Which is bad, considering I really AM a hex.
Yancey, hoarse: “I know. Oh, Ed—oh, shit! I think . . . I think . . .”
“Think what?” Ed asked, desperately hoping he didn’t know full well what she was going to say. Horrifyingly, however, she went on ahead and turned in his arms, fish-gasping, to blurt it out anyhow—
“. . . baby’s coming, oh fuck yes. Right. Damn. NOW.”
“But—it’s too soon.”
“Oh, really? I wasn’t aware!” Yancey gave a great groan and rolled further still, humping up on hands and knees; as she did, something several sorts of wet broke from her in a gush, soaking skirt and floor alike with strong-smelling liquid and runny pink blood, the sight of which melted her bravado away like snow. “Good God Almighty, help me please,” was all she barely had time to husk before the next cramp hit, bending her back in two.
Ed cast his wild gaze ’round for anything to help her in her agony, finally fixing on Chess, whose own eyes seemed to’ve gone suddenly twice their normal size, slit-pupil green as a startled cat’s. “What d’we do?” he demanded of the awestruck hex. “You’ve seen this before, plenty times—said so yourself. For Chrissakes, what now?”
Chess gulped. “You, uh, said Doc Jenks, or whatever—”
“He ain’t due back for two damn weeks! Look at her, Jesus—she needs help now!”
“Okay, okay! Um . . . stop squealin’ and get her stood the hell up, hook your hands under her armpits . . . brace her on the chair-back, so’s she can hang on tight, and step back.” As he did, Chess took his place, leaning in over Yancey’s hunched and panting shoulder, voice surprisingly gentle. “All right, honey, you gotta stand wide—no, wider than that. Now, Ed’s gonna go get the sheets off the bed and I’m gonna work them drawers off, so you don’t have to worry about ’em slowin’ anything down; make a nice little nest for the baby to fall into, him ’n’ me.” Yancey gave a short, hoarse scream, unconnected to any of the above, and Ed jumped like it’d cut him. Chess patted her back, awkwardly. “Hell, I know it hurts, always does—nature of the beast, like every other goddamn thing. But this ain’t anything a thousand women before ain’t done, Yancey-girl, and walked away from, after. . . .”
She nodded, teeth grit, lip already bloody. “You’ll stay with me, though, right?”
“Well, now—”
“Chess, you have to! What if something goes wrong? She could—I mean, she might—” Ed let his voice drop, straining hard to fool himself Yancey couldn’t hear, just in order he could get the words out. “You can heal her, she needs it, better than any sawbones alive; she can’t do that, not for herself, or anybody else. And shit knows, I sure can’t, either.”
Chess laughed, a nasty little bark. “You two—want me for a midwife. Me.”
“Who’s better, ’mongst all three of us?”
“She’s seen babies born before!” Chess protested, with just the slightest bare hint of a whine to it. And: “Not mine, I haven’t,” Yancey snarled back, hanging onto the chair for dear life, so hard her knuckles cracked.
“Hey! I already said I knew it hurt—”
“You could make it hurt less,” Ed reminded him, to which Chess flushed, swore—and stroked a palm down her spine, sowing peace so sudden it registered as ecstasy. Yancey made as if to slump forward, all care for herself forgotten, ’til Chess hooked her up once more, grunting with effort. “No, don’t do that,” he told her. “Hell, it’s like you’re drunk! Have to level it off, next time.”
Yancey’s lips curved, slightly. “So,” she managed, a whispery mumble. “You . . . are staying. . . .”
“Looks like. But you’re still goin’—right?”
“Can’t not,” Ed replied, hoping he sounded more sure than he felt.
“I’ll try all I can to help, but that might not be much. Yancey—she’ll be busy. So this is on you, Ed. Get it done.”
“Geh whah?” Yancey tried to ask, as Ed nodded. But Chess’s hands were on her again, pulling her down. She closed her eyes, bobbing back and forth on waves of muffled pain ’til a swell woke her, and she came awake screaming her not-husband’s name.
