“Good job,” Prima told him. “No, truly. You’re giving Ben a run for his money.”
Ben gave a very unconvincing cough to hide his laugh.
Jamie merely shook his head. “Going back to school will be much easier after this,” he muttered. “What can anyone say to me that’s worse than Prima in a good mood?”
“You know, I am in a good mood. I feel good today.”
Taigan, Ben, and Jamie chuckled, while Josyla and Yulia exchanged a glance that said they thought the others were crazy. Jamie couldn’t exactly blame them for that.
They could see Gwyna now. She stalked toward them with magic pooling around her hands, blue-black shimmers that called to mind the lightning she’d thrown at Ben before. Her hair straggled from its braid and blood ran down one side of her face.
“What did you do to her?” the boy asked Ben.
“I hit her with a bucket,” he said with a big thumbs-up.
“I can verify that.”
“A bucket,” Taigan mused. “Sure.”
“Results are results,” Yulia interjected. “Now, she’s angry—and that’s usually a time that people stumble. What it should make her do is doubt her certainty that she’s entitled to everything.”
“She should doubt that,” the girl muttered.
“This is not the time, young lady. What we must do, if we hope to harness the blessing of the forest, is work like a forest. Let our spells and our attacks protect each other and work together as vines grow on trees or fallen leaves enrich the earth.”
Jamie, Ben, and Taigan looked at one another. They nodded. The boy had the sense that all three of them were half-sure this was entirely made up hooey, but they were also all half-sure it was true.
“It’s how we beat her last time,” Ben pointed out.
“And she doesn’t get to take the power of the forest,” Taigan said. “That well gets to choose where it bestows its power, and it doesn’t want that power to go to her.” She looked at the stones Yulia held. “We need to protect them.”
“Focus on each other,” the old woman said confidently. “And trust me. The stones will take care of themselves.”
“Hmm,” Ben said.
“Is there actually a plan?” Josyla demanded.
“Rock and a pointy place,” the other three responded at once.
Jamie gestured to Taigan and Ben. “You two are the rock. Josyla and I will be the pointy place. Uh, Josyla, do you have anything you can stab with?”
“Yes.” She did not elaborate.
There wasn’t time for further discussion. The next blast from Gwyna’s magic shredded the shield around them and Taigan charged out of the rubble with a shriek. Josyla jumped and Jamie looked at her.
“She does that. The two of them yell a lot.”
“I…so I see.” She watched Ben and Taigan whip their weapons at their adversary. “They’re not at all afraid, are they? That’s…stupid.”
“Probably,” he said cheerfully, “but it’s that or simply give up and let her win.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that.” The elf nodded decisively. “Very well, then. What’s our part?”
“We let them drive her back to us,” he explained. “We’ve done it once before so she might look over her shoulder, but as long as we can keep one group at her back, we’ll eventually get her.”
“Good.” She looked to where Yulia had knelt to begin casting spells and then at Jamie. “Where should we go?”
“Let’s circle out.” He drew his sword and began to circle.
Gwyna yelled something about vengeance and freedom and he rolled his eyes. “Was she always like this?”
“All the time,” Josyla said. “She thinks she never got her due—and that the reason is people being nice to each other or…something. I don’t know. She’s insane and she wants to be able to do things like wipe out cities with a snap of her—whoa!”
The sorceress had turned to snake a line of lightning in their direction. To Jamie’s amusement, Josyla threw a piece of metal and drew the lightning away before she lobbed a tiny blade directly at Gwyna. The woman ducked but not fast enough to avoid it entirely. Red bloomed on her shoulder and she screamed.
“You bitch,” she said to Josyla. “I gave you everything you needed to take your revenge.”
“I never wanted revenge!” she screamed finally. “I wanted to be free. I wanted to go home! You can yell about revenge all day, but it won’t make anything better, it won’t make anything right!” She ducked under another bolt of lightning and pulled a few more of her tiny knives out. They rested between her fingers and she settled into a fighter’s crouch. “But you did give me considerable time to practice throwing knives.”
Gwyna curled her lip. “Fine. Be weak. Run back to your little elf. And when the people who sold you once sell you again, don’t come crying to me.”
How Josyla threw all her knives at once, Jamie didn’t know. He only knew that they seemed to sprout from the sorceress’ body. She staggered back, her face white.
“And when you are killed by all the people you wronged,” the half-elf said, “don’t come crying to me.”
He was a little nonplussed. He’d expected to win this—it was five against one, after all—but he’d hardly expected it to be easy.
But Gwyna seemed to grow. She stretched, her neck twisted oddly, and her eyes turned a full black that bled onto her cheeks.
“Now,” she said, and her voice seemed to be a chorus, “I’m very angry.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ben hadn’t met many elves in his time. Still, he was beginning to think that you should never piss one off. He watched as Josyla—scared, shrinking, terrorized little Josyla—threw all her knives at once. One landed in Gwyna’s throat and others across her torso and shoulders. There was no surviving those injuries.
If you were mortal, that is, and not a demon.
As the sorceress’ body began to shift and stretch, he cast a horrified look at Yulia. Please, he thought, let her at least know what is going on. Let her understand.
