The respite was over. Infuriated, Grimshaw gave a roar of fury and rushed the other man. The sound was unlike anything Isobelle had ever heard, even from the dragon – a low, splintering thing that was more like a force of nature than …
Suddenly, beside her, Gwen was moving.
She grabbed a coil of rope from Achilles’s saddle and threw one end of it at Isobelle, shouting orders in a manner Isobelle found deeply compelling. ‘Get back. Tie this around Achilles’s tack – Achilles,guard!’ She threw herself from Achilles’s back and went sprinting towards the two men. As she ran, she was tying the other end of the rope around her waist.
Only then did Isobelle realise that the roar of fury hadn’t stopped. And that it wasn’t a roar anymore – that the sound had grown, deepened, become the grinding thunder of stone and snow breaking loose.
The cliffs above shuddered. A sheet of white peeled away from the ledge, spilling down in a blinding curtain. Then the whole mountainside gave way with a deafeningcrack. Snow and rock cascaded at once, a rolling wall that devoured the light as it fell.
Gwen didn’t hesitate. She hurled herself into the chaos, vanishing into the billowing white cloud just before it swallowed Orson and Grimshaw too. Isobelle cried out, jerking the rope tight around the saddle leather with fumbling hands, her knuckles raw where the coarse fibres burned them. Achilles snorted, stamping, but held his ground like a pillar driven into the earth.
The torrent roared across the pass, surging down the slope, taking half the road with it into the ravine. Stone and ice flowed down, down towards the glittering frozen river delta like a waterfall. The rope went taut, the other end arcing a path towards the edge of the cliff before halting, trembling and swaying, as the snow and stone swept everything down into the ravine. Achilles squealed with effort, his hooves sliding in the snow. Isobelle shouted a wordless command for him to hold, and felt her own horse lean close against the larger stallion. She felt at any moment that the rope would snap, and Gwen too would tumble down, down into the depths …
Then, as suddenly as it began, the thunder died.
Silence descended. The air was full of glittering dust, still drifting from the cliffs. The rope stretched tight from Achilles’s tack, vanishing beneath a mound of snow and stone.
The only sound was Isobelle’s own breath, quick and harsh, her body frozen, her eyes fixed on the spot where the rope vanished into the remaining debris.
Across the field of tumbled snow and stone, the carriage gave a violent shudder, and then burst open, spilling the girls out onto the snow – one of them must have kicked the door open at the hinge. A figure came rushing towards the debris. It was Sylvie, and she was limping conspicuously. It must have been she who burst the door of the carriage.
Isobelle found she could move again, and with another command to Achilles to stay where he was, she slid out of Buttercup’s saddle, her legs shaking. She stumbled the first several steps, but soon she was running, and she reached the other end of the rope moments before Sylvie did.
They worked without speaking, steaming the air with effort, scooping out the snow with their bare hands and throwing aside splintered rock. Jane and Hilde caught up to them, but there wasn’t room for four, and Isobelle had no care for them, or indeed for Sylvie, across from her. Each piece of stone or broken branch was an arm or a leg or a long black braid until she cleared the snow to reveal it as just another bit of debris.
The rope quivered once beneath her hands, a faint vibration that jolted her heart. ‘She’s there!’ Isobelle gasped, half to Sylvie, half to herself. They dug harder,breath ragged, until at last she barked her knuckles against a hard surface – not rock, not wood, but the cold glint of chainmail, and the coarse weave of Gwen’s cloak, crusted with snow.
‘Here – help me!’ she cried, and together they pulled, heaving at that cloak until a dark head broke the surface, hair tangled with ice and grit.
Then Gwen’s face tilted up, pale but fierce, her eyes blinking against the sudden light. She had her arm locked tight around Orson’s chest, dragging his limp, dead weight up with her. Blood streaked his side, staining the snow in ribbons, but he breathed.
Isobelle seized Gwen’s free hand and hauled, Sylvie bracing the other side, until both knights were pulled clear of the drift. Gwen collapsed to her knees, still clutching Orson, her shoulders heaving as though she had wrestled the mountain itself. She looked up once at Isobelle, just long enough for Isobelle to see the wild light in her eyes.
Isobelle scarcely recalled moving, but she was in Gwen’s arms a moment later, inspecting her for wounds, brushing snow from her cheeks and throat. Sylvie had bent over Orson, declaring in a shaking voice that he was alive.
There was no sign of Grimshaw – there wouldn’t be. He was at the bottom of the ravine, buried under several tons of rock and snow.
It took some time for them to catch their breaths, to properly bandage Orson’s arm, and to find the lump beneath his thick blond hair that explained his unconscious state. By the time they’d run out of tasks, the sun had begun to dip low towards the horizon.
‘There’s no way we can get the carriage back across this debris,’ Gwen said finally, broaching the subject no one wanted to raise. ‘And we can’t leave it and the horses here, they’ll die. And Orson can’t travel by himself.’
‘I can drive a carriage,’ Jane said. Her face had regained its colour and then some, the cold blooming like roses in her cheeks. When the others turned to stare at her, she blushed more deeply. ‘Remember that squire I was seeing, during the tournament a few months back? He taught me.’
‘We can’t let you travel alone,’ Hilde protested, ‘with only a wounded man for protection.’
‘Maybe you should all go.’ Isobelle heard the words leave her lips before she’d fully formed them in her mind. She was used to launching herself into conversations without being certain what she intended to say, but rarely had the words struck her own heart so sharply.
At her side, half concealed by the drifts of snow, she felt Gwen take her hand.
‘We can’t leave you,’ Sylvie muttered, though Isobelle could see in her eyes the fear and worry, echoes of what had taken hold of them in Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea.
‘Gwen and I can keep each other safe,’ Isobelle went on, lifting her chin and squeezing Gwen’s hand. ‘But it’s … it’s harder, you see, if …’
‘If you have to protect all of us as well.’ Sylvie’s eyes met hers, carrying a hint of her characteristic dry humour. ‘Or worry about the curse taking us too.’
‘Go, travel back to Darkhaven and get Orson to rest and heal. And you can tell Whimsitt …’ Gwen’s voice trailed off, and her eyes slid towards the emptiness on the other side of the road, the side that had been washed down into the ravine, along with half the cliff face … and Grimshaw.
No one had said his name. They didn’t say it now.
