Winterspell (49 page)

“How are you feeling?” Clara said at last, at the same time Nicholas said, “You couldn't sleep either?”

They laughed, embarrassed. They were, it seemed, suddenly ten years old. Then Clara saw something that startled her. Unthinking, she hurried closer to him.

“The curse! It's—”

“Receding. Somewhat, anyway. At any rate it hasn't gotten worse.”

“Oh, it looks
much
better. Do you think it was the binding?”

“Yes, I do.” He paused, and there was a weight in the air as he opened his mouth and closed it, as his eyes bored into hers. The weight of
almost
.

She had to look away, her pulse coming in sharp bursts. “I couldn't sleep. You know, to answer your question. From before.”

“Neither could I.”

She knit her fingers together, then lowered them, rigid at her sides.

“Clara . . .”

“Tomorrow we'll discuss strategy,” she said hurriedly. “We have much to plan. I think I can get everyone in with a few Doors. I'm quite good at opening Doors.” She laughed. “Not so good at other, more useful things, I'm afraid. I wish I had more time. I wish I could be a better champion for everyone. Like a knight or something. Sir Clara. But then, no, I'm a Lady, aren't I?”

He found her hand, quieting her. “We'll find him, Clara. We'll get him home.”

She stared at him, and the softness in his face sent her into his arms.

They were clumsy kisses at first, as they fumbled in the dark. Then Nicholas's hand threaded through her hair, and the other fell to her waist, held her in place. The kisses deepened.

Clara's blood surged through her, and she stretched up onto her toes to press herself closer to him. The heat she had felt at the fire returned tenfold. She clutched his arms, his shoulders, and when her fingers brushed metal, she felt not repulsed but emboldened. She knew that metal. It had been of her statue, and she had kissed it when no one else would. She
trusted
that feeling.

Nicholas bent lower, his kisses trailing hotly down her neck. He tugged at her collar, urgent, and they stumbled back, bumping against the wall. His hands clutched the hem of her tunic, brushing her belly, sliding sweetly up her waist, and then higher. Clara gasped and parted her lips, and Nicholas groaned.

It wouldn't stop—it
couldn't
stop, or Clara would die. Her blood sang. She couldn't kiss him deeply enough, couldn't touch him everywhere she wanted to. Only hours ago they had shared blood, shared skin, and the knowledge of that raced through her veins like a drug.
Like sugar,
she thought wildly as his fingers skimmed up her neck . . .

. . . and circled there, closing around her throat.

Her eyes shot open. “Nicholas?”

His hands tightened. Malice rippled through the room, possessive.

Clara . . .

She couldn't breathe. Terror struck her, and fury. She reached into the night air for anchor, gathering her strength.

“Oh . . . ,” Nicholas murmured, and it wasn't his voice. It was higher and crueler. His eyes glinted blue in the moonlight. “Just a bit more, sweet Clara . . .”

Clara let her power off its leash.
Do not hurt him. Only stun him.
A wave of force struck Nicholas, hurling him across the room in a burst of crackling energy. He hit the opposite wall and slid to the floor.

Shaking, she approached him. The lingering magic illuminated his dismay.

“I thought . . .” He cleared his throat. “I'd hoped the binding would diminish her.”

“I had as well. Are you hurt?”

“Not terribly.” He looked up at her, afraid. “Are you?”

“No. You didn't—
she
didn't get far.”

They waited in awful silence. Nicholas picked himself up off the floor and put as much distance between them as the small cottage would allow. Somehow—even in such an aftermath—heat remained between them, but neither of them moved to quench it.

“I won't touch you again, Clara.” His shadowed profile was tight, furious. “I meant what I said in the binding. I'll never force anything upon you. Not even she can make me.”

Clara nodded uncertainly and left without another word. She did not sleep that night, just as she had thought, but for a different reason.

C
lara awoke before dawn to the sensation of being strangled.

She jerked up, her arms tensed to strike, but no one was there except Ralk, who had frozen at the door. It stood open behind him. Half his body was still outside, and he put up his hands.

