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“I think my brother was supposed to steal it so that Victoria and Able, the goblins, couldn’t steal it and take it to Ymir.”
“He couldn’t be bothered to just drop in with a warning,” she muttered, her attention firmly on what her hands were doing under the water. I caught a glimpse of light playing along one of her fingers, but it was gone before I could be sure I’d actually seen anything.
“Hey, look, frost giant. Your brother is sending thieves to steal that artifact you need to keep the world from ending,” I said in a cartoon Coyote voice, before dropping into my own. “Not his style. But my brother stole the artifact. I think something about the situation tipped Gary off that our father was playing a game, though. I think he went back to check with a source he could trust. So he went to talk to H— to the frost giant, who, instead of discussing matters, hit my brother with a spell that made communication impossible.”
“By then your father knew what the Soul Taker had done to you,” Grandmother Spider said comfortably. “He had this plot going already and saw an opportunity. A unique opportunity, in fact. So he saw to it that one sibling was replaced with the other. The one who needed to be here, in this place, at this time.”
Yep. That’s what I’d thought. Coyote had played my brother not once but twice.
“To what end?” I asked.
“Hmm,” she said, bending down a bit and bringing her hands up to the surface. I saw light then, like a red thread in her hands. She lowered them again, and the water was all darkness once more. “Let me tell you how I was brought here, to this pond, to tell stories with you.” She paused and smiled. “The night before the shortest night of the year is a good time for stories. For remembering.”
The water tingled a little against my skin.
“Do you know Baba Yaga?” she asked me.
“Do you know,” I said seriously, “that is the last question I expected you to ask me tonight. Yes. Or at least I have met her. And she has taken an interest in me a time or two.”
“Ah, that might explain things,” she said. “Baba Yaga told me that she had a decoration job in Uncle Mike’s pub, and would I do her a favor?” She paused. “I owed her a small favor. And a Christmas tree in a fae pub sounded amusing—at least in theory. In practice…let us just say that I was looking for something interesting when you wandered in. Soul damage is unusual by itself. But there was more to it. And your power tasted…There are not many of Coyote’s descendants running around anymore. He doesn’t bestir himself to flirtation as much as he used to and—” She gave me a rueful look. “They do tend to die young, child.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“He and I are…well, not friends exactly, but we are friendly, and I decided to follow you a bit and see if I might mend what was broken.”
“Heal me?” I said.
“I am not a great healer,” she offered. “But I do weave, and sometimes that will substitute.”
“You came here to help me?” I said slowly. “But what about Jack? Why did you attack Jack?”
“Jack?” She paused and gave me a faintly bewildered look before comprehension dawned. “Ah, the vampire’s true love.”
I think it was supposed to sound ironic, but it sounded a little tender to me. Maybe I was projecting.
“You’d mucked about trying to heal your damage,” she said. “And it looked like you had some help, but you might tell the Dark Smith to stick to metalwork next time you see him. Clumsy repairs are guaranteed to make things worse eventually. I needed to see the actual wounding—and it was better for you to rip that patchwork off than for me to do it.”
“You can fix me?” I said.
She nodded, then said, “With help. I can fix the damage to your soul, Mercy, but it takes a holy being to fix the damage to the spark of divine that your father bequeathed you.”
She stood up. In her hands was a…a something. It looked like a piece of cloth maybe two feet by three feet, but it was made of deep red light that flickered and sparkled in turn.
Grandmother Spider walked to the edge of the pond, the one nearest the lake, and held her work over the surface.
I was somehow not surprised to see a woman rise from the steaming depths a few feet from our pond. Like Grandmother Spider she was Native, but her skin was smooth with youth and her braided hair—one long braid down her back—was pitch-black.
“She killed one who took refuge here,” she said, her voice so soft I almost could not hear her. I could feel her anger, though.
“Did she?” Grandmother Spider said.
As if her voice called him, I heard the tapping of short claws on the stone where the warmth of the lake kept the snow at bay.
“Ah,” she said, not moving from where she stood, holding the cloth of light. “Good dog. Thank you.”
I backed up so I could see the spirit of the lake, Grandmother Spider, and Garmr at the same time.
In his mouth, the great dog carried a silver lyre whose blue stones leaked light into the darkness, illuminating the woman’s face on the bottom of the lower curve of the instrument.
