by Karen Chance
He bent down and patted my head. “Gold star.”
He walked off a little way, giving me a view of a wide-open courtyard in what looked like a small castle, if a run down one. It was high in the mountains of Romania, at a guess. I was becoming familiar with the velvety forests and rocky slopes, like the ones falling away from our current perch.
I just didn’t understand what we were doing here.
Mircea must have shifted us, and he’d obviously been somewhere back in time when he did it. My power hadn’t warned me about that, or maybe it had and I’d been too busy dying to listen. But that didn’t explain anything about Jonathan. How had he followed us—or from the way things looked, gotten here ahead of us?
I didn’t know, but he’d brought friends. A lot of them. Maybe a hundred Svarestri warriors were scattered around the courtyard, their shiny black armor gleaming in the sunlight, their silver hair whipping out behind them in the wind. That included a line of a dozen nearby who I barely glanced at, because I’d just seen what was in front of them.
I stared at the lineup, and then at Pritkin, who looked back blankly. He clearly had no idea, either. Which was fair, since I couldn’t think of a reason for that group to all be assembled together.
From right to left, the Svarestri appeared to be guarding Mircea, who was kneeling on the ground looking stunned; a strange, cloven hoofed creature with a goat’s head but intelligent eyes; Rhea in a long, white lace gown; and—
I had no idea.
There was a fourth prisoner in the lineup, but she was flickering in and out. One minute, she was a spectral creature, barely visible against the backdrop of the sky. And the next, a woman appeared, blue gowned and brown haired, with braids that looped up around her ears and . . .
And I decided that the pain was making me hallucinate, because that looked a lot like the Pythian Court’s librarian.
She went transparent again, and I finally realized why, when I spotted an absolutely huge portal, thrumming away in the space just off the edge of the precipice on which the castle was built. It was big enough to have driven a medium sized jet through with room to spare, and appeared to lead straight into Faerie. The librarian wasn’t in Faerie, but she was in the area around the portal to it, where time and magic streams got all jumbled up.
No wonder she was looking so freaked out. Spirits manifested bodies in Faerie. So, when the fey currents were hitting her, she turned solid, but when Earth’s were prevailing, she went back to her usual ghostly form. Which might also explain why the feedback loop had shut down.
It ran on demon magic, which Faerie ate for lunch.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” Jonathan asked, coming back this way. I didn’t know what he meant, and didn’t care. I was looking at the phalanx of Svarestri he had with him, which he arrayed around Pritkin and me, except for the space opposite the portal. “Wouldn’t want to obstruct your view,” he told me kindly.
And then he belted Pritkin straight in the face.
I made a sound and tried to get up, but the guards held me back. And then made me watch an absolutely savage beating. It went on for long minutes, until Pritkin’s face looked less like a human’s and more like a pile of ground beef. I didn’t even know if he was conscious anymore when Jonathan finally let him go and turned toward me.
And then I found out, when Jonathan grabbed me by the hair and Pritkin launched himself at him, only to be hit by a spell from one of the guards that sent him flying back what must have been fifteen feet.
He hit down hard enough to stun him, several Svarestri lunged for him with spears out, and I screamed. But Jonathan held up a hand and they stopped short, before dragging Pritkin into the lineup with Mircea and the others. Where they proceeded to beat him into unconsciousness.
So much for his incubus and them being allies, I thought sickly, as Jonathan grabbed me again.
But I didn’t get a beating of my own, as I’d half expected. Instead, I was dragged over to the edge of the precipice, my contingent of guards coming along with me. But I wasn’t thrown off. Instead, Jonathan sat down next to me and opened a blue and white cooler.
“Beer? Soft drink?”
I stared at him and then at the cooler, which was full of ice, beverages, and a few sandwiches. He took out what looked like an egg salad on rye and began to munch it. Then he snared himself a beer and popped the top. He glanced at me and waggled the cooler again.
“Last chance.”
“W-what is this?” I asked.
“Best seat in the house. Least I could do for a Pythia.”
“Best seat to what?”
Jonathan patted my shoulder. He seemed to like to pat things. “Just watch.”
I watched.
The view through the portal was somewhere up high, another mountaintop probably, because the whole area appeared to be ringed by snow-capped peaks. Inside this natural barrier lay an expansive valley—cold, rocky and bare, except for some scattered villages here and there. And, in the middle of the plain, a great castle that gleamed in the sunlight.
It was more like a castle-sized city, and appeared to have been magicked up from the surrounding rock. Because the feel of it was totally different from the tiny fortress we were currently sitting in. There were no blocky towers or squared off edges. Instead, it looked more like a mountain had simply decided to grow in the approximate shape of a castle, with rounded, weathered protuberances interlaced with bridges and terraces made of what looked like ice.
It also had several rows of walls and defensive towers, at least a dozen drawbridges that were all currently closed up, and it bristled with anti-siege weapons. Not that it needed them. Because, milling about outside the castle, were what looked to be thousands upon thousands of manlikans. And when I say outside, I mean that they covered not only the area around the castle itself, but much of the valley as well, huge though it was.
