The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) (11 page)

“On your knees, Lachlan Laidlaw. Beg for mercy before last of the Ice Kings, the Lord of Winter’s Night. For you, at last, there is no time.”

The man’s face split into a grin so wide Vanessa thought his head would split open. Lachlan, crouching, made a swift forwards movement and there was a metallic, swishing sound. In a second he was up on his haunches, his arms straining under the weight of the Ice King’s broadsword. There was the hissing of unsheathing steal as three of the other men made a move forward to protect their king, but the fourth man in a black bearskin halted them with a commanding hand.

“Hold.” his voice hard.

“NO!”

The Ice King turned for a second at the betrayal and as he did Lachlan took his chance, the rusty light liquid against the weapon as Lachlan thrust the blade forwards.

The Ice King took in a deep breath as his own sword pierced up into his ribcage. He looked displeased, his hands reaching, his fingers closing around Dr Lachlan Laidlaw’s skull, pressing so hard that Vanessa could hear the bones grinding but Lachlan held strong, his shoulders tensing and straining, his arm forcing the stolen blade higher, deeper, further.

The Ice King let out a long last breath as the blade retreated, slicing back through lung, kidney, liver, his blood rushing out, splashing, making the floor a slick, black-red river.

The body shuddered and fell forward and the man in black stepped forward. Clamping his fingers around the Ice King’s head he lifted the body and looked into the dead face with interest. He turned the face this way and that as the body, huge as it was, dangled from his fist.

“Here he is then, my friend, or here he was…” the man turned to Lachlan as to an old friend “…not so formidable, when death leaves behind the skin and bones.”

Lachlan’s left hand was holding onto Vanessa, his body still shielding hers although their clothes were sticky now and wet with the Ice King’s blood. Lachlan spoke up.

“Is it done?” His voice was not hiding its shakiness but already the man in black was shaking his head.

“No, Lachlan…” His smile was not friendly, not wide, it was all knowing. “Not yet… This king shrugged off the mantle at last.” dropping the Ice King’s corpse to the floor the man in black reached towards Lachlan. Lachlan pinned Vanessa tighter behind him.

“Don’t harm her. Not her. She found me, she’s done her part. Let her go.”

The man in black held up his hands.

“There is no letting go, Lachlan. She is part of your destiny and you are all of hers. Sixty years is no time at all where those like us are concerned.” The man in black smiled his unfriendly smile. “There are rules. Written somewhere.” He stepped forwards, his hands reaching to rest on Lachlan’s shoulders “The rule states that we must take an eye for an eye, my friend.” He smiled across at Vanessa and then glanced at the bloody mess on the floor “Recall…you are here to take the mantle from him, Lachlan and wear it yourself….”

Vanessa gave a cry, understanding, with horror, what was going to happen.

“No. Lachlan…no…”

The man in black spoke over her.

“The law states; A king…for a king. That, Lachlan Laidlaw, is your destiny…” the man in black reached a hand, spreading the fingers across Lachlan’s face. Vanessa rushed him.

“No. No…please…” but she was plucked aside, picked from the ground by one of the other men and held.

Vanessa watched. The man in black did not turn his head from his task, as Lachlan writhed and groaned the man’s fingers traced patterns across Lachlan’s skull and beneath the fingertips crisp black lines formed and merged, angled and grouped on Lachlan’s skin, rising up into his hairline, the runes writing themselves onto his scalp.

“The King is Dead…” The man in black declared at last. Beside him Lachlan Laidlaw groaned and stumbled in his newly etched skin.

“Long live the King….” the men thundered, their feet stamping approval, the storm building around them, the noise unbearable now, beating at Vanessa.

She reached for Lachlan.

“Lachlan?” her voice was weak. The Ice King turned to her, his face now fully recognisable, the dream stranger’s face “Lachlan.”

“It is time to go.” The man in black looked at Vanessa, his eyes carrying sadness. Vanessa felt compressed, her limbs inactive, her breathing shallow. In the darkness there was a smell of blood, the cracking of bone and she watched as the Ice King Lachlan’s body bent and distorted at the storm inside him, scouring, displacing, ravaging. He looked at her,

“Vanessa.”

His jaw widened out, wider and wider until the bones snapped open, skin and fur folded and suddenly he was there.

The wolf.

Instinct should have made Vanessa step back, but she understood, there was no time. She reached forward, the wolf looking back at her, with one green eye, one brown.

“Lachlan?” the wolf tipped its head back and gave a mournful howl, a sound as bitter as the wind, the volume rising and rising, filling her head so that Vanessa could not think anymore. The howl widened, stretched, the other wolves joined, the noise tearing at Vanessa until the sound was no longer wolf, it was weather. A sound of snow and wind, of ice chinkling on the surface of a frozen lake, the sounds grew and combined, deafening until the roof began to rattle with the energy of it.

