Chapter 1: Cucumber Sandwiches
Winter had come hard that year. And it could not be said that Aliandra was unthankful for it. The bitter cold and frequent snowfalls meant that conditions were particularly bad further north. After Amelia's harrowing experience and discoveries on Hollow Skerry, there would be no opportunity for The House Beneath to reach south and cause further trouble before spring. This allowed at least some time to prepare, to plan.
Amelia had travelled home to spend Christmas with her parents, and Aliandra and Jenny were once again enjoying the hospitality of the Ingles home for the festive break.
The goose had been stripped to a glistening carcass by half past four, and Will Ingles was already snoring gently in his armchair with a paper crown slipping down over one eye. Crackers had been pulled, bad jokes read aloud, brandy set alight over the pudding until the whole dining room smelled of burnt sugar and something older underneath it. Samantha moved through the wreckage of the table, gathering plates in stacks while she hummed along to the carols playing low on the radio.
Now the three of them were arranged on the sofa beneath a crocheted blanket older than Jenny, the television flickering blue across their faces. Aliandra sat in the middle, her black skirt rucked up over bare thighs, stockings stretched tight. Jenny's head had found the hollow of her shoulder, strawberry-blonde hair spilling across Aliandra's collarbone, glasses fogging faintly every time she laughed at the screen.
Aliandra drank her mulled wine and felt the Serpent coiled deep in her gut turn over once, slow and pleased, like a cat settling.
Through the window, past the fairy lights strung along the sill, the snow had begun again, thicker than the forecast promised, and it was falling in a silence that did not belong to Christmas.
The film ended the way they all did, with a kiss in the falling snow and a song nobody could hum properly afterwards. Jenny reached under the blanket and squeezed Aliandra's hand, thumb pressing hard into the hollow of her palm, twice. A small signal, well rehearsed.
Aliandra turned her head. Jenny's glasses had gone opaque with the heat of her own face, and beneath them she was smiling in a way that meant she wanted to be somewhere else, or somewhere without her parents in the room.
"Walk with me?" Aliandra said. "Before it gets too deep. Last chance before it's knee high and we're stuck in here watching your dad snore through the Queen's speech tomorrow."
"I'd have said yes anyway," Jenny said. "You don't need the excuse."
They peeled themselves off the sofa. Samantha looked up from the plates and told them not to go far, and not to be late, and that there was cocoa in the tin if they wanted it when they came back. Aliandra kissed her on the cheek and told her she was a saint. Jenny wound herself into two jumpers, a scarf, a hat, gloves, and a coat that had been her mother's in a decade when coats were made to last.
Aliandra dressed in black, as always, and looked like something that had stepped out of the snow on purpose.
The back door opened onto a world gone soft and dimensionless. Snow had swallowed the garden path, the fence, the shape of the shed. Beyond it, the woods stood black and vertical, and the air bit at the inside of Aliandra's nose and tasted faintly of pine resin and woodsmoke from somebody's chimney further along the lane. Their boots made the first marks in a drive that had been clean ten minutes before.
"Listen," Jenny said, and stopped.
Aliandra listened. Snow does something to sound. It takes the edges off everything, so that the world seems to be holding its breath, waiting for you to notice.
"That's what I mean," Jenny said. "I forgot what quiet was like. College is never quiet. Even at three in the morning there's somebody screaming in the corridor."
"Usually us," Aliandra said.
"Usually you."
They walked deeper, following the old logging track. Snow gathered on Jenny's shoulders and in the folds of her scarf. Aliandra kicked up a spray of powder and watched it hang in the dark like it was deciding whether to fall. The Serpent in her belly had gone still and attentive, the way it did when something was about to happen. She didn't mention it. Jenny had enough to worry about without Aliandra narrating her own guts.
The trees thinned. They turned back when the cold had reached the point where Jenny's fingers had stopped being fingers and become claws of ice.
Coming back along the track, Aliandra heard bells.
Small bells. The kind that hang on harnesses, or on shop doors, or on the ankles of dancers. They chimed twice, soft, then stopped, then chimed again, and the sound seemed to come from off to their left, where no path went.
