by Laken Cane
“To the new throne,” another added.
“To the daughter of Skyll!”
And they tore the veils from their faces.
The leader was startling in her beauty, with thick, white hair, ice-blue eyes, and bone structure almost too perfect to be real.
Rune saw nothing but strangers staring out at her, but Ian must have seen something else.
His eyes blazed with hatred as he lifted his shotgun and pulled the trigger.
He shot the leader in the chest.
She didn’t fall, or bleed, or do much more than take a step backward.
As her people screamed in horror, the leader raised her hand and returned Ian’s shot.
Ian’s body exploded—his blood, guts, and bone flew through the air.
Rune released her claws and went for the group, confusion battling with anger.
But the woman held up both hands and created a barrier Rune could neither see nor cross.
“Who the fuck are you?” Rune asked, raking at the invisible barricade with her claws.
“Please,” the woman begged. “I am not your enemy. I will help you.”
“You killed my guard,” Rune said. “You fucking bitch, you killed Ian.”
Jim pulled at her arm. “Back away, Princess. Come away.”
“I am not her enemy,” the woman screamed, helpless rage and frustration in her voice. “I am not her enemy.”
Rune shook Jim’s hand from her arm. “Who are you?”
Her chest hurt. Her head hurt. Confusion and frustration made her legs tremble and her hands shake with fear. “Tell me who you are.”
“Princess.” She lifted her chin and stared at Rune with eyes dark and fierce and somehow familiar. “I am the witch’s daughter. And I have come to help you kill my mother.”
Part Three
No Fear
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The witch’s daughter dropped the imperceptible wall and walked to Rune.
“I didn’t believe it when I heard Sorrow’s message,” she said. “Not really. I knew it was time, but I…” She covered her eyes with her hands and whispered, “I didn’t have faith.”
“I thought I was…” Rune couldn’t finish her sentence. Couldn’t voice the horror of what she’d thought. Not out loud.
But the stranger knew. “You thought you were the witch’s daughter.” She gave Rune a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. You are—sort of—the witch’s daughter. But you’re more than that. You’re the princess.”
There might have been a hint of bitterness in her voice, but it was there and gone so quickly Rune thought she imagined it. But the girl’s eyes were just a little dark.
Rune wanted to fall upon the ground and beat it with her fists, crying and laughing and screaming hysterically.
I am the witch’s daughter.
I really am.
It was there. No longer unspoken. No longer could she pretend otherwise and hide from that particular foul truth.
She was the fucking witch’s daughter.
She controlled herself, though her insides quivered with a disgust and horror too strong to stomp down. “You’re my sister?”
“Damascus is my mother by blood. You have two mothers and four fathers by…magic.” Again, she shrugged. “I suppose I am your sister, in a vague sort of way.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, there it was.
The joy.
And then, remorse and self-hatred at that joy.
She’d wanted a mother. A real fucking mother.
Now she had one. And a sister.
“Two mothers?” she asked, pushing against her stomach with a tight fist.
The woman nodded. “This will be difficult to explain, but you’re not made simply of or from Damascus. She carried you—at least for a short time—but you’re created from Mother Skyll as well.” She opened her arms wide as though to embrace the entire world. “You’re the daughter of Skyll.”
It made sense that she’d been birthed from earth and sky and moon. From sun and water and animal. From Skyll.
She felt it.
“You haven’t accepted this world yet, have you?”
Rune clenched her fists. “I don’t know.” I don’t know how.
“When you do, her power will be yours, Princess.” The other daughter moved a bit closer and peered into Rune’s eyes. “Enough to defeat the evil that would destroy her, and that would destroy you.” She thumped her chest with a closed fist. “We will defeat it.”
“What’s your name?” Rune asked.
“You may call me Snow.” The woman smiled almost shyly. “It’s the name I chose once I extracted myself from my mother.”
“No one mentioned you to me. I didn’t know you existed.” Rune shook her head, trying to think of how that could have happened.
If Gunnar, Brasque, or any of them knew about the witch, surely they knew about the daughter. Surely.
But Snow shrugged. “I am not important. I am nothing. Few knew me. I am a disappointment and embarrassment to the witch. Not enough power to suit her, not enough evil to wield what power I have…” Again, she smiled. “I was her shame.”
“Shame,” Jim said. “I’ve heard of you. I thought you were a legend created by the storytellers. The witch refused to name you until she knew you, and then she named you Shame.”
Snow inclined her head, then looked at him with eyes so icy that even Rune shivered. “You will not mention that again.”
Jim held up his hands and backed away. “I’ll just go cook you all some food.”
“You killed Ian,” Rune said. “You didn’t have to fucking kill him.”
“I’m sorry,” Snow said. “I’m not perfect, Your Highness. When I’m attacked, it’s my nature to send the attack back.” She inclined her head. “That’s the extent of my power—that, and the wall.”
“Why am I so weak?”
Snow laughed. “You’re not weak. You are all the power that is. You simply must let it be. Accept it.” She took Rune’s arm and turned her in a circle. “See the sky, the trees, the ground. Breathe the air and feel the life. This is the mother you need to know. Your true mother. You must simply accept her.”
