Winterspell (44 page)

Once out of the capital, she summoned Doors—tiny things, only strong enough to last for mere seconds. They helped us jump across vast stretches of country. For long hours we fled through her rickety chain of Doors until we arrived, breathless, in Mira's Ring. The earth trembled here, eternally restless against the edge of the sea.

Drosselmeyer demanded explanation at once. “We meant to help you escape, not have you take us on some mad journey.”

“You're jealous,” I hissed. My patience was worn thin. “You wish that you had this kind of skill. Even now, with Leska just saved from death, you can think only of your jealousy.”

“Stop it, Nicholas,” Leska said. Then she took my face in her hands and
kissed my cheek, and I nearly lost my composure, for I couldn't remember how long it had been since my own parents had touched me with anything like love. “Remember what we have done together,” she told me. “There is still the possibility of peace.”

Drosselmeyer stirred irritably beside us, but I ignored him. “Anise will never agree to peace.”

A great melancholy crossed Leska's face. “Perhaps she will if she is given reason to.”

Then she embraced me, and I felt her exchange a look with Drosselmeyer over my shoulder. Something charged and silent and sad passed between them.

“Look after him,” she whispered, and then she turned and there was a flash of light—another Door, strong and solid, the strongest I'd ever seen. It engulfed her, swallowing her with a violent, roaring sound.

Then she was gone. White energy crackled in her wake.

Drosselmeyer let out a cry of despair.

I waved my hands about, stupidly searching the air for the Door as though it were a knob I could grasp, a hinge I could pry open.

But Leska had gone Beyond. Drosselmeyer tried in vain to open a Door after her, but although he could sense the path she had taken and could have followed her familiar magic as easily as a road, he had never been as powerful as she. He could not open a Door to Beyond; he did not have the skill for it, made himself sick trying. I knew at that moment, with Drosselmeyer screaming on his knees in the snow, that we would never be able to find her. Those who went Beyond did not return. If you believed the old stories, it meant she had gone into another world. Perhaps the world from which we had originally come.

Father knew what we had done, but without evidence to condemn us, and to save himself the humiliation of arresting his own son, he simply became even more impossible to live with.

Luckily, I didn't have to live with him for long.

On my eighteenth birthday, in the dead of winter, the faeries came. Not
an escort or entourage but an army—they sacked Wahlkraft, murdered my mother and father as they fled, murdered the Seven as they fought to defend us.

The capital was lost to blue flame and black mechanized swarms. Drosselmeyer and I saw it from the farmlands as we fled the city on horseback. We were the only two of my parents' court left alive. Of course Cane would be cruel enough to leave me alone with him.

Anise pursued us like an indomitable storm. Across the country she hunted us, following us through Drosselmeyer's unfocused attempts at Doors that spit us out with burned skin and singed hair.

In Mira's Ring our horses collapsed. I searched the snowy darkness for Anise and her lok-mounted lieutenants, while Drosselmeyer scorched his fingers trying to open a Door, cursing himself, cursing Anise, cursing me loudest of all. He had practiced for years now, since Leska's departure, with the intent to follow her. I saw that he would be able to do it if given a moment. I saw his desperation and thought him pathetic. I wondered why he had not shown Leska such devotion while she'd still been his to love.

The shriek of a lok told me Anise was near. I saw her, draped in furs, a helmet of metal and feathers on her head like a crown.

The Door opened at last. Drosselmeyer stepped through and yanked me along with him, but in his haste he could not pull me fast enough, and Anise's weapon struck me in the ribs. Needles stabbed me. Faery magic surged through my blood, burning me from the inside out. I heard Anise's laughter, gradually thinning to a tiny point, for her curse was swallowing me, stifling my breath, freezing my limbs. I saw the blackness cloud my eyes, felt metal sprout from my skin in cascades of pain.