Some looked like the stone sentinels that Mircea and I had fought—deliberate carvings made to look like soldiers, if soldiers were the size of skyscrapers. Many were new and pristine, their lines sharp and newly cut; others were old and crumbly, with weathered featured and pitted surfaces from too many storms. But all were huge and well-armed. They were arrayed in rows, like giant chess pieces, or like ranks of flesh and blood troops with perfect discipline.
Others were of the type that Pritkin and I had glimpsed once before on Aeslinn’s borders. Craggy, barely recognizable as humanoid, they looked more like the mountains from which they’d been made than actual people. But if you looked closely, you could see discernable arms, legs and heads.
Well sort of. The one currently passing closest to the portal must have been twenty stories tall, with a spring bubbling out of its rocky head and cascading down its mossy beard, because it had just been called forth from the mountainside. Another, standing a little way off, had a vein of ruby slashed across its face like war paint and a mohawk of fir trees growing out of its stony skull. And a third was pockmarked by crystals, its broad face glittering, but its eyes dark caverns that nothing looked out of.
But then, it didn’t need eyes. The tiny figure of a man that stood on its shoulder served that function for it. Or should I say, the tiny fey, who was probably seven feet tall like the rest of them, but looked small in comparison to his ride. Because each of the living mountains had a rider who directed its mass in the deadliest way possible.
That would have been bad enough if there was only a handful of them. But there were walking mountains as far as the eye could see. And many of them didn’t have riders, although they seemed to be navigating around perfectly well without them, something which shouldn’t have been possible.
It felt like ice had started to collect in my gut.
“You see,” Jonathan said, watching me. “The problem with a surprise ley-line attack is that you can’t send in scouts. You have to do it all at once, and hope your intelligence was correct. If it was, you surprise your enemy, if not . . .”
He smiled at me.
> “They surprise you,” I whispered.
Chapter Forty-One
I stared at the trap being laid for our troops, while Jonathan drank beer and pawed through his cooler, with the air of a tailgater waiting for the main event to start. For my part, I watched one of the mountainous sort of manlikans dueling with another. They were both the size of 747s stood on end, which made them among the smaller of the type, yet they were lighting fast—too fast.
The mountains with riders lumbered about, with the slow, heavy gait that you’d expect of something that large. Not these. And not plenty more, I thought, seeing another dueling pair nearby, where one had just somersaulted over the other’s head.
And then took it clean off with a sword the size of a freight car, because yeah.
Metal comes from the earth, too, doesn’t it?
“If it makes you feel any better,” Jonathan said, while the vanquished mountain searched around for its head, “your little plan worked a treat the first time. Caught us right off guard, it did.”
I turned my head to look at him. “The first time?”
He nodded and ate eggs. “Your people surprised the shit out of us. We had the majority of our forces on the borders—as I’m sure you know—thinking that there was no way round them. Planned to have your army slog through all the passes, getting massacred right and left, only to curb stomp whatever remained of you with our fey forces should any actually win through to the city.”
He waved his sandwich around.
“It seemed perfect. There were bets going on as to whether you’d even attempt it. Three rings of mountains, three sets of passes, absurd! Then, out of the blue one day, there you were. Well, not you personally, of course, but your people. Your army. We didn’t even get all the shields up before you were breaking through, leaping over our walls, and scaling us like a swarm of—” he broke off. “What’s fanged?”
“What?”
He snapped his fingers. “Insect. Not ants, not bees.” He put his sandwich down so that he could put a couple of fingers up by his mouth and make little proboscis-like movements at me.
I just stared.
“Oh, well, I can’t think of it, either,” he said. “But fanged tiny things, anyway. Overran us in no time. Killed the king, killed most of the army, almost killed me. I managed to escape through a tunnel dressed as an old woman. Then, of course, I hopped back in time and warned Aeslinn. He was . . . displeased . . . that you lot made allies of the Old Ones, and talked them into manipulating the ley lines for you. They’ll pay a price for that, I imagine. Should have stayed in hiding.”
I struggled to take all this in. “You—you mean that—”
“Take your time,” he encouraged. “Work it out.”
“—you mean that you’re from the future—”
“See, and they told me you were stupid.”
“—a future where we won—”
“Slaughtered us.” He agreed. “Wasn’t even close.”
“—but you went back in time with Jo’s power and warned Aeslinn—”
“I’m his fair-haired boy.”
“—so he could prepare and have a different outcome?”
He beamed at me. “Right in one! You know, I think we’re going to deal very well together. Any particular bit you’d like to claim, by the way? Getting a bit crowded on the stomach.”
He rolled up a shirt sleeve to show me a stringy bicep, as if asking for my opinion on where to get a new tattoo. Which I supposed he sort of was. I stared at his arm and thought about passing out.
I thought hard.
But Pritkin was currently unconscious and would likely be dead as soon as Jonathan got tired of beating on him. Mircea wasn’t laying waste, which meant God knew what, because the only way to stop a first level master was to stake him. And Rhea—I had no idea what Rhea was even doing here, except that she’d brought me a librarian.
