Desmond was unbelievable.
Rosa’s mouth was dry, and she thought longingly about a drink of water. After leafing through his grimoire twice, Desmond had found the spell he was looking for, and the Huntsman, seeing this, retreated down the staircase to the first floor. But he did not get far.
“Sire!” came the startled voice from the stair. “Intruders!”
Her heart leapt. There was the immediate sound of scuffling, the sounds of bodies impacting and grunts. Desmond tossed his book aside, grabbed his sword from the table where he had left it and charged down the stairs himself. Then there came the clash of metal-on-metal, grunts and curses, as the fight began in real earnest, and her heart didn’t just leap, it raced with excitement and the need to get free.
Rosa fought the paralyzing magics in a frenzy of impatience, attacking them with everything she had in her.
She had loosened them, yes, but no more than that. They weren’t undone, not even close to being undone. She still had to pick the ends loose and unweave them. She tore at them with mental fingers, her heart racing, her chest aching with the urge to swear at them. All the time she fought with the bindings, she could hear the sounds of fighting below, and thought she recognized Leopold’s and Siegfried’s voices.
And it sounded as if they were in trouble.
She had to get free! She concentrated all of her strength on the unraveling bonds. She didn’t know what she could do, but she was going to do something! But first she had to get loose!
She was able to physically struggle a little—then a little more—
Was there any untainted magic around here anywhere that she could use? She could see the magic that Desmond had been using, lying around her like stagnant, repellent puddles, but was there anything she could use? Because there was no way she was touching that stuff.
The necklace pulsed gently, and a bit of power flowed into her from that. With a last push of impatience, she shattered the remaining strands of the magic, grabbed the nearest thing she could see—the candlestick standing on the same cabinet where Desmond had left his sword—and scuttled down the stairs herself with one hand on the stone wall for balance.
The fight had moved into the kitchen. She sprinted to the doorway in time to see Desmond about to get past Siegfried’s guard. She heaved the candlestick at him in a fury, glanced around and grabbed a bowl from the cupboard beside her.
The candlestick struck Desmond a glancing blow to the shoulder. Startled, he turned, giving Siegfried an opening. She flung the bowl at the Huntsman, who had pinned Leopold’s arm and blade against the wall. It hit the wall beside his head and shattered. He whirled, giving Leopold the chance to get away from where he’d been pinned.
The look of rage in Desmond’s eyes would have made anyone less angry than Rosa start running. Instead, as he took a single step toward her, forgetting about Siegfried for a critical moment, she dashed over to the kitchen cupboard, wrenched the doors open and seized a frying pan. It was heavier than it looked, but she picked it up with both hands, whirled, and threw it anyway, making him duck, and giving Siegfried a chance to move in on him.
The cupboard had quite a few things on it and in it. She emptied it out, then moved to the shelves, and threw everything she could get her hands on, keeping both Desmond and the Huntsman distracted from what should have been their main concern, the men with swords in their hands. Meanwhile Siegfried and Leopold kept Desmond and the Huntsman from coming after her. It was stalemate. And it couldn’t remain that way for long.
The Huntsman swore, bound Leopold’s blade with the flat of his own and sent Leopold’s sword flying out of his hands. Leopold dropped and rolled, bowling into the Huntsman’s legs and knocking him over. Leopold got to his feet before the Huntsman did, and he came up with—
The frying pan.
Holding it like a short club, he ducked and moved in under the Huntsman’s thrust, came up inside his reach, swung hard and bashed him in the side of the head with the flat bottom.
The Huntsman went down like a stunned ox.
But now Rosa had run out of things to throw. And the sound of the frying pan hitting the Huntsman, and the Huntsman dropping, momentarily distracted Siegfried. Siegfried glanced to the side to see which of the two had gone down. Desmond saw his opening, and took it. His face full of savage joy, he, too, bound Siegfried’s blade with his own and wrenched it out of Siegfried’s hand. Siegfried tried to evade him but ran up against the wall. Rosa screamed as Desmond moved in for the kill.
