I Only Summon Villainesses

I glanced up at her in confusion.

”An Heir? An Heir to what?”

Brunhilde giggled softly.

”An Heir to disaster. Chaos. Disorder.”

I reeled back.

”What? Eeew. I know I’m bad, but I’m not that bad. Please don’t put me on a universal scale like that.”

It was strange. I’d been sure she was teasing me, but there was no laugh after, no look that said she was kidding.

Instead she looked dead serious, and gorgeous while she was at it.

”Heirs are a rare event in the world. If one were to put it clearly, we’d call it an unpredictable force of nature. But even I do not know all that could be known about them.”

She sighed.

”That being said. I asked you to do what you did because I needed to break my bond with Ilse and re-tie it with you. My suspicion was that you would be able to re-summon me at my full strength. With Ilse it was greatly hindered, and that hindrance was the only way she could summon me at all. But for her, even that is already a great enough feat.”

Hearing her, I finally calmed. I sighed and looked at her.

”Then where is Ilse now.”

Brunhilde tilted her head toward the direction she had flown from.

”There’s a despicable bird that has plagued us.”

I tilted my head back a little, looking at her with disbelief.

”You were defeated that bad... by a bird?”

She turned and grimaced at me.

”It was a very horrific and treacherous bird. I have never seen anything like that. Even while I was alive.”

I inhaled, held it a moment, then exhaled. And picked up Wren.

”Ilse’s in trouble, right? Then let’s go save her.”

”Calm down, blue balls. I hid her before going to fight it alone. And there’s no need for you to be involved. I am stronger than I was a few seconds ago. I can teach that bastard a lesson.”

I gave her a side look.

”You sure?”

She frowned at me.

”What’s that supposed to mean?”

”I mean. You got defeated once.”

She laughed menacingly.

”You do realize I taught your Tyrant Empress to hold a sword, right?”

I chuckled with disbelief.

”Kassie’s grown from that child holding a sword into a force of combat since you taught her. I’m sure she can put you in your place even now that you’re a Calamity.”

Displeasure crossed Brunhilde’s face, but she closed her eyes and kept her expression flat, trying to hide it. I could see it. The problem was why she was reacting that way.

’I don’t know if I can ever understand these women.’

Wren hummed against my palm, the vibration climbing the blade into my wrist like she’d been waiting her turn.

You could try understanding the one holding you first.

’You’ve been quiet.’

I’ve been listening. Someone in this cave has to.

I almost smiled. Brunhilde was still standing there with her eyes shut and that too-flat expression, the one that told me I’d stepped on something she’d rather I hadn’t.

The air had dropped a few more degrees while we talked. I only noticed because my breath had started ghosting again, thin and pale, drifting up past her cheek before it faded into nothing. It wasn’t the cave doing that. It was her. The cold came off her the way heat comes off a stove, steady and patient, filling the room a degree at a time whether she meant it to or not.

’So that’s just... always on.’

She opened her eyes.

”You’ve made your point.”

Her voice had gone smooth and level again, the displeasure folded back somewhere I couldn’t see it.

”It doesn’t change anything. Stay here. I’ll retrieve Ilse and deal with the bird, and you’ll keep your fingers, which I imagine you’re fond of.”

”Yeah, I’m real attached to them.” I turned Wren once in my grip. ”But no.”

”No?”

”No. Ilse’s hidden out there where the murder-bird lives. If you lose again, she’s got no one, and I’ve got a summon with a grudge and a dead summoner on my conscience. So I’m coming.”

Brunhilde regarded me for a long moment. The frost crept another handspan across the stone between us.

”You think I’ll lose again.”

”I think you lost the first time.” I shrugged. ”That’s a fact, not an insult. Well. It’s a little bit of an insult.”

She let out a slow breath, and this time the cold went with it, a visible curl of white that hung in the air and didn’t melt.

”I lost because that woman could pull perhaps a third of what I am out of the spirit world. I fought at a third of myself, on ground that suited it and not me, and I still nearly had it. Now I’m whole.”

She lifted one hand, and the air above her palm crackled, a lattice of ice knitting itself out of nothing before she let it fall apart.

”There is a difference between the two.”

She’s not lying. The cold in here is deeper than it was a minute ago. She wasn’t like this before you touched her.

’Comforting.’

