Cold Days

Chapter Thirty-two
A slow smile stretched my lips back from my teeth.
Mortals had the short end of the stick on almost any supernatural confrontation. Even most wizards, with their access to terrific forces, had to approach conflicts carefully—relatively few of us had the talents that lent themselves to brawling. But mortals had everyone else beat on exactly one thing: the freedom to choose. Free will.
It had taken me a while to begin to understand it, but it had eventually sunk into my thick skull. I couldn’t arm wrestle an ogre, even with the mantle. I couldn’t have won a magical duel with Mab or Titania—probably not even against Maeve or Lily. I couldn’t outrun one of the Sidhe.
But I could defy absolutely anyone.
I could lift my will against that of anything, and know that the fight might be lopsided, but never hopeless. And by thunder, I was not going to allow anyone’s will to stretch me out on the floor like a lamb for slaughter.
I stopped pressing at my bindings with my limbs and started using my mind instead. I didn’t try to push them away, or break them, or slip free of them. I simply willed them not to be. I envisioned what my limbs would feel like coming free, and focused on that reality, summoning up my total concentration on that goal, that ideal, that fact.
And then I crossed my fingers and reached into me, into the place where a covert archangel had granted me access to one of the primal forces of the universe, an energy called soulfire. I had no idea how it might interact with the Winter Knight’s mantle on an ongoing basis. I mean, it had worked out once before, but that didn’t mean that it would keep working out. I felt certain that I was pretty much swallowing bottles of nitroglycerin, then jumping up and down to see what would happen, but at this point I had little to lose. I gathered up soulfire, used it to infuse my raw will, and cast the resulting compound against my bonds.
Soulfire, according to Bob, is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, the original power of creation. It isn’t meant for mortals. We get it by slicing off a bit of our soul, our life energy, and converting it into something else.
Bob is brilliant, but there are some things that he just doesn’t get. His definition was a good place to get started, but it was also something that was perhaps too comfortably quantifiable. The soul isn’t something you can weigh and measure. It’s more than just one thing. Because soulfire interacts with souls in a way that I’m not sure anyone understands, it stands to reason that soulfire isn’t just one thing, either.
And in this case, in this moment, I somehow knew exactly what the soulfire did. It converted me, my core, everything that made me who I was, into energy, into light. When I turned my joined will and the blazing core of my being together, I wasn’t supercharging a magical spell. I wasn’t cleverly finding a weak point in an enchantment. I wasn’t using my knowledge of magic to exploit what my enemy was doing.
I was casting everything I had done, everything I believed, everything I had chosen—everything I was—against the will of an ancient being of darkness, terror, and malice, a fundamental power of the world.
And the bonds and the will of Mother Winter could not constrain me.
There was a sharp, shimmering tone, like metal under stress and beginning to fail, but more musical, and a blinding white light that washed away the darkness and dazzled my eyes. There was a thunder crack, and a terrible force erupted from my wrists and ankles, throwing a shock wave of raw kinetic energy—a mere shadow of the true forces at work, a by-product—out into the space around me. In that whiteness, I caught an image of a shrouded, hunched dark form, flung from her feet to impact something solid.
And then I was free and hauling myself up onto my feet.
I backed up, hoping I hadn’t gotten turned around in the flash, and a surge of relief went through me when my back hit a stone wall. I felt out along on either side of me, and my hand brushed something solid, maybe a small shelf made from a wooden plank. I knocked it off its peg. It fell to the dirt floor with a clatter and a clink of small, heavy glass jars.
I leaned against the wall, dazed, panting, and gasped, in my deepest and most gravelly voice, “No one can chain the Hulk!”
I heard a stir of cloth in the darkness then, a slight grunt of effort, the faintest whistle in the air. I can’t claim credit for being smart or cool on this one. Some instinct pegged which way the cleaver was coming and I flung my head sharply to one side. Sparks flew as the cleaver struck the wall where my skull had been and sank into it as if it had been made of rotten pine, not stone. It stayed there, making a faint vibrating sound as it quivered.
I have got to learn to keep my freaking mouth shut. I clenched my teeth together and stayed still, giving no indication of where I might be in the darkness.
For a long time there was quiet, except for the breathing I fought to slow and silence. And then a horrible, slithering sound went through the blackness. It caught in Mother Winter’s ancient throat, clicking like the shells of swarming carrion beetles. It wormed its way through the air like a swarm of maggots burrowing through rotten meat. It brushed against me, light and hideous, like the touch of a vulture’s lice-infested feather, and I struggled to press myself back a little closer to the stone at the sound of it.
Mother Winter was cackling.
“So,” she said. “So, so, and so. Perhaps thou art not entirely useless after all, eh, manling?”
For all I knew, Mother Winter had a whole cutlery set over there. I gathered my will into a shielding spell, but I didn’t release it. Magic was like air and water to the fae. I had a feeling Mother Winter would have been able to home in on it.
