Winterspell (52 page)

Up here, alone, with memories of Anise eating away at the edges
of her courage, Clara felt suddenly unsure. But the sight of her father suspended like a demon's plaything kept her moving forward.

“Hello, Anise.”

Anise smiled, her bow a mockery. “
Lady
Clara.
Lady
of the North.”

Clara put up her chin. “That's right.”

Lazily Anise circled her finger in the air. John Stole twirled, matching her movement. “I gather you bonded with the usurper prince. I can feel the change in you and in the air. Surprising, Clara, that you should give yourself to someone who thinks you a monster, who so utterly betrayed you.”

“He doesn't think I'm a monster.” Clara examined everything, noting the closeness of the clouds, the temperature of the air, the taste of oncoming snow. The treacherous incline of the roof below her and to the left, capping a squat tower. “He struggles with prejudice, and he betrayed me once, but he wants to change. He wants to do better, and he will not hurt me. I am stronger than he is.”

“Oh dear. I thought you were smarter than this, Clara.”

“And was I smart to trust you, to believe you? Much has happened since your bedroom.”

For answer Anise laughed. She clapped her hands, and John Stole jerked and fell, and jerked still again, and then floated back up to his former position.

It happened so fast that Clara could not even move.

Anise put a delicate hand to her mouth. “Oh, how clumsy of me. I forgot to mention that at one wrong move from you, or from me—one gesture, one blink of my eye—I can send your father plummeting down into—”

“You don't need to explain. I understand. I am like you. You are like me.” She paused, and there
was
a hurt inside her; she held it in place, stubbornly, so it could grow no more. “I thought you wanted to remake the world. You said we could do it together. You said we would be unstoppable.” She smiled sadly. “We could have been friends.”

Ah—there. Anise faltered, uncertain. There was that vulnerability from the snowy tower roof; there was the fervent hope, the terrible affection.

But only for an instant.

“I was wrong,” Anise said, her voice hard, and the air teemed with vengeance. Clara felt her power building inside her in defensive response, the air bending toward her and the tiny hairs on her body rising to meet it.

She moved before Anise could, running along the walkway with the wind at her back. She gathered magic into her fingers, drew strength from the lightning in the air, and prayed that she could be strong enough to at least make a good go of it.

* * *

The first strike caught Anise by surprise, a cold thrust of air slamming into her belly and flinging her back against the opposite tower. But she fell gracefully, sprang to her feet, and recovered, then flung off her furs with a savage smile. She wore a corset of chain and curved metal, her arms bare. She cast one of them violently to the side, ripping forth sharp metal plates from the shifting rooftops beside them. They shot straight for Clara, whistling through the air, and she leapt to evade them, and landed hard on her knees.

Below her, on a terrace tucked beneath buttresses, she saw a courtyard abandoned to neglect, a tangle of old trees and black soil. Drawing upon it, gasping through the stifling iron tang in the air, she jumped to her feet and flung her arms up over her face, just as a wave of mechaniks struck her, sending her reeling back. She rolled, still clinging to the anchor of the trees below, and flew unsteady arrows of light at Anise, but the queen dodged them nimbly, leaping from the walkway to a gargoyle adorning an adjacent tower.

She landed on her hands and feet, and cut her arm through the air. One of the watching kambots flew toward Clara in a flash of blue and sharp black. Clara jumped to avoid it, then reached out and sent it
back at Anise on the slingshot of the wind, but Anise put out her hand and dissected the thing as it flew, its wires and metalwork scattering.

Clara ducked beneath the flying debris; her foot caught on a crack in the walkway. She teetered and fell back, grappling for handholds on the nearest statue—a sea serpent, its fanged mouth gaping. Its scales cut her hands, embedding tiny black shards in her palms. She hung there, her legs swinging for purchase on the narrow ledge below her.

This was it, then. That had been quick. Out of the corner of her eye, Clara could see herself on the chromocasts, a hundred images of her dangling in fear, and she hoped that, wherever they were, Nicholas and Godfather would not have to see.

“Such a shame.”

