Ilse Witch

It was a mistake. In that instant, caught up in the excitement of their success, Bek stopped humming.

At once, his disguise fell away and the feel of the castle changed. The change was palpable, a heavy rush of wind, a flurry of dust and debris, an agonizing sigh that spilled down the stone hallways and across the courtyards, a shudder that emanated from deep within the earth. Bek tried to recover, to conceal himself anew, but it was too late. Something fierce and primal howled down the corridors and rushed across the stones like an uncaged beast. Bek felt his heart freeze and his chest tighten. He stood where he was, trying to muster a defense he didn’t have.

Truls Rohk saved him. The shape-shifter snatched him off his feet as if he were a child, tucked him under an arm that felt as if it were banded in iron, and began to run. Back down the halls and passageways and across the courtyards he raced. Leaping over crumbled stone and along worn trenches, he bore the boy away from the enraged spirit. But it was all around, infused in the castle stone, and it came at them from everywhere. Hidden doors dropped into place before them with deafening thuds. Iron gates clanged shut. Spikes rose out of the earth to spear at them. Trapdoors dropped away beneath their feet. Truls Rohk catapulted and twisted his way past every hazard, sometimes using the walls and even the ceilings to find handholds and footholds. Nothing slowed him. He ran as if on fire.

Bek used his voice in an effort to help, humming anew, not knowing what he did, but needing at least to try. He hummed to make them as swift and elusive as birds, to give them the liquidity of water, to lend them the ethereal qualities of air. He threw up anything and everything he could think of, constantly changing tactics, trying to throw off the thing that pursued them. He melted into the creature that bore him away, di1sappearing into the smell of earth and grasses, into the feel of iron muscles, into the feral instincts and quick reflexes. He lost himself completely in a being he did not begin to understand. He lost all sense of who he was. He stripped himself of identity and fragmented into the night.

Then suddenly he lay stretched upon the earth, buried in the tall grasses, and he realized they were back outside again. Truls Rohk crouched next to him, head lowered, shoulders heaving, and the sound of his breathing was like an animal’s growl. Then he began to laugh, low and guttural at first, then broader and wilder. Bek laughed with him, oddly euphoric, strangely exhilarated, the death that had sought them outrun and outsmarted.

“Oh, you’re nothing of what you seem, are you, boy?” the shape-shifter gasped out between laughs. “Nothing of what you were told all these years! Did you know you had a voice that could do this?” He gestured back toward the castle.

“What was it I did?” Bek pressed, convulsed by laughter, as well.

“Magic!”

Bek went still then, his laughter fading to silence. He lay in the tall grasses and stared at the stars, listening to the echoes of the word in his mind. Magic! Magic! Magic! No, he thought. That wasn’t right. He didn’t know any magic. Never had. Oh, yes, he had the phoenix stone, the talisman he wore about his neck, given to him by the King of the Silver River, and perhaps that was what—

“You saved us, boy,” Truls Rohk said.

Bek looked over quickly. “You saved us.”

The dark form shifted and slid nearer. “I took us clear of the spirit’s reach, but you were the one who kept it at bay. It would have had us otherwise. It dwells all through those ruins. It masks the truth of what it is and how it looks. It protects itself with deception. But you were its equal this night. Don’t you see? Yours was the greater deception, all movement and sound and color … ah, sweet!”

He leaned close, invisible within his cloak and hood. “Listen to me. You saved us this night, but I saved you once before. I carried you from the ruins of your home and the dark fate of your family. That makes us even!”

Bek stared. “What are you talking about?”

“We are the same, boy,” Truls Rohk said again. “We were born of the ashes of our parents, of the heritage of our blood, of a history and fate that was never ours to change. We are kindred in ways you can only guess at. The truth is elusive. Some of it you discovered for yourself this night. The rest you must claim from the man who holds it hostage.”