Bryn screams in the distance; the woman and I both turn to the sound. “Take what you can and bleed the rest,” she says, moving into the trees in search of Bryn. Dismissing me, the useless one.
Kellig waits for her to disappear before he regards me with a grin. “Five hundred pieces of silver,” he says, shaking a finger at me. “You see, North knows. He always knows when to buy and when to sell and when to disappear.”
I climb to my feet and back into a tree, assessing my escape.
“What’s your name?” Kellig asks, still pacing. “Or maybe you’d rather have mine? You can scream it as I kill you.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“I like to start with the teeth,” he says. “Those are the first thing to rot, you know? Noble addicts pay good money for good teeth to hide their dirty habits.” He bares his own teeth at me, snapping them together. I flinch and he grins. “I’ll rip them out one by one,” he continues, “while my men fight to drink that virgin blood as it spills down your chin.” His dark eyes drop to my chin and lower, to the sagging neckline of my dress. “They bite sometimes,” he says. A dark smile carves his lips into something terrible. “You might actually like it.”
Another scream, wild and feral, before heat flashes across my calves in warning. Bryn. I realize—too late—that she’s more of a liability to my safety when I can’t see her. If she gets hurt, I get hurt too, and despite everything, she’s not my enemy. Not tonight.
“And then I’ll peel your skin off,” Kellig says. He makes a gruesome squelching noise at the back of his throat as he pantomimes tearing flesh from his face. “Exposing all your secret spells.”
“No secrets here,” I say, wetting my lips, shifting my weight. I know men like him, the kind who come to the Stone and Fern, their egos outweighing their abilities in the ring. All talk to compensate for little action.
I try to relax into position, fists loose but ready: I’ll only have one chance to strike first. Unlike with Loomis, this is self-defense, and I welcome the taste of adrenaline, the familiarity of a fight.
Kellig feints for me but my sidestep is too slow. He grabs a fistful of my hair and twists as my legs buckle and fear clouds my strategy, turning everything muddy. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he says, flattening his palm across my exposed collarbone. Needles of pain slide under my skin and start digging.
Is he a transferent, able to rip the magic out of my skin with just his bare hands?
“Let her go,” a voice says, sharp from the shadows behind us.
Kellig spins, swinging me in front of him as a shield, his palm sliding off my skin. Icy relief floods through me, immediately eclipsed with fear: I can’t fight more than one at a time.
A man steps forward, slender and ominous, a face framed in all black. North. He aims a crossbow toward Kellig and edges closer, sure-footed, eyes never leaving his quarry. “Let her go,” he repeats.
“Make me an offer,” says Kellig, hugging me close, grinning as he rests his chin on my shoulder. “Two hundred pieces of silver, North—a bargain considering what you would have paid.”
“I’m not bartering with you.”
“Where’s the fun—?” Kellig starts, as I slam my dagger into his upper thigh. He swears and releases me, doubling over.
I run.
North shouts for me to stop but I ignore him, crashing through the trees, stumbling over roots and sunken gulches. Pine needles slap at my face before I stumble into the same clearing as before. Two horses, one body.
Where’d the other one go?
Three monstrous figures are bent over Loomis, tearing at his flesh in their greed for the magic woven through his skin. The nameless boy is nowhere to be seen, and a detached thrill of fear runs down my back. Am I sure the screams I heard belonged to Bryn? The pain I felt certainly did.
The hellborne pause their eating and look at me with bleary, moony eyes. I stare back, frozen. Every breath aches, and each one is torn from me in short, staccato bursts that threaten to send me to my knees.
And then I am on my knees, knocked forward by a blast of heat that scorches the air and thickens it with the smell of blood and brimstone. The hellborne scream in agony, clawing at their chests where tiny striations begin cracking the skin. Boiling poison seeps out, steaming in the cooler night air.
North appears behind me, shaken and gaunt, a bare hand outstretched. With a look of pain, of concentration, he makes a fist and the hellbornes’ screams abruptly end as they slump over. Dead.
I scramble away from North, hauling myself to my feet. He turns to me, magic still glowing in his fingertips, casting eerie shadows across his face.
“Wait,” he says.
I throw myself back through the trees, shouting for Bryn, voice cracking as I gag on the lingering stench of burnt flesh. The only pain that answers my calls is my own: Wherever she is, she’s alive and unharmed.
Even so, when she shouts my name, I pick up speed, angling through the trees before I find her, flat on her back, fighting against a boy pinning her down.
I tackle the boy. He protests, hands flying toward my face, my wrists, holding my dagger away from his skin. “No,” he says, panicked. “Wait!”
I draw back, confused. He’s not hellborne and he’s unarmed; he’s a child, barely older than Cadence, with round shoulders and a round face and shaggy hair.
“Kill him,” Bryn growls, rolling onto her stomach to see us. Her hair hangs in wild tangles around her shoulders; dirt is smeared across her cheek.
I’m pulled off the boy, momentarily suspended before my feet find purchase. A hand tightens against my shoulder but I wrench free, spinning to find North, crossbow in one hand, the other held open in peace.
“You’re all right,” he says softly. He reaches for me but I step out of range, holding my blade between us in warning. North dutifully takes a step back as well, widening our distance. “We’re not here to hurt you. My name is North and this is my apprentice, Tobek.”
The boy, Tobek, scrambles to his feet and falls behind North.
“What do you want?” Bryn asks, as I hold tighter to the dagger, bracing my weight, debating which one to strike first.
North and Tobek exchange glances. “That,” says North, “has a complicated answer.”
Eleven
NORTH LEADS US THROUGH THE woods, casting glances behind him every few feet, stopping to cock his head and listen. Tobek trails behind me, penning Bryn and myself between them, and I hold my dagger in an unrelenting grip. It was easier to trust a kind face in a crowd of infected monsters, but out here in the dark, after what I’ve just seen, I’m second-guessing myself and the faith I’ve placed in a stranger. A magician.
Trust no one, I think.
“We’re not far,” says North, crossbow half raised to his chest.
“Too far for no explanation,” says Bryn, as her cloak snags on a rock.
North watches her from over his shoulder. A branch snaps behind us, jarring as a gunshot. I flinch away from the sound, from the memory, and North’s eyes shift back to me, a slight furrow dividing his forehead. “My wagon is warded against the hellborne,” he says, turning. “It’s not far, and it is far safer than out here.”