by Jen Williams
Frostling slid through the air like liquid silver and sliced a crimson path across the woman’s collarbone, spoiling the wolves inked there. Wydrin gave a shout of triumph, and then to her surprise Estenn threw one of her cutlasses at her, the whistling metal barely missing her face. Estenn snatched up the sack with her free hand and threw it over her shoulder, turning to run for the far door.
‘Oh no you bloody don’t!’
Wydrin sprinted after her, catching up quickly and reaching out to grab a fistful of the woman’s thick black hair, twisting it around the pommel of Glassheart. Estenn gave a squawk of outrage and spun round, cutlass flying, and the flat of her curving blade struck Wydrin on her left hand, hard enough for Frostling to go flying from her fingers. Instinctively, she let go of Estenn’s hair only for the woman to kick her solidly in the shins. Swearing, Wydrin punched out with her free fist, striking Estenn on her cheekbone. There was a crack, though whether it was from her fingers or Estenn’s face, Wydrin couldn’t have said.
‘Give it up, you lunatic!’ she shouted. All at once she felt too hot, as though she were coming down with a fever, and her face was burning where Estenn had touched it. Frostling was missing from her hand, and she wasn’t sure now where she’d lost it. ‘The gods don’t care about you.’
Estenn barrelled into her and they both went over, crashing into the crates and glass boxes. For a few seconds it was a bar brawl; a fight too close for blades, they scrabbled at each other, fingers and fists and knees and teeth. There was a tinkling crash as one of the glass cases smashed to pieces by their heads – Wydrin caught a glimpse of delicate silver links and with a grunt she rolled herself away from Estenn and scrambled towards it. Somehow she had lost Glassheart too, but the Tower Gauntlets were there, lying amongst the broken glass. Stumbling slightly she snatched them up and slid them over her bare hands. There was a sensation, like plunging your hands into hot water, and she made a pair of fists in front of her. The gauntlets were over-sized but beautiful, and she grinned, tasting blood in her mouth.
‘All right, then, let’s see what you’ve fucking got.’
Estenn glared up at her as if she were mad. She still had the single cutlass, although she was holding it awkwardly – Wydrin guessed there was a wound on her arm somewhere. All this blood couldn’t be hers alone.
‘I will kill you, heathen.’ Estenn’s voice was low and utterly certain.
‘You’re not doing a very good job of it so far.’
Estenn leapt for her, cutlass flying. Wydrin, always good at anticipating a move, dodged it easily. With the assassin suddenly within reach, Wydrin brought her fist across, missing the woman’s chin but catching her full on the shoulder. Estenn flew into the nearby boxes as if she had been thrown from a horse.
‘Ye gods!’ Wydrin looked down at the gauntlets. ‘Where have you been all my life?’
Estenn was already climbing out of the wreckage, although she looked faintly stunned.
‘I can kill you with my dagger, which will at least be quick,’ said Wydrin. ‘Or I can beat you into a pulp with these. Your choice.’
Estenn opened her mouth to reply, when there was a commotion at the far door. Wydrin looked up to see a score of mages piling into the room, their arms covered in fluttering strips of silk.
‘You took your time,’ cried Wydrin. ‘She’s here, look, freeze her solid or whatever you do, or just let me finish the job—’
Wydrin looked back, but Estenn had vanished. Desperately she cast around, looking for the tell-tale flicker in the shadows.
‘Watch the door!’ she called, ‘the bitch can make herself invisible, and she’s still got a sword—’
Abruptly she was crashing to the floor, a cold encircling her arms, so deep and crushing that she could barely breathe. She gasped, dragging air into her shocked lungs – there was a starburst of ice around her hands, frozen solid.
‘What are you doing?’ Instinctively, she pulled her hands apart, shattering the ice with the gauntlets. The mages were advancing, their hands held out in front of them as though they approached a wild beast.