“That was a test?” I whispered—behind my hand, so that it might not make it utterly obvious where I was standing.
“Or a meal,” she rasped. “Either would suffice.”
And then brightness flooded the room.
I thought some massive force had inundated the area I stood in, but after a second I realized that it was a door. The light was sunlight, with the golden quality that somehow felt like autumn. I had to shield my eyes against it, but after a moment I realized that I was standing in a small, simple medieval-looking cottage—one in which I had been before. Everything in it was wooden, leather, clay, and handmade. The glass in the windows was wavery and translucent. It was a neat, tidy place—apart from one corner with a large, ugly, raw-looking rocking chair. Oh, and a spilled shelf of small clay pots with wax-sealed mouths.
“You can be so overly dramatic, betimes,” complained an old woman’s voice, as gentle and sweet as Mother Winter’s was unpleasant. She came into the house a moment later, a grandmotherly matron dressed in a simple dress with a green apron. Her long hair, silver-white and thinning, was done up in a small, neat bun. She moved with the slightly stiff, bustling energy of an active senior, and if her green eyes were framed by crow’s-feet, they were bright and sharp. Mother Summer carried a basket in one arm filled with cuttings from what must have been a late-season herb garden, and as I watched, she entered, muttered a word, and a dozen tiny whirlwinds cleaned thick layers of soot from the many-paned windows scattered around the cottage, flooding it with more warm light. “We’ll need a new cleaver now.”
Mother Winter, in her black shawl and hood, bared her iron teeth in a snarl, though it was a silent one. She pointed one crooked, warty finger at the window nearest her, and blackened it with soot again. Then she shuffled over to a chair beneath the window, and settled into the resulting shadow as if it were a comforting blanket. “I do what must be done.”
“With our cleaver,” Mother Summer said. “I suppose one of our knives wouldn’t have done just as well?”
Mother Winter bared her teeth again. “I wasn’t holding a knife.”
Mother Summer made a disapproving clucking sound and began unloading her basket onto a wooden table near the fireplace. “I told you,” she said calmly.
Mother Winter made a sour-sounding noise and pointed a finger. A large mug decorated with delicately painted flowers fell from a shelf.
Mother Summer calmly put out a hand, caught it, and returned it to the shelf.
“Oh, uh, Mother Summer,” I said, after a moment of silence. “I apologize for intruding into your home.”
“Oh, dear, that’s very sweet,” Mother Summer said. “But you owe me no apology. You were brought here entirely against your will, after all.” She paused for a beat and added, “Rudely.”
Mother Winter made another displeased sound.
I looked back and forth between them. Centuries of dysfunction in this family, Harry. Walk carefully. “I, uh. I think I’d prefer to think of it as a very firm invitation.”
“Hah,” said Mother Winter, from her hood. Her teeth gleamed. “The Knight knows his loyalties, at least.”
Mother Summer somehow managed to inject her voice with profound skepticism. “I’m sure he’s overjoyed to owe loyalty to you,” she said. “Why did you bring him here now, of all times?”
More teeth showed. “He summoned me, the precious thing.”
Mother Summer dropped her herbs. She turned her head toward me, her eyes wide. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”
Mother Winter’s rocker creaked, though it didn’t really seem to move. “He knew certain names. He was not wholly stupid in choosing them, or wholly wrong in using them.”
Mother Summer’s bright green eyes narrowed. “Did he . . . ?”
“No,” croaked Mother Winter. “Not that one. But he has seen the adversary, and learned one of its names.”
Calculation and thought flickered through those green eyes, faster than I could follow. “Ah, yes. I see,” Mother Summer said. “So many new futures unwinding.”
“Too many bright ones,” Mother Winter said sullenly.
“Even you must think better that than empty night.”
Mother Winter spit to one side.
It started eating a hole in the dirt floor a few inches from one of my feet. I’m not kidding. I took a small sidestep away, and tried not to breathe the fumes.
“I think,” Mother Winter said, “that he should be shown.”
Mother Summer narrowed her eyes. “Is he ready?”
“There is no time to coddle him,” she rasped. “He is a weapon. Let him be made stronger.”
“Or broken?” Mother Summer asked.
“Time, time!” Winter breathed. “He is not your weapon.”
“It is not your world,” Summer countered.
“Excuse me,” I said quietly.
Green eyes and black hood turned toward me.
“I don’t want to be rude, ma’am,” I said. I picked up the fallen wooden shelf from where I’d knocked it down, and put it back on its pegs. Then I bent and started putting the sealed jars back onto the shelf. “I’m still young. I make mistakes. But I’m not a child, and I’m not letting anyone but me choose which roads I’ll walk.”
That made Mother Winter cackle again. “Precious little duck,” she wheezed. “He means it.”