The last thing I saw of the outside world was a bit of blue lightning ricocheting against the Door's edge and slicing across Drosselmeyer's face. Blood spewed, and he let go of me to clamp a hand over the wound.

It was some comfort then, as Anise's magic ate me alive, to hear Drosselmeyer's screams of agony and know that he had lost an eye.

But you see, these performers are all members of our mechanical ballet, so they can only do the same thing over and over again.

N
icholas crouched on the ground like a beast, metal erupting across his body. Time unfurled slowly as Clara watched him, long pulls of horror that wound around her and squeezed.

“But Godfather broke the curse. We
freed
you.”

Even as she said the words, she realized it wasn't true. Godfather had not had time to remove everything. There had been pieces left behind in his body. Maybe, then, the curse had not been broken but had simply lain dormant. Now it awoke and crawled across Nicholas's body, folding him back into its cage. He was howling, and so was the palace behind them, as though something deep within it were awakening.

Clara knelt and reached for the fresh pin that had burst out of Nicholas's arm, coated with his blood. She would dislodge it, she would throw it into the snow—but it had already wrapped itself around his forearm like a creeping vine.

“Don't touch me!” He was kicking at her, thrashing. His fingers were metal claws. “It could infect you. It could travel to you next.”

Surely not. Otherwise it would have spread from Nicholas through Godfather's workshop to encase Godfather, or Clara, or the city itself. New York, enveloped in iron and glistening black.

She forced her voice to a semblance of calm. “I don't think it will—”

“No, Clara!” He threw himself away from her. The falling snow
melted where it touched his rippling skin. “Stay away.”

When Clara stood, she felt a presence sifting through the air with invisible hands.

Clara, what have you done?
The voice again—Anise's voice. It seemed to call to her from Nicholas himself, or at least from the metal devouring him.
Why are you leaving me?

“Because of
this
,” Clara snapped, near tears, and she helped Nicholas to his feet despite his protests. Her anger temporarily vanished in the face of his pain. “Because you lied to me. You say you want to remake the world, but what you really want is bloodshed.”

The voice was quiet.

Clara tried to run, but Nicholas's sagging weight was too much. She couldn't hold him. They fell—Nicholas writhing beside her, his voice going hoarse from screaming—and for an awful moment Clara lost hope. The watchtowers were spinning around to illuminate her and Nicholas. The soldiers had resumed pursuit. They were outnumbered.

Then an idea came to her.

She dragged Nicholas to his feet again. “Think of Rieden.”

“What? Clara, I can't—” He bent over, clutching his head.

“Imagine it, on Bo's map. Remember? The dark circle around the capital. The forest no one can enter. It should be north of here.”

“Far north.” He struggled for breath. “But, yes. All right.”

“Picture it and hold it in your mind.” She made herself smile at him. They had done this together once before, though it had been out a window. It seemed like such a long time ago. “Do you trust me?”

“With my life,” he rasped, and Clara did not pause to cherish the careful warmth in her heart. Instead she used it—along with the sound of her father's voice, fresh in her mind, and her memory of Felicity's face—to focus on the idea of Rieden.

Once again she felt Anise's presence behind her, closer this time, but she did not turn back. She knew what she would see: Anise, in
mad pursuit, mechaniks spilling around her feet like a dark tide cascading toward them across the tundra.

Clara
, the voice said, whispering up from Nicholas's shuddering arms,
you will regret this.

The Door erupted, more glorious and violent than any Clara had yet summoned. When she stepped through it, Nicholas heavy in her arms, the passage bashed them senseless. They landed hard, the wind knocked out of them.

Clara lifted her head. She thought she might be sick. The world was tilted, the sky was spinning, but she could see they hadn't gone far enough. They were in the middle of a vast tundra—Rosche, then. Behind them, but not so far as to feel comfortable, shone the lights of the Summer Palace. This was, Clara assumed, as far as her power would be able to get them.

At least in one try.

