“And you could never lurk in the shadows,” I managed with a half-smile.
She laughed, a little watery, a lot brittle. The sound made me want to hold her, and I must have moved like I might dismount, because she held up a hand. “I feel like we’ve said goodbye so many times already. Would you do me this favor and just go. Now. Like you’re off to scout ahead.”
I glanced at the other sleigh, where the twins still slept with their nurses. They’d be up all night again, but I’d miss it. And I wouldn’t get to say goodbye to them. Though that was likely just as well. It would only confuse and upset them.
Ami followed my line of sight, then met my gaze again. “Please.”
A more articulate man would have thought of parting words. Something meaningful, for her and for me, to remember in the days ahead.
But I only nodded, bowing from the waist, and turned my horse’s head toward the road leading away from Windroven.
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.