Proven Guilty

by Jim Butcher

Chapter 37~38

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  The black ice walls of Arctis Tor were sixty feet thick, and walking through the gateway felt more like walking through a railroad tunnel.

  Except for all the bones.

  Every breath, every step, every rasp of bones rubbing against one another, multiplied into a thousand echoes that almost seemed to grow louder rather than fading away. The bones piled higher as I went, forcing me to walk atop them as best I could. The footing was treacherous. The deep green and violet, and occasionally red or green, pulses of luminance in the black ice walls did nothing to light the way. They only made the shadows shift and flow subtly, degrading my depth perception. I started feeling a little carsick.

  If one of the fetches appeared at the far end of the tunnel and charged me, things would get nasty, and fast, especially given how ineffective my magic had been against them and how the bones had slowed my pace. That was more than a little spooky, and it was hard to keep myself from thrashing ahead more quickly out of pure fear. I kept a steady pace, held it in, and refused to allow it to control me.

  I had been shielding my thoughts from Lasciel for a couple of years now. Damned if I was going to give a bunch of murderous faerie monsters the chance to paw through my emotions.

  I checked behind me. Charity had trouble managing the awkward task of crawling over the bones while armored and holding that big old war hammer, but she stuck to it with grim focus and determination. Behind her, Murphy seemed to have far less trouble. Thomas prowled along at the rear, graceful as a panther in a tree.

  I emerged from the gate into the courtyard. The inside of the fortress was bleak, cold, and beautiful in its simple symmetry. Rooms and chambers had either never been built or had been built into the walls and their entries hidden. Stairs led up to the battlements atop the walls. The courtyard was flat, smooth, dark ice, and at its center the single spire reared up from the ground, a round turret that rose to a crenellated parapet that overlooked the walls and the ground beneath.

  The courtyard also held a sense of quiet stillness to it, as though it was not a place meant for living, moving, changing beings. The howl of the wind outside and overhead did not reach the ground. It was as silent as a librarian's tomb, and each footstep sounded clearly on the ice. Echoes bounced back and forth in the courtyard, somehow carrying a tone of disapproval and menace with them.

  Bones spilled out in a wave from the gate, rapidly tapering off after a few yards. Beyond that were only scattered groupings of bones. Thomas drifted over to one such and poked at it with his drawn saber. The blade scraped on a skull too big to stuff into an oil drum, too heavy and thick to look entirely human.

  "What the hell was this?" Thomas asked quietly.

  "Troll, probably," I said. "Big one. Maybe fourteen, fifteen feet tall. " I looked around. Haifa dozen other enormous skulls lay in the scattered collections of remains. Another six had fallen very close to each other, at the base of the spire. "Give me a second. I want to know what we're looking at before we move ahead. "

  Charity looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she took up position a few yards off, watching one way. Thomas and Murphy spread out, each keeping their eyes on a different direction.

  Mixed in with the fallen trolls' bones were broken pieces of dark ice that might have been the jigsaw-puzzle remains of armor and weapons. Each fragment bore the remnants of ornate engraving employing gold, silver, and tiny blue jewels. Faerie artistry, and expensive artistry at that. "Thirteen of them. The trolls were Mab's," I murmured. "I saw some of them outfitted like this a couple of years back. "

  "How long have they been dead?" Murphy asked quietly.

  I grunted and hunkered down. I stretched my left hand out over the bones and closed my eyes, focusing my attention on sharpening my senses, mundane and magical alike. Very faintly, I could scent the heavy, bestial stink of a troll. I'd only seen a couple of the big ones from up close, but you could smell the ugly bastards from half a mile away. There was a rotten odor, more like heavy mulch than old meat. And there was more sulfur and brimstone.

  Below that, I could feel tremors in the air over the spot, the psychic residue of the troll's violent death. There was a sense of excitement, rage, and then a dull, seldom-felt terror and a rush of sharp, frozen images of violent death, confusion, terror, and searing agony.

  My hand flinched back from the phantom sensation of its own accord, and for just a moment the memories of my burning took on tangible form. I hissed through my teeth and held my hand against my stomach, willing the too-real ghost of pain away.

  "Harry?" Murphy asked.

  What the hell? The impression the death had left was so sharp, so severe, that I had actually gotten bits of the troll's memories. That had never happened to me before. Of course, I had never tried to pick up vibes in the Nevernever, either. It made more sense that the substance of the spirit world would leave a clearer spiritual impression.

