Winterspell (14 page)

Godfather was beside himself. “Enough. You will not go, Clara. You will not
leave
me. You don't know what you're doing. We don't know where that Door leads. Wait a moment, let it close, and we'll open another, if you like. I'll show you how it's done. I'll answer your questions.”

Nicholas laughed, his expression cruel. “Are you still capable of such things, old man?”

Godfather stared murder at Nicholas. His face was darker than it had ever been, tinged with brimstone. Clara realized in that moment that she did not know him and perhaps never had. He was an unfamiliar creature with a Godfather mask. He tried to straighten and couldn't, crying out and clutching his sides.

“Clara,” he rasped, “I know I did wrong. I should not have kept the truth from you, but—forgive me, I didn't know how to tell you. Can you blame me?”

She watched him, impassive. She hardened her heart to him, though it gutted her to do so.

“I've always kept you safe, haven't I? Your mother trusted me to do so. You know me. You
know
I want what's best for you.” He thrust a shaking finger at Nicholas. “This boy is— You don't know what he's capable of. Just come here, and we'll work this out. We two, you and I, as we always do.”

At the sight of his feeble smile, Clara felt nothing but disgust and heartache, sentiments she had never associated with him. She stepped away, toward the window.

Nicholas followed at a respectful distance. His eyes locked with hers.

“If I go through those lights,” Clara said, “what will I find?”

“Nothing worth finding,” Godfather said furiously.

“I don't know what you will find,” Nicholas said, his steadiness in such contrast to Godfather's unraveling temper that Clara felt instantly more at ease, “but the Door has not closed. If you enter it, you will be following your father's direct path.”

“That is the way of Doors?”

He nodded, near her now. She had backed into the windowsill, her fingers inching out toward winter. Cautiously, Nicholas offered his left hand. Unlike his right, which was bare, this one sported three fingers still encased in metal. He smelled the same as the statue had—like childhood and safety, now with a strange hint of the sea.

“Do you trust me?” he asked in that broken, rebuilding voice of his.

“Who are you?”
What are you?
might have been the more incisive question.

“Do you
trust
me, Clara?”

Trust? She supposed she would find out soon enough. And out of everyone in the world, this strange, half-broken man seemed the likeliest to help her. She almost laughed. Her statue, come to life at last! Her girlish fancies had conjured up such a moment many times, but it had never been quite like this.

Godfather ran for them, shouting for them to stop. What remained of the windowpane shattered at his approach, as though his anger had manifested as a physical force. He was a mass of gray skin and white light and silver blood, sparking as if catching fire.

But they had already turned.

Clara flung herself out the window at the same moment Nicholas did, their hands clasped together—cold, black air; Godfather's screams; Nicholas's tight metal grip.

They fell.

A
kiss. A wicked, forbidden kiss. A kiss to end a kingdom.

It was King Alban, of the Somerhart family, the First Family, who doomed us. He threw propriety to the wind and brought the faery countess into his bed.

Rinka was her name, and they say she was beautiful. Like all faeries, she was as pale as winter and had long white hair, kept in braids. “Countess” was a title we forced upon her, the way we forced titles upon all of them, along with pesky annoyances like rules and civilization. For the faeries had no monarch, no court to speak of. Only clans that haunted the forests and painted bloody circles in the ground, and a great haunt called Geschtohl, where their revels raged at each turn of the season.

We thought they would appreciate structure. We thought they would see the sense in having a court, a nobility, cities and fields, rather than their dank caves and ramshackle seaside villages, and their eerie haunts, set deep in the southern forests.

Our stories say that near faery haunts things change when you're not looking. Ground becomes sky, and sky becomes fire, and the tree roots over which you stumble are not roots at all but faery arms, seducing you underground.

They say that the faeries will charm you out of your own skin if you let them.

All magic folk can charm, but only the faeries seemed fond of using it as a weapon.

They say that Rinka charmed King Alban, that she tricked herself into his bed and lied her way into his heart. They say she convinced the king that his wife would forever fail to bear him an heir, that her lack of passion was criminal.

