30. In which there are revelations and fears are embraced
IN WHICH THERE ARE REVELATIONS AND FEARS ARE EMbrACED
“Mother?” It couldn’t be true. How could it be true?
The woman’s eyes softened. “Yes.”
A thousand questions sprayed up, like droplets on the crest of a wave, and she couldn’t catch hold of any of them. Tears sprang to Hester’s eyes, her face crumpling.
“Do not go with him. Own your fears. Embrace them. Do not magic away the pain you feel,” her mother said, moving to stand at Hester’s back, wings splayed wide.
Orcus’s face was twisted in a sneer. “So, now you know what you truly are.”
“An…aquiline?” Hester choked the words out.
He laughed, the sound piercing.
Hester’s whole world creaked and snapped around her.
“I don’t understand.” She looked between her mother and Orcus. So many questions. “How did you find me? My magic is drained.”
“I felt your pain in the currents, tasted your fear blowing on the wind. Come now, why should you listen to her?” He stabbed the harpoon into the ice, and cracks radiated from it.
“I can give you everything. Whatever your heart desires, I can give you. I could raise your ship. I could give you revenge on those who cast you aside. I can teach you to control your power. It would all be within your reach. All I’d need in return is your power.
Melt the ice from this world, feed me with the souls of the drowning. ”
But Hester stared at her mother. Hardly heard Orcus through the million questions bubbling inside of her. She whispered, “Why did you leave me?”
Her mother reached for her, eyes full of pain, but her hand passed through Hester’s shoulder. “It was not my fault.”
“But—”
“It matters not,” Orcus said. “Because you are coming with me.”
He grasped her arm, and a thousand needles of frost pierced Hester’s skin. She cried out, but he dragged her towards the crack in the ice floes.
“No!” She pulled back against him, desperate to get away. The magic in her chest flared, the wind stirring, sparks snapping in the frozen air.
A shot rang out over the ice, sharp and loud.
Orcus dropped to his knees, clutching his side, releasing his grip on her.
Black liquid oozed between his fingers and splattered to the floe.
Another shot rang, and he thrust a hand up, catching the second bullet just before it met his temple.
His eyes narrowed in the direction the bullet had come from, and he let it drop to the ice.
Hester swivelled to find Septimus taking aim. His pistol fired again, this time hitting Orcus in the shoulder. She staggered back a step, and another, his control on her released.
“Hester, run!” Septimus bellowed.
She almost complied. But she held a hand up to him. Could not have a man save her. Drawing her own pistol, she pointed it at Orcus. Magic sparked in the air. Overhead, the sky darkened and crackled with lightning and the wind built, whipping her hair around her face. “I will not go with you.”
Own your fears. Embrace them.
“I don’t take no for an answer,” he rasped, thick, black blood still gushing through the wound in his stomach. “Think of all we could do together. Perhaps you will be more amenable when you’ve thought over my offer. I will return.”
He began to morph, and it was the most grotesque thing she’d ever seen. Worse even than Odette’s transformation. He became larger. Monstrously large. Fins and sleek, black skin. The ice beneath them trembled and cracked.
“Run!” her mother cried.
But there, just out of reach on the ice, the harpoon. The weapon. The wolf man’s words suddenly piercing her mind. Take from him a weapon that he has touched.
Hester tried to find purchase on the ice, her feet sliding before she found the momentum and traction to run forwards.
She seized the harpoon, and then spun, her vision narrowing to where Septimus raced towards her, narrowing to his outstretched hand, his face a mask of terror as the cracks in the ice rumbled past. She started to run towards him, the cold metal of the weapon biting into her palm.
“Faster!” he yelled.
She put every scrap of energy she had into her legs. The roar of water as the enormous orca slid into the sea pushed her onwards. A towering wave raced for her.
Faster. She had to move faster. Her breath came in ragged gasps, the frozen air shredding her lungs. And then he was by her side, running for the sleds, the dogs. Hester looked over her shoulder, looked everywhere for her mother. Where was she?
Her feet faltered, but Septimus was there, a hand on her lower back, urging her forwards, the harpoon still clutched in her hand.
The wave crashed behind them, the foam sliding under their boots.
Hester flung her arms wide, sliding until she hit the back of the sled, and Septimus leapt on behind and pulled on his snow goggles.
He snapped the reins, the black dogs barking and surging forwards.
She crouched beneath him, stowed the harpoon safely, and then sat with her head in her hands as they sped over the ice, back in the direction of the camp, Snowball and Romeo following.
Hester sobbed, sucking in mouthfuls of frigid air. Her mother. What did it all mean? Questions were rising and falling in her head. So many questions. And she was nowhere to be seen.
She had appeared thrice now. After Orcus had attacked and she lay dead, in the Underworld when she had almost frozen to death, and now again. What was the link?
“Stop!” Hester cried. “Stop. I have to see her. I have to ask her…”
But Septimus did not stop, looked at her like she had gone mad.
Maybe she had.
“Stop. Please!”
Septimus shook his head. “We have to get away from here.”
“Did you see her? The winged woman?”
“What? I only saw a…I don’t even know what that was. A man. What did he say to you?”
So, he hadn’t seen her. Only she had been able to. “STOP.” And when he didn’t, she eyed the snow. Hester braced herself and rolled off the sled.
“Orn!”
She scrambled to her feet, wincing. “Are you there? Please be there,” she called into the eddies of snow that whirled. The black clouds flashed above, lightning carving the sky.
