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case this massing of taints is aimed at attacking us,” said the Queen.
    “Well—” began the Officer, but what he was about to say next never got said, because there was an explosion of activity behind them. Everyone spun, and those who had weapons drew them and aimed at a furious whirlwind of snow and feathers and a yowling bronze feline at the foot of the arch.
    The black bird—who on closer inspection, of course, revealed itself to be the Raven—was a big bird and a feisty scrapper, but the cat Hodge was just as fierce and much, much heavier. After a few flaps and a lot of aggrieved squawks, the Raven found itself pinned to the snow with a metal forepaw across its neck. The cat hissed in victory, showing its teeth—in no hurry to kill the bird while there was still fun to be had from it. The Raven went limp, hoping the cat would lean lower and try to bite it, so that it could then give it a good hard peck in the eye. The Raven had died and gone to hell so many times before that death itself had no fears for it. What it never enjoyed was the journey back. It always reappeared in the world with its feathers in a shocking state of disarray. Pecking the cat wouldn’t do a bit of good to anything except the Raven’s self-respect.
    “It’s the Walker’s bloody bird,” said the Gunner. “Either the cat kills it or I do. . . .”
    He cocked the pistol in his hand.
    “NO!”
    The vehemence of the voice surprised everyone. Including Edie, whose voice it was.
    “No. Don’t kill it.”
    The cat hissed again and raised its free paw to swat the bird in the head. Cats don’t like being told what to do.
    They also aren’t particularly in favor of ferocious girls diving across the snow, grabbing their tails, and flinging them into a snowdrift.
    Which is exactly what Edie did.
    The cat rolled and turned back with its claws out, ready for bloody revenge.
    “Hodge!” bellowed Dictionary. “No!”
    Hodge stopped and looked at the girl and the Raven.
    The Raven lay on its back and looked at the girl. Part of its natural instinct was to flip over and fly away to safety. But the Raven had seen everything, and forgotten none of it. And one of the things about remembering the past is that it can all get a bit stale. What it was particularly interested in was the opposite of the past, the bits it didn’t yet know about or remember.
    Its job was the past.
    But its hobby was the future.
    What it enjoyed was the simple pleasure of seeing what happens next.
    So it ignored the instinct to fly, and waited to see what the glint would do.
    What she did was reach forward and move the feathers at its neck.
    And now the Raven was so interested it didn’t move a pinfeather.
    “It’s still alive,” said Edie, “but there’s blood.”
    She suddenly pulled her hand back in surprise.
    “It’s not blood. It’s a thread. . . .” She leaned back in and moved the oil-black feathers apart. The Raven didn’t dare blink.
    “It’s a red thread.”
    “Don’t touch it!” said the Queen and both of her daughters at the same time.
    “It’s part of the old magic: ‘Red thread to bind; red thread to catch dreams; red thread to make the wearer not what she seems.’ It must be part of the binding spell the Walker put on the bird,” the Queen continued. “Meddling with the old magic if you don’t know what you’re doing is a very, very . . .”
    Edie leaned down and neatly bit through the red thread.
    “. . . very bad idea,” finished the Queen.

CHAPTER TWELVE
Lost in the Murk
    I t wasn’t daylight everywhere in London. Inside the ice murk, the gray freezing miasma that slowly billowed out from the Ice Devil’s tower, it was still dark. Anyone flying above the city would have seen that at the center of the whiteness covering everything, the ice murk was a starkly contrasting cloud of near-black fog. It bloomed slowly and inexorably, now a massive black growth six hundred feet high and nearly a mile across that swallowed buildings