"Did you hear that?" Jenny said.
"Yes."
"Because if we're both hearing it, that's a thing. That's a magical thing."
"That's what I was thinking."
They followed it. Aliandra went first, pushing through a break in the hedge of young firs, snow sliding off the branches in fat wet clumps. On the other side was a clearing about fifteen paces across, and the moon had found it exactly, as if a spotlight had been hung above the trees.
Three snowmen stood in the middle. Fresh ones. Rolled and stacked and shaped with real care, by hands patient enough to get the middle ball properly round. Each had a face of small stones. Each had two stick arms angled out.
They faced each other, and the snow between them was not snow.
Jenny knelt. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that's a triangle."
Aliandra looked. Lines ran between the snowmen, pressed into the drift, each one straight as a rule and about a finger deep. Dozens of small prints along every line, as if something with narrow feet had walked the circuit again and again. Where the three lines met in the centre, the snow had melted and refrozen into a shallow dish of clear ice, and beneath the ice something dark glinted.
"A triangle of manifestation," Jenny said. "It's in the second year text. It's how you call something through. Aliandra, that's a proper one. That's not kids messing about."
"Kids don't do this," Aliandra said. She crouched beside her, black skirt dragging in the snow, and put one gloved finger against the nearest pressed line. Under the leather she felt the faintest hum, like holding a tuning fork long after the note has died.
The bells started properly then.
Not two chimes. A whole peal of them, close and bright, ringing in a way that had no business in a wood at midnight, and the sound came from the empty air in the middle of the triangle. Snow lifted off the ground in a fine white spiral. Ice cracked. The three ordinary snowmen sat there, dumb and round, while between them the light gathered and hardened and took on a shape Aliandra knew very well.
Coals for eyes, one of them slightly lower than the other. A carrot that had gone a bit crooked at the tip. A scarf she had knitted herself, badly, in the first week of the first holiday she had spent here, out of wool that had been in a drawer since Jenny was a child. And of course, a rigid cucumber for a cock.
Mr Cucumber stood in the clearing, arms out, glittering like a man made of sugar.
"Girls," he said.
His voice came out the way it always did, somewhere between a rumble and the creak of a door in a cold house, and it was absurd, and it was wonderful.
"Mr Cucumber!" Jenny was up and across the clearing before Aliandra could stop her, throwing her arms around a torso made of frozen water and getting a face full of snow for her trouble. She didn't care. She was laughing into his shoulder. "You absolute madman, you frightened the life out of me. Where have you been? Why didn't you write? You don't write, do you. You can't hold a pen."
"I have been north," Mr Cucumber said. He patted her back with his stick arm, and his mitten, which was one of Will's old gardening gloves, squashed against her coat. "And I have been listening. It is good to hear you both."
Aliandra got up and went to him and put her hand flat against his chest, where the snow was packed tightest. The cold went through the glove, through the skin, into the bone, and she didn't pull away. He was cold in a way that ordinary snow was not. He was cold like an old wound.
"You look well," she said. "For a man made of frozen water."
"I am in excellent condition," he said. "I have not melted at all."
"That's the spirit."
Jenny finally let go, wiped her glasses, and looked around the clearing with the expression Aliandra had learned to recognise, the one that meant she had already solved the puzzle and was working out how to say it without sounding clever.
"The triangle's yours," Jenny said. "You built it. You made the other three and then you used them to call yourself here. Why not just come to the house?"
Mr Cucumber turned his coal eyes on the three snowmen. His face did not move. Snowmen's faces don't. But something in the tilt of his head changed, and Aliandra felt the Serpent uncoil and slide upward along her spine, alert.
"Because I did not want to be seen arriving alone," he said.
Aliandra looked at the three round figures. Freshly made, well made, facing inward. Somewhere in the base of her stomach, dread began to gather like meltwater.
"All right," she said. "Say it."
And Mr Cucumber said, "I want you to wake them up."
The quiet in the clearing stretched a beat too long. Jenny's hand closed around Aliandra's wrist, a small pressure. Consent can be silence, but not this kind.
