The snow cushions Freya’s landing. She knew it would, but it didn’t ease the drop. Fifty feet up, with the valley crashing down? Nothing makes that feel fun.

Stretching her jarred legs, she swipes them free of snow. We’re here. She turns to the cliff wall, nodding at the ice. Baffling the Whisper would be beautiful. See?

Above the river, the wind whines. I assume you’ll explain, the Whisper says, why we’re facing nothing.

Freya lifts her chin. Somewhere, boulders crack and crash.

The Whisper shifts, and Freya’s eyes widen. Not nothing. It shifts again, shaking her head. Taika’s protected this?

Freya rubs her arms. She acquired the heartiest coat she could, but humans get so cold. Blown about on this thin, snowy spine, she’s nastily exposed. She took the idea from the Kyo, she says. Only three of us get in. Me, her, and Mathew. It’s… She tenses. Unpleasant.

Folding her fingers into her sleeves, she steps forward. When her front is flush with the glassy wall, riddled with frozen rivulets, Freya shuts her eyes, holds her breath, clamps her lips, and pushes.

Ice. Fires of ice. Flooding her body like a water-skin, it crystallizes her mouth, her nose, so even if she was trying to breathe, she wouldn’t be able to. The first time she came, she tried.

Swallowing, Freya pushes with her shoulders, thinking of something, anything else. Sun. A fruitful, tailless life. The skydd she left behind.

Closing at her back, the snow compacts.

This is what it’s like to be buried alive. Freya fights her eyelids, aching to open, her nose, aching to breathe. Her mind, aching to panic. Taika explained it once: if someone new ever wound up here, the pulse, the tingle, and charged enchantment would sense the intrusion, crackle to life, and trap the poor intruder. She tested it on a faun.

Roughly, the fires of ice subside. Freya tenses every muscle. The pulse of the enchantment throbs in her ears, tingling over her skin. Hung in Taika’s magic, in the dark, forever, severed from your senses but not allowed to die…what a hideous thing. A violent thing. Taika was a girl, fairly nice, fairly not, but she’s grown to be cruel, as cool, as ruthless, as the Kyo and Whiteland have made her.

The tingle flares and fades, dripping from her fingers. Freya’s lungs expand with the lapping panic. What if her immunity no longer exists? She left Whiteland; she’s a different creature. Could the Whisper get her out if she was trapped?

I imagine not. He nestles closer to her sense of self. Their suffocation is iron. If Taika has something strong enough to blind us, I doubt we would manage to break it.

Wonderful. The panic mounts to a tidal wave, no matter how much she curses. Why is she not pushing through? Did it take this long last time? Any time? She should have thought of this risk before.

She can breathe. Her body warms from front to back. Her eyes flick open, and there’s Taika, young and bright, surprised. ‘Freya?’

Freya’s wrist becomes a fist and clouts her in the face.

Pain bursts up her arm. ‘What?’ Freya grabs her fist, her knuckles hot and jilted. Slumping to the floor, Taika’s head cracks stone. ‘I thought I was making her trust me?’

Excellent trust. The best trust. The punch-to-the-face-for-your-shelter trust.

How do you think the Kyo work, Freya? The Whisper is urgent, impatient, now, more human than she could have imagined.

But then again, so is she. ‘Not like this.’ Made of knives, she cups her knuckles. ‘This will make us conspicuous.’

True. Freya feels her eyes tugged to Taika. Her lips wince. But without her, they’re helpless. Without others, they’re always helpless.

They’re not.

They are. The Whisper scratches at her skull, like a cat in a cage. They take the women who are near them, or the souls that fit. The abused, the murdered. Whatever they say. They could try to reach you, but either our protection or Taika’s would stop them.

Freya says nothing. At least Taika’s breathing. Sprawled on the stone, with that scarf in her braids, she looks even younger than she is.

That scarf. That gaudy, lurid scarf, and those stupid dungarees. She never shrugged the river people off.

Okay. Freya drags her eyes away. Look around.

