Page 109 of A Frozen Pyre
With her ability to craft doors, he hadn’t expected her to be gone for long.
The castle had remained quiet, and the attendants were too afraid of Sedit to do much more than shove piles of food into Ophir’s chambers and leave. Fortunately, this kept Tyr fed while doing markedly little for his own survival.
Sedit rammed himself into the door again. Tyr had known the creature to be sloth-like in Ophir’s absence. It was content to sleep all day, graze on the food provided, and warm itself by the fire. It would occasionally curl up next to Tyr whenit wanted attention. More or less, the demon hound kept to itself. He’d only seen Sedit strike or act in violence when Ophir had commanded it.
He threw his body into the door again.
“Is she calling you?” he demanded of the vageth. “For fuck’s sake,” he mumbled to himself, “the dog isn’t going to answer.”
If he had to, he’d open the door and sprint after the vageth until his legs could carry him no farther. He took four steps across the room, but he wasn’t fast enough. Sedit had given up on the door again and bolted across the room with full force, thrusting his body into the window. It shattered into a million pieces as he burst through the glass. It cut into him, blackened blood spurting into the air in streaks as gravity claimed him.
Tyr ran for the window in shock. He’d scarcely reached its lip when the loud, horridthwackof meat hit the frozen earth. His stomach roiled in horror at the limp, smattered remains of the dog on the ground below.
Ophir’s door flew open as an attendant responded to the commotion within. The woman barely had time to scream before Tyr slipped out around her. He snagged a cloak and gloves and tugged them into the unseen place between things with him as he slipped out of the castle. It took him less than a minute to round the corner and slide through the snow-slick lawn to where pieces of Sedit twitched. From overhead, the servant was still screaming.
He wasn’t sure as to the wisdom of what he was about to do next.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered to Sedit. The vageth whimpered, white, phantom tendrils emanating from his jaw as they attempted to stitch the upper and lower halves together. Tyr took off in the opposite direction as he ran for the stables. He didn’t know how much time he had before Sedit put himself back together, but two horses were tethered to the back, ready for riders. Whether it was dumb luck or the goddess was blessing his haste, he had no idea. Still unseen, heunwrapped the reins from the post, swung into a saddle, and clicked his tongue, kicking the horse to spur it into action. He’d made it around the castle before a shout from the stables alerted others to a runaway horse.
By the time he made it to Sedit, the hound was missing vital pieces.
Tyr knew he only had a few moments before his horse was snatched. He jumped down from the saddle and scooped what he could of the vageth into a pile. “How does this work?” he hissed urgently.
He flinched away from the searching, prodding cobwebs that reached from one piece of the demon to another. The hound’s head was whole. His front legs were working. The wounded split in his torso was nearly knit. He pulled back his teeth in a snarl, but not at Tyr. A loud, threatening growl rumbled from his throat as he stared down two attendants who’d taken off after the horse.
Tyr counted on Sedit to keep them at bay, letting the hound bark and snap as he pushed the vageth’s back leg back into its socket, allowing the ghostly vines to sew it back together. Sedit got up onto unsteady feet and took a testing step forward. The attendants cried out in horror as the demon rose from the dead, unable to be killed by glass or heights or dismemberment.
Tyr was in the saddle before Sedit took his first lunging steps away from the castle, over the bridge, and into the city. People screamed and parted like the sea as a rabid hellhound tore through the streets, a stallion without a rider quick on its trail.
Tyr pushed the horse faster and faster but knew he’d lose the vageth soon. He looked up at the mountains stretching to the west and cautiously eyed the land beyond the city. Days of rugged terrain, rocky foothills, and useless soil separated Gwydir from Gyrradin’s unknown northern lands. From the looks of his arrow-slick body and the intensity of his speed, it looked like Sedit was barreling straight for the Unclaimed Wilds.
Forty
Three Hours Following the Wedding
Aubade and the Frozen Straits
Harland had thought himself a coward for running away, until he realized he was runningtoward, notfrom. A door stood on the cliffs just as he broke free from the coliseum, perfectly at home as if it had been constructed for no other purpose than to watch the sun set over the western horizon. The screams of bloodshed had died down by the time he wrapped his hands around the knob. He shot one look over his shoulder, but he knew there was nothing for him in Aubade. Not anymore.
He gagged on the blinding white that hit him as frigid wind filled his lungs.
His eyes watered from the blast, eyelashes instantly feeling heavy as they frosted.
“Fuck.” Harland slammed the door. He wasn’t sure what had happened in the coliseum, but if the Duchess of Yelagin was any indication of the maddening screams that had come from the now-silent stadium, going back would mean facing the blackened pits of hell. Still, walking through Ophir’s door into the frozen wasteland with little more than temperate seaside clothes on his back would help neither him nor the princess.
Night had fallen by the time he returned to the door.Numbness beyond a warrior’s fight had descended on him. Harland had seen death. He’d encountered blood and taken lives. He’d fought, and protected, and buried. There was no space in his head or heart for what he’d encountered as he’d picked his way through the quiet, lifeless carnage to reenter Castle Aubade and retrieve lifesaving clothes for temperatures that would see him dead in under a minute. His mind had succumbed to a chill as cold as the weather beyond Ophir’s terrible door as he’d stepped over fallen bodies, open mouths, and unseeing eyes.
His shoes were slick with blood, his eyes glazed with an unseeing, protective nothingness by the time he found his way back to the sea. The waves continued to pound against the shore as they had long before the wedding and as they would for one thousand years after. Seabirds called out against the darkness. The night and its moon burned through the starry sky, promising that time would go on, that the world wasn’t over, that this was not the end, but he felt nothing.
He put one foot in front of the other as he gripped the frosted knob and braced himself against the cold.
It ate him alive.
Harland stumbled into the loud crunch of ice-crusted snow breaking beneath his feet. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him as he crested the small hill and gazed over the bright silver snowscape. A full moon cast metallic light over the flat plane that spread out before him. At the bottom of the hill sat a large black shape. He scrunched his face against the cold and stared into the howling winter night as he struggled to see the silhouette.
Seeing nothing else and knowing that Ophir had created this door, he set forth toward the ominous gray-black shape that broke up the reflective obscurity of winter midnight. It wasn’t until he reached the bottom of the hill that a tall, thin shape distinguished itself against the shadow blotting the snowscape. He was nearly upon it before he realized he wasseeing a ship.
He’d run through a number of curious scenarios in the time it took him to discern the wooden structure from the ice around it, but he decided it was a ship that had been abandoned before the waters had frozen beyond passable voyage. He gripped as tightly to his theory as he did to his thick winter clothes as he trudged toward the shape, until his guess was shattered.
