The Tree of Story (21 page)

The sight filled Will with such terror that he was rendered immobile, unable even to cry out.

Shade snarled and bounded toward the Angel, but in the next moment he was brought up short, his paws scrabbling on the tiled floor, by a voice. A woman’s voice that seemed to echo through the entire lobby.

“Children, why are you here? You should not be here.”

The voice sounded angry, but there was something else in it, a deep sadness. It was a voice that Will remembered hearing before but couldn’t put a name to, though Shade apparently had no doubts. He padded up to the white figure as if by command. A slender hand emerged from the sleeve of the shrowde cloak and touched the wolf’s forehead.

Then Will knew. He gripped Rowen’s shoulder to keep her from fleeing.

The white figure drew back the concealing hood and they saw a face that they remembered well, the face of a young woman with dusky skin and jet black hair. It was Morrigan of the Tain Shee.

“My friends,” she said. “You should never have come here.”

11

F
REYA STOOD IN THE
wind and the snow and wondered where in the Realm she had come to.

She had been locked in a lightless room in the toyshop for hours. The Marrowbone brothers had bound her hands and closed the door, and then she had heard them moving something heavy in front of it. When their footsteps had died away, she had tried pushing the door with her shoulder. No matter how hard she tried it wouldn’t budge, and she couldn’t climb to her feet because of her ankle. Flitch had broken it; that was almost certain. The pain wasn’t going away, and she felt cold all over and couldn’t stop shaking. So she had sat on the stone floor, hopeless and in agony, dreading what would happen the next time the door opened.

She was sure of one thing only: that Brax had not yet discovered whatever he was looking for. She was still alive
only because he suspected she knew more than she had admitted about Father Nicholas’s secrets. If he did find the cabinet, she would be of no further use to him. And then the hogmen would have their revenge on her, as they’d promised when they were shutting her up in here.

She couldn’t tell how long she had waited in the dark, but after a long time she became aware of a light. A warm yellow flickering, like candle flame. It was coming not from the crack between the door and the floor but from behind her, from the back of the closet, as if the back wall had opened onto a vast darkness. With effort she turned and the light swiftly grew and then she saw that it was the tiger, padding out of the dark toward her.

There was nowhere to run or hide, even if she’d been able to. And so she had pushed herself up against the door and waited.

The tiger had stopped a few paces from her, and then she could see that it was not as solid and catlike as it had been when it had sprung at the mage. It was more a thing of separate flames woven together, with patches of nothingness in between. The flames themselves appeared frayed and wavering, as if they might go out at any moment. Even so, their light was strong enough in this dark place to hurt her eyes. This thing had been pretending to be Master Nicholas, and she hadn’t understood how or why. Then she felt the rope around her wrists loosen and fall away, and as she gazed into the tiger’s glowing yellow eyes, she finally grasped what Rowen had done.

“You’re Riddle, aren’t you,” she had said, rubbing her chafed wrists. “You were guarding the toyshop for Rowen while she went to search for Father Nicholas.”

The tiger did not speak, but its eyes were fixed on her and she was certain that it wanted something from her, though
she had no idea what. Some of its flames fluttered as if about to go out.

“He hurt you, too, didn’t he?” she finally said. “The mage. Can you still talk to me?”

Again the tiger said nothing, then it turned and took a few paces away from her, back into the darkness where there should have been a wall. It halted and looked back at Freya.

“You want me to follow,” she said. “I understand. But I can’t walk.”

The tiger came close to her. She couldn’t help pulling back in fear, but it had no intention of harming her. Instead it ducked its fiery head under Freya’s arm and lifted it. She understood immediately: Riddle was offering to carry her.

So she had climbed on the back of the tiger, and to her surprise the creature of fire was solid enough to hold her and the flames did not burn. He had plunged with her into the dark and then they were in a place she could not understand, where everything around her was shifting and rippling and changing. She had no idea how long they travelled through this impossible world, when without warning the whirl and rush stopped. They were in a place of dim light and softly falling snow. The sudden quiet and stillness made her head spin.

The next thing she knew Riddle was coming apart: the many small, fluttering flames that composed him drifted farther and farther from each other. Freya found herself sinking slowly into the soft, thick snow. Then all the flames went out, one after another, and Riddle was gone without a word.

Now she was here, and Riddle had left her with no explanation why he had brought her to this place. Was she miles away from Fable? She could not even be sure of the time of day. At least she did not feel cold, which was very strange when she thought about it. She should have been freezing
to death out here, but all she felt was a briskness to the air that seemed to revive all her senses and ease the pain of her ankle.

And then she thought,
Snow
.

Snow was the reason she had made the long journey to Fable in the first place. The dragon, Whitewing Stonegrinder, had come to Skald one night in the form of fog, snow and hail. He had given her a message for Father Nicholas and for Rowen. His message was that when Rowen saw snow in a high place, she would know he had come to help her. Snow had fallen on Fable one night in the middle of summer and they knew that Whitewing Stonegrinder had come as he’d said he would. Rowen had gone willingly to Appleyard that night, no doubt hoping to meet with the dragon at the top of the hill, which was the highest place in the city. But then Freya had been taken away by order of the mage, and she had no idea what had happened to Rowen after that.

Freya held out her hand now and the flakes of snow fell onto her palm, but they did not melt. They lay there, glittering in the dim light.

