Chapter 524: More Dreadful Ravens

The feathers came down like the sky had finally decided to answer for something.

Not one this time. Not two. They fell in a slow black-crimson drift across the whole frozen field, dozens of them, then dozens more, each one turning lazily end over end through air that had nothing in it to shed them. No wings. No shapes. Just feathers, and the awful patient quiet under them, and the growing certainty in my gut that the thing Brunhilde killed had never been the problem.

It had been the scout.

There’s more of them, Wren said, low. A lot more. I can feel them the way you feel a headache coming.

"Brunhilde."

"I know." She hadn’t turned. She stood over the grey ruin of the first bird with frost sighing off her shoulders, her azure eyes already lifted to the dark. "When one finds prey, the rest follow. I had hoped to be gone before they arrived." A pause. "Hope was always a poor tool."

’So we’ve got a flock. Of murder-birds. In the dark. Where we can’t see them.’

’Cool. Great. Love the Precipice. Ten out of ten.’

I did the math anyway, because that’s what my brain does instead of panicking — it files paperwork. One of those things had opened my shoulder and nearly beaten a Calamity. A whole flock of them should have had me looking for a very deep hole to die in.

Except it didn’t add up that way. And it took me a second to see why.

The first bird beat Brunhilde because it never gave her the field. It kept her hurried, kept her season from arriving, danced above her where the cold couldn’t reach. But the field was here now. Her winter had come. The ground under my boots was a sheet of white, the air came into my lungs sharp and glassy, and every degree of it belonged to her.

Which meant the flock wasn’t flying into a fight.

It was flying into a freezer.

"They can’t get fast in here," I said slowly. "Can they. Your whole domain is already up. The second they come down into it, they slow."

Something almost like approval crossed her face.

"You understand it better than the knights ever did." She raised the greatsword and set it point-down in the ice again, both hands folded on the pommel, settling in like a woman who had decided exactly where she was going to stand and dared the world to move her. "Let them come. Inside my winter they are ravens. Only ravens. I have killed a great many ravens."

For one clean second I let myself believe it was going to be that easy.

Then I remembered Ilse.

"They hunt warmth," I said. "And fear."

Brunhilde went still in a different way.

"You hid her out there." I was already turning toward the ridge of leaning spires, toward the hollow beneath the roots of the stone. "Out there, where it’s not freezing. Where she’s warm. Where she’s been sitting alone in the dark for however long, listening to you lose a fight and not knowing if you were coming back." My jaw tightened. "You didn’t leave her warmth or fear, you said. That was true an hour ago. How true is it now?"

She didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

The flock wasn’t going to dive into the freezer to get to us. Some of it would. But a bird that hunts fear, given a field of cold and courage on one side and a lone, warm, frightened woman on the other, is going to make the smart choice.

They were going to go around us. Straight for her.

’Of course they are.’

"Hold the field," I told Brunhilde, and I didn’t wait for her to argue. "Kill everything stupid enough to come at you. I’ll get Ilse."

"Cade—"

"You’re the anvil. You can’t chase. I can." I rolled my shoulder, felt the wound pull and complain, and decided to hate it later. "Light it up. Give me somewhere to run that isn’t pitch black."

She looked at me for half a heartbeat. Then she lifted her free hand toward the sky and the air above us cracked, and a lance of crystalline ice ignited into being, wreathed in that clean sacred light, and hung there like a second cold sun. The field lit silver. Every leaning spire threw a long blue shadow. And in the sudden light I finally saw them — the flock, wheeling high in the dark, a churning black mass of wings that made no sound at all.

"Run," Brunhilde said. "I will bury anything that follows you."

I ran.

Feather Step took the weight out of my legs the way it always did, that lurch where the ground stops fully believing in you, and I went across the ice in long skating bounds toward the ridge with the light of her frozen sun throwing my shadow out ahead of me. Behind, I heard the first of the flock make its choice — a shriek, then the specific brittle crunch of a bird meeting Brunhilde’s winter and coming apart inside it. Then another. Then a lot of them at once, a sound like a hailstorm hitting a window that would not break.

She was fine. She was better than fine. She was, for the first time since I’d met her, exactly where she wanted to be.

The ones that peeled off after me were a different matter.

I felt them before I saw them, that wrong pressure at the back of my skull that the first bird had taught me to respect. Three of them, dropping out of the churn, angling not for me but past me, toward the spires, toward Ilse. Faster than they had any right to be even out here at the ragged edge of the cold.

’Not past me you don’t.’