‘That’s the one,’ she heard one woman say. ‘The Archmage wants her taken down. But carefully. He wants her questioned.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’
Wydrin rolled over and brought her gauntleted fists down on the stone floor with all her strength. There was a deafening crash and the entire room shook, so violently that she saw several mages thrown to the floor. In the confusion Wydrin scrambled up and ran for the far door, spotting a shadow just beyond the entrance as she did so; Estenn was already leaving. As she streaked past the mages one of them raised his hands to her, a ball of crackling electricity growing between his fingers, and she flung out her right fist, catching him in the chest and sending him flying into the mages gathered behind him.
‘Sorry!’
Out the door and across the Moon Gallery, she saw Estenn’s footprints appear afresh – she wasn’t being so careful this time – and as they emerged into the wider corridor Wydrin realised she could make out the outline of the woman, a darker shape amongst the shadows. Perhaps she had to concentrate to do her little vanishing trick, or perhaps the beating she’d already had had shaken something loose. Ignoring her own aches and pains Wydrin sprinted after the woman, following her up flight after flight of stairs. The strange heat in her face was now a steady throbbing, making it hard to concentrate. Estenn seemed to know exactly where she was going.
‘I can see you, Estenn!’ she bellowed. ‘And there’s no bloody mystical hole for you to jump into this time!’
Estenn crashed through another door and they were out on the roof. The air was cold and damp, with wisps of fog like spirits curling around the jagged architecture. Immediately in front of them was one of the great white globes, lit from within with softly glowing light. Estenn made for this immediately, making a decent job of scrambling up the side, sack swinging back and forth over her shoulder.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Wydrin followed, surprised to find that the globes were made of a rough, grainy sort of glass, giving her boots enough traction to climb easily enough. There was a series of shouts from below, and with a sinking feeling Wydrin realised that several of the mages had come out onto the roof after them.
Estenn turned to face her. ‘There is nothing you can do.’ Her tone was calm, relentless. ‘What is happening now was meant to happen. It was always my destiny to save the gods. It was why they saved me, back on Euriale.’
‘You saved yourself, you silly cow,’ shouted Wydrin. There was a crackle as something exploded, and a fireball arched over her head, followed by another that brushed her arm. Wydrin cried out and stumbled, only for a cone of intense cold to hit her shoulder from the other side. She turned to shout at the mages. ‘You should be shooting that shit at her, not me, you idiots!’
She could see their faces in the light from the globe. They looked confused, perhaps uncertain as to the sense of their orders. One of them, a young man with long blond hair, opened his mouth as if to shout at her, but before he got any words out his face seemed to crumple in on itself. He aged rapidly before her eyes, his skin creasing to wrinkles and his cheeks caving in, his blond hair turning grey and then white in the space of a second. His eyes were wide and terrified, and then they, too, fell back into his skull and he was a pile of bones in a black robe, and then less than that – dust. Behind him stood Frith, his hands raised, his body bathed in a strange, shifting light.
For a few moments no one moved – the mages seemed too stunned to act, and even Estenn seemed taken aback by the man’s sudden death – and then all was chaos. A handful of mages threw a barrage of spells at Frith but he raised his hands and they, too, died screaming, their bodies rushing to their deaths like mud washed away in a stream.
‘Frith?’ Wydrin made to move towards him – the light that bathed him coloured him in shades of grey and it made him look incorporeal – but he waved her back.
‘Stop he
r!’
She turned back to see Estenn looking up to the sky, waving the staff over her head as if signalling to someone. There was something up there, something lit up with green lights and swooping down at an alarming speed.
‘No one’s coming to pick you up, wolf cub.’ Wydrin dropped into a crouch and brought the gauntlets crashing down on top of the globe. There was a sound like a thousand bottles breaking and Wydrin fell back down onto the roof, rolling away from the shards of glass while a tower made of white light shot up into the dark sky, briefly illuminating the roiling clouds there before winking out of existence. When she lifted her head the mages were all gone, either destroyed by Frith’s new dangerous magic or having fled. Frith ran towards her.
