The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“How far now?” The land had run to the low hills and rolling valleys of Hennan’s homeland, the sky above us bruised a yellow-purple, and swirled in some great spiral about a centre point directly ahead of us. “About two miles less than when you last asked, Jal.” Snorri led the way, swaying to the gait of his steed, offering me no view but broad shoulders beneath a leather cape, and thick black hair reaching down past his neck.

“Twenty miles, maybe.” Kara took pity on me.

Hennan rode with me on Murder, perched on a collection of blankets secured to my saddle. His words had run out as we reached the margins of the Wheel-lands where his grandfather had once tended goats. Approaching from the south this time we saw no signs of life, either on four feet or on two, save once a pair of ravens flying west.

The countryside had not yet taken on the twisted and alien aspect encountered further in but everything about it felt wrong—the grass an unconvincing shade of green, the wind whisper-laden and beating strange patterns into the rushes that grew thick around the valley fens.

“Do you see them?” Snorri asked.

“No.” I had been hoping they were figments of my imagination. “What are they?”

“Figments of your imagination,” Kara said behind me, struggling to keep her nag from panic.

“Oh good.” It had seemed that shadowy shapes had been pacing us on both sides, quite far off, and either vanishing when I looked directly at them, or refusing definition, remaining indistinct blurs in the middle distances, like a stain on the eye.

“It’s bad. Very bad.” Kara glanced around. “The Wheel is reaching out this far and starting to put flesh on our fears. I had expected something like this, but much closer in.”

“Hell.” Several weeks’ worth of good intentions melted away like a snowball tossed into a furnace. “This is never going to work. We don’t stand a chance.” I’d spent my time worrying about what I might do if we really got to the heart of the Wheel, somehow allowing myself to gloss over the business of actually getting there. As I stared out at the indistinct shapes some of them started to look more solid, more sharply outlined. One in particular darkened and began to sprout long thin legs . . . “Shit! We need to run!” I hauled on Murder’s reins. He’d galloped me to safety before, he could do it again.

“Jalan!” Kara’s voice stabbed through me, taking the strength from my arms. “You need to calm down, empty your mind.”

“Empty my mind? What the hell are you talking about?” My mind was a bubbling cauldron, I’d never been able to still its voices, even enjoying a goblet of wine out on a balcony after a tumble in the sheets my thoughts would be a seething mass of this and that and maybe and when. “I can’t!”

“Then concentrate on something else, some good memory, something peaceful.”

“I . . . I can’t think of anything, damn it!” Every image that sprang to mind my imagination rapidly warped into some terrifying nightmare, and out across the grass yet another faint shadow grew darker and started to take on the shape of the horror in my head. I thought of Lisa DeVeer but no sooner had I pictured her, deliciously striped in light and shade, than my treacherous imagination started to speculate how the Wheel might hurt me with her—the flesh fell away around her mouth, revealing triangular teeth around a devouring hole. “I’ve got to go! I’ll get us all killed.”

I shook Murder’s reins, but Snorri leaned across and took them in one hand.

“Jal!” He snapped his fingers beneath my nose. “You don’t have to empty your mind, or fill it with something good, you just need to listen.” Snorri steered Murder back toward the Wheel and walked his horse on, slowly. “A story will lead a man through dark places. Stories have direction. A good story commands a man’s thoughts along a path, allowing no opportunity to stray, no space for anything but the tale as it unfolds before you.”

“What story have you got, Snorri?” Hennan asked. “Is it the one about the jötun who stole Thor’s hammer?”

“Christ don’t tell one of your monster sagas!” I could see it now, frost giants shambling out of the mist just as Snorri described them.

“Oh, it’s darker than that.” Snorri turned in the saddle to look back at us. “But if I tell it true there will be no space in you for anything else. You won’t think of Hel coming out of the Wheel for you, because I will have already laid it before you.”

And like that, riding toward the Wheel of Osheim, Snorri ver Snagason spoke for the first time of his quest through Hel. Perhaps Snorri’s storytelling had always been a kind of magic, and being so close to the Wheel had taken that gentle spellbinding and made something more powerful of it. All I know is that the words ran around me and like a bad dream I was back in Hell, seeing only what Snorri’s tale laid before me.