Tane attacked at the same time, and Hoten half parted from Lirr to stop her from embedding a shard of wood in his host’s spine.
The Mother Ghisting seized Hoten and hauled. Hoten nearly separated from Lirr but a tether remained, thick and binding. Just as Tane remained tethered to me. But how far would it stretch?
Then Hoten leapt fully from Lirr’s flesh and tackled Tane to the ground. Both tethers snapped.
I lunged for Tane, trying to restore our connection. A hand seized my ankle and hauled me back.
I twisted to see Lirr, cursing at me with blood-lined teeth and eyes full of malice. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he held my gaze. Just him. Just me. No Hoten, no Tane.
Athe’s ghisting bear attacked Hoten, massive claws seizing his shoulders and jaws closing about his head. A white crow plunged from the trees and darted at Lirr, making him flinch, but Harpy was nowhere to be seen.
Using the corvid’s distraction, I kicked Lirr in the face. He seemed to sense it coming, dodged and grabbed my other foot, shoulders hunched against the crow’s repeated assaults.
The bear roared and a musket cracked. I struck out and struggled, my world a blur of dirt, deadfall and striking limbs. I sighted Olsa Uknara sprinting from the forest, musket smoking, and Demery and Illya behind. Harpy separated from Demery in her human form, flicking a mask onto her face. She changed from indistinct woman to an armored goddess of war, spinning a spear into position as she charged towards Hoten, Tane and the bear.
More ghistings came, gathering close—a feline the size of a hound, coiling around Olsa’s legs, an eldritch oaken god detaching from the wreck, a lithe stream of smoke from Illya’s parted lips and glaring eyes.
From all around, from flesh and bark, ghistings emerged. I knew each of them as Tane’s children. They joined with Tane and the ghistings of my companions, trapping Hoten outside of Lirr’s flesh.
Bellowing a wordless cry of rage, Lirr grabbed me around the throat with a forearm and forced me backwards, wooden knife in hand. I twisted and bit down on his hand like a feral dog, thoughtless in my need to survive. I felt warm skin and fine hair, tense muscle—then spurting blood and raw flesh on my tongue.
Lirr staggered away from me with a disgusted, pained howl. Another pistol cracked. Lirr moved just before it, but it still struck. There was a wet crackle of bone and Lirr’s knee buckled.
Our enemy roared, rage and agony combined. I spat blood and bile and swayed upright, as he too clawed, punishingly, to his feet. His shattered leg sagged but he grasped a nearby tree with his mangled hand and reached to pull a steel knife from his boot.
Demery closed in. Anne, Samuel Rosser and Athe materialized from the twilight at his back, joining the Uknaras. My mother had reclaimed her axe, and now she hefted it in both hands as the others surrounded them—the ghistings trapping Hoten, the humans Lirr.
I could feel Lirr’s blood on my face, more blood seeping down my side, but I smiled at my mother and gave a short nod. I’d survive.
Rosser slipped up to my side, breathing heavily. “Are you all right?” He spared me a glance, his eyes drawn to the hole in my side, seeping a steady scarlet bloom. “You’ve been shot!”
I nodded, though I could no longer find the will to speak. Samuel moved closer, as if his shadow could shelter me from further harm, and I did not protest. I’d done all I could, and my debt of vengeance was not the greatest here tonight.
Lirr hissed as Demery and Athe advanced, and the sorcery in the sound was enough to make even the ghistings waver. But Demery, Athe and my mother resisted. They closed in.
Lirr’s eyes darted to his ghisting, who watched him with a similar, dire gaze through the restraining horde of his kin. Harpy herself held his arms behind his back.
“Don’t be a fool, Tane,” Lirr called. Demery and Athe moved to flank him, and my mother passed Samuel and me by as she came to face Lirr directly, axe in hand. “I did this for our people. For us.”
We want freedom. Tane’s voice was warm deadfall under a summer sun. She came through the crowd to stand at my side, and our tether reformed. The thundering of my heart began to calm. But not this. Not suffering and death.
Lirr laughed. “Death? Look at you! You’re perfect, Mother. Unified, with that girl. I made you.”
No. Tane looked to my mother, her sea-glass eyes reflecting my own. She did. And together, we are more than you ever imagined. We are more than you can stop.
“That is very nice,” Olsa commented dryly, resting one hand on the head of the feline ghisting at her side. A lynx, I realized. Its tufted ears flicked to and fro. “I also have many feelings. But we need to kill them now.”
Anne hefted her axe and gave Demery a meaningful look. He nodded.
The axe took Lirr right in the throat at the same time as the ghistings erupted. Ethereal screams and howls tore through the Wold in a keening cacophony of joy or lament or something in between.
One strike, two. I closed my eyes on the third and felt Tane slip back into my skin. The blood seeping from my side slowed and my pain retreated.
I exhaled and started to open my eyes again, but hesitated. When I looked at the world once more, Lirr would be dead, Hoten extinguished and the battle over. I’d be standing in a summer Wold on the Winter Sea, with pirates and Samuel Rosser, my mother and a swarm of ghistings.
Whoever I’d been when I stood on the gallows in Fort Almsworth would be truly gone. And what I’d become, the life I’d choose and the people I’d spend it with? They were nothing like the Girl from the Wold had ever imagined.
I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was not Lirr’s headless corpse. It was not Hoten fading from existence, crumpling like ash, and the ghistings that cavorted or stood solemnly by to mark his passing. It was not even the shape of a monstrous spider, lingering among the trees like a hound awaiting its master.
I saw my mother, pulling me into an embrace.
And Samuel Rosser, smiling down at us.
FORTY-SEVEN
A Doorway in the Birches
SAMUEL
Through a veil of fine snow and the eternal dusk, I watched Hart drop anchor in the channel beyond the Wold. I stood at the edge of the forest, its gentle heat at my back and the north’s bitter cold on my face. Around my boots, mist curled from bare earth and moss. It prickled at the exposed skin of my forearms, where I had pushed my sleeves back and my bandages clung. The scent of the forest was easy in my lungs, earthen, deep and cool—the bridge between unnatural summer and endless winter.
Hart was battered and crippled, but he lived. His stovepipes released plumes of grey into the drifting snow as he settled in, his crew moved with calm efficiency, and Captain Fisher stood tall on the quarterdeck.
As the crew furled patched sails above her cocked hat, Fisher saluted me. I raised my good hand in return and started to pick my way down to the water, over the snowline and onto a blood-soaked beach that had, a few hours before, been covered with dying and wounded. Most of them were aboard Harpy now, moored off an ice shelf to the south next to Nameless, or housed in tents inside the summer Wold. We would mourn the dead tonight.
My relief at seeing Fisher was sweet, but exhausted. I had been run off my feet since the conflict ended, organizing a search for missing allies and lurking enemies. I had dismissed my Other-born spider under Olsa’s guidance too, and it had faded back into its own world. But not before I looked it in the eyes and dispelled any last threads of fear.