by May Peterson
This was why they watched each night for a coming frost, why even the Lady Eirlys’s image was shrouded.
I fell against the door into the front hall, the wind being knocked from me. I couldn’t run anymore. Not without catching my breath. The frailty of my body suddenly lurched up at me, as if any of these newly forming icicles could splinter me. I should never have come here. Nothing would work, nothing could save me, because I shouldn’t have expected salvation.
The false Rhodry’s voice feathered my skin. “I think you owe us this.” Phantom sounds were soaking through the walls like suffocating waters. “Rhodry—” His name was singsong, as if in mockery “—gave you another chance. I can let him go. Forgive him his debts. I can even save you from her. If you let me hear you again.”
I shoved myself up, the muscles in my legs screaming their protests. My feet burned on the frosted floors, losing sensation. The door couldn’t be that far, could it? Rhodry’s house seemed suddenly labyrinthine.
The foyer came into view. The room looked like a diamond replica of itself. Ice gleamed everywhere, occluding the windows.
I staggered in, propped myself against the wall. My heart sank. Clumps of ice as large as boulders had fallen and filled the passage to the front door. Tears swelled in me, making my chest hurt. No. I couldn’t do this. If I could climb over the wreckage—
“Tsk, tsk.” The phantom voice rasped in my ear. I whirled, slid to the floor. The shadows clustered over me, massaging themselves into inchoate shapes. “Now you’ve gone and hurt yourself.”
Snow fell lightly, materializing out of nothing. An aurora was rising from the center of the hall. From the stairwell. It turned the ice into an array of blazing diamonds. The floor under me shook.
“Oh, my.” The not-face tilted to one side. “I think she’s cross.”
Cold gathered around the core of that light, seeping down the stairs and pooling across the carpet. It took what little breath I had away. Something in that undulation almost...sang to me. Something distant and human.
Something angry.
The atmosphere of the hall broke with thunder. It was like a swat across the face. But the sensation of a voice only became clearer.
I will kill you.
The phantom above me turned. I could hear someone. Just as I heard the inward songs of the hearts I touched. It shivered from the wintry light. There, at the center, a figure was taking shape.
I. Will. Fucking. KILL. YOU.
A broadsword materialized midair out of rapidly forming ice crystals, followed by the hand that bore it. She appeared as if stepping out of the shadows. Robed in white like a sovereign, a curtain of pure black hair. The aurora lit her like a halo. Bare feet striped with frostbite, and a wound studding her abdomen with darkness. She lifted the blade into the air.
It was the face from the photograph. With eyes so cold they burned.
The Lady Eirlys Bedefyr. She had come.
I wiped my eyes reflexively. Very well. I was going to die tonight.
The phantom closed in, blinking from infernally scarlet eyes. “I don’t even have to save you. You can save yourself. Tell her to stop. Say. Something.”
Get away from that boy, you soulless carrion.
The tenor of her inner voice shocked me. I felt it as surely as I sensed the thoughts of someone I was singing for. She dashed across the space, a falling star streaked with black. Her sword poised to strike. In seconds the distance was closed and she was here, present, blinding. Thunder rolled from her throat.
Her blade cleft the phantom in two.
You failed. You didn’t let your pet murderer take care of him before I got here. So now. I fucking. Kill. You.
She wasn’t aiming at me. Everything came together, as if slowed by the cold into perfect clarity.
Her sword thrust up, severing the imitated head. The spirit dissipated with a shriek. Shadows dissolved around the brilliance of her blade.
She’d saved me. And I could understand her. I stared, eyes watering, into her majestic visage. Rage resonated from her like a shout. But it was not directed at me.
The lady’s crystal gaze swept over me. I did it. I got here first this time. It didn’t get to take this one. Thank God. A pained expression twisted her face. Thank God.
I signed without thinking. “You protected me.” The image I’d had, of a killer, was fading like the snow. Aching, I tried to bow. “M-my lady.”
For a moment she hovered in silence, looking at me. I understood her. And she might have understood me. Then, a quiet rumble. Wait. What in hell is this? I don’t know handspeak.
