“Why isn’t there a door?” Sara asked.
“Maybe to keep people from getting trapped? The way they remove the doors from refrigerators at the dump,” Sheriff Norris suggested.
Robiquet studied that doorless frame.
“Or maybe because they’ve got a bad history of closed doors around here,” Sara suggested. The idea chilled her. Maybe whoever was responsible for overseeing the island as a National Historic Site had grown a little afraid of the doors on George’s Island over the years.
The sheriff looked at Robiquet. In the gray light that streamed in from outside, Sara saw the concern on Jackson’s face.
“But this isn’t the door we’re looking for, right?”
Robiquet shook his head. “No. Your world isn’t on the other side of the door we want. And there would be guards, remember? It’s this way.”
The fastidious man wiped his hands together as though just being in the damp, dusty fort offended his sensibilities. He did not lead them out onto the grass of the fort’s interior but across the chamber to another passage.
They followed him through what appeared to be a sequence of cells or bunk rooms, ending up in a large chamber whose entire inner wall was open to the vast courtyard at the heart of the fort. Wan daylight flooded the room, and Sara welcomed it.
“It’s here,” Robiquet said.
Surprised, Sara narrowed her eyes. At the back of the chamber, recessed into the granite, was a heavy iron door. The first door they had seen inside the fort.
Her heart skipped. A moment of uncertainty made her pause.
Sheriff Norris had no such hesitation. He strode over to the door as though confronting a troublemaker in a bar, every inch the cop that he’d been all of his adult life. The sheriff reached out and grabbed the door handle and gave it a pull.
Rust flaked and sifted to the floor, but the door did not budge.
“It’s not going to open for you. What kind of secret would it be if any ordinary human could walk right through?”
Sara stared at the door, then stepped up beside Robiquet. In the half-light at the back of that chamber, she felt she could almost see the goblin face beneath his human guise.
“Open it,” she said.
A flicker of fear crossed his face. Then he nodded and stepped up to the door. Sheriff Norris moved out of his way.
Robiquet grasped the handle and pulled. With a scrape of metal upon stone, it swung toward them.
Sara stared, a sick knot twisting in her stomach.
“What the fuck is this?” Sheriff Norris demanded. “What does this mean?”
Robiquet shook his head slowly, dumbfounded. “I have no idea.”
On the other side, the door had been bricked up with stones and mortar. Wherever it had once led, it was a dead end now. A wall.
“Jackson?” Sara said.
The sheriff ran a hand over the stones. He dragged his fingers over the mortar. When he turned to look at her, his eyes were full of frustration and fear.
“This is recent. Someone built this thing just in the past few weeks. No more than that. Maybe less.”
The three of them stood together for long moments, speechless, just staring at the wall. Sara was surprised that it was Robiquet who spoke first.
“I don’t know what this means,” he said. “It’s been sealed from the other side. In all likelihood, it isn’t just a wall. There are probably magical wards placed upon it as well. Whoever did this meant it to be permanent.”
“So what now?” Sara asked.
Sheriff Norris ran his hand over the wall again. “Now we go home to Maine,” he said, turning toward Robiquet. “If this Falconer got through, it wasn’t here, right? I mean, there’s got to be a door closer to Kitteridge—closer to the Bascombes’ house. Where did you first come through?”
Robiquet nodded. “It’s on Chadbourne Bridge.”
Sara looked at him. “On the bridge?”
“You’ll see.”
“Then you’ll come with us?”
He swallowed nervously and glanced away. When he looked up again, his gaze had turned hard.
“I loved Melisande. I don’t mean I was in love with her, but I adored her. And her children were always good to me. He changed later in his life, after he lost her, but in the early days Max Bascombe had a wonderful vigor. Among ordinary men, he was extraordinary. Max had a keen intelligence that made him the smartest man in any room, but he could set anyone at ease. Melisande was seduced by his intellect and his charisma. She loved to dance and to laugh, and Max shared those passions. He made her believe there was magic in just being ordinary. Losing her destroyed him in many ways. He rarely laughed, and he never danced after she was gone. He became arrogant and grim. But I never forgot the man he had been, and how much he had loved her. I swore my loyalty to him because of that.
