Chapter 529: A Very Bad Time To Ask About Horns

The blood on my forearm had gone tacky, then hard, and somewhere in between it had glued my sleeve to the wound.

I found this out the way I find out most things down here, which is to say too late and while already pulling.

"Ow. Okay. That’s — that is attached to me."

Nobody came running. Naturally. Brunhilde stood out at the edge of the field with her back to us and her sword grounded in the bone, and Ilse was still sitting in the snow with her head against the stone where she’d dropped, and both of them had the specific stillness of women who had decided that whatever noise I made next was not going to be their problem.

I tried again, slower. The leather came up a quarter inch and brought skin with it.

’Nope. Nope nope nope.’

You could just leave it on.

’It’s frozen to the meat, Wren.’

’Wear it forever. Grow around it. You would look distinguished.’

’You’re enjoying this.’

’Enormously.’

There is a particular indignity in surviving a hundred werebats and then being defeated by a jacket. I’d faced down the Archmage. I’d been dropped on by something with a skull mask that could take a man’s head off in one dive. And here I was, in a cavern full of things I’d killed, losing to a sleeve.

"Stop."

Ilse was on her feet. I hadn’t heard her get up, which said something about her and nothing good about me.

"You’re going to tear it open again and then I’m going to have to watch you bleed for another hour. Sit down."

"I’m fine—"

"Sit down."

I sat down.

She crouched in front of me and took my wrist, turning the arm to the blue light of the frozen sun overhead. Her hands were steady. Her hands had no right to be steady, because the rest of her wasn’t, and I could see the fine tremor running up through her shoulders that she was pretending very hard wasn’t happening. Whatever the horns had cost her, the bill was still arriving.

"This will hurt," she said.

"That’s what everyone keeps telling me right before—"

She cupped both hands around my forearm and breathed on it.

And her breath came out warm.

I want to be clear about how wrong that was. We were standing in a room a Calamity had made her own. My breath had been leaving me in pale ghosts all evening. Brunhilde’s breath didn’t even do that anymore, it just went out and joined the rest of the cold like water into water. Nothing in this cavern was warm. Nothing in this entire layer had been warm since I fell into it.

But the air that came out of Ilse hit my skin like standing too close to an oven, and the ice in the leather let go all at once, and the sleeve peeled away clean.

I looked at the arm. Then I looked at her.

’...What.’

She was already reaching for the wound, and she did not look up, and she said, very evenly, "Don’t."

"I didn’t say anything."

"You were going to."

"I was going to say a lot of things, actually. I’ve narrowed it down to about four."

"Then keep narrowing."

’Wren.’

Don’t look at me. I’m a sword.

’You’re a sword with opinions.’

Not this time.

I let it sit for a moment. Out past us the snow had piled soft and even over the dead, smoothing the whole field into gentle white shapes with wings in them, and the frozen sun burned quietly over all of it like it had always been there.

"The horns," I said.

Ilse’s fingers stopped on my arm. Just for a beat. Then she went back to work, and it was Brunhilde who answered from forty paces away without turning around, in that flat old voice that never once bothers to be kind about anything.

"Drakonir."

I blinked. "Dragonborn? Ilse’s a—"

"Half." Ilse said it herself, cutting across, the way you say a word before someone else can say it worse. "My mother."

"Okay." I thought about it. "Okay, that explains the part where you caught a diving bat with one hand like it was a rude letter."

"It explains very little."

"Then explain the rest."

She tied off the wrap on my arm harder than the wrap needed.

"Drakonir stand seven feet at the shoulder. Scales. Proper horns, not these." She touched her hairline briefly, where the two blunt things had gone back down, and the gesture had nothing fond in it. "Three hundred years. A breath that can take a wall down. Half of that is not half as good. Half of it is a woman who gets four inches and a warm mouth and horns that don’t finish."

"Your breath just melted ice off my arm."

"My mother could have melted the arm."

’...Ah, damn.’

Which was when I finally worked out what I’d actually been told, and I stopped being amused about it.

Because I’d met the Drakonir. Not personally, thank god. But everyone who’s spent ten minutes in Ealdrim has heard how that race feels about spirits like mine. Honor culture. Heirs of the Wyrm. A people who can only summon what they judge worthy, and who have judged, with total unanimity and about eight hundred years of enthusiasm, that villainess spirits are unworthy of existence.

And Ilse had spent nine years holding one.

Not just a villainess. A Calamity. The Frost Valkyrie, the thing that ended armies before anyone thought to write the armies down.

’A Valkyrie does not answer a summons she does not respect.’

She’d said that to Brunhilde in the hollow. I’d taken it for the Valkyrie’s rule, some cold Celestial etiquette about who gets to call on whom.

It wasn’t. It had never been. That was Ilse’s own blood talking. That was the Drakonir in her, the part that could only ever reach for what it deemed worthy, and what it had reached for was the single most unworthy thing her people recognise.

She hadn’t been permitted to summon Brunhilde.

She’d decided Brunhilde was worth it, and then spent nine years being right at the top of her lungs to a room full of nobody.

"So when you said respect," I started.

"Yes."

"And your people—"

"Yes."

"Right." I looked at the wrap on my arm. "So that’s why you were alone at your mansion, and now at the bottom of the world with a Calamity and no friends."

Ilse looked up at me then, and I’d like to report that I read something profound in her face. I didn’t. She just looked tired, and about forty percent less like she wanted to stab me than she had that morning, which by our standards was practically a wedding.

"Yes," she said.

And Brunhilde, still not turning around, said, "I taught her to use it. Her mother’s people would have called that a second heresy. I called it Tuesday."

"That’s four heresies now," I said. "You’re going to run out."

"I have never once run out."

’Fair.’

Then, because my mouth is my mouth and there has never been anything I could do about it:

"Hey. So if I hold you long enough, do I get a rack too? Because honestly the horns work. I’d wear it."

The silence that came down over the cavern after that was so complete that I heard snow land.

Neither of them laughed. Neither of them even did me the courtesy of looking annoyed. Ilse finished the knot, sat back on her heels, and let me marinate in it, and I have taken talon wounds that were less educational.

’Wren, back me up.’

’You are on your own and you have earned it.’

Ilse stood. She brushed the snow off her knees, and she didn’t look at Brunhilde, and she asked the ceiling, "What happens to me now?"

I opened my mouth.

"Not you," she said. "I know what you’d say. You’d say something generous and stupid and then you’d have to live with it."

"That’s — okay, that’s genuinely how I operate, yeah."

"I know. I watched you do it to a Calamity." She let out a breath, and it came out warm and did not fog. "I have no summon. No contract. No house that will have me back. Nine years of my life are sitting in that man’s chest and he cannot even feel them properly yet."

She finally looked over at Brunhilde’s back.

"So. What happens to me."

Brunhilde said nothing for a long moment.

"You walk," she said. "Down. With us."

"That isn’t an answer."

"No," Brunhilde agreed. "It is not."

I got to my feet, testing the arm, and the wrap held, and the warmth of Ilse’s breath was still faintly in the leather. Above us the frozen sun burned on, steady and clean and blue, throwing three long shadows across a field of white.

Which was the moment it occurred to me that the Precipice had never given me a shadow before.

’Huh.’

’Wait.’

Because the snow had stopped falling.

Brunhilde had not stopped it.

And out past the reach of the light, where the drifts went grey and then black, the dead were moving.

Not twitching. Not reconstituting, not yet, not this soon.

Moving. Being moved. One dark shape after another sliding away from where it had fallen, unhurried, in a straight and tidy line.

’...Oh, you have got to be kidding me.’