No, she thought a moment later. A painful one.

It started in her hands and toes: a cramping, searing ache as warmth ate into her cold skin. She cried out. Her body trembled, then shook violently. Tomik was trembling too, and she realized how cold he must have been, how hard it must have been for him not to give in to the same winter she had let creep inside her.

Then the pain became too great for her to think such thoughts.

When her shivering eased, and his, she whispered, “Thank you.”

He said, “You’re safe. You can sleep now.”

“Astrophil?”

“He’s outside. He won’t get cold, and he said he wanted to keep watch.”

“Yes. He should,” Petra said. “They might come here.”

She wondered what she’d meant by that. They? They who?

But if her mind-magic knew the answer to that question, it wouldn’t say.

She fell asleep.

* * *

TOMIK FELT PETRA startle against him. He opened his eyes, and his first thought was not really a thought, but an unformed feeling of great happiness to be this close to someone he had loved since she was a skinny-limbed little girl who had given him a fistful of grass.

Then he saw Petra’s face and his heart stopped.

Her eyes were stretched wide. Her voice came in a halting, terrified whisper. “Turn off the light.”

He fumbled for the two Glowstones that had fallen between their bodies. He squeezed them, and the blue light died.

“Petra? What is it?”

Her answer was a whimper. “I hear them. They … they can smell us. They’re coming.”

“Who?”

The darkness between them was alive with Petra’s silent fear.

“Petra. Who?”

“The Gray Men.”

15

Death in the Forest

“GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!” Petra shoved at Tomik.

He tried to stop her beating hands. “We can hide in here.”

“We will die in here. They smell us already. We smell like sacks of skin filled with hot blood, and they are hungry. So get out.”

Tomik pushed through the hole as a screech split the air. It was the sound teeth would make if dragged over stone.

Petra joined Tomik and pulled the rapier from its scabbard. Astrophil jumped from a pine branch to her shoulder. “How many?” the spider asked.

“Four.” Exactly like when she had been attacked by the Gristleki a year ago. She had panicked then. She had fainted.

She could not do that now.

Petra looked at Tomik, lit by the full moon, and wanted to tell him to run. But she’d seen the speed of a Gristleki loping on all fours. She knew it was hopeless to run.

She tightened her hand around the sword’s invisible hilt. Four of them. What was she thinking? Fighting them was hopeless, too.

A branch snapped in the distance. Petra’s heart jumped. Fear burned through her like acid.

“Don’t let them touch you,” she told Tomik. “They’ll scrape you raw. Their skin is poisonous, and their tongues…”

Tomik nodded. He looked so brave. If Petra had been capable of anything other than terror, she might have wept at the thought that he was here because of her.

“I will help you, Petra,” Astrophil said in her ear.

Another branch cracked the silence. Then another, closer.

The monsters burst through the trees.

A Gray Man leered at Petra, stretching its ashen human form. It leaped across the clearing and rammed into her.

Petra’s blade fell from her hand as the creature straddled her, scrabbling at her coat, enraged at the fur that covered her skin. She flung her arms over her face. The Gray Man pried them back, gave her a great, toothless smile, and pushed its face toward hers.

Astrophil jumped from Petra’s shoulder onto the Gray Man’s cheek. The spider stabbed his legs into one dark eye.

With a howl, the beast reared its bald head and swatted the spider off its face. Petra swung onto her side, grabbed the hilt of her rapier, and stabbed at the Gray Man’s chest.

The point of her sword glanced off its scaled skin.

The Gristleki giggled. “Sssilly girl,” it hissed. Black blood trickled from its eye.

She scrambled to her feet and stabbed again, straight at its heart.

This time, when the blade skittered harmlessly off its chest, three Gray Men laughed. Petra saw two of them sitting on their haunches below the trees, eyes eager, enjoying her pathetic attempts to retaliate.

And the fourth? she thought with a fresh burst of panic. Where is the fourth?

Where is Tomik?

Astrophil jumped to Petra’s knee and raced up her body. He is in trouble, the spider said.

