Cobweb Bride (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book 1)

Chapter 3

He was numb and cold as winter.

Ian Chidair, Duke Hoarfrost, had no blood inside of him. It had drained completely from his body by the time he walked up the sloping incline of the shore and stopped before his men.

The soldiers stood holding torches against the heavy blue twilight, some mounted, many on foot. His son, Beltain, sat on his warhorse.

They had grown silent, all of them. It was peculiar to observe the stricken expressions on those nearest, and the hastily concealed signs of the cross that swept across the ranks in pure animal reflex.

"Father? Are you my father? Are you . . . dead?" his son had asked him.

And Hoarfrost had to pause and think, his mind sluggish and devoid of emotion as though he resided in a waking dream.

"My . . . son. I don't . . . know." The words came with uncustomary difficulty, forced and hissing, because his chest was constricted somehow—indeed, frozen like a side of meat.

Ian Chidair realized that he was not breathing and made a conscious effort to inhale, so that he could form words, so that he could speak. But as his chest expanded that first time, his lungs were burning, seemingly on fire, endlessly so, with . . . ice; they had stiffened in rigor mortis.

Or maybe it was the simple action of cold upon water. Each intake of air caused him to fight against a new crust of ice that filmed over the insides of his lungs, and each ballooning of the membranes was breaking that ice, over and over, so that there were permanent razor-shards inside him. . . .

Along with the everpresent ice there was pain. At first it was raging mortal agony, foremost in his mind. But then it too had grown numb in the cold—in particular when he was first submerged in the icy waters of the lake. He didn't know cold could burn so. Cold burned with an inferno without end, and then it . . . receded. And thus pain became secondary, a constant sensation of remote horror that simply slipped in the back of his mind and lurked—for now.

Or, maybe pain was just a memory, and was not there at all.

Duke Hoarfrost pumped his chest in and out, or did something that caused a movement inside of him. Something; he was not sure what. He could hear the cold air swishing through the holes in his flesh, a soft hiss. It was almost curious to consider it, to listen. . . . Too bad he was so stiff, so cumbersome—he had never remembered being so peculiarly solid and heavy before, as though he was not made of meat but granite.

Am I dead? he thought, for the first time voluntarily, directly. But it was a lazy thought, a dreamlike passing thought with no emotion attached to it. And so he did not give it more than cursory attention, let it pass on into the void with other insignificant filaments of images and dream-fragments.

As though he had mused out-loud, Beltain, his son, spoke.

"What has happened, father?" he whispered. It was unclear whether he was afraid to speak up in a full voice or if he was unable to do so from the shock.

"What has happened to me?" the Duke echoed. He listened not to Beltain but to his own words. Somehow he found it now easier to speak once again, to form words on the exhalation of breath, as though the practice of pumping his own lungs was merely an old rhythm he could reclaim so that it was again becoming a habit. Inhale, exhale, his mechanism was working like clockwork.

And then he shook himself like a dog with great sudden strength that was not inhuman but merely impossible, considering the condition of his body. And he sent bits of water and ice flying around him. He flexed his arms, stomped his feet, his torso covered in iron plate and wet tunic.