Blackveil

She thought about the legends of Laurelyn and Castle Argenthyne because of where they were, and because her mother always sang and told her stories of Laurelyn to soothe her when she was little. She did not, however, even possess the energy to tell a story.

The lethargy settled in, took on a dreamlike quality. She saw the figure again. It tumbled and leaped through the trees like an acrobat. She tried to stir, tried to speak to Yates, but could not seem to do either. Yates just sat there, gazing unseeing into the forest.

The figure somersaulted right up to her and came to rest on bent knee. His face and head were encased in a looking mask just like the tumbler that had been at the king’s masquerade, but the mirror of this mask was tarnished and corroded. She could barely see her reflection in it.

The tumbler then rose and backed away, and with a flourish pointed to others stepping out from behind trees, ladies and gentlemen in ragged finery, faded longcoats and yellowed lace. They wore masks of grotesque horned demons and ferocious creatures with gaping, toothy maws, the eyeholes empty sockets. They leered at her.

Discordant music wafted through the woods and the ladies and gentlemen danced, their movements jerky, dead. A mockery of the king’s masquerade ball.

This is not real, she thought. Just the bent, craggy trees with their crazy limbs seeming to drift in the fog. Just her own madness making her see things.

She still could not move or speak, but this time when the tumbler knelt before her, she gazed at her wan reflection in his mask behind the tarnish—until it changed. A vision took hold. Blood splashed the looking mask like crimson rain on a window, then smeared away revealing a face. Not her own, but one she knew well. The king’s. She swallowed hard. His face was pallid, lifeless, the stained mask making it look diseased. The vision pulled back. He lay in bed and people in black surrounded him like mourners. And it was gone. The looking mask returned to its dull countenance.

“No!” Karigan cried. “Tell me!”

The tumbler leaped away.

“Karigan?” Yates said anxiously.

The dancers twirled away into the mist, and with each blink, the tumbler became more distant. Karigan staggered painfully to her feet with the aid of the bonewood and attempted to pursue him.

“Karigan?” This time Yates’ voice was sharper, alarmed.

She kept going, bent on seeing more in the looking mask. Tears of pain and grief washed across her cheeks. What was this vision of the king? What had become of him?

But the tumbler was gone. She searched the shadows, breathing hard, her body shaking with exertion and pain.

Several pairs of green glinting eyes stared back at her. The shadows came to life. Large, bristling shadows.

Oh, gods, she thought.

“Karigan?” Yates called, his voice quavering with fear.

She glanced back, saw more pairs of eyes, dark forms snuffling near him. A pack of Blackveil’s creatures had scented them out, two helpless people, one blind and the other injured—easy prey.

But they were not helpless. Karigan shook the bonewood to staff length. “Yates,” she called, “draw your sword and knife!”

With another glance she saw he already had. She shifted her grip on her staff and stood ready to defend herself.

SHADOW BEASTS

The creatures circled around Karigan, wove in and out of the trees. They watched her with unblinking green eyes. Had these been her dancers? She could not see them fully, for their dusky hides blended in with the forest, but she caught glimpses of barrel-chested torsos and limber hindquarters. Gray, slavering tongues hung from bear-trap jaws. She thought them wolflike, but nothing was certain in Blackveil.

They slunk around her, snuffling and snarling, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, always out of range of her staff. She swung it at a couple that came closest and they leaped away growling. It was clear they did not like the bonewood.

How long, she wondered, would it keep them away?

With a glance back at Yates, she saw the creatures creep close, retreating halfheartedly when Yates swept his sword through the air. His face was taut with concentration as if he listened for the slightest pad of foot or exhalation.

Karigan backed toward him. They must stand together. The beasts moved with her, and beyond, dancers swirled in the vapor, green glowing through the eyeholes of wolf masks.

She shook her head. Not dancers, just more beasts, the play of dark and mist. Carefully she inched back toward Yates, the shadows watching her intently, eagerly.

“Must hold it together,” she murmured to herself, but a battle raged in her mind and she was no longer sure of what was real.

“Yates,” she said, “I’m coming back.”

He did not reply, but she saw from the corner of her eye the gleam of his saber as he swept it at a fleet shadow.

When finally she reached him, they stood back to back, the beasts swarming around them.

“Are they real?” Karigan wondered aloud.

Yates snorted. “I felt one breathe on my neck.”

Karigan trembled with the effort to just stand. She’d eaten and drunk too little over the last couple days, and the lethargy pressed down on her shoulders like a mountain of granite. She’d no hope of fighting the creatures.

Dancers, dancers careened around them; the flow of dresses, the spiraling motion, the seesawing music.

She pressed her eyes shut and gripped her staff hard, recovering just in time to rap the skull of a beast that came close to tearing off Yates’ leg. It receded with a thunderous growl.

Another charged them, but swerved away from Karigan’s staff. The beasts pressed hard to one side of them, but less so to the other. Karigan wondered why. When she glanced over her shoulder, there stood the tumbler. He beckoned her. Or maybe it was Lynx.