Whatever the reason for it, one autumn day Queen Liane found them in the throne room, wrapped in each other's embrace.

The entire nobility, including the Seven, stood at the doors behind her.

Our historians point to this moment as the one that changed everything This, they say, is what started the war.

I think differently. Perhaps a mistress could have been forgiven.

But a child—the child of a human king and a faery countess—was reason for blood.

Unable to suffer the insult not only to their queen but to the sanctity of the races, Liane's family, the Drachstelles, the bearers of the dragon, engineered a coup.

One autumn night when the air was thick and damp, and Alban lay with his hand on Rinka's belly, feeling their soon-to-be-born child kick, the Drachstelles came for him. They butchered his royal guard and slit his valet's throat.

The king sent Rinka out the window, across the rooftops. As nimble as all faeries are, the stories nevertheless say Rinka slipped many times on the slick white roofs of Wahlkraft, for the king's dying cries upset her balance.

They pursued her into the night, through a storm that soaked the forests limp and black. They shot her with arrows, and the Seven, under orders of the new regime, sliced at her with cold lightning.

And when she could run no longer, our stories say, Countess Rinka fell, in agony, for the child had come. The abominable half-blood child forged out of depravity and lust.

When the Drachstelle guards and the Seven reached Rinka, they saw
that her belly had been sliced open. Blood pooled between her legs.

The child was gone.

They assumed the babe had died, or had been eaten by wolves, or had been snatched away by thieves eager for ransom.

But then word came from the south that Rinka's child lived, hidden away deep in the caves beneath Geschtohl. Murmurings began that she was already demonstrating a difference from the rest of them. The faeries doted upon her, they said.

Years passed. Travelers on the road, come to the capital for trade, spread rumors that the southern forests were now whispering strange things. One feverish word, over and over:

Anise.

I don't think any of you children would have hesitated for a moment to follow the honest, good-natured Nutcracker, who never had a wicked thought in all his life.

C
old.

It was cold when Clara awoke, the kind of cold so extreme that it took her a moment to feel it.

She blinked into the dull whiteness around her three times. Then the cold came at her, sharp-toothed, raising the hairs on her body.

I have to get warm,
she thought automatically.

She tried to speak the words several times, but her throat caught them in spasms of shock. Finally her voice began working: “Cold.”

Rolling onto her side, she cried out in pain, for every bone felt jarred loose. Her skull throbbed; her teeth ached. How far had she fallen?

Where was she?

She rubbed her arms to warm them, and failed. She realized that she lay in snow, or perhaps frost. Frozen bracken, mud, twigs.

She tried to ask for help. But who would answer her?

Then she felt the wind. Malevolent, cunning, it slipped up her tattered skirts and sliced into her skin. Her eyes squeezed shut, ice hammering her body, and she felt herself begin to shake violently. Even her thoughts seemed to shiver.

Perhaps it was the shivering itself that nudged her eyelids open one last time. Or perhaps it was the distant sense that she was actually not alone. Whatever it was, Clara opened her eyes, and saw him:

The man with metal patchwork across his body, wearing Godfather's greatcoat. Crawling toward her now. Reaching for her.

What was his name?

Nicholas.

Clara mouthed the word and stared at his outstretched hand, gnarled with metal and blue with frost. She blinked; the ice on her eyelids cracked into paper-thin flakes and fell away.

She remembered now. She had grabbed on to that hand moments before and had jumped out a window.

Godfather had been lying to her. Godfather was the reason her mother was dead.

A man had stolen her father away, and Felicity was at home, alone.

No, not alone—with Patricia Plum and Dr. Victor.

As these facts settled within Clara, fear shocked her awake. She surged upright, ignoring the pain of her wounds as she clawed at the frozen ground for leverage. Her eyes had lost some of their heaviness; she saw snow, vast stretches of snow, and a murky sky dim with dawn. She assumed it was dawn, anyway, and wondered how long they had been unconscious after their fall.

