by Karen Chance
“That’s no wand,” she said, her voice awed, before something was plucked off my bracelet.
And then the door gave up the ghost, slamming open with a crack like thunder, causing me to shriek and fall back. Unlike the woman. Who just stood there, a slim, dark-haired figure in a man’s tunic and leggings, facing an entire horde of furious fey warriors. Holding what looked suspiciously like—
A staff, I thought, my eyes widening, along with the fey’s.
Who were suddenly all trying to fit back through the door.
The woman helped them with that, laughing as she blew out the whole freaking wall. Huge boulders rained down, dust billowed everywhere, tiny shards of rock bit into my skin. And all the while, she laughed and laughed and laughed.
“Oh, Grandmother,” she all but sang, and stepped out into the hallway.
Or what was left of it.
I tried to stand up. I don’t know why. It wasn’t like I could help. But my brain had given up at this point and I was pretty much going on instinct. And instinct said to get gone before the rest of the roof fell in. But something was—
Oh.
A big rock had fallen on my skirt, large enough to have bashed my head in had it been a foot to the left. I looked at it, dazed and breathless, as what sounded like the apocalypse started up outside. And then I started coughing and swearing and hacking and tugging, for what seemed like only a minute.
But it might have been longer, because suddenly someone else was there, kneeling in the dust. And pulling my hand away. And lifting me up into arms, strong ones, familiar ones, ones that went with the heartbeat pounding under my ear. And the voice cursing as we ran down corridor after collapsing corridor, because this whole place was imploding.
Until we finally stepped through something that crackled painfully around us, and out—
Into something worse.
Rain slapped me in the face, cold and stinging, bringing me back to full awareness. And to the fact that the funny little house was all but gone, the roof having caved in. Or having been ripped off, because I didn’t see it anywhere.
I did see a sky, boiling overhead, laced with lightning. I saw rain slashing down, so thick it felt like a dam had burst. I saw wind throwing heavy tents around like they were made out of tissue paper, one flying at us too fast to duck. But it became snared on the front wall of the house at the last minute, covering the door and spreading out like a tarp overhead, cutting off the view.
But not the noise. Above the howling winds and drumming rain, above the flap, flap, flap of the heavy canvas, above the creaking sounds of a house about to come down around our ears, were screams. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands.
“What’s happening?” I yelled, practically in Pritkin’s ear, but he didn’t hear.
He did put me down, into ice-cold water that reached above my ankles. And I realized that I’d been so busy staring upward that I’d failed to notice the water pouring over the threshold, coming from what looked like a flood in the camp. A really big flood.
“Come on!” Pritkin yelled, and I could barely hear him. But I grabbed his hand, sloshing through the flooded house, while bits of the remaining roof and walls rained down around us, and the already waterlogged tent tried to collapse on our heads.
A moment later my question was answered, when we reached the door and he pushed the tent fabric up.
Revealing the burning hellscape beyond.
It looked like something out of a medieval vision of the underworld, with screaming people and leaping flames everywhere. The torches outside many of the tents must have been blown onto the canvas by the wind, or at least their sparks had, because a good number of the tents were ablaze. Like the blankets on a crazy-eyed horse that ran by, knocking over a man who slipped and then completely disappeared.
Only to reemerge a second later, gasping and shaking his head—his very wet head—because he’d just been dunked underwater. And I finally realized why the whole area looked like it was lit by flickering orange flames: the fire was being mirrored in the waves. And waves they were, already knee deep in the lowest areas of the camp and rising, as all the water from the higher land surrounding us flooded in.
The camp was in danger of becoming a small lake. And one that none of the increasingly frantic crowd had a chance of escaping, no matter which way they ran. Because the walls were still up.
Pritkin started forward, but I hung on to his arm. “Wait. I have to—”
“The palisade!” he yelled, gesturing at it.
“I know!” I bellowed, because anything less than a hundred decibels was inaudible out here. “But there’s something I have to do!”
“What?”
“Your . . . The creature I was with. I have to go back for him—”
Pritkin shook his head violently. “You stay with me!”
“I’ll be right behind you!”
“No!”
“I have to!”
He just looked at me, eyes wild.
“What?”
“I have the strangest feeling you’re going to disappear, and I’ll never see you again!”
“You’ll see me.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“You’ll see me!”
“Then meet me back here. Right here! I’ll come for you!”
I nodded, but he just stood there, looking torn.
And then he kissed me, sweeping me up off the floor, body hot and hard against mine while Armageddon swirled all around us.
Leaving me breathless and staggering when he put me down. Although that was probably just . . . just the wind. I gave him a push. “Go!”
He went.
I turned and sloshed back across the room, to the entrance to what I now understood to be a portal. It was snapping and cracking, and stinging my skin when I ducked inside. And found the whole place deserted and silent, except for rumblings from the still-shaking walls. Huge boulders were on the floor, and heavy oak beams were slanted across the hall, turning it into an obstacle course. One carpeted in dust that slid underfoot, adhering to my wet feet and ankles, and hanging suspended in the air.