Petra heard scuffling behind her, and a strange, whacking sound. She turned, and saw Tomik beating the monster away with the wooden board he had used to dig the snow cave.

The sight filled her with desperation. She had been saved from the Gristleki once by John Dee, but there was no one to save them now.

No one except her.

A clawed hand reached for her. She ducked and executed a move Nicolas had taught her months ago at sea. She planted a boot in the Gray Man’s face, jerked away, and curled her sword arm back for a double-handed swipe at the beast’s neck.

The rapier chopped off its head.

Black blood spurted, and the headless trunk of the monster collapsed to the ground. It was only then that Petra remembered what John Dee had told her: that while she was unconscious, he had cut off the heads of the Gristleki that had attacked her.

Petra whirled. She snatched Tomik’s shoulder, knocked him to the ground, and thrust her rapier into the second Gray Man’s throat. Blood bubbled down its neck as it clawed at the sword it couldn’t see. Petra dragged her blade, and the monster fell.

The remaining two Gristleki sprang at her.

They came too close, too fast for Petra to swing her long rapier, but she had seen what Astrophil had done to the first Gristleki, and knew their eyes were also vulnerable. She jerked up the hilt of her sword to smash it against a face. The creature stumbled back, hissing, but the second Gray Man tore off Petra’s hood, exposing the flesh of her neck. She jumped back.

Forward! Astrophil silently shouted.

Petra immediately understood. The Gristleki were used to people backing away from them. Humans always did.

She rushed at the two monsters and slipped between them as they flinched in surprise. She delivered a backhanded coup with her sword, digging her blade halfway through a neck. The body toppled against the last Gristleki. She tugged the sword free.

The Gristleki shoved aside the gray corpse. Its face was fixed on Petra’s, and filled with insane delight. Here, at last, was a challenge.

Petra remembered her lessons with John Dee, and with the Metis, who had told her to crave her mind-magic like a drug. Call it forth and let it rule you, they had said. Let it use you.

It was almost the hardest lesson they had taught her.

She let the magic fill her stomach and lungs until it seemed to suffocate her. The idea of who she was—that she was Petra Kronos, and had a history and hopes—receded.

She looked at the monster and thought of only one thing: which way it would move.

It clawed left, she swerved right. It kicked at her feet, she jumped. She let it make its moves, and with every move she dodged, letting it advance, letting it herd her back into the trees, yet never allowing it to touch her, always dancing away until she saw it c**k its head with surprise.

She stabbed her sword into the side of its exposed neck and pushed.

Blood spat forth. The body crumpled.

Petra stood, her rapier visible now, slick with inky blood. Her stunned senses registered one thought: she was the only thing left standing.

The only one, she thought again, and realized what this meant just as Astrophil shouted, “Tomik!”

Petra rushed to his fallen body and dropped to her knees. He must have been touched. He must have been poisoned. She illuminated a Glowstone, turned him over, and searched for a scrape or suction mark, wondering how she could possibly ever cure him. Astrophil dragged a lock of blond hair aside and Petra saw the red blood oozing from his temple. She saw the bloody rock on the ground. He had hit his head when he’d fallen.

“Tomik.” She shook him. “Tomik!”

He opened his eyes and stared blearily at her. Then he turned his head and vomited.

Petra wiped his mouth with the sleeve of her coat. Fur fell in tufts, drifting onto Tomik’s cheek, and she saw that patches of her coat had disintegrated, burned away by the touch of the Gristleki’s poisonous skin. Tomik’s coat was also ragged and splashed with black blood. Gristleki blood was flecked on his skin.

And on hers. In fact, she was covered with it. If their skin and tongues were poisonous, what could the blood of a Gristleki do?

She clamped down hard on that question and shoved it into the back of her mind. It was useless to try to answer it. Time would tell. In the meantime, she had to take care of Tomik.

The monsters seemed not to have touched his skin, but she was worried about his head. He mumbled incoherently as Astrophil peered into his eyes.

