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Home / Werewolf / Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy / Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

90 Chapters

CHAPTER 81

SeraphineThe thing let us into its house for four days and then, a half-day from the grave, it stopped pretending it ever meant to let us reach it.I should have known. It had let us cross because crossing cost it nothing and it wanted Amara at the grave to lie down alone. But somewhere in those four days it had finally understood what the rest of us were for... not an escort, not mourners, but a cage-crew, a fourth and a watch and a wall, the whole apparatus of holding it the new way, the surviving way. And a thing that has spent a thousand years making sure it could only be held by one exhausted woman does not want to watch six people build the machine that holds it forever.So on the fifth day it threw the dead ground at us.Not a wedge this time. Not a chosen-night raid on one man. Everything. The standing dead in the white bowl below the ruins came off their feet all at once, the whole frozen army of everyone who'd ever died trying to reach that grave, and they came up the rise

CHAPTER 82

AmaraZane was dying in the warm grass and the thing that built this whole long road had finally gotten what it wanted, which was me, on my knees, with the only person who could make me put myself down for good lying gray under my hands."Don't," he said. He could still talk. That was the cruelty, he could still talk. "Amara. Don't you dare. We came here to make the cage. You spend yourself on me, there's no holder for the cage, and then this was all for...""Shut up." My hands were already on his chest. The cold was past his ribs, climbing, the spent-cold, the kind I'd watched take the woman from Two Creeks while Bram held my wrist and made me let her go. "Bram's not here to stop me. That was the one good thing about this terrible day.""That's exactly why he sent himself west," Zane said, and tried to smile, and it came out wrong. "He knew. He knew I'd... that you'd..."I felt for Aldric without looking. He was already there, his hand between my shoulders. And I felt for the rope, t

CHAPTER 83

WrenThe dead fell down all at once.That's how we knew it had worked, before anything else, before I understood what I was holding or what it would cost me. One breath the frozen army stood in its ring around the warm grass, hundreds of them, our own dead among them now, all facing in. The next breath they came apart. Not dramatic. They just stopped being held up. Whatever had been standing them in their lines let go of them the same moment the three let go of the warm world, and they dropped into the white, and they were only dead again, the ordinary kind, the kind that stays down.The cold stopped advancing. I felt it stop. The whole front of winter that had chased us four hundred miles just... quit. Sat down where it was. Began, very slowly, at the edges, to be only weather again.And in the middle of all that stopping, I was on my knees in the grass with a cord burning warm in my fists and nothing on the other end of it that I could see.But I could feel it. There was weight on t

CHAPTER 84

SelaIt took us nine days to walk out of a country that had taken us four to walk in, because everybody was broken in a different way and nobody could carry anybody else's broken on top of their own.I'd lost the crutch on the hill and Bram wasn't there to cut me a new one, so I rode the whole way, which sounds easy and isn't, because a horse moving under a leg that doesn't bend right is its own special hell, and I complained about it loudly and often, because that's the job and somebody has to keep doing the job even when the woman who gave it to me is behind a door I can't see.Seraphine rode beside me most of those nine days. We hadn't been people who rode beside each other before. We were people who'd traded sharp looks and sharper history. But she'd dragged me off the hill once with her own ribs full of cold, and I'd hauled her to her feet with my own leg screaming, and that buys you something even between two women who used to plan, on opposite sides of a fire, how the other mig

CHAPTER 85

SeraphineGreywater was still standing, which we hadn't let ourselves expect, and empty, which we had.Rell brought us in through the bridge gate at dusk on the twelfth day since we'd ridden out, and the town sat there in the thaw with its fires long dead and its doors shut and not a soul on the wall, and for one bad stretch of road I thought we'd find what I'd found at the waystation. Then a dog barked somewhere in the lower town, ordinary and alive, and a window opened, and a face looked out, and within an hour the word had gone through every house that hadn't burned, and people came out into the streets.What was left standing was less than what we'd left. But more than I'd feared.Bram had the four hundred camped two days west in a valley with good water, waiting on a runner, and Rell sent one before she'd even gotten off her horse. I watched her do it and understood she'd been holding that errand in her chest the whole ride home, behind the counting, behind the command voice, a w

