18
Albric emerged from his tent to find a blanket of glistening whiteness laid over the world. It shone like a bridal mantle, newly made and unstained by sin. The air cut him with cold as he breathed, and yet that seemed a small blessing as well: each breath seemed to bring a measure of purity, and of penance.
It was fitting that his last morning should be so frostily pristine. It was a gift, really: a last note of grace from a goddess he had dishonored. He did not expect to see that winter sun set.
Albric ate lightly, savoring each bite of his last breakfast. He heated water for bitterpine tea and washed his face, reveling in those small rituals as well. Finally he allowed himself a sunrise prayer, spoken privately but no less fervently for that, for the first and last time on this journey.
Then he left his snow-covered camp and walked to the edge of the wood, and his perfect morning shattered.
A single trail of footsteps came from the walled town far below the forest: a long line that ran straight from Tarne Crossing to the woods where Severine waited. The trodden snow made a stark blue line across the expanse of dazzling white, dappled darker where each step had landed.
Near the tree line, yet far enough down the bare hill that it stood out like a bruise on fair skin, the snow was trampled in a wider circle and spattered crimson with blood. Scarlet drops sprayed in long shallow arcs across trampled snow and fresh alike. Whatever had bled there had done so badly, and violently, and in a way meant to draw eyes from a distance.
The challenge was too plain to mistake, and it was not the one he had planned.
Albric turned sharply and strode to the camp, careless whether he left any tracks of his own.
A fox slipped out of the snow-cloaked underbrush and trotted alongside him as he came back under the trees. It was a gaunt little animal, and it moved with a jerky stiffness that he knew too well. It was dead. Something had torn its throat out; the fox’s belly was brown with dried blood, and its head bounced obscenely over the gaping wound in its neck with every step it took. Its eyes were glassy and unblinking; he could not tell whether they were glazed by death or had simply frozen in a head no longer warmed by living blood.
Either way it was not a thing he cared to have shadowing his steps. Albric scowled at the fox and quickened his pace.
As he neared the camp he heard a child’s muffled sobs. The sound filled him with a rage that crushed out speech, breath, thought: everything but anger. This was not how it was supposed to be. If Severine had betrayed him …
She had. He saw that as soon as he came to the clearing.
A girl sat on the fallen tree, her face red from cold and crying. Mirri. Bitharn’s friend. She had clapped a hand over her own mouth to quiet her weeping, but tears trickled through her fingers and dripped from her nose. Blood smeared her cheek and her left sleeve, although Albric could see no wound grievous enough to account for all the blood he’d seen on the hillside.
Two of Severine’s ghoul-hounds circled the clearing like vultures wheeling around a dying calf. Their distended faces were drawn taut with hunger; they licked their fangs constantly, staring longingly at the child with empty, fog-filled eyes. But they came no closer than the fringe of trees, for stronger than their hunger was their fear of the Thorn.
Who was there, abruptly, watching him from the far side of the clearing. The dead fox heeled her like a hunting hound, its head lifted so that the grisly ruin of its throat was on full display.
“What have you done?” Albric demanded. He took a half step forward, one hand on his sword hilt. Immediately the ghoul-hounds moved to intercept him, but that did nothing to stop him. He welcomed the provocation; he wanted to fight. Albric slid his sword a handsbreadth from the scabbard, and the ghouls hissed at the sight of steel.
But they did not attack. Severine seemed determined to frustrate him, as ever.
“What I promised,” she answered. “No more than necessary.”
“I was to take the girl.” And keep her safe, he added silently. What else was he cursed to fail at today?
“She came out too early. You were still abed.” Severine shrugged. “The opportunity was there, and I saw no reason to leave it. The trap is perfectly set: How can the Burnt Knight see this poor wounded child, so cruelly stolen, and stay back?” Her voice sharpened to a mocking edge at the end, and the crystal of her false eye glittered.
“Why is she hurt? You said that wasn’t needed.”
“You said that wasn’t needed. I do not recall agreeing. Blood adds urgency, and haste makes fools of wise men. But you needn’t be so upset. She has only a scratch. The fox gave most of the blood.”
“Fine. It’s still damned stupid to have her sitting there while you’re fighting. Letting her run underfoot doesn’t help.”
“It will confuse and slow him.”
“It’ll confuse and slow me. You said you wanted my help. Do you or don’t you?”
Severine frowned minutely and folded her hands into the sleeves of her robe. “What do you propose?”
