Chapter 77. Come Home, He Whispered, and Elsbeth Answered by Realizing She Already Was

Chapter 77: 77. Come Home, He Whispered, and Elsbeth Answered by Realizing She Already Was

Elsbeth stopped in the middle of the courtyard and stood there with her arms hanging at her sides, staring up at the monster that had been her mother.

She didn’t move... She didn’t even make a sound.

And then a wave of cold went out from her body, so sudden and so violent that the cobblestones cracked, and every drop of moisture in the air turned to a whirling cloud of frost.

"N-no..." she said.

She said it very quietly.

"No... No... No...!"

"Come home, little wolf."

Cassian’s voice was soft. It wasn’t loud, and it wasn’t cruel.

It was a gentle, almost loving murmur, the voice of a man calling a lost child in from the cold. It carried across the courtyard like a hand on her shoulder.

Elsbeth’s head turned toward him.

I saw her eyes flicker.

For one terrible second, a pale blue spark kindled in the deep red of her irises, and the frost whirling around her trembled and began to spin the wrong way.

Her shoulders shook with her hands opened and closed. She dropped to one knee on the cracked stone, shuddering, with her head bowed.

"ELSBETH!" I yelled.

I tried to reach her. Two Chosen stepped in front of me, smiling, and I had to fight my way through them with a sword that felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.

By the time I’d knocked the second one down, I was twenty feet away and wheezing, and I saw something flicker at the edge of my vision.

Ding!

[Partner: Elsbeth Evershade.]

[External coercion: Rejected.]

[Covenant integrity: Stable.]

I stared at it. I had no idea what it meant.

’Covenant.’

The word sat in my head like a stone. I only knew that, in that instant, I saw Elsbeth stiffen, from her shoulders down to her knees, as if somebody had put a rod of iron through her spine.

I didn’t know what she was seeing.

I know now... because she told me later, in a quiet moment, and I’m going to tell it to you the way she did.

She heard a soft voice calling her home. It was warm and kind and promised her an end to everything.

No more grief... No more fear... Her mother was waiting, and her sister was waiting, and the house was lit and the fire was warm.

She only had to say yes.

And then she remembered something else.

She remembered a hand. A single open hand, palm up, held out through a blizzard in a frozen forest, in front of a wolf who had threatened to rip out his throat.

A hand that hadn’t grabbed, or demanded, or begged... It had only waited.

"I am... already home," Elsbeth said.

She said it aloud. Her voice was hoarse and cracked and utterly steady.

She rose to her feet, and her eyes were red again, clear and burning.

The frost around her turned inward, spiraling into a single spinning point, and with a cry that tore her throat, she gathered every shard of ice in that courtyard into one enormous spear.

It was as long as a tree. It blazed in her hand like a bar of white fire.

She threw it.

SWOOOSH!

It crossed the courtyard in a heartbeat.

Cassian saw it coming, and he raised the Throne Glass, and a shell of golden light snapped up around him, the same shield that had turned aside every other attack.

I saw the spear hit it, my eyes caught the gold bend, and spiderweb and scream.

And I saw it break through.

The tip of the spear hit Cassian in the face.

"GAGGGHHHH...!!!"

I will never forget the sound he made.

It wasn’t a dignified sound... It was a thin, high, animal shriek, like the scream of a man who hadn’t been hurt in a very long time.

He staggered backward with both hands pressed over the right side of his face, and blood poured between his fingers, bright red against the white of his sleeve.

His spectacles hit the stones and shattered.

He dropped his cane. He dropped the bag of sweets, too, and a little shower of honey drops skittered across the cobbles.

When he lowered his hand, the right side of his face was a ruin.

I’m not going to describe it... I’ll just say that the eye was gone, and that frost was creeping out from the edges of the wound in delicate white threads, and that whatever he tried to do to close it, the ice wouldn’t let him.

I saw him swallow a shard of glass. I saw the wound twitch and shiver and refuse to heal.

And I saw his face.

The smile was gone... It had slid off him like a mask, and what was underneath was nothing I’d ever seen on him.

It was flat, and cold, and utterly naked.

For one second, I understood that the kind, patient, fatherly man I’d been looking at all day was not a man at all.

He was wearing a costume that something else was wearing.

"Mother Wolf," Cassian said, in a thin, shaking voice.

He pointed a trembling finger at the monster that had been Hrafnhild Evershade. "Deal with them...!!!"

The Beast Warmother turned her great head.

She came at us like an avalanche.

Elsbeth was still standing in the middle of the courtyard with her hand outstretched, drained, swaying, her face gray.

She’d thrown everything she had into that spear. And she hadn’t even raised her sword.

She just stood there looking up at the enormous wolf bearing down on her, and I knew, as certainly as I’ve ever known anything, that she wasn’t going to move.

I didn’t think. And so I ran.

I threw myself in front of her with my sword held across my body, which was the dumbest idea I’d ever had, because Gate Junior was about the size of a toothpick compared to the claw coming down.

My Bulwark was flickering like a candle in a draft. I had about thirty-five points of life left in my body, and I was about to spend every one of them on a gesture.

The claw came down.

But...

It never touched me.

There was a sound like a mountain falling over, and a spray of snow and stone, and the world went dark for a second.

I opened my eyes and found that there was a person standing in front of me, two heads taller than I was, with her feet driven ankle-deep into the paving.

Magnara had caught the claw.

She’d done it with her bare arms, both of them locked around the great curved talon, her shoulders hunched and every muscle in her body standing out like rope.

Her horns scraped against the beast’s wrist. Blood ran down her forearms where the ice had cut through her skin.

The ground cracked outward from her boots in a spiderweb, and the whole mass of the Beast Warmother’s weight bore down on her, and she did not give an inch.

"You bleed like a fool," she grunted, without turning her head.

"More like a hero," I managed.

She snorted. It might have been a laugh.

For a long moment, they stood there, straining against each other, a woman and a monster the size of a house.

Then Magnara roared and heaved, and the claw lifted a foot, two feet, three, and the great wolf stumbled sideways and fell back a step.

"Move," Magnara said.

I moved. I grabbed Elsbeth by the shoulders and hauled her out of the way, and for the first time I looked into her face... it broke something in me.

She wasn’t crying. That was the thing.

She was staring at the monster with a face as blank and white as paper, and her eyes were enormous and dry. She was shaking so hard that her teeth were chattering.

"I won’t let you carry this alone," I said. "Elsbeth..."