by Danielle Monsch, Cate Rowan, Jennifer Lewis, Jeannie Lin, Nadia Lee, Dee Carney
“It doesn’t look like there is anyone on watch,” Wolf said slowly. “Perhaps we should consider our options.”
Ivan shrugged. “We have no options. We need to get to that castle. We need to get over the ground, through the wall. The best option for that is to let Gullfaxi do the work. Because he’s so fast, they won’t be able to hit us. The air will blur us a bit, as well. We should be across the killing field quickly.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Noted. Do you have another option?”
“Not immediately.”
“Then we do it my way,” Ivan said. “If you think of something else, let me know. Ready to do the shielding?”
Wolf moved a shoulder in his version of a shrug.
Ivan held the silver box with the shield spell in his palm. Both he and Wolf eyed it warily. Bone Shaker had made it clear there would be some cost to using it, but they didn’t know what that would be. Hopefully whatever happened with the shielding spell would be similar to the explosion, so they’d know what to expect.
Ivan took a breath and flipped the lid of the box, releasing the spell.
At first nothing happened, or at least nothing that he could perceive.
Wolf yipped and began to shake. Before Ivan could determine what was happening with Wolf, the pain hit him square in the chest. It plowed into him with the force of a charging troll. Agony seared through him and his vision narrowed to a point. He fought to maintain consciousness, gritting his teeth against the searing burn that moved out to his skin. If he’d been set alight it wouldn’t have hurt more. His own magic fought the shielding, but this magic was alien and powerful. His runes flared in a blinding blue glow, and the shielding absorbed the rune magic before pulsing over his entire body.
When it finally released him, the sting of the shield lay beneath his skin and there was a faint blue glow around him. He knew without a doubt that the protection was incredibly strong, maybe stronger than the intended spell. It seemed unlikely Bone Shaker would have known about or accounted for the rune magic laid into his skin. He’d have to thank his mother again.
Ivan turned his head, finding Wolf in his bestial form, hunched and breathing hard. He took a wary step back, making sure Wolf had plenty of space. A faint white haze surrounded him, more diffuse and paler than the shielding Ivan wore.
After a moment, Wolf lifted his head. Ivan stopped himself from stepping back again, but it was a near thing. Wolf’s beast form was more humanoid than Ivan remembered. Though his legs and feet were oddly jointed, he stood on them easily. Only his face was distinctly lupine, with its elongated muzzle and close-set eyes. And very big teeth.
“Wolf. The shield spell is in place. Are you ready?”
Wolf shook his head, not so much in denial as to clear it. He grunted and heaved himself upright.
“Yes,” he grated. His voice wasn’t the same. It was deeper, raspier, more animalistic than the true wolf form. It seemed odd that the more human-seeming form would sound more like an animal, but looking at the feral light in the beast’s eyes, Ivan was certain that this form was, indeed, the more animalistic.
After another long moment, Wolf seemed to pull himself together. The shaking subsided and his breathing evened out. Finally, he nodded and walked toward Gullfaxi.
Gullfaxi shied away from Wolf, and Ivan couldn’t blame him.
Ivan pulled the explosion spell out of the holding spell and wove an ice chain to hang the silver box around his neck. He wanted that spell available if they needed it. The kick was heinous, but if they needed something like this, they weren’t going to have time in a fight to pull it out of holding.
As Wolf stomped in circles, rolling his shoulders and letting the shielding settle in, Ivan pulled on the thin, silken garments he wore under his armor. The cloth was densely woven to help slow blades, and the material was enchanted to slow bleeding and deflect magic. Combined with his rune-inscribed armor and the shielding, he was well-protected. Only personal magic produced better armor than the Northlands armory. He wished he had a set for Wolf. If they survived, he’d gift Wolf with one.
He bent and twisted, testing the armor. Nothing impeded his motion.
Ivan mounted the stallion and spoke soothingly to him. Eventually, Gullfaxi settled enough that Wolf was able to mount behind Ivan.