"Wake them up," Aliandra repeated. "You mean give them life."
"I do," Mr Cucumber said.
"Why?"
The snowman's coal eyes moved between them, and he seemed to draw himself up to his full, absurd height. "I have two reasons. One you will like, the other rather less. I will tell you both afterwards. If you help me first."
Jenny let go of Aliandra's wrist and folded her arms. Snow creaked under her boots. "That's not a lot to go on."
"It is what I have," Mr Cucumber said. "I would not ask if I did not need you. I am north of where I should be, and I have seen what is moving. I cannot do this alone. You were always the ones who believed in me when believing was strange."
Aliandra looked at the three round men, standing in their silent ring. They were nothing, just packed snow and stones and sticks. But she remembered the first night she had made Mr Cucumber, drunk on bad wine and loneliness, laughing into the snow while Jenny slept upstairs in their bed. He had been a joke, then a friend, then a lover, then part of the strange family they were building.
"Fuck it," Aliandra said. "We do this. For old times' sake."
Jenny laughed, a nervous bright sound, and ducked her head. "I was hoping you'd say that. I was also dreading it, but I was hoping."
They produced their wands. Jenny's was birch, smooth from years of handling, with a core of wyrm scale. Aliandra's was blackthorn, knotted and black, and the Serpent in her belly coiled tight as she gripped it. She felt the cold hum of the triangle beneath her feet, the same note as the tuning fork, rising.
"Right," Aliandra said. "This is manifestation work. Human biology funnels it through the pelvis and the heart. This is how we've always done it."
Jenny's cheeks flushed. "Mum and dad are inside. I'm not going to make a lot of noise."
"Then you'd better be quiet, love."
Aliandra pulled her skirt up. The cold bit into her thighs, the hem of her stockings already wet where the snow had soaked them. She hooked her fingers into the waistband of her stockings and pushed them down, and the night air stroked the damp heat of her cunt. She knelt in the snow, black wool and black stockings around her knees, and spread herself. The winter wind knifed across her exposed flesh, a shock of cold so sharp it was almost pleasure.
Jenny made a small sound, half protest, half want, and came to kneel beside her. She had to wrestle her jeans down past her hips, the soaked denim clinging, and she cursed under her breath until her bare thighs met the freezing drift and she gasped. Her cunt was already wet, a strand of slick catching the moonlight. She looked at Aliandra, eyes huge behind her glasses.
"Together," Aliandra said.
She put two fingers to her clit and stroked. The touch of her own hand was electric after the cold, the nub of flesh engorged and needy. She pressed, a small circle, and her hips rocked forward. Between her legs, the Serpent's heat coiled, climbed, pushing more blood into her sex. Jenny moaned, quiet, through her teeth, and matched the rhythm, her fingers moving fast and tight, already too vulnerable to the cold and the closeness.
"Oh, that's so good. That's so warm," Jenny whispered, and her head tipped back.
Aliandra watched her, the flash of pink between Jenny's fingers, the slick glistening down her inner thigh. She felt her own body answering, the heat spreading up into her belly, making her skin prickle despite the frost. She pushed deeper, circling her clit hard, then pressing two fingers inside herself, just to the first knuckle, and curved the pressure. The magic rose from her pelvis like steam, cold and hot at once, feeding the triangle. The snow between them began to glow.
"Now," Aliandra breathed. "Invoke."
They spoke in unison, voices shaking with want and concentration. The words were half Old Norse, half something older, the language of the mound and the frost. Aliandra's blackthorn wand wrote symbols in the air while she worked her clit with her other hand, and the symbols hung there, burning like candle flames. Jenny's birch drew the counter turns, and her fingers had begun to fuck her own cunt with a slow steady rhythm, her eyes closed, her lips moving.
The three snowmen shivered.
The glow caught them first, rimmed their edges in silver, then sank into their cores. Their stone eyes flickered. Their stick arms tilted, stiffly, like a baby waking. Snow cracked along their seams, and dust fell away, and inside their round bodies something woke, something small and curious and horribly alive.
