Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  “Ma’am?”

  “When our children come of age, they must learn to fly,” she replied, flicking a piece of lint off my shirt. “Some of it is intuitive, but there is much that cannot be taught. Children learn by flying, not by speaking of flying. Do you follow?”

  “I…think so,” I said, suspecting where this was headed.

  “I believe the same could be helpful in your case,” she continued. “Learn through making the attempt. Jump from the tree and face the wind.”

  “What, uh…what, exactly, did you have in mind?”

  Lailu looked up at me and smiled grimly. “Well, we seem to have a troll problem.”

  “You agreed to do what?”

  Joey’s shout echoed around the cave, and I cringed as the reverberations died away. “Fight a troll,” I repeated, feigning nonchalance as I strapped on my sword. “Lailu said they’re nocturnal. If I can sneak up on it before sundown, I’ll have a better shot.”

  “Hell, no. Sit your ass down,” he ordered, shoving me against the wall with one arm. I struggled against his grip, but Joey had cultivated sinews of steel. “Now, let’s think about this, okay?” he said, his voice low and warning. “Maybe it’s just me, but I think a troll is slightly too much for your first go-around. Let’s start with something smaller. Saner. Affected by iron.”

  I blinked first. “Trolls aren’t?”

  “Nope. Skin’s tough as dragonhide, too. Tanned dragonhide. Double-thick, reinforced dragonhide.”

  “How do you—”

  “If you ask nicely, Val tells war stories,” he muttered. “Only way you’re going to take out a troll is to blast a hole straight through it and wait for it to notice. Now, still feeling cocky, champ?”

  He loosened his hold on me, and I pushed his arm away. “Got a better idea?” I snapped. “The sooner I figure this out, the sooner we get Coileán back.”

  “We only get Coileán back if you don’t get yourself killed first,” he countered, stepping in front of me before I could slip past him. “And I’m pretty sure I told Helen I’d look after you.”

  “This isn’t her decision,” I said, glaring at him from the shadows. “And it’s not yours. Back off, Joey.”

  “No.”

  “Back off.”

  He pinned me to the wall again, harder that time, and I grunted with the impact. “Don’t be stupid,” he said, leaning out of my kicking range. “I’m sorry that Lailu’s got a rogue troll, but that’s not our problem right now. You’re not taking this on today.” He waited until I stopped squirming, then said, “If I let go of you, will you stay put?” I said nothing, and with a sigh, Joey removed his arm and backed off a few steps. “All right, now, listen to me, I’m trying to help you—”

  I feinted right, then left, and made a break for the ledges to the surface. Unfortunately, Joey had better reflexes and managed to snag me by the back of my shirt. “Damn it!” he yelled, and threw me against the wall so hard that I saw stars. When the lights cleared, he was still standing at a distance—but he’d drawn his sword and was holding it at my chest. “I’m really sorry, man,” he panted, “but I can’t let you do this. Sit down, and I’ll put it away.”

  I sensed the blade’s presence like a warning beacon. The logical part of my mind piped up to suggest that Joey was absolutely correct, he was trying to keep me from committing suicide by troll, and he probably felt awful about our current standoff. But another part—a sharper, louder part—saw only red.

  “Back off,” I heard myself growl. “Last warning.”

  He shook his head and held his ground. “For your own good—”

  The enchantment surged to life in an instant, and before he could finish his sentence, Joey was flying backward across the cave. As I watched in stunned horror, the parabola of his trajectory peaked and fell, and he slammed down and slid several yards across the stone before coming to a stop. Dazed, he groaned and struggled to rise, then gave up and slumped on the floor as the sword fell from his hand.

  I stood where I was, paralyzed with the realization of what I’d done, then broke free and ran to his side. “Joey,” I begged, patting his face in an effort to rouse him, “aw, shit, Joey, I’m sorry…come on, wake up, man, please…please wake up, I didn’t mean to, Joey, come on, I’m sorry…”

  He breathed but didn’t open his eyes, and I knelt beside him in the cave, praying that I hadn’t killed him.

