Winterspell (16 page)

N
icholas took two staggering steps back.

“No, no,” he muttered, “not that. Not a train.”

Ignoring him, Clara tucked her dagger back into its sheath and squinted to the east—at least, if that was where the sun rose in this place. The railroad tracks were not far from them; if they hurried, they could intercept the train, which would surely take them near some kind of civilization. Maybe her father was even on board? Unlikely. Too convenient to consider. And even if they somehow managed to climb aboard without killing themselves, there was no way to guess what the train held, and if it would be even more dangerous than blizzards and barbarous hunters.

Too tremendous a gamble—were her family's lives not at stake.

Resigning herself to it, Clara straightened her posture, steeling herself.

Nicholas pulled her toward the shack and pressed them both flat against the wall and out of sight. “I know what you're thinking. Yes, we have to leave here, but not like this. We can't trust it.”

“The train?”

“It will listen to her. It will do whatever she wants it to.” He leaned his head back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. “We can't trust it, mustn't trust it.”

Her
again. “Are you talking about Anise?”

Nicholas opened his eyes, his expression sharp. “What do you know about Anise?”

“Nothing except that she exists, that Godfather was taunting her in the ballroom. Although, of course, no one was there but me. The man who took Father, Borschalk, also mentioned a woman, twice.” She paused, frustrated. If the train had not been approaching, she would have sat Nicholas down in that shack and demanded to know everything about the mysterious Anise. “I spoke to one of the loks about her. I didn't know what I was saying, but it seemed distracted by my words anyway.”

“As though it were listening to instructions from far away?” Nicholas suggested darkly.

“As though it didn't realize who I was, and then it did.” She paused, thinking. “Or perhaps
she
did.”

Nicholas was silent, staring inscrutably at the sky.

Clara turned away, watching the train's approach. “If she has my father, I must find her.”

“What would Anise want with your father?”

His skeptical tone nettled her. “You tell me,
Your Highness
.”

After a pause Nicholas came quietly to her side. “It's not traveling quickly. If we stay close to the ridge and run alongside the tracks, we should be able to jump on board without anyone seeing us.”

“Agreed.”

“It will hurt.”

“Undoubtedly.” Clara glanced at him, tall and silent beside her. “Those mechaniks. That's what you called them, the tiny mechanical things. They frightened you, didn't they?”

He raised his hand between them, his eyes haunted. “They
are
me. Or at least, they were.”

“That's what happened to you, isn't it?” Saying it aloud made her earlier assumption even more grotesque. “You were eaten alive by those . . . mechaniks.”

His silence confirmed it. She shook her head. “I don't understand. How do they do that?”

“Faery magic,” he said, the words full of hate.

The horn sounded once more. The great black train was much closer now, and it had no windows. Only smokestacks and blank walls.

She grabbed Nicholas's hand, trying not to imagine those hundreds of black monsters enveloping him, sealing him away. “Are you strong enough to run?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I
am
a prince, you know. The epitome of chiseled athleticism.”

She almost smiled. “I suppose you haven't had the chance to look in a mirror yet.”

“Such flagrant rudeness.”

They ran for it, alongside the tracks but never too close. Clara was loath to get too near the train itself. She felt the gaze of unseen eyes upon her, and was that faint, feminine laughter in the air?

It will listen to her,
Nicholas had said.
It will do whatever she wants it to.

Clara wrenched her thoughts from speculation about Anise and concentrated on speed. It was fortunate that Godfather had insisted she always train in her boots; she might have fallen otherwise, or twisted an ankle. But her vision still spotted as they ran, and beside her Nicholas's breaths came raggedly. He had been correct; the train was slow, as though weighed down by massive cargo. But they needed food, bandages, rest. Even with the train traveling so slowly, they might not be strong enough to make it.

At the caboose an open platform surrounded by dark railings awaited them. Clara closed her eyes as they neared it and said a prayer to whatever gods reigned in Cane that this was the right decision, that this would lead them to her father.

