I turned my neck to see what had befallen her, and shock coursed through me. She lay on the rocks beside me, broken and twisted, a swath of gray fabric wound around her pale, naked limbs. Blood flowed from her dark hair in a stream to her shoulders, coating the chain and small nautilus shell that lay around her neck and dripping down one arm that bore a tattooed vine and flowers.
“You… You…” Her lips formed a small circle before she fell silent, her eyes rolling back and her limbs going slack.
Was she dead? I did not want her dead. At least, not yet. I needed to take her apart myself, watch her crumble,hoardher. Dead flesh did nothing but rot away.
I had been meaning to keep her, torment her, until she begged my forgiveness. Until she took me to my enemy, and I showed her how he would be defeated for the final time. Then I would take her to my lair, where I could wrap myself around her and freeze her to me before I slept again.
Or something like that. But if she were dead…
Something deep inside—not my stomach that still growled with physical hunger, but something else. My heart? It could not be my spirit, could it?—shied away from the thought of her being taken from me by my own error.
Pain shot through me as I dragged my head up and turned to see her more clearly. “Wake, little enemy. You are not allowed to die.”
She did not wake.
“Disrespectful spy,” I hissed. I did not know how to fix this. Her blood was flowing too quickly. Perhaps…Ah, yes.I could freeze her. Freeze her, and find some servant who knew how to mend her pathetically weak body.
I took a deep breath, sending the air to the icy core of my being, but before I could exhale, something barked.
I blinked, and it barked again. At me.
A seal? I lowered my head to inspect the creature that leaped onto the rocky shore.
Suddenly, it stood on legs like a human male, a seal pelt in one hand, and screamed, “Do not!Oh, great one, do not kill the Omega, the favored daughter of the Goddess!”
Kill? The…Omega? I remembered that word.
I let the air out, aiming my head toward the sky, then replied, “I am not killing her. I merely freeze her, in order to find…”Wait.This was the small creature I’d found swimming beneath the ice, the one who had been with the spy. He knew what she was, perhaps who she was.
I inhaled. He smelled nothing like my enemy. He could be my servant, perhaps.
“Do you know how to fix this spy?”
“Spy?” His wet hair swung around his frail body, small gold beads dangling from the dark strands.
“Do not lie to me, little seal man. I know she is a spy.”
He nodded, glancing at the dying female. “Yes. Her name is Rada, and she is a spy. You said you didn’t want to kill her. If you don’t let me help her, she’ll die in minutes. She’s bleeding to death.”
“You can make her whole?” I asked, wondering if he, too, was a spy. “Do it.”
I leaned my head back, and he scrambled toward the spy, panic in every move. I watched as he used the seal pelt to staunch some of the wounds. I wasn’t sure how, but the pelt seemed to work to stop the bleeding. He fumbled with her gray fabric as well, wrapping it around parts of her, pulling small items out of the cloth and setting them on the rocks.
How curious.
The little spy had mumbled something about stealing from a dragon’s hoard when I had her the first time. But she had no jewels with her. She did have an inordinate number of small packages, some of which the seal man was pulling out and lining up on the rocks until he found something. “Got it!”
I sniffed at the things he’d removed casually. They smelled of her in the way the green-jeweled needle-tooth had. I wanted them. As the seal man pressed something between the spy’s lips, I picked up the small packages and tucked them behind my foreleg toward my back, applying a thin layer of ice over them so they were fixed to my scales.
They were not quite as good a hoard as pieces of the spy herself, but they served to soothe a little of the painful ache that she’d created when she forced me into this shape.
The seal man did as he’d promised, staunching the bleeding while I quietly explored the other packages inside the gray cloak. He’d wrapped the sealskin around the spy’s body and then rolled her own garment around and under her head for some reason.
When I asked, he mentioned the wind. “This cold is harmful for humans. I’m not sure how long she can withstand being exposed to the elements like this, not as weak as she is.”
“Cold can be lethal,” I agreed, glad that he recognized my power. “As lethal as any blade. Cold can kill entire villages at once, whole herds of wandering caribou, flocks of unsuspecting seabird?—”
“Yes, yes, cold is very powerful,” he agreed, an odd tone in his voice. “But can cold build a structure for her to rest inside, out of the wind, so she can heal enough to survive?”