Hearts clash
. She was choking with effort and fear, her lungs tightening in her chest.
Bones break
. Blood in her throat, the ice ringing and ringing around her. Until it did not ring, it groaned, there was a sound then as if the sky was tearing, shards of noise and a crack opened up above her.

The roof ripped off, whipping into the wind, bent like cardboard and the cold bit hard, gripped her skin, froze her breath and there was nowhere to go now, but darkness.

PART FIVE

There is No Time

“I hear your girl was a bit of a silly tart and got pregnant then?” Mrs Langdon was an unpleasant woman, revelling in other people’s troubles and keen to pass judgement wherever possible. Most people in Woodcastle disliked her but her small corner shop was useful if you ran out of bread, needed emergency beans or a pint of milk. It was a horrid shop, carrying an air of rancid fat and smelling of hay. Hettie Way always felt you needed a ration book to shop there. “So much for all her science then eh? Never did any biology did she not? Loves her Arctic Roll eh?” Mrs Langdon gave her grim smirk. She was an odd mix, a woman who was round in the middle, a heavy bust and heavier waist and hips, but she managed to be skinny at the edges, her arms sinewy and thin and her legs bony.

“You never had children did you Mrs Langdon?” it was the cruellest thing that Hettie Way had ever said in her life. Anyone who knew Mrs Langdon knew that her husband had left her for a woman who later bore him five children. For a second she held Mrs Langdon’s gaze, felt the way that her comment sliced into that flabby belly and let Mrs Langdon’s emotional innards slop out. She left the loaf of bread she had come for on the counter.

When Hettie returned to Cob Cottage Vanessa was sitting, as was her current habit, in the chair by the window with the notebooks by her. There had not been much salvaged from the wrecked Arctic research centre but the few notebooks had come in the supply plane along with Vanessa and some plastic boxes filled with samples of the local flora.

The compass was in Vanessa’s hand and she was staring at it, deep in thought. She had made copious notes today, Hettie could see the drawings and scribbled comments, the pages that had been filled and she wished she had thought to buy Vanessa another notebook. They had to be a particular kind, a cloth bound A5 size that they could only get in Castlebury. It would be useful to have that as an errand, Hettie thought, she needed to distract Vanessa from whatever terrible knowledge the notebooks withheld.

Hettie had pussyfooted around her daughter since her dramatic return. She did not have a phone and so it was young Sergeant Williamson who, initially, had come to the house with the news about the Arctic disaster. The first thoughts were that there had been an explosion, this theory being superseded a few weeks later by the evidence of a bad storm. It seemed to Hettie that no one knew what had happened and that no one was really bothering to go and take a look. It was a long way to travel after all and De Quincey Langport Ltd were on the brink of going out of business, a matter more pressing than unravelling the fates of the dead professors.

Hettie was waiting for her daughter to tell her the tale. She waited. She waited. Even the news of the baby did not prompt the telling.

So Hettie decided to take action.

The bath made a wonderful waterfall sound that seemed to be a result of the strange acoustics of the curvaceous walls of the bathroom. The space was small and yet sounded vast. Hettie let the water run hot for several moments. She took her time lighting the candles in the window recess and the various small nooks and crannies set into the walls themselves. The room began to glow and steam.

“You having a bath?” Vanessa stood in the doorway. She was showing now, her belly rounded out, still with four months to go. She was looking tired, circles had darkened beneath her eyes and her skin was paler than it had ever been.
Ghostlike
. Hettie blacked the word out of her mind.

“Nope. You are.” she rose as Vanessa entered the room “It won’t take long to fill. I’ll fetch your robe and the towels…and that bath stuff you like…” Hettie busied herself in the small hallway, pulling towels from the honeyed oak of the linen press, lifting Vanessa’s robe from the hook on her door. The bath oil was in a bag on the little chest of drawers, a little treat that she had brought back from the chemist in Castlebury yesterday.

With Vanessa settled, the water running, the scent of the bath oil drifting through the cottage Hettie stepped back into the kitchen, through the arch.

The compass was on the coffee table, perched on one of the much folded maps that Vanessa’s mind toured over again and again.

Hettie Way knew what a compass was, of course, but it was her long held opinion that if you needed a compass to find your path you deserved to be lost. The glass above the face was cracked where, during the research centre disaster, it had saved Vanessa from being impaled by falling metalwork. Hettie Way understood that this small round of metal and enamel marked with letters was a talisman, an artefact, but she was uncertain whether it was for good or ill and there was a great deal at stake.

Her hand reached for the compass. So small. So inconsequential. They’d bought it at the outdoors shop on Laundry Lane. Hettie knew that did not make the difference, events imbued the talismans, they were ordinary until some event lent them power. She reached and stopped as the compass’s energy reached back, a fierce prickling, like electricity, sharp and cold. Warned, she turned her attention to the notebooks. The oldest looking one with a black cloth cover, foxed at the edges and water stained, was lying open, face down on the arm of the chair. She reached and was warned once more, the bright prickling feeling like frost in her fingertips.