“I'm sorry to wake you.”

The memory of Nicholas's face flickering into Anise's left her unbalanced and full of sadness. “What is it?”

Ralk hesitated, distressed. “There is something you must see.”

She swung her legs out of bed and tugged on her boots. Outside, Godfather, Bo, and Nicholas already waited. Bo was fiddling with a bundle of thin metal, swearing under her breath; slender tools glinted behind her ears.

Withdrawn and guarded, Nicholas would not meet Clara's eyes. He kept as far from her as possible as they followed Ralk through the bracken. She was glad, for the memory of his hands at her throat was still near enough to frighten her, but it was difficult to keep this distance between them—like resisting the instinct to breathe.

They came to a strange part of the forest. The ground had grown increasingly uneven, and now the forest before them trembled like a thorny mirage. Beyond the tangle glowed a ghoulish blue-green light.

“What is this?” The sound of Nicholas's voice in the gloom startled Clara. Something was not right here. She put out a hand and felt the tension in the rippling air, and the energy of angry magic.

Ralk gestured forward. “See for yourselves.”

They bunched together where the light was strongest. Clara peered out, beyond Rieden, and understood that the rippling was the magic guarding Rieden butting up against what lay beyond.

There was a city, black and teeming and . . .
growing
. Towers rose and fell; buildings tumbled into one another, and were pulled apart. Shining black strings stretched between them before snapping, sending up tiny showers of what Clara realized were spurts of clacking mechaniks. The ground shifted, hilly one moment and flat the next, jagged spires reaching high up into the sky like trees in a forest fighting for sunlight. They knocked into one another, climbing higher and higher until the height became too great and they cascaded down in dark waves. Iron bridges crossed the sky. She could not tell if it was day or night. The light here was murky, the sky thick with bulbous clouds and lightning that never ceased. A great black wall surrounded it all.

“Erstadt.” Nicholas's voice was quiet and furious. “What's happened to it?”

“I think you know, Your Highness. Anise happened to it. And since you arrived, it has grown all the more ruthlessly. See there?” Ralk pointed at a swath of land past the edge of the mages' magic, a thin forest of scrawny obsidian trees. Thin metal cords wound around them, sparking blue, stunting their growth. “Yesterday that was Rieden, safe within the boundaries of our protection.”

Godfather had been right. “Her magic is eating away at your wards,” Clara said.

“Even now it approaches the forest.”

As they watched, a shallow line of mechaniks tore at the ground. Some, overwhelmed by Rieden's wards, spasmed and fell, but the others kept coming, pushed onward by some relentless force.

“She is furious,” Clara whispered.

Nicholas's eyes shot to her, but she ignored him. Part of her feared looking too closely at his face.

“We cannot delay any longer,” Godfather said. “We have to leave. Now.”

Yes, they had to. Urgency nettled Clara, put her even more on edge. It was her twentieth day in Cane—and five at home.
Felicity, I'm coming back to you soon. I swear it.

Ralk agreed. “I confess, I've no guidance for you, no strategy. I've never seen the capital in such unrest.” He fingered the thorns of a vine at his side nervously. “Nor have I ever seen Anise so agitated. You have provoked her mightily, Lady Clara.”

Her title still sat strangely around her, but not so much as it once had. She was growing accustomed to it, like she would to a new friend. Her blood surged, chilling her, and she opened her mind to it gladly.

“Anise will be expecting stealth,” she said. Nicholas's attention was still sharp upon her, and she glanced at him. “You realize you can't be privy to our planning, Nicholas. She might hear our every word.”

If her matter-of-fact coolness hurt him, he hid it well. He nodded curtly. “A word, before I leave you?”

They walked a little apart from the others. Clara noticed that he kept her at arm's length, but the look on his face was anything but distant. “Clara, you know I'll fight at your side. Curse or no curse.”

She longed to draw him to her, to take and give comfort. Instead she said, “Certainly.”

“And you know what you'll do if it does get the best of me. If I can't keep up, if she breaks me, or if I become too dangerous.” He took her hand, fingers light on her palm. “You know, don't you, Clara?”

