that were like my mother’s realm, the trees and the earth beneath the snow, the water beneath the ice. Somewhere very far in the distance I heard a heartbeat. No power came, no strength apart from what I had already, but a taste caught on my tongue and a scent cut through the air. The land was the king and the queen was the land.
I walked a few paces away from where the wolves were scrabbling, and drew my dagger. Then I searched for that frost-and-shadow power I’d felt the first time I’d tried to reach for the Deepwild and, finding it, I plunged the blade hard into the ice at my feet.
The wind screamed. Blood oozed from the lake where the point of the weapon had cracked the surface. Somewhere, somebody was very angry. Somewhere my mother laughed. Somewhere much closer, my broken arm protested loudly at the amount of shit I was putting it through.
“Kate.” Tara had come back to her human body in an instant, and for a fraction of a second the part of me that was in a place of hunters and prey, of weak and strong, wondered if I could make her kneel the way I had the others. “What the fuck did you just do?”
I was half here and half elsewhere, half myself and half another being entirely, but I tried to answer. “Started a war.”
Ice shattered across the lake and the splintered shards resolved themselves upwards into the shape of a woman in a silver gown. There was the thinnest trace of red on her left cheek. I really had not done that much damage to her.
“Does this action have your mother’s approval?” asked the Queen of Winter.
“It’s violent, reckless, and pointless. So my money’s on yes.”
She stepped closer—there were no shadows on the open lake, so chances were we wouldn’t be seeing the King any time soon. “Neither of us profit by enmity.”
“No, but my mum and I have one big personality trait in common. We both hate it when people fuck with our stuff.”
“I have not trespassed on your territory, or your mother’s.”
“Yeah, I think she disagrees. She wants her wolves back.”
For somebody with mirrors for eyes, the Queen of Winter could be surprisingly expressive. “They have not been hers for centuries.”
“Because of course you faeries are famous for letting shit like that go, aren’t you?”
“You tread a dangerous path.”
I couldn’t quite resist the obvious. “On thin ice, am I? Way I see it, if we don’t get out of here I’m dead anyway. I might as well go out fighting, and when I fight my mum fights, and when she fights things get hellaciously fucking bloody.”
For quite a long moment I thought that she wasn’t going to go for it. After all, if I fought I’d probably get killed, and killing the—as far as I knew—only daughter of the Queen of the Wild Hunt would have been a heck of a coup. Then again, I didn’t think mum would have cared that much, whereas spreading a bit of chaos in a corner of the cosmos that currently had a bit less chaos in it than it might otherwise have was right up her alley. Umm, grove.
“Very well,” she said at last. “Take the wolves and go. But do not return here. Cross me again and you will find me in less forgiving a mood.”
I had zero doubt of that. For the ruler of a land bound in perpetual snow and ice, the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had surprisingly little chill.
The Queen turned away, snow flurrying about her as she went. The ice beneath us cracked, and a paranoid part of me wondered if this was just a very elaborate way of killing us fast enough that I couldn’t, for want of a less schoolyard phrase, tell my mum. We crashed down through the rapidly unfreezing surface of the lake, and I swam as hard as I could for the wolves. The water was dark, and now the danger had passed the mix of adrenaline, endorphins and borrowed faery power was ebbing away quickly, leaving me cold and in pain and bleeding in quite a lot of places, trying to find a magic hole back to the real world alongside six werewolves, four of them still with spikes of glass in their eyes. I caught sight of Tara’s golden fur through the murk and did my best to swim towards her. Then a chill came over me