“You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself, pretty one.”
The tension in the air rose at the sound of the king’s voice. A reminder of the obstacles that stood between her and the future she was only now daring to admit she wanted. She clenched her teeth as the troll king’s grating tone dragged her attention back to reality.
She forced a smile to her lips and turned to face her would-be husband. “Oh, but I am. It’s always best to deal with the past before proceeding to the future.”
The troll king’s smile broadened, revealing even more of his jagged teeth. Ingrid suppressed a shudder and turned away before she could lose what little food she had in her stomach all over the dais. Though she doubted that would do much to dissuade the king from leering at her. If he willingly put himself in Typhoid’s presence, a little vomit wouldn’t faze him.
The ogre waved a hand encouragingly, gesturing for Tyr to take the first plunge the way someone might encourage a guest to take the last piece of cake. Ingrid returned her attention to the captive just as the wind shifted. Steam wafted over the pirate and his nostrils flared. He winced, no doubt singed by the heat that was a mere taste of what awaited him.
The guard jabbed the head of his spear into Tyr’s broad back, prompting a humiliating, terror-filled shout from the pirate. His body pitched forward, arms wind-milling as he desperately tried to keep his momentum from carrying him off the edge of his platform and into the boiling oil below.
As soon as his body hit the surface, a wave of magic broke outward, rolling over Ingrid like a high tide. She inhaled sharply, fighting not to close her eyes at the invigorating slap of energy. For a moment she could feel the oil around her, feel the heat enclosing Tyr’s flailing limbs. The smell of apple blossoms filled her senses and the oil in the cauldron bubbled as though Tyr were screaming beneath the shimmering surface.
The king’s booming laugh filled the air only to be cut short as a trembling hand rose from the oil to grasp the edge of the cauldron. Tyr sucked in a breath of air as he broke the surface, his chest heaving as he fought to get oxygen to his deprived lungs. Ingrid noted with satisfaction that his skin was flushed, but not burned. His hair was plastered to his face and shoulders, and his wet clothes clung to every bulge of muscle as he heaved himself out of the water.
Keep going, she willed him. She took a deep breath, the power flowing from the land resting on her like a net, there for her to tug at and manipulate as she willed. Jump into the next cauldron.
As if he could hear her, Tyr hauled himself to stand on the thick lip of the cauldron, balancing precariously for only a moment before leaping into the next one. The milk closed over his head, but this time he leapt up almost immediately. It was not a human feat, but rather a leap that required strength and agility reserved for otherworldly creatures. Ingrid leaned forward, barely aware of the king’s bulging eyes and hanging jaw. One more.
She almost collapsed with relief as Tyr leapt into the final cauldron. A shiver ran down her spine, her nerves dancing with the sensation of ice crystals forming on her skin as though it were her and not Tyr submerged in the freezing water. Her skin ached, but the pain wasn’t unbearable. She leaned back, exhaling slowly as Tyr reached out of the ice water to grip the cauldron with his good hand, then hauled himself out and over the edge. He landed roughly, limbs jarring as he hit the ground. For a moment he just sat there, blinking.
Ingrid couldn’t suppress the smile that pulled up the corners of her mouth as he patted himself down, checking for injuries. He felt his face, rubbing his fingers down his forehead, past his cheeks, to his chin. The magic would still be running fever-hot inside him, infusing bone and flesh with the vitality of a man half his age. Already his blond hair had swallowed the grey, glowed with the health of youth again. The only wrinkles he retained were the laugh lines around his eyes.
As she watched him fight free of the magical daze, something twisted her stomach. It was time to find out if he were truly a changed man. His body, though still one-handed, was strong again, young and just this side of human. If his yearning for an end to his pirate life had been driven by the pains of his aging body, if his mind had taken no part in the change in desire, then the sea would call him back. He would take her home and leave her there. Alone.
Or he could choose to travel a different path. Start his own orchard, live a farmer’s life as if his time as a pirate was only a dream. He was young and strong, and he certainly had the knowledge.
But if he stayed… If he stayed, she would know he stayed for her.
“By the gods, you spoke the truth.”
