Then I was flung and spun twice on the horizontal, and I crashed into a wall. I bounced off it and landed on what felt like a dirt floor. I lay there, not able to inhale, barely able to move, and either I’d gone blind or I was in complete blackness. The nice part about having your bells rung like that is that mind-numbing horror sort of gets put onto a side burner for a bit. That was pretty much the only nice thing about it. When I finally managed to gasp in a little air, I used it to make a whimpering sound of pure pain.
A voice came out of the darkness, a sound that was dusty and raspy and covered in spiders. “Me,” it said, drawing the word out. “You attempt to summon. Me.”
“You have my sincerest apologies for the necessity,” I said, or tried to say to Mother Winter. I think it just came out, “Ow.”
“You think I am a servant to be whistled for?” continued the voice. Hate and weariness and dark amusement were all mummified together in it. “You think I am some petty spirit you can command.”
“N-n-nngh, ow.” I gasped.
“You dare to presume? You dare to speak such names to draw my attention?” the voice said. “I have a stew to make, and I will fill it with your arrogant mortal meat.”
There was a sound in the pitch-darkness. Steel being drawn across stone. A few sparks went up, blinding in the darkness. They burned into my retinas the outline of a massive, hunched form grasping a cleaver.
Sparks danced every few seconds as Mother Winter slowly sharpened her implement. I was able to get my breathing under control and to fight past the pain. “Mmm . . .” I said. “M-Mother Winter. Such a pleasure to meet with you again.”
The next burst of sparks gleamed off of an iron surface—teeth.
“I n-need to speak to you.”
“Speak, then, manling,” said Mother Winter. “You have a little time left.”
The cleaver rasped across the sharpening stone again.
“Mab has ordered me to kill Maeve,” I said.
“She is always doing foolish things,” said Mother Winter.
“Maeve says that Mab’s gone insane,” I said. “Lily concurs.”
There was a wheezing sound that might have been a cackle. “Such a loving daughter.”
I had to believe that I was going to get out of this somehow. So I pressed her. “I need to know which of them is right,” I said. “I need to know who I should turn my hand against to prevent a great tragedy.”
“Tragedy,” said Mother Winter in a purr that made me think of rasping scorpions. “Pain? Terror? Sorrow? Why should I wish to prevent such a thing? It is sweeter than an infant’s marrow.”
It is a good thing I am a fearless and intrepid wizardly type, or that last bit of sentence would have set my flesh to crawling hard enough to carry me across the dirt floor.
I was kind of hosed anyway, so I took a chance. I crossed my fingers in the dark and said, “Because Nemesis is behind it.”
The cleaver’s rasp abruptly stopped.
The darkness and silence were, for a moment, absolute.
My imagination treated me to an image of Mother Winter creeping silently toward me in the blackness, cleaver lifted, and I stifled an urge to burst into panicked screams.
“So,” she whispered a moment later. “You have finally come to see what has been before you all this time.”
“Uh, yeah. I guess. I know there’s something there now, at least.”
“So very mortal of you. Learning only when it is too late.”
Rasp. Sparks.
“You aren’t going to kill me,” I said. “I’m as much your Knight as Mab’s.”
There was a low, quiet snort. “You are no true Knight of Winter, manling. Once I have devoured your flesh, and your mantle with it, I will bestow it upon someone worthier of the name. I should never have given it to Mab.”
Uh, wow. I hadn’t thought of that kind of motivation. My guts got really watery. I tried to move my limbs and found them numbed and only partially functional. I started trying to get them to flip me over so that I could get my feet under me. “Uh, no?” I heard myself ask in a panicked, cracking voice. “And why is that, exactly?”
“Mab,” said Mother Winter in a tone of pure disgust, “is too much the romantic.”
Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Mother Winter, right there.
“She has spent too much time with mortals,” Mother Winter continued, withered lips peeled back from iron teeth as the sparks from her cleaver’s edge leapt higher. “Mortals in their soft, controlled world. Mortals with nothing to do but fight one another, who have forgotten why they should fear the fangs and the claws, the cold and the dark.”