I smiled, trembling with relief. “It’s magic.” A new manifestation of it, but one I was now desperately glad to have developed. In the past, my sensitivity to the moods and auras of others only had come alive after I’d used my voice. But her intensity and intent seemed to pulse through my mutism like heat through glass.
She floated back, eyes wide. Do you. Hear me? The words were so careful that the resulting thunder was almost gentle.
I nodded, the strain catching up to me. My head was getting fuzzy. Tears fell from my chin. “Yes. Somehow. Lady Bedefyr.” Either her will to speak was strong enough to reach me when normal thoughts would not, or my powers were growing in ways I hadn’t imagined.
Her hand jumped to her mouth. I didn’t think it was possible. A snapping sound interrupted her. She spun to meet rising laughter, harsh and mechanical.
The shadows congealed into spectral lines, tall and inhuman, half-shaped features like a mask. “I believe that was meant to ‘fucking kill’ me?” It swelled larger, as if angered by its temporary dissolution. Tendrils jutted from the dark core, strangling its own neck and twisting off the false head. The mouth snarled with dozens of tongues. “If only I could be killed. If I could die as prettily as you did. As your hopeless, laughable dreams did.”
Eirlys positioned herself in front of me. She seemed impossibly bright, diamond-like against the rising field of haze. I’m not going to let you take him. You’re not getting one more soul. Not one.
I was losing coherence; my body was going numb. Rhodry had tried to warn me from her, but she was the only thing now between me and these swallowing illusions.
The mouth filled the breadth of the hall, hundreds of blood-bead eyes glaring down at Eirlys. “Oh, my poor child. You still haven’t recognized your helplessness.”
As its strange laughter pelted her, she didn’t flinch. So why hasn’t your loyal killer taken him yet?
Loyal killer. It was slowly making sense. She hadn’t come to kill me—and she hadn’t killed the others. My mind didn’t have enough heat to grasp it all, like I was trying to pick up a needle with numb fingers. But a new, warmer light was washing over me from behind. Something shone through the ice at the doors. This light was rosier, softer.
Sunlight. Someone was at the door.
The spirit hissed. “Ah, the Lady Eirlys. So brave. So valiantly you fight me, with your vows and your vengeance. You still believe that you can conquer the story of your life. So many things you wanted to be, that you had in you. Leading soldiers, staving off death, fighting for freedom. Hoping that he’d love you. And yet you weren’t even good enough to be your husband’s whore.” The myriad tongues lashed out, licked the shapeless lips.
Eirlys turned, her gaze dominating my vision. Her anger seemed to inure her. How long had she had to endure it torturing the wounds her death hadn’t let heal? Whoever you are. Please. I don’t know how to reach Rhodry. I’m begging.
I just nodded, on and on. Before I lost consciousness. Something cracked at the ice.
My curse binds me to the incubus. I see it watching, listening.
Incubus. That had to be the name of the creature.
Since the day you have entered this house, its eyes have turned always toward you. It fears you. I know it must. Because
, somehow, it has not been able to curse you.
What? The dawn fell hard on my shoulder. Her words in my mind felt physical, driving the cold into me. Rhodry’s curse? How was that possible?
“Fuck! Mio!” Rhodry’s voice, wild and rough and dear, snapping me out of my fever trance. “Goddammit, she has him.”
Eirlys spared a glance for the crumbling ice, for her husband fighting to reach me. The spirit—the incubus—behind her was writhing in the invasive light, brandishing phantasmal fangs.
We must not let you fall. I don’t know what grace you possess to thwart the incubus. But whatever it is, if you can find it in your heart to help him—to help me. Please. But I will do anything.
Rhodry had broken through the ice, and he stood with breath streaming, bright as a bloodstain. Animal ferocity had reshaped his hands into bearlike claws, dark fur shining on his face and arms. His roar shook the air. My heart all but stopped at the sight of him. “Eirlys?”
The incubus echoed its cacophonous laughter. “Ah, now we are all gathered. No two sinners ever deserved each other so richly.”
