Winterspell (17 page)

They pushed their way through that car and the next, past more of
the same cargo, with no sign of John Stole nor of any other passengers but themselves. Explosives hit the roofs in their wake, tearing open the ceilings overhead in a cacophony of blue. None of it felt right. It was too easy, the faeries' pursuit too escapable. The explosions rained debris upon them, but never enough to slow their progress. Arrows flew at them carelessly, persistent but never hitting the marks. These faeries were soldiers, that was plain to see, and soldiers did not miss.

“It's too easy,” she shouted to Nicholas.

His eyebrows shot up. “Easy? You can't be serious.”

They emerged onto the next platform. Clara glanced to her right, ready to duck oncoming arrows. She saw the long black curve of the train winding its way through woodlands and meadows twisted with ice. Ahead of them, snaking alongside the tracks, was the immense wall Clara had seen from a distance. This close she could see the watchtowers topping it, and that it was mechanized, made of ever-shifting, ever-changing parts.

Nicholas struggled with the latch of the next car, then shouldered his way in.

Clara, uneasy, followed him.

In the sudden darkness it took her a moment to assess the situation—Borschalk towered over Nicholas and was flanked by four other faeries, all with terrible, satisfied grins. A slender bundle of black wiring blinked blue at Borschalk's ear. Clara's father was nowhere to be found. Unsurprising, but it added to Clara's sudden horrified despair; her knees nearly buckled.

“Drachstelle. I'm surprised you returned.” Borschalk's words were harsh, as though this was not his native tongue. “Surprised, but glad to be the one to kill you. She will be pleased.”

“Wouldn't she be more pleased,” Nicholas said, stepping forward, “to do it herself?”

Clara watched, tense with readiness. She frantically scanned the car for a means of escape, and found none.

Borschalk's face twisted. “You know nothing of her desires.”

“And I suppose you do? I remember you, in her guard. I remember your face.” A hard quirk of his mouth. “Have you wormed your way into her bed at last?”

“Enough.”
Borschalk threw up his arm, his glove flaring brightly. Nicholas straightened and stood his ground, and the sight overwhelmed Clara with fear and rage. Something cold surged through her limbs, as though a primal switch had been thrown.

She rushed at Borschalk, ignoring Nicholas's cry of protest. She could not have stopped if she had wished to—overpowering instinct drove her forward. Her daggers fell, forgotten, from her hands. The air around her pulsed so violently that she gasped in pain—had the storm returned? She reached out to steady herself, to grab at nothing with both hands in one last, futile gesture. The detached realization came to her that she was about to die, and so was Nicholas, and so would her father and Felicity, and untold scores of New Yorkers in the grasp of Concordia, because she had not been there to save them—

—but then it was as if her clutching hands had tugged on something invisible, and tugging on that something was a trigger to turn the world inside out.

Winter invaded her blood.

Frigid wind pummeled her, cold seized her—tore
through
her—releasing an energy she had not known existed.

The ceiling exploded. The car lurched sideways and, with a horrible wrench, careened off its rails. The faeries flew out of the train, propelled by a howling wind that flung Nicholas off his feet and into the wall. He slumped to the floor, unmoving.

Only Borschalk remained, saved by his bulk and tenacity; his fingers bled, cut by the metal of the far wall, to which he clung. He stared at Clara for a moment—a probing, horrified look—and then leapt off the car. He hit the ground and rolled safely away.

She watched him flee, then looked at the hole through which he had exited the car, the realization coming slowly:

An entire portion of the far wall had been blown away.

Wind smacked against her face, ripping tears from her eyes. The front half of the train continued on, unharmed. But their car had gone off the tracks, derailing the cars behind it. They were still moving, headed straight for the great, shifting wall.

Clara threw herself over Nicholas's body and squeezed her eyes shut as the car began to roll over. She held on to him as hard as she could. She knew logically that she and Nicholas should both be flung around the car, or thrown from it altogether. Impaled upon metal. Knocked to bloody bits.