Aliandra came. It hit her like a wave of cold fire, clenching along her whole body, her thighs shaking against the snow, a cry pulled out of her throat. Magic poured out of her, into the triangle, into the three men. Jenny came a breath later with a muffled sob into her own fist, her body going tight, her cunt clamping around her fingers.
The glow died.
The three snowmen stood upright. They turned, all three, to face Mr Cucumber.
He walked among them with a gardener's care and pressed something into the snow at the base of each, at the point where their round bellies met their round lower halves. Three cucumbers, dark green, ridged, thick, so cold they seemed to steam in the moonlight. He twisted them upward, seating them firmly into the snow until each one stood out proud and rigid, an absurd green cock against the white.
The snowmen looked down at their new organs, then at each other. One of them, the one with a crooked coal eye, made a creak that might have been laughter. They shuffled across the clearing, three sets of stick arms swinging, and took up positions at Mr Cucumber's side. They stood to attention, facing the world, cucumber cocks gleaming with frost.
"Now," Mr Cucumber said, "the reasons."
"The first reason," Mr Cucumber said, "is that I wished to give you both a proper welcome."
Aliandra's laugh came out sharp and disbelieving. "You made three living snowmen so we could have a good time?"
"I made three living snowmen so you could have a very good time."
Jenny was already pulling her coat open, a flush creeping up her neck that had nothing to do with the cold. "Four. Four snowmen. Four cocks. Two for each of us."
"Mathematics has never been your subject," Aliandra said, but she was smiling now, and the cold between her thighs had stopped being a shock and started being a promise.
The new snowmen shuffled forward. Their cucumber cocks stood out, thick and ridged and gleaming with frost, and each one curved slightly to the right, the way Mr Cucumber's own had always done. They creaked as they moved, stones shifting in their coal eyes, and one of them, the one with the crooked eye, made that sound that might have been laughter and might have been hunger.
Jenny laughed too, a breathless sound, and shrugged off her coat. It landed in the snow with a soft thump. Two jumpers followed, then her jeans, and she stood shivering in her knickers and her mother's thick wool socks, her nipples hard through the cotton of her vest. She looked at Aliandra, and behind her glasses her eyes had gone dark and soft.
"Mum's going to kill us if we lose these," she said, lifting one soaked sock.
"Mum's going to kill us for other reasons before the night is out."
Aliandra stood and stripped. Black jacket into the snow. Black shirt unbuttoned, button by button, her fingers still cold and clumsy, and the night air hit her breasts and she hissed through her teeth. Her skirt came off with the stockings already tangled around her boots, and she stood naked in the clearing, pale as the snow under the moon, the Serpent coiled warm and pleased in her belly, and the three new snowmen creaked in unison.
Mr Cucumber's coal eyes moved over her, slow and fond. "You are even more beautiful than I remembered."
"You say that to all the girls."
"Yes. But I mean it this time."
The two tallest snowmen moved behind Aliandra. One from the front, one from the back. She felt them flanking her, the cold of their bodies pressing against her bare skin, and she gasped at the shock of it, everything contracting, every nerve alive. The front one lowered its hands to her waist. The back one pressed against her arse, the ridge of its cucumber cock sliding between her cheeks.
Jenny cried out as her own two found her, one kneeling before her, one behind, and the one in front took her face with its stick hands, so gently, and tilted her head up.
"Hello," Jenny whispered.
The snowman creaked.
Between Aliandra's legs, the front snowman pressed its cock against her cunt. The cucumber was frozen through, ridged along its length, and the cold against her heat made her whole body clench. She had expected pain. She got pleasure so sharp it felt like pain, the shock of frost against her clit making her arch backward into the second snowman's chest. It took her weight without complaint, and its cock slid up against her arse, seeking the hole.
"Hold me," she said. "Hold me up."
Stick arms wrapped around her waist. The front snowman's hands took her hips. And the cucumber slid in, slow, inch by frozen inch, the ridge scraping along her walls until she was full of cold solid veg and her legs were shaking.
She heard Jenny moan, low and long. "Oh. Oh, that's cold."
"Is it too cold?"
"No. No, no, no. Don't stop."
