Why are you still here? The voice was colder than the snow.
The girl on the ground closed her eyes in shame and took another breath.
Stop that, the voice said. You failed. You lost. What right do you have to go on living? Why do you waste my time?
The girl shook her head and curled her body tighter. “Please,” she whispered, her voice little more than a hoarse vibration in her throat. “Please don’t leave me, Master.”
The voice made a disgusted sound. Shut up. You don’t get to speak. You don’t even deserve my attention. Just die in a place that’s easy to find so my seed doesn’t go to waste.
The girl gave a sobbing cry, but the voice was already gone. Her head throbbed at the sudden emptiness, and she realized she was alone. Truly alone, for the first time since she could remember. She would have wept then, but she had no strength left even to break down. She could only lie there in the shade of the tree, hoping the slope was close enough to fulfill the Master’s final request. After losing so completely, it was the least she could do.
It wouldn’t be long, at least. Her blood was red again, mixing with the dirt to dye the snow a dull burgundy in a circle around her. Soon, all her failures would be behind her. All her weakness, everything, it would all be gone. She was so focused on this she didn’t notice the man coming across the mountain slope toward her until his shadow blotted out the sun in her eyes. She looked up in surprise. He was very tall, dressed like a poor farmer in a ragged wool coat, but his body was that of a fighter, with blades strapped up and down his torso and a monstrous iron sword on his back.
He stood a step away from her, his face shadowed and unreadable with the sun behind him. Then, in one smooth motion, he drew a short sword from the sheath at his hip. This much, at least, she could understand, and the girl closed her eyes, ready for the blow.
It never came. The man simply stood there, staring at her with the blade in his hand. When she opened her eyes again, he spoke.
“Do you want to die?”
The girl nodded.
Overhead, the sword whistled through the cold air, then stopped. The man’s voice spoke again. “Look at me and say you want to die.”
The girl lifted her head and stared up at him. The morning sun glinted off the sharp blade he held in the air, ready to come down. How easy it would be to let this stranger end it, how simple. And yet, when she tried to tell him to go on, finish what the demon hunters had started, her voice would not come. She tried again, but all she managed was a squeak. The dull red circle on the snow around her was very wide now. Soon, she wouldn’t even have a choice. She knew she should take his offer, end it quickly, but her mouth would not move, because it was not true.
She did not want to die. The realization came as a surprise, but the truth of it rang in her, vibrating against the inner corners of herself she’d long forgotten. She had been defeated, abandoned, wounded beyond repair. She owed it to the Master to die, owed it to herself to save the horrible shame of living on when she was not wanted, but still, despite all reason…
“I want to live.” The words came out in a croak, and she only recognized the voice as her own from the pain in her dry throat.
Above her, the man nodded and sheathed his sword. “Then take another breath.”
She met his eyes and slowly, shuddering with pain, did as he said.
He grinned wide and reached down, grabbing her arms in his hands. He lifted her like she weighed nothing and tossed her over his shoulder. “Come on, then,” he said. “I had a long walk up here to see what that crash was, and we’ve got a long walk back. If you’ve chosen to live, you’ll have to keep your end and keep breathing. Just focus on that and I’ll get us back down to camp to see to your wounds. Then we’ll see where we go from there. What’s your name?”
“Nico,” the girl said, wincing against his shoulder. The Master had given her that name.
“Nico, then,” the man said, setting off down the mountain. “I’m Josef.”
Nico pushed away from his shoulder, trying not to get blood on his shirt, but he just shrugged her back on and kept going. Eventually she gave up, resting her head on his back to focus all of her energy on breathing, letting her breaths fill the emptiness the Master had left inside her. As she focused her mind on the feel of her lungs expanding and contracting, she felt something close at the back of her mind, like a door gently swinging shut. But even as she became aware of the sensation, she realized she could no longer remember how she’d come to be on that mountain slope, or where her wounds came from, and just as quickly, she realized she didn’t care. The one thing she could remember was that before the man Josef appeared, she’d been ready to die. Now, clinging to his shoulder, death was her enemy. Something deep had changed, and Nico was content to let it stay that way. Reveling in a strange feeling of freedom, she went limp on Josef’s shoulder, focusing only on savoring each gasp of air she caught between jolts as Josef jogged down the steep slope to the valley below.
CHAPTER
1
Two years later.
The house on chicken legs crouched between two steep hills, its claws digging deep into the leaf litter to keep the building from sliding farther down into the small ravine. If Heinricht Slorn had any worries about the precarious position he’d put his walking house in, his face didn’t show it. He sat in his workroom, his brown fur glowing in the strong lamplight. His dark, round eyes glittered as they focused on the object taking up most of the large worktable. It was about four feet long, white as a dried bone, and shaped somewhat like a sword, or like a stick a child had carved into a sword. Despite its crude form, Slorn hovered over the object, his enormous hands running over its smooth surface with the painful, meticulous slowness of one master appreciating the work of another.
Pele sat at his elbow, also staring at the white sword. She was trying her best to match her father’s focus, but they’d been doing this for two days now and she was getting awful sick of staring and seeing nothing. Sitting in the dark room, her mind began to wander back to the other, more interesting projects she’d been working on before Slorn had put her to work on the Fenzetti blade.
“Pele.” Slorn’s gruff voice snapped her back to attention. His eyes hadn’t left the sword, but that didn’t matter. Her father seemed to have a supernatural ability to tell when her attention began to drift. “What is the first thing we determine when examining an unknown spirit?”
“Its nature,” Pele answered at once, sitting up on the hard workbench. “A Shaper must know the nature of her materials. Only when a spirit’s true nature is known will the Shaper be able to bend it to her purpose.”
“Good,” Slorn said, reaching out to take her hand and press it against the smooth surface of the Fenzetti. “And what is the nature of this spirit?”
Pele flinched when she touched the sword. It was unnaturally smooth and strangely warm, yet she knew from experience that its surface could not be scratched even by an awakened blade. They’d tried half a dozen blades the morning it had arrived, and none of them had been able to make so much as a nick in the sword’s white face.
Slorn was looking at her now, and she shrank under his intense gaze, her brain spinning to come up with an answer. “It’s not wood,” she said uncertainly. “Not stone either. It could be a metal not yet known, one of a different nature than iron or the mountain metals, perhaps a—”
“Stop,” Slorn said. “You’re not answering the question. I did not ask what it wasn’t.”
Pele sighed in frustration. “But—”
“Look again.”
Slorn picked up the sword and set it point down on the floor between them. “Look at it as if you’d never seen it before and tell me what you think it is.”
Pele bit her lip, looking the sword up and down. “A bone,” she said at last.
Slorn grinned wide, showing all his yellow teeth. “All right, let’s say, for the moment, it’s a bone.”