”Fine. You’re whole. Congratulations.”

I started toward the mouth of the cave, then stopped and looked back at her.

”But you still haven’t told me what makes this bird so special that a continental-grade winter goddess got her feathers handed to her.”

That got the grimace again.

”It doesn’t fight...”

She folded her hands, and her gaze drifted to the past.

”That’s what makes it special. It waits. It circles above you where you can’t reach it, and it doesn’t make a sound while it does, and it does this for as long as it takes. Hours. My strength is a season, Cade. It arrives. It settles. It takes the field an inch at a time until nothing living can move against me.”

She flexed her fingers, and I heard the faint pop of frost forming and breaking at each knuckle.

”That thing never gave me the field. Every time the cold began to bite, it was already somewhere else. Fast. Impossibly fast. And it feeds on the exact moment you begin to doubt.”

I filed that away. Waits you out, punishes the flinch, never stands still long enough to freeze. A slow, patient winter against a thing that refused to hold still long enough to be winter’s. Bad matchup didn’t cover it.

She’s not wrong to be careful.

And yet she’s going anyway. You two have that in common. It’s insufferable.

”So it’s fast,” I said aloud. ”You’re slow. And your whole thing is being slow correctly.”

”My whole thing,” she said icily, ”has ended armies.”

”Armies stand still and let you catch up. Does the bird?”

Her jaw tightened. Somewhere in the back of my head I clocked that I’d finally found the loose thread. She knew this too. She’d known it the whole time she was losing. That was why the loss sat in her the way it did. It wasn’t shame at being weaker. It was the specific insult of being stronger and losing anyway.

”Then it’s fortunate,” she said, cold and precise, ”that I no longer have to do it alone.”

I blinked.

’Wait, did she just—’

”Don’t look so pleased,” she added. ”You’re not help. You’re a distraction with a sword. If it fixes its attention on you, it stops circling. And a bird that stops circling to look at something is a bird I can reach.”

”So your plan is to use me as bait.”

”My plan is to use you correctly.” She smiled, and it was Kassie’s smile, near enough that something in my chest went sideways. ”You did say I was slow.”

I like her, Wren decided.

’Of course you do.’

We went out through the cave mouth together, and the dark of the deeper layer opened up around us.

I still hadn’t gotten used to this part of the Precipice. There was no sky, not really, just a vast bruised nothing overhead that swallowed the top of every rise and gave nothing back.

The ground fell away in long shelves of black rock, glassy and old, the kind of old that made the word feel too small. Down here the dead were ancient enough that even the stone seemed tired.

Brunhilde’s winter spread out ahead of us as she walked, frost racing over the rock in delicate fern-shapes, and for once the landscape looked almost peaceful under it. White over black. Clean.

”How far?” I asked.

She lifted her chin toward a ridge of jagged spires standing against the dark, leaning like the teeth of something that had died mid-snarl.

”Ilse is below there. In a hollow beneath the roots of the stone. Safe, unless it thinks to look, and it won’t. It hunts warmth and fear, and I left her neither.”

She paused.

”The bird will find us long before we find it. That is the nature of the thing. We won’t choose the moment. It will.”

’Great. Love that for us.’

We walked. The cold deepened as she moved, which I now understood wasn’t a mood but a countdown — her season, arriving. The longer we were out here, the more the field became hers. Which meant the bird’s whole game was to make sure we never got the time.

I kept my eyes up.

That was the mistake, I realized later. Watching the sky. Because the sky wasn’t where it started.

It started with the quiet.

Not silence. The layer was never truly silent, there was always that low grinding hum of old stone settling. But the quiet went wrong all at once, flattened, like a hand had come down over the world’s mouth. Brunhilde stopped walking. She didn’t say anything. She just went very, very still, and the frost pouring off her stopped spreading and hung where it was.

”Cade,” she said, low.

”I know. I feel it.”

’Down,’ Wren said, and her voice had lost all its dryness. ’Look down.’

I looked down.

A feather had landed on the frost in front of my boot. Long. Black going to crimson at the shaft, the color of something bleeding through the dark. As I stared, a second one drifted past my face, slow, turning lazily end over end, and settled beside the first without a sound.

There was nothing above us, no shape against the bruised sky. No wings or cry.

And yet feathers were falling — where there was nothing in the air to drop them.

’...Ah, damn.’