CHAPTER 86

WrenI didn't wait for it to come to me. Waiting is Maren's old patience and I haven't earned that yet, so I did the thing I'm actually good at, which is hunting.I told Seraphine and went out the back of the keeper-house an hour before the watcher usually showed, and circled wide through the wet dark the way you circle a deer stand you don't want the deer to scent, and I came up behind the tree line from the river side instead of the camp side, and I found him exactly where I'd have stood if I were watching that house and didn't want to be seen doing it.A man. Younger than me, maybe, hard to tell in the dark. No weapon out, which told me something. A bag at his feet, half-packed, which told me more... a man ready to run isn't a man planning violence tonight. He was watching the cord-light in Wren's window through the trees with the particular hunger of someone who'd traveled a long way for exactly that light.I put an arrow on him anyway. You don't get careless because a man looks h

CHAPTER 87

WrenCorin didn't open the satchel that first night. He sat by my fire and drank what I gave him and told me about the lake-thing in careful, exhausted pieces, and I let him, because I know that kind of telling and you don't rush it.It was three nights before he put the satchel on the table between us."You should see what alone costs," he said. "Before you decide you and I are trading even. I don't think we are."Inside, wrapped in oiled cloth, was a hand.Not whole. Three fingers and the heel of a palm, gray-white, frost-burned the way Aldric's had been, the way mine had nearly been on the hill. Old enough that the gray had gone past fresh and into something like stone, preserved by whatever had taken it rather than healed."Mine," Corin said, before I could ask. "I held the lake-thing alone for six hours getting it back into the cage after it slipped. No anchors. No rope. Just me and a working I half-remembered from watching my teacher, getting it wrong in places I didn't know wer

CHAPTER 88

AmaraThere's no time behind the door. I want to say that plainly, because I spent what might have been the first hour or the first decade trying to find the edges of it and there aren't any, and once you stop looking for edges that aren't there, it gets easier, a little, to just be.We're not cold. That's the first thing I'd tell anyone who asked, if anyone could ask. The dark isn't cold the way the dead ground was cold. It's just dark, total, the kind you'd go mad cataloguing if you were alone in it, and I understand now, all the way down, why Orsel's voice through the warm stone had sounded the way it did. Not broken. Worn.Zane's hand is in mine. Has been the whole time, however long the whole time is. His grip changes... sometimes strong, sometimes faint, the way Wren feels it on her rope, and I've learned to read the faintness the way I used to read his face, which I can't see anymore, none of us can see anything, we're three voices and six hands and the thing held still between

CHAPTER 89

ZaneIt said three words to us and then it didn't say anything else for what might have been a year.You'd think silence from a monster would be a relief. It wasn't. It was the silence of someone who's said an honest thing by accident and is now mortified about it, and I know that silence, I've lived inside that silence, I am the king of saying a true thing and then needing four jokes to climb back out of having meant it.So I did the thing I do. I talked to it."You're not going to out-quiet me," I told the dark, the weight, the old tired thing held between the three of us. "I want you to know that going in. I have made grieving men laugh at their own father's grave. I once talked a guard named Toller into liking me while bound at the wrists. You are not the toughest audience I've had. You're just the rudest, because at least Toller eventually said something back."Nothing."Fine. I'll go first. My name's Zane, you've technically known me since you wore Corvus and called me by it lik

CHAPTER 90

WrenThe rope went warm all at once, and then it went warmer, and then it went warmer still, past any temperature I'd felt on it since the grave, past the warmth of Orsel's grass, until I had the cord in both fists with the fire between me and Corin and Seraphine and I couldn't speak for a moment, just held it, held the extraordinary thing coming up the line toward me.Not words, exactly. The rope doesn't carry words the way a letter does. It carries shapes, weight, intention... the flavor of a thought more than the thought itself. What came up from Amara had three parts, and I learned to read them in the order they arrived.The first part was the entity answering.The second part was the entity noticing itself being different from what it was.The third part was Amara's word for it, the one she'd arrived at in the dark, which she pushed up the rope not because I needed it but because she knew I'd been carrying the question for months and she wanted me to be the one who got to hear th

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