The ogre king’s voice was muted, awe thickening his tone as he rose from his seat. Beside him, his younger brother took a subtle step forward. The movement did not go unnoticed and the king growled and bolted off the dais, racing for the platform with earth-shaking footsteps. His brother followed in a mad dash, eyes locked on the cauldron of still-simmering oil.
“Ogres. There’s no accounting for their hierarchy. What’s the sense of being king if you can’t relax enough to enjoy it?”
Ingrid jerked her head to the side, lips parting as she found the firebird sitting on the vacated throne. Its feathers seemed slightly muted in the light of the sun without the dark of the cave or the tower to provide contrast to the brilliant yellow and orange sheen. If it noticed it was less impressive, it didn’t show it.
“How did you escape?” Ingrid demanded.
The bird continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Look at them, clawing at one another to see who gets to dive into the boiling oil first. You don’t see that every day.”
Ingrid didn’t look. She knew what would happen to any creature that jumped into that vat now and it wasn’t something she wanted to witness.
The magic only worked once.
She returned her attention to Tyr, found him wandering away from the vats like a drunk stumbling out of a tavern. His movements were clumsy, and he clearly hadn’t fully recovered from the infusion of magic, but he stayed on his feet.
Neither ogre on the platform paid him any notice. The king’s face twisted in rage as he wrapped one enormous hand around one of his brother’s horns, the other trying to force a dagger into his sibling’s stomach. Likewise, his brother fought to keep the king from taking advantage of the magic, baring his teeth as he tried to angle them so he would be in a position to cast himself in first.
Ingrid held her breath as she looked to where the two guards stood, watching the king and his brother. Neither moved to intercede, likely for fear that they would choose the losing side and find themselves executed for treason after the fact. Typhoid was nowhere to be seen.
Unease rolled through her stomach with the acute awareness that the wizard could have easily cloaked himself, hid from her sight. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to test his magic, try to find him beneath whatever power made him invisible.
Holding her breath as she rose, Ingrid pointed at the ground beneath the guards and whispered a spell. The earth beneath them pulsed, then dirt shot into the sky. A pit opened beneath them, just large enough to swallow them both. They shouted as they tried to leap to solid ground, but tangled together in a chaos of flailing limbs.
As soon as they dropped into the pit, Ingrid leapt off the dais, her attention focused solely on Tyr. She had to get to him now, drag him after her if necessary. They had to leave before either ogre succeeded in falling into the vat and the other realized what fate awaited him if he followed. With any luck, the wizard had no master now, no reason to stop them.
Her bare feet hit the ground, but she didn’t get the chance to run. Nausea overwhelmed her, spilled her to the grass with a violent thud. Rather than the lush greenery she’d expected, the blades of grass beneath her were brown and dry, the earth reeking of sudden decay. Her stomach heaved and bile rose with frightening speed to her throat. She turned her head and retched.
Feet appeared in front of her. Musty boots and legs wrapped with vile-smelling bandages.
“I’m afraid you cannot leave just yet.”
The wizard’s voice sent a chill down Ingrid’s spine. There was a roar followed by a heavy, wet thud. Ingrid raised her eyes in time to see the ogre king roar his victory to the sky, eyes shining with battle-madness, his entire body splattered with blood from his horns to his feet. He looked but didn’t seem to see anything, turning like a wounded bear and throwing himself into the boiling oil.
There was a skin peeling hiss, and a roar of flames as the oil surged over the sides of the vat, igniting in the fire. Silence held the courtyard, even the two guards scrambling to get out of the pit going still as they tried to see what had happened. The king’s body bobbed to the surface, flesh no more than a blood red ruin streaked with black.
“Your king is dead.” Drool pooled in her mouth as she tried not to vomit again. “You have no reason to hold me here.”
“On the contrary. I have a great deal of interest in you. You see, my power is great, but the toll it takes is rather…dramatic.” The wizard’s smile was clear in his voice, though there was a slur to his speech that said part of his lips may have rotted away. “Nothing bonding with an earth witch won’t help, I’m sure.”
