Chapter Forty-Nine
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I hadn’t expected to catch much sleep, lyin’ in the leaves without as much as a blanket, further discomforted by an empty stomach, but I opened my eyes to the gatherin’ light of dawn—and to a serious crick in my neck. As though I didn’t already hurt enough.
“Ow.”
“Ya snore.”
Louisa sat ten feet away, leanin’ against the trunk of a tree, peerin’ forlornly at a pile of kindlin’ ready to be fed more fuel. She must have sensed me lookin’ at the to-be fire.
“Collected the wood before I discovered I didn’t have a flint stone with me,” she said.
I smiled, rested my hand on the hilt of my sword lyin’ in front of my face. I’d never attempted the task—Selene or Morgan always seemed in competition to build the evenin’ fire, as though to prove somethin’ to the other. They are very competitive. The tic of majic woke within the steel of the blade and I imagined the kindlin’ afire.
A moment passed. And another, before a whiff of smoke rose from the dab of kindlin’. Another moment it burst into full flame.
Louisa grinned. “So, ya’re a wizard after all, are ya?”
I felt warmer, but not from the flickerin’ flame. I hate the way emotions flow from everyone around me, even critters, as though I intentionally draw them to me. It’s a violation of their—privacy. But it ain’t intentional.
I must learn how to control it.
Louisa rose and added ever-larger sticks to the fire. In mere seconds it helped push back the mornin’s gloom. I sat up, leaned over my crossed legs. The stretch actually seemed to help my achin’ hips. I stared into the yellow lickin’ off the wood. Smoke billowed.
“Don’t rightly know why we need a fire,” Louisa mumbled. “Not that chilly, and we don’t have so much as a pot to brew a cup of tea.”
Her depression pressed hard on my chest. No memories of her adult life had come to her through the night—but a few more, when she still lived on the plain. None to help make the memory of killin’ Blake’s friend fit in context with her confusion.
“They’ll come back,” I said.
She jerked a look at me. “Am I so obvious?”
I had to lie—which isn’t somethin’ I wanted to do. “Just imaginin’ how I’d feel if I woke up in the middle of a fight to the death without knowin’ how I got there, or why.”
She shook her head. “So are we gonna just sit here and blabber?”
I concentrated to form a heavy dark blanket, which I mentally laid over the flames—Not that I believed it would work. That was Selene’s thin’. I couldn’t believe he actually managed that trick either. But the flames and smoke folded to nothin’. My mouth hung open, as did Louisa’s. We both closed them together, and rose.
I stirred the blackened sticks to ensure no embers remained. Satisfied, I peered up into the ogre hen’s sad face. She motioned me to lead and I stumbled forward, strugglin’ with the buckle which bound the sword to my hip.
I figgered I followed the trail, but held back. There was nothin’ left for me to follow. I stopped after hikin’ less than ten minutes.
“What’s wrong?” Louisa asked.
“It’s gone. I can’t sense them.”
“Sense?” She shook her head. “Never mind. Ya can’t read the tracks? They’re clear as the freckles on yar face.”
My skin prickled. Hate my stinkin’ freckles. Freckles are for girls. “Then I’ll follow ya,” I said with anger I didn’t mean.
“Fine.” She took the lead at a jog.
Within fifteen minutes I had to beg her to slow down.
“So ya wizards aren’t as special as ya like to put on, eh?”
I sighed, glad a bit of humor replaced her earlier mood. “I’m hopin’ I come across that mare that threw me yesterday. I wouldn’t mind a drink or slice of cheese.”
“Ya’re quite the whiner, aren’t ya.”
I grinned with the tease. I could have been back in Morgan’s company. “I thought ya ogres were special when it came to huntin’?”
“Ya want me to hunt, or ya want to catch up with these folk who are sposed to be my great friends?”
“If ya’re so special, why can’t ya do both at the same time?”
“Do all humans have as sharp a tongue?” she asked.
“Ha.” Her—grin—hit me like a soft breeze.
I picked up the majic the instant she waved madly to shush. We stood like pillars, silent except for the sniff-sniff comin’ from her snout. The moments passed, and I had to take a breath.
She hunkered down, glanced back at me and whispered, “Good folk or bad?”
I had never considered whether I could discern one wizard’s majic from another’s. I concentrated, comparin’ what I knew of the auras of my three friends. The majic spiked.
“Uh oh.”
A glare a hundred times brighter than the sun blinded me. After what could have been an hour, or three days, I realized my body shook like a kite caught in a cyclone. After another day or week, my senses clarified. I lay flat on the ground—not so flat on my back, because spasms continued to shoot through my body. Arms and legs thrashed, my head bounded off the leaf-padded ground. My ears roared.
Shoutin’ penetrated the din after a moment, and I succeeded in blinkin’ away the blazin’ light, but the world remained over-bright, and grainy. A skull-crushin’ agony swept through my body, every muscle crampin’ into granite fists. A new screech, my own scream, replaced the dull roar in my ears. I was about fed up with all the pain. Thought the saddle was bad.