“Let me take her home. The trail’s laid: the Burnt Knight has to come. You don’t need her anymore. Once he follows her trail into the woods, you have him. I’ll take her back to town on a roundabout path, so there won’t be any steps leading back to ruin your little display on the hillside.”
“No.”
“Why not?” The question came out as a snarl. His patience was near snapping, and the ghoul-hounds tensed as if they could feel it. They shifted their weight forward, whining their hunger. They were close enough that he should have been able to smell their breath, like dogs’, but there was nothing. No breath, no life, no scent.
The Thornlady regarded him impassively, unmoved by his anger. “If you act too quickly, the townspeople will know she is safe. Certainly, if you take her home, her family must know. What reason would they have then to seek out the Burnt Knight? But if you wait, and go too late, you will still be there when he comes to me.”
“Then let me put her in my tent. He’ll still have to come and I won’t be far. You can put your own tent in the clearing if you want him to think she’s inside. Set the hounds to guard it.”
Severine’s lips drew into a bloodless line, but she nodded assent.
Albric didn’t wait for her to reconsider. He shouldered her ghoul-hounds aside and grabbed the little girl’s hand. Without a word he hauled Mirri to her feet and dragged her away from the Thornlady and her hungry, hideous pets.
Only when they were inside his tent, and well out of Severine’s view, did Albric look down and realize that he had taken the girl’s left hand, straining her injured arm. The child’s face was white as death and her eyes were dark with pain, but she hadn’t uttered a word of protest as she stumbled along at his side. Her hand felt like ice. He wondered how long she’d been sitting there, bleeding through that threadbare coat.
Albric let go of the hand at once. “I’m sorry,” he muttered gruffly. “Didn’t realize.”
Mirri didn’t reply. She shivered in her torn coat and began to suck her thumb.
The tent was just as chilly as the clearing outside, although it warmed quickly with two bodies in the cramped space. Albric bade the girl sit on his rumpled pallet and went out to scoop handfuls of snow into his kettle.
While the water melted over his cooking-lantern and slowly came to a boil, Albric tried to get the girl’s coat off so that he could examine the wound. Mirri sat there in a daze, neither helping nor resisting. Eventually he was able to tug the coat loose. She wore two thick woolen shirts beneath it. Both were soaked with blood from three narrow slashes on the left arm between elbow and shoulder. The cuts were from a ghoul-hound’s claws, and although they had not pierced the skin deeply through the layers of wool, there was a creeping discoloration in them already. Tendrils of bloodless ivory radiated through Mirri’s flesh from each of the scratches, and her arm was cold as a corpse’s.
Albric had lived his life by the sword. He knew what infection looked like, and he knew a small cut could kill the strongest man if it sickened with no Blessed nearby. He also knew that no wound, unless poisoned, should sicken so soon.
“How do you feel?” he asked the girl.
“Cold,” Mirri whispered back. Her lips seemed to be numb; she had difficulty shaping the word. The tent was warm, but she only shivered harder. “My arm is cold.”
“I’m going to wash the cuts to keep them clean,” Albric said, although he doubted that any water could do that. “It might sting a little. I’m sorry for that. Try to be brave.”
Mirri nodded and closed her eyes as he cut off her shirtsleeve. Her arm felt like marble. The hot water he swabbed over the cuts sent up steam when it touched her flesh. The girl kept shivering, but she never flinched, and Albric didn’t know if she could even feel the rag on her skin.
“Am I bait?” she mumbled while he worked.
The rag stilled on her arm. Over the child’s head, Albric frowned. He couldn’t lie, not to this girl who had suffered a morning of horror and a ghoul-poisoned wound because of his failed cleverness. But what else could he say? “You are. But not the way she thinks. You’re bait for her, little one, for the Thorn in all her pride and cruelty. Your friends will come, and she’ll stand to fight them, and then they’ll strike her dead.”
“Bitharn will shoot her full of arrows,” Mirri agreed, eyes closed.
Albric patted her shoulder awkwardly. He finished washing her arm and tied linen bandages around it. He was generous with the wrappings; he wouldn’t need the bandages for himself. After hanging the coat loosely over her shoulders, he moved back to the door flap but lingered there, reluctant to leave the tent’s small sanctuary.
“Why do you help her?” the child asked without opening her eyes.
He had no good answer for that. He was spared from offering a bad one by the harsh caw of a dead crow outside.
