I Only Summon Villainesses

We walked down.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about the Precipice — there’s no staircase, no gate, no helpful sign reading DEEPER, THIS WAY. The layers just get older around you. You keep going and at some point you notice the rock underfoot has stopped being rock and started being something that was rock a very long time ago and hasn’t decided what it is now.

The dark thickens by degrees. And the dead in it get less recent, which sounds abstract until you understand that recent dead are the ones that still remember being alive, and the older ones don’t, and that’s worse.

Brunhilde walked point. Frost fanned out ahead of her in slow fern-shapes, mapping the ground three steps before any of us reached it, which was useful and also meant I spent an hour watching a woman turn the bottom of the world white just by existing in it.

Ilse walked behind her. Not beside. Behind, at a fixed distance, the exact spacing of an escort who has decided where she stands and isn’t discussing it.

And I walked at the back with a hole in my shoulder and a sword who wouldn’t stop talking.

She hasn’t said a word in three hours, Wren observed.

’I noticed.’

Neither has the other one.

’I noticed that too.’

I’m just saying, if this is what you’re like when you win a fight—

’Wren.’

—I’d hate to see a funeral.

The wound had closed. Brunhilde had done that back at the ridge without asking, laying two cool fingers on it and letting the cold seal the edges shut, and the whole procedure had taken about four seconds and involved no eye contact whatsoever. It ached now in a clean, distant way. There was blood dried stiff down my arm and into the sleeve, and every so often the fabric cracked when I moved and shed little brown flakes onto the frost, and I found that I couldn’t stop looking at them. Small red-brown specks on white, spaced out behind me like breadcrumbs. Marking the path of a man who had ruined a stranger’s life yesterday afternoon and was now hiking.

’Not my best week.’

Naturally, that was when Ilse spoke.

”Stop looking at my back.”

”I’m not looking at your back.”

”You’re looking at my back and thinking about how to apologize again.” She didn’t turn around. ”You’ve done it four times. Twice out loud. Don’t.”

”...That’s an oddly specific accusation from someone facing the other way.”

”I was a summoner for nine years. I’ve spent my whole life reading a thing walking behind me.” Now she did turn, just her head, just enough to catch me over her shoulder in the last of Brunhilde’s blue light. ”I know what it feels like when something at my back wants something from me.”

’Ah, damn.’

I let that sit for a few steps, because I’ve learned exactly one thing in my whole miserable career and it’s when a comeback would cost more than it earns.

”For what it’s worth,” I said eventually, ”I wasn’t drafting an apology. I was looking at the blood coming off my sleeve and having a nice quiet think about what a disaster I am. Very different activity. Much more self-indulgent.”

Ilse studied me a moment longer.

”Huh,” she said, and faced front again.

Which is not forgiveness. But it’s the sound a person makes when they’ve filed you somewhere other than enemy, and at the bottom of the Precipice I’ll take administrative reclassification as a win.

Progress, Wren said.

’Don’t jinx it.’

Ahead of us, Brunhilde stopped.

She did it without a word or a signal, and Ilse stopped a half-second later, hand already at her hilt, before I’d even registered why. The two of them just went still at the same instant, the way two people do when they’ve done this a thousand times together and the muscle hasn’t caught up with the fact that they’re broken up.

I watched Ilse notice it. Watched her hand come off the sword like the grip had gone hot.

Nobody said anything about it. Naturally.

”What?” I said.

”The cold isn’t spreading.”

I looked down. She was right. The frost that had been running ahead of her all day had stopped dead in a rough circle around her boots, edges crawling and failing, crawling and failing, like water trying to climb a wall.

”Something’s eating it?”

”No.” Brunhilde crouched and laid her palm flat on the stone, and her breath came out white and hung there without rising. ”Something older is already here. This layer belongs to it. My winter is a guest and it is being told to sit.”

’Oh, that’s fine. That’s a completely normal sentence to hear.’

”Told by what?”

”I don’t know.”

”You don’t—” I stopped. ”You’re a continental-grade calamity who freezes oceans. What in this hole is big enough to tell you to sit.”

Brunhilde straightened, and for the first time since I’d bound her, she looked something other than composed. Not afraid. Afraid isn’t the word, and I’d be lying if I used it. But there was a weight in her face like a woman reading a name she recognized on a very old list.

”Cade,” she said. ”How deep do you intend to go?”

”All the way down.”

”Then understand what that means, because you keep saying it as though it is a distance.” She gestured at the dark ahead with the flat of Glacies Aeterna, and the frozen sun’s light didn’t reach anything out there, just went out a dozen paces on and gave up. ”The shallow layers hold things that died last season. Bandits. Beasts. The bird. Down here we are past the age of anything with a name in your language. And below this there are older layers still, and below those—”

She stopped.

”Below those?” I prompted.

”Below those, there is the first thing that ever died.” A pause. ”And she did not die of natural causes.”

The dark did not get colder, exactly, because Brunhilde’s cold had already lost that argument to whatever lived down here. But something in the air changed pressure the way it does before weather, and I felt the bond in my chest — the new one, the one I was still learning to hold — pull faintly toward the deep like a compass needle finding its north.

’...Now that is dangerous.’

’Also: she?’

I filed it. I filed it very carefully, in the drawer where I keep the things I’m going to need later and can’t afford to want yet.

”Right,” I said. ”Well. Not today, obviously.”

”No,” Brunhilde agreed. ”Not today.”

”Today we camp, I eat something that isn’t a ration brick, and someone explains to me why the ground here isn’t rock.”

”It’s bone,” Ilse said.

I looked at her. Then at the ground. Then, at length, back at her.

”...Cool,” I said. ”Great. Love that. Thank you for that.”

”You asked.”

”I did ask. I regret asking. I’d like to un-ask.”

Something happened at the corner of Ilse’s mouth that was almost certainly not a smile, because she’d have denied it under oath, and I wasn’t about to point it out and kill it in the crib.

We made camp in the lee of a ridge that I chose not to examine too closely for anatomical features. Brunhilde took first watch without being asked, standing at the edge of her stalled frost with the greatsword grounded and both hands on the pommel, looking out into a dark that had told her no. Ilse sat with her back to a wall, sword across her knees, and did not sleep, and did not pretend to.

I dropped down a few feet from her and started the long unpleasant business of peeling dried blood off my own sleeve.

”Can I ask you something that isn’t an apology.”

”You’re going to anyway.”

”What do you do now?”

She was quiet long enough that I thought I’d stepped in it again.

”I don’t know,” she said finally. ”I’ve been a summoner since I was fifteen. Everything I am is built around holding something that isn’t there anymore.” She turned her hand over in the blue light, palm up, and looked at it, and it was empty in a way that had nothing to do with the hand. ”There’s a place in me where she used to sit. It’s still shaped like her. It just doesn’t have anything in it.”

I didn’t say I’m sorry, because she’d banned it, and because it would have been about me anyway.

”Then you’ll fill it with something worse,” I said. ”That’s usually how it goes down here.”

Ilse looked over at me.

”Was that meant to be comforting?”

”It was meant to be accurate. I’m told the two overlap about eleven percent of the time.”

She snorted. It was small and it escaped by accident and she looked genuinely annoyed with herself for it, and out at the edge of the frost, Brunhilde did not turn around, but the frost around her boots crept forward a single, quiet inch.

Above us the frozen sun burned on over a field of bone at the bottom of the world, and somewhere far below it, in the dark that had told a Valkyrie to sit, something that had been murdered by its own siblings before the world had a name for siblings went on not being dead enough.

’...Let’s not get too excited.’

’That will take time.’