The courts tried to hammer me flat under the crushing cold of the ice, they wanted me to be afraid, to give up, to give in. But I braced myself on my sword and warmed my hands on my locket. I answered the polite greeting they had not made, for they did not know how to reciprocate in the traditional way.

“I have no trouble, thanks to my power as a woman. I just want to clarify two things. There is one sacrifice each year. There cannot be another, and it is this sacrifice that binds the Wild Hunt and indeed all your servants for another year. So you all agree and accept me as the sacrifice?”

“We accept.”

They were so hungry and impatient and greedy that they threw their chains off my sire and onto me. Their touch tore at my skin as a hundred sharp nails of ice, a net of barbs poised to puncture me and drink me dry.

“That being so, you take my mortal blood. Is that not right? Mortal blood seals the contract by which you first bound the Hunt and all your other servants?”

They answered by tightening the chains. A bloody seam opened on my breast right above my heart. So rich and sweet blood streams, alive with the salt of life and the spice of power. They suckled the air to suck me dry, to use the salt of my life to yet again chain those who served them.

Blessed Tanit! It hurt.

My soul was being torn from my body, all life and love and courage and strength pouring through the gash.

But I still had a tongue.

I still had breath.

I had a plan.

“My mortal blood I sacrifice. But only my mortal blood. You have no right or claim to my spirit blood, the blood I inherited from my sire. So if you have taken even a drop of my spirit blood, then the contract is broken.”

48

The festive cacophony twirled on unceasing as I took in a breath and let it out, as I moistened my bone-dry lips. My legs and arms trembled, but I did not fall.

The throned presences leaned forward as if suckling on a suddenly dry teat. Stretched toward me a little more, as if puzzled. Then probed with talons and knife-bladed teeth. The sharp planes of their human-like visages wrinkled as they sniffed the air, as they tugged on the chains and, in increasing frustration, shook those chains to try to force the blood to flow.

But the chains no longer bound me because there was no possible way to separate my mortal blood from my spirit blood.

“I invoke rei vindicatio.” My voice rang clear above the hissing whirl of the courts as the chains slithered off my body and wilted like withering vines on the ground. “Without my blood to seal the contract, we reclaim ownership of our own selves.”

Insubstantial chains make no sound as they shatter.