I grabbed a lantern off the wall and held it out. “Rosier!”
Nothing. And the farther I went, the worse things got, as the dim light from the portal faded. Leaving my one, flickering flame as the only thing to illuminate whole corridors impassable from rockfalls, and a darkness so heavy I almost felt it on my skin.
Even worse was the thought that maybe there was nothing to find. That Rosier was so small and so vulnerable, and the fey had been so angry with me. And that maybe Pritkin would have thought to bring my “familiar” if there had been anything left to bring.
“Rosier!”
Nothing.
I picked my way through the rubble, cutting my hands and bruising my heels, and wishing that, just once, I’d go on one of these stupid things with a decent pair of shoes. But I didn’t have shoes, and more importantly, I didn’t have a map. Because, whatever freaky place this was, I guessed the fey knew it by heart, but I didn’t.
I leaned against a wall for a minute, facing the inevitable. I was never going to reach Rosier like this. I was just going to have to hope that Gertie couldn’t read through whatever magic the fey had on this place, and that I wasn’t going to fall over from the strain, because this was really going to suck.
And it did, oh God, it did, I thought, feeling like somebody had punched me in the gut, just from shifting the short distance back to the queen’s chambers.
Where the roof was currently falling in.
The fall from above knocked me back against a wall, and half buried me in dirt and weeds. But it didn’t kill me, because none of the giant beams came down. Maybe because most of them already had, explaining why, after I finally dug my way out, it was so damn hard to walk.
The floor was
a minefield of debris I couldn’t see, since the lantern had gotten buried along with me, leaving the room pitch-black. And me coughing and gasping, because it was like trying to breathe through a sandstorm in here. Or like being buried alive, I thought savagely, floundering around, trying to get enough breath back in my lungs to call out.
“Rosi—” I stopped, coughing so hard I got dizzy, and tripped over one of the damn beams, sprawling in the wreckage and cutting my hands on some glass.
Glass I could see, I realized a moment later, glittering like diamonds against the dark soil. I looked around, and saw something glimmering through a crack in the rubbish. It was barely a gleam, but bright as a searchlight in the darkness. I brushed away dirt and sticks and someone’s forgotten shoe, and discovered—
Part of a mirror.
It was just a shard, barely bigger than my palm, but it was enough to leave me blinking. Only not at my reflection. But at a flickering fire, part of a wooden floor, and a rough plastered wall with a bit of mural on it. It looked like the mural I’d seen behind Arthur when he was talking to Nimue. And that looked like part of his chair.
The man himself had gone, probably after everything went dark on our end.
But it looked like he’d left the lights on.
I scrambled up, cupping the small piece of glass in my palm. And a moment later, I was navigating the long, tumbled rooms of the queen’s chambers, a flickering sliver of firelight illuminating my path. Well, sort of illuminating, since the place was pretty much trembling constantly now, with little siftings of dirt coming down like dry rain, making visibility lousy. But it wasn’t sight that got my attention.
It was sound.
A pitter-patter of footfalls, light and fast, was the only warning before something crashed into me. And knocked me backward, into a pile of sharp-edged wreckage. And then slammed down, scattering rubble and crushing glass, but not my skull. Because I’d moved as soon as I landed, rolling to the floor and then scrambling back into the darkness.
The blow had knocked the mirror from my hand, leaving it wedged in the pile of debris, and me cloaked in gloom and billowing dust. I crouched against one of the half walls that separated the rooms, breathing hard and staring at whirling particles that glittered gold in the firelight. And which highlighted basically nothing at this distance.
Nothing except a slim, dark shadow, rushing out of the void and coming straight at me.
“Cassie!” someone yelled, and I jerked. And so did the figure, who hesitated and looked around. Allowing me to grab a large vase and throw it hard enough to wrench my shoulder.
I gasped in pain, the sound lost in the shattering of porcelain when the figure whirled and brought up a large stick, hitting the vase like a batter trying for the outfield. Shards went everywhere, causing me to cry out again as what felt like a dozen tiny knives pierced me. And then to choke it back and dart away, breathless and silent this time, because my assailant seemed to be working on sound, too.
For a moment, there was nothing but two shadows circling the dim beam of light, each looking for an advantage. And my assailant must have found one. Because the next thing I knew, I was hitting the wall and then the floor, barely understanding what had happened.
Until I saw someone looming over me, cudgel in hand, splashed by distant firelight—
And then eclipsed by it, when the weak beam from the shard suddenly became a blaze. A searing white glare, like staring into the sun, spilled out of the tiny thing, filling the room. It was so bright and so strong that it blinded me, despite the fact that I had landed underneath and wasn’t even getting the full effect.
But someone was.
I heard a voice curse—a woman, although not Nimue. This voice was higher, lighter, and in pain. Probably from having her retinas burned out of her head, I thought, shielding my own eyes with both arms. It left me defenseless, but I didn’t think it mattered. I heard flailing around, groaning, and then footsteps growing distant. Then nothing at all, as the room fell silent again and that awful light blazed on and on.