For all she knew, that was happening. Perhaps she was beyond pain; perhaps she had died.

With a shuddering lurch the train ground to a stop.

Abruptly the cold that had been surrounding her, whistling around her, whistling
inside
her, fell away.

She waited in the crackling silence. Impossibly, it seemed that she was alive. She smelled smoke and hot metal and snow. Nicholas lay beneath her, peaceful. She touched his throat, feeling through the web of metal there for his pulse. When she found it—rapid but steady—she murmured quick, relieved thanks to no one in particular.

Unsteadily she stood. Now she could see the true extent of the damage—the train car's ceiling had been blown completely off, and the walls had exploded outward in curls of metal, dark with burn marks, frosted with ice. What could have been strong enough to tear steel asunder?

Clara touched what was left of the low-hanging roof; the metal was incongruously freezing, her fingertips sticking to it. The contact gave her a slight shock. Odd. She examined her skin, and then the roof. She had been freezing too, in that moment when she had rushed at Borschalk, and it had been a different cold from that of winter outside—a wilder cold, heavier, more vibrant. There had been a storm, and winds. And then the car had exploded—
everything
had exploded—and the faeries had been flung out like rag dolls.

She stared out the ruined wall.

Behind them the back half of the train lay in charred ruins.

Impossible. The fear that came from witnessing something too inexplicable to be believed settled into her, and she swayed on her feet.

How had this happened?

If her father
had
been anywhere on this train, surely he was now burned to a crisp or had been bludgeoned by the force of the crash. But perhaps he had been elsewhere, stashed away for whatever ransom or blackmail his abductors had planned.

Please,
please
let him have been elsewhere.

Nearby cries pulled her reluctantly back into action. She crouched, blinking to clear her head of its shock, and peered out the train car toward the enormous wall looming to her left. The train had come to a halt not far from it, and she quailed to think what might have become of them had they collided with it. Figures ran out from the wall, shouting. Plates on the wall's surface shifted together and apart—knotting, stretching, knotting again. It reminded Clara, horribly, of Nicholas's statue-skin.

And Borschalk, not nearly far enough away for her to feel safe, sat mounted on a lok once more, watching her. The sight of him was so unexpected that she cried out and teetered, unbalanced. She fumbled around the car for her discarded daggers.

“Clara?” Nicholas's weak voice made her turn. “What happened?”

Clara hurried to him; never had she been so glad to hear a voice. She slipped her daggers back into her boots, patted her thigh to ensure the third was still intact. “Nicholas, I think Borschalk's coming back—”

“We've got to leave. Now.” He struggled to his feet, swaying against her. “He'll kill us.”

Clara looked back. Borschalk was close enough for her to see the expression on his face. It was more contemplative than Clara would have thought—cautious, even. He put a hand to the wires at his ear. He was listening to something; his gaze flickered over Clara curiously. Angrily.

Then he turned and slapped his lok's reins, and disappeared into the smoke.

C
lara stared after Borschalk's retreating figure. He had abandoned them—why? He should have attacked them, now that they were vulnerable. He should have completed his mission. Was that not what soldiers did?

“Clara?” came Nicholas's strained voice.

Blood covered him, and ash; he leaned hard against her for balance, and if she hadn't been so afraid, she might have enjoyed the fact that for all his boasting of “agility under duress,” she was the stronger one in this moment.

“The train,” he said. “What happened to the train?”

She almost told him the truth, but something stopped her, an internal voice that sounded suspiciously like Godfather's.

The train had exploded for a reason, but until Clara knew that reason, she couldn't risk Nicholas's thinking she was mad. A mad girl was not worth helping.

But perhaps she
was
mad. Her fingertips tingled as though they had been frozen and were now thawing out. The air around her remained lightly charged; whatever force had swept over them had not gone far.