Ed had discovered the hard way that rock salt worked better than lead buckshot ’gainst things made mostly of hexation, but in wind like this, salt wouldn’t go more than a few yards before dispersing harmlessly. He left the salt-shells he’d prepared in the kitchen, therefore, and loaded up with his old familiar: waterglass-tipped brass shells, with the Remington stamp. For things hexacious he sheathed his Bowie knife at his hip; cold steel wasn’t the equal of Doc Asbury’s anti-hexological silver-iron-sodium alloy, but it cut sharper and harder than many a hex realized. Then he pulled his hat down to shield his eyes, belted his overcoat tight, put one hand on his hat to hold it on and shouldered out into the storm.
The howling snow slashed near horizontal in its fury. Ed staggered, bracing himself against it, and forced himself on through a night thickened to sheer pitch by the blizzard. Only the long years he’d worked this steading guided him, a ground-knowledge better than any compass; he let his feet carry him through the fallow, empty field, feeling the slight rise as he neared the ridge dividing their land from Missus Daughter’s. Under the wind’s frozen teeth, anger and fear bled together, dulling into numbness. The snow even smelled wrong—stony, ashy, with a biting undertone like brimstone and the faintest tang of rotten fish, as flakes melted stingingly on his lips.
Yancey’s back there, bringin’ our first into this world, he told the storm grimly; might be its maker could hear the thought, but it wasn’t for her he spoke. And my friend, my best— A sharp, startled gust of laughter broke from his mouth, surprise so sharp the wind itself seemed to falter; God help him, it really was true. My best friend’s doin’ all he can to keep ’em both alive. So if you think a little sleet’s gonna keep me off, ma’am, then you’re much mistaken.
Step after step he trudged, head down and shoulders forward, like pushing a stuck cart through mud. Despite heavy sheepskin mitts, the hand he was using to hold his hat on was losing feeling, so he switched it—stuffed the other under his arm as he did, to little effect. The snow was near a foot deep, now; each step cost more strength as he kicked forward through thickening drifts. How long had it been? Felt near an hour, and the distance less than a mile under sunlight. . . .
In his gut, anger sank beneath rising fear—this was some disproportionate working, almost Biblical. Reminded him most of Pinkerton reports on the rain of fire Reverend Rook had called down on Calvary Cross, an Egypt-style plague lasting three full days and nights. Yancey hadn’t had any sense the Missus was as strong as Rook, but then, she wasn’t a hex; might she have been mistaken? Ed swallowed, a knife-blade in his throat. Bull-goose stupid, he raged at himself, thinkin’ you could take on a hex all your lonesome without Chess, or a Manifold—
All at once, he broke through the wind’s wall, almost falling as he stepped over the ridgeline and stumbled to a halt, heaving. The air here was similarly winter-cold, but still, and clear as water; the stars blazed overhead. He spun about, just in time to see—something, a bit like a long, shimmering curtain, thirty feet high and coloured like the Northern Lights, stretching some two or three hundred yards along the borderline ’twixt the farms. Could hear the wind he’d fought against howl from behind it, like a curtain, billowing up into furious storm-clouds. And here and there, blurry shapes that seemed to move and shift: black snow-capped peaks, a hellish vista, each trailing separate plumes of smoke . . .
Christ Almighty, Ed thought. She didn’t make this storm, at all. Just opened a door to—
(where? All the way back to Iceland?)
—and invited it in.
Which meant that even if the old woman wasn’t as strong as he’d feared, she was a damn sight cleverer than he’d hoped.
He started loping down the ridge, headed for the small farmhouse at its slope-bottom, a dark square shape with only a single light aglow in one window.
And as he ran, he unholstered his shotgun.
“Ugh,” Yancey groaned. “Did you knock me out?”
“Somethin’ like,” Chess snapped back, hands busy below her waist. “Now stay still, damnit.”
“Can barely stand, that’s how much it hurts. You want anything better, maybe you should do it again.”
“Yeah, well—maybe I will, too, you don’t shut the hell up. Lucky I’m here, and that’s a fact.”
Yancey felt her face droop, an all-over wince that’d probably seem comic, to a disinterested third party. Barely managing to tell him, as it took hold: “I know I am.”
Chess shot her a look, like he wanted to reply, but didn’t; just nodded, curtly, and kept on with what he was doing. While Yancey, in turn, put her head back down and yawned, jaw-crack wide, to prevent herself from puking.