It finally cut out, as abruptly as it had come, leaving me panting on the floor, confused and afraid and seriously disoriented. And still blind—my eyes seeing only a leaping sheet of afterimages. But I wasn’t deaf, and once more, I heard a voice.
I rolled to my hands and knees, trying to hold on to the floor, which didn’t seem quite steady. Or maybe that was me. I didn’t know; I just crawled in the direction of that thin sound, like a mother trying to find her lost infant.
Or something almost as small, I realized, as my searching hands finally found a tiny body trapped under the debris, in the next room.
I hadn’t remembered to bring the shard, but it didn’t matter, since I couldn’t see anyway. But I didn’t need to. Because the voice had resolved itself into the most profane curses ever devised, which managed to sound vicious even in a teeny, tiny, squeaky voice and—
“Rosier!” A huge grin broke out over my face.
The curses stopped. “Cassie?”
“Yes!”
“You get me out! You get me out right now!”
I sat back on my heels, grinning.
And then I got him out.
The good news, we discovered, was that the main corridors had a few lanterns still flickering here and there, which my slowly returning vision found helpful. The bad news was they weren’t corridors anymore. Beams, and in some cases whole walls, had come down in our path, some of which I could climb over, but some of which were as tall as what remained of the ceiling, forcing me to backtrack. Or, in the cases where I could see past them, to shift.
Only that wasn’t going so great.
“All right,” Rosier said, sometime later. “Once more. It was just around here.”
I shook my head, staring at the latest blockage and holding on to the wall for support. “I can’t.”
“You have to.” The place shuddered again, the walls trembling harder now, like they’d been doing for the last couple of minutes. Because this wasn’t a pass through to Faerie as I’d halfway expected. It wasn’t a pass through to anything. According to Rosier, it was the magical equivalent of a Winnebago, a portable palace fey nobles took with them when they traveled so they didn’t have to live like peasants.
It was carved out of a portal, something about looping it back in on itself to make a stable pocket—or whatever. I didn’t get all of it. But I did get that said portal had been damaged when Pritkin blasted through it. And then again when the wacked-out princess started ripping the fey a new one. And now it was trying to collapse on us, and apparently bad things happened to you when you were inside a portal that collapsed.
But I still couldn’t. I’d been reduced to doing line-of-sight minishifts, the very easiest kind, but I was out. I was out of those, I was out of everything, I wasn’t going to be doing a damn thing without drinking the last of my joy juice, and I wasn’t doing that. I wasn’t, even if the rest of the ceiling came down on my head!
“What are you doing?” Rosier demanded.
“You said it’s just through here, right?”
“Yes, but—I didn’t mean through through!” he said, as I started digging my way forward, as dirt and debris tumbled down on our heads, as I struggled to breathe with lungs that were already caked with dust, as Rosier cursed and rocks fell and my hands kept digging and then clawing at the earth, which just went on and on.
Until another tremor shook us.
And this one was about a seven on the Richter scale, causing dust to billow and walls to crack and the floor to start bucking wildly under our feet. And the wall of earth in front of me, a previously impenetrable mass, to cascade away, like an avalanche down a mountainside. One that took us with it.
Rosier and I half stumbled, half slid out the other side, and then I grabbed him and ran for the portal, wishing the damn dirt hadn’t mostly blinded me again.
And then really wishing it when we splashed down into a freezing lake of water, almost over my head.
Chapter Twenty-seven
I went under, just from the sheer shock, and came up gasping. And then gasped some more when we were almost run down. I’d been inside ten, maybe fifteen minutes, but everything had changed.
People were wading and swimming through what had to be a five-foot surf. And there was nothing to impede them now, since the only thing left of the little house was the wall holding the portal. And then not even that when it flared out behind us, causing me to duck as fiery bits flew over my head and the wall crumbled to dust.
Like the palisade, which was now just a few smoking piles of logs, crackling with whatever remained of the ward. Which probably explained why the once orderly camp was a working anthill of people, running, splashing, and scampering through the burning remains, making for the hills. And the fey weren’t doing much to stop them; they barely even seemed to notice.
For good reason, I thought, staring upward.
Holy shit.
“What the hell is that?” Rosier screeched, sounding outraged.
I didn’t answer. Like the fey, I was kind of busy. Watching the battle of the ages take place in the air above us.
Or, to be more accurate, a battle of the air—and water, and lightning, and fire, all of which were getting tossed around like . . . like things that get tossed around, I thought, my brain pretty much fried at this point. But it didn’t matter, because how did you describe that?
At its simplest, it was two women, standing on opposite hills in the open land behind the camp. Two dark-haired women with long raven tresses whipping around their heads as they faced off, although that kind of missed the point. The point being what was happening all around them.
I watched as what looked like a hurricane filled the skies, and as tornadoes snaked down, a dozen at a time, snatching men off their feet and sending them flying. As others ignited, turning the burning cinders of campfires into roaring maelstroms of heat and light, which tore through the army on the hillsides and cleaved red veins across the countryside. And as still more filled with water, one of which encapsulated three fey who had almost snuck up behind the princess, dragging them off the hill and threatening to drown them midair.