“Indeed,” Mother Summer said, but her tone was thoughtful as she watched me restore the fallen shelf to order.
I kept on replacing jars, lining them up neatly, and spoke as gently and politely as I knew how. “You can take my body and run it like a puppet. You can kill me. You can curse me and torture me and turn me into an animal.”
“Can,” said Mother Winter, “and might, if you maintain this impertinence.”
I swallowed and continued. “You can destroy me. But you can’t make me be anything but what I choose to be, ma’am. I don’t know exactly what you both are talking about showing me, ma’am. But you aren’t going to shove it down my throat or put it up on a shelf out of my reach, either one. I decide for myself, or I walk out the door.”
“Oh, will you?” said Mother Winter in a low, deadly whisper. Her overlong nails scraped at the wood on her chair’s arms. “Is that what you think, my lamb?”
Mother Summer arched an eyebrow and eyed Mother Winter. “You test his defiance against his very life, and yet when he passes you are surprised he does not leap to do your bidding?” She made another disapproving clucking sound. “He is brave. And he is courteous. I will show him what you ask—if he is willing.”
Winter bared her teeth and spit again, into the same hole, and more earth hissed and melted away. She started rocking back and forth, slowly, and turned her gaze elsewhere.
I picked up the last fallen pot and was about to put it away when I frowned. “Oh. I’m sorry, but there’s a crack in this one.”
I never heard or saw any movement, but suddenly Mother Summer was there beside me, and her bony, capable hands were wrapping warmly around mine. Her touch was like Lily’s but . . . gentler and more vast. It made me think of miles and miles of prairie soaking up the summer sun’s heat, storing it through the day, only to give it back to the air in the long hours of twilight.
As gently as if handling a newborn, she took the little clay pot from me and turned it slowly in her fingers, examining it. Then she exhaled slowly, closed her eyes for a moment, and then put it reverently back onto the shelf.
When she took her hands from the little pot, I saw letters written in silvery light upon it and upon neighboring pots, as if the letters had been awakened by the warmth of her hands.
The writing on the cracked pot said simply, Wormwood.
The letters began to fade, but I saw some of the others: Typhos. Pox. Atermors. Choleros. Malaros.
Typhus. Smallpox. The Black Death. Cholera. Malaria.
And Wormwood.
And there were lots of other jars on the shelf.
My hands started shaking a little.
“It is not yet the appointed time for that one to be born,” Mother Summer said quietly, and her hard eyes flicked toward Mother Winter.
She didn’t look back toward us, but her teeth gleamed from within her hood.
Mother Summer slipped her hand through my arm. I gave it to her more or less out of reflex, and walked across the cottage. She picked up her basket and then we went to the door. I opened it for her and offered her my arm again, and we walked together out of the cottage and into a modest clearing surrounded by ancient forest with trees the size of redwoods. They blazed with the colors of fall, their leaves carpeting the forest floor in glorious fire as far as the eye could see. It was gorgeous, but it wasn’t anywhere on Earth.
“I think she likes you, young man.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I could tell, because of the cleaver.”
“It is her way,” Mother Summer said, smiling. “She rarely leaves our cottage anymore. She lost her walking stick. While your summons was impertinent, it was a necessity and you had the right. But it is terribly painful for her to travel, even briefly. You, a mortal, hurt her.”
Mother Summer’s words made the whole chopped-up-for-stew-meat situation more understandable. Beings like Mother Winter tormented mortals—not the other way around. I’d injured her pride along with the rest of her, and in the supernatural world such insults were rarely forgiven and never forgotten.
“She was balancing the scales,” I said quietly. “Is that what you mean?”
Mother Summer nodded approval. “You phrase it simply, but not incorrectly.” She stopped and turned to look up at me. “She cannot take you to the places we must walk if you are to understand.”
“Understand what?” I asked.
Her green eyes reflected the colors of the autumn forest. “What is at stake,” she said. “If you choose to walk with me, what is seen cannot be unseen, and what is known cannot be unknown. It may harm you.”
“Harm me how?” I asked.
“You may never know a night’s peace again. Knowledge is power, young man. Power to do good and power to do harm. Some knowledge can hurt. Some can kill.”
“What happens if I don’t have it?”
Mother Summer smiled, a gentle sadness in her eyes. “You keep the bliss of ignorance—and consign our fates to fickle chance. Do not choose lightly.”
I pondered it for, like, ten whole seconds.
I mean, come on.
I’m a freaking wizard, people.
“It’s better to know than not know,” I said quietly.
“Why?” Mother Summer challenged.
“Because you can’t truly make a choice without knowledge, ma’am.”
“Even if it may haunt you? Harm you? Isolate you?”
I thought about it some more and then said, “Especially then. Show me.”
An emotion flickered across Mother Summer’s face—gentle pain and regret.
“So be it,” she said quietly. “Come with me.”