She tried not to think of how many hours had passed back at home. How long had she been gone? Six hours? Seven? She fought through
the fear such thoughts triggered; to survive this she had to be one with the shadows, one with the cold, one with the ache of her body. Betrayal or no, Godfather had at least helped her learn that much.

Beside her Nicholas increased his speed. Before Clara could react, he took a running leap toward the rear platform. His body slammed against the railing, and she winced, but he held tight and pulled himself over with a cry. He grinned back at her, though his face was pale with exhaustion and he leaned hard against the railing. “See? Prince-like agility, even under duress.”

Clara bristled. Such arrogance. Agility? More like an ungainly stab of luck. Her irritation galvanized her, and she used the short burst of speed to leap up after him, her eyes trained on the railing as though it were a target to be struck. A great crash as she hit the railing; she knocked her head against it, and her vision spun. The toes of her boots hit the tracks and dragged, nearly unbalancing her. But Nicholas had caught her arms, his grip painful but steady. Her feet found the bottom ledge of the car, and together they pulled her on board.

The train jerked, knocking her into Nicholas's arms and out of the path of an arrow that shot out from the dim morning. Thick and black, it struck a hatch on the train car, embedding itself in the metal. Tiny black legs sprang out from the arrow's head and dug into the hatch as if it were flesh and the arrow an insect. Blue energy crackled along the arrow's shaft, electrifying the hairs on Clara's skin.

From somewhere out in the white wilderness, savage cries sounded.

Clara moved toward Nicholas, automatically, until they stood back to back, eyes alert. Her fingers curled at her thigh, above her dagger. When she saw what approached from the west, her heart sank—monstrous shapes, pale on top and dark below. As they neared, they came into awful definition.

The dark shapes were loks, dotted with lights and covered in armor, darting toward the train as they had through the mansion's ballroom. Here, however, they seemed more at home; they bounded through the
snow as if it were nothing. Atop them rode pale, ghostly people. They carried spears in their hands, tipped blue with electric power. Their battle cries were high and strong, and they were, even from this distance, arrestingly beautiful.

“Nicholas, what are they?” Clara said, although she thought she knew. “Do you know?”

“Oh, yes.” His face was grim. “They're faeries.”

N
icholas turned to the hatch.

“There's no handle,” he said. “Just a lock.”

Clara could not tear her eyes from the sight of the faeries' approach. Their movements were brutal, elegant. Their battle cry was almost a song, a chorus of unearthly beauty. They moved silently through the snow in a V formation. At the point was a figure that looked more familiar than the rest, though he no longer wore the ragged clothing of the day before.

Borschalk.

The last time she had seen him, he had dragged her father out the window by his collar. Now he rode a lok, shouting foreign commands—and her father was nowhere to be found.

But if she closed her eyes, as she suddenly so wanted to do, maybe she would be better able to hear the faeries' high, keening cries. Maybe she could decipher them somehow, and hear if they spoke of her father—

“Clara!” Nicholas snapped.

She turned to look at him, bewildered. “What do you want?”

Nicholas's mouth thinned. “So you're not immune to their charm. Try not to listen to them too closely. They'll catch up soon.”

“Charm?”

“All magic-dealing folk have it.” He yanked back his sleeve, thrusting his arm toward her. “Hurry. Take out this pin on my forearm. It looks about the right size.”

Clara hesitated—surely it would hurt. His arm was an angry mass of damaged skin and black metal. But there was no time for kindness. She set her jaw, grasped the pin, and pulled.

The sensation of the pin's grooves dragging against bone and whatever metal still lay within him made Clara hiss through her teeth. Nicholas cursed hoarsely.

A second black arrow shot past them, and it too embedded itself in the train car. The faeries' cries had escalated into a frenzy.

“Pick the lock,” Nicholas urged; his face had lost what little color it had. “Quickly.”

Clara started to work. The keyhole was miniscule, set in some sort of iron plate. Without a handle to apply leverage, it was difficult to find where the pins would give and yield to the pick in her hand. Sweat dripped down her back.

“Clara,” Nicholas warned, drawing his sword.

