Cura’s inkling turned on them. Snowflakes dissolved in the air around it. The ice beneath its feet was already softening to mush. There was, Tam could see, a figure within the fire, though she was little more than a silhouette behind the burning veil. The bard couldn’t make out its face, but Tam was certain it had locked gazes with Cura.
The Inkwitch stood her ground. Her hands balled into fists at her side. Her eyes went wide and wild above flaring nostrils and gnashing teeth.
She’s terrified, Tam thought. She admires Rose. She must, or she wouldn’t have followed her all the way here. But she fears her as well, and this—the bard supressed a shiver—is how Cura sees her.
A soul on fire. A woman imprisoned by her nature, a danger to those nearest her …
Whatever silent struggle transpired between the summoner and the summoned was cut short as the smaller Simurgling pounced, driving Bloody Rose to the ice beneath it. The inkling twisted as it fell, catching the creature’s lunging bite with one arm. The space between them was a flurry of scratching talons and flaming swords.
Cura slumped to the ground, shrugging Tam’s hand away when she reached for her. “Go help Rod,” she muttered.
Rod? Roderick! Fuck! Tam had forgotten all about him.
Whirling, she saw the booker was still alive, having adopted the surprisingly effective tactic of lying on his back and pinwheeling his feet in the air. The Simurgling managed to clamp down on one, only to find itself with an empty boot in its mouth and a cloven hoof in the face. It reared—
—and Tam’s arrow punched through the soft scales on its belly. The Simurgling screeched and leapt away, shielding itself with a pair of wings as it used its teeth to pull the barb free. Roderick was up and running by the time it did.
Following the satyr’s retreat, Tam found Hawkshaw closing in on her. The Warden hoisted his double-decked crossbow.
“Hey, I—”
Click.
Tam heard a whine in her ear as the bolt that should have killed her missed by mere inches. A gust of wind had saved her life, but there wasn’t time now to thank it.
“Hawkshaw, listen—”
Click.
Tam juked right, and heard a second shaft buzz like a hornet past her nose.
The Warden tossed the spent crossbow away and drew his scabbardless bone sword without slowing.
Tam backed away, drawing Hawkshaw away from Cura—though she was fairly certain the Warden’s ire didn’t include the Inkwitch anyway. “Bloody gods, would you listen to me? I’m sorry! I didn’t know the Widow was—”
Given the choice between finishing that sentence or evading the blade thrust at her head, Tam chose the latter. She leapt to one side and was turning to run when the Warden’s sword slashed her shoulder. The blow drove her to her knees. She thought at first that her leather longcoat had borne the brunt of it, but a stripe of searing pain assured her that wasn’t the case. A kick sent her sprawling facedown on the ice. Her bow clattered ahead of her, out of reach.
She rolled onto her back and found Hawkshaw looming. He reversed his grip on the rag-bound hilt of his sword and prepared to drive it through her.
Tam fumbled beneath her coat, found the raven-carved hilt she was looking for. She lashed out, hurling Cura’s dagger at the Warden’s face—which might have helped if she could throw worth a damn, but since she couldn’t, the pommel glanced off his cheek and dropped at his feet.
That’ll leave a bruise, remarked the cynic slouching in the corner of her mind.
Hawkshaw watched the knife fall, then grunted as a pair of flaming swords sprouted from his chest. He was lifted from the ground. The bone sword dropped from his twitching fingers. The fiery spectre of Bloody Rose pushed the Warden from her blades with a foot, and he hit the ground like a sack of meal, dead beneath his smouldering straw cape.
For a span of heartbeats Tam and the inkling stared at one another. This close, the bard could feel waves of heat rolling off the woman inside the fire, and … something else—a radiating aura that boiled with angst, and anger, and pride. Tam was overcome by the sense of being torn into halves. She felt love, and the need to be loved, warring inside her. The reconciliation of the two seemed an impossible thing, and yet if she could only grasp the one …
The apparition cocked her head, as though aware of how deeply she was being perceived. The shrouding fire burned from orange to blue. The ice beneath her puddled and sloughed. Tam knew she should get away, or at the very least look away, but the woman’s presence compelled her to watch …
The flames vanished suddenly; the woman inside them dissolved into ash and was pulled into strands by the raking wind.