She didn’t and her pale, shocked face said as much. He hung his head for a moment. They would have to kill this demon-creature, and he had no idea how. He had a vague idea of crosses and wooden stakes, but that was vampires and crosses probably weren’t what would defeat real ones, anyway.
Until he thought of something else, he would have to continue with Operation Rock and a Pointy Place.
“Hey!” he bellowed at what was left of Gwyna.
The monster swung to face him. Its head lolled and its black eyes were a hungry void as it hissed in fury.
He didn’t wait for more conversation. For one thing, it wasn’t particularly scintillating and for another, he decided he had more of a chance to be freaked out the longer he delayed his attack. He rushed in with his sword held slantways across his body, grateful that he’d had the presence of mind to retrieve it before he left Gwyna’s caves.
The demon lowered its head and shrieked at him. The sound made every hair on his body stand up, but momentum carried him through. With Taigan at his side, screaming something that sounded suspiciously like a yodel, he met the demon head-on. He put his entire strength into pivoting his blade ninety degrees and slashed up and to the side across the creature’s face and neck.
His strike did injure it. That was the good news. The bad news was that the black blood that spurted over his face burned like acid. He yelled, ducked, and dragged his sleeve desperately across his face. The cloth began to disintegrate with a hiss.
Ben could not afford for this to drag on. None of them could, so he stood and tried to keep his eyes open. They stung and he was fairly sure one of them was swelling closed. It was a good thing Eliza wasn’t there to see this, he thought dimly.
Taigan yelled and flailed at the demon with her staff. She had put all her energy into the enterprise, and between that and her natural inclination to speed, she delivered a fair amount of damage and allowed almost no strikes thro
ugh. The demon held its ground, but it wasn’t taking any.
He almost threw up when he saw what his sword had done. The monster’s skin was sliced open and dripped black blood, but it fought on. It had the form of a human but there wasn’t anything vital in its neck or head, it seemed.
That somewhat surprising realization gave him an idea.
“Hit it anywhere!” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t waste effort going for vital organs. It doesn’t have any!”
“Roger!” Jamie replied.
“Got it!” Taigan added.
“I could have told you that!” Josyla yelled. “I didn’t realize you didn’t know.”
“Is there anything else I should know?” Ben sidestepped a wild slash of the lethal claws.
“It’s weak against its opposite element,” the elf told him, “but I don’t see one of those, so I have no idea if you can use that. Keep hitting it!”
“Can do!”
Taigan and Ben launched into another flurry. One darted in and the other stepped forward as the first reached a crescendo in their hacking and slashing. Some of their best strikes came as the other was winding up for a massive blow. The demon—elemental—might be otherworldly, but it was as constrained by the limits of its focus as they were. It had trouble focusing on even two people when they were both attacking.
And it had probably forgotten about Jamie and Josyla entirely, not to mention Yulia.
All he needed to focus on was his part, Ben told himself. He had never been in a fight like this before, where he was content to relax his vigilance over the whole situation. In the fae lands, he had looked for the elven assassin, tried to watch everyone else’s back, and despaired of the wanton violence around him instead of focusing on what he needed to do. In Heffog, he had done his piece but left immediately to ensure that everyone else did theirs.
Here, he trusted. If anyone had told him a few weeks before that he would gladly go into battle beside two teenagers and an old woman, he’d have thought they were insane, but there he was.
Taigan stumbled and he yelled her name, but she managed to recover her footing and drove the butt of her staff directly into the demon’s face. She whooped when he followed her strike with one of his own and sliced at the creature’s leg.
They had it on the back foot now and were determined to not let the momentum die. Ben delivered three strikes to the torso, then swung his blade and hacked as hard as he could at the demon’s neck.
Its head careened away.
He froze. His glance first saw Taigan, who held a hand clapped over her mouth. Jamie looked a little green about the gills, while Josyla and Yulia both seemed to watch with what might best be described as academic interest.
That was all he saw before the demon hauled its headless body to its feet and screeched again. He wasn’t exactly sure how as it no longer had vocal cords or a mouth. But perhaps, like its neck and head weren’t vital, it didn’t need them for speech, either.
It surged toward him in a rush and he had no more time for thought.
“I never thought I’d”—he bashed one of its arms— “fight a headless demon!”
“Roll with it!” Taigan yelled.
Ben said nothing to this. He tried to pivot to force their adversary back to Jamie and Josyla, but it seemed wise to their tricks now. It twisted and attacked, keeping him and Taigan on the defensive instead of the other way around.
Finally, Jamie seemed to give up. He and Josyla raced in to aid their teammates.
“What are you—” Ben panted and gestured tiredly for them to complete the sentence in their heads.
“Helping you,” the boy said. “This is dragging on. Rock and a Pointy Place works best when the Rock phase doesn’t take ten fucking minutes.”
“You don’t say.” He felt light-headed by now, and his muscles were dragging. Determined, he tried to summon the energy for one more slash. Then another. And one more after that.
The demon was not pleased to now face four armed people. It yelled and clawed at them.