But as though she sensed my waning strength, Eirlys continued. He has been deceived. Neither I nor the incubus has taken these lives. Its hand is stainless. There is one who serves it. And I cannot stop them.
I kept nodding through my dizziness, hoping I would remember her words.
“Eirlys.” Rhodry crouched on his claws near me. “Please. Not him. Kill me this time, if you have to. Consider this begging. Eirlys, just—”
The cold seemed to increase, and I realized that Eirlys must be holding me up. If nothing changes, Rhodry and I will fail. He will do all in his power to preserve you. But you must live.
The activity in the room had collapsed into mist; Rhodry was roaring with deafening strength, mixed with the lady’s thunder. The incubus was crying out, either in spite or in rage.
It is the work of the deceiver. I fear what power the incubus will gain from your defeat.
I didn’t have anything left. I was fading into unconsciousness.
The deceiver is already among you.
Chapter Eight
RHODRY
Mio was still breathing. I held him, my jacket cowled around his shoulders. His nostrils puffed weak plumes onto my skin. He was still alive. I carried him through the hall, reminding myself that I was not hallucinating.
Let him keep breathing. Let him keep breathing. Let him—
Rosemary flew ahead, no longer bothering with the motions of walking. “You go down to the kitchen. Heat water; boil about a kettle, we’ll need it to control temperature. The rest I want only warm, or it could damage his nerves.”
I barely registered what she was saying. But she was issuing the instructions to Cecilio, not me. Cecilio bobbed through the wall, Rosemary keeping up her litany as she pushed open the door to my room, immediately began the fire. “Bring him here for the moment, my lord. Rub his back and arms.” She produced a pile of blankets and began shawling them over Mio.
I helped, but my hands were numb. I repeated my prayer. Let me not be hallucinating. Mio was trembling, so delicate in my arms, the color blasted from his face. Stripped of what should have protected him. The decade of clenched caution that had been crumpled and thrown away on the tail end of kiss.
Eirlys’s face rent my thoughts. Lucent and severe as the edge of a sword. Speaking to Mio. Covering him.
“My lord!” Rosemary barked, as if she’d had to repeat herself. “I need you with me now. Mio is in a state called hypothermia. We can keep him from losing body temperature, but there’s no knowing what other effects Her Ladyship may have had on him.” Cecilio appeared, buckets and a kettle orbiting him. Rosemary nodded; with a wave of her arm, the tub slid across the floor.
In moments, they had it full. The thought of stripping Mio in the lingering cold made me want to cry. But his clothes were damp with slush, and his wounds would need cleansed. As gently as I could, I laid him on a blanket and undid his pajamas.
Rosemary supported me easing him in. Mio’s naked form stretched out between us, my hands under his arms and Rosemary holding his legs. I should have looked away. This boy who had run from me, who craved sanctuary—all his hidden places now chillingly on display.
But we had to know. Rosemary’s eyes and mine hunted his skin for a mark. Black and heavy as a spot of venom.
Mio’s breathing seemed to even out once he was in, the warm water up to his neck. I held his chin up to keep him from sputtering. Rosemary locked gazes with me across the tub. “I can’t find any curse mark.”
And the living always had a mark somewhere, designating the influence of a ripening curse. My shoulders sagged. “I don’t see one either. Good fucking God.”
Cecilio was wringing his hands, watching us. “Then it hasn’t cursed him. Then—”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t mean it can’t.”
But it was as if Eirlys...had been guarding him. She was fighting the incubus. This had to mean something.
Except—
Cecilio spoke into the silence. “Why didn’t she kill him?”
The question fell and pooled on the floor like spilled molasses.
Rosemary found my eyes again, this time with an apologetic lift of a brow. As if to say, Your guess is as good as mine. Rosemary had always been the level head of the three of us. The one who stayed sharp under pressure. So if she didn’t have a theory yet, then—
Goddammit to fucking bastard hell.
I ground out a cough. I almost dared not voice it, like it would transform into something deadly the moment I tried to name it. “She looked...” A rough swallow. “She looked like she was trying to protect him.”