“And . . . that’s bad?”
“What value has life when it is so easily kept?” Mother Winter spat the last word. “Mab’s weakness is evident. Look at her Knight.”
Her Knight was currently trying to sit up, but his wrists and ankles were fastened to the floor by something cold, hard, and unseen. I tested them, but couldn’t feel any edges. The bonds couldn’t have been metal. And they weren’t ice. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I was completely certain. Ice would have been no obstacle. But there was something familiar about it, something I had felt before . . . in Chichén Itzá.
Will.
Mother Winter was holding me down by pure, stark will. The leaders of the Red Court had been ancient creatures with a similar power, but that had been a vague, smothering blanket that had made it impossible to move or act, a purely mental effort.
This felt like something similar, but far more focused, more developed, as if thought had somehow crystallized into tangibility. My wrists and ankles wouldn’t move because Mother Winter’s will said that was how reality worked. It was like magic—but magic took a seed, a kernel of will and built up a framework of other energies around that seed. It took intense practice and focus to make that happen, but at the end of the day anyone’s will was only part of the spell, alloyed with other energy into something else.
What held me down now was pure, undiluted will—the same kind of will that I suspected had backed up events presaged by phrases like “Let there be light.” It was far more than human, beyond simple physical strength, and if I’d been the Incredible Hulk, I was pretty sure there was no way I’d have been able to tear myself free.
“Ahhh,” said Mother Winter, during one last stroke of the cleaver. “I like nice clean edges to my meat, manling. Time for dinner.”
And slow, limping steps came toward me.
Chapter
Thirty-two
A slow smile stretched my lips back from my teeth.
Mortals had the short end of the stick on almost any supernatural confrontation. Even most wizards, with their access to terrific forces, had to approach conflicts carefully—relatively few of us had the talents that lent themselves to brawling. But mortals had everyone else beat on exactly one thing: the freedom to choose. Free will.
It had taken me a while to begin to understand it, but it had eventually sunk into my thick skull. I couldn’t arm wrestle an ogre, even with the mantle. I couldn’t have won a magical duel with Mab or Titania—probably not even against Maeve or Lily. I couldn’t outrun one of the Sidhe.
But I could defy absolutely anyone.
I could lift my will against that of anything, and know that the fight might be lopsided, but never hopeless. And by thunder, I was not going to allow anyone’s will to stretch me out on the floor like a lamb for slaughter.
I stopped pressing at my bindings with my limbs and started using my mind instead. I didn’t try to push them away, or break them, or slip free of them. I simply willed them not to be. I envisioned what my limbs would feel like coming free, and focused on that reality, summoning up my total concentration on that goal, that ideal, that fact.
And then I crossed my fingers and reached into me, into the place where a covert archangel had granted me access to one of the primal forces of the universe, an energy called soulfire. I had no idea how i
t might interact with the Winter Knight’s mantle on an ongoing basis. I mean, it had worked out once before, but that didn’t mean that it would keep working out. I felt certain that I was pretty much swallowing bottles of nitroglycerin, then jumping up and down to see what would happen, but at this point I had little to lose. I gathered up soulfire, used it to infuse my raw will, and cast the resulting compound against my bonds.
Soulfire, according to Bob, is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, the original power of creation. It isn’t meant for mortals. We get it by slicing off a bit of our soul, our life energy, and converting it into something else.
Bob is brilliant, but there are some things that he just doesn’t get. His definition was a good place to get started, but it was also something that was perhaps too comfortably quantifiable. The soul isn’t something you can weigh and measure. It’s more than just one thing. Because soulfire interacts with souls in a way that I’m not sure anyone understands, it stands to reason that soulfire isn’t just one thing, either.
And in this case, in this moment, I somehow knew exactly what the soulfire did. It converted me, my core, everything that made me who I was, into energy, into light. When I turned my joined will and the blazing core of my being together, I wasn’t supercharging a magical spell. I wasn’t cleverly finding a weak point in an enchantment. I wasn’t using my knowledge of magic to exploit what my enemy was doing.
