high seat so much as reality itself seemed to take a polite step to one side. One moment she was there; the next there was a trail of falling snow and frost-blanketed floor in a laser-straight line, and Mab stood within arm’s length of Corb. “Your maggot lips aren’t worthy to speak his name,” she hissed.
“There you are,” Corb said, his tone approving. “I knew you had to be inside all of that ice somewhere. Gather all the power you wish, old woman. You know who you are, and so do I. You are no one.”
Mab’s face twisted in very human-looking fury, and that scared me more than anything I’d seen in a good long while. Her lips lifted into a snarl and she began to speak—before her black eyes widened. Her focus shifted, her gaze swiftly tracking up the chain to the bronze-and-crystalline fist of the woman who held it.
Corb let his head fall back and let out a delighted, crowing cackle.
The cloaked figure moved every bit as quickly as Mab had. One moment she was ten feet behind Corb. The next, there was a sound like thunder.
There was no way to track what happened clearly. I think the cloaked figure lashed out with a kick. I had the sense that there were defensive energies beyond anything I could have managed around Mab, and that the kick went through them as if they had not existed. The thunder was followed almost instantly by a second sound, a roar of shattering stone.
I turned my head, feeling as if I had been encased in gelatin, and saw the pieces of the high seat flying out in a cloud. There was a ragged hole in the stone wall behind the seat about half the size of a coffin.
And the Queen of Air and Darkness was nowhere to be seen.
A stunned silence settled over the room.
The cloaked figure raised her hands in a very slow, deliberately dramatic gesture and slowly peeled back her hood.
The woman beneath the hood was made of bronze and crystal, and she was beautiful beyond mortal reckoning. Her hair, long and slick and close, as if she’d just emerged from water, looked like silk spun from silver.
It was her eyes that bothered me. Or rather, her eye. One of her eyes was a crystalline emerald green.
The other …
On that perfect bronze face, the mutilation of her eye stood out like a gallows in a public park. The orbital ridges around the socket were covered in white, granite-like scars, as if the biggest, ugliest cat you’d ever seen had scratched it out. It wasn’t sunken, though the lid was closed. That mangled eye bulged ever so slightly, as if it had been meant for a being considerably larger than she was.
There was, around her, a humming throb of energy unlike anything I had ever sensed before, a power so ancient and terrible that the world had forgotten its like. That power demanded my respect, my obedience, my adoration, my abject terror, and suddenly I knew what was happening.
I was standing in the presence of a goddess.
I could barely breathe.
I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.
A moan went through the room, and I realized with a bit of alarm that one of the voices moaning was mine.
Some part of me noted that Vadderung and Ferrovax had both come to their feet, fists clenched—and they were not looking at each other any longer. Both stared hard at the woman.
The goddess swept her single-eyed gaze around the room, tracking from face to face. She gave the Winter Lady a look of pure contempt and delivered exactly the same expression to the rest of the gathered Accorded nations.
Her voice …
Oh God.
Her voice was sex and chocolate and hot soup and a bath on a cold, rainy night. It was a voice that promised things, that you could find yourself listening to with absolute intensity. It filled the room as if she’d been using a PA system, even though she wasn’t.
“Children, children, children,” she murmured, shaking her head in disapproval. “The world has gone to the children.” Her gaze reached Ferrovax and paused. One of her cheeks ticked. She looked from the dragon to Vadderung, and when she saw him her teeth showed white and perfect. “One-Eye. Are you that involved in the Game, still? Are you still that arrogant? Look how far you’ve fallen. Consorting with insects, as if you’re barely more than mortal yourself.”
No one moved.
No one spoke.
And then footsteps sounded on