Aliandra's own snowman began to move. Slow at first, testing, the long ridged shaft dragging out of her almost to the tip and pushing back in, a rhythm that made her eyes roll. Behind her, the second snowman angled its cock and pressed against her arse, and she felt the resistance, the tight ring of muscle, and she pushed back against it.
"All the way," she said. "Fucking give it to me."
It did. The cold cucumber breached her arse in one long slow thrust, and she was full in both holes, the chill of the two shafts meeting through the thin wall between, and she screamed, a raw broken sound that went up into the bare trees.
Jenny was on her hands and knees in the snow, her arse in the air, and the snowman behind her had both stick hands on her hips as it worked its second cock into her cunt, dragging her back and forth against it. The one in front knelt before her face, its cock level with her mouth, curved like a question.
"You want it?" Aliandra called, voice wrecked.
Jenny opened her mouth and took it, as far as she could, the frozen shaft filling her throat, and her muffled moan was answer enough.
They fucked like that for a long time. The snowmen were tireless, mindless, built for this. Aliandra took cock in her cunt and cock in her arse, the two cold shafts working in counter-rhythm, one pulling out as the other pushed in, and the Serpent in her belly coiled tighter and tighter with every thrust. Her hands dug into the snow, and she heard herself babbling, nonsense, filth, all of it true.
"Fuck, yes, fill me, both of you, I want to be full, I want to be cold, make me come, make me come around both of you."
Jenny came first, crying out with the snowman's cock in her mouth, her whole body shuddering, her cunt clamping down on the shaft inside her hard enough that the snowman halted mid-thrust. When she pulled off, gasping, she laughed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "That's going to taste like salad for a week."
Aliandra laughed with her, and the laugh became a sob as the rear snowman found a new angle inside her arse, pressing against the wall through her cunt, and she felt herself rising, helpless, electric.
"Jenny. Jenny, touch me. I'm close, I'm close."
Jenny crawled across the snow, knees and palms and the careful crunch of frost, and pressed herself against Aliandra's side. Her fingers found Aliandra's clit, warm and slick and swollen, and she worked it in tight circles while the two snowmen fucked her from both ends, and Aliandra came apart.
It took the whole length of her body. The orgasm ripped through her like the cold itself, clenching her around both cocks, her thighs shaking, her spine arching, the Serpent in her belly uncoiling in one long shudder of satisfaction. She screamed into the snow and the trees and the night, and the sound came back to her softened and strange.
The snowmen finished with them after that. Not gently. The rear one in Aliandra's arse picked up a hard punishing rhythm that made her see sparks, and the front one matched it, and between them they wrung a second orgasm out of her and then a third, the last one a thin silver thread of pleasure that left her limp in the snow.
Jenny was taken again herself, lying on her back on a drift of white, the moonlight on her cunt, one snowman kneeling over her face with its frozen cock, another between her thighs. Aliandra watched her lover swallow and moan and shiver, watched the double rhythm, watched Jenny's eyes roll back, and felt nothing but a deep animal satisfaction.
When it was done, all of them in a heap in the snow, the four snowmen stood up and arranged themselves in a loose circle. Their cocks had steamed away their frost and stood gleaming wet, and the one with the crooked coal eye creaked again.
Mr Cucumber looked at them, at his creations, with something that might have been pride. Then he turned to Aliandra and Jenny, sprawled naked in the wreckage of the snow, breathing hard.
"The first reason," he said, "was joy. The second reason is war."
Jenny sat up, gathering her knees to her chest and pulling her coat over her bare shoulders. The steam of their breathing hung between them and the snowmen.
"War," she said. The word came out small. "You said war."
"I did."
Aliandra pulled her jacket on, skin still prickling with frost and spent heat. She looked at Mr Cucumber, at the coal eyes that somehow held more weight than they had a moment ago. "You warned me last year. When we fucked in the snow then. You said the Frost Giants were moving. I thought it was just one of your things. A story to scare me into letting you sleep in the shed."
"It was not a story," Mr Cucumber said. "I heard it in the ice. The giants do not speak the way we do, but the ice carries their steps for a thousand miles. I felt them marching before the first snow of last winter had settled. They are closer now."
