The crone’s eyes swiveled toward me. I felt their weight like crushing black rock.
“Have you any idea,” she whispered, “what horrors I could summon? What pain I could bring forth? Think you that you have suffered agonies in one little battle? When over the eons I have fought thousands upon thousands, back unto the dawn of Creation itself?”
I started calling Soulfire into my thoughts and will, and the runes in my staff suddenly flared with light, pure light, the echoes of the First Light, when darkness was on the face of the deep.
The crone hissed. She didn’t exactly flinch from the light. But she lowered her head until her hood shielded her eyes.
“Everyone talks a big game,” I said, “but at some point, I stoppedcaring how much bigger they are than me. I’ve been punching out of my weight class my whole life. You wanna go? Here I am. Let’s go.”
No one moved.
The air crackled with tension.
Then something creepy happened.
Mother Winter started to cackle. It was a dry, raspy sound. The sound of sandpaper on skin. The sound of broken glass scraping away at leather. The sound of dried stalks of grain falling before a scythe. It sent aches, real pain like I was no longer used to feeling, running through my joints and limbs, cramps and arthritis and ague all at once, and I had to fight to stay standing straight.
“Bold,” Mother Winter muttered. “Bold.”
She turned to Mab and swept into a stiff, somehow mocking bow.
“Perhaps,” she croaked, “he will do after all.”
And there was a rushing sound as Mother Winter vanished. Just imploded. The air collapsed in on the space where she’d been like thunder, making us all stagger, making my ears pop, and drawing a cold, earthy, uneasy wind down from the tunnels above us leading to the surface, echoing weirdly like the cawing of a thousand crows.
Mab let out a slow exhalation, her breath pluming into the kind of thick condensation you’d normally see from liquid nitrogen. As she did, pain and cold alike faded from my body, leaving only weariness in their place.
“Honestly,” Mab said, her voice rather startlingly human. “I don’t understand why Mother feels such a need to be so dramatic.”
I turned my head to her slowly and started to say something. But I must have been growing as a person or something. Because I took a deep breath instead and shut my mouth.
Lara helped Thomas sit up, rested her forehead briefly against his, and then rose to face Mab and me. She nodded past us, to where Justine was still bound to the column of ice. “Now what?”
The Queen of Air and Darkness’s mouth curled up at one corner. “Fear not, Lady Lara. You are quite correct in your assessment of our situation and in demanding your rights and my obligations be respected. Thomas Raith is under my protection from those powers outside ouralliance. So is the woman, Justine. As is the child. I will safeguard all of their interests as I would those of my own.”
I must be growing even more, because I thought it might be impolitic to point out that Mab’s idea of safeguarding her own daughter’s interests had included asking me to assassinate her and standing by doing nothing while she died, precisely because Maeve had been compromised by Outsider influence.
But I decided it would be a discussion to have with Lara later.
Thomas was staring at Justine, his expression absolutely ragged with grief and worry.
“That’s not her,” he said quietly. “That thing. It’s still got her.”
Mab turned rather sharply to Thomas, an eyebrow raised. “You can sense this? How?”
Thomas glared at Mab and then looked at me.
I nodded to him.
He took a deep breath. “Her…her energy. Her energy. I don’t know how else to phrase it. I know it. It’s part of me. And I can’tfeelher.”
Mab made a thoughtful noise, tapping Medea’s bodkin against her cheek. “The enemy spirit, then, is suppressing the woman severely. Generally, it prefers to remain a subtle and unsensed influence. Mmmm. It must have known that you sensed a change and was thus forced to move more aggressively. Interesting. A very limited means of forewarning, then. And one fraught with perils of its own. Yet it might be useful…”
“What are you going to do to her?” Thomas said.
Mab turned and considered the bound woman.
Justine’s dark eyes blazed with fury and something else for which there might not have been a name, and her naked body strained, wiry muscles standing out. There was a groaning sound, followed by several sharp cracklings, and shatter shards spread briefly across the pillar of ice, only to crackle more and vanish as if the ice was healing, seconds later.