It took another long moment to get their positions right, since Wolf’s beast form was both larger and differently formed than the true wolf form which usually rode ahead of Ivan. The whole thing was complicated by Gullfaxi’s uneasy fidgeting.
Finally, Ivan put his heels to the stallion’s flanks.
The stallion leaped forward, hooves churning just over the ground. This was why they needed the golden stallion. No other horse could keep them safe from the enchantment of the earth.
They were maybe two thirds of the distance to the castle wall when the stallion screamed, then dove toward the earth.
Ivan cursed. He wrapped air around Wolf and threw both of them clear of the stallion. The air cushioned the fall, but they continued to roll, the momentum taking them forward. Ivan looked back to see the stallion disappearing into the soil.
He continued to curse, thickening the cushion of air under them. He had no desire to touch this ground.
“Lost?”
Ivan snarled. “I don’t know. But we’re on this cursed ground and in the open. Hold still. I’m going to use the air to move us. It’s slow and we are totally exposed.”
“We are nearly to the ditch,” Wolf told him after long, sweaty minutes.
Ivan believed him. He couldn’t see it, but Wolf had better eyesight and Ivan wasn’t about to quest with magic to confirm Wolf’s judgment. Holding the air cushion below them was taking more power than he wanted to spend.
“Can you tell how wide the moat is?”
“Two body lengths?”
Too wide. He wouldn’t be able to maintain the air cushion over a drop without some kind of material support. “We will have to go into the ditch. I can only hold us a foot off the ground.”
Wolf growled. “Smells bad.”
“I don’t like it either, but we have no option.”
Wolf’s sides expanded with his breathing.
Ivan could see the edge of the ditch now, and he could smell the death and corruption magic that had Wolf on edge. Whatever was in that ditch wasn’t good.
The cleared the edge and dropped fast.
Sunlight didn’t reach the bottom of the moat, but his vision was good enough to see the things moving in the shadows as they came down. When they hit, he was already drawing his sword.
Above him, he heard the familiar scream of the firebird. Wolf howled response to his mate, tipping his head back.
“Quiet!” Ivan ordered, but it was too late. It had been too late when they landed. Any chance at stealth was lost.
The shadow-things were moving toward them. They didn’t move fast, but he could smell them coming. Wolf growled.
Ivan began calling in illumination orbs. He couldn’t fight what he couldn’t see, and it was possible that whatever was in the shadows was, like the vampire race, vulnerable to light.
The first of the shadow things launched itself from the edge of the circle of light thrown by the orbs. He didn’t think, but swung, taking off the thing’s head. A second launched, and there was a roar beside him. He beheaded the second thing and turned slightly. Wolf had used his claws to slice the head from one of the creatures.
There was rustling beyond the range of the light orbs, and Ivan settled himself back-to-back with Wolf. The ditch was narrow, so the stance would allow them to defend themselves from anything coming from either direction.
Ivan glanced at the bodies at his feet. They were still moving. The head had the elongated muzzle of a rat or weasel, but the other features were almost feline. The teeth, serrated and slightly curved, were pure predator. The body was skeletally humanoid, with a thin pelt of dark fur.
“Wendigo,” he spat. “Decapitate the
m. It won’t kill them, but it will make it so they can’t attack. Until they heal.”
Another launched out of the shadows and Ivan swung again, separating head from body. There was a scuttling in the dark, and he knew more wendigo were gathering.
Ivan considered their options. The wendigo were coming at a shambling run toward them. The smell of blood and fresh meat drew them.
They couldn’t chance the explosion spell. If it incapacitated them like the protection spell had, the Wendigo would be on them before the spell activated. Even if that weren’t an issue, they didn’t know what kind of area the explosion affected. They could just as easily blow themselves to pieces as not.
Ivan took a single step from Wolf, giving them both room to work.