“I must go.” Albric drew on his gloves. He checked his sword and took up his shield; he expected to need nothing else. No armor today. “If you hear fighting, run. Straight back to your town. Go to the captain of the guard, or the town solaros, whoever you can find. Tell them what’s happening here. Once you’ve done that, don’t leave the town walls again, no matter what happens, until they return and tell you it’s safe.”
“Why do I have to run? Isn’t the Burnt Knight going to win?”
“Yes,” Albric said, forcing himself to sound certain. “But once the Thorn knows she’s losing, she may send her pets to kill you, so you’d best run as soon as the chance comes.” That part, he knew, was not a lie at all.
He didn’t wait for the child to nod. Either she understood or she was dead, and Albric had done what he could to tip fate’s scales toward the first. He hardened his heart against caring any further; it could no longer be his concern.
Ahead he glimpsed the sloped silhouette of the Thornlady’s tent through the haggard trees. There was more blood on the snow outside its door-flap; he wondered what poor unlucky beast had died for that. Two crows perched in the branches of the highest tree above the clearing, and their lifeless eyes sent a chill through him although they did not look down.
Severine was still standing where she’d been before; she didn’t seem to have moved at all. She turned her head as Albric approached, her face pale as a shade’s in her wide gray hood. No ghoul-hounds were in view.
“He is coming,” she said.
“I gathered that. Where are your pets?”
“I sent them to the edge of the wood, the better to bring him back here. He comes without his tracker, and I do not want him getting lost.”
“He came alone?” Albric rasped, too amazed to hide it.
“Unless he can hide his companions on a treeless field of fresh snow, yes.”
“Bloody light-blinded gods-cursed fool! What is he thinking?”
Severine said nothing. But she smiled.
IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR Sir Kelland to come. The Burnt Knight made no attempt at secrecy. He walked straight up the hill, following the trail they’d laid for him, his sun-blazoned surcoat and dark skin proclaiming his identity for anyone who cared to look. He carried his sword and shield and wore a hauberk and chausses of silvery chain, and he came alone.
If they’d had arrows they could have quilled him from the tree line. It was still early in the morning; the sun was to their backs and in the Burnt Knight’s eyes, dazzling him from the sky and the new-fallen snow. Shooting him down would have been child’s play. Mirri could have done it, even with her wounded arm.
Severine did not.
With a sense of creeping unease, Albric watched the Burnt Knight go beneath the leafless trees and out of his view for a while. The crows were still in the branches; the Thornlady could still watch his progress.
“Pull back,” Severine said moments later. “He is coming.”
“Why don’t you take him now?” Albric asked. What worse plan could she have for the man if she didn’t take the easy kill?
The Thornlady shrugged. “He is not as unguarded as he looks. In the open sun his goddess watches over him. But he will come to us in shadow … and I have other reasons to wait.” She slipped back through the underbrush, sliding over clutching brambles and crunching snow without a whisper.
Albric moved back more slowly, and more noisily. He was competent in the woods but hardly a Northmarchain tree-scout; it was not in him to do these things silently, even if he had been inclined to try. And he was not. He trampled leaves and cracked icy twigs as he retreated to the clearing, and took a brief pleasure in the tightening of the Thornlady’s lips when he arrived.
He saw the ghoul-hounds slip forward, encircling the maple’s clearing, as he and Severine retreated farther into the wood. There were more than he’d expected. Five, not two. A sixth loped up to join them as he watched. Then a seventh. She’d been killing more men besides the pilgrims to make that many. Albric wasn’t sure whether to be relieved that he wasn’t involved in those deaths or disgusted that he hadn’t had a chance to stop the slaughter.
“Thought you sent them after the baby,” he muttered as the ghoul-hounds came out. Three against one, the Burnt Knight might have been able to handle. Three against two, certainly, if Albric joined in. But seven to one was death for the one, even if he faced mortal men, and ghoul-hounds did not die as easily as that. Seven against two was not much better. Again he cursed Kelland for leaving his archer behind. What had possessed the man?
“It does not take so many ghaole to kill a child,” she whispered, the words barely audible over the wind through the branches. “And you barred me from killing the rest, did you not? So I kept most of my pets close by.”
A crashing through the trees kept Albric from making a reply. Sir Kelland came to the clearing, batting the brush aside with his shield. Snow filled the gaps in his chausses and dimmed the rays of the sunburst on his surcoat; if he lived through this morning, he’d have to spend hours polishing the rust out of his armor.
