Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,79

him away with a perfumed hand, her fingernails manicured and trimmed.

“Strands of fire from the king,” she said. “But not the only braids of prophecy I see tonight. Strands of fire thicken this room. It marks each and every one of you. It comes, I can feel it. Strands of fire, filling the room. Filling it so that I almost cannot breathe.”

“The winter wars come; it wraps you all in it, like cocoons. The keep shall freeze and the keep shall burn before the keep shall rise. Do you not feel it? Do you not feel them? They shall rise up from the quiet places, to honor that which was broken, and the keep shall burn.”

Overcome by her own words, the Dame lifted a hand to her temple, turning her head like she was shaking off a blow.

“Mother!” The count was at her side in an instant. The servants hurried forward. Ken started up from his chair, and West’s eyes were round with fright.

“Perhaps you should go and lie down again,” the count suggested gently.

The Dame wavered. Suddenly she looked old, the jewelry and exquisite clothes doing nothing to hide it. “Perhaps I should.” She reached out one last time to grab Loki’s arm, holding on for a moment. “A traitor,” she whispered again, almost pleadingly, before allowing her hand to drop, servants appearing to guide her away.

“Woof,” Loki said. Only the firebird, now feasting on apples, remained unaffected.

“I must apologize,” the count said. “This is the first I have seen her so agitated in quite a while.”

“How long has Great-Aunt Elspen been this way?” West asked.

“She has been insistent about this coming war for years now, though she was always too vague for us to glean more. This is the only time I have heard her go into this much detail, though for the life of me, I do not know what she means by it.”

In the ensuing silence Kensington, looking like he’d been cheated somehow, but wasn’t entirely sure of what, spoke up.

“How in the bloody Burns did she know I can’t swim?”

A battering of wind screamed through the walls, as outside, the sounds of hail grew louder.

18

In Which the Dame Has the Last Word

With sleep came nightmares.

Tala stood before two heavy gates against a background of endless, swirling black. One stood to her left, crumbling and in disrepair, of aged bone. The other on her right, white and gleaming.

“Choose,” a voice whispered, a slow rattling hiss not unlike the ice maiden’s. Alex’s face, pale and exhausted, drifted into her line of vision, but faded from view just as quickly.

“Choose.”

Beyond the left gate she saw fire. Screams rang through the raging inferno, and the flames reached out for her, the heat searing her skin. Tala stumbled back, coughing.

Zoe, Kensington, and West sat motionless before her with heads bowed, indifferent to the loud roaring from the skies. Above them, several hundred—perhaps even thousands—of creatures made of fire raked the ground with flames. Tala found herself yelling to warn them, pleading with them to run, but a large fireball engulfed the trio, and they disappeared in the smoke.

She saw Alex kneeling before a curved hook suspended in the air. She saw Cole lying motionless on his side, a sword through his back while wolves made of ice worried at his hands and feet. She saw figures rising from the blood-soaked ground—corpses, crawling and snarling and clawing their way out from black soil—and she saw Ken again, only this time withered and drawn and no longer laughing, leading them away into darkness.

“Choose,” another voice cackled, and this time it sounded like the Dame of Tintagel’s.

Beyond the right gate a crystal castle stood. Tala saw the Snow Queen, so lovely and elegant and cold, sitting on an ice throne at the center of a frozen lake. Her eyes were closed, her expression serene.

She saw Loki, sitting in a chair forged from steel and knives. They swung at a mirror with a heavy cudgel, which broke into thousands of pieces.

She saw a woman rising from the sea, skin a dark brown and black hair long and flowing. She held a curved dagger in one hand and a bright, shining sword in the other. Her eyes were oddly mismatched; brown in one, and golden in the other. Tala watched as she bestowed both weapons on Kensington, who raised the sword and stabbed himself with the dagger without hesitation.

She saw another Zoe running across a snowy field, pursued by a magnificent hawk, while just beyond