Rune swallowed and looked away. “How much do you know about me?”
Snow shrugged. “More than some, less than others. I’ll share with you anything I am capable of sharing.”
Rune’s heart beat with excitement. She wanted to know everything there was to know and she wanted to know it all at once. “Tell me.”
“I only know what I’ve heard over the years. I doubt anyone knows your entire story. You were taken away to protect you until it was time for you to come into your power. You were weak. You are not weak now. You were created to be Skyll’s defense, but my mother’s doctors informed her that you would rise up to destroy her. She meant to kill you—had sent her man to do the deed to the baby in the crib—but you were already gone.”
“They created a monster,” Rune said, her voice hoarse. “I’m a monster.”
“You’re a mystery,” one of the other women declared. “Not a monster.”
“You are everything you absorbed. You are what touched you. Flesh. Magic. Blood.” Snow squeezed Rune’s arm. “Death.”
Rune nodded. “The shimmer lords.”
“And more.”
She still didn’t really understand. If Mother Skyll had helped create her, where then was Mother Skyll?
Where was her beginning? How did she come to be?
“I’ll never know everything, will I?” she murmured, more to herself than Snow.
“Maybe,” Snow said, “it’s better for you that you don’t.”
“But Damascus said she knew me. That she’d forgotten me.”
“In the beginning,” Snow replied, “my mother was a favorite of this world. Of your mother, if you will. Over time, she and Skyll became enemies. Damascus wanted to rule Skyll. To hurt Skyll.” She drew back, her eyes wide, as though the mere act of telling the story was so
mehow profane.
“Go on,” Rune said.
“Damascus became so very powerful. Someone would be needed—someone of the flesh—who would be her match.” She leaned closer and almost whispered, “More than her match.”
“And I was created for that eventuality.”
“Yes.”
Rune stared her down. “Why would Damascus help create something that could destroy her?”
“She didn’t create you to destroy her—wasn’t even aware the others were plotting that very thing. She helped create something—someone, sorry—who could rule with her. The two of you together would have been invincible.”
“I would never—”
“Yes, you would have. Damascus would have groomed you and trained you and warped your mind from birth. You think you’re a monster now.” Snow shook her head and her eyes were dead serious. “If she’d have kept control of you...”
Rune shuddered when Snow’s voice trailed off. The woman didn’t have to finish. Rune could imagine how she might have turned out had the witch raised her.
“So how is it you didn’t turn out like Damascus?” Rune paused. “Or did you?”
Snow studied her. “You don’t have to trust me, Rune, but you do have to accept Skyll. Not as just a world or an it. This is where you belong. You’re made of this world. She’s yours, and she needs your help.”
“I have no idea how to do that.”
“You’re afraid to give in, to let yourself be vulnerable. To trust. And I understand. You’ll have to do it, but I understand.”
“Food’s done,” Jim called.
Rune turned to look at him, amazed that he wasn’t more broken up over Ian’s horrible death. A little amazed that she wasn’t.
But in her defense, she hadn’t known him. Not really.
“Does the witch have Z?” she asked Snow, as they walked toward the campfire. Despite the fact that she’d just eaten, her stomach rumbled at the scent of cooking meat.
She took the tin plate Jim offered her and took a bite of food as she waited for Snow to answer her.
“If Z is one of yours and my mother believes she can use him against you, then it would be safe to assume so.” Snow began to eat, and she ate as though she’d not seen food for a very long time.
Rune couldn’t help but ask. “Why do you wander around Skyll starving and begging? If Damascus is your mother, you could have everything you needed.”
“I’d rather starve,” Snow snarled, and went back to her food.
Rune walked a few steps away and motioned for Jim to follow her.
“Was Ian your friend?” she asked him.
He nodded. “He was. We arrived at nearly the same time.”
She looked down at her plate. She didn’t want to sound judgmental, but she really needed to know. “You’re not…grieving. You’re not broken up.”
He stared at her for a moment, the bland and pleasant-faced, grinning clown disappearing beneath something darker. “It isn’t the same here, Princess. We…” It was his turn to hesitate.
“Go on.”
“We don’t think of life and death the way you do. There are other worlds than this one, than yours.” He smiled then. “I’ll miss him, but I don’t fear it is the end. Do you understand?”
She was silent for a long moment. “No,” she said, finally. Then, “Maybe.”
But it seemed incredibly sad to her.
There was always an end.
“You’re going back, aren’t you?” he asked. And there was no judgment or anger in his eyes.
“I have to.”
“Princess,” Snow said, standing suddenly beside Jim. “I know you believe you must. I also know things will happen here that will challenge that belief.”
“How do you know?”
There were hundreds of years of knowledge and mystery in Snow’s blue eyes. “I know.”
Rune met her gaze and didn’t look away. “You’ll also know I can’t trust you.”
Snow inclined her head and the white length of her hair slid against her pale skin. “I understand.”
Jim said nothing. He stared off into the distance, and Rune could feel his discomfort. He didn’t trust Snow either.
More than that, he feared her.
“Princess,” Olson called. “Your charge is asking for you.”
