She winced at the cold, leaving the car once more, for the last time. Her cell in the center console, the keys inside. He had left everything behind, made it easy for everyone, and she did the same. The wind was biting, a sharp cold that felt like a knife moving through her, despite her layers, and she did not dally while stepping into her previous footsteps.
The cold of the outside world was nothing compared to the icy burn of the key. It had grown colder in the weeks of her possession. Silva could feel the burn of it now, seeping through the leather of her glove, almost pulling into her hand, as if it recognized its proximity to its purpose.Now or never, she repeated to herself, pulling the key from her pocket.
The lock was as old as the gate itself, its keyhole rimed with ice. She expected resistance. She expected a struggle, for the key to not fit, for the lock to be too caked with ice and snow to work properly. She had imagined it finally giving way with a grinding groan, like a tree slowly cracking its way to the ground. Instead, the key slid home with an unsettling ease. There was no resistance, no grinding protest of disuse. It was as if the lock had been waiting, patient and untroubled by time. The click it gave was soft and final, the gate swinging open without a sound.
There’s no coming back from this. There wasn’t, but doing nothing was not an option she could abide any longer. Silva stepped through the gate.
She didn’t know what she’d expected fromthiseither.
You’ve read too many books. You were expecting a winter fairyland, with whipped cream snowdrifts and a glitter castle. The snow-covered graves looked exactly the same on this side of the black gate as they had on the other, and she couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t a teensy bit disappointed. The sky was the same mid-afternoon white-grey as it had been for weeks, the same biting wind made her tuck her nose down into her scarf. The only difference was that she had apparently spent a fantastic amount of money on some charlatan’s attic detritus.
“Tate!” Silva called out, feeling that she had to dosomething to justify the past several months of nonsense. “Tate!” Her voice was swallowed by the wind. There was nothing and no one.
You need to go home. You need to go home, and tomorrow, you need to go to the club and join a committee or three. Tannar’s right — you’re not even trying and everyone is going to start noticing, if they haven’t already. Either that or you need to just disappear for good.
She had barely turned back around when she realized just how far she was from the gate. She had barely taken two steps through the snow, yet the frost-covered gate was at least fifty feet behind her. Silva felt the world pull, fractured memories of crooked trees and a shining little pond, the door to the Plundered Pixie getting further and further away from her. Panic crowded her throat, her shoulders hitching as she gasped for breath, the cold making breathing at all nearly impossible.
Movement caught in her peripheral vision. Something in the tree line. Something gaunt and hunched, with a long face and gaping black holes where eyes should be. Beside it, a white hound, impossibly long, eerily silent. The cat-eyed man was right. Shewasgoing to be eaten.Run, you need to run!She needed to get back to the gate, needed to make it back to the black iron before either of the creatures broke from the trees,needed to getoutof here before the option to do so was removed entirely.
“You may not wander.”
Silva shrieked in fear, whirling to find a figure standing between two headstones just to her left in a space she could have sworn was empty moments before. He was tall and narrow, wrapped in layers of grey that blended so completely with the landscape, her eyes struggled to settle on him. So great was the stranger’s camouflage in this frozen place that it took her several long, panicking moments to realize it wasn’t a man at all. It was a moth, mottled white and grey, the layers of what she thought was fabric were wings. His eyes were a washed-out blue, and what she’d thought was a fur scarf was his mantle, not unlike the fur wrap around her head.
You need to run. Run and scream and fight. You’re an elf, not a mouse. Don’t let them take you without a fight.
“Don’t.”
She hadn’t spoken, but it seemed he could discern her plan with ease. Silva let out a shuddering breath, her hands clutched in a gesture of pleading. “I-I’m not trying to wander. I was looking for someone, but I’ll leave. I’ll leave right now.”Please let me leave. She didn’t know why she thought she could do this.
The sentry regarded her in silence, his gaze lingering on her face, her hands, the line of her shoulders. His eyes dipped briefly to her coat pocket, where the key rested, before returning to her face.
“You possess Winter’s Bone. That grants you passage. Not permission.”
This was a mistake. She should never have left her house. She should have stayed home and found another way to deal with her grief. She could have developed a drinking problem, a gambling addiction, cheated on her husband with abandon. All would have been more sensible than this. Silva of the Daytimewasa mouse, and when faced in a similar situation, Silva of the Nighttime had been as well . . . but it was a mistake she’d already made, she reminded herself, even as she trembled.In for a penny.
“What’s the difference?” she heard herself ask.
He considered that. Considered her. The moth was unhurried, and she shivered in the cold.This is how they kill you. Slowness.
“Duration,” he answered at last, an echo of her thought.
She nodded, absorbing the response. It was as good as she could have hoped for. “I’m willing to leave now.”
The moth turned. “No. You entered; now you must be received.Permissionis not mine to give. Follow.”
She should have stayed home, Silva cursed herself again, too afraid tonotfollow.That jerk was right.Somethingisgoing to eat you. She was too far from the gate to have been able to run, and the moth would have caught her easily.You don’t want to find out what the punishment is for not listening.
There were more creatures on the perimeter of the gravestones. Small white hares with beady black eyes, a graceful stag sitting beneath a tree that blended in so well with the snow, Silva was only able to ascertain what it was from the majestic antlers that rose from their head. On the hill, a snowy-white fox sat watching. As they walked, it began to snow, thick and blowing. She had never felt further from Cambric Creek in her life.
Just beyond where she had parked her car, down the sloped embankment and across the field of headstones, the cemetery had a chapel. She had seen it from the road, while she sat in her car sobbing noisily. It wasn't terribly big, just a white block rectangle with a pitched roof of gray shingles, and a cupola with a small bell. It was where the moth was leading her, she realized, struggling to follow behind in the deep snow.
Her footsteps were not leaving tracks. So far there was nothing about the landscape ofthisside of the gate that was terribly different from her own, save the animals and creatures she had no doubt would have made a meal of her if the moth had not intercepted, but these little reminders – distance stretching without her notice, the physical evidence of her existence being so easily discarded — made her shudder with something other than the cold.
Silva felt a shiver deep within her, realizing it was the first flutter that had made itself known since her arrival that morning, as if her invisible passenger had decided to tuck up beneath her lungs and remain as still as possible, keeping warm.It’s alright. We’re alright. She didn’t know if that was true anymore, but she wasn’t about to admit it.Not yet.
They passed beneath an archway of ice without slowing, the chapel doors already open to receive their entry. The whole building was encased in ice, she realized. It did not glisten or drip, its surface opaque, as if the weak winter sunlight had been absorbed and stilled within the stone. Inside it was colder. Colder andmassive, all the proof she needed that she was no longer in the same world where her car was parked, just a few yards away, for she had been able to see the size of the chapel from the road. This hall dwarfed it.
“You will wait.”
