by Leigh Evans
Goddess. He’s already navigating the boulders.
I raised my arms toward the cloud of confused green sparkling in the daylight. “Come to me!”
Chapter Ten
All of my magic heard my call. The donut around the Gatekeeper’s waist blew apart. She shimmered in a momentary cloud of confusion—bees suddenly dislodged from their hive—that quickly coalesced into a torrent of intention.
My talent hadn’t left me, departing to find a better host in this realm of full-blooded Faes. It flowed right to my primed fingers
“She has magic!” screamed the Gatekeeper as the rider kicked his horse past the last of the boulders. “Beware of it!”
It better be enough.
I braced my feet to face the charge. I told my bowels to give it up—you don’t have time to cramp in fear. I informed my rippling horror to stuff it. Do not look at the horse. Do not feed that fear. The rider doesn’t intend to crush you under its hooves. Look at his arm, how it is raised high, the tip of his sword pointed at you.
He has no plans to flatten you. He means to cut you in two.
Stop the sword, I thought as he came thundering down the first hill. Get his wrist.
Plan intact, my vision tunneled, my focus centering on the arm that held the weapon. Get the wrist and I had a chance. Miss it with my magic and I was going to be minced up like an onion on a cutting board.
“Beware of her magic!” she shrieked again.
Get the wrist.
“Cut off her hands!” she howled.
He heard her. During those last seconds, when I was trying to squelch the thought that maybe he was planning to mow me down, he pulled on his reins and canted his body to the side. Dust plumed as his mount fought to answer the command issued by his knees. And for a second, I couldn’t see through the cloud churned up by the horse’s hooves. All I got was a confused glimpse of horse legs, and girth, and riding boots as the animal veered for a sharp right.
Get the wrist.
I saw the flash of his arm in motion, swinging up to cut me down.
“Attach!” I screamed.
My magic surged up, a living bolt of green fire. It hit the tanned circle of skin above the sleeve of that awful bottle blue jacket and wrapped itself around it, a living manacle of my talent.
I experienced a brief spurt of elation.
Then physics fucked me.
The horse and rider were still moving, even if their trajectory was slowed and no longer in a straight line. And I was no immovable object.
The shock of impact went right through me.
“Ah!” I was blown backward, the laws of science that I didn’t understand propelling me willy-nilly off the path and then off it into space—this is where the trailing h of my cry rose in a shriek—and still, I kept going.
Gravity made a snatch for me halfway over the ditch.
I had a brief touchdown in the curve of the pebbled gully. Then, a hot poker of pain stabbed as my shoulder’s ball joint did things it shouldn’t when the object I’d grabbed—the wrist of one big man with a sword—went shooting over the ditch.
I saw him fly: a blur of bottle blue, shiny silver, and flailing legs.
Then, I noticed the green bungee cord trailing after him.
Oh shit. With a sense of inevitability, I watched as the line tethering the two of us grew tauter than a tightrope. There was a snap, sharp as a whip crack. And then, I was being pulled again by my fingernails—sweet heavens, when’s it going to end—right up and over the lip of the gully.
We didn’t go far, my magic and me. Our bungee cord lesson was thankfully brief.
I landed in a patch of wild daisies.
The rider landed elsewhere. I heard a bad sound that I equated with meat being thrown on a counter: a cross between a splat and a thud.
I hoped he was dead.
* * *
My landing, though relatively soft, was a stunner—the culminating blow on top of everything else. I found myself dazed, stretched on my back. My spine hurt like it had spent some time on the rack. My shoulder was on fire, and my arm was twisted painfully over my head.
I could feel my nails; they burned with fierce pressure.
I tilted my chin and rolled my eyes for a look-see.
The landing had twisted up my Fae. Her lines were kinked, her flow all jammed up. She was the garden hose that was threatening to burst. I could sense the dam of her anger; I could measure the insult she took from being twisted and bent like a pipe cleaner.
Got to fix her.
“Chop off her hands!”