  I sat vigil all that afternoon and through the long night, occasionally touching Joey or saying his name in hopes of a response, but I didn’t dare to do more. For all I knew, the landing had broken his back. His brain could have been swelling—it probably was, with my luck—and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t move him without risking further injury to him, and so we remained where he had fallen as the piq flew back and forth, avoiding us. Panic and hopelessness warred within me, and I struggled to keep my composure, fearing how much worse I could make the situation if I let myself go.

  By sunrise, when Joey had yet to return to consciousness, Lailu landed on his chest and looked up at me as she bobbed with his steady breathing. “We cannot cure him,” she said quietly, folding her arms. “I can set an arm, staunch a wound…but for him, I do not know how to treat his condition.”

  I nodded, saying nothing.

  “Perhaps,” she ventured, “he could be cured by magic.”

  “Magic,” I said, my voice hoarse with my failed attempts to wake him, “is what did this to him in the first place.”

  She shrugged. “You were pushed from the ledge, and you flew. We know that it works.” I opened my mouth, but she held up her hands to dam the angry tide. “Your friend needs care that we cannot provide. You may be his only hope. How long will you hesitate, Aiden?” She pointed to the cave opening behind me and the soft glow filtering through the bushes above. “Daylight is upon us. Strike now and see what you can learn. Who knows?” she added, spreading her wings. “You might find a way to bring him back.”

  Lailu flew off, leaving me alone with Joey. I couldn’t see much of him in the shadows, but his motionless face condemned me with its stillness.

  I’d never felt anger like the rage that had bubbled up during those last days. Oh, I’d had plenty of excuses to be angry before—being the target of an acid spray will do terrible things to your mood—but I’d always been able to control my feelings, to suppress them and keep myself in check. There was no point in taking a swing at my bullies, after all. I might have gotten a punch or two in, but they’d have turned around and broken my hand.

  This was something new, something raw and strong, and it welled to the surface at every opportunity. The Arcanum notes I’d read universally said that faeries were vindictive and cruel, quick to punish any perceived slight—was this the cause? Had this always been hiding inside me? And now that it was unleashed, was anyone safe from my anger? I’d knocked my friend into a coma, and he’d just been trying to protect me. Who else was I capable of hurting? Of killing?

  I was terrified, then, of myself—of what I had become. My inner voice, which had only recently been so reassuring, had fallen silent with this proof of my monstrosity.

  Had Dad known? Had he always known this was lurking in me, coiled and eager to strike? Had he suspected that I would someday lash out with a fury I couldn’t check?

  Hell, I’d have driven me away, too.

  But as I sat there, wishing Joey would wake up, the realm spoke once more in my mind: You can save him.

  “How?” I whispered.

  First, you must learn control.

  I stood, feeling my sword bump against my leg as I rose. “You promise he’ll be all right while I’m gone?”

  I make no promises.

  I didn’t want to leave Joey alone—not like that, laid out and helpless—but I knew I wasn’t going to fix him with apologies. “Any tips?” I muttered, turning for the exit.

  Faerie said nothing for a few seconds, then replied, Joey was correct. Blasting a hole through it would be most
effective.

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” I said, and pushed the voice to the back of my thoughts while I climbed to the surface.

  I knew almost nothing about trolls when I set off to slay my first. Aside from Joey’s warnings, Lailu had informed me only that the one nearby had been driving away their prey, ripping up trees, and generally making the piq’s lives difficult. It was male, she offered, and lived a short distance to the west, in a cave set into the base of a cliff. Also, it was quite big. Just how big, she couldn’t say—big to a piq was anything over about a foot tall—but she believed it was larger than me. She pointed me toward the path, whose broken trees evidenced the troll’s passing, and wished me luck.