“One of the faeries discharged something,” she heard herself saying. “Some sort of weapon. I didn't get a good look at it, but I suppose it was faulty. It exploded. There was a bright light, and something threw
us back. Next thing I knew, our car had gone off the tracks and you were unconscious.”

Nicholas's eyes found hers. They lingered, hard and strange, as though he saw something on her face he could not decipher. “What did it feel like when it happened?”

She frowned. A strange question. “It was cold, electric. There was a great wind, like a storm. I've never seen anything like it.”

He turned away and raked a hand through his hair. “How many different weapons do the filthy beasts have?”

Light shot overhead, exploding in a fiery spray of blue. Movement nearby sounded as though others were approaching.

Their eyes met; without a word they crawled out the car's gaping back wall. The air was hot from the fires scattered throughout the wreckage. Smoke drifted everywhere, playing tricks, smothering the daylight. Hidden behind another car a few yards away, they watched as faeries uniformed in angular black searched the car they had just abandoned.

“My God.” Clara sagged against the car's wall. “What if you hadn't woken?”

“But I did.” Nicholas scanned the wall, jerked his head. “We'll make for that tunnel there. Do you see? In the wall.”

Clara followed his gaze. Figures passed through a slim tunnel in the fluid black mass of the wall, emerging and disappearing. Shouts in a harsh, foreign language—faery language?—drifted from it. Lights shone at its edge, blinking rhythmically.

“You can't be serious,” Clara hissed. “Someone will see us!”

“Do you see another way through?”

No. There was no other way.
Godfather dearest,
she thought grimly,
let's hope your sneaking lessons work as well in Cane as in New York.

“No,” she admitted, and stepped out from their cover. They slunk through the debris, flattening themselves against steaming metal, picking their way through spoiled cargo. As they reached the wall, a pair
of faeries passed close by, and Clara and Nicholas paused, silent in the shadows. Clara looked back at the tumbled ruins of the great train, at the crooked woodlands not far from the tracks, lined with snow and now flickering with fire. A storm was building on the horizon. Multicolored lightning flashed, and the ground beneath them quaked gently. Ash rained down from the wall, as though knocked loose by the tremor.

Hidden somewhere in this horrid, strange beauty was her father—she hoped. She
had
to hope.

She looked up the wall's great height. “What if we're going the wrong way? What if Father's back there, in the wilderness?”

“Trust me,” Nicholas said darkly, “if he's with the faeries, he isn't in the wilderness.”

Clara watched him for a moment as they waited for more faeries to pass.

“When we're somewhere safe,” she said, struggling to steady her voice, “and we've a moment to rest, I will have many questions to ask you, and I hope, for your sake, that you will answer me.”

Nicholas glanced at her, half his attention on the tunnel. “Is that a threat, Clara?”

“I don't want to hurt you, but if you hinder the search for my father in any way, I will, without hesitation.”

“I believe you.” He smirked, ducking low so that their eyes met. “Just remember: I know all your best moves. Not much else to do in that shop but observe.”

Her mouth thinned. “That's not fair.”

“Don't worry. On a good day you're the tiniest bit better than me.”

“On a
good
day?”

“When you don't let your fear and doubt get the best of you.”

Clara started to protest but then subsided. The truth of his words shamed her, left her feeling shrunken and exposed. “It's unjust that you should know me and my faults so well,” she said quietly, “when I don't know you and yours at all.”

“You'll know them soon enough. I'm crammed full of them.” His voice was light, but his face was full of secrets. “There—they've stopped. Go. Hurry.”

She did, staying close to the tunnel's walls and its shadows, and through her gown she could feel the cold metal touch of Nicholas's hand on her back.

* * *

On the other side of the tunnel—after an excruciating half hour of sneaking past walls that shifted like monstrous membranes ready to burst, and holding their breaths so passing faeries would think them merely shadows—they emerged into a world of light.

Fields and oceans of lights, bridges and thoroughfares of lights. Buildings taller than Clara had ever seen, edged with parades of lights.

It was a city, she supposed—but New York was a city, and this was nothing like that.