Leopold turned and saw at a glance what was about to happen.
Leopold lunged forward, moving faster than Rosa had ever seen him before.
Not for Desmond; Desmond was out of reach. Leopold lunged for Siegfried. He flung himself between Desmond and Siegfried. And the blow intended for Siegfried plunged into his body instead.
Rosa’s heart all but stopped.
With a curse, Desmond wrenched his sword loose as Leopold slumped to the floor, hands clasped involuntarily over the wound, blood pouring between his fingers. He turned to find Siegfried.
But Siegfried had already rolled to the side and found his sword, and Siegfried’s face was contorted into a mask of fury. An animal roar came from his throat as he charged Desmond. The first blow would have been countered by Desmond’s parry, except that Siegfried shattered the sword to the hilt in Desmond’s hand, and all Desmond could do was try and scramble out of the way. As he dodged and overbalanced and fell to his hands and knees, he spotted Leopold’s sword on the floor and scrabbled for it desperately. He reached it just as Siegfried reached him. Again, Desmond tried desperately to parry; this time it was his sword that was knocked from his hands like a toy as he backed into the table. His widened eyes stared at Siegfried in utter disbelief.
With another roar, Siegfried actually drove his sword down with both hands into Desmond’s undefended chest, impaling Desmond to the table like a beetle pinned to a display board.
Desmond shook once, then was utterly still, a look of disbelief still on his cruel, handsome face.
Freed from her shock, Rosa ran to Leopold, undoing the useless light armor, tearing open his shirt with her bare hands, which were soon blood-covered. Grateful that she was wearing her peasant clothing, she pulled up her skirt and began ripping strips off her petticoat.
“Leave it be, Princess,” Leopold croaked as Siegfried joined her, and grimly pressed his own hands against the wound while Rosa fashioned a bandage. “Looks like the contest is over. Hell of a way to get eliminated, but you got the better man. We wouldn’t have suited each other anyway.” He tried to laugh, but it came out as a moan. “Just give me a big fancy funeral.”
“Shut up, Leopold,” said Siegfried. But Rosa glanced at his face, and her heart sank as she read the truth in his expression. Leopold’s wound was fatal.
And to prove it, at that moment, Leopold slipped into unconsciousness, his face gone gray and pasty.
“It’s now or never,” Lily said, putting Jimson’s mirror in her pocket. She had suspended her travel-mirror facedown between the back of a chair and the table. Crouching beneath it, she invoked the spell, hoping that combining the four small mirrors wasn’t going to scramble her, or leave her quartered as she came through.
Slowly and carefully, she stood up, passing through her travel-mirror at the oddest angle she had ever taken.
She found herself waist-deep, as if she was in a pool of water—except, of course, she was in a mirror at the edge of a churned-up field. Beside her, there was an exhausted firebird, and a very surprised unicorn.
The unicorn yelped and jumped away. The firebird’s eyes pinned in startlement as she fluttered her wings and trilled with alarm.
She ignored them, getting a grip on the frame and pulling herself out, exactly as she would have pulled herself out of a pool of water, getting her rump up on the frame, then swinging her legs out. That went better than she had any reason to believe. “Jimson?” she asked.
“Still here, Lily, a
nd much relieved,” he said from her pocket.
She turned to the unicorn and firebird. The stared at her as if they could not believe their eyes. “Where are Leopold and Siegfried?” she demanded.
“In the Tower,” the unicorn said promptly, the first of the two to recover her wits. “They told us to stay here.”
“And you obeyed them?” she asked incredulously. “Come on! Let’s go! They might need us!”
The unicorn blinked. “You have a point, Godmovver.” And as Lily dashed across the field to the tunnel in the thorns, she shook herself and followed at a weary trot.
It was not easy ground to run across. Every step threatened to turn her ankle, and the gown she was wearing was not exactly constructed for running in. I should have taken the time to change— She thought about transforming what she was wearing, but that would take too much time. Illusions were one thing. Actually changing—that was something else entirely.