  "Harry?" Murphy said again, more sharply.

  "I'm all right," I said through clenched teeth. The imprint had been more clear than anything I had ever felt in the real world. In Chicago, I would have thought it was only a few seconds old. Here. . .

  "I can't tell how old they are," I said. "My gut says not very, but I can't be sure. "

  "It must have been weeks," Thomas said. "It takes that long for bones to get this clean. "

  "It's all relative," I said. "Time can pass at different rates in Faerie. These bones could have fallen a thousand years ago, by the local clock. Or twenty minutes ago. "

  Thomas muttered something under his breath and shook his head.

  "What killed them, Harry?" Murphy asked.

  "Fire. They were burned to death," I said quietly. "Down to the bone. "

  "Could you do that?" Thomas asked.

  I shook my head. "I couldn't make it that hot. Not at the heart of Winter. " Not even with Hellfire. The remains of perhaps a thousand creatures lay scattered about. I'd cut loose once in the past and roasted a bunch of vampires-and maybe some of their victims with them-but even that inferno hadn't been big enough to catch more than a tithe of the fallen defenders of Arctis Tor.

  "Then who did it?" Charity asked quietly.

  I didn't have an answer for her. I rose and nudged a smaller skull with my staff. "The littler ones were goblins," I said. "Foot soldiers. " I rolled a troll-sized thighbone aside with my staff. An enormous sword, also of that same black ice, lay shattered beneath it. "These trolls were her personal guard. " I gestured back at the gate. "Covering her retreat to the tower, maybe. Some of them got taken down along the way. The others made a stand at the tower's base. Died there. "

  I paced around, checking what the tracking spell had to say, and triangulated again. "Molly's in the tower," I murmured.

  "How do we get in?" Murphy asked.

  I stared at the blank wall of the spire. "Um," I said.

  Charity glanced over my shoulder and nodded at the spire. "Look behind those trolls. If they were covering a retreat, they should be near the entrance to the tower. "

  "Maybe," I said. I walked over to the tower and frowned at the black ice. I ran my right hand over its surface, feeling for cracks or evidence of a hidden doorway, my senses tuned to discover any magic that might hide a door. I had the sudden impression that the black ice and the slowly pulsing colors inside were somehow alive, aware of me. And they did not like me at all. I got a sense of alien hatred, cold and patient. Otherwise, I got nothing for my trouble but half-frozen fingers.

  "Nothing here," I said, and rapped my knuckles on the side of the tower, eliciting the dull thump of a very solid object. "Maybe the trolls just wanted to fight with their backs to something solid. I might have to go all the way around checking for-"

  Without any warning at all the ice of the tower parted. An archway appeared, the ice that had hidden it flowing seamlessly into the rest of the tower. The interior of the tower was al
l shadows and slowly shifting lights that did little to provide any illumination. Inside was nothing but a spiral staircase, winding counterclockwise up through the spire.

  I glanced from the archway to my chilled fingers and back. "Next time, I guess I'll just knock. "

  "Come on," Charity said. She shifted her grip on the war hammer, holding it at something like high port arms, handle parallel to her spine, heavy head ready to descend. "We have to hurry. "

  Thomas and Murphy turned to join us at the door.

  An idle, puzzled sense of familiarity gave way to my instincts' furious warning. Fetches were the masters of the sucker punch. Like the Bucky-fetch who had jumped us just as we opened the doors to the theater, they knew how to position themselves to attack just as their enemies focused their attention on some kind of distraction.

  The suddenly opened doorway was it.

  Mounds of bones around the courtyard exploded into motion. Fetches hurtled at us over the ground. There weren't three of them, either-there were dozens.

  The fetches, here in Faerie, did not look like movie monsters. Their true forms were only vaguely humanoid, wavering uncertainly, as black as midnight shadows but for ghostly white eyes. I could see other shapes around them, translucent and faint. Here, another one of those alien monster things. There some kind of wolflike biped. There an enormous man with the head of a warthog. But the salve I had spread over my eyes revealed those illusions for what they really were, and showed me the thing beneath the mask.

  My magic had a risky batting average against these creatures, but there were things I could do besides hosing energy directly at the enemy. Hell-fire came to my call, and my staff's runes exploded into light as brilliant as a magnesium flare. Their flame lit the benighted courtyard while somehow not damaging my clothing or flesh. My will and the Hellfire roared through me in a torrent as I whirled the staff in a circle over my head and screamed, "Veritas cyclis!"

