~ 6 ~
Ami’s scream rent the air.
I knew it well—even at a distance. So well that I’d already wheeled my horse around and with one mind we leapt into a flat-out gallop before I even processed what the sound was. So many times we’d drilled this alarm system, during those days we’d traveled through the Wild Lands and into Annfwn seeking Stella. I’d taught Ami how to wield a short blade and the considerable power of her lungs, to protect herself long enough for me to get to her.
Snow flew in a blizzard of our own making as my steed and I barreled down the road at top speed. Had I the ability, I would have taken wing to get there faster. My heart pounded as if I were the one running.
I should never have left her.
We passed the fork and followed the road, though the sleigh tracks veered to cut across the fallow snow-covered fields. The mare couldn’t go as fast in the soft drifts as we could on the snow-packed road, which still wasn’t fast enough. In the vast open whiteness, I should be able to see…
There. So far out.
At my signal, we bounded off the road, lurching through the drifts, making for the dark spots of the line of sleighs. Other shapes darted in and out, worrying the outriders like wolves attacking a herd, trying for the vulnerable center.
Blood boiled in my ears, my thighs clamped around the horse, urging the gelding on, feeling as if I tried to lift him up through each lunge. With screaming urgency, I wanted to leap from his back and go it myself, but I knew, knew, I’d only go more slowly. Never had I more bitterly regretted my inability to shapeshift.
Ami had stopped screaming—I only hoped because she trusted I’d heard and was on my way, not because she couldn’t—and the only sounds other than the whisk of wind over snow were the grunts of Graves and his men, fighting the silent beasts.
As I watched, still helplessly too far away, a horse and rider went down, the black-furred shapes swarming it. My own gelding and I caught the scent at the same time, the sticky sweetness of corruption, of magic-born undeath. He faltered in his great-hearted speed, wanting to balk, and I ruthlessly clamped down on his mind, forcing him to go on.
It made me as bad as those black-souled practitioners of Deyrr who’d surely created the attacking creatures—I knew that smell far too well from the siege at Ordnung—but in that moment I only cared about one thing. The one person I’d barter my own soul to save.
Ami. I had to get to Ami.
I caught a flash of her face, stark in the whiteness, the flame of her hair a blaze of promise that she yet lived. Then she disappeared, crouching down into the sleigh. Two of the animals fighting had to be the Tala nurses—one in wolf form, the other a big cat—worrying the attacking creatures. No sign of the twins, so hopefully Ami was sitting on them.
I plunged into the fight on the weakest side, swinging my sword to decapitate a black wolf-like creature. It went down silently, staining the snow with black ichor that had long since ceased to be blood. We’d have to go back and chop them up, then burn them, as the pieces would keep on going in their unnatural way. For the moment, disabling them was key. Graves and his men hadn’t been at Ordnung, had never fought these things, and so wouldn’t know that until too late.
“Chop off the heads!” I shouted to Graves. “Disable, then kill.”
He nodded, the other men hearing and changing their defense. The habitual response is to stab and wound when wolves attack. Cutting off their heads takes too long with a normal creature. But these weren’t natural and they never bled out, never flinched from pain. It changes the battle from one of pitting cleverness and courage against a worthy enemy to hacking apart a mindless scourge.
I took off two more heads. Shapeshifter speed lent me a certain strength and leverage the other men couldn’t match. I carved my way through the pack, getting to Ami. One of the creatures climbed into the sleigh just before I got there. I went after it. I leapt off my horse and into the sled, grappling the beast, which snarled and writhed in my grip with unnatural strength.
Dropping my sword—in such close quarters, I ran too much risk of accidentally striking Ami or the kids if they got in the way of the long blade—I throttled the thing with one forearm, wrestling it back, and wishing I’d thought to draw my short blade.