Two launched at the same time, leaping at him from the dark. Then they began coming one after another, and his sword began to sing through the air. He turned off his brain, descending into the blankness of battle, relying on muscle memory and instinct. Head after head hit the ground. He kicked them out of the way, back toward the shadows. The only way to truly kill a wendigo was fire, and that was the one element in magic with which he had no affinity at all. He couldn’t even call a flame. The closest he could manage was the light orbs, and those held no heat. They were no good for igniting the wendigo.
He could hear Wolf behind him and the screams of the firebird overhead.
How many wendigo were there? How many could he behead before Koschei became involved? Could he get through enough to get clear before the first ones he’d beheaded began to heal?
Ivan gritted his teeth and swung through another neck. He would take the heads of as many wendigo as he needed to get to Vasalisa.
He let the fury rise up, let it sharpen his instincts. He kicked more heads to the side of the ditch, making room at his feet for him to move.
The orbs pulsed, flaring briefly. Behind the wendigos he was currently fighting there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. The ditch was filled with them.
He considered how large the ditch was, running around the perimeter of the green space. Fuck. There was no way they could take that many fast enough. They would fight the wendigo until they dropped from exhaustion. Then they would be eaten.
He was really damned tired of things wanting to eat him. He swung the blade. If he was fated to die here, he would not go down easily.
*
Something was wrong. The stones of the castle hummed with it. She didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it was something bad. Vasalisa rose slowly from her seat. Her legs were still healing so she couldn’t move very fast. Not to mention the fact that her abdomen wasn’t healed yet, so everything sloshed when she moved. Walking made her nauseous, and puking would make everything worse. Gritting her teeth, she kept her movements easy despite her urgency.
Masha shrieked in her new cage, beating her wings against the gold bars. She’d only returned an hour before, and Koschei had flung her into the cage. It was the third cage Koschei had tried since the last full moon, and this one didn’t hold her any better than the others. The bars shimmered, bending under Masha’s magic, and the firebird flew free. She was at the window before Vasalisa could get there.
Impatient, Masha tapped frantically at the glass with her beak. If Koschei hadn’t been so certain of Masha’s magical abilities, he could have figured out weeks ago that the gold was the problem. Masha was able to heat the gold enough to bend it. Glass, though, didn’t bend out of the way.
“I’m working on it,” Vasalisa muttered, flipping the latches on the windows and pushing them open.
Masha was in flight before Vasalisa stepped out of the way. Her feathers brushed the raw skin on Vasalisa’s arm.
Vasalisa winced, shying back from the contact. She sucked in a breath and her head dipped, her eyes glazing a bit from the pain.
A blur of gold and blue caught her attention. It streaked across the dead ground between the forest and the boundary ditch. It was moving faster than any horse she’d seen, but she knew it was the golden stallion. Just as she recognized the blue of the runes. Ivan had come, as he promised.
Hope bloomed in her chest as they sped across the dead ground, the sweet ache of it displacing the pain from Koschei’s attentions.
She lifted her hand to her mouth, tracking his progress. No one had gotten so far through the first barrier without Koschei. Those bound to the earth pulled anything living into the ground with them.
She’d no sooner thought it than her heart stuttered. Something had gone wrong. The horse was going into the earth, and the ball of color that contained the riders had been flung free, toward the barrier moat. By the time they stopped moving, the horse had disappeared, taken by the dead ground.
They began moving forward slowly. How was he doing that? How was it that he wasn’t being swallowed by the dead earth?
Masha was nearly to them when they went into the boundary ditch.
Vasalisa cursed. She knew what was in the ditch. Ivan Frostbreather would not have the magic needed to defeat the wendigo. But she did.
Wedging herself into the window ledge, she gathered her magic. It hurt. She was too weak to channel without pain. She clenched her teeth and gathered more magic into her hands.
She formed it into what she wanted and shot it into the sky, arcing toward the ditch. It was close enough to the wall that she had some difficulty with the aim. She would do what she could for Ivan.
The fireball missed, hitting the dead ground beyond and flaring briefly before sputtering out.
Wincing, she gathered another, adjusting her aim. The second fireball was a direct hit into the ditch, but the hit sent Masha reeling into the air shrieking.