  The howling winds thundered down into the silent courtyard as if I had torn off an unseen roof. They gathered along my spinning staff, fluttering with lightning the same color as the blazing runes on the staff. I cried out and hurled the winds, not at the oncoming fetches, but at the thousands of bones lying between them and me.

  The wind picked them up with a wailing shriek; a sudden cyclone of broken bones and shattered armor, spinning them into a whirling curtain. The lead fetches were too late to avoid plunging into the cloud, and the ossified tornado began to rip them apart, battering to pulp whatever was not sheared away by the edges and points of bone and broken shards of ice. Fetches following in their wake skidded to a halt, letting out a startlingly loud chorus of hisses, the sounds filled with rage.

  Thomas cried out and I heard heavy footsteps. Another fetch, this one much larger, came around the curve of the spire's wall. The ghost image of the Reaper was all around him. A beat later, another charged us from the other direction, just as large, this one with the faint image of Hammer-hand, an almost obscenely muscled figure in black, heavy mallets emerging from the ends of his sleeves.

  "Into the tower!" I bellowed.

  The Reaper reached Thomas, and its arm rose up, tipped with gleaming black talons in its true form, the illusion superimposing the image of the Reaper's trademark scythe over them. Thomas caught the Reaper's sweeping claws on his saber, but instead of the ringing of steel on steel, there was a flash of green-white light and the Reaper-fetch howled in agony as the steel of the blade struck its claws cleanly from its appendage.

  Thomas crouched, hips and shoulders twisting in a sharp, one-two movement. The saber's blade cut and burned a flattened X shape into the fetch's abdomen. The fetch roared in agony, and liquid green-white fire burst from the wound. The creature swung its other arm, its speed taking even Thomas by surprise. He avoided most of the power of the blow, but what was left slammed him into the side of the tower.

  I heard a gunshot behind me, then another, and then Murphy snarled, "Damn it!" I turned in time to see her bob to one side and then to the other as Hammerhand swung a mallet limb down at her. The blow crashed into the courtyard with a cracking impact as loud as a rifle shot. Murphy danced in closer to the fetch, inside the awkward reach of its club-hands. It thrust one down at her. At first I thought she was slapping it aside, but then she grabbed onto the fetch and continued the motion, adding her own weight and strength to the fetch's and redirecting the force of the blow so that the fetch's weapon-hand crushed its own foot. The fetch bellowed in pain and lost its balance. Murphy shoved in the same direction and the fetch fell. She leapt away from it, for the tower door, while I grabbed Thomas and hauled him inside.

  From somewhere up the stairs, I heard a terrified scream.

  Molly.

  Charity let out a cry and threw herself up the stairs.

  "No!" I shouted. "Charity, wait!"

  The doorway darkened as a fetch tried to come through. Murphy, her back flat against the wall beside the door, drew the long fighting dagger she had taken from Charity's box of goodies. Just as its nose cleared the doorway, she whirled in a half circle and with all the power of her legs, hips, back, and shoulders drove the knife to its hilt in one of the thing's white eyes.

  The fetch went mad with agony. It slammed itself blindly against the inside of the doorway, more liquid fire erupting from the wound, and lurched back and forth until Thomas stepped up to it, lifted a boot, and kicked the fetch with crushing strength, hurling the mortally wounded faerie back out onto the courtyard.

  "Go!" he cried. Another fetch began to press in, and Thomas went to work with his sword. His blows struck more burning wounds into the fetch, and its blood sizzled like grease on a stove when it touched the cold iron of his blade. Thomas dodged a return blow and pressed his attack with a sneer, driving the thing back from the doorway.

  "Go!" he yelled again. "I'll hold the door!"

  A snakelike, whipping limb shot in along the floor, seized Thomas's ankle, and hauled his foot out from under him. I clutched at him and kept him from being drawn into the open. "Murph!"

  Murphy slid up, pointed her pistol out the door, and squeezed off several shots. A fetch screamed in pain and Thomas's leg suddenly came free. I pulled him in and he lunged to his feet again.

  "We'll hold the door," Murphy said, her voice sharp. "Get the girl!"

  Molly screamed again.

  Charity's booted feet thudded unseen from the stairs above me.

