The hart’s head darted up. It moved as fluidly as water tossed on the wind. For an instant, their gazes met, Wren’s dark eyes flown wide in astonishment and the hart’s glowing with an inner liquid light.
Later, when he had a moment to reflect on the incident, Wren would realise his error. He, a mortal man, weighed some ten or eleven stone. The white hart, being ethereal, weighed nothing unless it chose to.
And in that instant, it chose for its hooves to prove as hard as adamant as it struck the ice and bounded away.
A sound like a thunderclap resounded across the lake. The crack shot across the ice from the point the hart had struck, spreading from the drinking hole and shooting between Wren’s boots. He had just time to perceive it before another noise burst the air, this one like lightning cleaving an ancient oak in twain, as the ice shattered beneath him.
Wren plunged into darkness.
Cold like a thousand knives raking his skin. Cold fit to turn his very veins to ice. Cold that burned in his bones in a way he’d never realised cold could do before. He wanted to shut his eyes against it. He couldn’t.
And a very good thing that turned out to be, for he was not alone.
Shafts of sunlight pierced the water from the jagged hole in the ice overhead. By their illumination, Wren glimpsed a shadowy thing. It glided through the water beneath him; he knew not how many fathoms down, but not far enough. Its smooth undulating form, dappled like a leopard in shades of grey, ran some three yards long, if not longer, from head to tail. It had a maw like a hound on a skull the size of a horse’s—as longas Wren’s thigh and as broad as his shoulders. The eyes were pure black, almost human in their shape, but nothing human in the promise of cold death behind them. And as it rolled through the water, it fixed its hungry gaze on Wren.
The sight forced the breath from his lungs in an incoherent yell. He gulped freezing water in its wake. Now he had ice within him as well as without. His heart ceased to beat.
Yet he must escape.
The thought consumed him. He forced his frozen legs, weighed down with wet wool, to kick. His trembling arms clawed through the water as he sought in desperation for the shafts of sunlight still beaming down from the hole he’d fallen through. It felt as though he crawled through molten lead. The cold burned him inside and out with every thrash of his limbs.
But it drew it him nearer to the surface nonetheless.
At last, just when it seemed sheer exhaustion would drag him down to the dark depths forevermore, his flailing fingertips breached the biting wind above. Instinct forced him to recoil from the sensation, dry cold feeding on wet cold to shatter his nails, but survival demanded he try again, and this time, his hand closed on the jagged rim of the hole in the ice.
He ought to have hauled himself up all at once. As matter stood, he could only do so by degrees. His limbs convulsed with the cold, jerking him to and fro, whilst he struggled upward. He got his face above the water, spilling out what had filled his lungs, gulping down freezing air that scraped his throat on the way down and again as he coughed, droplets of ice still stuck inside him. He threw both arms across the ice. The soaked sleeves of his coat stuck fast and held him up even as his strength failed and he could draw himself out no further. He knew he had no hope of saving himself. Yet, with water still sputtering up from his throat and the biting wind burning in its wake, he couldn’t even whisper, much less shout for aid. If he could butcatch his breath... if he could regain his strength… if he were to close his eyes, just for a moment, to restore himself…
“No—Butcher, you daft bastard! You’re too heavy, you’ll fall straight through!”
The shout jolted Wren out of his waking dream. A voice he recognised. A woman’s voice. He turned his head despite his stiffened joints and squinted against the sunlight reflecting off the snow to see who had spoken.
Several shadows clustered at the shoreline. One figure in particular strained against others clinging to their arms and legs to hold them back. This, Wren knew, even with the ice-water freezing his lashes together, was Shrike.
Another shadow slithered towards him across the ice. A figure crawling on their belly, smaller and more slender than Shrike, moving far faster than Wren himself could have done. Only when they drew within arm’s reach and thrust out an unstrung longbow towards him did he recognize Nell.
“Oi, Lofthouse—catch hold!”
Wren forced his frozen fingers to unclench and try their grip against the bow. With an effort, he peeled his sodden garments off the ice. They stuck again elsewhere, but by then Nell had begun reeling him in. His shoulders emerged from the waters. The wind nipped the nape of his newly-exposed neck. He kicked his legs to try and propel himself further out.
Then it struck.
Dozens of dagger teeth pierced him through all along his right-hand side. The crushing bite forced a scream from him. He whipped his head ‘round to see what had caught him—as if he didn’t already know.
The cold, dead eyes stared back at him above the wolfish muzzle.
Wren, half-frozen and bleeding out, had no power to save himself.
Then a blade plunged into one of the eyes.
The creature released him with a shriek fit to shatter glass. It veered off, taking the blade with it. Hands seized Wren under his arms.
“Come on, Lofthouse—up, up, up…!”
Wren scrambled to get his legs under him as Nell lifted. The jagged ice scraped against his wound as his waist emerged, then his hips, then his knees. Nell drew him into an embrace, twining her arms through his and linking her hands behind his back. From someone else, in a different sort of moment, it might have felt tender.
“I’ve got him!” Nell barked over her shoulder. “Reel us in, now!”
With a jerk, they began to slide together across the ice. What sort of magic drew them along, he knew not. It worked in pulses; a slide of some few yards, then a rest, then another slide. Wren’s sodden and swiftly-freezing clothes stuck to the ice with every halting, only to be torn free in the successive tug. Every jerk of the line sent fresh stabs of agony down his right-hand side. He took advantage of the pauses to raise his head, despite exhaustion dragging him down, and try to glimpse his Shrike.