The knight hesitated upon seeing the tent in the empty clearing, but after a moment he came forward. Standing to the side of its fluttering flap, he eased it open with the tip of his sword. When no crossbow bolt came whistling out, he peered into the opening.
Whatever the Burnt Knight saw in there made him pull back with a grimace. “Thorn!” he bellowed. A shaft of sunlight flashed white as it struck the knight’s blade. “Come out! I know you are here. I can feel you. Come out!”
Severine stayed where she was, that odd little smile still on her lips. Her ghoul-hounds attacked.
They leapt from the trees with a showering of snow and sprang for him, claws outstretched and jagged teeth bared for the sweet warmth of living blood. They came from all sides, gaunt forms blurred by motion: two, three, four. The others stayed in hiding, Albric could not say why, but the four who came out were enough. More than enough. They ringed the Burnt Knight and crowded him from view, claws tearing, jaws gnashing.
His sword was moving before the first one was in reach. Kelland’s blade danced through a dizzying set of parries, low to high, left to right, though the ghoul-hounds’ claws were not close enough to be blocked. Albric wondered if the man was mad. Why waste energy moving when there was no enemy to be hurt? Did he think he could impress them? It was a fine display of skill, surely, but squandered on the hungry dead. No one could fight forever; all the knight was doing was tiring himself too soon.
Then the first ghoul flung itself at him, and Albric saw that he was wrong.
White-gold light burst from the air in a lattice drawn by the knight’s sword strokes. The net showed only where the ghaole sprang into it, fading into invisibility a handspan away, and it was woven in a pattern too dense for Albric’s eye to follow, but he saw that it was made up of gold threads and white ones, swirled around and around in a shimmering wall.
The lattice of white stopped and held the ghoul-hound. The gold seared into its flesh like holy fire. Hairless skin withered and burned, peeling away in curling sheets to show ropy pink muscle and bare bone. The ghoul-hound screamed, a sound that froze Albric’s marrow, and tore vengefully at the web that trapped it, but all that did was shear off its fingers against the fiery net, leaving the creature howling at the burned stumps of its hands as its talons thumped down to the snow.
Kelland set his back to the spell-woven wall and turned to meet the rest of his foes as they loped forward, cautious now. The wounded ghaole pulled itself away from the scorching net, blackened lines still smoldering across its face, and circled warily around it. When the ghoul-hound came free, the visible part of the web vanished again, and all of them approached uncertainly, not sure which angles of attack were safe.
The Burnt Knight did not wait for them to decide. He lunged forward, singling out the nearest ghoul to his left. Again and again he hacked at its side and shoulder, driving the creature farther to the left each time. He kept his shield up to catch the ghaole’s frantic claws, but let it shudder slightly with every raking blow. The ghoul-hound took the bait: it grabbed hold of the shield with both taloned hands and tried to rip it from the knight’s seemingly weak grip.
At once Kelland shoved the shield forward, unbalancing his attacker, who had expected him to resist. Stumbling backward, the ghaole crashed into the sunlit net, and there it burned.
The Burnt Knight spun smoothly away, trusting his goddess’ power to hold his enemy, and thrust his sword low into the gut of a ghoul who had thought to catch him distracted. He spoke a holy word and light flared from the buried blade, throwing the creature’s ribs into sharp relief: a cage of shadows that tried and failed to contain the radiance burning within them like a captured star. One by one the ghaole’s ribs shattered into flecks of bone cinders. It staggered back, vomiting light, and kept burning as it fell. An eyeblink later there was nothing left of it but a handful of charred bones and a toothy skull in a puddle of slush.
Kelland didn’t pause to watch. He was perfectly confident in his magic; he didn’t hesitate to turn his back on the downed ghaole to confront the two that had finally worked their way around the invisible wall.
He dispatched the nearer of the two with three swift strokes, forcing it to its knees and then sweeping off its head. The other he held at bay with his shield—only for an instant, but an instant was all it took for that one to be alone, and doomed.
The sight of it simultaneously humbled Albric and filled him with pride. Hope flowered in his breast, bright and hot as the flare of Celestia’s holy light. This was the power and the glory of the goddess whose faith he had forsaken. This was what it meant to be a righteous man. Standing witness to the Burnt Knight’s valor brought him to the brink of tears. How had he lost his way so badly? How had he forgotten? Why?
