoing weirdly like the cawing of a thousand crows.
Mab let out a slow exhalation, her breath pluming into the kind of thick condensation you’d normally see from liquid nitrogen. As she did, pain and cold alike faded from my body, leaving only weariness in their place.
“Honestly,” Mab said, her voice rather startlingly human. “I don’t understand why Mother feels such a need to be so dramatic.”
I turned my head to her slowly and started to say something. But I must have been growing as a person or something. Because I took a deep breath instead and shut my mouth.
Lara helped Thomas sit up, rested her forehead briefly against his, and then rose to face Mab and me. She nodded past us, to where Justine was still bound to the column of ice. “Now what?”
The Queen of Air and Darkness’s mouth curled up at one corner.
“Fear not, Lady Lara. You are quite correct in your assessment of our situation and in demanding your rights and my obligations be respected. Thomas Raith is under my protection from those powers outside our alliance. So is the woman, Justine. As is the child. I will safeguard all of their interests as I would those of my own.”
I must be growing even more, because I thought it might be impolitic to point out that Mab’s idea of safeguarding her own daughter’s interests had included asking me to assassinate her and standing by doing nothing while she died, precisely because Maeve had been compromised by Outsider influence.
But I decided it would be a discussion to have with Lara later.
Thomas was staring at Justine, his expression absolutely ragged with grief and worry.
“That’s not her,” he said quietly. “That thing. It’s still got her.”
Mab turned rather sharply to Thomas, an eyebrow raised. “You can sense this? How?”
Thomas glared at Mab and then looked at me.
I nodded to him.
He took a deep breath. “Her…her energy. Her energy. I don’t know how else to phrase it. I know it. It’s part of me. And I can’t feel her.”
Mab made a thoughtful noise, tapping Medea’s bodkin against her cheek.
“The enemy spirit, then, is suppressing the woman severely. Generally, it prefers to remain a subtle and unsensed influence. Mmmm. It must have known that you sensed a change and was thus forced to move more aggressively. Interesting. A very limited means of forewarning, then. And one fraught with perils of its own. Yet it might be useful…”
“What are you going to do to her?” Thomas said.
Mab turned and considered the bound woman.
Justine’s dark eyes blazed with fury and something else for which there might not have been a name, and her naked body strained, wiry muscles standing out.
There was a groaning sound, followed by several sharp cracklings, and shatter shards spread briefly across the pillar of ice, only to crackle more and vanish as if the ice was healing, seconds later.
Mab’s voice snapped with contempt as she spoke to the thing within her. “Thou hast caused me problems enough, twisted little deceiver. Already has Mab vanquished thee once. From thirteen puppets you are now twelve. So it shall be again, and you shall be eleven.”
A muffled, raw, hideous sound came from Justine’s throat, though she was gagged with ice. Her eyes were wild, so bloodshot that the whites had all but vanished.
“With enough agony, carefully applied,” Mab said calmly, “the woman’s mind will eventually be unable to contain the spirit.
” She held up the knife before Justine’s eyes.
“And the very vessel in which it attempted to enter my Court will trap it before it can flee. At which point I will consign it to as much torment and desolation and confinement as my imagination can devise.” She stepped up close to Justine.
“Already you feel the part of you imprisoned, and what it suffers. I will double that and more, thing. You think yourself untouchable. How dare you strike at the world in my charge?”
Justine again made that raw sound of inhuman fury.
Mab’s slow smile was crueler than anything I had ever seen.
And I’ve seen some things.
“Harry,” Thomas said, voice tight, desperate. “She’s going to torture Justine.”
“Necessary,” Mab said, voice hard. “I did it to my own handmaiden. My friend of many centuries. It is the only way.” She turned back to us and faced Thomas calmly.
“But know this. When it is done, the memory of her torment will be excised. Calmly. Precisely. She will remember nothing of her possession, or her necessary treatment. It will be a door in her mind that is closed, barred, and locked—and which must remain that way to preserve her sanity. You cannot bring it to her mind, by word or deed. She must not dig at the wound or it will once more rip wide open, and she will be torn asunder.”
