We unwrote them all, it says, and its last look at her face—if such a thing could see at all—was an expression of such horror that it reduced her to stunned wonder: a child who has been slapped, too astonished to cry.
And now she was evicted: mid-air still, a
bean-sidhe sailing silently down the cnoch, with the weight of a grown man abruptly hanging off her arm, her hand still glued to his face. He spasmed and kicked like a man on a gallow-tree. On instinct she stiffened up her elbow and wrapped her other arm around his waist (the too-hasty gesture split the skin over her shoulderblade) and thought
down now, down now, even though there was no real need to command it. She was holding
herself in the air by her own power, and she always had been—not the torc at all.
The moment her weight fell on her feet again, her legs spilled out from under her. Her limbs felt as they did after she’d been swimming a long time: the pull of the earth reasserting itself after the liquid weightlessness of water. Her mind felt the same. She stared agape into his face, trying to remember why she had hated him.
Mo stórin, you’re hurting him, came Meg’s mild voice in her mind.
That’s not nice of you at all. You had better stop.The black cables extruding from her fingertips crackled as they whipped back to the space under her nails, and she, dazed, was only grateful that they
could do that, that they
could be withdrawn, though she still could not allow herself to wonder where, exactly, they had gone.
Snow on the ground, ice on the water. Her mind groped forward and seized on the idea that snow might slow the fire, that it might make a barricade. It might not reach the town.
It had been snowing that day behind the Dagger with Catch, and there had been an emptiness in the world that cried out, and then there was nothing at all,
nothing and nothing, forever and forever, and then the wintry world had returned but for a moment, there had been nothing but whiteness. Everywhere. Forever and ever.
Catch, Catch, where is it? Where did it go?
His reply, newly calm, still unfamiliar, had seemed almost like someone she didn’t know:
I have to speak to Gloria. That was Jernoah, leaving.
Ruin, he had said.
Ruin.And certes there was ruin enough: ruin all around, the Woods in ruins, her left hand in tatters and blisters on her back, and the man himself, drooling across her inner wrist as she cradled his head, trying to lift it upright. The gods alone knew what ruin lay behind his face.
They had gone into his eyes. Her mind groped lazily, then seized upon the thought that he had said
Ruann, not
ruin—seized it with such ferocity that her heart squeezed tight. At last, a word she recognized.
Her lips parted to repeat
Ruann?, to demand he explain himself. Her chin quivered, lower lip shaking. All that emerged was a thick crow’s-croak—
uck—with tongue mired behind her teeth. Tried again, jaw flapping open, and fell into a blind panic as the words kept rolling further and further out of reach. She
knew them, she could
hear them, but her mouth seemed incapable of giving them shape.
At the bottom of her despair, she tried to scream and found that she could: a wild, wordless shriek.