“What are you saying?” She knew, of course.

“You'll stop me, no matter what it takes. The important things are finding your father and destroying Anise, if we can. Whoever sits on the throne after that is less important.”

“Don't act as though it doesn't matter,” she said sternly. “Not to me. Tell me to kill you for the greater good if you must, but don't pretend you're indifferent.”

She paused. The word “kill” hovered crookedly between them.

With a searing intensity, Nicholas studied her face as if to memorize her. Then he turned and left her.

Clara watched him go. When she returned to the others, her face was a mask of coolness. She would not let them see how he had shaken her. “Here,” she said, “is what we'll do.”

* * *

They began at dusk, that same day.

“It's crude,” Bo said, slipping a tiny headset over Clara's ears and hiding it beneath her hair, “but it'll do.”

The device crackled, a mechanized growl.

Bo grimaced, her nose crinkling as Felicity's did when she saw something unseemly. “Wasn't kidding about it being crude, was I? Sorry, Lady.”

“Please,” Clara said, watching as the others gathered before her,” call me Clara.”

“But you
are
a Lady, you know.” Bo winked at her over her own tangle of thin black wires. Bo's voice came to Clara both in the air and at her ear, distorted. “Might as well get used to it.”

“I don't feel like a Lady. I feel like a girl.”

Bo shrugged. “All Lady mages were girls at one point, weren't they? And I bet few of 'em ever planned any assassinations.”

Clara winced at the word.

Godfather came up and took her elbow. “You owe Anise nothing, Clara. Don't doubt yourself. Don't doubt this.”

“There were moments,” she whispered, too low for the others to hear, “when she was kind to me. Treated me as I've never . . .”

She trailed off. It felt silly. Silly and dangerous and shameful. Anise's magic was eating away at the very world. She was dangerous,
destructive, vengeful. She was not a person to feel kindly toward. Clara would remember that. She
must
remember it.

“I know, dear heart,” said Godfather. “But it was a manipulation. You see that, don't you?”

Yes, she was all too used to manipulation. In the wake of her mother's death, every aspect of her life had been a bargain, a careful maneuvering. Evading Dr. Victor, guiding her father through his grief, ushering Felicity through a thinning path of safety. Navigating Patricia Plum's web—not to mention Godfather's own, much as his deceptions might have been for Clara's own good.

But there had been moments, almost too fragile to acknowledge, when Clara had seen something in Anise's face—something worth giving a second chance.

Our mothers made this moment between us, Clara, this moment in time.

And what a moment,
she thought bitterly.
It could have been a better one, Anise, if you'd had the guts for it.

“Don't worry about me,” she said to Godfather, and adjusted her earpiece. “Is everyone in position?”

Another crackle, a stutter. Then Ralk spoke: “Yes, we're here. We await your signal.”

Clara closed her eyes and drew the structure of their attack in her mind. At first she did nothing but imagine the capital's layout, as Godfather had sketched in the dirt—at least, what he had once known of it. With Anise's magic so pervasive, anything could be awaiting them now.

“I'm here,” Godfather murmured at her side. His presence was a comfort. For Clara's protection Nicholas was positioned elsewhere. Bo had stepped back into the trees. Her meager army gathered in clumps along the shifting line between Rieden's magic and Anise's encroaching mechaniks. Without Godfather steady beside her, she would have felt rather alone in the world.

No, not entirely alone—even if Godfather had not been there, she
would have still had her magic. It pulsed steadily within her, waiting for instruction. As she urged her power into readiness, preparing it for their most extreme experimentation yet, she felt the land responding to her, the air accepting her. She could sense it, and it was overwhelming, even frightening—a tremendous, sentient entity recognizing the newness of Nicholas in her blood. Sensing it, and bowing to it, and saying,
Welcome home.

Protectiveness seized her, a possessive thrill that she had not felt for a long time back at home, save for in Godfather's shop. Perhaps
this
could be her home now. Or maybe it already was, or always had been.