The woman stands with chest heaving, her dark eyes fixed on us. What I see in them dashes my hopes that she’s on our side. The same consuming rage I saw in the bear heats her gaze.
Her axes come up.
“Get ready!” I shout.
Freya darts away, staff up. I charge forward to meet the artaois’ attack. She curses in a language I’ve never heard as her arms come around, and her war cry is piercing. Our blades meet, metal shrieks, and her blows numb my hands.
Gods, she’s strong.
But I’m faster, and despite her being taller, she’s human. She doesn’t have the reach of bear, the raw power. But now I hesitate to hit her, not wanting to wound her or do worse. No more fur to absorb my strikes. Her armor exposes so much golden skin.
Her blows come hard, and the stars reflect from her axes as they cut the night. She comes in low, a slice to my stomach that would split me crotch to chin, but I dance back, turn her stroke. Her other axe screams in on a cross strike, hungry to bite my skull. At the last moment I flow around it, let it pass, and she stumbles as her momentum carries her forward. I snap a glancing blow at the back of her head. One of her blades beats me, blocking my strike.
She spins in place, axes sweeping the ground. I jump, barely clearing as they pass beneath. I land and she’s on me, roaring in my face. She cuts again, and again. My swords meet her every time. I can see her moves in her eyes, her stance, as she makes them. Block, turn, parry.
But I can’t keep this up. She’s so fucking powerful. I’m faster but she doesn’t need speed if she can beat me into the ground with strength.
Freya’s rotating around us, watching for an opening, her staff spinning above her head.
I keep the artifact’s attention on me and Freya sees her chance. She swings to stun.
Impossibly, the artaois blocks it. An axe comes up and she spins in place, deflecting my sword and knocking aside Freya’s staff in the same moment. She kicks out, and Freya tumbles across the ice with a cry.
My blades hum, move like liquid, and now the artaois is on the defensive. She blocks, grunting at the power of my strikes, her blades meeting mine, but barely. I’m too quick for her, and I slide between her axes.
My blade kisses her throat.
But I can’t kill her, won’t, and at the last moment, I pull the blow.
And she knows it.
Her grin is triumphant, and the bloodlust in her eyes is an inferno.
She comes again, unstoppable, an avalanche of blades and anger, and I’m retreating. Her blows rain down on me, and they’re like hammers. I can’t keep absorbing them. I can’t feel my hands, my arms.
And then cold iron skitters across the ice, wrenched from my grip. Her axe comes in behind, scoring a line of blood across my chest. The burn steals my breath.
Freya’s healing is instant. She’s still down on one arm, blood sheeting her face. But her staff is up, and my body hums.
The artaois rears back, shielding her face.
Like she’s afraid. Afraid of Freya’s healing.
Freya’s eyes meet mine; she’s seen it, too.
I remember how she reacted to the healing when in bear form. How did I miss this? Not think of it before?
The artaois recovers, flies at me, axes whizzing at my head. I dive back, roll, as Freya staggers to her feet.
She heals again, but not me this time.
Fireflies of golden radiance surround the woman. She throws her head back, screams into the night, loud enough to pierce the heavens.
Then she’s silent, falling to her knees as Freya’s healing swirls around her, enveloping her body.
It’s working.
Freya’s knuckles whiten on her staff. She shakes, her teeth grit, almost spent from battling Mordenn’s influence.
I reach her side just as she exhausts. She falls into my arms.
The artaois sprawls too, writhing. She struggles to her feet. I measure her, the look in her eyes and the tension of her muscles. She’s a woman now, wild and disoriented, but the taint,the rage, is gone.
“Name?” she pants, eyes darting over the landscape.
“Tamlir. Or Lir.”
“You are not of Verdajln.” She’s not asking. My voice, my clothes, her instincts; she already knows.
“I’m not here to fight the artaois. Or the selkie.”
“Only one artaois.” She exhales, launches into a ragged cough and bends a moment, winded. “Callista. The last.”
The portal appears below, outside the den. I’m so fucking relieved.