Beside him Severine pushed back her hood and strode forward. Albric followed, hesitant once more. Could he trust that the Thornlady had dealt with the child? If so, was he still worthy to stand beside the Burnt Knight? He drew his sword but held it loosely, the tip near dragging in the snow.
“An impressive display,” Severine said as she came to the clearing. The three surviving ghoul-hounds slunk alongside her. The ghaole trapped on Kelland’s wall shrieked and spasmed, unable to tear itself free. “I can see why my mistress wants you.”
“Then come and take me,” the Burnt Knight snarled. Sweat pearled on his deep brown skin and hung like dew from his braids, but he did not seem tired. He wrapped both hands around the hilt of his sun-marked sword and thrust its point into the earth. Between his fingers the golden pommel pulsed light with each beat of his heart, brighter each time: once, twice, and a third beat that filled the clearing with white radiance, dazzling as sunlight on snow. Albric could hardly bear to look up; it was like staring at the sun without blinking, a brilliance too great for mortal eyes to withstand.
He averted his eyes from the shining knight and looked to the ghoul-hounds instead. They were blistering in the sunlight, dying where they stood. Their pallid skin rose up in hissing welts, then burned to gray ash and blew off their flesh. Withered muscle scorched and crumbled as Celestia’s fury tore through their bodies. The ghaole flung up their hands to shield their eyes from the sun that had come down to burn them, and the Burnt Knight’s power scoured those hands to webs of bare white bone.
Even Severine gritted her teeth against the onslaught. Her good eye narrowed; her crystal one blazed in answer. “In good time. I might first wonder why you came alone.”
In the clearing, the wounded ghaole exploded into ash against the Burnt Knight’s wall of woven light. The others continued their halting advance, stooped forward as if marching against a punishing wind. More of their skin blew away with each labored step. One stuck its tongue out, panting, and the sunfire seared off the appendage so that it came flapping back behind the ghoul like a ribbon torn off in a breeze.
But Severine’s voice rose with iron implacability.
“I might wonder,” she said, “if you left your companion behind to protect her … or because you could not afford the distraction.” She made a small, vicious gesture with her maimed hand as she spoke. For the briefest instant the Burnt Knight hesitated, but then he jerked his sword up to parry some unseen blow. Had there been a real strike, it would have skittered to the left, deflected by his blade … and even as the thought came to him, Albric saw the ghaole in front of him, to Kelland’s left, shriek and double over. The long bones of its arms shattered, pebbling its hairless skin outward with thousands of fragments sent flying by the force of the break.
Severine did not seem to notice her spell’s misfire. “I might wonder,” she continued, inexorably, “whether you left her behind because you love her.”
The ghoul-hound with the broken arms collapsed in a plume of sparks and ash. Its fall seemed the only sound in the world. Now there were only two left. But Kelland’s light faltered for an instant following Severine’s words, and Albric felt the knight’s moment of doubt resonate through his bones, fatal as the tolling of a mourning bell. He saw the Thornlady smile.
A sudden coldness took hold of him, tracing down his back with chill fingers. What had he done? What had he said last night? He couldn’t quite remember, not the exact words, and cursed the drinking he’d done that day.
“I might even wonder,” Severine said—and now she was triumphant in her certainty—“whether you love her more than you love your goddess, and thus you have broken your oath.”
The light went out.
And Albric howled, a wordless cry of fear and hatred and fury at himself for waiting too long, and swung his sword two-handed at the Thornlady’s back.
Shadows flung his blade aside. They rose up from the folds of her robe and seized his steel with tendrils of darkness, too solid to be real, and turned his killing blow away more firmly than any shield. Albric staggered, thrown off balance. His foot skidded in the trampled snow and he went to one knee.
The Thornlady whirled as he struck, her pale face twisted by hatred. In her eye—her good eye, her real one—he saw a rage to match his own, and a glimmer of what might have been fear. She brought her maimed hand up like an angry cat drawing back a paw, although he was well out of her reach, and then she seemed to catch hold of herself.
“Kill him,” Severine spat, and turned back to her true prey.
The last ghoul-hounds leapt to her bidding. Both were badly hurt, their talons reduced to yellowed hooks on skeletal hands, but they did not slow like living men and they still had the strength to flense Albric’s flesh from his bones. And although the Burnt Knight had faced them and killed them with Celestia’s holy power, Albric had only steel in his hands, and the ghaole had no fear of that.