Clara looked up. Anise was perched above her, catlike, on the serpent's back. The wind tangled her hair; the storm lit her eyes. Overhead, kambots had taken wing and now circled, waiting to pick Clara's bones clean.

“What's a shame?” Clara said, stalling. If she could lower herself enough, traverse the narrow black eave, she might make it. The tower she had come up stood a few paces away, its metal-plated wall full of footholds and narrow windows. She could climb up it, use the serpent gargoyle there to pull herself back up to the walkway.

“I thought you'd turn out to be stronger than this,” Anise was saying. “Maybe it's a good thing you betrayed me. I'm well rid of you.”

It would have been convincing, had her voice not had such a childishly sulky note in it. But a sulky child could still be a dangerous one, so Clara jumped, and landed hard on the ledge below her. Pain knocked her shins, and she nearly fell, but she found her balance and pushed on, not letting herself glance down at the steep drop on her left, where the castle's lower towers roiled—or beyond the far battlements, where the capital burned.

Anise was behind and above her, leaping from parapet to parapet in what was almost a dance, flinging kambots like darts. They hit the
wall against which Clara sidled, feathers flying, knocking mechaniks loose like hailstones. Clara made for the tower amid a shower of them, crying out as they scraped her face. When she reached the tower where the ledge came to a stop, she clung to the corner where the walls met, fighting for strength.

Above, Anise laughed. She perched on a parapet overlooking the very gargoyle Clara needed to climb, and the scornful, petulant look on her face filled Clara with cold fury. How
dare
she act as though this were Clara's fault? Lonely or not, the queen deserved no pity.

“I
am
stronger than this,” Clara hissed, and opened a Door in the sky.

* * *

Such a simple thing, a Door, that Clara had not thought of using it until now.

She emerged behind Anise, safe on the walkway, having traveled through the Door in the space of a blink. The force of it threw Anise back, and she lost her footing. The kambots faltered too, so closely linked were they to their queen. Clara ducked to avoid the tiny cuts of their flashing wings, but Anise was dazed, clumsy. A hundred wings rushed past her, clipped her, took her balance.

There was a scream in the confusion, a terrible sound, lost and frightened. Amid the mire of storm clouds and lightning and squawking black birds, Clara saw a white figure topple from the parapet and fall. She heard a sick crunch, a choked noise.

Above her another cry sounded.

Clara turned and saw her father falling. The net holding him had vanished.

“No,” she said calmly, and though fear gripped her heart, though the human in her urged her to run, the Lady in her whispered, “Softly,” so she cupped her hands and let magic loose from her fingertips. It skipped across the winds and gathered below her father in a gentle curve of shimmering air. He fell into it, was cradled by it, and was eased down onto the walkway.

Only then did she run to him, and it felt so strange to see him like this—to touch his ravaged face and feel the familiar stubble under her hands—that tears filled her eyes. Exhaustion overtook her, and though he was the one unconscious and barely breathing, she longed to wake him up, ask him to hold her and tell her everything would be all right.

As if he had heard her, his eyes fluttered open.

“Father,” she whispered, stroking his cheek. “You're safe now. I'm here.”

“Clara?”

She nodded, unable to speak. His brow creased.

“You've . . . changed.” His eyes fluttered once more and fell closed, but he was still breathing—whole and breathing and the most handsome thing Clara had ever seen. She bent and kissed his cheek, so glad, she burst out laughing.

Behind her something gurgled.

She knew at once what it was, what she would see when she turned. She gathered herself into a hard knot of resolve, of unfeeling, and turned.

Anise was pinned there, below the parapets at the opposite end of the walkway, caught on the serpent gargoyle's long coiling tail. It had impaled her, soaking her in blue.

Clara approached her with a strange sense of calm. She knelt between the parapets and forced herself to look.

“You . . .” Anise's voice was full of blood. Her eyes were vague and fading, and her body kept twitching, death pulling on the strings of her limbs. “You are . . .”

“What?” Clara took her hand. She had nothing to fear from Anise now; despite her resolve to remain unmoved, pity flooded through her, and a whole lifetime of
what if.
“What am I?”