Halfway across the field, she heard Rosa scream. Cursing the encumbering skirt of her gown, she reached down, grabbed the hem in both hands, and hauled the mass of fabric up to run faster.
As she entered the tunnel through the thorns, she heard a bestial roaring that sounded more as if it had come out of a bear’s throat than a human’s. And just as she was within sight of an open door—
The vines shrieked in a high-pitched cry that sounded like nothing she had ever heard in her entire life.
She had to clap her hands over her ears, and she bent over double; the terrible sound cut through her head like a knife, bringing tears of pain to her eyes. The vines shook with a convulsion that nearly brought the entire tunnel down around her.
For a moment her heart leapt into her mouth as the vines thrashed uncontrollably. Something was killing them—but if they broke through the barrier of their own dead, they could still impale her and the unicorn.
Then the scream cut off abruptly, leaving behind an echoing silence.
And with another convulsion they all straightened, pointing skyward. Then they abruptly shivered into black, bitter dust.
The dust went everywhere, and she found herself coughing desperately to rid her lungs of it. Dashing her hand across her eyes to clear them, Lily ran the last few feet to the open door, and froze at the gory vision that she had stumbled into.
The first thing she saw was Prince Desmond, quite dead, grotesquely pinned to a table by a sword. His eyes stared sightlessly at her, his face bearing a strange expression of surprise.
The second thing she saw was Siegfried cradling a near-fainting Rosa in his arms, touching her face and kissing her, both covered in blood. Her heart nearly stopped.
Then as they both looked up, she realized it was not their blood, and her heart started again. “Godm—” Rosa exclaimed, reaching for her.
And the Huntsman rose up from beyond the table, face mad with rage, a sword in one hand, a meat cleaver in the other.
Lily froze. Siegfried had his back to the Huntsman and couldn’t see him. Rosa was looking at her. In another second, the Huntsman would—
The unicorn shouldered her aside and charged the Huntsman, uttering a high-pitched scream of fury.
The Huntsman laughed and dodged, so that the unicorn hit him with her shoulder instead of her horn. She whirled on her hind feet and charged again. He neatly stepped aside at the last minute and parried her horn with the sword. This time the cleaver came down on her neck, inflicting what had to be a mortal wound. The unicorn made a gurgling sound and went to her knees, scarlet blood pouring down her neck, and the Huntsman turned on Siegfried, who flung himself between the Huntsman and Rosa, searching frantically for a weapon.
“Lily! Throw me! Throw my mirror!” Jimson shouted from her pocket, breaking her paralysis. Without even thinking, her hand went to her pocket almost of its own accord, and as the Huntsman raised the sword for another fatal blow aimed at Siegfried, she threw the mirror with a snap of her wrist, sending it spinning for him.
She hit the Huntsman squarely in the face with the edge of the mirror. And it was the Huntsman’s turn to scream. The mirror shattered into a cloud of coruscating motes and a deafening explosion, half blinding her for a moment, and the Huntsman went down on his knees.
Then the cloud condensed back into the shape of the mirror again; the mirror clattered to the floor. But—it was not Jimson’s mirror, with the clear glass and the gold frame. It was a mirror with a sinister, tarnished black surface, and a frame of rotting wood and verdigris-greened bronze.
Lily ran for the mirror and snatched it up. “Jimson!” she whispered, her voice catching in her throat with fear. What had happened?
But what looked back at her out of the mirror was not Jimson.
It was the Huntsman. The Huntsman, as she had never seen him. His face was contorted in a rictus of terror, his mouth open in a silent scream, as two skeletal black things seized him by the shoulders. He glanced at one of them, and turned his gaze back to her, clawing at the surface of the mirror frantically.
His captors were inexorable. His face receded into the black depths, mouth still open in a scream she was glad that she could not hear, as they hauled him down, down, and at last, were gone. Then there was only the mirror, black and empty. “Jimson?” she sobbed. Where was he? What had happened to him?
“I’m—here, Lily,” said a hoarse voice beside her, and she looked down, startled. What looked up at her might have been wearing the Huntsman’s clothing, his body even—but the face?