The pain was bad as anything, worse even than bleeding herself in cannibal worship to feed Chess’s power, back when he was still a god—and like then, Yancey couldn’t keep the agonized waves from buffeting Chess too, in the forced closeness of linking mind-to-mind. Chess knocked it back as best he could with those hexacious surges of euphoria, but each had less and less effect; stretched thin, her body was learning the falseness of it, and rejecting it. They’d both figured out quick she couldn’t push worth a damn under that languor anyhow, and Doc Jenks had warned her that if things went too long, it could go . . . badly . . . for her, as well as the babe. So they danced together, keeping a flailing balance, Chess struggling to steady Yancey as each tidal swell first crashed in, then receded.
On the downslope of the latest wave, she dared to open her eyes, sucking in a shaky breath. “Ed?” she whispered.
“Ain’t back yet,” said Chess, wetting her mouth and forehead with cloth soaked in snowmelt, its cold moisture a touch of bliss. “But it’s only been an hour. How long a walk to this bitch’s place, anyway?”
“Ten minutes . . . fifteen, at most,” Yancey husked. “When it’s clear, I mean. In this—ahhh, shit, not again . . .!” Teeth clenched, she pushed her head back into the pillows, then gasped and relaxed. “In this, could be an hour.”
“And she’ll know he’s coming, I guess.”
“. . . u’huh . . .”
Chess glared longingly at the door, fixed to bolt, but Yancey squeezed his hand, and he subsided. “Okay,” he growled, instead. “Should’a thought of this first, but fuck it, better late than never. The boy: Freyr. Can you reach him?”
Yancey shook her head, suddenly dizzy. “Christ, Chess, I don’t know . . . he’s not you, or even Ed. I could reach him, all I’d be able to do is talk; can’t command real live people, the way I do spirits. And you saw him—he wanted out. Not too likely to come back, just on my account.”
Chess wrung out the cloth and rubbed his hands together, grimly. “Sure, I saw. But there’s no more time for mollycoddling . . . had a crazy mother myself, remember? Sometimes, you gotta do what’s right. So find him, Yancey, and hitch him up to me, brain-pan to brain-pan. I’ll ride him like a damn horse, once you help me get a grip.”
“And send him . . . where?”
“Back Momma’s way, ’course. ’Cause if I’m right, Ed’s gonna need all the help he can get, dealing with her.”
Another wave was coming—chest-high clench of misery and desperation, rendering her decision far less a choice than a simple refusal to fight against the notion. With no more will to spare, Yancey rose up and flung her mind out across the miles, sweeping around for anything that reminded her of poor Freyr’s stupid, honest thoughts.
Didn’t take long, with pain to drive her. Amazing how agony could clear the mind completely, rendering it empty but for an image of the one thing that might make it all stop. . . .
There you are, she saw, eyes still shut. And smiled.
When Ed kicked the door of Missus Daughter’s house open, it burst back so easily that he knew it hadn’t even been locked, which told him as blunt as made no nevermind how much use his shotgun was like to be. But he levelled it anyway, drawing a bead on the old woman, who sat on a small three-legged stool before the hearth, one leg agitating on the pedal of an ancient spinning-wheel. She was swathed in colourless wool blankets, thick white-blonde hair draped over her shoulders, her wide eyes pale, clear, blue and shining as a Northern lake; but their glazed stare didn’t move or blink. Between her swollen-knuckled hands, a cloud of grey wool stretched into a thread winding about the whirling spool—but from the spool, a glowing thread of oily blue-white light spun yet further into the air, coagulating in a tangled cloud that pulsed with a sick, fungal radiance. Ed wanted to retch just looking at it.
He shifted the shotgun’s muzzle to bear on the cloud, and fired. The shot blasted through the roiling coils harmlessly, bursting chips from the far wall; Missus Daughter might have been as deaf as she seemed blind, for all she moved. The spinning wheel never ceased whirring. Ears ringing, Ed grounded the shotgun’s butt and turned back to her, dread and despair like fists in his chest.
“God damn you, woman!” he bellowed. “I know you’re sick—I know you got problems, but—my wife is not a hex! Can’t you get that through your thick goddam skull? I don’t . . .” His throat felt thick, voice dropping to a rasp. “I don’t know what to do, so help me, ma’am. Tell me what it is you want from us.”
Silence, for long seconds, broken only by the spinning wheel’s whir. But what answered came not from Missus Daughter’s mouth, or even her mind: something thick, and dark, and old—something that spoke out of that cloud, shaping itself into a vaguely rectangular form like that curtain on the ridge, a closed door cracking open. And it spoke with the same gut-deep, wrenching voice Ed Morrow had heard twice before, from at least two Powers long lost to humanity.