"How close?" Jenny asked.
Mr Cucumber's stick arm swept toward the black line of the trees. "This winter is their bridgehead. Not a normal season. Their Jarl, Orm Iceborn, has decided the mortal lands are fertile ground for his realm. He does not want conquest in the old way. He wants the cold itself to become permanent. He wants spring to fail."
"But spring always comes," Jenny said. "It always has."
"Not this year. It will not. Orm has frozen the turning of the seasons. While he holds his court in Niflheim, the cold will deepen and spread. The hours of daylight will shrink. The world will grow quiet, then still, then dead. And then the giants will walk south through their own weather, and there will be no force of mortal arms that can stop them. And their scouts are already near."
Aliandra felt the Serpent in her belly go cold. Not the good cold of pleasure, but the deep dread cold of a snake scenting a fire.
"Magical mortals," she said. "Us. The college. The professors."
"Not enough," Mr Cucumber said. "Orm has an army. The wizards of Caarjys have a few dozen practitioners, most of them still learning. The giants have had a thousand years to grow strong in the dark. Even the most powerful summoner on earth cannot fight the end of the world."
"Then what do we do?" Jenny's voice cracked. "We die?"
"You warn them," Mr Cucumber said. "You travel to Caarjys and you tell the headmaster everything I have told you. You gather every wizard, every hedge witch, every cunning woman and wise man who will listen. And you fight back as best you can. The odds are not good. But you have won against impossible odds before."
Aliandra stared at him. "You want us to defy the winter itself."
"I want you to try." The snowman's voice softened, creaking like old ice shifting. "It may be that you cannot. It may be that we are already lost. But I have seen you both do impossible things. I have seen you give life to snow and laughter to dark places. If anyone can find a way, it is you. And I will stand with you as long as I can hold my form."
The three new snowmen creaked in unison, their cucumber cocks still glistening in the moonlight. The crooked-eyed one shuffled forward and pressed its stick hand against Jenny's shoulder, a gesture so gentle it made her eyes sting.
"The cold is coming," Mr Cucumber said. "But you are not alone in it. Go to Caarjys. Warn them. And when the time comes to march to war, I will be there."
The snowman would not come to the house. He said it plainly, the way he said everything, that the garden was too warm and the doorway too narrow and Samantha would scream and Will would fetch a poker. Instead he walked them to the edge of the clearing, where the firs closed over like fingers, and told them he would keep watch among the trees. Behind him his three new men stood in their ring, cucumber cocks glistening, coal eyes patient.
"Go home," he said. "Get warm. I will find you when I need to."
Jenny kissed his frozen cheek. Aliandra laid her palm flat on his chest one last time and felt that cold like an old wound press back.
Then they walked. The logging track had filled in behind them and the snow took their boots to the ankle, then the calf. Jenny held Aliandra's arm the whole way, and neither of them said a word about wars or frost or the end of the world, because the cold was doing enough talking for both of them. By the time the Ingles house came into view, low and gold through the trees, Aliandra's teeth had started to chatter in a way she could not stop.
The back door stuck with the frost. Jenny shouldered it open and they fell into the kitchen, and blessed heat rolled over them like a wave off a beach. The boiler ticked. The radio in the front room murmured carols. Will's snoring carried down the hall, steady as a tide.
They stripped where they stood. Coats, jumpers, soaked jeans, those ridiculous wool socks, all of it in a heap by the radiator where it began to steam and smell of wet wool and pine. Aliandra peeled her black stockings down her legs and they came away stiff with ice. Jenny's hair was wet at the ends, her glasses fogging instantly in the warm, and she stood in her knickers with her arms wrapped around herself and shook.
"Blankets," Aliandra said. "You do the blankets. I'll do the cocoa."
"You're the guest."
"I'm the one who can't feel her fingers. Blankets."
Jenny went, padding barefoot up the stairs, careful on the fourth step that creaked. Aliandra found the tin in the cupboard above the kettle where Samantha had said it would be, and the milk in the fridge, and she made it properly, the way her own mother had never once made it, with real chocolate and a pinch of salt and the good vanilla Jenny's dad kept for his birthday trifle. The Serpent in her belly had settled low and quiet, worn out, content.