I carry Freya down, Callista at my heels. I turn to her, unsure. With every other artifact, I’ve had time to get to know them before reaching this point. Five minutes ago, the artaois was trying to kill me. Three minutes ago, I finally learned her name. How do I tell her that she’s an artifact, ask her to join me when she doesn’t know anything about me?
She sniffs deep, sees the war play out of my face. She hasn’t moved. She watches me with the dark eyes of a reluctant predator, measuring, but holds her ground. “I’m not going with you.”
“Why…what…?” I’ve never considered what would happen if an artifact refused to come. “You don’t have to do anything to the villagers. Mordenn will see to them.” Probably the only time he and I will ever be on the same side.
She looks away. “We swore an oath to the selkie. I can’t leave without knowing they’ve been avenged. If their skins are destroyed along with the village…I’ll carry that disgrace.”
Shite. No part of me wants to trudge back to that fucking village. But I need her, and I suspect she needs me, or she wouldn’t still be standing here. She’d have left me behind already.
I hold Freya closer, weighing.
“My den is safe. No mortal has your ability; none have ever discovered it.”
“But a god of death?”
“His vision is obscured when it comes to the living. That’s why he uses mortals and thralls. If Mordenn could find me, we’d have been extinct before the Verdajln learned a language.”
This makes me feel a little better. I settle Freya by the fire and she burrows into furs that are piled beside it.
“Fur?” I ask Callista, curious.
“Mine. Molting once a year. What did you think, I’d hunted them?” Her smile is grim. “The selkie would punish me if I dared.”
I bet they would. “I’m ready,” I fib, because I’m fucking exhausted and the astratempus ticks away, but I’m committed. “Tell me how to help.”
“The selkie can hide in the tides, but they can’t return to the ocean without their skins. Ten of them.”
A word jumps out. “Ten is a very even number.”
Callista chucks her chin toward the entrance and we start up the crevasse. “You’re a quick one. Mordenn is called god of death, but what is a being who gathers the dead but a collector? His purview is to have all of something; a race, a species, a family. He completes collections and places them in his skáli to be admired at demon feasts.”
Night and cold make it easy to imagine an endless banquet hall divided by pedestals where paralyzed corpses wait to be ogled. Heads of beasts like the artaois mounted above fireplaces gaping like green-flamed maws of damnation. “He’ll have to wait on at least one of those collections.”
Her grin is wild, triumphant, breaths puffing. “A very long time.”
“At the village…” I can’t bring myself to recount what happened at the pyre. “I’m surprised he hasn’t interfered again.”
“You don’t see?” Callista shakes her head, ash-and-walnut locks ruffling around her shoulders. “He takes all the artaois by the blood and sweat of the Verdajln. And lets the Verdajln gather the selkie. What do you think would have happened to the villagers if they’d caught me?” She crouches now that we’ve reached the shore. Callista’s smile is filled with bitterness and reckoning. Her teeth gleam white and almost demonic in the moonlight.
“He gets them to gather all of your kind, and they’ve also caught all
the selkie, so he takes them, too.” My head aches.
“So strange to me, the youngest thing in any realm thinks itself the most clever, the most devious. Equal to making bargains with gods who crushed out the race of men for sport in ages past. It’s to your credit you keep sprouting. But you never gain wisdom. Like barnacles,” she spits.
“Oof.” Fair. Hurtful, but fair. “Maybe we gain something else. I made my bargain with the Mad God with no expectation of surviving. Just getting revenge.”
She raises from her crouch. “You came to this contest knowing you would die?”
Bitterness twists my insides. “I used to hope I would.”
Callista’s sniffs deep, and this time her grin his hot and hungry. For a second, I’m afraid she’ll devour me, but not like she did the hersir. When I start west across the floe she grabs my furs, dragging me like a child onto my heels. “You don’t have to travel beneath the ice. You were hiding from me, remember?” Her eyes gleam, and she’s fucking terrifying, and her beauty is breathtaking. Instinct wars in me, to take her, bond with her, and to escape before she claims me.
