I Only Summon Villainesses

”Hello, Ilse,” Brunhilde said again.

Ilse still didn’t look up. She stayed leaning on the sword with the point set against the stone, her half-undone braid hanging over the cut on her cheek, and when she finally spoke her voice was the flat, iced-over calm of a woman spending the last of her control very carefully.

”You could have told me.”

”I could not.”

Frost fanned out from Brunhilde’s boots and stopped a careful hand’s breadth short of the hollow’s mouth, as if even her winter knew better than to cross that line right now.

”You would have refused. And then you would have died, and I would have gone back into the black room, and the bird would still be circling this ridge waiting for the next warm thing to wander under it.”

”So you decided.”

”I always decide. It is the only thing you never learned to stop me doing.”

I opened my mouth.

”No,” they said. Both of them. At the same time. Neither one looked at me.

I closed it.

’Right. Okay. Cool. I’ll just be over here. Holding your sword. In the murder hole.’

Ilse pushed herself up off the blade, unfolding out of the dark by degrees, and in the blue light of the frozen sun overhead I watched her make herself stand straight in front of the thing that used to belong to her. She was shaking. She let herself shake. She just didn’t let it move her.

”Nine years,” she said.

”I fed you spirit essence until I couldn’t stand. I pulled you out of that place with a third of what you needed and I held you there, every time, every single time, because you told me a Valkyrie does not answer a summons she does not respect.”

Her voice cracked down the middle and she kept going straight through the crack.

”I respected you. I built a whole life out of respecting you. And the first moment something came along that could hold you properly, you had him—” a jerk of her chin at me, still not a look ”—you had a stranger cut the cord while I was hiding in a hole you put me in.”

Brunhilde was quiet for a moment.

”Yes,” she said.

That was it. Yes. No softening, no speech. I winced on Ilse’s behalf.

”You want me to lie to you?”

Brunhilde went on, and now something moved under the cold, an old grief worn so smooth it barely caught the light.

”I have never lied to you. I will not start because it would be kinder. You held me at a third of myself for nine years, Ilse, and it was the finest work I have ever seen a mortal do. And it was killing you. I watched it take you a piece at a time. Every summoning cost you something you did not have to spare, and you gave it, and you called it respect.”

Her jaw tightened.

”I called it something else. I called it a slow grave I was digging with your hands. And I decided I would not stand in it any longer.”

Ilse’s face didn’t break. What it did was worse. It took on the specific damage of being told the cruelest thing that ever happened to you had been done for you.

”That wasn’t yours to decide,” she whispered.

”No,” Brunhilde agreed. ”It was mine to do. There is a difference, and I have never once pretended otherwise.”

I shifted my weight. The ice creaked.

Two heads turned. Two glares, one glacial-cyan and half-lidded, one red-rimmed and furious, landed on me with the combined force of about a continent and a half.

”—I wasn’t going to say anything...”

”You were breathing loudly,” Brunhilde said.

”That’s a life-support thing, I kind of have to—”

”Do it quieter,” Ilse uttered to me and went right back to Brunhilde without missing a beat, and I want it on the record that being told to breathe quietly by two women in the middle of the worst reunion I have ever witnessed is a very specific way to feel like furniture.

’You’re doing great. Really holding the room.’

’Shut up.’

For a while neither of them said anything. The frozen sun hissed faintly overhead, shedding its clean cold light down into the hollow, and out past the ridge the last of the grey feathers were finishing their long fade into nothing.

Ilse looked at Brunhilde. Brunhilde let her. That was the part that got me, watching it — that the Frost Valkyrie, who never flinched, who ended armies without raising her voice, just stood there and held still and let the woman she’d abandoned look her over like a debt.

”Are you happy,” Ilse said at last. It wasn’t really a question. ”At full strength. Bound to him. Is it everything you wanted.”

”I don’t know what happiness is. I stopped looking for it a long time before you were born. But I am whole. For the first time in an age, I am the thing I actually am, and not a third of it wearing my name.”

Brunhilde’s gaze flicked to me, just for a second, and back.

”He did not do it for me. Understand that, at least. He did it because I asked, and he barely knows you, and he has been carrying the weight of it since the moment he understood what it cost you. Look at him. He is terrible at hiding it. He has been trying to find a joke for the last five minutes and failing, which for him is a form of grief.”

’...Hey.’

I didn’t say it out loud. But it was true, and being read that accurately by someone I’d known for one afternoon was its own small cold horror.

Ilse finally looked at me. Really looked, the way she had in the dark before she understood — except now she understood, and the look was different. Not warm. I hadn’t earned warm and wouldn’t for a long time, if ever.

But the sword-point came up off the stone and she straightened, and some of the murder went out of her shoulders, and what was left was just a bone-tired woman standing at the bottom of the world holding the frayed end of a rope that used to be her whole life.

”Give me my sword back,” she said to me.

I handed it over hilt-first. She took it, sheathed it in one clean practiced motion that told me more about the nine years than anything she’d said, and let out a breath that fogged pale in the cold and didn’t come back as a sob, though it had every right to.

”I’m not forgiving you,” she told Brunhilde.

”I did not ask you to.”

”I might never forgive you.”

”That is also yours to decide.”

And then, quieter, in a register I hadn’t heard from her yet, something almost gentle worn down onto the cold like frost on glass:

”I would rather have you alive and hating me for a hundred years, Ilse, than proud of me in the ground. If that makes me a monster, I have been called worse, and by better.”

Ilse closed her eyes.

When she opened them the worst of it had passed — not gone, you don’t pass through a thing like that in one conversation at the bottom of a pit, but banked, folded down, filed away to be taken out and suffered properly somewhere warmer and safer and later. She was a professional. Grief was just one more thing she’d learned to hold at a third of what it wanted to be.

”Fine, then someone tell me what an Heir is, and why it’s him.”

There were two beats of silence. Then...

”That’s the reaction I had,” I offered. ”Word for word, actually. Well. There was more swearing.”

Ilse looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at Brunhilde. Then she looked back at me, at the white flame guttering off my knuckles and the bond sitting in my chest that she could feel and I was still learning to, and her expression settled into something wary and exhausted and grudging, not trust but at least willing to stand in the same hole as me while it made up its mind.

”He’s an idiot,” she said to Brunhilde.

”Profoundly,” Brunhilde agreed.

”...And you bound yourself to him. Forever.”

”Yes. It’s not very often that you find a very strong Idiot like him.”

Ilse exhaled slowly through her nose, and for the first time since I’d found her in the dark, the very faint ghost of something that in better light might have been a laugh crossed her ruined face.

”Then you deserve each other,” she said, and stepped past both of us out of the hollow, into the blue light and the frozen field and the long dark road deeper down, walking like a woman with nowhere left to fall.

I looked at Brunhilde.

Brunhilde looked at the frozen sun she’d hung in the sky, still burning, casting its clean cold light over three people and a great many dead birds at the bottom of the Precipice.

”She took that well.”

”She did not.”

”No,” I agreed. ”She really didn’t.”

And we followed her down.