The screech came from the beaten path, where in the instant before I’d sat on a fat pony named Seabiscuit. The Gatekeeper had followed our flight and now danced on the other side of the ditch, screaming encouragements. She was using her hands, punctuating her shrieks with chopping visuals.
She wasn’t talking to me.
I swung my head, my gaze following the line of my magic past the crimped part. The rider lay sprawled. Please be dead. He looked like a corpse; he lay unmoving, though he maintained a death grip on his damn sword.
Can corpses really do that?
“Kill her!” the Gatekeeper shrieked.
His toe twitched.
No, no, no.
He sat up. A rivulet of blood spilled, hot and fast. Smelling sweet but faded.
“She has no balyfire! Use your blade!” shouted the Gatekeeper.
Where was her balyfire? The thought was fleeting, and I didn’t pause to examine it further because the rider was shedding his lethargy with impressive speed. He shook his head, then rolled to his side, and the coil of green between us swelled obscenely into the fatter knot.
Pain in my hands.
Distress in my ears. I could hear the hiss of my Fae—sss, sss, sss! She was wordless with suffering. From the squeeze, from the knot.
I rolled as the rider had, in a desperate effort to unkink the current running between us. And it was a partial success; the bend started to open, and the awful growing heaviness in my head and hands—
He twisted again, moving onto one knee.
I gasped at the spike of unbearable pain.
He forced the fingers of his clenched fist open, allowing the sword to drop. He reached for it with his free hand.
“Go!” I screamed, releasing my Fae. “Hurt him!”
“Yesss!” I heard her hiss as she exploded into a cloudburst that dappled the leaves and the grasses with flashes of bright shiny green light. In the space of one eyeblink, she re-formed herself into a stream of glittering maleficence, beautiful and deadly. Now, tethered to no one, grounded by none, she surged toward the rider, a hungry python.
A snap of her tail and she was a coil around his throat.
She squeezed.
The rider dropped his weapon. He tore at his skin as she swelled around the purpling column of his neck. Gasping for air, he staggered to stand. She bore down on him, her rage cold and cruel. His back arched, his eyes bulged. Then, he whined, high through his nose, as she cracked the first vertebra.
He dropped.
He died with the second crack.
* * *
I turned my head away from the sight of my magic twisting around the corpse’s neck. Her color was a gloating green, her movements almost orgasmic.
“Abomination!” screamed the Gatekeeper as she scuttled down the pitch of the ditch toward me. Her lips were pulled in a pointy-toothed grimace.
“Whore!”
I raised my aching hands to ward her off, but she had no intention of her flesh touching mine. When she reached me, she lifted a foot, twisted slightly at the hip, and swung her little black boot.
Her aim was true; her kick got me right on my wounded ankle. Though I didn’t feel pain, I felt horribly, stomach-turning wrong.
Goddess, where’s my strength?
Her expression darkened into a troll’s leer. She took a step back. I knew her next kick would be aimed at my head. I raised my free arm to crook it protectively
in over my head as I opened my mouth to summon my magic.
The words on my tongue were never uttered.
From out of nowhere, Mouse came at her with a roar, no weapon other than his hands and his speed. His dive was a bruising tackle that swept her off her feet. As they crashed to the earth, her voluminous skirts flew, dark wings of a crow.
They landed in a tangle of dress and shouts. She jerked up a knee to get him in the balls. “Base-born scum!”
“Dog cock!” he shouted, twisting to avoid her sharp little knee.
“Touch me?” she screamed, pushing at him. “I’ll have them boil your balls, you—”
He hauled off and hit her. His palm was open, but the slap was wide. Her head whipped to one side.
Goddess, where’s my strength? I was sliding … slipping toward some place I shouldn’t go. I shook my head to clear it, blinking hard to bring the scene into focus.
The Gatekeeper’s cheek was no longer pale. I could see the outline of Mouse’s hand: four red fingerprints, with a red smudge below them for his palm.