Later. I force myself to turn back to the village. Not having to deal with the dark, the tide, and admittedly the selkie is a relief. We cross the ice, and I’m unapologetically cocky.
Verdajln’s west gate stands wide open to the boat launch. Flames blaze in the center of town. Not the pyre; they’ve lit another bonfire, an inferno that dwarfs the one they’d lit before Freya and I arrived, and I can see the silhouettes of villagers hovered around it.
“I think they’re expecting us.”
“If they weren’t, they’re bigger idiots than I thought,” utters Callista, axes gripped tight.
Women, children. My stomach turns. In Loria, women they were never agents of war, just victims. I know these women, most of them, must be complicit, but it’s not in my nature to be ruthless like this. “What about the children?” I whisper as we approach the gates.
“They are selkie born. Their mothers will skin them up and take them back to the ocean. They will forget their mortal half, after a time.”
After what happened here, that’s probably for the best.
Hersir ring the close side of the fire. On the far side village women clutch children into their skirts with pale hands. One holds a baby to her breast, long blond hair curtaining it from what’s happening.
Between us and the hersir, heaped on the snowpack, lays a pile of skins. Pewter gray and glossy, dappled with sable spots.
“Take them,” shouts one of the men. “Take the cursed things and go.”
Cold pricks up my back. Why did they build a fire when the lamps give plenty of light? Why offer the pelts so freely?
“Something isn’t right,” I breathe to Callista. Her bronze skin bunches over taut muscles. I’m not telling her anything she doesn’t know.
Behind the fire, almost obscured by bright flames and thin smoke, a hersir begins to shoo the children together. A woman’s sob breaks the tight stillness.
“You must go now,” he says to the children in a low grunt to. “You must go back.”
The woman with the babe clutches it, cants her body, and begins backing away. The hersir grabs her bib, her sleeve. They struggle, and the baby begins to fuss.
She turns to run and the hersir takes a handful of her hair. She screams now, feet punching the snow, slipping.
He grabs the baby by fragile limbs, tearing.
My eyes fall on the bonfire. “They’re not giving the children back.”
Callista sees the picture now, too. I hear it in the growl vibrating her chest.
Small things snap together. Thin clouds of breath from behind the gate halves, guards hiding, ready to spring forward. A yellow and gold sheen of oil on the ice, around the selkie skins and the bonfire, ringing the children. The way the hersir grabs for the baby like a hound after meat.
“It’s a trap, for us, the selkies. They’re going to burn it all. Us, the skins, the babes,” says Callista, her voice raising by octaves.
She doesn’t hide our discovery from the men. Their faces change from guarded and wary to twisted in the firelight.
The hersir kicks the woman to the ground, grabs the baby and flings it.
Callista crouches, but it's a massive white beast who sails over the flame-tops, catching the baby in its jaws. Bile rises in my throat.
She skids to a stop and rounds on the hersir. The baby screams when she deposits it on the ice, flails tiny fists, but he’s angry, not injured.
I’m stunned. But not for long. The gates creak. I lunge, kick off and flip myself behind one door. My blade comes around as I do, opening the guard into a steaming gut pile.
His companion charges out. He’s fast, as big men go, but too slow for me. He leads with his axe, but after fighting Callista, this is laughable. I lean to one side, turn, the blade passing a finger’s width from my face, then thrust. He’s skewered on cold steel before his war cry has finished. I kick him to the ice where he lies still.
Callista can’t hold her form; she twists, morphing into her human shape. But she stands over the baby, axes at the ready the whole time.
The hersir smirks at what he thinks is her weakness, grabs a limb from the fire, and hurls it onto the oil slick before him.
The fire spreads, hissing as it melts the ice, the oil too hungry to extinguish. It races in a semicircle, converging on the innocents. Women beyond the conflagration turn to run. Some try to reach the children, crying out and cradling burned arms to their chests.
An arc of Callista’s weapon send’s the hersir’s head into the bonfire.
I run. Through smoke and flame, ignoring searing heat and flesh that tightens, splits beneath immediate blisters.
