Bonnie glanced back at the thurgs, then looked at the lake.
“That way,” she said, without hesitation, and she pointed straight across the lake.
“We’d better carry some of the cooking stones and fuel and backpacks with iron rations in them,” Stefan said. “That way, if the worst happens, we’ll still have basic supplies.”
“Besides,” said Elena, “it’ll lighten that thurg’s load — if only by a little.”
It seemed a crime to put a backpack on Bonnie, but she insisted. Finally, Elena arranged one filled entirely with the warm, curiously light fur clothes. Everyone else was carrying furs, food, and poop — the dried animal dung that would from now on be their only fuel.
It was difficult from the first. Elena had only had a couple of experiences with ice that she had reason to be wary of — but one of those had almost been disastrous for Matt. She was ready to jump and whirl at any crack — any sound that the ice was breaking. But there were no cracks; no water flowing up to slosh onto her boots.
The thurgs were the ones who seemed actually built for walking on frozen water.
Their feet were pneumatic, and could spread out to almost half again their original size, avoiding putting too much pressure on any one section of ice.
Crossing the lake was slow, but Elena didn’t see anything particularly deadly about it. It was simply the smoothest, slickest ice she had ever encountered. Her boots wanted to skate.
“Hey, everybody!” Bonnie was skating, exactly as if she were in a rink, backward and forward and sideways. “This is fun!”
“We’re not here to have fun,” Elena shouted back. She longed to try it herself, but was afraid to make cuts — even scuffs — in the ice. And beside that, Bonnie was expending twice as much energy as she needed to.
She was about to call out to Bonnie and tell her this, when Damon, in a voice of exasperation, made all the points she had thought of, and a few more.
“This isn’t a pleasure cruise,” he said shortly. “It’s for the fate of your town.”
“As if you care,” Elena murmured, turning her back on him and touching the unhappy Bonnie’s hand both to give comfort and to get them going at arm’s length again. “Bonnie, do you sense anything magical about the lake?”
“No.” But then Bonnie’s imagination seemed to fly into high gear. “But maybe it’s where the mystics from both dimensions all gathered to exchange spells. Or maybe it’s where they used the ice like a real magic mirror to see faraway places and things.”
“Maybe both of them,” Elena said, secretly amused, but Bonnie nodded solemnly.
And that was when it came. The sound Elena had been waiting for.
Nor was it a distant booming which could be ignored or discussed. They had been walking at arm’s length from one another to avoid stressing the ice, while the thurgs walked behind them, and to either side — like a flock of geese with no leaders.
This noise was a dreadfully near crack like the report of a gun. Immediately, it sounded again, like a whiplash, and then a crumbling.
It was to Elena’s left, on Bonnie’s side.
“Skate, Bonnie,” she shouted. “Skate as fast as you can. Scream if you see land.”
Bonnie didn’t ask a single question. She took off like an Olympic speed skater in front of Elena, and Elena swiftly turned.
It was Biratz, the thurg Bonnie had asked Pelat about. She had one monstrous back leg in the ice, and as she struggled, more ice cracked.
Stefan! Can you hear me?
Faintly. I’m coming for you.
Yes — but only come as close as you need to Influence the thurg.
Influence the—?
Make her calm, put her out, whatever. She’s ripping up the ice and it’ll just make it harder to get her out!
This time there was a pause before Stefan’s answer came. She knew though, by faint echoes, that he was talking telepathically with someone else. All right, love, I’ll do it. I’ll take care of the thurg, too. You follow Bonnie.
He was lying. Or, not lying, but keeping something from her. The person he’d been sending thoughts to was Damon. They were humoring her. They didn’t mean to help at all.
Just at that moment she heard a shrill scream — not so far away. It was Bonnie in trouble — no! Bonnie had found land!
Elena didn’t lose another second. She dumped her backpack on the ice and skated straight back to the thurg.
There it was, so huge, so pathetic, so helpless. The very thing that had kept it safe from other Godawful Hellacious monsters in the Dark Dimension — its great bulk — was now turned against it. Elena felt her chest tighten as if she were wearing a corset.
Even as she watched, though, the animal became calmer. She stopped trying to get her left hind leg out of the ice, which meant that she stopped churning up the ice around it.
Now Biratz was in a sort of crouching position, trying to keep her three dry legs from going under. The problem was that she was trying too hard, and that there was nothing to push against except breakable ice.
“Elena!” Stefan was within earshot now. “Don’t get any closer!”
But even as he said it, Elena saw a Sign. Just a few feet away, lying on the ice was the tickle-prod that Pelat had used to get the thurgs going.
She picked it up as she skated by and then she saw another Sign. Reddish hay and the original covering for the hay — a giant tarpaulin — were lying behind the thurg. Together they formed a broad wide path that was neither wet nor slick.
“Elena!”
“This is going to be easy, Stefan!”
Elena pulled a pair of dry socks out of her pocket and drew them up over her boots. She fastened the tickle stick to her belt. And then she started the run of her life.
Her boots were fur with something like felt underneath and with the socks to aid them, they caught on the tarpaulin and propelled her forward. She leaned into it, vaguely wishing Meredith were here, so she could do this instead, but all the time getting closer. And then she saw her mark: the end of the tarp and beyond it floating chunks of ice.
But the thurg looked climbable. Very low in back, like a dinosaur halfway into a tar pit, but then rising up along the curved backbone. If she could just somehow land there…
Two steps till jump-off. One step till jump-off.
JUMP!
Elena pushed off with her right foot, flew through the air for an endless time, and — hit the water.
Instantly, she was soaked from head to foot and the shock of the icy water was unbelievable. It caught hold of her like some monster with a handful of jagged ice shards. It blinded her with her own hair, it squeezed all the sound out of the universe.
Somehow, clawing at her face, she freed her mouth and eyes from hair. She realized that she was only slightly below the surface of the water, and that was all she needed to push upward until her mouth broke the surface and she could suck in a lungful of delicious air, after which she had a coughing fit.
First time up, she thought, remembering the old superstition that a drowning person will rise three times and then sink forever.
But the strange thing was that she wasn’t sinking. There was a dull pain in her thigh but she wasn’t going under.
Slowly, slowly, she realized what had happened. She had missed the back of the thurg, but landed on its thick reptilian tail. One of the serrated fins had gashed her, but she was stable.
So…now…all I have to do is climb the thurg, she puzzled out slowly. Everything seemed slow because there