Nicholas was staring at her, and the light in his eyes reminded her of that night in the stable, the first time he had seen her with his own true eyes. He was full of wonder and a quiet joy.

“Lady Clara indeed.” He gave her an unsteady smile.

Lady Clara.
Lady
, like her mother. The title still felt strange to hear, and yet she cherished the words, for within them lay a new sense of kinship with her mother's ghost, and she cradled it fiercely in her heart. She leaned hard against Nicholas for a moment, as if she were the one who needed help to stay upright. Then a new light shone on his face—behind them, a Door that was not Clara's.

Anise.

“North,” Nicholas said, pointing ahead of them. “North is that way. Again.”

Clara had already begun to open the next Door, and then another, and another. And each time they tumbled out into the snow, she looked behind them to see that the Summer Palace's lights had shrunk a bit more, and that Anise was still following them.

When they exited a seventh Door, it was at the edge of a black forest, a great brambled structure as high as the perimeter wall and nearly as solid.

“Rieden,” Clara whispered. Her body tingled, ached, hummed; the air around her throbbed with power. She could hardly believe it, but here they were:
Rieden.

Nicholas laughed, heaving. “Clara, you did it.”

Behind them a thin light began to spiral.

Clara hauled Nicholas to his feet, his weight heavy against her. “We've got to go. Anise is right behind us.”

Dismayed, he looked at the forest ahead of them. “But
how
?”

Clara didn't answer. She seized Nicholas's arm. Spider-sized metal bits scurried across his flesh and away from her touch, burying themselves in the crooks of his elbows and beneath his collarbone. This seemed significant, but Clara couldn't stop to wonder. She hardened her mind against his cries, against everything but the forest before her.

It was calling to her, beckoning her inside. She could feel it in her blood. A sense of home suffused her. Rieden was drenched with mage magic—unsteady, maybe even cracked, but there, and holding fast. It reminded her of Godfather, of standing outside his shop and knowing without even looking inside that he was there. A magnetism.

“Clara!” Anise was behind them, stepping out of her Door. Her voice was furious, thick with desperation.
“Don't.”

A pang in Clara's chest, to hear the queen's raw emotion, but she ignored it and reached for the forest wall. Her fingers scraped bark, and it gave way as though it had never been there at all, as if it were her and she were it—
You are the room. You are the shadows.
—and swallowed them whole.

With a tremendous sucking sound, the forest closed behind them, silencing Anise's unintelligible screams. Thunderous noises boomed as though something were pounding on the forest wall from a great
distance. Clara saw faint blue lights, like a storm on the horizon, and heard distant shrieks of fury.

The forest rippled around them and fell silent.

* * *

It was a huge black tangle of thorned brambles and vines draped in prickly moss, and great trees with trunks so thick that the linked arms of a dozen men could not have wrapped around them.

Too dense for breezes, or perhaps magically insulated from them, the forest was still and watchful. Clara could not see or hear any traces of wildlife, but she felt the stares of countless malevolent eyes.

She touched a curling vine. It was as though the rest of her time in Cane had been experienced through a veil, and only now could she see the country for what it was. She smelled spice in the air, woodsy and damp, and felt every tiny prick of spindly moss against the pad of her finger. Her blood raced powerfully, tight and cold and vibrating with silver. There was no faery magic here.

Except for in the man behind her. It tainted the air like disease.

“Clara?” Unable to hold himself up, Nicholas had collapsed behind her. “Someone's watching us. There, in the trees.”

Clara followed his trembling hand to a crooked black tree with bulbous roots. At its base stood a figure, slim and cloaked. He raised his arms, something long and slender and glowing held between them.

Nicholas pulled Clara to the ground and pushed himself on top of her. Silver lightning sliced into the tree behind them.

“Stay down,” he told her, but then his body seized and he rolled off her, crying out in pain.

“Nicholas?” Clara bent over him. More metal plates sliced through his skin, flattening into a patchwork suit of armor up his spine, across his shoulder blades.