The children stand screaming, babies wailing in the last blank space before the inferno spikes to the night sky.
I can just reach the pelts. I gather them, trying not to moan at the pain of my burns, even as they heal. I spy a thin patch of flame I can dive through. Ice melt from the fire has slowed the burning oil there, but not for long. Heat chaps my lips and face like desert sun. Fast as I heal, I’m still gripped by animal hysteria as I run, reaching the children and falling to my knees.
The ground shudders. Not a small tremor of sea ice. It moves like the halves of the world being sundered. A crack splits the air, a sound of ancient wood breaking or a glacier being cleft. A dark bolt runs along the ground, over the main road down the village center. It gapes; the bonfire shifts and slips into the crack on a hiss of steam and momentarily boiling water.
Callista bobs, weaves, holding back hersir. They come at her in twos, threes, and then they die. She looks annoyed, but not worried by what’s happening. “It’s Cetus!” she shouts, burying her blade in a man’s face with a smooth swipe of her arm.
I usher the children into a tight circle. “Who?”
I don’t hear her answer. Two hersir, screaming in fury, plunge through flame. The furs of one catch fire as he rushes the children, and the flames make him crazed. He screams a war cry as he flies at us, and I rise, weave around his sword, and my blade takes his head.
The other is more cautious. “You cannot save them,” he spits, hanging back.
I don’t answer, don’t have time for this. I step forward, blade darting out, but he’s faster than his friend, and blocks my strike. He grins, triumphant, just as my other sword plunges into his mouth, shattering teeth as it erupts from the back of his head.
Behind him, through flame, Callista grins, and in it a see a hunger that sets my blood boiling, even amidst the insanity around us.
Oh Gods, I hope we survive this.
The ground buckles, and shudders like the punch of Heijl’s fist against the world. Chunks of ice and boat wood sail into the air beyond the west gate. I lay my body over the mound of furs and tiny bodies, sword ready, no idea what else to do.
A tail crests, high as a castle tower. It’s slick and leathery, two joined black teardrops that slap the ground
, and where it strikes, the ice cracks, split, a spiderweb across the earth. Waves of water wash across the ground, recede back into the split, taking flame with it.
So, that’s Cetus. A sound tremors on the air, primitive and sonorous, almost mournful. The whale slips from sight.
Everyone left in the village crouches, clinging to shattered ground in sputtering lamplight. Darkness swells. Sea water laps gently from the cleft.
One slender blue-green arm appears, then a pair, then more. The selkies glide from the waves soundlessly.
A hersir screams, crazed, and bounds to his feet. He charges them, axe held high. Callista unhinges his head with a zip of her axe and his body spins into the drink.
A lamp between two of the houses sputters out.
“No, no,” murmurs one of the women. She rocks herself, eyes darting. “The darkness.”
The children have stopped crying. I sit up as the selkies tiptoe close, eyeing me with their sea-gray gazes. They claim their skins and a child at a time my group of charges dwindles.
Two more lamps go out. Sobbing ceases. The villagers stay hunched, night filled with their collective hitching breaths.
Now there’s just the baby. I scoop it up like a man who’s never held a living thing and offer it to the selkie. But they each have a child.
There are only nine. I remember cutting, severing limbs, but none of these are injured.
Callista, keeping one eye on the prone men, moves toward the selkies. She meets the eyes of the first one we saw beneath the ice; at least, I think it is. They all have the same dark hair, lapping slowly in the air, and their lithe forms are almost identical.
Callista nods at something silent between them. The selkie creeps her way around the bonfire’s dead ashes, to the woman thrown down by the hersir. She moves so timidly for a creature who could make short work of every person present, and it hits me how brutal the selkie’s time here must have been.
She offers the skin she holds.
The woman flinches away, shielding her face with a shaking arm.
“Elmany didn’t survive the ravaging of your men,” Callista says, speaking for the selkie. “Even though you tried to free her. But her sisters know what you did. They remember. You tried to save her. You can take her place and keep the babe.”
Temple of Cocidius Page 21