that was pent up inside of her.
But niggling at the back of her head was her secret temptation, which she guarded for herself like a precious thing, kept in a drawer and only taken out to fondle when absolutely no one else was around:
It was a nice, comfortable thought, but she knew it was grown from her fear; the last eight years had taught her that. She actually had escaped Ni?ergeard, against the odds, and yet fear still ruled her life. She was tired of being afraid. Weary. Fatigued.
She wouldn’t let that happen. She refused to bend any longer.
She reached deep inside and grabbed Fear and threw it into the flames of Rage, letting it be consumed, relishing its heat. And then the fear was gone-sublimated into fuel for her fury.
This was the new deal: she would stay angry and she would stay unafraid.
The first thing she would do is search the rest of the tower.
She had taken a lantern from the study, so as to conserve the battery power of her flashlight, and counted the stairs as she went upward, the temperature dropping as she did so. Her fingers felt like icicles and she could see her breath clouding before her in the light of the lantern. The stairs seemed to go on forever, but finally she came to a landing that snaked away into darkness. At the end of the short hallway she found two identical doors, thin like the small, medieval doorways that were in church bell towers. She reached out and pushed gently on the right-hand one. It shifted at her touch.
She slid into the doorway and squeezed past the door and into a very narrow and unlit corridor. It curved around, as all passages did in the Langtorr, but tighter than usual, and Freya wondered how high, exactly, she was in the spire-like tower, and how thick the wall was between her and the cold emptiness outside.
Her lights picked up something sparkling around the curvature of the walls. It was a bobbing twinkle, as if something was coming toward her. She froze. The bobbing light also froze, and she realised that the light was only a reflection of her own. She drew closer and found herself confronted with an incredibly ornate silver doorway, the likes of which she’d never seen before. It was patterned with circular swirls and knot-work that ran all along the edges, framing a burnished surface that showed her as only a shadowy shape in the dark.
After admiring the door for a moment, she placed her hand against its centre-she saw a ghostly reflection of her own hand rise to meet hers-and pushed, watching her mirrored self fall away.
The room was lit, which was a surprise, and empty. It was a curved, kidney-shaped space with no windows, but with three large mirrors hanging at opposite ends of the room.
Each mirror was of an ornate, flowing design, with a bulbous, vaguely hourglass shape. There were four odd metal racks in the centre of the room, sort of like coatracks. A golden chandelier in the ceiling fixed with silver lights threw an uncharacteristically warm light on the room. She walked closer to the mirror across from her and stopped in the middle of the room. Something caught her eye and she turned her gaze to the right-hand side mirror.
She leapt aside, and her mirror image also leapt aside.
But it wasn’t her image, not exactly. Freya moved back so her “image” was centred again. It was clearly her, but she was older, maybe thirty, and dressed in fine robes of deep red and burgundy, with bright trim and gold lacing.
She looked confident, self-possessed, a little sad, perhaps, but that seemed to add to her air of wisdom. But it was the crown atop her head that she found most stunning-and disconcerting.
She was wearing the hero’s crown that sat on the throne downstairs-the dragonhelm.
V
Daniel sat down next to Certain Doubt, who tensed instinctively. “Awake so soon? It has been a very short time.”
Daniel nodded and scanned the darkness. He could see almost nothing, just abstract angles where the rock ceiling sloped to meet the floor on various levels.
“You are fully rested? We may depart?”
“No, not yet. Let’s let the others-what’s that over there?”
“Where?” Certain Doubt’s head shifted slightly, giving Daniel the opportunity to shove his sword into the yfelgop’s throat.
The movement was swift, fluid, and vicious. Daniel knew he’d only get one chance, and he had to be exact or the yfelgop would raise the alarm and he would be sunk.
Certain Doubt’s eyes bulged and his tongue worked soundlessly, trying either to breathe or shout, Daniel didn’t know, but his efforts were fruitless, and he died quickly. In that moment, Daniel felt his heart calm and beat steadily. He experienced an awareness of his senses that quite took him by surprise. As the leafleas writhed on the end of his blade, Daniel felt more relaxed and in control than he had felt in days, and it comforted him. He was doing the right thing.
He wiped his blade against the dead creature’s arm to clean it. And then, working quickly and with some difficulty, Daniel propped the body up to make it look, in the low light and at a casual glance at least, that it was still on guard. He was so successful in this that as he rose and cast a last look back, he almost thought Certain Doubt was still alive and he would have to kill him again.
He laughed at himself. That was silly. No one had to kill anything twice-only Gad was the thing you had to kill again, apparently, and he would. He was working toward it. But first things first. And what kind of name was “Certain Doubt,” anyway? “A spy’s name, that’s what.” Daniel thought that Kelm would give them a better story than some weird names. That wasn’t sticky. Not sticky by any stretch.
Moving forward in a crouch, he made his way to each of the other leafleas on watch, killed them, and returned to the site where the rest of the yfelgopes were resting.
This next part was even trickier, but moving systematically, he made a complete circuit. In his left hand he held a bunchedup piece of cloth that he pressed against the yfelgopes’ mouths to smother any noise they made while he was piercing their throats with the sword in his right. Some of them uttered muffled death rattles that made him hold his own breath, fearing they’d wake the others, but most of them died without even opening their eyes.
The last one dispatched, Daniel tried to dry his sword with the cloth but found it too sodden with blood to be of much use for that. He tossed it to the side and sat down to recover. He had hardly dared to draw breath during the operation, and hadn’t used even one of his lucky words, and now he filled his lungs with a deep, regular rhythm.
“Not shaky. Not shaky. Jagged. Not jagged either. Folded down. In a pocket. Calm. Relaxed. Sticky. Length. Length.” The words were balms to his troubled soul. They were direct lines to meaning in his mind; he could almost feel the strings. Yes, strings. Strings in his mind, connecting thought to action to event to consequence. He just had to keep thinking and it would all stick.
Daniel rose. It was time to follow the next mind-string to its end-knot. But what to decide? Take all the heads, or only some of them?
VI
The smell of fresh death followed him in a cloud, making his eyes tingle. He swallowed back bile and rubbed his eyes with the back of a hand. He was exhausted. He had decided on bringing all the heads, in the end. That