That night, as on all the others, Vanessa did not sleep well. Hettie was woken as Vanessa got up and left her room. There were not the usual bathroom sounds and so Hettie listened harder, heard the doors to the porch open, the creak of the deckboards outside.

She pulled on her black waxed raincoat and stepped out through the kitchen door. As Hettie made her way around the side of the cottage, she could see Vanessa walking down towards the water, her bare feet not bothered by the stones. Hettie watched, careful to remain out of sight. Her daughter stood as though asleep, the breeze rose and Hettie took in a scent that she was not used to, the hint of snow and of smokey honey. As she watched the water grew steely grey beneath the night sky, a thin light glimmered from its surface and a different sound lifted out of the water, discordant, offkey. The hair on the back of her neck rose and she folded herself deeper into her coat. The water’s edge was stiffening into thin shards of ice that could not hold their shape, the lake water lapped and sipped them to liquid. After a few moments Vanessa turned back into the house.

In the morning there was no breakfast. Vanessa awoke from her troubled sleep and after dressing she headed into the living room to take up her seat and her studies. Her mother barred her way.

“You are my daughter. My family.” Hettie spoke, her voice too quiet, sounding strained. She took in two or three deep breaths, as if she was considering her actions, before speaking again.

“Understand. I would not do this normally. Know. I do not do this lightly.” Hettie was struggling with emotion, her eyes searching her daughter’s face. “But today it must be done.” Vanessa felt the burning heat from her mother, the spell was being cast and she let it warm her.

“You have found your way here, there is time enough to tell me…” Hettie’s voice was altered as it reached Vanessa’s ears, deeper, commanding and she could not stop herself from talking, of bark and lichen, blood and ice, of maps and paths and the route to Far North.

It was a full moon, of course, when the baby, a girl, was born. They had not argued about where Vanessa was going to give birth, Hettie thought she might have argued for the science and safety of the hospital at Castlebury but Vanessa wanted to be home.

“Not want to be. Must be.” Vanessa said and knew her mother would understand. That was a difference since her homecoming, Vanessa had a new angle on her mother and their relationship. She saw Pike Lake with different, wider angled eyes and was more careful about the paths she took in Havoc Wood.

Right now however, there was a pressing need to get down to the lake shore, to the flat rock.

“The lake…by the lake…got to be there…” Vanessa took her breaths, deep and regulated and not the slightest bit of use against the deep and rolling tidal wave of pain.

“You do what you must…I’ll follow…” Hettie felt her daughter crush her hand as she rode out the newly powerful contractions. She had been afraid before, at the beginning, but now, with the contractions really strong, Vanessa changed mental gears, she was, Hettie understood, locking into the practical biology of childbirth to distract herself.

Outside, the moon had shifted its light and illuminated the flat rock that served as resting place and sentinel post at all times of the year. Vanessa’s progress was measured in pain as she halted every third step to ride out each new wave of agony.

Hettie Way had delivered many babies over her lifetime but her heart was pounding at the imminent arrival of her first grandchild. She too, locked onto the practicalities, this was not the time to be felled by emotions. They were both focused on the pain, on the timing, arriving at the rock as Vanessa’s waters broke, flooding over the rock and lashing back and over and into the lake where they were drunk up thirstily.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” Vanessa’s voice was low and tight, grinding through the contraction.

“You don’t have to, your body does.” her mother said and squeezed her hand. Vanessa gave her a searing, poignant look, looked through her almost as if at a stranger, tears springing into her wild scared eyes.

“It will be fine.” and Hettie hoped it would be. Her daughter was strong, so far everything was progressing.

In the end, there were no dramas, once at the rock the contractions were harder and in a few moments the baby was out, slithering onto the rock with a cry that echoed around the lake. Hettie cut the cord and Vanessa held her daughter to her chest. Hettie waited, worried about them getting cold, anxious to get them inside the cottage. For some time Vanessa couldn’t speak, could only make strange small moans and then the tears washed out of her, warming her daughter who gave another strong, high cry. Tears pressed at Hettie Way’s eyes and blurred her view of her newborn granddaughter.

They called her, Anna.

Far North, a lone black wolf paced by a hole in the ice on a vast frozen lake that had a name no one could remember. At a sound, a high cry, as of a baby being born, the wolf looked deep into the water, reached in with its tongue and lapped a little. Then, he turned and headed back towards the shoreline.

Anyone foolish enough to be freezing on the lake would have watched the wolf’s steady progress, up until the moment that the wolf seemed to stretch and yawn its body open and out stepped a man who once was Dr Lachlan Laidlaw.

Different now. Chieftain. Ice King. The God of Winter’s Night.

A man who found himself Elsewhere and was not given to looking back.