The thing inside Justine screamed in fury again.
Thomas flinched at the sound. “But…I…how am I going to…There is a blood feud with Etri…”
Justine—Justine; there was a palpable difference in the voice, even to my ears—let out a scream of utter pain, high-pitched and desperately tired. Her body bowed, gravid belly rippling, and a sudden rush of fluid burst into steam in the air.
“Justine!” Thomas cried, suddenly surging to his feet.
“The child comes,” Mab said briskly. “As must balance. My Knight, have I your permission to summon aid to this place for the purpose of assisting in a safe birthing?”
And a horrible thought hit me.
The Outsiders had been trying to crack into Demonreach for a while now. I assumed because they wanted to release the horrors that lay imprisoned in its tunnels.
But what if they’d gotten to Mab, the way they had to the Leanansidhe?
What if she was about to trick me into letting more of them in?
Paranoid?
Yes, definitely. But I was up against beings that deserved paranoia. Nemesis was an absolute nightmare of corrupt influence that could be in more than one place at a time, could infest almost anyone.
“Harry?” Thomas asked, his voice desperate.
Oh yeah. This could be a setup.
I felt myself start to panic. To sink back into those dark places where I’d been living the past year.
I began to clench my teeth.
Justine screamed again in pain, her eyes beseeching.
“Harry!” Thomas cried.
I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I turned to see Lara staring at me. Her expression said it all. She didn’t understand my hesitation. But she knew it wouldn’t be happening without good reason. She gave me a small nod.
I closed my eyes.
I took a slow, deep breath.
Mab was a nightmare herself. The queen of every dark and horrible storybook tale ever told.
But she was Mab. Always and absolutely.
I didn’t like her.
But I trusted her.
I respected her.
If Mab had fallen, we were all screwed anyway.
And if I couldn’t extend trust for the sake of saving an innocent child and its mother, what was left that was worth fighting for?
“You have my permission to bring needed aid for Justine and the child,” I said quietly.
Mab gave me the kind of look that a teacher might reserve for a slow student who had finally begun to show understanding, and I had the uneasy feeling that she was way too aware of everything that had just run through my head.
“Excellent,” she said in a crisp tone. Then she drew in her own breath, bowed her head, and murmured, “Let scales be balanced and life preserved, that infant may wail and justice be served.”
From the same opening torn by Mother Winter came a sudden sigh of wind, and the scent of fresh earth and new grass.
Light grew, a sudden shaft of what looked like sunlight, pouring down from above, somehow, through thousands of feet of earth and stone, setting the crystalline chamber aglow, and I had to squint my eyes against the sudden brightness.
Music, like the faintest of wind chimes, if the wind had organized itself for a gentle symphony, filled the chamber.
And then my eyes adjusted, and in the center of the shaft of light was a tall, kindly-looking old woman, her silver hair long, her seamed face wrinkled and grandmotherly, her eyes the blue of a clear springtime sky.
Mother Summer. The Crone Queen of her Court.
Mab turned to her and flourished a deep, courtly curtsy.
Mother Summer quirked a small, wary smile and inclined her head in reply. “Winter Queen.”
“Mother Summer,” Mab said. “I’m sure my mother gave you the details.”
“She wrecked the cottage,” Mother Summer said mildly, amused, “and threw her cleaver through the window. I haven’t seen her that worked up in ages. I think it was probably good for her to finally get out.”
Justine screamed again, writhing.
Mother Summer’s eyes went to the bound woman with gentle compassion. “Oh. Poor thing. She’s in a very bad way.”
And then she turned to me. “I am not capable of interfering directly with mortal matters of my own accord, wizard,” she said in a gentle voice.
“Only mortal will can allow me that freedom of action, and I am a guest in your demesne. It is no small thing to bring a new life into the world. Is this what you wish?”
“Help them,” I said gently. “Help them both. Please.”
She smiled, beatifically, and it felt like stepping into a beam of warm sunlight after coming out of a plunge into a cold lake.
“So be it,” she said.
—
The delivery didn’t take as long as I thought it would.