Her eyes were hard, black pebbles. She raised her hands—not to point or to plead. Her fists were turned toward him, clenched so hard that her knuckles gleamed. I knew it meant bad things were coming, but I couldn’t remember what they were or how they would hurt me.
Or us.
Or we.
As I struggled to untangle the meaning of the “wes,” and the “mes,” he lunged for her wrists, snaring them in his own punishing grip. I nodded, owlishly wise. That’s right. Get the wrist and you’ll be safe …
She kicked out with her leg.
He twisted, swinging her around, and then he shoved her hard, and she fell, her hands briefly starfishing. Before she could rise or turn, he placed his foot on her back and pushed her down until she was flat on the ground.
Fast as a crocodile hunter, he jumped on her back, his legs snaring hers. “Chop off her hands, you said?” he said, grabbing her wrists again. “Cut them off? Shall we do that to you?”
She bucked and cursed. “Get off me! You verminous—”
He ground her clenched knuckles into the earth. “If I had a knife I’d do it. I’d chop them off so you could never use your balyfire again.”
“Scum!”
“Aye, I’m scum. And wouldn’t you like to singe me with your fire?” He leaned over, lowering his face so that he could speak into her ear. “But you can’t, can you?” His voice dropped to an intimate whisper. “You haven’t got any balyfire left. You’ve used it up, haven’t you? Who did you lay a streak of sulfur on?”
Me, I thought. She shot a fireball at me. She came up the steps from the Safe Passage and popped her head into my world, and then she sent a ball of sizzling fire my way. And still I followed her to this world …
Why did I do it?
Mouse was shaking his head. “By all the Gods in the sky above, if I’d known that you would never have got me out of the castle. And now look what you’ve done. I can’t go back. There’s nothing left there for me but a terrible death. You bat-fowling bitch, you’ve killed me without using an ounce of your talent.”
His hands went to her neck. From the look on his face, I knew his intent was to squeeze until her skin was the color of a boiled beet.
“Stop.” My voice sounded thin.
I don’t think he heard me. Shoulders bunched, he leaned into the task of killing her.
“No, Mouse!” I summoned authority, even as the world around me dimmed into shadows, and blurred light, and creeping numbness. “Don’t kill her,” I explained, my words smearing into a weary trail. “I need her alive.”
A beautiful serpentine stream of sparkles undulated past me, drawn to the boy who wished his mistress dead.
“Donut time, magic-mine,” I murmured. “Keep her away from me if you can.”
The sky winked blue. Then it was gray.
Movement in my pocket. Faint warmth on my chest.
Can’t be Merry. I think I lost her.
Burning in my eyes.
Only damsels in distress pass out.
Be a dame, not a damsel.
* * *
“Breathe through your mouth slowly,” I heard Mouse mutter.
How long had I been out? I worried.
“The fresh air will clear your head,” he said.
I gave it a try and discovered it did.
When the sky was blue again and the inclination to pass out again receded, I rolled my head toward him. Mouse sat against a tree. His legs were drawn up, and one arm was braced on his knee.
“Did you kill her?” I whispered.
He shook his head. “No.”
Thank heavens. I needed her to open the portal.
Wait. Mouse was free. He could have run. He had not.
Why not?
Merry!
I fumbled at my own chest, searching for her, and found two pendants. One was hot; one was not. I looked down, way past the boobs, to the place where my ribs met, and my heart beat hard. Ralph stood over Merry, his icy belly pulsing with white fire. Somewhere during the fuzzy period when I’d briefly succumbed to damsel status, he’d slipped out of his hiding place in my jeans and morphed into a stick figure on steroids.
He must have climbed my body to reach her. Her color was horrible—a mustard brown.
The end of his right “arm” was rapier sharp.
“One minute you’re a dickhead; the next you’re protecting her. Ralph, I’ll never understand you.”
“You have two amulets,” said Mouse. “And one is the Royal Amulet.”
“I need your tree,” I said in a stronger voice.
“Why?”
“To feed my friends.”
