Breathe.
Kicking my way around to the stern, I pushed the boat toward the ice floe. As my legs grew inert and my heart grew numb, the shadow of the ice covered me. The boat nudged onto a shelf.
Gasping, spitting, retching, I crawled out. I had no feeling in my hands and little strength in my limbs, yet by fixing fingers onto knobs of pitted ice, I pulled myself out of the deadly water.
For a while, an eternity, I lay on the ice like a suffocating fish.
A whisper of warmth pulsed against my skin where the locket pressed between my breasts. It aroused me from my stupor. I took in a breath, salt water fouling my mouth. Shaking, I rose. I checked my sword, the loop twisted so tight my frozen fingers could not untangle it. The locket’s throbbing heat fed strength to me as I stared across the shelf toward a vertical fissure in the ice. The fissure led into blackness.
Really, what choice had I?
“Brave enough for my purpose,” said a male voice, smooth and cold. I saw no one, not a single sign of life. “Come, Daughter. I will look on you now.”
“I hate you,” I whispered to the empty ice.
He laughed, as if my squeak of outrage amused him. As if he could hear everything. And maybe he could, for would it not explain me?
Maybe that would teach me to keep my mouth shut and not speak when I ought to be silent.
My legs were as heavy as logs as I stumped into the fissure. If he hadn’t killed me by now, he might actually wish to see what manner of creature he had sired on Tara Bell. A warm breeze stirred the passage. A bell tolled three times, the vibration passing right through my flesh. I felt as if my soul were being rung to check its temper, as a person might flick a finger against a finely wrought glass vessel to see how pure the sound is.
Light bloomed to reveal an arch made out of two massive ivory tusks. The tusks were carved with crows and hounds and saber-toothed cats and an eru, and with the image of a girl no more than six years of age. She had long, straight hair and held a sheathed sword far too big for her.
The girl was me.
My body began to prickle and stab as sensation returned. I stumbled under the arch, which vanished, leaving me in a blast of humid air so fetid I hid my face behind my hands. The smell faded, and the light sharpened.
I lowered my hands.
To find myself and see myself in a maze of mirrors, reflected over and over again. Blessed Tanit! I was a mess! My complexion looked as lifeless as the underbelly of a dead fish; my hair clumped in knots and tangles to my hips; my clothes wrung around my body.
“Find me,” his voice said. “One is a gate, not a true mirror. Walk through it, and I will answer three questions.”
I turned, seeing myself turn over and over, I and I and I, each one of me alike. My thoughts lurched sluggishly as I blinked, trying to signal myself as I had blinked at Andevai in the troll’s nest. Why did I think of the troll’s nest? Of course: The upper floor had formed a maze of mirrors.
What was it Andevai had said that time in the carriage when he had thought I was asleep? He had been weaving illusions. He had woven my face in light.
“The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion.”
I had it: In every mirror except one I saw my reflection. My jacket’s buttons were sewn on the left so when I drew my sword it would not hang up in the cloth. I looked for the one image of me with the buttons on the image left not the mirror left.
When I found her, I walked into myself. Heat cut through me to banish the chill that numbed my bones. My steps sank into a thick pile of lush rug, and I halted.
I was the candle that lit the chamber, for its depths were shadow as layered as draped cloth dyed black. At four points equidistant around me, as if at the four points of the compass, loomed four monstrous toads with belligerent stances. Their skin had the yellow-green color of fouled mucus. They did not move, nor did they blink, if toads even blinked. The only way I could tell they were alive was by the pulsing beat in their throats.
A personage sat cross-legged on the back of a turtle. He was clothed in amulets, or perhaps his body was covered in an illusion woven to appear as a shimmering fabric. He had long straight beautiful jet-black hair just like mine and Rory’s. The skin of his bare arms had the same coppery burnished-bronze shade as Rory’s. His face was hidden behind a mask like a sheet of ice. His eyes had neither colored iris nor black pupil, only fathomless light.
He regarded me in silence, masked and unkindly. On a perch next to him sat that evil crow, watching me with its evil black eyes, and I understood that what it saw, he saw, because he had bound it to his will.
I tried to marshal my thoughts, but I could not keep the accusation from popping out.
“Would you have let me drown?”
“You must be both clever and strong. Otherwise you are of no use to me. That is one.”
“What manner of creature are you, that you can breed with a saber-toothed cat and a human woman, and no doubt other females besides?”
“I am the Master of the Wild Hunt. That is two.”
His words hit as a blow. I sank to my knees as the truth poured over me.
My sire was the Master of the Wild Hunt, before whose spears even cold mages were powerless.
Had Tara Bell known? Blessed Tanit! Of course she had known!
“Did you kill my parents?” I whispered.
“Yes. That is your third. Now, Tara Bell’s child, I will ask you three questions.”
“Even though it wasn’t Hallows’ Night, you found a way to kill them,” I cried. “It was your voice that said ‘Daughter,’ not my father’s. It was your arms that pulled me out of the Rhenus River while leaving them to drown. You killed them, and saved me.”
“Your destiny was chosen before you were born because I made you. Tara Bell promised to bring the child to me, but she disobeyed me. So I punished her.”
“I hate you.”
As if hate blazed, the chamber grew brighter. The shadows retreated to reveal a seething mass of creatures ringing the edge of what I now realized was a vast cavern whose walls were ice. Everywhere frozen within the transparent ice I saw hunters caught in motion: sleek hounds striped in gray and gold; hulking dire wolves; scowling hyenas; carrion crows; big spotted cats; men with dog faces and four paws instead of hands and feet; creatures half moth and half woman with soft gray wings and wicked sharp teeth; a cloud of wasps; slumbering snakes in coils and layers; furred spiders with faceted eyes; owls; and rank upon rank of bats with folded-up wings. Did they sleep, or were they suspended by the power of the ice?
“You can’t hate me because you do not know me nor do you know anything of me.” His voice’s timbre was limned with an indifference so supreme it was like asking the sun what it thought of you and receiving no answer. “You are a mortal creature bound and ruled by the tides and currents of the Deathlands. The tide that surges through you, you name as hate because you have no other way to describe it. But you need not remain bound and ruled by the tides that govern other creatures. How do you cross between the worlds?”
His question compelled my answer. “With my blood.”
“In the Deathlands, in what ways can you weave the threads that bind the worlds?”
“I can see in the dark. I can hear exceptionally well. I can conceal myself.”
“What is your name?”
I gritted my teeth in stubborn resistance, sinking to sit on my heels as I pressed my right hand to the locket. Its heartening pulse rose and fell like my father’s breathing when as a young child I had sat on his lap as he told me stories. I grasped my sword’s hilt and thought of my mother. With my elbow I brushed the hem of my jacket, feeling the stone I had picked up from the road. I remembered what Vai’s grandmother had told me: Names are power.
I pressed my lips together. Keep silence. Tell no one.