More bile threatened to surge up her throat and Ingrid swallowed hard, gathering every shred of self-control she had as she rested her head on the ground and reached for more power. She recoiled sharply as her attempt met with the sickly tingle of necrotic energy. He’d poisoned the earth. As she looked around, she saw the wave of his power eating away at the grass in a broadening circle. Her heart sank and she met Tyr’s eyes again.
“Run!” she shouted.
Chapter Thirteen
Tyr put one foot in front of the other, vaguely aware that his bones were vibrating. His flesh hummed and his head throbbed. It should have felt unpleasant, but it didn’t. Quite the contrary, he felt as if his blood had been replaced with expensive rum, his body rejuvenated, returned to what it had been in his twenties. Or a fey’s twenties. He looked at his hand, felt his face. He blinked, felt his face again. It was not the face of an old man. He grabbed a lock of his hair, stared at it. No grey. On top of all of that, he suddenly felt as if he could take on a mob of giants with his bare hands.
Assuming I don’t fall over first.
“Run!”
Ingrid’s scream lanced the bubble that held him in his strange new world, snapped his attention to the dais where he’d last seen her. His beautiful witch lay on the ground in a spreading circle of dead grass. Typhoid stood before her, his staff planted on the ground, looking down at Ingrid as if he were some sort of vulture waiting for a dying lioness to draw her last breath.
His muscles tensed, prepared to launch him over the ground at the wizard, pathetic chances of success be damned. He’d barely twitched forward when Ingrid raised her hands and brought them back down on the ground, hard.
Earth exploded upward, chunks of thick dirt spraying into the air and leaving a gaping pit below the wizard. A hoarse cry squeezed from the rotting man’s throat and he tilted wildly, trying to throw himself onto solid ground. Ingrid rolled away, dry grass crunching beneath her body as she tried to get out of the circle of blight that surrounded her and the wizard.
“Ingrid!”
Tyr looked around wildly, searching for something he could use as a weapon. His attention fell on the dead ogre still lying on the platform. The king’s brother had been well armed for as little good as it had done him, and Tyr sprinted for the body, eyes locked on a flash of polished steel pinned beneath it. He wrestled the sword from the sheath with a grunt of triumph. It wasn’t until he was holding the massive iron weapon that he realized how large it really was. Too heavy for him.
Or rather, it should have been too heavy.
A flash of light caught his eye, ripped his concentration from his newfound strength. A bolt of purple energy shot from the glowing tip of the wizard’s staff. He’d managed to avoid Ingrid’s trap, recovered his balance on the solid ground beside it. The magic struck Ingrid in the chest just as she was sitting up on a patch of healthy ground ten feet away.
She fell to the grass, heaving stomach bile into the greenery she’d just managed to find outside the circle of death. The blood drained from her already pale face, leaving her with the pallor of a corpse. Her eyes appeared sunken in, glazed over as if unseeing. The skin on her hands sagged, veins bulging as the flesh thinned. She slumped forward, and for one heart-stopping moment he thought she was dead.
Tension strung tight in her shoulders as she dug her fingers into the ground, shaking with the effort. On some level, Tyr knew she was healing herself, drawing energy from the un-blighted earth to drive out whatever the wizard had done to her. He didn’t have time to wait and see if she was successful.
He leapt off the platform with a cry to frighten the undead, shoving his hand into his pocket and withdrawing a handful of tiny black apple seeds. He roared at the wizard, demanding his attention, forcing him to look away from Ingrid. Typhoid’s eye glowed with sickly purple light like a will o’ wisp in a bog. Tyr didn’t dwell on that eye, that spark of necrotic power. Instead, he zig-zagged around the magic-wielder, throwing the apple seeds at his feet.
“Fool,” the wizard snarled. “You should have run while I was willing to give you that chance.”
“I am a clever man, not a smart one.” Tyr gave the magic-wielder his most unpleasant smile even as instinct screamed at him to run for the castle, to make his way back into the mountain, toward the inlet where he hoped his ship still waited. But he would not leave Ingrid behind. He had to keep the wizard from concentrating on her, give her time to heal the damage.
A beam of violet power shot in front of him, missing him by no more than a foot. He started to laugh, ready to hurl a mocking insult at the wizard, but a groan from ahead of him froze the words on his tongue.
