The Phantom Queen Awakes Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself, hardly knowing why, and
continued in her original direction.
    She lost track of time, of her steps, of the
depth, but felt she had travelled the lengths of many raven wings
when she heard the distinctive sound of raspy breathing.
    Her footsteps froze.
    “Who comes?” asked a voice.
    Maire thought her hands had changed to solid
ice. Her throat hurt. “One who has summoned the raven.”
    The cold, if possible, deepened. She reached
behind her, to the bag she carried, trying to draw out a second
feather, but her hands were too cold to move.
    “Who comes?”
    “One who has used the raven’s
feather.”
    “Who comes?”
    “One who would speak with the Raven
Queen.”
    Something dry and cold brushed her cheek. She
held herself still. The cold dryness reached up to cup her face in
ten narrow, rough points. She suddenly knew what her cheeks felt:
fingers of dry bone. She swallowed to keep from
screaming.
    “And what would this one speak of to the Raven
Queen?”
    “Ravens fall into our village.”
    “Lives for a life,” said the Raven
Queen.
    “You have had four,” said Maire. “Four for the
death I asked. The death I asked and three.”
    “And still I am unpaid. Three and three and
three again: that is and was and will be the price.”
    Maire remembered the fists slamming into her
back, the shouts, the nights she spent huddled in the ashes,
wondering if she dared kick a coal into the wall. She remembered
the woman, now dead, who had never learned how to bake.
    “Do you touch them, and I shall take your
wings.”
    “Do you take my wings,” the Queen hissed, “and
I shall take your eyes.”
    “You cannot,” said Maire. “For I am already
blind.”
    Silence. Then the Raven Queen
laughed.
    “Yes, I remember you,” she said, her voice
seemed filled with a thousand screams, the cries of songbirds and
the shrieks of ravens. “The blind one, crying in the night, weeping
over her tender and torn skin ― without the courage to bend her
fingers around his neck.”
    But she had dreamed it, dreamed of choking
him, of beating him, of wrapping her fingers around his neck and
hearing his breathing cease and―
    “I had the courage to call your name, and call
upon the raven song.”
    “To have another kill him. For
cruelty.”
    She remembered the blows striking her cheek,
remembered the―
    “No. Because I could not see.”
    “And now refuse to pay my price.”
    “I did not know your price.”
    “You did not see.”
    “Three and three and three again? For but one
death?”
    “A price of kindness, not of
cruelty.”
    Maire thought of the child who had died. “You
name that kind?”
    Another whisper of frozen touch across her
cheek. “The child plays beneath my mounds. And her brothers may
waver now before they call my name. And think upon it. What would
it mean, if any could call upon my name, and have no cost to
pay?”
    “And why should they be the ones to pay my
price?”
    “A point. A point.”
    Finger bones caressed her cheeks again; this
time Maire did not suppress a faint moan. “Indeed, a most fair
point. And I could, I think, spare your village, yes. Spend my
nights in the shadowed hills, and think no more of ravens, and let
its children grow in peace.”
    Maire found herself breathing
again.
    “But then no other could call out my name, for
aid at home and war.”
    Maire thought of her own dark nights in the
straw bed; thought of the women with arms bruised from their
husband’s love, thought of the men who sobbed at the deaths of
brothers and friends. She thought of the tales she so often heard,
of ravens shrieking during war.
    “You lie,” she said.
    “Without the blood, I cannot answer another
call. And I am too weak to journey far.” And now the voice was a
rich caress, “Your words brought me to this hill. If not your
village, where else can I sip my blood?”
    “Our cows―”
    “Do not pulse with a human soul.”
    “Your wings―”
    “Beat only when filled with