Chapter Twenty-Four
Cold comes first.
Then my head—a deep, sick throb on one side, close to the bone. Something in there is still ringing.
Then the part where I’m moving and my own feet have nothing to do with it.
There’s cloth over my face—rough, close, stinking of horse and cold smoke. My wrists are bound behind me, the angle wrenching my shoulders, and someone’s got me under the arms, hauling, my heels dragging two long lines through snow I can’t see.
The last thing I’ve got is the wood store. The cold coming through the door. Working out how to say it to Baldr.
A man who said he’d walk me down.
He walked me down.
My heart slams. I get my feet under me for half a second and the grip hauls me straight up by one arm, hard enough that I gasp.
Above my head a voice says something low to a voice further ahead.
I don’t catch the words. I catch the shape of them—orders, and calm ones—and that’s when it drops all the way through me.
Nobody knows where I am.
The new place under my ribs pulls tight.
Eirik.
I grab for him down that thread, and all of it goes with me—the cold, the head, the rope, the fear of it. Every wall I had, gone.
Wake up. Feel this. Please wake up.
I try to think. How long was I out? The light through the hood is flat and grey—could be ten minutes, could be an hour. We’re climbing, then dropping. Trees. Snow deep enough to drag in. That’s everything I’ve got, and it’s nothing. I don’t even know which way is back.
Behind us, something screams.
Not a person. Too high. Too furious.
I’ve heard it once. On this same road.
Snowpetal.
The hands on me stop.
“—the cat,” somebody says. “It’s the—”
He doesn’t finish.
The grip lets go and I drop—shoulder, then cheek, into the snow. I twist and shove the hood up against my own arm until grey light comes through, until I can see.
I wish I couldn’t.
Snowpetal’s already off the ground. One second she’s a white streak between two sets of boots—the next both her horns are buried under a grey-eyed man’s jaw and she’s taking him over backward into a pine.
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Her talons open his coat, her back legs rake, and his throat comes apart between her horns while his boots knock twice against the trunk and go still.
Blood sheets over the white of her horns, thins, and disappears into them.
She turns. White eyes, round. Red mouth.
“Snowpetal—”
The men break apart around her. One drops his sword without meaning to. Another takes the club-tail across the knee from the side—I hear the joint go, a wet wrong crunch—and he screams and folds. Copper eyes. I hope it never sets right.
She’s between me and all of them now, back arched, fur up and stiff with blood, that ridiculous white puff of a tail soaked red and dragging a line through the snow.
And she’s still so small.
“Get the silver,” someone says through his teeth.
Two of them drag a dark roll out of the snow and shake it open. Fine metal catches the light.
Vein-silver. Lace-fine, looped, and no torn end on it this time. Somebody made this one to hold.
“Snowpetal, run—”
She launches at them instead.
The mesh comes down over her. She hits it hard enough to drag both men off their feet, and for one breath I’m sure she’s going straight through—then the loops pull tight around her front legs, catch the club, close over her back.
She twists. The little wool puffball I made her tears off her tail and drops into the blood, and the metal only gets tighter the harder she fights.
A man moves in with two silver loops on leather cords. The horn restraints.
“Don’t you touch her—”
I get a knee under me and a boot comes down between my shoulders and grinds me flat.
One loop goes over a horn. She shrieks—a sound way too big for her, big enough to shake snow down out of the branches—and throws herself sideways so hard the loop rides up the horn and off.
She gets a front leg free. Then the club. She sinks her talons into the nearest man’s wrist until he lets go, and then she’s out of it—bloodied, one horn still trailing a snapped cord, every part of her furious and wrong. Alive.
For one breath she looks at me.
“Go,” I get out. “Go—go—”
Three of them close in with the silver stretched between them.
She sees it. She sees me. She could come back, and every one of them is praying she does.
She turns and runs uphill instead.
White fur, there and gone between the black trunks. Up toward the ridge. Toward Myrkvier.
Toward him.
The thread under my ribs yanks hard enough to take the breath I had left.
Far off, at the other end of it, something catches.
Eirik.
I don’t know what reached him. I hold onto the thread anyway—thin, pulling, the only thing I’ve got—because the people I spent all morning trying not to hurt are the only ones coming for me now.
The boot lifts off my back. Hands drag me up. My legs don’t want any part of it.
The copper-eyed man gets himself upright on a leg that hangs wrong and takes my chin in a hand slick with her blood. He’s gone grey around the mouth.
“The general’ll want her,” he says—not to me, to the others, like he’s still talking himself into it. “Alive’s worth more than a body. Move.”
The hood comes back down. The road goes with it.
They haul me off the road into the trees. My boots cut two broken lines through the snow until it turns rough with roots, and the cold works in under the cloak and finds every wet place the snow left on me.
I think about Asta, waking to a made bed and no note, scared out of her mind and furious, and both of those are mine.
I think about Baldr down at his wagons, waiting on a woman who’s already gone.
I think about Eirik, who got all of it down the bond and is somewhere behind his silver right now, knowing something’s wrong and not knowing what.
The thread stays tight. I can’t see him. But the far end’s moving now—I can feel that much. Coming.
Somewhere behind me, Snowpetal is bleeding her way uphill in the dark, running for the one person who can find me.
I hold on.