Hero

Finally, the two of them pried the bird’s foot open enough for Peregrine to get a decent grip on Jack and pull him free. Jack was as tall as Peregrine remembered but a great deal thi

The witch’s familiar had captured a woman.

Still, the resemblance was remarkable. She must be a sister. Jack had kept Peregrine amused on many a chilly evening with tales of his sisters’ colorful exploits.

Whoever she was, Peregrine’s arms were now filled with a woman. Even broken, battered, and half dead, she was the most beautiful thing he’d seen in a very, very long time. So he kissed her.

The cold, chapped lips warmed beneath his. “Sword,” she whispered.

“It was only a kiss,” mumbled Peregrine, but his heart leapt with happiness. A new friend! He should be worrying about her plight or her health or her family, but the desire for human companionship overwhelmed him.

Betwixt pushed the sword along the ground until it was within Peregrine’s reach. Peregrine dutifully offered the sword with a chipper “milady,” but her once-again-lifeless body did not take it. Awkwardly, he shifted her in his arms and sheathed the blade in the scabbard at her belt. Regardless of whether or not it was wise to leave her armed, keeping the sword there would be safer for everyone while he moved her out of the snowy cave mouth.

“I need you,” he said to Betwixt. Strong as he might have been from all his active spelunking, this girl was too large and unwieldy for him to carry like the romantic hero he’d once pretended to be. He hoped—and was pleasantly surprised—that she fit along Betwixt’s back. Her neck curved up his tail, and her legs trailed out over his tusks. His six stubby chicken feet seemed to bear the weight without strain.

Peregrine led Betwixt to the cave he used as a bedchamber and rushed to throw coals on the fire pit in the center of the room. He pulled his sleeping pallet as close to the fire as he felt was safe before ungracefully rolling the girl off the chimera’s back. Even in the dim light he could tell that the blue tinge had miraculously vanished from her skin. She began shivering. That was a good sign.

He decided to remove her frozen shirt and trousers and replace them with fresh ones from his own wardrobe. He had a much harder time coming up with the latter than the former—skirts were less restraining and more adaptive to the extreme temperatures. He unearthed some hose and a pair of short pants and decided against them both—the short pants had been made for a much smaller man and while they might have fit in the waist, they would have looked ridiculous on Jack’s sister. He finally found something suitable enough that hadn’t rotted to shreds and returned to where she lay, still shivering on the mattress.

He took a deep breath, steeled his nerves, and proceeded to undress and redress her. It took far longer than it should have, as he kept his eyes half closed most of the time for her modesty. As if she’d care, unconscious as she was. Though Jack might have had something to say about the manhandling of his sister, and that something kept going through Peregrine’s mind as he pulled her deathly cold legs and arms through the unwieldy fabric.

Betwixt, thankfully unable to laugh in his current state, merely hung his orange head and shook his giant tusks.

When Peregrine finished, he covered her gently with several fur blankets. It would have to do for now. As much as he hated to leave the girl, he still needed to tend to the witch and Cwyn before the two of them froze in the cave mouth. If the witch died, then her hold on the dragon would be lifted. He didn’t need some freshly woken beast of legend burning him out of house and home, or more cave falling down around his ears, thank you. He was comfortable enough with the way things were, leagues above the world of the eternally dying, down where clocks ticked seconds away and counted breaths that, once exhaled, could never again be taken.

He jogged back to the windy cave mouth. Cwyn had blessedly shrunk to a manageable size. The witch looked so small and fragile now: a bag of bones in a tattered gray dress with a white mop for a head. Her eyelids remained closed over the one aspect that ravaged her features. Betwixt prodded her foot, and it flopped over. Peregrine pressed his fingers into the wrinkled flesh of her neck and felt for a heartbeat. It was there, faint but steady.

“Still alive.” Peregrine glanced up at the looming, frosted fingerstones above them. All the witch’s spells would be lifted upon her death. As a water witch, the lorelei’s talent had aided in the formation of these icerock caverns. Without her beating blue heart, the mountain would collapse on top of them.

Assuming they hadn’t been roasted by the dragon already, of course.

Betwixt patiently resumed his role as stretcher and bore the witch down the opposite side of the rubble to her bedchambers, the lantern dangling precariously from the deadly, hooked stinger of his tail.

Peregrine followed the chimera, his arms full of the still-rather-large and unwieldy Cwyn. He administered a healing salve to Cwyn’s angry scrape before tucking the witch beneath her patchwork fur blankets. The witch and Betwixt were the closest thing he’d had to family beyond his parents. How strange it was to care for someone and hate her all at the same time.

Betwixt prodded Peregrine in the leg again, reminding him of the girl—as if it were possible for him to forget. He needed to be present when she awoke. Even after all this time, he still remembered what it had been like to come into this cave of majesty and madness; the least he could do would be to guide her through her first steps. Poor lost soul. She would be so frightened! He would be as gentle as he could, easing her into these new circumstances. He would be her friend. After all, they had someone in common: her brother.

Peregrine banked the fire in the kitchen caverns, covering the stewpot so that it might still be warm when the witch and her familiar awoke later. He set more clear ice to melt in another pot. His mother the countess had always had tea to calm her nerves. Peregrine had taken up the affectation in memory of her, what little memory there was left.

By the time he returned to the Woodcutter girl, he was relieved to see that her cheeks had regained a rosy flush and her breathing was deep and regular. Her face was unblemished; what he thought had been a bruise along her jawline must have been just a shadow. There were no gashes or lumps, only pink scratches on her arms and across her ribs. The blood on her clothes must have been Cwyn’s. In his panic, he must have imagined the worst. If he didn’t know better, he’d have guessed she’d merely fallen asleep after a long day’s work instead of being dragged half dead against her will to the peak of the tallest mountain in the world.

But he did know better, just as he knew that the deepest wounds were not always visible from the outside of the body. Peregrine lay down next to Jack’s sister and held her tightly, willing his body’s heat into her. Having been without human company for so long, the embrace was as much for his own healing as it was for hers. He breathed in her tangled mass of hair; she smelled of frost and bird musk, but beneath that he imagined he caught the scents of salt and sunshine. She sighed in her sleep.

It was a lovely sound.

7

Welcome to the Madness

THE AIR tasted like the kitchen in winter, all frost and cinders. Her coverlet was rough in patches. She was excessively warm. Saturday opened her eyes and tried to focus on the stone blocks in the ceiling of her tower room. Had Papa let her sleep past dawn again?