‘Wydrin, my staff, she dropped it next to you! Quickly, pass it to me and—’
Estenn appeared out of the darkness behind him, a sudden pale face in the shadows, and the long curving tip of her cutlass burst from the middle of his chest, slick with blood that looked black in the gloom. Frith looked perplexed momentarily, and she saw his questing fingers brush the lethal edge of the blade, as if wondering what it was doing there.
‘NO!’
For a long dizzying moment, Wydrin’s vision went dark at the edges, and she felt as though it was she who had been stabbed – what else could this pain in her chest be? But then her vision snapped back and she was catching him, catching him as he slid from the end of Estenn’s sword. They collapsed together onto the cold black rock of the roof. Dimly, Wydrin was aware that Estenn was getting away, that a carapacer had landed nearby and she was climbing in, but she could only take in the blood, and Frith’s dark grey eyes, looking into hers.
‘No no no.’ Hurriedly she shook off the gauntlet from her right hand and pressed her palm to his face. ‘Stay with me, stay, don’t you bloody dare go anywhere without me, princeling.’
‘Wydrin, I can’t …’
‘You have to listen to me, stay with me, please.’ Her voice broke on the words. ‘By the fucking Graces, I can’t lose you, I can’t.’
‘I love you.’
She saw his eyes lose focus, and it was the world ending. He grew heavier in her arms as his body grew still, and then a rough hand took hold of her collar and hauled her up and away. She turned to kill this person, to open his throat, and a flash of purple light tore consciousness from her. It was a relief.
PART FOUR
The Black Feather Three
61
Far across Whittenfarne, beyond its lonely hills and desolate wastes, a hunched figure stands in the darkness. He doesn’t need light to see by.
The terrain in this eastern part of the island is considered by the mages to be too difficult to bother with. There are too many pools of caustic, foul-smelling water, with too many creeping lizards with needle-sharp teeth waiting at the bottom of them. It was hard enough to carve out a settlement on the western edge – Whittenfarne is always unforgiving. Nothing pleasant or useful grows here and there are few native animals that you would want to look at for longer than a handful of seconds, although the hunched figure is quite partial to the shellfish that cluster in the rock pools. Sometimes he will make a point of spending a day harvesting them, and then an evening cooking them over a fire. There are always more than he needs to eat – and he doesn’t really need to eat at all – but it is one of his stubborn little habits, a small pleasure he makes a point of enjoying because he feels keenly that his siblings wouldn’t understand it. There is a particular satisfaction to be had in collecting the meat yourself and then cooking it to your specification.
He is not cooking tonight. Instead he shuffles around the pools, pausing every now and then to push a long, grey finger into the black mud. There is little of interest on Whittenfarne, save for the magic. The Edeian here is so strong he can taste it in the air, and it prickles on his skin when the mists swirl around him. That’s why the mages keep coming, that’s why they built their fortress here.
In truth he is out here checking his traps. They were excavated some years ago, under his careful supervision and to his specific design, and thankfully, so far he hasn’t had to use them, although he wonders a little more every day. The war with the mages, and between themselves, spirals further out of control every day. He sees evidence of this wherever he goes on Ede; from far above he sees the burnt towns and cities, he sees the refugees hiding, the devastated crops and blasted land.
They haven’t sought him out yet. He clings to that thought, and hopes that he will be left in peace. His siblings have never trusted him. Why would they? It was never his nature to be trustworthy, and the idea of them trying to bring him over to one side or another is ludicrous. Alliances never last, not with them.
There is a series of caws and he straightens up from the pool to see three black birds perched on a nearby rock. They are all watching him.
‘You don’t much like it here, I know,’ he says, amiably waving a finger at them. Inside his cowl his large yellow eyes are creased at the edges. ‘The mist gets your feathers all damp, you can’t get the smell out for days. I know. But there is so much power here, my sweets. I can’t turn my hand against them directly, no, but I can leave something waiting for them. Just in case.’
There were other places like this, across Ede, with similar secrets hidden under the mud and clay and grass. His companions preferred those places, with warm breezes or clear days of crisp sunlight. There were more trees there, for a start. He feels their exasperation against his skin – as light as eggshells. They want to nest, to perch, or to run free. They want to go back to the Rookery and preen.