“Almost!”

A third arrow hit the wall beside her, and a tendril of hot blue energy licked across her cheek. She cried out and clapped a hand to her face. It came away covered in crystalline residue, flecked with iron. Another arrow hit, and another careened off the railing; the air thrummed with them.

A thud shook the platform. Clara and Nicholas whirled to see a figure crouched on top of the railing. A white face with high cheekbones and unnaturally long, slender ears; white hair knotted in dreadlocks, threaded with pieces of steel and black glass. Metal bands at the forehead and upper arms, inlaid with gems, giving their bearer an air of royalty. An iron helmet, a lithe body clothed in black leather cords and dark trousers and black boots.

Two piercing blue eyes.

“Borschalk,” Clara gasped.

In response Borschalk leered.

Clara returned to the lock as Nicholas whipped his sword across
Borschalk's face. Borschalk roared, losing his footing, clinging to the railing.

Something in the lock clicked and gave way. The door cracked open, and Clara grabbed Nicholas's arm and pulled him through it. He kicked it shut behind them, and they ran.

Something pounded on the door behind them, denting its surface. Blue lights illuminated the door's seams. Black arrowheads bled straight through the metal, carving their way in with pincers.

A weight fell onto the roof above them, making the car shudder on the tracks. Nicholas pulled Clara through stacks of crates wrapped with chains, canvas-draped parcels, metal barrels marked with familiar symbols—from the statue, from her mother's corpse. Faery symbols.

A circular blue light glowed through the ceiling, blinking rapidly; a high-pitched whine began to sound, increasing in volume.

Nicholas saw it, cursed, threw Clara behind a stack of crates and himself down over her.

A portion of the ceiling burst open, spewing shards of metal with blue electricity crackling after them. A charred metal disc—some sort of explosive?—clattered to the ground.

Two faeries dropped down from the ceiling. The first had barely touched the ground when he raised his arm—encased in black metal like a scabrous glove, wires wrapped around his biceps and ending somewhere in the flesh of his back. A nodule atop his knuckles snapped upright like one of Godfather's clockwork mechanisms and blinked a rapid blue.

Nicholas grabbed Clara's hand and yanked her behind a second stack of crates just as an electric bolt shot out from the faery's glove.

Clara dropped to her knees and pressed the catches on her boots, releasing the twin daggers in her heels.

Beside her Nicholas's eyes flashed in approval. “Are you well enough to fight?”

Honestly she did not know. “Are you?” He gave her a hard smile, and together they leapt out into the fray.

The first faery nearly felled her. Her legs were unsteady, her senses overwhelmed, her confidence lacking. Her blade met the metal glove on his arm, the impact shooting off sparks. When she hesitated, he whipped his arm around and down. The movement flung her away from him, and he swung at her with his palm out. The hissing tubules on his fingers might have cut open her face, but she ducked in time and caught him with an underhand stroke of her dagger, thrusting the blade into his abdomen.

Bright blue blood gushed out over her hand, and the faery fell.

When he hit the ground, Clara paused, staring at him. His blood was hot on her hand, and she would have done it again if she had to, but she had never killed someone before. The lok was one thing, and horrifying enough, but this beautiful faery, with his muscled forearms and long-lashed eyes—he looked almost human.

More faeries were sliding in through the ceiling, and Clara forced herself to move.

She grabbed Nicholas, turned, and ran out of the caboose to the next car. She tried to get a good look at the surrounding country as they passed through the gap between cars, balancing precariously on swaying black couplings.

Faeries on either side. Faeries on loks.

“How many are there?” she cried.

Nicholas's eyes shone with battle fever—and, Clara thought, more than a bit of fear. “Just keep going!”

The door to the next car was unlocked and slid open easily. Clara hesitated; that seemed entirely too convenient. But they had no choice. Faeries followed them, raising their metal gloves, throwing their black spears. Clara managed to dodge them and almost fell, unbalanced. She tried to focus on the tug of Nicholas's grip and his voice urging her on, and not on how close she was to collapsing with exhaustion.