“Old One?” she whispered, her heart pounding. She remembered that this was the right way to address an ancient power of the earth like a dragon.

She had seen him in his dragon form once before. He had been terrifying to behold, a great winged being with scales that held the blue light of ancient ice. But crouched here in the snow, she thought back to the first time she had met the dragon, when she was just a child.

Her father had taken her into the mountains to search for a rare kind of yellow-grey stone he used to sharpen the blades he forged in the smithy. Finding these stones was one of the many things she needed to learn as his apprentice in the craft.

People from Skald didn’t go into the mountains very often. They were afraid of the mountains, though she didn’t know why. On that trip her father had brought her all the way up the valley of the Whitewing River to the foot of the great river of ice. There they stopped and her father built a small fire to warm them with wood he’d gathered on the way. He’d already found the stones he was looking for, and now Freya understood they had come here for something more. Snow began to fall, large soft wet flakes drifting down all around them, enough snow to put the little fire out. Her father had whispered then that the dragon was here. She had looked around, frightened but not entirely believing him, then asked her father where the dragon was.

“He is dreaming,” he had said. “Listen, you can hear him stirring in his sleep.”

She listened, and she heard faint sounds of creaking and rumbling from deep from the ice, as if something huge and very powerful was indeed stirring within it.

“One day,” her father had said, “the dragon will awake.”

“Old One,” she said now, a little louder this time. “Are you here?”

There was no answer. The pain in her ankle had subsided to a dull throb. She thought she might be able to stand. Slowly and carefully she climbed to her feet, keeping her weight off her injured leg. She balanced there, straining to see through the veils of falling snow.

The snowflakes in her hand were glittering even more brightly now. Then she looked past her hand and saw that the snow all around her was glittering, too, in softly pulsing lines like veins under the skin.

“It
is
you, Old One,” she said, scarcely daring to breathe. “You’re here.”

Then she heard a voice that seemed to come both from
inside her and the cold air around her. A voice she had heard once before, when hail fell on the roofs of Skald at midsummer.

His voice was not as strong as she remembered—it was little more than a whisper—but it carried a rolling undercurrent within it as of great storm clouds in the distance. And beneath the voice a faint creaking and rumbling that she remembered from that day at the foot of the ice with her father. The dragon stirring.

Freya Ragnarsdaughter
, said the voice.
Welcome
.

“Riddle brought me here, Old One. The shapechanger. I don’t know what’s happened to him.”

I sent him to find you and bring you to me. He was injured and now he has returned to the weave of things, to heal
.

“You sent him for me? Why, Old One?”

We have a task to perform, child of Skald. One that we can only accomplish together
.

“My friends,” Freya said, and now all that she had been through and seen welled up in her and she could not stop the tears that slid down her face. “Father Nicholas and Rowen and Will—they’re in danger. Can you help them?”

They are far away, Freya Ragnarsdaughter. We cannot reach them now. It is too late for that. And I have need of you here
.

“Me, Old One? What can I do? My ankle is broken.”

Listen now, mortal child. What you see around you is all of me that remains. You call me Old One and that is right, for I am old. Old—and the sun is strong. Stronger now than I have ever known in the long ages of my life. What strength I have left I must spend to keep the clouds above us, to keep the sun from finishing me. I have sent my roots into the earth to seek out the lightless underground rivers that are always cold. But they are deep here and difficult to reach. I am weary. I need a living heart and will to keep me from surrendering to the sun. I need your heart and your will, daughter of Skald
.

Freya felt her fear rise up. She struggled to keep the weight off her injured leg. “What must I do, Old One?”

I will share with you what I know and what I am. You will be changed, as will I. We will become something that is both mortal and dragon, yet neither. Together we will gather our strength, and when the time comes, we will return to the Loremaster’s city together
.

“Then I give you my heart and will, Old One,” Freya said, and she closed her eyes and waited.

It was then that she truly felt the cold. The true, deep, deathly cold of the dragon that he had been shielding her from until now. It burned her hands first and her feet, and then it moved inward. There was a terrible icy fire in her veins and she had to struggle not to cry out. Tears ran down her cheeks and dropped into the snow. She felt the cold flowing over her and stabbing deep into her. She felt it move into the broken bone of her ankle and the pain vanished. The cold itself was knitting the bone back together, healing and binding it. Soon she would be able to walk once more.

Then the dragon spoke again and his voice pulsed through her as if it was the voice of her own heartbeat.

Mortal child, tell me what you feel
.

“I feel ice in my veins, Old One,” Freya said. “I’m afraid.”

Do not fear. You will not die of this cold. It will preserve you and strengthen you for what lies ahead. It will become you and you will give it thought and purpose
.

What the dragon said was true. She felt now that she was nothing but the cold and that time itself seemed to have frozen to a halt along with her. Yet when she looked up, she saw, through a gap in the clouds, the stars wheeling through the sky, as if the night that had fallen while she stood here was rushing past. When she drew a breath, the air moved in and out of her as slowly as the sea’s tide rising and falling. She was aware of her body standing on the hilltop, but she
was more than just that small frail form lost in the snow.
That
was still a part of her, it was true. That was the Freya she had been. She knew that she cared for that Freya and wished her not to suffer. But now she had been taken up within this greater self, whose eyes and thoughts travelled out into the falling snow and farther still.