“Poor thing.” Amma wrapped arms around herself, cloak abandoned at the most inopportune time.
“That divine spell got the best of him, it seems, but he has no pressing injuries. He will only need time to recover. Here, keep one another warm.” Kaz made no complaint, only tucking in his wings and tail as Damien handed him to Amma. He still gave off plenty of heat though his leathery skin was cold to the touch.
“You have pressing injuries though,” she said, clasping onto Kaz with one hand and taking the other to Damien’s arm. His tunic sleeve had been shredded, and a gash ran up the length of his bicep, deep and oozing.
“Their arcana was slightly stronger this time,” he grumbled.
She gently moved a bit of ripped linen away, the damage worse than she’d ever seen it. The cuts Damien made to himself were bloody, yes, but shallow. This time, his skin was split gruesomely, no sign it intended to mend itself, and there was an angry bubbling at the edges of his flesh like it had been burnt. “I don’t like this. Why aren’t you healing?”
Damien gazed out at the way ahead, the wide trail bending away, trees hemming in on either side with blue-grey shadows. “Magic becomes uncooperative when you change planes, and it isn’t alwaysrighthere anyway.” He dipped a finger into his wound with a wince and swiped his hand through the air. Trailing behind was a hazy line of smoke, and then all at once the smoke expanded as a wall of blackness burst forth before them. Amma jumped back from it, and it dissipated harmlessly into nothing. “You see, I didn’t intend for that to happen, but my arcana is chaotic here.”
Amma grunted, then looked down. Crimson bloomed over the glittering white beside his boots. “We have to take care of that.”
“Damn it.” Damien kicked snow over the blood and tore at his sleeve. He tried to wrap the loose fabric around his arm, but struggled, and Amma took over. She knotted the linen tightly at his elbow, the excess soaking up the blood. “Good enough,” he mumbled. “It would have been better to end up somewhere less frigid, but Winter may be for the best since it’s purportedly desolate. I would cast for a return portal, but our eyes are more reliable than magic for now.”
Their boots crunched along down the trail, a sound that would have been otherwise pleasant, too revealing in the quiet. “You’re saying Winter like it’s a place?”
“The Everdarque is broken into four territories, though they are governed in no rational way. The fae are simply enthusiastic about their aesthetics and prefer to live in their so-called seasonal courts unendingly. They even give themselves nonsensical titles.” He put his hand out as they walked, and a snowflake fell into it, melting away into nothing. “I’ve only been to Summer, but the fae there spoke of Winter as an abandoned place.”
Each step had them sinking into the snow, but it glowed from below like daylight, and up against the darkness of the pines and the night sky, it was like walking through a dream. If it hadn’t been so cold, Amma would have appreciated its beauty. “So, you’re friendly with some Summer fae? Maybe we can find them?”
Damien chuckled, though there was no real amusement in his voice. “I would not say I’m friendly with any of them, no, but I allied myself with a viscount or a margrave or some such out of necessity while there. Fae are too fickle to have friends, not that I would be one if they did—blame the boredom that comes along with immortality.”
Amma watched him grip onto his wounded arm, trying to hide the look of pain he wore. She wanted to believe that it was just the strangeness of the Everdark that slowed his ability to heal, but that same sense that something hidden was watching them told her Damien’s injury was worse than he was letting on. “The fae are immortal like the vampires?”
“Neither have a natural end to their lives, but vampires can be killed. Death doesn’t stick to fae. They purport to not have been born either, which I suppose may be true since they don’t seem capable of reproducing.”
There was no wind, a blessing with the cold, but no other sounds of birds or scurrying creatures either. Amma held Kaz a bit tighter. “You mean it’s just been the same group of them forever?”
Damien shrugged his good shoulder. “If you manage to kill one, they just come back and go on with their interminable life. They have no concept of the permanence that death means for you or me. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”
They came around a bend in the trees, and the firs opened up to reveal a valley of untouched, sparkling whiteness, a frozen, turquoise lake in its middle. The sky was like a swath of velvet, dotted with hundreds of silver specs and spread out over the world, and rising up into the blackness from the lake’s center was a palace of ice.
“Oh, wow,” Amma sighed, her breath’s heat misting before it was swallowed up by the cold.
Dozens of spires drove themselves upward, every surface sharp, threatening the very sky. But the colors glinting off the spears were the softest whites and teals and pinks. Glassy and beautiful, the castle unsettled Amma deeply.
“Of course.” Damien grunted at her side, a deep frown creasing his face, and then he grit his teeth as he clenched the fist of his wounded arm. Even in the dark, Amma could see his skin had gone more pallid than usual. “Let’s go back. I’ll cast for a portal instead.”
“Damien, you’re getting worse,” she said. “Shouldn’t we see if they can help?”
“Help?” He snorted, but even that looked to hurt him. “A fae could just as easily be our undoing as it would deign to assist us.”
“Why not both?”
The voice was like frost forming on the back of Amma’s neck, crawling frozen fingers over her scalp and turning her head. Behind them stood a creature as tall as Damien at its shoulder, it loomed well above them as its antlers sprouted in all directions. Body covered in white fur like an extension of the snow itself, it stood on four slender limbs and would have been majestic if its head were not so horrifying. As starkly white as the rest of it, the deer-like skull rose up out of a furry neck, antlers wider across than Amma could reach with both arms extended, and though it had no eyes, it thrust its head to look down on the two.
So grand a creature would have eclipsed a lesser rider, but the being on its back was just as striking. Clad in white furs, the matched, skeletal face also sprouted prongs, slightly smaller if much more ornate, covered in silver threads strung with red gems that glittered in the snow’s light as they swayed. The recesses of their eyes, though, were not empty hollows, something more peering out from behind them.
The rider shifted, and with a graceful swiftness alighted the ground beside the beast. Damien’s hand gripped Amma’s wrist covertly, squeezing her, and she was thankful for its warmth, even the stickiness of his blood a comfort.
Footsteps crunched much lighter than they should have for the large frame approaching them. Long—perhaps slightly too long—fingers slid beneath the chin, and the antlered skull dissipated into snow, gems and all swept away on a sudden gust of wind. Behind was a man—no, the portrait of a man laid over a fae’s face, though something in Amma lit up like she would have known, even without the descriptions from the fairytales, that she was looking on a fae regardless. Strikingly gorgeous with long, silver hair slicked back and eyes as crystalline blue as the frozen lake behind them, he was so beautiful that the oddness to his hands—what was that, an extra row of knuckles? No, it didn’t matter—he was too pretty to be in possession of anything wrong about him at all.
“You’ve come so far,” he said, voice as deep as the cavern in the karsts, and nodded toward the palace behind them, “why not beg a favor from the fae king himself?”
Damien’s grip tightened. She knew he wouldn’t react kindly to that word,beg. “King?” Damien’s voice, however, was lighter than she expected, and he cocked his head. “Is the Winter Court no longer ruled by a solitary prince?”
The fae held his features very still, a pleasant if cold grin assessing them with unmoving eyes. “And who told you this?”
