Kye grabbed at the rope connecting me to Sero.
But he didn’t even have time to cut as the titanic wall reached him, tall and wide and burning with icy wrath.
In an instant, he vanished in a phantom plume, the mountain roaring as it ravaged him and Sero under a devastatingly bright blur.
Blind terror gripped me by the heart as I took a running step toward them. The rope at my hips lurched, yanking me off my feet.
It dragged me into the white cloud below, loose snow so thick in the air I couldn’t breathe.
I tumbled over rock and ice, a child’s plaything at the mercy of a screaming landslide. My fingers ripped along the surface of the snow, searching for purchase, but the avalanche tore me down the mountain, my body jouncing like it weighed nothing. The wall of snow had mauled Kye, but it dragged me behind him, and when I finally stopped, the rope sliced into my skin, angry my body remained on top of the snow while the other end lay buried deep below.
Air thickened with solid fog. As though the mountain had died, leaving a ghost to climb from its body.
Two of my fingers were broken at the joints. Tendons snapped rather than bone, they bent grotesquely in the wrong direction, though I already felt them weaving together, healing under my skin. A gash burned my shoulder. My lip had split.
But whatever pain should have followed, I never felt. I yanked one leg from the snow with a scream of fury. Hands on my rope, I shoved the compact snow aside, digging straight down with both bare hands and my water call.
Sero was somewhere on the other side, right below me. And Kye had been holding the rope when the avalanche hit him. Hopefully, they stayed together. Hopefully—I bit back a desperate wail, refusing to believe anything else. Hopefully, he was here.
A whinny came through the fog, and I halted for a moment, ears desperate as I strained for the sound. Black legs climbed over the snow toward me, and Kolibri’s nose arched toward my shoulder, ears tucked forward.
I didn’t have time for relief.
I plunged my hands into the snow, rending it apart with a violence that shook my arms. My vision blurred, and I shoved my cheek into my shoulder with a vicious swipe, banishing wet tracks from my face, angry at the waste of a moment’s breath.
The sound of snow separating grated on my ears as I dug deeper without success. No matter how much I uncovered, the rope was still there, stuck fast. Pointing down, down,down. Securing a hand on the rope, I plowed the snow left and right, desperate to feel something on the other side.
“KYE,” I screamed, not caring if the enemy camp heard me from below. But the blanket of crystal dust in the air gulped my voice without even an echo of reverberation. “KYE! KYE!”
The mountain silence was my only answer.
Chunk after chunk of cold snow came loose through my fingers. I shoved it aside, desperate for more.
Sunlight drifted through the floating powder as it slowly settled.
I was taking too long.
I scrambled into the slowly growing hole, aware of the danger I faced if it suddenly decided to close on me, and performed every feat I could think of to dig. Water calling, scooping, stabbing, punching. Ice crystals flew into my eyes and down my lungs, soaking the legs of my pants.
My hands drove in and hit ice. A sheet of ice, through which the rope had split a crack, held the line between Sero and me.
Thrusting my fingers into the crack, I wrenched it apart, feeling skin separate from my nail beds. When it refused to budge, I screamed into the sky, bright blue penetrating the haze over my head.
Kye hadn’t even wanted to take the mountains. I’d made him. I’d forced him to come this way when ships waited in the harbor, so close I could smell the salt. The snow imprisoned him somewhere under my feet, and I as good as buried him there.
I tried again from all angles, fitting my hands around the slab, searching for a weak corner to pry apart. But it didn’t matter how hard I pulled; the ice was too heavy to lift. Frozen water ignored my summons, and I didn’t have time to melt it. The rope shifted over my thighs as I sank back onto my heels, ferociously thinking of what to do.
The rope.
“Kolibri,” I snapped breathlessly. The black mare raised her head and stepped closer, hooves soft over the snow.
I turned myself onto my knees, wriggling out of the harness. Pulling the knife from my boot, I chopped notches into the ice, fitting Kye’s loops in with trembling fingers and vaulting to my feet to saw at the base of the rope. It ripped loose in seconds under my knife, but every second felt too long. I tied it to her, and ten feet of slack connected Kolibri to the patch of ice.
“Pull, Kolibri!” I ordered, grabbing her reins and stumbling over trembling legs and deep snow as I led her away.
Air crackled around me. A sharpness bit my chest. As though my heart had frozen with the world around me, threatening to shatter any moment.
I ignored it, guiding Kolibri through the berm of snow, the mare’s head and shoulders bent forward as the slack of rope snapped taut. Her iron shoes slid before they found enough traction to move, and she took a heavy step forward.