Tam sucked in a mouthful of cold air. She reclaimed her knife, then scrambled to where her bow lay. Suddenly, the ice beneath her lurched, and she was thrown to her backside.
Between the Simurglings and Hawkshaw trying to kill her, she’d been too preoccupied with her own survival to worry about the citadel-sized juggernaut they’d come here to kill.
But Rose hadn’t. Nor had Freecloud.
From this side of the ice-water abyss, their fight against the Dragoneater looked absurd—like a pair of overly optimistic mice trying to bring down a lion. Tam could make out Rose, red-haired and black-armoured, striking at it from below. She was hurling her swords as fast as they returned to her hands, but it was hard to tell if her attacks were having any effect whatsoever.
Freecloud remained just inside the Dragoneater’s reach, an obvious target. Madrigal’s music bounced across the ice, the singsong warble of a bird drunk on brandy. The druin was using the prescience to anticipate the creature’s attacks, running and leaping to avoid swiping claws, while occasionally finding time to retaliate.
A splashing figure drew Tam’s eye: Brune, naked but for his drenched red scarf, was dragging himself from the lake. By the time she reached his side the shaman was sprawled on the ice, gasping for air and shivering like he’d seen his own spectre swimming in the depths below.
“Brune! Are you okay?”
“T-T-Tam? The f-f-fuck are you d-doing here?”
The bard opened her mouth to tell Brune that she’d spotted the Dragoneater lurking beneath the ice, then pushed Hawkshaw overboard, discovered the Widow hiding in Doshi’s room, put the Simurg’s eye out with a firebomb, crashed the ship, helped Cura fight off the Simurglings, and then watched the summoner’s inkling (which was Rose, but not really Rose) kill Hawkshaw with a pair of flaming swords.
“T-Tam?” the shaman urged.
She blinked. “Sorry, what?”
“Where’s C-Cura?”
“Here.”
The Inkwitch shambled up beside them. Tam couldn’t help but glance at the tattoo on Cura’s arm and recall the fury of those flames against her skin. The ink was faded, indistinct, and would remain so for the next several hours. Though she’d never thought to ask, she suspected the Inkwitch couldn’t summon the same inkling twice in one day.
“And R-Roderick?” Brune asked.
Roderick! Fuck! She’d forgotten him all over again. “He’s …” Tam glanced around, and found the booker running flat out while the injured Simurgling limped after him. “There.”
The shaman tried to rise. “I’ll get him.”
“Let me,” said Cura, slipping her right arm free of her shawl.
Tam stepped ahead of them both. “I’ve got this,” she said, and then barked, “Rod!”
The booker veered toward her. The Simurgling skidded behind him, wings flapping to keep it stable.
There were three arrows left in Tam’s quiver. She chose one and drew, angling her shot to arc over the satyr’s head. She took a deep breath, and her whole body flexed as she took aim.
Roderick was a flailing blur. The target, clear as crystal.
She released the breath and the arrow at once, and if the ice underfoot hadn’t shuddered violently Tam was certain she would have hit the Simurgling.
But it did shudder violently, so she missed by a mile.
She pulled the second-to-last arrow from her quiver, swore when it snapped in her hand, and hastily threw it away.
Cura asked her something. Roderick was shouting words she couldn’t hear. The Simurgling nipped at his heel, fouling his step, and the satyr went down.
Tam withdrew her last arrow. There wasn’t time to draw the way Tera had taught her to draw or breathe the way Freecloud had told her to breathe.
She let the shaft loose the moment its fletching grazed her cheek. It whistled over Roderick’s head and tore a gory hole through the creature’s neck.
Which left only one Simurg to kill.
Chapter Thirty-five
The Damndest Thing
“What in the Frost Mother’s frozen hell is Rose doing?” asked Roderick, squinting across the circle of shattered ice.
“Is she r-running?” Brune asked. He was still crouched, still naked, still shivering in the blowing snow. He’d be warmer as a wolf, Tam suspected, but unable to speak.
