“Did you see that throw?” Moog mimicked what looked to Clay like an old man tossing horseshoes with his grandchildren. When the wizard looked over, though, his grin vanished. “Sweet Maiden’s Mercy, are you okay?”
Clay climbed to his feet. His ears were ringing, and he could feel the wind probing the wounds on his face with frigid fingers. “Sure, why?”
Moog frowned as he assessed whatever damage the rask’s talons had done to Clay’s face. “No reason. We should hurry.”
They ran after the others, emerging from the tunnel mouth onto a precipice of bare stone. The storm had died down, but flecks of snow still rode the breeze, spinning like spring blossoms in the air.
The bridge was directly ahead, a depressingly vivid manifestation of everything Clay feared it would be. Broad at the base, it tapered at its highest point to a strip so thin they would need to cross in single file. The mountain opposite, whose name Clay hadn’t bothered to ask, was wreathed in white mist.
“Shall I remind you this was your idea?” Moog asked.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Clay, as they caught up with the others.
Kit started up it first, creeping despite the fact that a fall from several thousand feet would be little more than an inconvenience. Gabe and Ganelon put their backs to the bridge, ready to hold off the pursuing rasks.
Gabriel waved behind him. “Everyone over. Quick but careful. Very careful,” he added, looking up at Gregor and Dane.
Gregor nodded gravely. Dane giggled, likely having been convinced they were playing some childish game. “I’ll race you, Gregor!” he shouted.
“I’ll race you both,” said Matrick, jogging toward the summit. Moog and Sabbatha started up after them, making as much haste as they could before the bridge narrowed dangerously and forced them to consider every step.
“Clay—” Gabe started. “Good gods, your face!”
Clay touched two fingers to the gash across his nose. It hurt, and they came away bloody. “Is it bad?”
Before Gabe could answer Ganelon flexed his fingers on the haft of his axe. “Here they come.”
The rasks exploded from the tunnel mouth, yelping and screaming, dismayed that most of their quarry was getting away, giddy that three were still within reach.
Ganelon killed the first with a sideways chop. Gabe stepped in with Vellichor—the sharp scent of lilacs filled the air—and two more fell. Clay was ready at his shoulder. A thrust from Blackheart snapped the fingers of a grasping hand, a blow from his hammer cracked the skull above it. Gabriel’s blue-green blade flickered out to take a rask’s head off before Ganelon moved in again. He impaled one, kicked a second, punched a third in the face with a dragonscale gauntlet. Vellichor cut a rask into halves, and when another lunged at Gabe he dodged, tripping it toward Clay with an outstretched boot. Clay dropped, ducking beneath his shield before the thing landed on him, and then, every muscle in his back protesting, he stood and flung the creature off the precipice behind him. The look of grudging respect he earned from Ganelon made the pain worthwhile—for the moment, anyhow.
We will speak of this later, his lower back promised. Oh yes we will.
The next clutch of rasks were notably less enthusiastic about rushing the bridge, their hunger tempered by the only instinct that mattered more: self-preservation.
Ganelon turned on them. “You two go. I’ll hold them here.”
From anyone else those words would seem loaded with the dreadful freight of self-sacrifice. From Ganelon they were simply a statement of fact. He might have said I’ll put the kettle on with the same casual certainty.
Gabe hesitated, torn between wrath and reason, then finally nodded. He and Clay started up the bridge, legs pumping, breath gusting white from their mouths. Matrick was over the arch and had turned to wait for Gregor and Dane, who were shuffling carefully along the thinnest stretch of ice. Clay might have prayed it didn’t break, but he reckoned the gods were already watching and had placed bets on who would fall first. Safe money was on the eight-hundred-pound ettin.
Something lunged from the mist behind Matrick, a rask much bigger than any of those they’d faced thus far. A chieftain, Clay supposed, noting the loop of broken skulls slung around its neck. Its hair was spiked with frost, shorn to a strip down the centre of its head. It was on Matrick in an instant, tackling him and pinning him to the ice with a strangling claw. It raised the other to strike—talons splayed like a fan of knives—and Clay heard Kit’s warning words echo in his mind.
The Cold Road takes its toll. Always.
Chapter Forty-four
A Grave in the Clouds
Gabriel swore. Moog was yelling something, but the wind was in Clay’s ears and he couldn’t make it out. Sabbatha stood at the centre of the bridge, not moving, not trying at all to save Matrick before the rask killed him. And it would kill him, Clay was sure.
And then suddenly the ettin was there. It snatched the chieftain’s arm and yanked it into the air. The rask took a swipe at Dane’s head, but the ettin caught its other wrist as well. The two monsters wrestled one another, arms outstretched, thrashing like something pinned to a crucifix.
Dane turned to ask something of Gregor, but they were too far away, the wind too loud, for Clay to hear. The rask curled up on itself, lashed out with a clawed foot, and opened a wide red gash in Gregor’s throat.
The ettin teetered for a moment, then toppled from the bridge into white oblivion.
Clay’s heart fell with them, but there wasn’t time to grieve. The rask landed in a crouch. It began scrabbling toward Matrick again when Sabbatha’s voice brought it up short.
“Come to me.”
The creature turned its curdled gaze upon the daeva.
“Come to me,” she repeated, so quiet the wind stopped to listen, so compelling the mountains strained against the shackles of their roots.
In thrall to a will stronger than its own, the chieftain shambled over to crouch at her feet. The skulls around its neck clattered against one another, grinning like fools. Its expression twitched between fear and reverence, as though Sabbatha was the Winter Queen herself, dark and divine beneath the pale moon of her scythe.
Umbra came down like a guillotine, shearing away the top half of the rask’s head. It managed something like a whimper before it died. It tumbled from the bridge and was swallowed by cloud.
Clay found himself a step away from the narrow span without knowing how he’d come to be there. He dragged his eyes from the sickening emptiness below. The daeva was turned away from him. The wind had returned, ruffling the plumage on her back, lifting her long black hair like a pennant.
Clay swallowed. “Sabbatha—”
“Sabbatha’s dead,” she said. Her right wing snapped out, scattering a handful of black feathers into the air. Clay was watching them whirl away, transfixed, when a shadow fell across his face. He raised his eyes slowly, slowly, like a man condemned gazing up at the executioner’s axe, as the daeva’s supposedly injured left wing extended into the sky.
Fuck, he thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Larkspur,” he said gloomily. “Welcome back.”
She turned on him. “Thank you.”
Clay pulled his gaze from the not-at-all-injured wing and looked across at her. “How long?” he asked.
The grin that split her face was a feral thing, terribly beautiful. “Longer than you’d think,” she said, which wasn’t really the answer he’d been hoping for.
All that pointless deception, all those lies we told …Clay’s mind was reeling, struggling to grasp the implication of what she was telling him. All this time she was playing us, patient as a circling vulture, waiting for a moment like this.
“And now?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.
Larkspur’s gaze drifted beyond his shoulder. Ganelon had not only held the rasks at bay, but had driven them off altogether. He arrived short of breath, but otherwise unscathed, and the daeva’s smile broadened as her eyes met his. “Now I take your king,” she said.