The face was Jimson’s.
Before she could even begin to react to that, Siegfried’s frantic call dragged her attention back to the three against the wall. “Godmother! You must help Leopold! He’s dying!”
She stumbled over to them, but from the Prince’s pallor and his shallow, catching breaths, it was obvious that there was nothing she could do in time. “I—I’m not a healer,” she said helplessly. “He’s hurt more than I can mend—I can’t help him—“
“I…can…” coughed another voice. Bleeding terribly from the wound in her neck, the unicorn lurched to her feet and staggered the three steps it took to get to them, falling to her knees beside them all. With a last effort, she flung her head across Leopold’s chest so that her own wound bled into his.
“Fweewy…given…” she gasped.
As the light in her beautiful golden eyes faded, she sighed once.
Then she was gone.
Leopold opened his eyes with an effort at the sound of hoarse sobs. It was not something he had expected to do, actually. He should have been dead. He couldn’t imagine why he wasn’t dead. He knew he had taken a fatal wound, and a moment ago the world had been fading away around him. He couldn’t imagine why now he was feeling better by the moment.
“Lie still,” said the Godmother—how had she gotten there?—with a firm hand on his shoulder. “You’re still healing.” Healing? And then he saw past her.
He could only lie there in bewildered wonder, watching Siegfried cry with terrible grief as he cradled the head of the dead unicorn in his arms.
22
THE BALCONY WAS A GOOD TWO STORIES above the crowd, and as Lily looked down on the sea of faces below her, for the first time in her life she experienced a great deal of trepidation.
She glanced to the side, where Jimson stood in a uniform the Brownies had designed especially for him. Not overornamented, not overelaborate, and, she hoped, not uncomfortable. In black, of course, to match “Queen Sable’s” ubiquitous black, for Jimson was the Queen’s personal Guardsman so far as anyone other than Siegfried, Rosa and Leopold knew. His slightly pointed ears, that betrayed him as some form of Fae, were hidden beneath a helmet.
Lily still was not sure what had happened when the mirror hit the Huntsman. Jimson just got thin-lipped when she asked, and said, “Let’s just say that under certain rare circumstances, someone evil’s fate can catch up with him—and that allows for an exchange between our world and yours. I hadn’t planned on that, though. I had only planned to drag him
over into my world, where he couldn’t threaten you anymore.”
Well, whatever had happened, she was grateful for it.
She should have known that Jimson was Fae of some sort, though. After all, he had been alive longer than she had.
She held up her hand where he could see it, and they both watched it shake.
“It’s called stage fright, my love,” he said, quietly. “Don’t worry, everyone gets it.”
Well, that was comforting. Sort of.
This was her own fault, really; she had wanted to address the largest number of the people of Eltaria that she could to cut down on rumors and wild stories, and this was the result. She would just have to tell the butterflies in her stomach to settle down, grit her teeth and get through it.
She took a deep breath, and with a gesture hidden from those below, invoked the spell that would allow her voice to project to the farthest point of the crowd. It was a good thing that the Palace had been built with a view to making mass addresses like this, because otherwise she had no idea where in the Kingdom it could be done. But she, Jimson, Rosa and Siegfried all stood on the seldom-used East Balcony, and there was nothing in this direction but acres of practice fields and lawn. Not that long ago, those fields had held a small army of adventurers vying for Rosa’s hand. Now they seemed to hold every man, woman and child in Eltaria.
“People of Eltaria,” she said. Oh, heavens. Do I sound nasal? I sound nasal. I sound like I’m whining— “We thank you for coming here today. This day, this moment, marks a turning point in the history of our Kingdom. For centuries, we have lived in fear of the surrounding lands, for Eltaria is small and rich, and a tempting morsel for others to swallow up. For centuries we have worn out our Kings, sending them to early graves, forcing them to confront invader after would-be invader. For centuries our bravest warriors have spent their lives dashing from one trouble spot to another. But today, that is at an end.”
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