  The short distance turned into half an hour’s hike, and I sorely missed Joey’s presence. In the last weeks, we’d rarely strayed far from each other’s side, and now I was on my own, off in the woods with a dinky bronze sword and my new, virtually uncontrolled magical powers. Really, in hindsight, it was a recipe for disaster, but the queen had seemed positive about the idea, and I was too worried about Joey to give my other options much thought. Somehow, I’d gotten the idea that killing the troll would revive him, as if the two were locked in a zero-sum game, which was completely irrational but made perfect sense to me at the time. Killing the troll would make everything better. All I had to do was figure out how.

  I came out of the woods down a steep slope into one of the many grassy valleys that pocked the hills around us. Even in the absence of fallen trees to show me the way, I could guess where the troll had hidden itself. Several trampled tracks converged on one point in the valley’s wall, a dark discoloration in the green that had to be a cave. Stepping softly, I crept down the hillside and noticed an occasional footprint in the dirt path I followed. The troll had only four toes, a fact on which I focused in order to ignore the much more important fact that each footprint was nearly a yard long.

  As I reached the valley floor, I started to smell the creature within, a musky stench like wet dog and old blood mixed with the mildewed dankness of an overgrown pond. And then I started to see the bones—not many, not that far from the cave, but enough to show me what had died along the way. I spotted a bleached leg bone longer than my whole leg and quickly averted my eyes, trying not to psych myself out. But the longer I walked, the more it hit me that I was completely alone—not just on my own, but alone. There had always been life in the valleys we’d crossed, at least birds if not sheep or deer or oversized monstrosities. There was always something that made each little meadow its home. Here, though, there were no birds, no passing deer, no half-glimpsed things lurking in the bushes.

  I could guess why, but I tried not to dwell on it for fear that I’d turn around and sprint for cover.

  As I trudged on, the cave swelled in my field of vision—now a dot, now a distinct opening, now a shaded tunnel two stories high—and the discarded bits of previous meals rose proportionally in number. Here, there were tufts of hair that had to be fur…and there, a bone that still had meat on it, all covered with buzzing flies. I passed a young buck’s head and shuddered; what little I could see of its stump suggested it had been twisted off, not cut. The dirt below me took on a reddish cast, as did the grass, and I didn’t have to wonder at the source.

  And then, despite my foot-dragging, I was standing outside the cavern opening, trying not to choke on the combined stench of troll and decaying corpses. Most of the refuse had ended up here, scattered in the tall weeds to rot, and I hoped that what I was seeing was the buildup of months, not the work of a few days.

  There was no way in hell that I was going in there. I was desperate, but not quite suicidal yet. The trick, I thought, was to drive the troll out to me—disorient him in the sunlight, pin him with his back to the cliff, and…well, figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Not the greatest plan I’d ever devised, but I didn’t know how long Joey was going to linger. And so, steeling my nerve, I called up the green fireball I’d made once before, tried not to think too hard about how foolish this was, and hurled it into the cave.

  It flickered as it sped into the darkness with a life of its own—I couldn’t have thrown a ball half as far as the fire traveled—and then, with a hiss, it hit something solid.

  Something that roared.

  “Shit,” I whispered, and looked around for cover. There was nowhere to hide in the valley—it was treeless, and the tallest weeds were only knee-high—but I waded through the gore beside the cave and crouched down in the troll’s castoffs, hoping to go unnoticed while I thought about what I’d gotten myself into. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I reassured myself. Maybe he’d go back to sleep. And hey—weren’t there stories about trolls turning to stone in daylight? Maybe this one would come out and be toast. Problem solved!

  I can now state with authority that those stories about petrified trolls are nothing but filthy lies. The thing that barreled out of the cave like an overgrown, bipedal bull may have squinted a bit, but the light didn’t slow him.

  It was, I realized, a beginner’s mistake to trust a piq for any approximation as to size. I was a few inches shy of six feet that fall, and the troll was more than twice my height, and easily four times my width. He was gray and largely hairless but for a matted black mop on top of his somewhat pointed head and a long stripe down his back. The troll’s arms were elongated like a gorilla’s and thick with muscle. Overall, he looked knobby and lumpy, but when he stood still, raised his head, and sniffed the air, I saw that those bumps were signs of the rippling muscles just underneath his thick skin.

