She looked at him, then back at the circle. Then she looked at him again, searchingly. Her eyes seemed to settle on something.
Her expression changed from wrinkled-up thought to a clear smile. “I have it.” She carefully pulled a single hair from her head, between finger and thumb, and laid it inside the circle. Then she wandered over to one of the sacred blade-shaped stones, and climbed on top of it. The affront caused a murmur in the crowd. There was more than one horrified gasp. “I am off the ground, and a piece of me is in the circle. Or do you still insist on counting to ten?”
He glowered.
This was taking too long, and he was running the risk of looking like an idiot in front of his whole court. When he did finally win this foolish game, each of her little triumphs would make his eventual victory that much less complete. And besides, the riddles and challenges themselves were getting silly. It was starting to feel too much like a children’s game.
He called over the wine-boy and had his goblet filled again.
Tasting a knot of fury in his stomach, he nodded curtly and said, “Yes. Fine. Your turn now then. Get down from the stone. You profane it with your touch. A slave will have to be sacrificed at its foot to clean away your desecration.”
She frowned, and slid down. “You could just wash it with soap and water.” As she walked, rather lazily, back to her place on the grass she announced, all of a sudden, “I will not move from this place where I stand. I will not use the arts of my weirds, nor magics. I will not conjure a spell. And yet, I will take from you your greatest weapon. All you must do to defeat me in this, is to stop me.”
He felt his face tighten in confusion, and then a stab of panic found him. He reached immediately for the fragment of yellowed horn, but the satchel was still tied by strong leather straps to his belt. And then it occurred to him that it was only half a spell anyway, and not his greatest weapon. Not yet. In a moment of dumb confusion he looked down at his sword, knowing already from the weight that it was still there. And then his hand ran along his belt and found that something was missing.
The circlet of braided hair. Each piece taken from the victims given to the pool of the seeing spirit… to keep his control over the white wraiths he needed the pieces of their corpora to act as conjuror’s foci. In blind fear, feeling his throat constrict, he looked around madly.
The cup-bearing nameless, meaningless servant boy who had been filling his wine throughout the court was standing a little way off with the cord of braided hair in his hand. The child’s expression held its own hint of trepidation as he threw the braids straight up into the air. A shadow passed over them swiftly then, and an unnaturally large owl snatched the woven hair-braid out of the top of its arc, and carried it to the woman down the slope. It dropped the woven circlet–which tumbled airily and lightly–and she caught it with one gently outstretched hand. “There,” she said. “We did say that the contest was the first to pose three unsolved puzzles, or to the death did we not?”
In a rage, he turned on the boy, who was the nearest and most vulnerable target. With blinding red light soaking his vision, Athairdrost twisted his fingers and spat words of old power and brought a terrible fey-stroke down on the traitor. But to his shock and horror, the magic just swirled around the child, curling and withering the air with death-magic, scorching the grass, but leaving the boy untouched. With sinking confusion, he realised that this was the same ‘child’ he’d met in the woods. It was that same creature in the glade… the same one… Athairdrost took an uncertain step backwards. The thing was clearly beyond the scathe of magic, and maybe immune to all manner of other things too. The creature might plausibly not be mortal at all… but rather, some old monstrous thing wearing a human skin.
Athairdrost looked around in a rising panic. His knights and lords were too far off to be any immediate help. All his small servants and thralls were backing away now too, fearfully. A few of them had even broken into a run.
He could hear the woman’s voice, dimly through a fog of racing thoughts.
“White warths!” she called, “Young stolen maidens of the ghaist, of the shade, of the dead. Your prince has lost his power over you. I hold that yoke in my fingers. But I do not command you. No,” she said with a cold finality. “I give you freedom. Bring me the piece of the old and rune-cut antler your prince carries… and you may do freely as you please with him. Whatsoever you please…” After a pause she added. “I imagine you have suffered. Cold. Pain. Misery. Bleak grey horror. I imagine you may resent having lost your life, for the benefit of someone else’s petty delights. So. Hear this. You are free to express your feelings in this towards the Princeling Athairdrost.”
He could feel the chill at his back as a cold wind roiled up around him. He turned around, his face feeling a numbness, his fingers and toes nerveless with fear, his breath quick, rapid, like a cornered rabbit. Faster than seemed possible, the White Sorrows were behind him and around him. Their deathly beautiful faces were close all around. Pressing closer and closer. Their ice-blue eyes stared at him–inches away–emotionless. Their phantom locks blew upon the wind and their gossamer robes tugged and flagged as the air rose into freezing gusts.
He cowered and his hid his face behind his eyes.
“Please,” he said. And again, “Please…”
The first of their cold hands burned his skin.
In that moment, Athairdrost’s mind was transported.
He was inside the memories of one of the girls–she was alive, afraid to the point of terror, as a cold sharp knife slid over her throat. And then he was inside the memories of the next of the victims feeling the coldness and the pain. She didn’t want to die. She wanted her mother and her family and… he was in the next memory and the next.
He took a long time dying.