Jenny came back with two blankets and a duvet off her own bed and made a nest on the kitchen floor in front of the radiator, right up against the warm pipes. They sat wrapped in it, shoulder to shoulder, knees up, cocoa steaming, and for a while there was only the sound of drinking and the tick of the boiler and far off the sleigh bells in a song on the radio.
"You know we have to do something," Jenny said at last. She had cocoa on her upper lip.
"I know."
"We can't just sit here and wait for spring to not come."
"We're sitting here wrapped in a duvet drinking chocolate, love. That's exactly what we're doing."
Jenny elbowed her, but she was almost smiling. Then she got the look again, the puzzle-solving one, and set her mug down on the tiles.
"A week," she said. "That's how long until term starts. Seven days of nothing, and then we're back at Caarjys and we can tell Professor Groats everything."
"Groats will want evidence."
"Mr Cucumber is evidence. He's standing in a wood in a triangle he built himself."
"He's a snowman, Jenny. We made him. Twice. The first one I made while drunk. Professor Roebull is going to look at a talking snowman with a cucumber for a cock and ask me very seriously about my mental health."
Jenny snorted into her cocoa. "Fair. So how do we get word to them before term starts?"
Aliandra stared into the mug. The Serpent turned over once, slow, and something in the dark behind her ribs shifted, unfolded, stretched a wing.
"The crow," she said.
"The crow."
"The Crow Spirit. My Crow. It's been quiet since the Labiarinth, but it's there, and it can carry a message faster than any post. It goes where I point it. I could have a letter on Professor Groats's desk by morning."
Jenny turned to face her properly, blanket slipping off one shoulder. "Can it carry a thing? A physical thing? Because if it can, we send the whole story. Everything. Orm Iceborn, Niflheim, the frozen spring, all of it."
"I don't know that it can carry more than a scrap of paper. I've never tried to send anything but myself." Aliandra paused. "And once, a dead rabbit. It didn't end well."
"Okay." Jenny was already getting up, blanket trailing. "Okay. Then we write it small."
They found paper in the drawer where Samantha kept the takeaway menus and the birthday cards nobody had sent. Jenny wrote, and her handwriting went small and careful, the way it did in exam halls. Two sides of a card, then a second card, then a third. She wrote about the triangle, about the three new snowmen and what they had been made for, about the Jarl and the bridgehead and the failing of the seasons. She wrote it twice, once plain and once in the formal register she had learned for invocations, because Groats was fussy about that sort of thing. Aliandra read it over her shoulder and made her take out the bit where she had called Mr Cucumber a lovely idiot.
At the bottom of the last card Jenny wrote, Please believe us. J. Ingles, A. Crowsummons, third year.
They went out to the back step in their blankets and pyjamas, and Aliandra held the cards up in her fist and called. She called without words, the way the Crow liked, a pulling in the chest, and the snow on the shed roof moved and a shape dropped out of the dark and settled on the fence post. It was bigger than a real crow. Its eyes were not bird eyes.
"Caarjys College," Aliandra said. "Professor Eleanor Groats. Tower office, second floor, the one with the dead fern in the window."
The crow tilted its head. Then it took the cards in its beak, one, two, three, folded flat, and lifted off the post with a sound like a coat being shaken out, and it was gone south over the trees before either of them had drawn another breath.
Back inside, they did the only other thing left to do. Research.
Samantha kept a shelf of books in the front room, the ones that had come from her own mother and her grandmother before that, and among the paperbacks and the gardening manuals there was a fat green volume with a cracked spine: Tales of the Northern Peoples, translated by a man with six names and a fondness for footnotes. Jenny pulled it down and they sat on the sofa under the crocheted blanket, cocoa gone cold, and read.
