Cold Fire

Breathe.



Kicking my way around to the stern, I pushed the boat toward the ice floe. As my legs grew inert and my heart grew numb, the shadow of the ice covered me. The boat nudged onto a shelf.



Gasping, spitting, retching, I crawled out. I had no feeling in my hands and little strength in my limbs, yet by fixing fingers onto knobs of pitted ice, I pulled myself out of the deadly water.



For a while, an eternity, I lay on the ice like a suffocating fish.



A whisper of warmth pulsed against my skin where the locket pressed between my breasts. It aroused me from my stupor. I took in a breath, salt water fouling my mouth. Shaking, I rose. I checked my sword, the loop twisted so tight my frozen fingers could not untangle it. The locket’s throbbing heat fed strength to me as I stared across the shelf toward a vertical fissure in the ice. The fissure led into blackness.



Really, what choice had I?



“Brave enough for my purpose,” said a male voice, smooth and cold. I saw no one, not a single sign of life. “Come, Daughter. I will look on you now.”



“I hate you,” I whispered to the empty ice.



He laughed, as if my squeak of outrage amused him. As if he could hear everything. And maybe he could, for would it not explain me?



Maybe that would teach me to keep my mouth shut and not speak when I ought to be silent.



My legs were as heavy as logs as I stumped into the fissure. If he hadn’t killed me by now, he might actually wish to see what manner of creature he had sired on Tara Bell. A warm breeze stirred the passage. A bell tolled three times, the vibration passing right through my flesh. I felt as if my soul were being rung to check its temper, as a person might flick a finger against a finely wrought glass vessel to see how pure the sound is.



Light bloomed to reveal an arch made out of two massive ivory tusks. The tusks were carved with crows and hounds and saber-toothed cats and an eru, and with the image of a girl no more than six years of age. She had long, straight hair and held a sheathed sword far too big for her.



The girl was me.



My body began to prickle and stab as sensation returned. I stumbled under the arch, which vanished, leaving me in a blast of humid air so fetid I hid my face behind my hands. The smell faded, and the light sharpened.



I lowered my hands.



To find myself and see myself in a maze of mirrors, reflected over and over again. Blessed Tanit! I was a mess! My complexion looked as lifeless as the underbelly of a dead fish; my hair clumped in knots and tangles to my hips; my clothes wrung around my body.



“Find me,” his voice said. “One is a gate, not a true mirror. Walk through it, and I will answer three questions.”



I turned, seeing myself turn over and over, I and I and I, each one of me alike. My thoughts lurched sluggishly as I blinked, trying to signal myself as I had blinked at Andevai in the troll’s nest. Why did I think of the troll’s nest? Of course: The upper floor had formed a maze of mirrors.



What was it Andevai had said that time in the carriage when he had thought I was asleep? He had been weaving illusions. He had woven my face in light.



“The light and shadow must reflect and darken consistent with the conditions of light at the time of the illusion.”



I had it: In every mirror except one I saw my reflection. My jacket’s buttons were sewn on the left so when I drew my sword it would not hang up in the cloth. I looked for the one image of me with the buttons on the image left not the mirror left.



When I found her, I walked into myself. Heat cut through me to banish the chill that numbed my bones. My steps sank into a thick pile of lush rug, and I halted.



I was the candle that lit the chamber, for its depths were shadow as layered as draped cloth dyed black. At four points equidistant around me, as if at the four points of the compass, loomed four monstrous toads with belligerent stances. Their skin had the yellow-green color of fouled mucus. They did not move, nor did they blink, if toads even blinked. The only way I could tell they were alive was by the pulsing beat in their throats.



A personage sat cross-legged on the back of a turtle. He was clothed in amulets, or perhaps his body was covered in an illusion woven to appear as a shimmering fabric. He had long straight beautiful jet-black hair just like mine and Rory’s. The skin of his bare arms had the same coppery burnished-bronze shade as Rory’s. His face was hidden behind a mask like a sheet of ice. His eyes had neither colored iris nor black pupil, only fathomless light.



He regarded me in silence, masked and unkindly. On a perch next to him sat that evil crow, watching me with its evil black eyes, and I understood that what it saw, he saw, because he had bound it to his will.