“But I ran away, Sara. I never should have done that. The only way to make it right is to go back, and hope that we can all find answers to our questions in the place where this all began.”
In the dark, the soldiers of Atlantis prepared for war. From time to time, one of them would shudder and glance up into the star-scattered night sky, perhaps thinking how strange it was to encounter such a chill breeze so far to the south.
The winter man eddied and danced, nothing but ice and cold wind, a small storm of consciousness. Frost swirled in the darkness above the invasion force that Ty’Lis and the Atlantean High Council had mustered on the Isthmus of the Conquistadors. At least eight battalions of soldiers had come ashore—thousands of men and women in the armor of Atlantis, green-white faces turned upward to watch for the coming of dawn, when they would march north to engage King Hunyadi’s troops. When their conquest would begin.
Frost studied the glass ships of Atlantis that sat just off the shore of the Isthmus. The soldiers spilled over the edge of the deck and walked underwater toward land, weapons at the ready. Air sharks knifed across the night sky. Octopuses floated close to the ground, tentacles drooping, dragging along the dirt. They kept near the water, touching the surf.
The first of the giants had come up out of the ocean not more than an hour before. Three more surfaced now, two females and a male, seawater spilling off of them in a salty froth. Their eyes were half-lidded and they walked sluggishly toward where the first arrival sat on the ground, a hundred yards from the nearest troop encampment. A tremor went through the ground as they all sat heavily. One closed her eyes and began to snore, though she remained sitting up, slumped over, practically in her own lap.
The little ice storm watched it all, deeply troubled. There were sorcerers down there, and Perytons as well. Many Perytons. For now they were at rest. They had sent scouts ahead, but for the moment the only creatures high in the sky were the air sharks, and they did not even notice the winter man’s presence. Frost had no flesh for them to rend.
Still, he felt afraid. Not for himself, but for the future—for the outcome of the battle that the dawn would bring.
There were sorcerers as well. He felt sure one of them must be Ty’Lis, but he dared not get close enough to them to find out. The rank-and-file soldiers would shiver with the chill of his presence when they felt that cold wind passing above and around them, but the High Council of Atlantis would not assign such an anomaly to odd weather. Ty’Lis, especially, would know the winter man was there, and Frost couldn’t take that risk. King Hunyadi and the Euphrasian Borderkind had to know what sort of force they were facing.
To the north of the Atlantean invasion force were four or five ragtag battalions of Yucatazcan warriors. Their armor had been decorated with paint and feathers and the symbols of their Mayan, Aztec, and Incan ancestors. These were proud, noble, brutal warriors, yet their invasion had been driven back by Hunyadi’s forces. Many had obviously been killed and now they were regrouping, promoting officers to replace those whose corpses had been left in Euphrasia.
Yet something had gone wrong. They seemed sluggish and grim. Frost thought he knew why, though, and Hunyadi would be very interested to hear it.
He took a final look at the glass ships anchored off of the isthmus. The temptation to destroy them, or see them destroyed, was great. But the army of Atlantis was so formidable he would advise Hunyadi to leave the glass ships alone. If fortune allowed Euphrasia to force the invaders to retreat, they had to have a way to flee. If the ships were destroyed they would have nowhere to run, and would be forced to stand and fight. Frost thought that might be a spectacularly bad turn of events.
You’re getting ahead of yourself, he thought. First, Hunyadi’s army had to stop the conquerors from invading Euphrasia.
In a gust of wind, Frost slipped across the sky, away from the troops and the glass ships. He traveled swiftly southwest. The indigo night glittered with a billion pinprick stars. It was warm, but not nearly so warm as it had been to the south. With the breeze blowing across the isthmus and the cool water, he felt good. Stronger.