Another staggered silence. If she hadn’t been trying to kill him, then who was there to protect him from?
Rosemary chewed her lip. As if reading my thoughts, she said, “The incubus can’t inflict physical harm by itself.”
Oho, but all those other kinds of harm. “Fine fucking trio of investigators we turned out to be.” I coughed up a half-hearted laugh to cover my bitterness. That wasn’t fair. They’d done everything they could. “But can we save the deductions for when Mio wakes up properly? If I start speculating I’m going to end up gnawing my own arm off.”
Rosemary heaved a mighty sigh, rising to drape a towel over the rim of the tub. “I take responsibility. I wasn’t watching Mio closely. It’s just been so easy to get used to how...quiet he is.”
I smiled in spite of myself. That it was. “First of all, don’t take responsibility. If anything I...” Mio shifted fractionally, as if getting comfortable in his sleep. The innocence of the motion tore a line across my heart. “I promised him—”
That he’d be safe.
What a startling, beautiful lie that was. You’re safe. The lie swaddling all the harrowed children of this war, covering our faces as the edges of the night caught flame. Mio had probably never once been safe.
We dried and swaddled him, bundling him against the cold. The lines of his body were flushed pink with renewed heat, and his breathing was natural and even. But I couldn’t look at that sleeping face without Piero’s gaze, carved in hallucinations, appearing over it.
Except he wasn’t the one becoming the new Piero.
I was.
* * *
The noonday sun reduced the house to a dry skeleton. Rosemary and Cecilio threw open windows to let some heat in. All but the window of my room, casting its shadow on my sofa, where I held Mio in front of the fire.
Rosemary said the worst danger was past. “The main thing now is to prevent pneumonia. Just keep him warm. When he wakes up, we’ll feed him, but let him rest for now.”
It seemed hard with my unnaturally cold body. The entire place was not suited for him. If Eirlys was protecting him, she had the same problem I did—being his guardian made me as bad as
the threat. But I layered him in blankets and held him close.
He did rouse, briefly, as I was carrying him. Eyes opening meekly, finding me in the haze. He might have tried to sign, hands stirring under the blankets.
I did what I shouldn’t have done. I cupped my palm to his cheek, stroking it. “Shhh. It’s all right. Gentle boy.” A grim, mercenary thought emerged. He wouldn’t remember. If I was too affectionate, he’d be too sleepy for it to confuse him. I may as well comfort him if I could. “Just rest.”
An inchoate sound died in his throat. Tears sprang to his eyes before they closed.
I had to restrain myself from saying you’re safe.
Cecilio brought a tea tray with food, unasked. I thanked him by almost upending the whole pot down my throat.
His eyes seemed to bulge slightly as he watched. “You need to sleep, my lord. You’re looking haggard.”
I bared my fangs. “Flatterer. Haggard will have to do, because I’m not leaving Mio out of my sight.” Not again.
His minute frown was eloquent. “My lord, I mean it. I’m worried. You have barely—”
When I adjusted to turn to him, he jumped as if shocked. My smile had as much reassurance as I could pack into it. “Listen. I’ve got it, all right? You’re a worrier. But you don’t have to be. Besides. I can stand a few more days of sleep deprivation, and—” I waved aggressively at the God-blasted sunbeams streaming around the curtains “—this absurdity.”
He didn’t look reassured. But when I asked for two carafes of coffee and a plate of beef shank, he didn’t object.
I dozed off before catching myself dropping over Mio’s chest; he was stirring. The light outside was receding into the paint spatter of sunset, so my senses were sharpening again. I slid him off my lap, separating us quickly.
When his eyes opened on me now, they were lucid. He still looked sad and worn, and abruptly knowing, as if meeting Eirlys had changed him. And he continued to glow with a terrifying vulnerability.
His mouth worked briefly before it clamped shut again. I thought of him and Eirlys both, painfully unable to speak. The blankets swaddling him loosened, releasing his hands. His signs were once again as clear as they had been outside, as if touching my mind. “You’re here. It’s you.”