I was casting everything I had done, everything I believed, everything I had chosen—everything I was—against the will of an ancient being of darkness, terror, and malice, a fundamental power of the world.
And the bonds and the will of Mother Winter could not constrain me.
There was a sharp, shimmering tone, like metal under stress and beginning to fail, but more musical, and a blinding white light that washed away the darkness and dazzled my eyes. There was a thunder crack, and a terrible force erupted from my wrists and ankles, throwing a shock wave of raw kinetic energy—a mere shadow of the true forces at work, a by-product—out into the space around me. In that whiteness, I caught an image of a shrouded, hunched dark form, flung from her feet to impact something solid.
And then I was free and hauling myself up onto my feet.
I backed up, hoping I hadn’t gotten turned around in the flash, and a surge of relief went through me when my back hit a stone wall. I felt out along on either side of me, and my hand brushed something solid, maybe a small shelf made from a wooden plank. I knocked it off its peg. It fell to the dirt floor with a clatter and a clink of small, heavy glass jars.
I leaned against the wall, dazed, panting, and gasped, in my deepest and most gravelly voice, “No one can chain the Hulk!”
I heard a stir of cloth in the darkness then, a slight grunt of effort, the faintest whistle in the air. I can’t claim credit for being smart or cool on this one. Some instinct pegged which way the cleaver was coming and I flung my head sharply to one side. Sparks flew as the cleaver struck the wall where my skull had been and sank into it as if it had been made of rotten pine, not stone. It stayed there, making a faint vibrating sound as it quivered.
I have got to learn to keep my freaking mouth shut. I clenched my teeth together and stayed still, giving no indication of where I might be in the darkness.
For a long time there was quiet, except for the breathing I fought to slow and silence. And then a horrible, slithering sound went through the blackness. It caught in Mother Winter’s ancient throat, clicking like the shells of swarming carrion beetles. It wormed its way through the air like a swarm of maggots burrowing through rotten meat. It brushed against me, light and hideous, like the touch of a vulture’s lice-infested feather, and I struggled to press myself back a little closer to the stone at the sound of it.
Mother Winter was cackling.
“So,” she said. “So, so, and so. Perhaps thou art not entirely useless after all, eh, manling?”
For all I knew, Mother Winter had a whole cutlery set over there. I gathered my will into a shielding spell, but I didn’t release it. Magic was like air and water to the fae. I had a feeling Mother Winter would have been able to home in on it.
“That was a test?” I whispered—behind my hand, so that it might not make it utterly obvious where I was standing.
“Or a meal,” she rasped. “Either would suffice.”
And then brightness flooded the room.
I thought some massive force had inundated the area I stood in, but after a second I realized that it was a door. The light was sunlight, with the golden quality that somehow felt like autumn. I had to shield my eyes against it, but after a moment I realized that I was standing in a small, simple medieval-looking cottage—one in which I had been before. Everything in it was wooden, leather, clay, and handmade. The glass in the windows was wavery and translucent. It was a neat, tidy place—apart from one corner with a large, ugly, raw-looking rocking chair. Oh, and a spilled shelf of small clay pots with wax-sealed mouths.
“You can be so overly dramatic, betimes,” complained an old woman’s voice, as gentle and sweet as Mother Winter’s was unpleasant. She came into the house a moment later, a grandmotherly matron dressed in a simple dress with a green apron. Her long hair, silver-white and thinning, was done up in a small, neat bun. She moved with the slightly stiff, bustling energy of an active senior, and if her green eyes were framed by crow’s-feet, they were bright and sharp. Mother Summer carried a basket in one arm filled with cuttings from what must have been a late-season herb garden, and as I watched, she entered, muttered a word, and a dozen tiny whirlwinds cleaned thick layers of soot from the many-paned windows scattered around the cottage, flooding it with more warm light. “We’ll need a new cleaver now.”
