this impossible delicacy about it that you might reasonably expect from a place built out of ice, shadows, and metaphors. I couldn’t see any guards, but then we were still a fair way away and to say things in faerie weren’t always what they seemed would be a bit like saying the sun wasn’t always dark. I was nervous about drawing on my mother’s power while we were here, because as best I could understand that would be the equivalent of sending up a flare to the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter saying “hey, we’re here, come and turn the full might of your realm against us.” But that meant I was stuck relying on my regular human eyes. And it turned out regular human eyes sucked.
Tara went bipedal a moment. “They’re in there. I can smell them, even from here. Wolf, but not wolf. There are other creatures too, creatures made of frost and the night.”
Not the most comforting thing to hear. “Could you say how many creatures?”
“Everything here is one. It’s hard to say exactly where the King-Queen ends and his-her realm begins.”
That figured. I didn’t have a clear sense of how my mum’s power worked but from everything I’d experienced it was clear she was the Deepwild in a fundamental sense. She was the hunter and the prey and the woods the hunt ran through, she was the rivers and the rain. Yeah, I was beginning to think that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter wasn’t something we could fight. It’d be like trying to fight an idea.
Then again, fighting ideas was what I’d spent a good chunk of the last few years doing while I was sort-of-kind-of-okay-basically-definitely working for Nimue’s court, so maybe it wasn’t as outlandish a concept as all that.
The wolves became wolves again and we slunk down into the valley. We were downwind of the castle, which would help warn Tara and the dowager of anything that might be coming for us and which might have also given us the element of surprise. But the whole I-am-the-land thing made that fairly unlikely.
The run-up to the palace was an open expanse of clear, glittering snow, and there wasn’t much we could do to stop ourselves standing out against it like soup stains on formalwear. As we drew closer to the vast, sweeping staircase that led up to the main gate, we saw that the land around us was dotted with ice sculptures. Frighteningly lifelike ice sculptures, most of them showing people in various postures of distress or despair. The Merchant of Dreams had once described a different part of this place as a debtor’s prison. I was beginning to suspect that this was another one.
Faeries could officially go fuck themeslves.
We proceeded cautiously, because anything that looked vaguely humanoid in a faery realm, and most things that didn’t look vaguely humanoid, were very likely to come alive and attack you. To my tremendous relief, the statues stayed resolutely statues. There was still a good chance they were people, of course, but at least they were people who I wasn’t going to have to smash into tiny splintery pieces.
Then the wolves stopped dead, their fur bristling and their eyes bright. Something was moving white against the white of the snow. Four pale beasts, shards of glass gleaming in their eyes. There was no way they hadn’t seen us.
What came next was a strange, animal dance. Swift-moving hunters fanning out across the frozen ground in an effort to outflank their enemies. Maths was against us here, because four would always be able to cover more ground than three. Tara and the dowager seemed to realise this, because they quickly moved into a more defensive formation, all of us back to back to back inching forward while the stolen wolves closed in on all sides.
I was wearing a wet shirt in the snow with a broken arm and about to get jumped on by an average of one and one third werewolves. There was no world in which this ended well. Calling on my mother was a bad idea for so many reasons. Then again, this was looking an awful lot like an “or die” kinda deal.
The wolves sprang. And two hundred and fifty pounds of slavering shapeshifter bearing down on me got rid of basically all my misgivings. I reached. And I got nothing. Fuck. This close to the heart of the Cold and Dark, the Deepwild was further away than I’d counted