Foolish man, it said, in a language he didn’t know, yet understood effortlessly. None summon Grýla but for one service. To see foes’ children die.
Fast as he’d ever moved in his life, Ed hauled the shotgun back to his shoulder and took aim at the mad hex-woman. His fingers were already tightening on the trigger when he heard a man’s voice yell behind him—“Stop!”—and the only sound that could have made Ed turn, again, just as fast: a gun’s hammer-click, cocking back to fire.
Barrel still levelled, Ed froze. For here he and Freyr Ragnarsson stood staring into each other’s shocked faces, gun-muzzles held straight at one another’s heart.
The storm pressed hard against Yancey’s house-walls, making them creak and shiver. And: “Oh shit,” she heard Chess say.
She strained to turn, but another wave hit, and she had to struggle just to keep upright. “What do you mean, ‘oh shit’?” she managed.
“It’s bad—don’t look.” As she glanced down: “Said not to look, goddamnit!”
Red, lots of it, bright and dark at once, soaking the nest between her feet; Yancey began to grow light-headed, floating up. As she did, however—Chess’s voice, fear-thinned, dimming fast to a gnat’s angry whine—she felt someone catch hold of her hand, a familiar grip, though no longer fleshless. Or . . . was it that she had discarded her own flesh, somewhere along the way?
The Rabbi Diskin spoke once more, in her ear this time, not her mind. Saying, softly—
“Not just yet, maydel.”
(There’s something we have to do first, you and I. While we still can.)
“Don’t you shoot my mother!” Freyr yelled through numb lips, his beard stiff with frost. To which Ed yelled back, just as loud: “I don’t want to shoot your mother, son. That’s the last damn thing I want! Tell her I don’t want to shoot her!”
“I might, you put your gun down first—”
Ed shook his head. “Ain’t happenin’. Take a gander at what she’s doing.”
Freyr scoffed, but did—and Ed saw his blue eyes widen. “Oh, fuck,” he blurted out. “What did I tell you? She is bringing her, the trolls’ mother, out of the past—”
“Tell her to stop, then!”
�
�You think she listens? To me, or anyone?”
Now it was Ed’s turn to curse, which Missus Daughter seemed to hear, and giggle at. The door she spun grew wider, folding at its edges. From far beyond, wrapped up in the cold’s black heart, something neither of ’em wanted to see reached out to press against it, testing.
But: No, Yrsa. That’s not the way.
Again, Freyr and Ed swung ’round, this time in unison. Saw a shape hung dimly in the air, vaguely familiar, for all its face was a mere haze of light; Ed squinted hard, and realized with a further clench of his heart that it had something about it reminded him, oh God, oh no—
(That can’t be Yancey, please, Christ. It just can’t.)
Yrsa, think, the no-voice continued. This thing you spin, this opening—it’s way beyond anything you’ve made before, ever. So how can you be doing it?
The wheel spun on a minute more, unceasing, as though Missus Daughter hadn’t even heard—but then she paused, letting it whirr on without her guidance, ’til it ran down entirely. ’Til the edges of the doorway trembled, and the thing beyond it gave a low, unhappy growl. Still not turning, Ed nevertheless saw her shake herself slightly, and ask—
What do you say, hexe-woman?
I’m not—never mind. Yancey’s shade shook its barely there head, and continued. What powers the spell you’re spinning? Pain. And what’s your pain, the worst you have? Your own dead.
Do not speak of my—
I have to. Those things you sent our way, those Yule Lads . . . you really think they were imps conjured up from hell, or sicked up out of your own body? They were your children, not hers, and Gr?la knows it. Missus Daughter tried to interrupt, but Yancey wouldn’t let her. Ma’am, hear me out! I know you didn’t mean to, but how could you not reach out for the first fuel available, the most puissant? I speak to the dead, you know that. It’s why you don’t trust me. Well, I’m damn close to death myself now, and I’ve spoken with the things you made out of your Unn, your Isa, your Njall, your man Ragnar. These false faces, these puppets, her toys, preparing the way while you turn they key in her cage’s lock—they’re nothing but traps for the ones you love most, keeping them from moving on.
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