“Hester! Where the Hell are you?” Septimus appeared, battling the snow and grasping her forearm. “We have to get away from here.”
“I have to know!”
And then lightning struck the ice mere feet away. Septimus flung himself over her, shielding her from the strike, but Hester pushed him away.
Her mother now stood before them. “We don’t have much time. I can only be here when you are in grave danger.”
So that was the link. But she had to know more. Wanted to know everything. “Why did you leave me?”
“They would have killed you, like they killed me. My mother and I hid you.”
“Hid me? From whom? Who killed you?”
But her mother was fading fast. “I do not want you to go seeking them, but they are similar to him.” She pointed towards where Orcus had been.
“Am I an aquiline?”
“Yes.” Her voice was everywhere and nowhere.
And then she was gone.
Hester screamed her rage into the blizzard. Septimus held onto her, holding her together as she broke.
“Who were you speaking to? I thought I saw a shape in the snow,” he said, tucking his thumb and forefinger under her chin and raising her face to his. “What is going on?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. “She is my mother. She’s dead. Put your gun to my head.” She pulled his arm. “Do it.” She needed danger. Needed her to come back.
“What? No! Why would I—”
“She said she can be here when I’m in grave danger. Put the gun to my head. Do it now.” She wrapped his hand around the pistol’s handle and raised it to her temple.
“Hester, this is insane.”
She looked all around, but the woman did not appear.
“Not grave enough,” Hester said to herself, tears still leaking and freezing on her cheeks. “I have to know more.”
“Maybe it’s for the best not to know more. Who was the man?”
“Orcus,” she whispered.
“What did he say to you?”
“He said he would give me everything I desired if I went with him, and he filled up my magic. He said he could find me because he felt my pain, and before he found me because of the magic.” She faltered, tripping over the words.
“I have to use up the magic.” She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “Septimus! Make me angry.”
He froze, two creases forming between his brows under the snow goggles.
“Make me so angry I lose control and use the magic up. Say something misogynistic!”
“Hester—I’m not like that.”
“You are! You threatened to sink my ship, ordered me home, you made decisions without my input. Because I am a woman.”
He removed his snow goggles and pinched the bridge of his nose. “That’s not why. I didn’t say those things because you are a woman.”
She frowned up at him. “Then why?”
He held her shoulders and pinned her gaze. “The lifeboats—I did that because it was urgent, and I couldn’t find you. I honestly tried. I knew it was what you would have done.” His grip tightened. “And I did not want you coming down here because…”
“Because?”
“Because. Hester. I couldn’t imagine a world without you in it. I have lost so many friends to this Godforsaken place, and I couldn’t contemplate the idea that you would come down here and perish on the ice like they did. I am in love with you, and you cannot see—”
Love.
He was in love with her.
The magic in her chest exploded outwards in a shockwave. She hit him so hard in the jaw that he staggered sideways. The wind howling a gale around them, building so strongly it was hard to keep upright. Lightning tracked down some way off, striking the ice again and again. Thunder boomed overhead.
Septimus rubbed at his jaw, working it up and down.
“Of all the patriarchal overprotective bullshit I’ve ever heard, this is the worst! Do you expect me to fall on my knees and thank you?! You followed me down here because you felt sure I would die if you weren’t here to—what? Protect me?”
“Yes,” he ground out. “Now you say it like that—”
“And you risked your crew in hasty, poorly thought-out preparations to chase us? On the pretence of wanting to beat us to it? All because you couldn’t imagine life without me?”
“Yes,” he said, hanging his head, closing his eyes.
Thunder roared, the clouds starting to rotate as Hester panted, the magic spilling out in her rage.
“All because you love me?”
“Yes,” his voice was almost drowned out by the wind, but the admission of guilt was there.
“You love me,” she said. There was a glowing in her chest that wasn’t her magic. The magic was slowly fading to nothing, replaced by something that burned equally brightly. She balled her fists into his coat. “You. Love. Me.”
She pulled him forwards, touching her nose to his. Her gaze lingered on his and then moved down to his mouth.
She stared at his lips as they formed the words, “I love you, Hester.”
She threaded her fingers through his hair, the other hand covering the purple of his jaw, her knuckles a matching shade of violet. “You are—by far—the most infuriating person I’ve ever met,” she said, standing on her toes and shaking with built-up desire.
He set his hands at her hips. “And you are the most infuriating person I’ve ever met.
” He pulled her closer, so that all of her lined up with all of him.
Time seemed to slow, and Hester tugged the back of his head, gazing into sapphire eyes, blue as the deepest depths of the sea. Eyes she could drown in.
And then his mouth collided with hers. His tongue swept over hers, and Hester could have melted in his arms. She groaned into his mouth as his tongue claimed her, and she pressed her hips to him, a delicious heat coiling between her thighs, driving her wilder and higher with every stroke of his tongue against hers.
The brightness in her chest was burning away the pain, the fear, the longing.
Hester pulled away. “Take me back to the tent and fu—”
The dogs started baying, and she laughed. He swept her off her feet, kissing her still as he walked to the sled and set her down. A particularly vicious swipe of wind had all of the clouds streaming westwards, the sun blazing the bright blue sky.
Her magic was spent.
They sped over the ice towards the camp.
Hester fell off the sled in her haste to drag Septimus to his tent, ignoring the wide-eyed stares of the crew.
“Get everything packed up!” she called. “We leave tonight.”