“Yes, I dare!” Nimue’s furious tones shivered across my skin like a physical thing. “As you have dared, for centuries, making war with me by proxy, not willing to face me yourself! Too long have you squeezed us, forcing the creatures of the dark onto our lands, allowing the abominations—whom you armed—to burn our towns, kill and ravage our people—”
“Abominations?” The contempt dripped. “I should think you would welcome them. Everyone knows your people are nothing but mongrels, intermarrying with vermin, destroying—”
“Have a care!”
“Oh, I will. I do. And when my armies march into Avalon, I will put your half-breeds to the sword, along with any polluted blood I find—”
“Your armies march only in your dreams, Dirt King.” There was a savage form of mirth in the words now. “You will never have the numbers. The only way to take my throne is if I offer it to you—”
“As if anyone would want that collection of bogs and marshes—”
“—and I do!”
The room above suddenly went deadly quiet.
“Face me in combat,” Nimue challenged. “Now, tonight, according to the ancient rules you’re so fond of. And we will settle this. The winner becomes ruler of both kingdoms; the loser . . . receives the appropriate funeral rites. Duel me, King of the Wastelands. Or, once and for all, declare yourself coward before all Faerie!”
There was no sound for a long moment; even straining, all I could hear was my own frantic heartbeat.
“The only thing I will declare is your line extinct, once I finish with you.”
The room detonated, in shouts and curses and more of those strange crashes. And then Arthur’s voice cut through the din, loud as a foghorn. “If you want to kill each other, do it outside!”
The fey must have agreed, because the next noises echoing down the stairs were bootheels on stone, and a lot more shouting.
Pritkin crawled back up the stairs again, to peer out the top. “They’re leaving,” he said. “Everyone’s heading for the Table—”
“Even Arthur?”
He nodded. “And he’s not wearing his sword.”
“So what are we doing here?” I asked, jumping up. “We can get it in the confusion. Come on!”
And then somebody kicked me in the chest.
It was just that fast, and wholly unexpected because there was no one there. And just that painful, since it felt more like someone had just driven a boot through my body, the shock alone overwhelming. I fell backward, clutching for purchase I couldn’t find on the slippery stairs and couldn’t see.
Because everything had just gone black.
Chapter Fifty-three
I crashed down into a freezing flood. The shock left me gasping, the water I breathed in left me choking, and the confusion left me reeling. I just lay there for a moment, stunned and drowning, staring at the surface.
And then I started thrashing my way back up.
It was hard—way more than it should have been, since judging by the bruises on my backside, the water wasn’t that deep. But it didn’t seem to matter. It felt like all my energy had just been sucked out of me. And the thing was, I knew that feeling. I’d felt it before. But, like everything else, my brain wasn’t cooperating.
Maybe because it was running out of oxygen.
And then somebody jerked me up.
I stared in confusion at a man’s unfamiliar face. It was too dark to see much, but faint traces of firelight from somewhere gleamed off the beads of water in his beard and the crazy in his eyes. Which quickly went from hopeful crazy to crazy pissed.
“You’re not Dyfrig!” he said accusingly.
I tried to answer, but all that came out was a flood of water, all over the man’s clothes. Not that it mattered; they were already soaked. But he didn’t seem to appreciate it, nonetheless.
“Where is Dyfrig?”
“I . . . don’t know,” I choked, which didn’t seem to be the right answer. Because he threw me against a stone wall, yelling the same thing, over and over. “Where is he? What did you do with him? Where is Dyfrig?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” I said, and then cut off with a pained cry when he started shaking me, and my head hit the wall. And then did it another time or two, because the man clearly didn’t care if he bashed my brains out.
“Oh, Dyfrig,” I gasped, and grabbed his arms. “I . . . thought you said something else. I saw him . . . over there!”
I didn’t even know where I pointed—it was dark, and my head felt like it had been cracked open. But amazingly enough, it worked. Crazy Man splashed off, and I fell back against the wall, dazed and panting.
And very confused, because I wasn’t on the stairs.
I was in a low-ceilinged, stone-built tunnel flooded with water and people unhappy about it. Maybe because more was pouring in every second, spilling through grates, trickling down walls, and gushing off another staircase-turned-waterfall at the far end of what I now recognized as the dungeons. The same ones Pritkin and I had just escaped from.
And now that my brain was getting back to work, I had a pretty good idea why.
And that was before someone chuckled in my ear.
Someone I didn’t see, even when I whipped my head around.
“That was clever,” a woman’s voice said as I stared at more darkness. “For a minute, I thought you were a goner.”
“J-Johanna?”
Genuine mirth echoed off the walls, free and easy and sincerely amused. “Of course. How many ghosts do you know?”
“You’re not a ghost!”
“Close enough,” she whispered as something detached itself from the ceiling, dropping down at me like a huge bat.
I ducked down into the almost-waist-deep water, but it didn’t help. A spectral talon reached out for me and I slapped it away, causing my hand to feel like it had been flayed to the bone. And my attacker to give off a high-pitched screech and tumble through the wall, in a thrash of black smoke.
“So it was true.” Johanna’s voice came again, sounding amazed. “You are a necro!”
“So are you!” I snapped, trying to spot her in the darkness.
“Ah, but I’m not Pythia.” The hateful voice echoed strangely in the confined space. “I wouldn’t even have been an acolyte if they’d known. Yet what do we have here? A filthy necromancer as one of the chosen! I had to see that for myself.
“And now I have.”
Her tone should have warned me, a second before something erupted from the water, clawing at me. I felt searing pain and the sting of lost power, before I managed to throw it off my shoulder. And to stumble backward, hitting the wall again. And staring around wildly, because I hadn’t seen where it went.
“You should be more careful,” Johanna chided. “One more accident and you’re finished.”
“That makes two of us!” I said, furious and afraid. Because that hadn’t been an acolyte. That had been a ghost. Like the one that had attacked me upstairs, not kicking me in the chest so much as diving right through it, mugging me of power in the way that only one thing could.
And shifting me here in the process.
Or no, not shifting, I thought. Phasing. Because she couldn’t afford—
My thoughts broke off when two more shadows dove for me. And they were coming from both directions this time, too fast to dodge and too deadly to survive. I screamed, a sound lost among all the others, and started to shift—