Fundamentally, it’s a cave. A small one, by any standards, and while it hangs low and uneven, enough candles glow in hollows to almost make it homely. Freya scans it for the hundredth time. Two piles of furs line one wall, blue flames licking up another. Log-less and baseless, they make no sense, but they’re skinny, warm, and always there. That’s all the magic she needs.

It’s not what we expected, the Whisper remarks.

Freya shrugs. She spent her time with the Huldra. This place was for Mathew and magic.

And the door?

Freya flips a hand at the last wall, by the blank rock of their entrance. It’s as innocent as virgin snow. There. She cuts her eyes away. She wakes it up, and gets to work. Helping me, controlling Mathew, channelling the Kyo. She saw everything she needed to.

The Whisper moves her eyes around. The outside?

Freya pauses. Taika never whinged, but for a time, she was bony. It drained the Huldra to return her to herself. Yes, but it was hard, she says. Urnäsch was nearly impossible. Tilting her head, she frowns. What happened to Mathew?

The Whisper flutters like feathers. Vasi collected him.

The feathers bloom, and start to flap. They’re wings, beating faster, a hectic murmuration, snow-white swans in a dance through her mind. Freya blinks, but they’re spreading. Filling her vision, they flap and fly, clogging her throat with down. She blinks again, trying to breathe.

Ørenna, not again. Her breath sticks behind her teeth. Her mouth tastes of animal. The swan wings beat themselves into a gale, and she staggers, images swarming in front of her eyes. Anneliese, surrounded by white, backed by distant polar bears. A fossegrim on its knees, beautiful, begging, and briny. Flitting shadows above a desert, a mountaintop and a pack of wolves. Snickers-whispers-laughter-spitting, the cavern underground—

Pain blisters her temple. Freya’s head snaps back, and she screams. It’s boring a scorching spike through her skull, searing a hole through the flesh of her brain. Red and black explodes in her mind. Her knees give out, and she screams again, buckling to the stone. The wings are on fire. Fuelled by the gale, they’re wildfire, billowing, roaring, taking her over, the cave cracking like ice in her eyes. Ørenna, no, why won’t it end?

The spike punches through the opposite temple. Red-hot, Freya howls, bucking forward to retch. Her eyelids flutter beyond her control. The gale is all around her, burning her alive, and there’s nothing she can do, trapped and tortured, oh, let her faint, let all of this leave, before she vomits her organs and screams herself bloody and her eyes erupt from their sockets.

Anneliese.

With one word, everything drops. Freya’s head coalesces. The agony lifts, and she gasps, gutted, like a scooped-out, jittery shell. All around, the Whispers sigh.

‘What,’ she spits, on her hands and knees, clammy and heaving, ‘was that?’

The Whisper inside her settles again, and her urge to vomit thumps. Had she thought he was human? He’s not. Not at all. Shocking and sparking, jagged and sick, she shudders and quakes like frostbite. If the Whispers had bodies, she’d eviscerate them.

The one inside her lifts her eyes. You didn’t take much convincing.

Anger surges like acid bile. ‘It’s not like you gave me a choice,’ she rasps, pushing up to her heels.

Not you. The Whisper turns her rag doll head.

Freya stills. Frissons of childhood strike her senses, a match lighting tinder and running dry riot. The smell of the pool they went to, where it’s rumoured you lose your heart. The sound of creaking branches, every time Freya got scared at night and climbed down from her skydd. The sight of those blue eyes, the last time they killed, remorseless while the mouth said sorry.

Anneliese. In front of the furs, a ghost of a woman, in outside clothes a lot like her own. Staring, Freya struggled to her feet. Long hair, thin and blonde. High cheekbones. Pale eyes. Anneliese, the woman she saw as a sister. Anneliese, who left. Anneliese, the pariah. Anneliese, surprised and stilted, who’s meant to be worse than dead.

Shaking her head, Freya folds her arms. If there’s one good thing about humans, it’s their language. ‘Holy shit.’