The fire flared brightly as the wendigo in the ditch caught fire and burned. She knew they would scatter away from the burning ones, so it wouldn’t sustain, but at least there were now fewer for Ivan and Wolf to battle.
Masha screamed at Vasalisa, circling deliberately before diving again toward the ditch.
The flare of fire didn’t gutter as she expected. Instead, it continued to burn, which meant someone was feeding fuel into that fire.
Oh. That must be where they were. Her brain was a little sluggish with pain and exhaustion. She’d misjudged their location, and that one had been too close. Breathing heavily, Vasalisa gathered herself for another try, adjusting again.
This one landed on the wall, leaving a blackened scorch mark on the stone.
The fourth one hit where she meant it to hit: right in the ditch, significantly away from where Masha swooped and screamed.
There was a brief flare She wished she could be more precise, but she couldn’t see into the ditch from the palace.
She lobbed another, her face grim. It wouldn’t be long before Koschei noticed and came to stop her. It would be a race to see which gave out first, her ability to channel magic or her luck in not attracting Koschei’s attention.
There wasn’t anything she could do to prevent either of those things, so she needed to cause as much damage as possible before he arrived or before she flamed out. Fireball after fireball hit in the ditch. She rained them down as fast as she could make them, aiming to both sides of where Masha flew over them.
Pain dimmed her vision, and she knew she didn’t have long before her aim would suffer enough to make it dangerous to throw the fireballs.
The door flew open, Koschei standing framed in the opening.
“Naughty, naughty princess. You know I said no magic for you in the palace.”
Exhausted, she sagged against the stone, only to stiffen immediately as her internal organs shifted. Gods. She’d forgotten about that.
She swallowed, forcing down the nausea.
“Technically I wasn’t using it in the palace. I was leaning out the window and aiming away from the palace.”
He smiled at her, a charming grin that made him look like a mischievous youth.
“True, true. I guess I can’t punish you for that, then. Oh, wait. Yes, I can!”
Koschei laughed, delighted with himself. That happy laugh sent chills right through her.
Her eyes widened. Fear, nausea, and pain mixed in her uneasy belly. She was going to throw up, and it was going to hurt.
*
The first fireball hit with a sizzle. Ivan had seen the streak above them, but he ignored it. He couldn’t ignore the second. It hit close, only a few body lengths away.
The firebird shot out upwards, screaming, and Ivan cursed. The piled bodies of wendigo caught like dry tinder, flaming up. If he didn’t control it, the fire would engulf both Wolf and himself. And if Koschei was going to lob fireballs into the moat, they were going to die a lot faster than Ivan had expected.
The wendigo fled from the other side of the fire, and that gave Ivan an idea. If he could feed the fire, he could at least hold the wendigo at bay. With fire, he and Wolf might be able to kill enough to have a shot at getting out of the gods-damned ditch.
He kicked a head into the burning bodies. It flamed up, and Ivan smiled grimly.
The next fireball hit a good distance from them, and the firebird dove back into the ditch to help Wolf.
The fourth fireball hit in the ditch and he heard the screams of the wendigo from down the line. When the next hit in a similar spot, Ivan began to wonder who was lobbing those fireballs. Maybe it wasn’t Koschei, after all.
He used his sword to skewer bodies, heaving them onto the pyre. The bodies burned fast, but he was able to keep ahead of it enough to build a sizeable pile.
He started clearing the decapitated bodies of wendigo from around Wolf, too, not bothering to pile them up as much, instead using them to create a break between them and the wendigo on the other side.
“Enough!” Ivan roared. Wolf had decapitated the last wendigo between them and where the fireballs fell. They had a break, and he intended to use it to get out of the ditch.
Wolf whirled, teeth bared. The white haze of magical shielding was closer to his body now, a change Ivan thought might indicate damage. He checked his own and found it unchanged. Then again, he’d been using a sword to fight the wendigo, not tooth and claw.