The gods had helped Elva communicate with her daughters and the others, but they had not committed themselves to lending their strength in the fight ahead. Elva still wasn’t sure what they would do when the sticking point was reached. But she didn’t say that to Arvid. Time enough to worry if it happened.
She began. Poppy first, in the mine at Salt. She was standing, as she should be, in front of the people of the Town, humming the long undulating note the Sealmother had taught them. As with the gods, Elva could feel what she felt, hear what she heard. Poppy’s hand was tight gripped by that big girl guard, Larch, and Elva felt the strength that Poppy drew from the clasp. Strength and joy. Tears pricked Elva’s eyes. So often, it happened so often, that love grew out of danger. She was happy that her daughter had found someone she could lean on; Poppy needed that.
She gathered her daughter’s mind in, and with it Larch’s strength and the growing power of the people of Salt.
Saffron next. A very different mind, quick and flickering and simple. But oh, so determined. Saffron was in a town hall, and her musical ear was being tortured by the townsfolk’s inability to hold a tune. A whole family was off key.
Tell them to hum quieter, Elva instructed Saffron, and mind to mind she felt Saffie’s quick amusement, translated instantly into action.
The boy at the Valuers’ Plantation, Thyme, was next, and he and the Valuers were ready and powerful.
One by one she gathered them in. It was tiring, but she drew no strength from her mother, not yet. She would need it all later.
As she took them in and wove them, braid by braid, she understood what they knew, saw what they had seen.
When she reached the northernmost person with Sight, Atos, an old, old man in the little village of Purple Lights, she cried out at what she Saw. Wraiths attacking the flimsy cottage, wraiths made of ice and malice, claw and sleet.
Atos stood by a small window whose shutters hung askew, torn off their hinges by the ice wraiths. He swung an axe at the long clawed hand that reached through the gap, and as the metal blade touched the blue flesh it shattered, made brittle by the cold. A woman came from behind Atos with a broom and poked it right into the wraith’s face. It screamed and backed away, leaving Atos panting and his protector in tears, which froze to her cheeks before they could roll down.
“He comes!” Elva cried. “He is here! Gather in and sing! Together!”
Elva sent all the strength she could to Atos, in Purple Lights, but the old man was physically weak and not practiced at the kind of concentration she was asking of him.
And he was frightened. Behind him, in the cottage, his whole village cowered away from the windows and doors where ice wraiths were shrieking and scratching. Only his wife, as old as he was, had enough courage to face them.
Sing! Elva cried to Atos, and he began to sing, turning to the others to encourage them, to lead them, to bring them into one voice, as they needed to be to repel the wraiths. But turning away left a gap and one wraith slid through the window, clicking its claws, bits of ice breaking off with sharp cracks as it forced its way through. Atos turned, but too late—the claws were outstretched, reaching for him.
His wife threw herself between them, crying, “No!” and the wraith’s claws went through her chest, right to the heart, her blood freezing in an instant, her face turning blue.
Elva felt Atos’s heart stop for a long moment as he watched her fall, and then thud again, harder than ever, as anger took him. He screamed revenge and snatched a chair from under a woman nearby. She fell on the floor, scrabbling backward, away from the wraith who had come wholly within the room. Atos swung the chair over his head with impossible strength and smashed it down on the wraith. The wraith fell to the floor. Another man, emboldened, grabbed a hoe from a corner and attacked another wraith at the window. Then the woman on the floor picked up a bowl and broke it, using a long shard to stab into the wraith on the floor.
It writhed and screamed—a dark, low sound that made Elva sick to her stomach. Then it melted. Its fellow at the window cried out and slid away, and Atos closed his eyes and sank to the floor, his hands gentling his wife’s body, gathering her up to hold the cold, cold flesh close to his own heart.
Sing, Elva urged him. Sing, or they will be back. Slowly, painfully, Atos relayed her message, and the villagers began to hum. The woman who had stabbed the wraith led them, her shard shining in the streaks of light that came through the shutters. Shining clean, as though it had been new-washed.