“Father,” she croaked. Nothing but white wilderness surrounded her. “Father!”

“Take my hand,” Nicholas shouted, beaten halfway to the ground by the wind. His lips were white, splintering into brittle triangles of skin.

“Where is he?” She grabbed his arm, shaking him. “He's supposed to be here! Where did they take him?”

“I don't know—”

“You told me to jump through that Door, and now we're here.” Clara was frantic. The cold was making her teeth chatter; the pain in her head stabbed her behind the eyes. “Tell me where he is!”

Nicholas held her still. “I said I don't know, but I do know this—we'll die if we don't get out of this cold soon. We need to find shelter. Take my hand.”

When Clara reluctantly agreed, he pulled her closer and pressed his cheek to hers.

“I promise you, Clara,” he said, and even this close Clara could barely hear him over the howling wind, “we will find him. But we're no good to him dead.”

She nodded, put her arm around him, and let him do the same to her. They rose to their feet with great effort. Huddled close like some two-headed monster, they stumbled forward, their free hands up to shield their eyes. Lightning flashes, high above the snowy gusts and colored a strange, sickly green, illuminated their path. They walked for an interminable amount of time, stumbling through knee-high snowdrifts, futilely searching through the storm for a haven. They could have been walking in circles, and as the cold settled in even more deeply, numbing Clara with the temptation of sleep, she felt torn between tears and laughter. Dying in a blizzard, she supposed, was better than dying at the hands of Dr. Victor. She clung ferociously to such hysterical thoughts; they kept her feet moving.

A dark shape emerged, surfacing from frothy white depths like one of the sea serpents from Godfather's stories. Nicholas was pointing; he was gasping at her ear. It was shelter.

They stumbled inside after struggling to wedge open the door. It occurred to Clara that the place might already be occupied. It also occurred to her that she did not care. There had never been such a beautiful sight as this rickety shack and its floor of hard black dirt. Nicholas groped for the door, and pulled it shut behind them. They fumbled through the shack's contents, seeing by touch rather than by sight as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Stacks of strange equipment lined the walls. There was a desk, a chair, an empty cup, but no signs of life.

Falling to her hands and knees, Clara coughed violently in the sudden stillness, as though her body had grown accustomed to the storm and could not function outside of it. Nicholas staggered down beside her. She turned, shaking, to see him heaving at her side. Even through
her hazy vision she could see the angry colors on his face and chest—patches of yellows, reds, tinges of blues, the black metal. The storm had burned him—and her as well, she noticed, glancing down at her reddened arms.

“My skin . . . ,” she murmured.

For a long moment Nicholas simply lay there with his eyes closed, recovering. Then he said quietly, “We should take off our clothes.”

She wanted to be horrified but was incapable of it, not with her limbs half-frozen.

“Why?” she said, watching him fumble with the sleeves of his coat, the buckle of his trousers, and the sword at his waist. At the last moment she remembered to look away. As if she hadn't seen him completely naked not an hour ago. As if nakedness mattered in such appalling cold.

“It's easier to stay warm skin to skin.”

“How do you know that?”

Through the ice on his lashes, teeth chattering, he winked. “Everybody knows that, Clara.”

Unsure how to respond, she kept silent. He knelt beside her, a mosaic of metal clamps and pale, wiry limbs, and started undoing the laces at her back.

She stiffened at the touch of his fingers; it was intimate, terribly so. “Let me do it,” she said, trying to push him away, but she was fading, and so was he.

Nicholas released her at once; his voice was gentle, or maybe simply exhausted. “It'll be faster with two of us.”

A pause, and Clara acquiesced, though her body was rigid with the urge to hide, to run from the sensation of this man unveiling her, piece by piece. She remembered at the last moment to hide the dagger that had been strapped to her thigh, before Nicholas could notice it, and she slipped it into one of her boots. The less he knew about her weapons, the better. She might have jumped out a window with him, but he was still a stranger, even if his face did look like the statue's had, even if his
hands were soft upon her as he settled on the floor and drew her close.