  I spat out an oath and sprinted after her.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The spiral staircase spun me in a steady, ascending circle. The low, ugly light within the walls swirled sickeningly, adding to my sense of motion sickness and disorientation. Below me, I could hear Thomas's sharp, mocking laughter as he fought, together with the occasional report of Murphy's gun. My aching body hated me for forcing it to run up the stairs-particularly my knees. Anyone my size is prone to that kind of thing.

  But there was nothing to be done about it, so I ignored the pain and went on, Lily's fiery butterfly keeping pace with me and lighting my way.

  I had longer legs, and I caught Charity as she neared the top of the staircase. Molly screamed again, pure terror and anguish and pain, and her voice was very near.

  "I'm coming, baby!" Charity gasped, panting. She was in great shape, but no one's exercise program includes running up several hundred feet of spiral stairs in full mail and helmet carrying a big-ass hammer and a sword. Her legs had slowed, and she staggered a little when she reached the top stair and found herself in a short, level, low-ceilinged hall leading a few feet to another open archway. The cold light of winter night, moonlight on snow, shone in through the arch.

  I managed to snag her arm and check her advance just as a heavy door slammed to cover the archway with tooth-rattling force. If I hadn't delayed her, it would have hit her like a speeding truck. She recovered her balance, and while she did we heard a heavy bolt slide shut on the door. Charity shoved a han
d at the door, which remained fixed. She kicked a booted foot at it, and failed to so much as rattle it in its frame.

  Molly screamed again, still close, though muffled by the closed door. Her cry was weaker, shorter.

  "Molly!" Charity screamed.

  I thrust the spread fingers of my left hand against the door, and was instantly aware of the energy flowing through it, binding it, giving it strength beyond reason to resist being opened. I looked for a weakness, a soft spot in the adamant magic supporting the door, but there was none. The ward on the door was, simply put, flawless. It spread through the door's substance as coldly and beautifully as crystals of ice forming on a window, the magic of Winter drawn up from the heart of the land. There was no way for me to unravel the subtle, complex faerie magic.

  But then, it was faerie magic. I didn't have to be subtle to counter it.

  "Charity," I snapped. "It's faerie make! The hammer!"

  She shot me a glance of comprehension and nodded. "Clear the door. "

  I hurried back, leaving her room to swing.

  "Please," Charity whispered as she planted her feet and drew back the weapon. "Please, Father. Please. "

  Charity closed her eyes and took a deep breath, focusing her concentration on delivering the most powerful blow she possibly could in the confines of the hallway. Then she swung the weapon back, golf-club style, cried out, and swung, stepping forward.

  Maybe Charity was way more buff than I thought. Maybe that particular ward had a particular weakness to cold iron. Maybe it had nothing to do with magic, and Charity had somehow tapped into the strength available to all mothers when their young are endangered. Hell, maybe God was on her side.

  Whatever happened, that siege door of adamant ice and malevolent, obdurate magic screamed and shattered at the blow from her hammer, shattered like delicate glass, shattered into pieces no larger than grains of sand. The whole tower rang with the power of the blow, the very black ice it was made of seeming to shriek and groan. The floor literally shook, and I had to crouch to keep from taking a tumble back down the stairs.

  I heard Charity choke down a cry of pain. She had broken the door before us, but the spells running through it had backlashed against the hammer, and it too had shattered. A flying piece of fractured metal had cut across her hip and lodged in one of the rings of her mail. It glowed red-hot, and she frantically slapped it away even as it burned her. Other pieces of shrapnel from the hammer had struck the walls of the tower, burning their way into the black ice, sending a network of cracks of green-white light all through the tower around us like some sort of bizarre infection.

  Black ice melted away from the red-hot steel. The tower rumbled again like some vast, agonized beast.

  Charily dropped the handle of the hammer. I could see that her right arm hung limp and useless, but it didn't stop her from making an awkward left-handed draw of the sword at her hip. I slipped up beside her, staff held ready in both hands, and we stepped out onto the parapet of the tower of Arctis Tor together.

  The parapet was enormous, a hundred feet across, twice as wide as the spire beneath us. It was a garden of sorts; a garden of ice.

  Ice covered the parapet, somehow formed into ghostly trees and flowers. There were seats here and there in the garden, and they too were made of ice. A frozen fountain stood silent at the center of the parapet, a bare trickle of water sliding from the top of a statue so coated in layers and layers of ice that one could not readily identify its particulars. Replica rose vines and thorns spread all around the place, all ice, all cold and beautiful.

