Eirlys Frostwhisper's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Eirlys stood at the lip of the opened seam. The cold from below pulled at her coat. Behind her, the walls of the hall began to tick, the way ice ticks before it splits. Something was waking inside the stone. Sylphina backed toward the archway. "They come through the seams first. Small ones. Then larger." She lifted her lantern. The two winged dragons behind her flared their wings once and settled again, watching the walls, not Eirlys. A hand-shaped bulge pressed out of the wall to Eirlys's left. The stone stretched like wet cloth. A thin claw pushed through and scraped at the air. Eirlys stepped back from it and raised her knife. The knife was six inches long. The claw was longer. A second bulge opened near the floor. A third above the arch. Eirlys counted four before she stopped counting. She could not fight through this and climb down. She would die on the stair. The front doors of the hall boomed. Once. Twice. On the third strike they broke inward, and a white wolf came through the gap at a run. A man rode her low against the neck. His wings folded tight to his back. He carried a short spear. "Down," he said to Eirlys. She dropped. The wolf hit the wall where the first claw had come through. Her shoulder cracked the stone and the claw went with it. The rider pushed off her back, opened his wings once, and drove the spear into the second bulge before it finished forming. He landed on the wolf again without looking. "Sylphina," he said. "You called." "I called," Sylphina said. Eirlys stared at him. "Who." "Lysander. This is Skein." He did not look at Eirlys. He looked at the walls. "How deep is the stair." "I don't know," Eirlys said. "Go find out. We hold the hall." "Why." He struck a third bulge without answering. Skein tore a fourth open at the floor and shook the thing inside until it stopped moving. Sylphina spoke over the noise. "His people's migration is broken. Something in these walls broke it. He wants what's under the ice as much as you do." "Not the throne," Lysander said. "What sleeps around it. Go." Eirlys did not thank him. She swung her legs into the seam and lowered herself onto the first step. The stair went down into black air that smelled of old stone and older cold. Above her, the wolf snarled and the spear struck wood or bone, she could not tell which. She went down three steps and stopped. The hall behind her was noise. The dark below was silent. She had bought her way to the stair, and she had bought it with a stranger's fight she did not understand. She kept going down.