“Not running,” said Cura. “Not Rose.”
Roderick sniffed. “Really? Because I’ve done a lot of running today and that”—he pointed—“looks an awful lot like running to me.”
The booker was right: Rose was running, weaponless, away from the monster, while Freecloud went on the attack. Madrigal was a sun-bright blur in his hands, humming as it hewed into the Simurg’s foreleg.
Running or not, Tam marvelled that Rose was moving at all. Her own limbs were leaden with exhaustion, her every breath clipped by the cold. Rose was wearing plate armour, and had been dancing with the Dragoneater for several minutes now.
Brune looked up. His hair and beard were frozen stiff. Even his eyebrows were frosted with ice. “So what is it she’s doing?”
“She’s going to kill it,” Cura said, “or die trying.”
“Should we help?” Tam asked.
The Inkwitch shook her head. “I think it’s too late for that.”
They watch, helpless to intervene, as Rose runs flat out across the ice. She leaps a few smaller drifts, but a larger one looms ahead. The Simurg, its left eye a smoking ruin, must turn its head sideways to assess her flight. Then it points its muzzle at her, and Tam sees the red-gold feathers behind its head unfurl with the splendour of a courtesan’s fan.
“It’s going to—”
“We see,” Cura says.
“But she—”
“We know.”
She’s going to die, Tam tells herself. Unless … is she running for that snowbank? Can she make it in time?
The Simurg spreads its wings, bracing itself. As Rose clambers desperately up the sloping face of the drift, it expels a stream of splashing frost so bright it hurts to look at.
“D-did she make it?” Brune asks. “D-did you see?”
“No.” Cura’s voice is hoarse.
“No what!?” squawks Roderick. “No, you didn’t see? Or no she didn’t—”
“There she is!” Tam shouts, pointing.
Rose is climbing back over the drift, which has been transformed by the Simurg’s breath into a battlement adorned by spikes of crystallized ice. She stands there, red hair whipping in the frenzied wind, and screams. Not words. At least, no words Tam can make out.
The Simurg, however, understands just fine. It is wounded, badly. Its offspring are dead. It has wiped out cities, buried civilizations beneath centuries of ice—and this woman, this tiny, insignificant thing, has the gall to challenge it?
At least that’s what Tam assumes it’s thinking, because when Rose skids down the icy drift and begins running toward it, the Simurg charges to meet her.
Freecloud makes no move to hinder it. Instead, he returns Madrigal to its scabbard and takes a knee. Whatever his part was in this, Tam suspects it is over.
Rose flings her arms out, beckoning Thistle and Thorn to her grasp—little good may they do her. The Simurg’s hide is too thick. Its feathers, glazed in ice, are harder than scale.
The monster lunges, its head skewing sideways. As its jaw unhinges, Rose hurls one sword overhand, the other sidehand, directly into its mouth, and then slips—no, drops—onto her back, grinding along the ice as the Dragoneater’s teeth snap shut above her.
“Oh,” Brune says, very quietly.
Rose is on her feet again—Tam has no idea how—and running. The Simurg lifts its head, unleashes an ear-shattering screech that sounds at first like triumph, but becomes a strangled cry as Rose—gauntlets blazing—sprints beneath it, dragging her swords deeper into the creature’s stomach with every step.
It swipes at her, but she throws herself between two of its talons and keeps on running. It lifts a rear claw to try again, but Freecloud is leaping to attack its other leg. Madrigal shears through bone and tendon. The Simurg screams, drags itself in a half circle, trailing blood and sweeping the lake with the bright feathers of its tail.
Rose slows, stops, turns. Freecloud hovers beside her, and Tam sees him say something she cannot hear.
The Simurg twitches violently, curling instinctively around some kernel of invisible anguish. It collapses, rises, fixes its lone eye upon Rose, who holds both hands before her like a supplicant begging favours of her god.
Except Rose needs nothing from the gods.
She only wants her swords back.
The runes on her wrists flare, and the scimitars to which they are linked come spinning, slicing, and tearing through lung, through heart, through all the tender things in the behemoth’s throat, and then burst in a shower of blood and bile from its gagging mouth. At last they arrive, slick with gore, in the hands of the woman the world calls Bloody Rose.
