He turned away from me, and golden light burst from his chest. He spoke a few words in Ancient Fae—in the particular dialect I recognized as Ysian. “Egoriel glasgor beirianel gamrath, warre daras.”
A blast of cold sea air washed over me as a hole opened in the floor—a tidy portal ringed by silver. A chasm of dark water filled the hole, with chunks of ice floating on the surface. Shivers rippled through me, and I instinctively took a step closer to the Ankou—the only warm thing in the room. If he weren’t such a jerk, I’d want to get even closer to him.
“Wait,” I said. “Can you hold your horses for one second? How about I just swear an oath? I will give you an oath not to kill you again or whatever else you’re worried about.”
“Oaths can be manipulated. And the Beira has already given me a stark warning about you. A prophecy.”
My forehead crinkled. “And what is the prophecy?”
“She’ll tell you herself.” He nodded at the water. I was supposed to jump in.
I stared at the dark ice water. A thin silver ring surrounded the portal—large enough for two people to fit in. I’d seen a portal before, but it still amazed me. Fae assassins—the knights—were the only ones who could open them. Traveling between worlds was the privilege of the elite.
The Ankou made a swift move for me and scooped me up, pulling me close against the warmth of his powerful chest for a moment. He looked into my eyes, and I had that sense again that he was hesitating. Maybe he wouldn’t go through with it. Maybe—
Then, he simply let go. I sank under the icy surface, enveloped by the arctic sea. A little water dripped into my mouth—seawater, sadly, which I couldn’t drink.
God of the deep, I hated the Ankou with a fiery passion right now.
I wished I’d killed him with a more painful method than bullets, even if he wouldn’t stay dead.
Chapter 9
Clear, white light pierced the water’s surface. The cold went right down to my bones. As a Morgen I could stay in seawater forever without breathing, but I still felt the chill.
Gina would say I should just float here until everyone gave up and went home for takeout and TV.
The only hitches were that I’d starve to death, and also lose my mind.
Whatever was about to happen, I couldn’t actually avoid it forever. I just had to make sure to exude a sense of… trueness of heart. How hard could it be? Maybe I could charm her with my winning personality.
I kicked my legs fast, moving up and up until my head breached the surface. Silvery light hit me, and ice-cold air filled my lungs so fast they stopped working for a moment.
Still kicking my legs to tread water, hands bound behind my back, I looked around. I was trying to get my bearings. I seemed to be in an icy hole in the middle of a forest of silver trees. Slender boughs arched above me, spindly twigs jutting from their branches.
A strange bounty hung from the branches: jewelry, bones, a pair of jeans, a cell phone, a human skull, a chipped Victorian teapot, a silk scarf in flamingo pink… It was all strangely beautiful.
It also looked like the Queen of Misery might be some sort of demented witch hoarder.
My teeth chattered, and my breath clouded around my face. Moonlight gleamed off densely packed snow all around the icy hole. Now, I was shaking so violently I could hardly tread water—especially since my lungs were seizing up.
I wasn’t entirely clear how I could get out of the portal with my arms bound.
My answer came in the form of a clawed hand gripping my hair by the roots, hoisting me from the watery portal.
Ah. There you are, Beira.
Beira, Ancient Witch of Winter, threw me down on the ice. Already, my cheap cotton underwear was freezing to my skin.
I looked up at her, my stomach sinking.
When my mother had told me stories about the Winter Witch, she hadn’t mentioned that Beira was a giant, about ten feet tall.
Nor had she mentioned the pale frost that formed delicate webs over her blue skin, or the white hair that hung over her shoulders in long plaits.
Nearly as naked as I was, she wore only a tiny white sheath. And she stared at me from a single, bloodshot eye in her forehead. The pale eye blinked at me. She took another step closer, her bare feet crunching in the snow. Her toenails had the purplish hue of death.
A strange voice whispered in my mind. Beira, Queen of Misery. It wasn’t just one voice, more like a hundred whispers, all at once, ringing in my skull.
“Hi.” My teeth chattered so hard I could hardly form the word.
This was awkward. How did you charm someone, anyway? When I was busy scourging the wicked and harvesting their organs, I’d never mastered the art of flattery.
“You have a nice… eye.”
Nope.
She pointed a long, bony finger at me.
I want what you have. I keep things. Give me what you have.
Her words kept whispering inside my skull. Her lips moved wildly, but the sounds didn’t come from her mouth. They were in my head.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What do I have that you want?”
A keepsake from you. A treasure. To keep me warm.
Even after she finished speaking, her lips kept moving soundlessly, twitching.
Once, I’d seen an execution—a decapitation of a traitor back in my drowned kingdom of Ys. The executioner held the woman’s severed head up to the crowd. Her lips had twitched exactly like that for a few moments while he gripped her hair, blood dripping from her neck.
Clouds of frozen mist puffed from my mouth. My hair had begun to freeze, rivers of ice on my shoulders.
“What do you want from me?” I asked again.
She didn’t answer this time.
Movement caught my eye, and I realized we weren’t entirely alone. Women, with skin white as the snow, eyes blood-red, whirled between the trees. Dancing silently like snow squalls, they wore crowns of dark twigs. An oddly vacant look shone in their eyes. So much movement, so little noise.
Gods, get me out of here.
So far, this place was ranking somewhere below Ikea on the list of places where I most enjoyed spending time.
The Ankou had warned me about the cold. It was, in fact, the kind of cold where a tear rolls down your cheek and freezes part way, where atoms stop moving in the air around you and existence ceases. Where snowy owls develop the ability to speak just so they can beg the gods to send them into the relative warmth and comfort of outer space.
I looked up at Beira. “What do you need from me?” I asked through chattering teeth.
I need to feel warm. A hundred whispers crystallized in my mind into that one sentence.
“Something we have in common,” I said.
Then, she spoke out loud—a strange, halting speech that I could barely discern. A word repeated, low in her throat. It took me a moment to realize she was saying, “Fear, fear, fear.”
She threw back her head and howled—a keening sound, so shockingly lonely it cut into my chest.
Instinctively, I scooted away from her. I wasn’t warm. I was godsdamn freezing. My veins were tiny glaciers of blood.
Fear. Fear. Fear.
What was she afraid of?
She shut her mouth, and a heavy silence fell over us. Nothing but the sound of my own heartbeat.
The witch fixed her eye intensely on me, then stooped lower, speaking out loud now. “Fear. Fear. Fear,” her voice like iron scraping against ice. “She of the House of Meriadoc will bring a reign of death. She of the poisoned blood.”