He sent up a prayer for Kelland, silent and heartfelt, and then they were upon him and his world shrank to a corner of a snowy glade with the fox’s blood spattered underfoot and the ashes of dead flesh blowing on the wind.
It was nothing like a Swordsday melee. In his youth Albric had faced off against four challengers, five, and bested them handily—but that was on flat-beaten ground, against living men using dulled blades and with nothing but pride at stake. Today he was fifteen years older, and he fought over slippery snow and skittering leaves, against inhuman creatures with claws and fangs and unholy quickness.
He did not fight for pride. Nor did he fight for his life; he had given that up long ago. He fought for Kelland’s, and Mirri’s. He fought for the hope of Leferic’s rule in Bulls’ March, and the chance his domain had to become, finally, something more than a poor border castle torn ragged by war.
For that, he had to win.
One of the ghoul-hounds raked at his throat. Albric dodged back and to the side, out of its reach, and brought his sword down in a razor-edged arc. Its arms had already been burnt to bone by the Celestian’s sunfire; Albric’s blade severed one at the wrist and left the other dangling by sinewed threads. The ghaole screamed, jerking the bloodless stumps away. Turning the momentum of his swing, Albric brought the sword around low, chopping into its thigh. The ghaole stumbled, falling, and his next blow took off its howling head.
His sidestep had brought him into the next one’s reach, though, and Albric couldn’t evade both at once. The second ghoul-hound battered past his shield and tore into his side; he felt, with a tingling sense of disbelief, its talons catch against his ribs and twist in deeper. It thrust its face in for a bite and he slammed his elbow into its nose, crunching the brittle dead cartilage and the top row of its teeth back into its face.
The ghoul never flinched, never wailed. Its tongue curled up under the ruins of its smashed nose, flecks of cartilage clinging to the swollen purple flesh, and wrapped around Albric’s arm. He swore—at least he thought he did; he couldn’t be sure of the words—and kicked at its knees, yanking his arm desperately to get free.
It wouldn’t let go. He couldn’t free his sword to get a clean strike. In the corner of his eye Albric saw a flare of darkness and then another of light, white and gold and white again, before that was swallowed in turn by a wash of fell radiance in the red-streaked pale color of new ivory or bloodied bone. The salt-copper stench of spilled blood filled the air, and he knew he’d be getting no help from that quarter.
If anything, the Burnt Knight seemed to need his help. Sir Kelland was backed almost to the tree line, and he was plainly exhausted. Blood darkened his surcoat in half a dozen places; every stroke of his sword came slower, and although Celestia’s holy fire still limned the blade, it was little more than a candleflame, faint as Albric’s own hopes.
Severine, too, was wounded … but not as badly. Not near as badly. A thin cut on her cheek wept red, and she was favoring her right side, but her own blade moved quick as thought. It was a weapon Albric had never seen before: a needle of gleaming ivory, more long knife than sword, that tapered to a wicked point and seemed to have no edge. The hilt of that strange blade was fused to her palm, and the twisted basket of its crossguard wrapped around her hand and wrist like the coils of a constricting snake. Every time her ivory sword drew blood, Severine grew stronger and the Burnt Knight weakened. Already his fire was dying.
Albric wanted to scream, but his numbed chest wouldn’t let him. The frigid paralysis was spreading. He couldn’t feel the side of the body where the ghaole’s claws had sunk in, and his legs were beginning to falter. Very soon he’d fall.
Fighting to keep his sword hilt clenched between the fingers of his trapped right hand, Albric fumbled out his hunting knife with the left. He hacked awkwardly at the ghaole’s tongue. Slowly the ropy muscle gave way. It clawed at him, but its closeness prevented the ghoul-hound from slashing with much force; all it could do was rake and scratch, shredding his clothes and ripping open more shallow wounds.
Albric couldn’t feel the blood. He couldn’t feel anything beyond cold and terror. Finally the ghaole’s tongue flapped loose from his arm, still licking at him but no longer attached to the creature’s mouth. Instead of jerking away from it as the ghoul expected—it had already set its claws to disembowel him if he did—Albric dropped his sword and grabbed the top of its head with his newly freed right hand, slashing at its throat with the knife. Dry skin and pink-webbed innards gave way much faster than the coiled tongue had; the ghaole was headless before it recovered from its surprise.