Mother Winter, in her black shawl and hood, bared her iron teeth in a snarl, though it was a silent one. She pointed one crooked, warty finger at the window nearest her, and blackened it with soot again. Then she shuffled over to a chair beneath the window, and settled into the resulting shadow as if it were a comforting blanket. “I do what must be done.”
“With our cleaver,” Mother Summer said. “I suppose one of our knives wouldn’t have done just as well?”
Mother Winter bared her teeth again. “I wasn’t holding a knife.”
Mother Summer made a disapproving clucking sound and began unloading her basket onto a wooden table near the fireplace. “I told you,” she said calmly.
Mother Winter made a sour-sounding noise and pointed a finger. A large mug decorated with delicately painted flowers fell from a shelf.
Mother Summer calmly put out a hand, caught it, and returned it to the shelf.
“Oh, uh, Mother Summer,” I said, after a moment of silence. “I apologize for intruding into your home.”
“Oh, dear, that’s very sweet,” Mother Summer said. “But you owe me no apology. You were brought here entirely against your will, after all.” She paused for a beat and added, “Rudely.”
Mother Winter made another displeased sound.
I looked back and forth between them. Centuries of dysfunction in this family, Harry. Walk carefully. “I, uh. I think I’d prefer to think of it as a very firm invitation.”
“Hah,” said Mother Winter, from her hood. Her teeth gleamed. “The Knight knows his loyalties, at least.”
Mother Summer somehow managed to inject her voice with profound skepticism. “I’m sure he’s overjoyed to owe loyalty to you,” she said. “Why did you bring him here now, of all times?”
More teeth showed. “He summoned me, the precious thing.”
Mother Summer dropped her herbs. She turned her head toward me, her eyes wide. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”
Mother Winter’s rocker creaked, though it didn’t really seem to move. “He knew certain names. He was not wholly stupid in choosing them, or wholly wrong in using them.”
Mother Summer’s bright green eyes narrowed. “Did he . . . ?”
“No,” croaked Mother Winter. “Not that one. But he has seen t
he adversary, and learned one of its names.”
Calculation and thought flickered through those green eyes, faster than I could follow. “Ah, yes. I see,” Mother Summer said. “So many new futures unwinding.”
“Too many bright ones,” Mother Winter said sullenly.
“Even you must think better that than empty night.”
Mother Winter spit to one side.
It started eating a hole in the dirt floor a few inches from one of my feet. I’m not kidding. I took a small sidestep away, and tried not to breathe the fumes.
“I think,” Mother Winter said, “that he should be shown.”
Mother Summer narrowed her eyes. “Is he ready?”
“There is no time to coddle him,” she rasped. “He is a weapon. Let him be made stronger.”
“Or broken?” Mother Summer asked.
“Time, time!” Winter breathed. “He is not your weapon.”
“It is not your world,” Summer countered.
“Excuse me,” I said quietly.
Green eyes and black hood turned toward me.
“I don’t want to be rude, ma’am,” I said. I picked up the fallen wooden shelf from where I’d knocked it down, and put it back on its pegs. Then I bent and started putting the sealed jars back onto the shelf. “I’m still young. I make mistakes. But I’m not a child, and I’m not letting anyone but me choose which roads I’ll walk.”
That made Mother Winter cackle again. “Precious little duck,” she wheezed. “He means it.”
“Indeed,” Mother Summer said, but her tone was thoughtful as she watched me restore the fallen shelf to order.
I kept on replacing jars, lining them up neatly, and spoke as gently and politely as I knew how. “You can take my body and run it like a puppet. You can kill me. You can curse me and torture me and turn me into an animal.”
“Can,” said Mother Winter, “and might, if you maintain this impertinence.”
I swallowed and continued. “You can destroy me. But you can’t make me be anything but what I choose to be, ma’am. I don’t know exactly what you both are talking about showing me, ma’am. But you aren’t going to shove it down my throat or put it up on a shelf out of my reach, either one. I decide for myself, or I walk out the door.”