Which probably meant that I needed to hear what she had to say.
But that was a little hard at the moment.
Of course, so was thinking with my arm feeling like it was on fire! A glance down told me why. The flesh was seared, red and bubbly, as if I’d stuck it over a stove and just left it there to—
I blinked. It was red and bubbly, where a minute ago it had been black and bloody. It didn’t feel any better, but it looked . . . like someone was healing me. I glanced back over my shoulder and found Mircea’s eyes boring straight into mine.
For a second, until one of the guards struck me in the head with the end of a wooden pike. I fell over, because I was not doing well, and Jonathan jumped up and started screaming at the fey. And I started trying to mentally communicate with Mircea, because pain or not, I needed to know what the hell was going on!
But I wasn’t going to find out anything that way. Mircea’s head wasn’t full of whispers anymore, it was a full-on hurricane of voices. What sounded like thousands of them yelling and fighting, bellowing and howling, and none sounded remotely sane—or anything like him. I didn’t even think they were the voices of his family members, although some of them may have been. It was like trying to pick out an individual shout in a stadium full of cheering fans.
Only these fans sounded furious, and half of them weren’t speaking any language I’d ever heard.
“What did you do to Mircea?” I asked numbly, when Jonathan hauled me back up.
He grinned. And then silently opened his shirt. The little green lump on his side, which had looked dead and shrunken before, was pulsating furiously, like he had affixed an extra heart to his chest.
I guessed I knew what to tell Jonas it did, if we ever got out of this.
“When he tried to get in your head,” I said. “Back in the interrogation room. You . . . got into his.”
“Not stupid at all,” he said approvingly.
“Is it . . . permanent?”
Jonathan shrugged. “Well, for him it will be.”
I felt another ice cube drop into the collection in my stomach.
“You know, if you hadn’t cut the connection between you two, I’d have had you as well,” he added conversationally.
He turned back to the main event, which hadn’t started yet. But it would, any time now, and . . . and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t!
I felt panic start to rise, a bitter taste on my tongue, a lump in my throat, threatening to choke me. I was naked other than for a robe, in excruciating pain, and was about to be murdered along with everyone I loved. I had no weapons that would work on this group and almost no information. Except that we were about to lose—the war, our lives, everything—if I didn’t come up with a plan, right freaking now.
And instead, what was I doing?
Thinking about throwing up.
So, I thought about something else instead. About my mother, who would be ashamed to see me sitting here, cowering before this creature. I might be a shitty demi-god, but I was her daughter. I must have gotten something from her!
And then about Rhea. I had no idea what she was doing here, but she was likely being kept alive as insurance that I wouldn’t throw myself off the cliff to avoid becoming Jonathan’s latest body mod. Because if I did, the Pythian power would go to her and she would be harvested in my place. And I couldn’t let that happen!
But most of all, I thought about Gertie. She’d been training me hard all month, and not just on the Pythian skills. She’d taught me a lot there, but she’d seemed to emphasize this sort of thing even more, putting me time and time again in situations where I had to think creatively under pressure, to find solutions that no one else could see, and then to implement them flawlessly. She’d been a good teacher; I had tried to be a good pupil.
And now it was graduation day.
I nudged Billy Joe.
“Don’t come out,” I told him. “Come inside.”
“What?” Jonathan asked, turning to look at me.
“Inside your manlikans,” I said, a little louder. “Those are Ancient Horrors, aren’t they?�
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He nodded. “Some of them. We pulled them back from the borders to protect the city. Wait until you see what they can do—”
I’d already seen it, I thought, feeling Billy moving inside his necklace. I really hoped he took a moment to figure out the currents swirling around us. Because if he came out at the wrong time—
But he didn’t. I didn’t know if he’d been listening, or if we just got lucky. But the next moment, I felt a familiar spirit slide from the necklace he haunted into my body, so that we could speak silently to each other.
Jonathan was nattering on about his cool new army, while I clutched Billy in a mental hug that I never wanted to end. But it had to. I needed a favor, possibly the biggest I’d ever asked from him.
And although I expected an argument; I didn’t get it.
“My fucking pleasure,” he assured me viciously.
“Are you certain? Billy . . . if it doesn’t work—”
“My risk, my choice. Just tell me when.”
I looked at Jonathan, which also gave me a side eye view of the lineup. The librarian was solid again, her old-fashioned gown puddled around her knees, her eyes wide and staring. But not for long. She flickered, and then abruptly went ghostly, and I gave Billy a mental shout: “Now!
He tore out of me, surging across the courtyard between me and Rhea, moving like a silver bullet until he slammed straight into my acolyte.
And disappeared.
He’d made the transition in record time, before the currents had a chance to change again. Although whether that would matter I didn’t know, because Rhea could absolutely throw him out again. It was her body; he was an interloping spirit; she could toss him out on his ghostly ass any second now and just might.
Because she literally looked like she’d been shot.