He had left Collette in the shadow of a small, abandoned chapel on the outskirts of a small fishing village. The isthmus had little by way of farmland or fields for grazing. For those willing to settle on that unforgiving stretch of land, fishing seemed the only industry, and the only way to stay alive. Still, the chapel—dedicated to some local god or conscripted saint—stood crumbling and dark. Frost had seen such things many times before. Either the village had become prosperous enough to think they no longer needed to appease their god, or so withered that they no longer had faith that they could be saved.
The icy wind whipped across the roof tiles and through the gaps in stones. Just behind the chapel, where no one on the overgrown path could have seen him, Frost collected mist and ice and moisture from the air, pulling his substance together to sculpt his body anew. He glanced around, icicle hair chiming, and the ice of his face cracked as he frowned. He had expected to find Collette asleep, but did not see her.
Something shifted in the deeper darkness beneath a stand of trees perhaps fifty feet to the rear of the chapel. The petite figure resolved itself into Collette Bascombe. She had been in a stone grotto built by the architects of the chapel, with a shrine to whatever they had worshipped there. She emerged now, pale features illuminated in moonlight. With her reddish hair, mischievous eyes, and narrow face, she almost looked like a trickster.
“What is it?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Frost cocked his head, studying her. “You look different. It almost seems that with the truth of your heritage, the legendary part of your bloodline is coming to the fore.”
Collette shook her head. “I don’t feel any different.”
“That’s a lie, though whether to me or yourself, I don’t know. You have magic in you. Your mother was Borderkind. As Legend-Born, you’re called to something greater than the ordinary life into which you were born.”
“Bullshit.” She smiled. “You sound like Oliver. I’ve been trying to tell him since he was a little kid that ordinary people choose to be ordinary. We all have magic in us, no matter who gave birth to us. Maybe the legendary have longer lives, and maybe they can do things that people can’t, but it seems to me most of you are just as lost and wandering as the average guy or girl. It’s what you do, not what you are.”
Frost didn’t challenge the assertion, but he did ask her why she had that grin on her face.
“Because I think my brother’s finally come around to my way of thinking.”
The winter man made no reply. Last he had seen Oliver, whatever friendship had once existed between them had turned to sour resentment. He understood and regretted this, but there was little he could do about it. He could not travel back through time, and even if he had that ability, Frost wasn’t sure he would do things any differently. Collette and Oliver were still alive—thus far the schemes of Atlantis had been thwarted. How could he regret that?
“So, what’s our move?” Collette asked, ignoring his silence.
“The invasion force gathers to the north. We leave now. When we reach their encampments, I will have to carry you over them to make absolutely certain they do not see us.”
Collette frowned. “Over them? As in, through the air?”
The winter man smiled. “It would take us a very long time to dig a tunnel beneath them.”
She shook her head. “Wait. Can’t we just go around? Through the Veil? Head north and cross through again when we know we’ve gone far enough?”
Frost narrowed his eyes. “There are too many variables. Distance and time are different on the other side, as you well know. I am not certain where we would emerge in your world, now. We need to go directly to King Hunyadi, and as swiftly as we’re able. My observations about the invasion force may be of great value to—”
“All right. I get it.” Collette glanced around. “Which way?”
He pointed toward the path and they struck out from the chapel, headed due north.
“This should be loads of fun,” she muttered.
The winter man smiled to himself in the moonlit night. He wondered if Collette had begun to trust him. And he wondered if he deserved her trust. While he did not want her to die, what truly mattered to him was that one of the Legend-Born survive to see the end of this war.
“Don’t scream.”
Collette shivered. She didn’t like the sound of that. But there was precious little to like about anything tonight. They’d walked more than an hour before seeing the dark shape undulating across the night sky above, blotting out the stars as it passed. Frost had turned to her and with a gesture had lowered the temperature around them by fifty degrees. Ice crystals had formed on the air and her breath fogged.
The thing in the air had slid away from them. Her pulse steadied and she took a breath, then asked Frost what it had been. The answer had made her feel like throwing up. A shark? How could anyone be safe if there were sharks that swam through the air as easily as others swam through water? He believed that however the Atlantis-bred monster located its prey, it would have to do with heat or scent. His creating a little pocket of winter around her had hidden her from it.