Rune strode toward the cart, though she was hesitant to bring Owen to Snow’s attention. There was no help for it. Ordering the woman to stay put would only have drawn more attention to him.
It wasn’t that she disliked Snow. But she didn’t know her.
“Owen.” Rune leaned over the side of the cart and peered down at him. “Are you feeling any better?”
“A little,” he said, trying to sit up.
“Help him up,” Rune told Olson, but regretted her order when the guard grabbed Owen’s upper arm and hauled him into a sitting position.
Owen groaned. “Easy, man. Fuck.”
Rune glowered at the big guard.
“Sorry,” he said.
“My hat,” Owen said.
Rune snagged his hat off the cart floor but before she could give it to him, Snow spoke.
“Oh,” she said, her voice softly horrified, even though surely, as the witch’s daughter, she’d seen every horror ever imagined. “Oh.”
There was no mistaking the terrible shape he was in. He still hadn’t been dressed, and his torn, broken body wasn’t hidden by the blanket across his lap.
At Snow’s voice, he snapped his head around. “No,” he said. Then, “I thought you were gone for good.”
Rune wouldn’t have thought it possible but Snow’s face paled further. “Five,” she whispered, and put the back of her hand to her mouth. “Five?”
A spark of jealousy lit Rune’s inside on fire, for a second.
For just a second.
But Owen was not hers.
Not really.
Still, that jealousy lingered.
“I take it you two know each other.”
Snow turned toward Rune, slowly. “He belonged to my mother—to my household—once upon a time. I had no idea what had become of him until much later when he turned up in Flesh Shimmer.
“While I was growing up, he kept me safe, as much as he could.” Then she put the blue fire of her stare back on Owen. “He was all I had, and he left without a single word, goodbye, or twinge of guilt. These are the monsters. For what they are and what they’ve done over the centuries, I will be haunted forever. But his betrayal of me…that is what I hold Five accountable for.”
Rune frowned and pushed her fist into her stake wounds. “What are they?”
Snow just gazed at Owen, and though he had no eyes, it seemed like Owen stared back at Snow.
“What are they?” Rune asked again, her voice harsher, impatient. “They?”
“Don’t,” Owen whispered.
Snow answered anyway, but slowly, her horrified stare on Owen’s body. On his empty eyes sockets. “What did you call him? Owen?” She nodded as though Rune answered her. “Here he is known as Five. He is the fifth in a series of hums. Two of them live still, though I use the word live loosely. Owen is the very best of them. The most…human. The most adaptable. Brasque Dray tortured Four to death. It appears as though he was nearly there with Five.”
She turned once more to Rune. “You interfered with his death.”
“Yeah, I interfered. I stopped the sadistic bastard from torturing him further.”
“Brasque took its eyes,” Snow murmured.
“It,” Rune said. “It.”
Snow shrugged. “His, then.” Then she reached over the edge of the cart and took Owen’s bent fingers in hers. “Five could not be forced to obey, not even by my mother.” She smiled, slightly. “He never was controllable.”
Owen didn’t try to pull away from her.
“When you left there was no one to stand between me and Damascus. No one to cleverly divert her attention, or to warn me when I should hide for a few
days.”
The distance in her voice was matched by the distance in her eyes, and Rune knew that for that moment of past memories, Snow was back in the castle with the witch.
“I can’t really blame him for leaving,” she said, dragging her stare from Owen and planting it on Rune. “When my mother discovered our bond, she would torture him if I displeased her. And I displeased her a lot. I was nothing. Nothing. And that…that made her ashamed. Made her angry. Hurt, even. But it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t born to be spectacular.”
“Like Rune,” Owen said.
“Yes,” Snow snapped, then she visibly calmed herself. “But the fault is my mother’s. Not Rune’s. I used to hate you,” she told Rune.
“Why?” Rune asked, and her voice was husky.
“Because you escaped. Not just her, but this world she rules. You had people who cared so much for you, so much for your future, that they spirited you all the way to a different world. People who believed in you.”
Rune said nothing, but pity made her stomach tighten when she realized how abandoned Snow must have felt. How alone. Not only had Owen left her, but no one had cared enough to get her to safety.
“They can’t love you back,” Snow said, releasing Owen’s hand. Her eyes were so intense Rune found it difficult not to look away. “No matter how much you want to believe it, they can’t love you back. Love wasn’t built into them.”
“I do,” Owen murmured. “I love.”
Snow snorted.
Rune’s mind was spinning. “Owen…”
“Don’t,” he said, again.
“But what are you?” she asked. “What are you?” It didn’t matter that the question was nearly taboo, that she hated it, that he hated it…
It didn’t matter. She needed to know.
“What the fuck is a hum?”
He wouldn’t answer.
Snow answered for him.
“Hums are semi-human,” she said. “They’re created from—”
“Stop,” Owen said. “Shut the fuck up, Shame.”
But she would not shut up, and there was a sharp, dark satisfaction in her voice. “They are created in shimmer laboratories from stolen, enchanted blood and the souls of smuggled-in Other infants.” Then she stared quietly at Rune, waiting for her reaction.