  Upon the branch of a tree perched a cardinal, its bloodred feathers brilliant, though the bird itself was utterly still. I peered a bit closer, and saw that it was covered in a layer of transparent ice, frozen into a sculpture every bit as much as the rest of the place. Not far from it, a spider's web spread between some tree branches, the spider at its center also transformed into ice sculpture. A swift look around showed me more beings entombed in ice, and I realized that this place was not a garden.

  It was a prison.

  Next to the fountain sat a lovely young girl in a Byzantine gown, hand entwined with that of a young man in similar historic costume. Not far from them, three females of the Sidhe, Mab's kindred, the nobility of faerie kind, stood back-to-back, their shoulders touching in a triangle. The three looked so much alike that they might have been sisters, and they each held hands with the others, expressions of determination and fear frozen onto their faces.

  The ice sculpture of a thick, dead-looking tree held a dead, naked man upon it, crucified on its branches as a grotesque work of art. Bonds of ice held him there, transparent enough to let me see the blackened flesh of his hands and feet, the gangrenous darkness spreading upward through the veins of his arms and legs. His hair was long, unwashed, and fell over his face as he hung limp within his bonds, his body coated with layers of crystalline frost.

  Molly sat at the base of the same tree. Her artfully shredded clothes had been shredded in truth, and they hung from her as loose rags. Her cotton-candy hair hung in a limp mass, uncombed and tangled. She shuddered with cold, and her eyes stared at nothing. Her expression was twisted as if in effort, her mouth open. It took me a minute to realize that she had never stopped screaming. She'd damaged her throat, and no sound would emerge. But that didn't stop her from trying.

  Charity shifted her weight to hurry forward, but I cautioned her, "Wait. We'll do her no good if we're dead. "

  She clenched her jaw, but heeded me, and we paused for a moment while I swept my gaze over the rest of the parapet. Some movement in the shadows behind the crucifixion tree drew my eye, and I reached back for the handle of my blasting rod, sticking out of my nylon backpack. I drew the magical tool and primed it with an effort of will. Red-white fire suddenly glowed at its tip. "There. Behind the tree," I said.

  A deep voice let out a rasping chuckle.

  Then, from the darkness I couldn't quite see into, the Scarecrow appeared.

  This thing was no fetch, no changer of form and image and illusion. There was no shadowy mask over an amorphous form, no glamour altering its appearance, which my salve would have enabled me to see through. This thing was a whole, independent creature. Unless maybe it was a fetch so old and strong that it could transform itself into the Scarecrow in truth and not simply in seeming.

  Red flame glittered in the carved-pumpkin head. Its limbs, all long, tough vines as thick as my wrists, were clothed in ragged tatters of black that looked more like a funeral robe than a farmer's castoffs. Its long arms trailed almost to the ground, and one of them was stretched over to Molly. At the end of the arm, the vines tapered into dozens of slender, flexible tendrils, and die Scarecrow had them wrapped around Molly's throat and sliding up into her hair.

  We stood in silence, facing one another for a while. Wind moaned somewhere overhead, not far above the parapet. The sounds of hissing and screaming fetches drifted up as if from a great distance. Thomas and Murphy still held the door.

  I took several steps to one side and gave the Scarecrow a little smile. "Hi," I said. "Who the hell are you?"

  "One who has served the Queen of Air and Darkness since before your kind can remember," he replied. "One who has destroyed hundreds like you. "

  "You know what, Captain Kudzu?" I asked. "I'm not here to play guessing games with you. Give me the girl. "

  The bizarre creature's face twisted in what might been amusement. "Or what follows?"

  I wasn't absolutely certain the thing was quoting Shakespeare, but that didn't mean I couldn't do it. "Bloody constraint," I told him. "For should you try to hide the girl from me, even in your heart, there shall I rake for her. "

  Maybe the Scarecrow wasn't a Shakespeare fan. Its eyes flared with angry scarlet light. "Little man. Move an inch closer and I will crush her soft little neck. "

  "Inadvisable," I said, and raised my blasting rod to level it at the Scarecrow. "Bec
ause she's the only thing keeping you alive right now. "

  "I fear you not, wizard," the Scarecrow said. The creature narrowed its eyes, focusing upon me intently-perhaps preparing the same defense that had shed my spells in our first encounter. "Bring your fire, if you think it may survive the heart of Winter. It will avail you against me this time no more than last. "

  "You think I'd show up for round two without being prepared to finish what I started?" I asked him. I sidled a couple of more steps to one side. "The Council is already on the way here," I said. "I'm here to make you an offer before things fall apart. Give me the girl and your word not to go near her again, and I let you live. "

  The Scarecrow let out a laugh of pure scorn. "I shall enjoy killing you, mortal. "

  I prowled a few steps more and planted my feet, then brandished my staff and rod. The Scarecrow crouched in response, eyes burning even brighter.