‘Prideful creatures,’ he tells them. He unfurls his own wings, shaking their midnight-hued feathers to the darkness. His boldest companion changes his shape and pads over to him on the feet of a great cat. The creature pushes his sleek head into his hand, and he pats him absently. ‘We will go soon,’ he murmurs to the griffin. ‘Perhaps we will journey to Onwai, no? It’s summer there for them now, and it will be so hot that even you will stop complaining.’
All of a sudden, the rocks around him light up as bright as day, and far to the west a column of brilliant white light shoots up into the sky. It comes from the mage stronghold there and it sparks against his nerve-endings as only pure Edenier can. He watches it for a moment, hand lying forgotten on the griffin’s head, and then the light winks out. Behind him, the two bird-shaped companions caw and tok to each other in disapproval.
Perhaps the mages had engineered some sort of terrible accident and wiped themselves out. That, at least, might put an end to the continual fighting and destruction. Ten years of this madness. Sometimes it seemed that the only way it would end would be for one side or the other to cause their own annihilation.
‘And maybe I could help with that,’ the figure murmurs. He folds his wings away back under his cloak. ‘One way or another.’
It has always been his nature to be cautious, to see which way the cards will fall. It was another thing he knew his brothers and sisters could not understand about him, because they were always certain of how they would react: with anger, with generosity, with chaos, with order.
Cards. It had been some time since he’d played cards. He would have to find someone to play with, someone who would not be disturbed by his face but could still play a decent hand of Poison Sally. The griffins certainly weren’t any good at it. He supposed he might find himself a disguise of some sort again, something that would let him walk amongst humans without comment, although it would have to be something quite outlandish.
‘I keep telling you, if you applied yourselves, you’d be better at it,’ he tells the griffin. ‘These human games can teach you a lot about how to lie, how to keep your face unreadable.’ He glances down at the griffin’s long curving beak, black and flawless in the night. ‘Yes, well. That’s not the point.’
The figure turns back towards the west, looking out to where the bright column of light had been. There is some dark business afoot there tonight, and a
n ember of curiosity burns in his chest.
‘Mages and their squabbles and their quest for knowledge. What could I learn from a mage?’ He turns away from the stronghold, putting his back to it with some relief. ‘No mage deserves my counsel these days.’
He heads off towards the eastern coast. Perhaps there would be shellfish tonight after all, cooked on the beach under a crescent moon. That would be very fine.
62
The floor of the cell was damp and uneven. Dimly Wydrin was aware that a ridge of stone was digging into her side and gradually making her lower back numb, and there was a fine layer of grit pressing into her cheek. There was nothing in the room at all – no bed, no blanket, no stool, no window. There was a square hole in the door slightly above eye level, criss-crossed with thick black wire, and through that came the weak light from an oil lamp further down the corridor.
She was waiting. There was nothing else for her to do now, but wait. There was no sense wasting her energy shouting and screaming and banging on the door to be let out, because they wouldn’t. Eventually, they would have to do something with her, and that would be when she could act. This sort of advice came to her in her mother’s voice, in Devinia’s dry, serious tones. ‘Why are you wasting your voice?’ she would say. ‘You’re achieving nothing here. Wait, and watch. And choose the moment.’
Her mother’s voice seemed all too close at the moment, ready to tell her all the ways in which she had failed, to point out all the mistakes she had made. She could hear her speaking as if she were standing in the other corner of the cell, her arms crossed over her chest and a faintly disappointed look in her eyes. You always were too sentimental to be a pirate, she would say. You see what happens, when you love too deeply? When you stay in one place too long? The captain has to stand apart from the crew, has to know her own way. She doesn’t need anyone else, because as soon as you do, you are weak. And where has it got you exactly? What are you now? Worse than the words themselves was the sympathy buried under the disappointment. If Devinia felt sorry for her, then she really had fucked up.