Most of it was rubbish. Most of it was gods behaving badly and heroes being tiresome. But near the back, in a chapter that smelled strongly of the author's opinions, there was a passage about the Jotnar of the far north, and a hall built of blue ice that stood in a place the old poets called Niflheim, and a jarl who had ruled it longer than any Christian kingdom had existed. His name was written Orm. His wife was written Grimhild. Aliandra put her finger on the line and felt a small cold thing settle in her stomach, and said nothing, and read it twice.
"Bed," Jenny said eventually. It was past two. The house had gone entirely silent, even the snoring.
They went up together, and this time they avoided the fourth step out of habit, and closed Jenny's bedroom door and put the little fan heater on for the noise, because her parents' room shared a wall.
They had been cold all night. That was the thing. Even the blankets had not reached it. So they went about warming each other properly, and they took their time, because they had hours and nothing left to plan.
Jenny got under the duvet first. Aliandra followed, and pulled the covers up over both their heads so the world shrank to a tent of warm dark and the smell of Jenny's skin. Then she took Jenny's hands, both of them, still cool at the fingertips, and pressed them between her own thighs.
"Warm them," she said.
Jenny laughed, breathless, and did. Her cold fingers pressed against Aliandra's cunt through her knickers and stayed there, and the heat came up through them both, and Jenny made a small surprised noise as she felt how wet the cotton had already gone.
"You're soaked."
"I've been thinking about you all night."
"You've been thinking about frost giants."
"That too. It gets a girl going."
Jenny pushed the knickers aside and slid two fingers in, cold and then suddenly not, and Aliandra arched up into her hand with a hiss. She was tight from the cold and from the earlier fucking, tender in a way that made every stroke bright. Jenny worked her slow, thumb on her clit, fingers curling, and watched her face in the dark with an attention that was almost unbearable.
"Tell me what you want," Jenny whispered.
"Your mouth. Get down there and eat me."
Jenny went. She kissed her way down Aliandra's belly, over the little silver stretchmarks, over the dark patch of hair, and then her tongue was on her, flat and warm, licking up through the slick. Aliandra got a fistful of strawberry-blonde hair and held on. Jenny ate her like she had not eaten in a week, mouth open, tongue working her clit in fast circles and then slow ones, two fingers back inside her, curling up into the spot that made her legs shake. The fan heater hummed. Downstairs Will's snoring started up again, and Jenny giggled against her cunt, and the vibration went through Aliandra like a strike of lightning and she had to bite the pillow to keep from shouting the house down.
She came with her thighs clamped round Jenny's ears. It rolled up through her from the soles of her feet, deep and slow like the warmth was finally reaching the bone, and she held Jenny there through it, riding her face, until it broke and she slumped back into the mattress, gasping.
"Good?" Jenny said, wiping her chin, pleased with herself.
"Come here."
Aliandra rolled her onto her back and did her in turn, and did her slowly, because Jenny had been generous and deserved it. She licked her from arse to clit in long strokes and then settled in, working two fingers in and out of her cunt while she sucked her clit, and Jenny came twice that way, the second time with her hand over her own mouth and her heels drumming the mattress. Then Aliandra climbed up her body and lay on her, skin to skin, and they kissed with each other's taste still in both their mouths, and the last of the night's cold finally went out of them.
They finished with Jenny on her front and Aliandra behind, one arm round her waist, fingers sliding into her where she was still slick and open. It was slow. Jenny pushed her hips back into every thrust and made the smallest sounds into the pillow, and Aliandra held her close and finger-fucked her deep, and neither of them had to say anything at all. When Jenny came the last time she clenched so hard around her that Aliandra came with her, groaning into the back of her neck, spilling juice and shaking and gripping the softness of her hip.
After, they lay in the warm wreck of the bed, and Jenny's fingers traced idle circles on Aliandra's forearm.
"The crow will be there by breakfast," she said.
"Probably."
"Do you think they'll believe us?"
Aliandra looked at the ceiling, at the strip of moonlight on the wall, at the little snow falling past the window. The Serpent in her belly lay curled and quiet. In the far black trees a snowman kept watch alone.
"I think they'd better," she said. "Go to sleep, love."
Jenny slept within a minute. Aliandra lay awake longer, listening to the house, and somewhere past the window, faint as a tuning fork under a leather glove, the bells chimed once.