Or maybe I was just so tired that I couldn’t keep track.
Either way, it didn’t seem like very long before Mother Summer, ably assisted by Queen Mab, finished their work.
Thomas and Justine’s son let out his first thin little wail from the cradle of Mother Summer’s arms.
Mother Summer sang gently to the babe, wrapping him up in white cloth drawn from nowhere, smiling benignly down on him.
“May the days of thy childhood be filled with happiness, wisdom, and peace, child,” she murmured, and kissed his dark-haired head. She looked up at Mab and said, “Must it now be thus?”
Mab gestured toward the exhausted but still breathing Justine—who slowly lifted her eyes. The pain in them was gone. What was left was cold. Reptilian. A stare of pure hatred.
Nemesis had resumed control.
“There is more work that must be done if her life is to be saved,” Mab said quietly. “This is all the kindness that remains to her now.”
Mother Summer sighed. “And the child?”
“That was a matter of mortal will,” Mab said quietly. “Balance must be restored. Neither of us has power over that.”
And Mab held out her arms.
Mother Summer’s expression firmed. “A moment. Let him hold his child.”
Mab lowered her arms and bowed her head.
My stomach sank.
Because I realized what was coming.
What had to come next.
What I had asked for.
Mother Summer rose, slowly and carefully, looking down upon the child and singing softly to him, and brought him to Thomas.
“I give you this time,” Mother Summer said, “to give him your blessing.”
Thomas had recovered somewhat in the intervening time. He took the child uncertainly, as if fearing the baby might simply explode if he did something incorrectly. Lara was beside him, showing him how to support the baby’s head and body.
Thomas stared down at the child, weeping openly.
“My God,” he breathed. “Harry…look at him.”
He looked like a newborn. His face was all squished, there was some weird stuff on his scalp, his body still wanted to curl, and he looked odd and a little ugly and beautiful beyond the power of words to describe.
And I realized that I had a nephew.
I had more family.
I swallowed a lot. And blinked a lot. I didn’t cry, what with how manly I am. But the kid got blurry. Probably some kind of vampire thing.
I put my hand on my brother’s shoulder and we just looked down at the kid.
Thomas swallowed. And looked up at Mab.
“I don’t get to keep him,” he said quietly. “Do I?”
Mab’s face…couldn’t show compassion. But it could have been a lot more remote. “I have been tasked with restoring balance between the White Court and the svartalves,” she said quietly. “You have taken a life. You must give one in return. This is the old way.”
“I won’t let you take him to have Etri harm him,” Thomas said.
“I swear this to you,” Mab replied, something suspiciously like reassurance in her voice.
“He will be raised as one of Etri’s own family.
As a prince of his people. Treasured and protected and taught their ways.
And when it is his time, to deal with his own Hunger, Etri will permit him contact with your House, to be taught what is needed of your ways. ”
“If the child was…with me…” Thomas said. “With us. Justine…she’d never be able to heal from what has to happen to her.”
“Yes,” Mab confirmed.
“I’ll never be able to talk to her about him,” Thomas said. “Never be able to share how much I miss…Because it would hurt her, too.”
“Yes,” Mab said gently. “The pain you have given, coming back unto you. Balance.”
Thomas heaved several breaths in and out, shuddering. Ugly crying.
Lara slid her arm around his shoulders and leaned her head on his.
“And you’re doing this,” Thomas said, voice anguished, “because of Harry.”
“I wanted to save you,” I said softly. “All of you. From all of it.”
Thomas bowed his head over his infant son and shook.
“My son,” he breathed in a whisper, gasping between sobs. “I will always love you. And when you need me most, I will be there. I swear it.”
A shiver went through me.
Words have power.
Words are magic.
And I felt a tiny shudder of Doom go running over my skin.
“Let it be done swiftly,” Mab murmured, holding out her arms. “I have much work to do if I am to save Justine, and it must begin soon.”
Thomas curled around the baby for one more moment.
Then, slowly, as if every movement was pain, he held out his arms.
And the Queen of Air and Darkness stole my brother’s child.