  In short, I was staring down an oversized, body-building, apelike thing with reinforced armor—and, I realized as his piggy eyes locked on me in my impromptu hiding place, he had an excellent sense of smell. Distantly, I noted that the twin tusks jutting from his lower jaw were also somewhat porcine, but most of my brain gave up and shut down when the troll spotted me and bellowed. The bulk, the streaks of dried blood on his belly, the fists like sledgehammers—the whole package was enough to leave me frozen where I stood while the small part of me that was still keenly aware of the situation tried to reboot the rest of me and run.

  The troll roared again, and I saw the blackened spot on his flank where my fireball had hit him. I could try that again, I reasoned with my paralyzed limbs. Maybe the next fireball would be more effective. Now, if I could just remember how my hands worked…

  He dropped to all fours, snorted a challenge, and charged.

  My bind broke a few seconds before he would have run me over, and I frantically threw a fireball at his face while I sprinted away from the cave. The troll howled, but a glance back showed me that all I’d done was scorch his hair—he was still charging, and he was angry.

  I shifted left and right, trying to throw him off with a zigzag pattern, but the troll was too fast. As I vaulted over a pair of sheep skulls, I flung another pair of fireballs toward him, hitting him on the nose and left shoulder. The troll howled again and slowed to deal with the damage, buying me a few seconds to head up the trail.

  I don’t know what I would have done, had I made it to the woods. The troll obviously knew his way around, and as he’d picked me out of a pile of stinking offal, he could have tracked me through the trees with a head cold. But something irrationally insisted that I’d be safe if I could just get out of the valley.

  And then I heard the troll closing behind me once again. I gasped for breath and willed my legs to stop burning, but he was too close, I could smell him all around me, feel his hot breath on the back of my neck…

  Suddenly, the troll screamed and fell with a ground-shaking thud, and I wheeled around to see what had happened. Before I got a good look, the air beside me blurred, and something was shoving me backward, away from my pursuer.

  An arm.

  I landed on my back and scrambled to find my feet as the man who’d materialized beside me advanced on the wounded troll. He held his hands together above the creature’s torso as if he were praying, then yanke
d them apart.

  The troll’s head and feet flew in opposite directions with a shower of blood, and the man turned to me. I froze again—I’d have known that face anywhere, even if the clothes were strangely ornamented—but before I knew what was happening, Val grabbed my arm and yanked me upright. “What were you thinking?” he shouted, ignoring the spatter on his white silk shirt. “Aiden…what are you doing here, you’re supposed to be safe…” He gaped, too flabbergasted for words, then shook me by the shoulders and pointed to the troll’s closer half. “Moon and stars, boy, that thing would have killed—”

  Feeling the rage come over me, I pulled free of him and called up a fireball in each hand, and Val’s harangue ended abruptly. “Did you betray my brother?” I asked, taking advantage of his shock.

  Val stepped back, his dark eyes wide, and raised his hands in placation. “Of course not,” he said calmly. “What happened to you?”

  I looked at my arm and saw that I was glowing again. “Heard you were Oberon’s right-hand man these days.”

  “I can explain—”

  “How?”

  Val maintained his composure, even as I shook with anger. “He offered me a court of my own.”

  “That’s supposed to explain—”

  “Let me finish. He wants me to take control of what’s left of Mab’s people, but he wants me indebted to him. If I didn’t agree, he would have locked me away with the others. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Coileán is trapped, and—”

  “I know damn well what’s happened to Coileán,” he interrupted. “I check on him when I can.” He paused, gauging my expression. “I’d heard it was you and Joey who’d broken in, but I couldn’t believe it. The rumor from the dungeon was that the voices were yours, but…”

  My arms tensed, readying themselves to throw. “Realm made me an offer, too.”

  “I see. Aiden,” he murmured, lowering his hands, “look if you want. Go ahead, I’ve dropped my defenses. I’ve nothing to hide from you. But I swear, the only reason I’ve cooperated with Oberon is to protect your brother.”