The wizard hadn’t been aiming for him.
Horror frosted down his spine as the dead ogre rose from the platform. Dried blood coated him from his broken horn to the broad expanse of his bare chest. The zombie shambled to its feet, milky eyes locking on Tyr.
“Kill him,” the wizard shouted. “Kill—”
The rest of his repeated command was cut off as the apple seeds at his feet burst to life. Young wood cycled through stages of growth with mind-numbing speed. In the blink of an eye it was a tree, sprouting its first white and pink blossoms. Branches snared the wizard’s arms and legs, curling tighter even as the petals fell in a soft rain, hard new fruit taking their place.
The wizard bellowed in rage as the tight-knit grove consumed him in a living cage, his staff lodged in the V of two thickening branches. Ingrid held one hand out, the other still buried in the ground. Her eyes glowed as more magic flowed from her, fed the trees.
The zombie’s dagger slashed through the air, nearly severing Tyr’s good hand. He leapt back, cursing himself for being distracted by Ingrid’s magic. He raised the sword, a thrill racing through him at how easily he wielded the weapon that he would have needed two hands to lift no more than an hour ago. He grinned at the zombie and dove forward, thrusting the sword into its stomach.
Putrescence poured from the wound, blood and something that belonged in his intestines. The zombie didn’t react to the pain, but the force of the blow drove it back a step. Tyr pressed the momentum, angling the force to drive the zombie toward the fire that still burned beneath the cauldron of oil. A fire lit by sacred flame.
A howl of rage poured from the necromancer’s throat. Apples fell from the trees as he writhed against his bonds. The purple tip of his spear glowed to near-blinding brightness and a bolt of energy shot from its tip. It arced harmlessly into the sky, and the wizard screamed again. The staff slammed against the tree branches as the wizard put all his strength into aiming for a second shot.
An idea flashed into Tyr’s mind, an image of his ship and the piece of wood that had come to life. “Ingrid!” he shouted. “The staff! Remind it what it was!”
&nb
sp; Ingrid raised her hand again, drew a deep breath. Her eyes were no longer sunken in as she focused on the wizard’s staff, but it was obvious she was getting tired, the cost of so many spells taking its toll. The wizard stared open-mouthed at his staff as leaves flowed down the length of it, vines reaching for him, tangling his arms and legs still imprisoned by the apple trees.
The ogre moved even more slowly, though Tyr didn’t know if it was the blood loss or the necromancer’s own waning power. It slashed at Tyr with the dagger just as Tyr withdrew the sword from its body. He easily twisted out of the way and the blade only grazed his shoulder, leaving a bright red stripe in its wake. The wound sizzled, but didn’t hurt and Tyr didn’t waste time driving forward with the sword again.
They were close to the fire now, the cauldron of oil hissing as it cooked the king’s body. Tyr planted one foot on the zombie’s chest and with a great heave, he sent it flying into the vat.
The ogre hit the vat low, tipping it at a mad angle. Oil poured from the heavy iron, feeding the flames. They roared like a living beast, greedily consuming the oil-soaked offerings of the long-dead ogre king and his recently raised brother.
Tyr turned away from the searing brightness, the sickening smell of charred flesh. He looked back to see Ingrid still kneeling in the grass. The circle of blight was shrinking, dry brown blades plumping with life, becoming green and healthy once again. She was healing the earth, ridding it of the poison the wizard had poured into it.
Which meant the wizard was his.
His blade found the rotting magic-user’s neck, sliced through it as if his flesh and bone were no more substantial than a dried cornstalk turned to mush by blight. His head rolled off his shoulders, but stuck against the branches of the tree, held in place as if he had a badly broken neck.
Tyr backed away, driven as much by the smell coming from the headless corpse as a need to escape. He dropped down and wiped the sword on the grass, barely resisting the urge to abandon it altogether. Adrenaline singed his veins, reminding him that they were not safe yet. He ran to his witch, heart in his throat as he scanned her body for signs of lingering injuries.
The Pirate's Witch (Blood Prince) Page 14