“A Lady.” Anise coughed. Her fingers tightened around Clara's, and at this last, her face was soft. “A Lady of the North.”

Then she was still. Her limp body sank farther down on the sharp stone with an awful sound that made Clara turn away—but
everywhere she looked was a chromocast, the image of herself and Anise's body shining down from the skies.

“You've done it!” A cry erupted in her ear. With a high-pitched whine her headset flickered back to life.

Clara winced, pulled it away from her ear. “Bo?”

“Clara, everyone saw.
Everyone.
” Bo's voice was ecstatic, peppered with whoops she couldn't contain.

“What do you mean, everyone?”

“The chromos, they showed the whole damn thing! Through the entire city, probably through the entire kingdom, knowing Anise. She would've wanted everyone to see you die, don't you think?”

Clara blinked, coming back to the world, and looked around. She heard the triumphant cries of the surviving mages from the smoking ruins of the city far below, echoed by Bo in her ear. She wondered if the whole country truly had seen her duel with Anise, if similar celebrations were taking place in the choked streets of Zarko and the opulent ones of Kafflock. What were the faeries thinking, left leaderless at their posts and in the heaps of faded party trimmings at the Summer Palace? Some would be afraid; many would be angry. Perhaps a few, the ones with any sense, would be relieved.

The wind was gentle, the ground had stilled, and the castle towers no longer shifted and writhed. The air was quiet, where moments before it had been laced with Anise's chaos. Above, the clouds were fading as abruptly as the net imprisoning John Stole had disappeared. In place of clouds now shone countless stars, their configurations foreign to Clara, and a fat, luminous moon that bathed the city in a cooling glow.

“The storm,” came Bo's voice, thick with wonder. “The storm is leaving.”

Clara turned back to Anise's lifeless body. Even now her slender limbs held the poise of a dancer's. “No. The storm is already gone.”

Then a voice spoke quietly in her ear, cutting through Bo's. “Clara? Are you there?”

Her hand flew to her headset. “Nicholas? I'm here. I'm—” She could hardly speak for her relief. “Where are you?”

“Outside Wahlkraft, near the front doors. We were forced outside. We had to keep fighting. . . .”

Bo had fallen silent. Clara glanced at her father; he was breathing and safe. She hurried to the tower.

“What's wrong?” Clara asked.

“Come quickly,” Nicholas whispered, and Clara knew, as she flew down the stairs, what she would find.

* * *

A small crowd had gathered at Wahlkraft's immense black doors, composed of mages—bloodied, battered, and significantly fewer than had entered the capital—and faeries, held at spearpoint by a grim-faced Prince's Army. The faeries left standing were terribly mutilated, for the parts of them that Anise had made were gone, leaving open wounds behind; some would obviously not survive for much longer. They looked lost, frightened, grotesque, and Clara pitied them. On the periphery, lurking in the shadows, humans watched suspiciously.

Nicholas turned as Clara ran out of the castle and down the steps. They were pockmarked with the holes of the magic that had been there, and now was suddenly not.

A figure lay behind where Nicholas stood, and Clara's breath caught in a snare of heartbreak.

“He saved me.” Nicholas's voice was strange, his eyes bright. His clothes were tattered and bloody, and he leaned hard on a shattered pillar, but Clara could see that most of Anise's curse had left him. A few stubborn pieces remained, tiny and glinting. It did not surprise Clara—such terrific hate, she supposed, left permanent scars.

“Clara, I'm so sorry,” Nicholas said, catching her hand. “He was wild. He fought like . . . I didn't ask him to, but he saved me.”

“
I
asked him to,” Clara said, and she moved gently past him to kneel
on the hard ground. Blood stained her clothes silver, but she did not care. “Hello, Godfather.”

His eye was calm and open, the other a lump of knotted skin where Anise's curse had hit him. The metal was gone.

Even now his face lit up to see her. He fumbled for her hand.

“My Clara.” His breath was tight and irregular. “Is it done? Am I done now?”

The words seized Clara's throat with tears. She thought of the days when she had not visited, and wished suddenly, fiercely, that she had gone every day, always. So many years in service, alone in that cavernous shop, and for what?