"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.
