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Dread curdled in Thea’s gut. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter. There was only one way through this trial and it was up the icy obstruction before her.
She finished lacing the spikes to her boots, testing their sturdiness with a few kicks to the snow. They felt clumsy on her feet, but there was no doubt she’d be glad for them soon enough. Next, she took the ice axes in her hands. Small and simple, the blades gleamed sharp in the pale moonlight.
Trying to shake the nervousness from her body, Thea went to the foot of the cliff face and looked up, her breath whistling between her teeth as she did.
The Glacier’s Embrace…The words came to her as though she’d spoken them aloud, but she knew she hadn’t opened her mouth. It was a whisper from the Furies, along with the icy gust of wind that swept along the wall’s face. A warning.
Though every instinct within her screamed to run away, to not swing that first blade into the ice, there was nothing for it.
This was the Great Rite.
There was no going back.
Thea swung her axe above her head. The first sound of steel piercing ice echoed across the strange, desolate space like a battle cry.
She kicked her spiked toe into the wall, testing her purchase there before allowing the tools to bear her whole weight.
‘Here goes nothing,’ she muttered to herself, swinging her second axe into the ice.
With several more pitches of her blades and kicks of her spikes, Thea was suspended several feet above the ground, the bitter cold of the wall pressing into her front, soaking through the layers of her clothing. She would have to move fast ifshe wanted to avoid the heart-stopping effect exposure to such conditions could have.
Steeling herself against the increasing drop below, and the stiffening of her joints in the face of the freeze, Thea threw her blade upward, pulling herself up while digging her spikes into the vertical surface, again and again. Her breath clouded before her face, and for once she was grateful, as it distracted her from looking at the distance yawning between her and the unforgiving ground below.
At what felt like an agonisingly slow pace, Thea climbed.
Her teeth chattered, enough to rattle her brain inside her skull, but she pressed skyward, losing herself in the rhythm of her axes and spikes, testing her purchase with each push up into the mist. Her muscles ached and then burned in protest with each movement, but she held fast, knowing that a single misstep could send her plummeting to what now looked like an abyss below.
With every ounce of momentum, her heart raced, and she didn’t dare to look down at how much of the wall she’d covered. She breathed in through her nose, the frigid air hitting her lungs hard enough to make her gasp, her grip faltering on her axe.
She pressed herself to the wall with all her strength, screwing her eyes shut in a moment of panic.
‘I will regret nothing. Not the lies I’ve told, nor the lives I’ve claimed or the rivers of blood I’ve spilt. I do not regret a single moment, because every one of them led me to you.’
Wilder’s words came back to her like a flicker of flame in a long, dark night, and Thea gritted her teeth, spearing her axe into the unbroken surface of ice above her, hauling her body along with it.
She clung to those words as she clung to her axes: for dear life. She let them hold her together as Wilder himself had held her through many nights before.
The pale light of the moon was fading, darkness kissing the ice, the temperature around Thea dropping even more. The wall groaned. The heart-stopping sound of cracking filled the air as the ancient ice shifted in the gale that picked up at Thea’s back.
Hours passed. Thea’s limbs burned with every movement. On the horizon, the first golden rays of dawn had started to spill into the world. She clutched her axes hard enough that her knuckles split beneath her gloves and the warm trickle of blood graced her chilled skin.
Thea didn’t know how far up the wall she’d managed to get, only that the howling wind now threatened to rip her clean off its surface. As though it had claws, the blast tugged painfully at her cloak, her braid, and Thea’s whole body trembled with the effort it took to cling to the vertical face of the glacier.
Althea Nine Lives, she reminded herself. That was who she was. Those lives would see her through this ordeal, they would —
The ice groaned again.
And jagged crevices split its surface into a treacherous web of frozen veins. It was another labyrinth – an echo of the maze of mirrors over which she’d just triumphed.
With a cry, Thea flung her axe into the ice above, only for it to crumble – too close to a fault she could not see.
A scream of terror ripped from her throat.
Her loose hand went flying out into mid-air, and for a split second, she thought she was falling.
But all those countless hours of training snapped into place, and she managed to maintain her grip on her axe and swing it with all her might back into another patch of ice.
Panting, she tested it with her weight.