“Josyla?” Ben called. “Any—”
“Nope,” she replied. “If you give yourself over to one emotion or element too often, you can get sucked into it—especially when you’re close to death. I should have known she might—aaaah!”
“Josyla?”
“Just…ow.” She panted with pain. “I got too close. Jamie landed a good hit out of it, though.”
“Hell yeah, I did.” The boy grinned.
Ben smiled at the twins. When he’d first met them, they had been two people against the world, consumed by their problems. Now, Jamie was learning to trust others and Taigan had come into her own as someone who existed beyond her illness.
Then he realized what Yulia had planned this whole time. He looked at the old woman and then at the demon.
He circled and ran with a berserker yell. The twins scattered at the sound and he vaulted upward and struck the monster feet-first. As his legs punched out, it staggered back and he watched to see what would happen.
Unfortunately, he landed first. Pain blossomed through his back and he uttered a noise halfway between a grunt and a yell.
Still, he managed to catch some of it. Operation Rock and a Pointy place, as it turned out, had not been a failure after all. They had not driven the demon to Jamie and Josyla but instead, to Yulia.
While they had held the enemy’s attention, the old woman had worked with the power of the stones.
The demon’s feet impacted with the earth and one of the stones from the well. As Ben watched, the crystal-like stone sprouted like a split acorn. Roots burrowed into the dirt of the road and a tree swept into the sky at the same time. The trunk thickened, branches appeared, and leaves sprouted. When it was over, the five humans stood under a canopy of leaves that rang softly like crystal.
He gaped at the tree. It had suddenly appeared in the place of his enemy and he didn’t know what to do with it. “What—”
“The forest reclaims,” Yulia said, with satisfaction. “Gwyna took its power for her spells and transformed those poor wretches into creatures that lived among the trees. The forest took that and also absorbed all her fear and her hatred.”
“She’s part of the forest now?” Taigan asked urgently. “We need to cleanse it. The forest will be sickened—”
“Did you hear nothing Josyla said, girl?” Yulia raised an eyebrow. “Focus too much on any one thing, any emotion or aspect of life, and it can consume you, but all aspects of life may exist in moderation without sickening the whole. Do you think the forest has no anger within it or no sense of vengeance or justice? No, Gwyna became in death what she had forgotten to be in life—part of a greater whole, a being without any single outlook on life. She did not need to be cleansed. She needed to be part of something more.”
Taigan approached the tree and rested her hand against it. She shuddered when she touched the crystal bark but the tree did not lash out at her. “But she was evil.”
“Evil is what happens when darkness and vengeance consume you,” the old woman said. “Now…well, now we’ve ruined the road, I’m afraid.”
“We’ll build around it,” Josyla said absentmindedly. She studied the tree. “It’s beautiful. She’s beautiful now.”
“And at peace,” Yulia said, “at last. How many years, I wonder, has that demon stalked her? No wonder she was so determined to make others embrace their thoughts of revenge. She did not want to be alone anymore, although it was all she knew how to do.”
Ben looked at Taigan, who was crying silently.
“Are you all right?” he asked her in an undertone.
“I don’t like this,” she said. She wiped at her eyes. “I don’t like it when people miss their chance. She was powerful and could have been more. Now, she’s gone forever and she’ll never have the chance…”
“She’s part of something,” he said when she didn’t finish the sentence. “Part of the forest, Taigan, so she’s not gone. She wasn’t her whole self at
the end when we still saw her as a human. This is closer to what she was.”
The girl nodded. “Thank you,” she said finally. She straightened and nodded at Josyla. “We should help you get home.”
“I’d like that,” the elf said. “But first, there are people in the forest I need to help. I was afraid of the pain and I let her bully me into putting bindings on them. Even with her specific spell released, they have the rings still fixed to their skin. I need to correct that.”
Ben nodded. He was exhausted now. His face still stung where the demon blood had touched it. Although the day was calm and the sky clear, everything felt out of place.
He felt out of place.
“It’s time,” he said to Prima in a low voice. To his surprise, his throat ached with unshed tears. He could not remember the last time he’d moved on for any reason other than anger.
“Almost,” she said. “It’s almost time. I’ll miss you, you know.”
“I’ll miss you, too.” He smiled suddenly. “And I can come back to visit, you know. Since we’re parting on good terms.”
“Wow, you’ve had a strange life, haven’t you?”
“Yep.” He smiled and sheathed his sword. “Okay, everyone, let’s go…get some sleep first. Then piles of food. Then we’ll help Josyla.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
They set out the next morning while the sun was still rising. Yulia gave them heaping portions of porridge and stood over them while they ate it. The old woman seemed tired from her efforts the night before but not in a way that worried Ben.
When she caught him looking at her, she smiled. “It is a privilege, at my age, to learn new forms of magic. Studying the magic of the forest is something I never thought I would have the chance to do. I had felt its whispers in my dreams but never anything like that.”
“Working with it—” he began.
She shook her head. “You don’t work with the magic of the forest. You call it and you see if it answers. That is what the twins were given at the well—two names telling the story of the forest in night and day. A name is a powerful thing.”
Grasping The Future Page 16