Swearing weakly, Albric picked its claws out of his sides. Some were too slippery with blood or sunk in too far for him to pull out, and he left those where they were, leaving the ghaole’s hand to dangle from his ribs like some enormous bony tick. He stooped to retrieve his sword and nearly fell face-first into the snow; bloodloss had him dizzy, and the ghaole’s touch had turned his limbs to unresponsive ice.
He’d never been so slow, so useless, in his life. But he couldn’t give in yet. There was one more thing he had to do.
He walked toward Severine.
She did not turn to see him coming. The Burnt Knight had fallen; his braids snaked dark across the snow and his sword lay at his fingertips, its fire gone. He was breathing, barely, with a shallow, stuttered quickness that spoke poorly of his chances. Severine hunched over the downed knight, chanting feverishly. Whatever she was doing, it completely absorbed her attention. Shadows danced around her like ebon flames, growing thicker by the moment.
With every step, Albric prayed, and for once his unworthy prayers were answered. She did not turn.
Albric plunged his sword into her back.
It was a killing blow; he knew that as soon as the steel bit in, and thanked Celestia for giving him the strength. He’d been afraid that the ghaole had weakened him too badly, or that he’d been wrong about what the Thornlady’s wounds meant. But he’d guessed correctly: the fact that Sir Kelland had been able to hurt her meant her shield of shadows was gone. He could hurt her. He could kill her.
Yet as his sword sank into the Thornlady’s robes, scraping past her spine, Albric felt it slide too quickly, too cleanly, as if it cleaved through something less substantial than flesh.
Severine released her chant in a choking gasp and turned toward him. Around her, the shadows continued their frenzied dance, leaping higher and higher until they swallowed the trees. She bared her reddened teeth in an expression that was as much snarl as smile. “You are an extraordinary fool.”
Yes, Albric tried to say. Yes, I was. But I made amends. He couldn’t make the words come. Icy bands constricted his chest; each breath came harder than the one before. He felt himself falling and leaned forward so that his dead weight would push the sword in deeper.
The shadows were whirling around him, blinding. They whipped through the air like war-banners caught in a windstorm. Gathering around the Thornlady and the fallen knight, the darkness rose and engulfed them both in its treacherous, shifting depths. An instant later the shadows fell away from a suddenly empty space and were ordinary once again, moving to no more than the wind.
Severine was gone. So was the knight. Blood turned the once-pristine snow to a wallow of red mud where they’d been.
Without the Thornlady’s body to hold it fixed, Albric’s sword slipped and clattered to the ground. He slumped down beside it, unable to stand on his useless, frozen legs.
The Burnt Knight’s sword had fallen nearby. Albric watched the snowflakes collect on its pommel, blotting out the golden sunburst. Blood darkened the blade’s silvery edge. He stared at the blood, hoping it was enough, that it meant she was dead, and let the darkness fill his sight until his eyelids grew heavy.
A scream pierced the stillness. Footsteps crunched through the snow; the blood in it was freezing hard again. A blurred shape fell to its knees beside him, and when he blinked through his exhaustion Albric saw that it was the Burnt Knight’s companion. Bitharn. She had her bow strung and her hair knotted back in a loose, half-finished braid. The buckles of her leather armor were unfastened on the sides; she had thrown it on and run. So foolish. So brave.
“Is she dead? Is … is he dead?” Bitharn picked up the knight’s sword, brushing off the snow. The tracks of tears were bright on her cheeks.
A great unseen weight pressed down on Albric’s chest. Breathing was like trying to suck air from the bottom of the sea. He could feel nothing but leaden heaviness in his limbs, and numbing cold everywhere. Still he struggled to speak.
“Don’t know,” he managed to croak.
“He promised me. He promised me. He said he wouldn’t fight alone.” The girl’s hands trembled on the hilt. She wiped away the melting flakes, closing the sunburst between her fingers.
“Not alone. I was here.” The words were unintelligible to his own ears. Albric could not tell if Bitharn understood him, but he had to try. “Shadows. Took them both. Hurt … hurt bad. Should have died.” He fought for another gasp of air. His ears were filled with the roar of rushing waves. “Mirri. In my tent. Ghouls got her. She’ll need help.”
Bitharn nodded, and Albric let go of the impossible effort of speech.
It was snowing again. He did not know when it had begun. A light fall, only: soft whiteness drifting from a pearl-gray sky. Snowflakes stuck to his eyelashes and fell on his eyes, and he did not have the strength to blink them away. The first ones melted; he could feel the warmth of them trickling down his face like tears.
Then they did not. He was already that cold.