Page 236 of The Sun He Buried

Something hits the side of my head.

The white ground comes up.

Then nothing.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Cold comes first.

Then my head—a deep, sick throb on one side, close to the bone. Something in there is still ringing.

Then the part where I’m moving and my own feet have nothing to do with it.

There’s cloth over my face—rough, close, stinking of horse and cold smoke. My wrists are bound behind me, the angle wrenching my shoulders, and someone’s got me under the arms, hauling, my heels dragging two long lines through snow I can’t see.

The last thing I’ve got is the wood store. The cold coming through the door. Working out how to say it to Baldr.

A man who said he’d walk me down.

He walked me down.

My heart slams. I get my feet under me for half a second and the grip hauls me straight up by one arm, hard enough that I gasp. Above my head a voice says something low to a voice further ahead. I don’t catch the words. I catch the shape of them—orders, and calm ones—and that’s when it drops all the way through me.

Nobody knows where I am.

The new place under my ribs pulls tight.

Eirik.

I grab for him down that thread, and all of it goes with me—the cold, the head, the rope, the fear of it. Every wall I had, gone.

Wake up. Feel this. Please wake up.

I try to think. How long was I out? The light through the hood is flat and grey—could be ten minutes, could be an hour. We’re climbing, then dropping. Trees. Snow deep enough to drag in. That’s everything I’ve got, and it’s nothing. I don’t even know which way is back.

Behind us, something screams.

Not a person. Too high. Too furious.

I’ve heard it once. On this same road.

Snowpetal.

The hands on me stop.

“—the cat,” somebody says. “It’s the—”

He doesn’t finish.

The grip lets go and I drop—shoulder, then cheek, into the snow. I twist and shove the hood up against my own arm until grey light comes through, until I can see.

I wish I couldn’t.

Snowpetal’s already off the ground. One second she’s a white streak between two sets of boots—the next both her horns are buried under a grey-eyed man’s jaw and she’s taking him over backward into a pine. His mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Her talons open his coat, her back legs rake, and his throat comes apart between her horns while his boots knock twice against the trunk and go still.

Blood sheets over the white of her horns, thins, and disappears into them.

She turns. White eyes, round. Red mouth.