  I had to be careful. If I spooked him too much, he'd kill Molly as a prelude to closing with me. "You know what your problem is?" I asked him.

  He stared at me for a blank second of incomprehension. "What?"

  I showed my teeth in a wolfish smile. "You underestimate people. "

  While I'd drawn the Scarecrow's attention and eye, Charity had slipped around behind it, silent as a puff of smoke. As I spoke, she lifted her sword and swept it down at the appendage holding her daughter. The steel blade hissed and flashed and seared its way through the limb holding Molly.

  The Scarecrow reared its head back in a sudden howl of rage. Molly's body bucked in panic as the severed limbs contracted on her throat. I lifted my staff and snarled, "Forzare!" Unseen force lashed out, caught up Molly as gently as I could manage it, and flipped her tail over teakettle away from the creature. No sooner had I moved her than its stumpy arm swung down to smash into the ground where the girl had been sitting.

  The Scarecrow turned to grab at Molly, but Charity stepped into its path, cold steel gleaming, her eyes harder and colder than the black ice of Arctis Tor. She faced the thing squarely and snarled, "You will never touch my daughter again. "

  The creature roared in fury and rushed Charity. I whipped up my blasting rod and snarled, "Fuego!" A lance of flame as thick as my wrist lashed out from the tip of the rod-and died two feet away from it, the burning energy of the magical strike swallowed by an unfathomable ocean of cold, cold power. I had hoped that I could get in a shot while the Scarecrow was distracted, but I had already decided on what to try next if I couldn't.

  I stuck the blasting rod through my belt, whipped my staff up to point the tip at the ground beneath the Scarecrow's feet, and shouted, "Forzare!"

  Invisible force lashed out and struck the black ice under the Scarecrow like a mortar round. It threw the creature ten feet into the air, spinning end over end. Deadly chips of black ice flew. As the spell's energy roared out of me, I staggered and almost lost my balance. My vision tunneled for a second or two out of pure exhaustion. I'd been pushing too hard, for too long, with no rest. The magic I'd been using had drained my reserves entirely. The human body has limits that cannot be circumvented, and I had reached mine.

  Charity rushed forward before the Scarecrow could rise. Her sword hacked down at it in elemental brutality, and the Scarecrow's blood and woodlike flesh sizzled on her blade. But she didn't kill it.

  The Scarecrow regained its feet and lashed an arm at Charity. She swung her sword to meet it. Cold iron bit into faerie flesh, drawing forth another explosion of brilliant, liquid flame. The creature screamed, a sound louder than any living thing I'd ever heard, and its backswing slammed into Charity's limp right arm. The impact tore a grunt of pain from her and flung her several feet through the air, but the Scarecrow paid for it. Coming into contact with Charity's mail burned it again, and its furious howls redoubled.

  It lifted a foot to stomp down on the helplessly writhing Molly, to flatten her like an aluminum can.

  It was the kind of thing that draws suicidal levels of chivalry from me. I ran for the Scarecrow, ditching my blasting rod on the way. I took my staff in both hands, slammed it down like a pole-vaulter, and launched myself into the air, both feet aimed at the Scarecrow's back. I hit the thing with considerable force, but I'd been too tired to manage it as precisely as I wished. The blow only staggered the creature, and I bounced off it and flopped onto the icy surface of the parapet.

  I had bought time enough, though, for Charity to regain her feet and charge forward with her blade, diverting the Scarecrow's attention from her daughter.

  Before I could regain my feet, the Scarecrow snapped a foot at me in a clumsy, unbalanced kick. It landed with only a fraction of the force it might have had. Even so, that was enough to send me sprawling ten feet away and maybe crack one of my ribs. Pain washed through me and I suddenly couldn't get my lungs to take in enough air.