“What are you?”
“Same answer as before,” I replied. “I’m Hedi of Creemore.” I could hear someone breathing harshly. “Did you break the Gatekeeper’s larynx?”
“And what would that be?”
I didn’t really know, so I rolled my head in the direction of the noise.
The Gatekeeper was flat on her back, her legs wide. She was breathing noisily through her teeth. Not in pain, I thought, but in rage. My magic had correctly interpreted “donut time” and had encircled her waist.
Tightly.
Good enough. I tried to sit up the normal way, but my head was heavier than a bucket filled with wet cement. I rolled to my side and braced myself into a partial recline on one elbow.
Much dizziness ensued.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.
Mouse tilted his head to consider me. “The teeth of the wolf traps are coated with juka. I expect your wolf licked your wounds and the juka is inside you now. Before we set off, you should have been made to vomit and your wound rinsed well in the stream.”
“You couldn’t have told me that before?”
“Could have. Didn’t.”
Fine. “What is juka?”
He blew some air out of his pursed lips, shaking his head. “It must be a rare world you live in that you don’t know about the dust that sickens the wolves. It’s made from a plant. Once it’s dried, they grind it up into a fine dust. A bit of it sprinkled in a wolf’s food will lay the man wasted.”
“How wasted? How sick?”
“You won’t be up to your full strength until the juka’s worked its way through your body. Until then you’ll want to sleep like the dead and you’ll be weak as a—”
“So bottom line, no death by juka dust.”
“Aye, no death.”
“Good to know.” No fade into twilight, just this sludge of extreme fatigue that made lifting my noggin a piece of labor. I thought of the body lying just out of my line of vision, and then I thought of Qae and Trowbridge, and of Lexi … How was I going to get to the rock now? There was neither hide nor tail of Seabiscuit.
I used what abdominal muscles I owned to sit upright.
Whoa. Spinning world.
I waited for it to clear.
“Have you noticed that your le
g’s been dripping blood for a mile or more?” Mouse inquired.
I knew that, but I flicked my gaze southward. The side of my foot was forked with crimson streaks. I didn’t try to tug my jeans high enough for a thorough inspection. Memory of the holes—let’s not forget the holes—tightened my gut.
What a mess.
I braced my palms on the ground, then started shimmying backward toward the closest tree. It was a maple. Merry was very fond of maple.
Sweat had pearled my upper lip by the time I’d maneuvered the three of us into the crotch of the tree’s fat roots. I drew in a shaky breath, hooked their chains with a grimy finger, and pulled them over my head. For a tick or two, I let them dangle, thinking they’d untwine themselves, because feeding was going to be complicated if they didn’t, but Ralph held on and Merry didn’t push him away.
I lowered the knot of them to eye level and gave her the WTF squint. After a pause, she replied in her own way—a blip of ruddy orange light, small as pinprick.
Where there’s life, there’s an FU.
It was Merry’s way.
Smiling faintly, I laid the two of them on a root by my hip before settling my back against the tree. The forest was quiet except for the Gatekeeper’s indignant breathing.
“How long does it normally take for the poison to wear off?”
Mouse didn’t answer. For the minute it took me to compose a bullet list of items required to make a travois he sat near me, studying his twined fingers and saying nothing. Finally he rubbed his temple with the heel of his palm in exasperation.
“I have something that will help,” he said.
I gave him the same silent glare I used to direct at customers who complained about too much foam in their lattes. He lifted an unrepentant shoulder. “As I said, most of the damage was done already.”
My tone turned acidic. “Before we ever set off on the trail.”
“Aye—”
“Stop saying ‘aye!’” I snapped. “Say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘kiss my ass,’ but stop with the ‘aye.’ Every time you do it, you remind me that I’m here. And right now, Mouse…”
I rubbed my mouth with my fist.
“You don’t want to be here,” he finished. “Then we have something in common, don’t we?” He stood to stretch. “If you’re still dead set on traveling to the rock, you’re going to need some of the juice.”