“Ash!” Ami’s eyes were wild blue—and far too close to the beast’s slavering jaws as it snapped and lunged at her in eerie silence. To stop it, I thrust the meat of my other arm between its jaws, uncaring that it mindlessly savaged me. The pain fueled me. And better my arm than her throat. Ami, face contorted in horror, reared up, short blade fisted in both hands, and drove it into the beast’s eye. A good strategy, with a normal creature. This one, of course, didn’t falter.
But she gave me the blade I needed.
I let go the beast’s throat, hauling it back by dint of my arm in its jaws, yanked the blade out and drove it into the spinal column at the back of its head. Black ichor sprayed my face and I pressed my lips tight against accidentally getting any of the poisonous shit in my mouth. It still mindlessly chewed, lurching to push through my restraint, and I sawed through its neck. A laborious and grim task. No speed or leverage to help me, only determination.
At last the head separated from the body, though the jaws remained locked on my arm, still gnawing away. A bright haze of shock surrounded everything with halos of light as I lifted the creature’s body and threw it out of the sleigh with vehemence. It slogged through the snow, searching for prey it could no longer detect.
All of the creatures seemed to be headless now, similarly confused, and Graves and his men—along with the Tala—were working methodically to dismember them all.
“Ash!” Ami’s voice grated harshly, no music in it, and she pulled the blade from my hand. “Glorianna take you, sit down before you pass out.”
She began sawing at the tendons in the beast’s jaw, cutting the magically animated muscles that gave it strength. Black ichor and my bright red blood fountained over her white and gold gown, no doubt ruining it forever. Ami shouldn’t be covered in gore like this.
“Your dress,” I managed and she threw me a ferocious glare.
“Shut up, you stupid, stupid man. I don’t care about the fucking dress!” The lower jaw fell away and the head, losing its hold, dropped to the floor of the sleigh. The twins shrieked, popping tousled heads—one bright, one dark—from beneath the furry blanket where Ami had indeed been sitting on them. They screamed again when the beast’s remaining eye blinked at them, the upper lip lifting over fangs in a snarl.
I grabbed it by the ear with my good hand and flung the head as far away from them as I could. For good measure, I sent the lower jaw after it. As if that sapped the last of my strength, my legs gave out, and I sat heavily.
Ami was cursing me steadily, tearing strips from her gown to bandage my arm. “If you don’t die, I’m going to kill you,” she muttered. Blood and ichor streaked her face, making her look like Glorianna as warrior.
“I’m all right,” I told her. “Don’t worry. I need to—”
“You need to shut up and sit. You’ve already lost too much blood.”
“Are you hurt?” I tried to sit up, suddenly seized with the fear that the blood might not be all mine. “The twins?”
“We are fine,” she bit out. “It’s you who’s hurt, which is thriced inconvenient since you can heal anyone but yourself. Why would you be so contrary? Just to make me crazy, I’m sure.”
I watched her, bemused by her ferocity. The twins had pulled the blanket back over their heads and held on to each other. They’d have bad dreams now. So young for their first nightmares. I’d failed to save them from that.
Ami might have been right about the blood loss, because lightning-streaked black edged around the corners of my vision, which had gone blurry.
“Tell Graves he needs to burn the pieces, too.”
“I will. Stay with me. You’ll be fine.”
“I love you, Ami. You’ve been the one bright spot in my life.”
“Now he gets verbose,” she muttered, tying a knot in the bandages viciously tight. “Too tight. Too tight,” she was saying, “but I’d rather he lose the arm than bleed out, right? I don’t know how in Glorianna we’re going to heal him.”
“Leave me here,” I managed.
She rolled her gorgeous eyes at me and seized my jaw in a surprisingly firm grip. Staring fiercely into my eyes, she spoke slowly and clearly. “No one is leaving you. Let me handle things for once. I’m not some fragile moonflower who can’t survive the cold, okay?”
I smiled at that image. No, my Ami was no moonflower. She was a rose: lush, lovely, and full of lethal thorns.
The blackness swamped me and I went under.