  The Scarecrow stretched out an arm toward Charity, and ropy-looking vines shot from the ends of his arms, flickered across the ten feet between them like lightning, and wrapped her sword arm's wrist. The tendrils tightened. The Scarecrow shook Charity violently. She screamed, and the sword tumbled from her fingers. More vines wrapped around her throat, and the creature simply hauled her up into the air. Its wounds were already closing, rebuilding themselves. It seized Molly in its other hand and lifted her as well, holding the pair of them face-to-face. There was a malicious eagerness in the creature's stance.

  "See," it murmured to the fruitlessly struggling Charity. "Look at her. Watch your daughter die. "

  Charity's eyes widened with terror. Her face turned dark red. Molly, meanwhile, simply lay limp, her own face darkening as she was strangled.

  "Not long now," the Scarecrow purred. "There is nothing you can do to help her, mortal woman. Nothing you can do to stop me. "

  It was a fetch, I was sure of it, a creature who had been given talent or power enough to exceed its former status, to become the embodiment of the icon of fear mortals called the Scarecrow, to draw power from that image-power enough to block out my strongest magic. That was why it tormented both Molly and her mother-to feed on their terror.

  I stared at it dully, while my mind ran through the logic tree and my lungs kept trying to get in a deep breath. I searched through myself for energy enough to do something, anything, to help.

  I didn't have it in me.

  I lay there on my side, too exhausted to feel fear, too exhausted to feel hate, too exhausted to feel anger. It was all that I could do to keep from lowering my head and going to sleep, and without will or emotion to fuel my spells, I might as well have been one more frozen sculpture in Mab's prison garden.

  Charity's heels began to kick frantically, uselessly. The Scarecrow went on purring, and I thought I could actually see the damned thing grow a couple of inches taller. Lily's incendiary butterfly fluttered around my head, obscuring my view for a second.

  And I suddenly got it. A sluggish hope surged up in me.

  The fetch drew its power from fear.

  And I had none. I was just too tired for it.

  That was why I had thrashed the fetch at the hotel so badly. Not two minutes before I faced it, I had gathered up my fear and hurled it out on that decoy spell. When I faced the thing in the darkened hallway, I'd been nothing but angry. Without my fear to play on, the fetch could not disrupt my magic, and I had batted him around like a softball.

  Similarly, when I decapitated the Bucky-fetch, I had been feeling no fear. It all happened too fast. I'd reacted on pure reflex, before any pesky thoughts or emotions could weigh in on the matter. There'd been no time to be afraid, and I'd struck the fetch down.

  I would never have realized the weakness in the fetches' defenses had I not pushed myself to my limits; the only thing I had to fear was fear itself. I suddenly knew I could take this chump out, if only I had enough power left for one more spell. I'd done it twice. Third time's the charm.

  The butterfly danced wildly in the air in fr
ont of me.

  I stared at it for a second, realization dawning, and then I burst out into weak laughter. "Lily, you manipulative, deceitful, wonderful girl. "

  I held open my left palm, and the butterfly alighted on it. Its light flashed brighter for a second, and then my will touched it lightly. It fell apart into glowing threads that settled down on my scarred palm and rushed into my spirit. Pure flame filled me, the joyous heat of full summer, and I exalted in the sudden, overflowing life of it. It met the tiny spark of hope still glowing within me and the two multiplied, power unfolding and expanding inside me.

  I found myself on my feet, arms spread to my sides, face turned up toward the enormous silver moon. Sunlight seemed to spill from me, to wreathe me in dancing fires that blazed their defiance of Winter. Arctis Tor itself, the fortress of black ice, groaned in protest at the intensity of the light.

  I looked down to find the creature staring at me in utter shock. Its tendril-fingers had gone loose, and Molly and Charity lay moving weakly at its feet.

  "You cannot do that," the fetch said in a shocked tone. "You. . . It is not possible. "

  I flicked out a hand, whispered a word, and my blasting rod flew from the ground where I'd dropped it and into my hand, its carvings bursting into light as the blazing heat of a thousand Julys welled up, ready to fly free. "You like movie villains, do you?" I lifted the blasting rod while Summer fire flickered around my outstretched arm. I peeled my lips back from my teeth and purred, "Have you seen this one?"

  The carvings along the rod flooded with a blaze of scarlet-and-golden light.

  "How about a little fire, Scarecrow?"