I didn’t have the range to stop them clean. So I did the only thing that works on a thing that runs on your fear — I made myself the more interesting target. I turned mid-stride, planted, and threw white flame up into the dark across all three of their paths, not to kill, to mark. Heretical Pursuit caught on the lead bird and clung, a pale burning brand that wouldn’t come off and wouldn’t let it hide, and the whole trio broke formation to deal with the sudden, loud, on-fire problem that was me.

They came down.

And the second they dropped low enough, they crossed into the thin outer edge of Brunhilde’s field, where the cold was only just beginning, and I watched the impossible speed drain half a beat out of every wingbeat. Half a beat was enough. I took the marked one out of the air with Wren on the way past, a single clean stroke through a hollow-boned thing that weighed almost nothing, and it hit the stone in two pieces and did not get up. The other two, blind and burning at the edges from the splash of the flame, wheeled off screaming toward the bright easy heat of Brunhilde’s frozen sun.

She ate them. Naturally.

Two down, one very dead, Wren reported. The rest are hers. Go.

I went.

The hollow was exactly where she’d said — a black gap beneath the roots of the stone spires, where the rock had grown down into the ground like fingers and left a space between the knuckles. I dropped to my knees at the mouth of it, and the frozen sun overhead threw just enough light past me into the dark to show a shape huddled at the back of it. Still. Coiled tight around a drawn sword. Braced.

"Ilse?"

The shape moved. A woman’s face lifted into the blue light — sharp, drawn, exhausted past the point where exhaustion means anything, a long braid of pale hair come half-undone and stuck to a cut on her cheek. Her eyes found me, a stranger, at the mouth of the hole where she’d been left to wait out her own death.

The sword came up.

"Whoa. Whoa. Not a bird." I raised both hands, Wren included. "Do I look like a bird? Don’t answer, I’ve had comments about the nose."

She didn’t lower the blade. Her voice came out cracked and cold and very controlled, the voice of someone who has decided that if she is going to fall apart she will do it later, in private, on her own schedule.

"Who are you."

"Cade. I’m a—" How, exactly, do you finish that sentence. "I’m a friend of Brunhilde’s. Sort of. It’s complicated. She sent me to get you."

Something happened in her face at the name, and it was worse than fear.

It was hope.

"She’s alive." Her hands tightened on the hilt. "Brunhilde is alive. She won. Tell me she—" The words ran out. She looked at me, really looked, and I watched her take in the details in the order that damned me. My hand. The white flame still guttering off my knuckles. The place low in my own chest where a bond sat now that hadn’t been there before, and that a summoner of a Calamity would be able to feel across a room, the way you feel a note played on your own instrument by somebody else’s hand.

Her sword arm dropped an inch. Not in surrender. In understanding.

"No," she said quietly. "No, she’s not."

"She’s completely alive," I said. "That’s the good news. She’s about forty feet that way, murdering an entire flock of these things without breaking a sweat, and she’s stronger than she’s ever been in her life." I made myself hold her stare. "That’s also the bad news. And I’m the reason for both."

For a long moment the only sound was the hailstorm of Brunhilde’s winter chewing through the sky behind me.

Ilse lowered the sword the rest of the way. She didn’t cry. I’d think, later, that I would have respected her less if she had, and hated myself for it, because it was a cruel thing to respect a person for. She just set the point of the blade against the stone and leaned on it like it was the only thing in the world still holding her up, and she looked at the space in the air where her whole life used to be, and she said, in that flat frozen voice:

"She left me."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came. For once in my miserable smart-mouthed existence, I had absolutely nothing.

Because there wasn’t a joke for that. There wasn’t a deadpan for it, or a shrug, or a curse. There was just a woman in a hole in the deepest dark I’d ever stood in, who had held a Calamity together with a third of the strength it needed and never once let go, and the terrible fact that the thing she’d held onto had asked a stranger to cut it loose.

"Yeah," I said finally, because she deserved the truth and not a punchline. "She did. And she’d tell you exactly why, and you’d probably even believe her. Doesn’t make it hurt less."

Behind me, the hailstorm stopped.

The quiet that came after wasn’t the wrong kind. It was just quiet — the ordinary settling hush of a killing field where the killing was done. Then footsteps, unhurried, crossing the ice, frost fanning out ahead of them in slow fern-shapes, and a cold clean presence came up to the mouth of the hollow and stopped.

Ilse didn’t look up.

"Hello, Ilse," said Brunhilde.

And I stood there between the two of them, the anvil and the woman who’d been left on it, holding a sword that wasn’t mine to hold, in a hole in the ground at the bottom of the world, and thought the only thing there was to think.

’...I am so bad at this.’