The Simurg is convulsing. Its wings shudder like sails in a storm. Its tail-feathers thrash, its talons rake trenches in the ice. It tries to roar, to shriek indignation at the woman who has severed the golden thread of its immortality, but can only heave more of its shredded innards onto the ice.
At last, the Dragoneater crashes to its side, spilling back into the freezing water from which it emerged. It claws feebly at the fractured ice before slipping and sinking into the cold depths of Mirrormere.
For a while no one speaks, and then Roderick chuckles. “Fuck me, would you look at that!”
The satyr’s fox-tail hat, which he’d lost while piloting the Spindrift, comes tumbling across the ice and lodges in a snowdrift near his hoof. The booker scoops it up and sets it firmly on his head. “Well, if that isn’t the damndest thing I’ve seen all day!”
Cura scoffs. “Seriously? That was the damndest thing you’ve seen all day?”
Roderick looks mildly affronted. Whatever reply he is about to offer, however, dies on his lips. “Actually, no,” he says, pointing toward the flaming wreck of their skyship. “That is.”
The Widow was alive, but on fire.
Stranger still, she seemed indifferent to the flames eating at her shift as the wind dragged it out behind her. She was barefoot, striding with slow purpose toward the open water.
Cura gawked. “Who the hell is that?”
“It’s the Widow,” Tam said. “She was hiding in Doshi’s quarters.”
Brune was shivering violently now. “Sh-she’s a d-d—”
“Druin,” Tam finished. “I noticed.”
Roderick frowned over at the shaman. “Here, take this.” He shrugged off his bulky fur cloak and offered it to Brune, who was busy glaring at the duplicate cloak the satyr had been wearing underneath it.
“Y-you’ve h-had t-two c-cloaks this whole t-time?”
Rod snorted. “Um, yeah. We’re in the Brumal Wastes.”
Brune looked ready to throttle the booker, but the urge to survive compelled him to reach for the cloak instead.
“Guys,” Cura demanded their attention, “look.”
The Widow was standing over Hawkshaw. Strands of black hair obscured her face as she gazed down at his corpse, so it wasn’t clear whether or not she grieved. She didn’t seem the sort to mourn a servant’s death, but she lingered long enough
for the flames chewing her shift to go out.
“Get up, you miserable lout,” she said.
Tam was about to point out that the Warden was quite obviously dead, but since Hawkshaw was in fact getting to his feet she decided that staring openmouthed was a better idea.
“Gremlins on a fucking stick!” Roderick turned on Cura. “I thought you killed him!”
The summoner scowled. “I did kill him.”
“Well then how …?” The booker gasped. “Wait, so she’s a—”
“Necromancer,” Brune finished. “She’s a godsforsaken necromancer.”
Hawkshaw fingered the wounds in his chest. His flat grey gaze fell on Tam first, then he looked across the water at the lake of blood vomited up by the Dragoneater.
Why is his eye the same? Tam wondered. Why wasn’t it burning, like every other undead thing they’d encountered these past few months?
The Warden turned on the Widow. “The Simurg is dead?”
“It is,” she replied.
“Then why am I still here? You said no more. You said that once the Dragoneater was killed I could be with Sara. You swore—”
“I lied,” she said blithely, as though addressing a man who’d found celery in his egg salad sandwich instead of one whose soul she’d enslaved with foul magic. “Oh, don’t pout, Hawkshaw. It makes you look so sinister, and we both know what a puppy dog you are.” The druin grazed his leather-masked cheek with a pale hand. “I have need of you still. You’re my champion. At least until I find a better one.”
The Warden gave a grudging nod.
The Widow’s fingers took rough hold of Hawkshaw’s bristly chin. “And if you ever utter your first wife’s name in my presence again I will bring her back from the grave so you can see what a beauty she’s become. Do you understand me?”
Something—a lingering remnant of the Warden’s free will, perhaps—glinted in his eye like a knife in the dark. “Yes, my queen.”
Bloody Rose Page 27