“My extensive medical research leads me to conclude that Tomik is concussed,” said the spider.

“What does that mean?” said Petra.

“He hit his head.”

“I can see that. What does it mean?”

“He should lie still. If he did not fracture his skull, he should be fine in a few hours. If he did…”

Petra did not want to consider the end to Astrophil’s sentence. “How many hours?”

The spider wrung four legs. “It is difficult to say. Sometimes these illnesses pass quickly. Sometimes they do not. But if we do not move him and he is to remain here on the ground, we will need a fire.”

Petra burst to her feet, eager for something to do, and gathered the scattered wood from the rowboat. Yet even as she heaped the scraps into a pile near Tomik, she knew she had nothing to light them with. There were no matches. There was nothing. Nothing except …

She wiped her sword on the snow and considered it. She knew, from having watched her father forge horseshoes and other metallic things in his smithy, that metal could produce sparks. But that required a lot of force, and usually heat.

Her magic would have to do. She grabbed a small rock and struck it against the sword’s hilt.

It took several attempts before she managed to draw a spark from the sword, and then it fell on a board and immediately died. The second spark burned a little longer. Petra was blowing at it frantically, certain it would fade like the first, when Astrophil stepped onto the wooden board, hawked, and spat a drop of brassica oil onto the smoldering spark.

A small flame licked the wood.

“It worked!” Astrophil jumped up and down, and the burning board trembled beneath his small weight.

“Astrophil! Don’t—you—dare—” Petra scolded him as she puffed at the flame. “Do—that—again!”

“But am I not a clever spider? I thought, ‘Now if only we had some oil. Oil is so flammable.’ And then it occurred to me that I had oil. I admit that was a rather disgusting and ill-mannered way to use it. Normally, I would never approve of spitting, but—”

“You need that oil. It’s all you have.”

“Oh, but I am a machine. I can run for days on very little.”

Petra narrowed her eyes. “How many days?”

“Many, many!”

“Astrophil. Promise me. Never again.”

The flame ran along the board, and Astrophil jumped from it to the snow. “Oh, very well. I promise.”

Once the fire was burning steadily, Petra gathered fallen branches and stripped bark from the trees to add to the flames. She used one large, curled piece of bark to scoop some clean snow, then held the makeshift bowl close to the fire until the snow melted. She trickled the water into Tomik’s mouth.

He seemed to be doing better, and when he said her name, Petra relaxed, thinking that the worst was over. As her tension eased, a sense of pride grew inside of her, dancing like one of the small orange flames. She had fought the monsters. She had fought them, and had won. They were all dead.

Then she remembered the eyes of the first Gray Man she had killed, and her pride vanished.

They were all dead. And they had once been human. She had killed four people. Four people like her father.

Petra choked. She turned away from Tomik and hid her face in her hands, yet couldn’t block out the knowledge of what she had done. Maybe she couldn’t see the bleeding gray carcasses, but she could smell them. She knew they were there.

Dark eyes. The first one had had dark eyes. And the others? What color were theirs? Everything had happened so quickly. She had not noticed. She didn’t know.

Petra pressed her fingers against the tears sliding down her cheeks.

Had one of the monsters had silver eyes?

What if…?

She couldn’t finish the thought.

Astrophil climbed up her wrist and pulled away one finger. “Petra, what is wrong? Tell me.”

“What if…” she whispered. “What if one of the Gray Men was my father?”

Astrophil fell to her lap. Horror filled his tiny face. “No.”

Petra let her hands drop away, and her wet cheeks shone in the firelight.

When Astrophil spoke again, his voice was heavy. “Stay here,” he said. “I will look.”

Petra stared at the fire as the spider noiselessly crept away. She tried not to imagine him peering into each monstrous face, searching for silver eyes that would be strangely hard, because they had been enspelled at Prince Rodolfo’s command.

A lifetime seemed to pass before the spider crawled onto her knee. “Master Kronos was not one of them,” he said.

“Are you lying to me?”