If this is what Louisa experienced, when she got blasted, ogre hens are as tough as the bulls.
A man stood over me, holdin’ a sword tip at my throat. The man’s other arm clung tightly to him, cocooned into a cape sliced up to form a sling. One side of his face puckered in red and orange blisters, a wound very much like the one centered in Louisa’s chest. The man’s lips moved, but I had no idea what the words meant. Not that they weren’t Standish. A fear closed off my air. Had I been stricken like Louisa, erasin’ even my memory of speech?
I remember Louisa.
Every fraction of a second, the agony ricochetin’ within my body ebbed a trifle. A trifle-bunch too slow. I gasped. Vision blurred again. I was gonna pass out. Finally air snuck back into my lungs from somewhere, and I drew in more greedily.
I searched for Louisa, which wasn’t easy to do, since liquid misery still coursed through my muscles, and the blade tip at my throat didn’t help.
She knelt over a human who lay splayed out on the ground. Her huge fist encircled his throat, but another human held a sword at her throat. A standoff. Both shouted, faces contorted in rage. But their words meant nothin’ to me either.
A new wave of relief flooded me. Muscles stopped jerkin’ of their own accord, and I closed my eyes. The distinct prick at my throat reminded me of the blade tip.
As though slapped in the side of the head, I flung open my eyes. I remembered Louisa—why I was in these woods. Realized two of the three men had to be the missin’ wizards from the manor. So my mind hadn’t been emptied as Louisa’s had. I took a deep, satisfyin’ gulp of air.
“Tell her to let him go!” the man standin’ over me shouted.
There was an indescribable desperation in the man’s voice, but I focused on the fact the words now made sense.
“Ya attacked us. Why shouldn’t she kill him?” I asked, my voice crackin’ like crumpled paper.
“Because my friend will kill her if she doesn’t, and I’ll skewer your throat,” the man said.
“Yar friend will still be dead,” I said, surprised at my own obstinacy. I think that’s the word I meant.
An ogre’s mirthless cackle blended with the ringin’ noise.
“You don’t care about your life?” the man asked, his voice calmin’.
“I care—” I had to swallow. “We have at least one of ya in bad straights. If she releases him, we have nothin’ to bargain with.”
“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” the man said.
I considered tellin’ him to take a short hop over a broad ravine. But somethin’ more reasonable came to mind. “And then Rutland and Nador will only have one wizard to deal with.”
“I told you he was the one with Rutland,” one of the men near Louisa said.
“That traitor,” my tormentor, Blister-face, said.
“He tried to convince ya of yar folly,” I said.
“Ah.” The man nodded as though hearin’ new information. “So you are the young one Selene found in the Range, eh?”
“Took ya an incredibly long time to figger that out,” I said.
“Can’t—breathe,” the man in Louisa’s clutch rasped.
“Cut the ogre’s throat,” Blister-face said.
“Nahhhhh,” the one in Louisa’s grasp screeched.
“She’ll not have the chance—”
“Nahhhhh,” the man screamed again.
“Won’t take much for me to snap his neck,” Louisa said. “Could do that easily before I die.”
“Lordy,” her man with the sword mumbled. “If this is the hen that idiot Blake dragged out of the Range, he mightily ticked her off. How’d you get away from him, anyway?”
“I killed ’im,” I said. Expected that to rile ’em. Instead, the two men with the air to spare, laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Never thought Blake had the brains to weigh down a gnat,” Blister-face said.
The other said, “The council will appreciate—”
The man flew forward and the air snapped with accompanyin’ groans of agony. I craned to see, but Blister-face pressed the sword tip deeper. The burn of blood bein’ drawn forced me to relax, which wasn’t too easy to do. The man loomin’ over me glared to the right. My eyes maybe bulged in disbelief.
Louisa spoke over a cutoff grunt. “Now it’s two to one in our favor.”
I couldn’t see, the way I was crushed into the leaves, but I assumed Louisa took care of the one, and now held the other.
“You’re bleeding pretty bad there, ogre. He got you good. I think I’ll just stand here until you bleed out.”
I gasped. Tried to find her, but every movement drew my captor’s blade deeper.
“That’ll take a long time, if ever,” Louisa mumbled. “Takin’ ya in, I’d suspect ya’ll pass out long before I do.”
No one said anythin’ for a moment. My aches lessened, perhaps allowin’ me to consider the grander issue at hand. Not that a desire to live wasn’t high on my list of thin’s to accomplish today. I swallowed hard as I formed the words for my counter threat.
“I sense Rutland comin’.”
Blister-face tilted his head as though listenin’. “Nonsense. I don’t bluff that easily.”
“Really. That’s my skill,” I said. “I can sense the majic of others.”
“We all do,” he scoffed.
“Not like I can.”
The man looked down at me for the first time in several minutes. I jerked from the image of the man plungin’ the blade into me. Whether it was just a consideration, plan, or a pre-sight, it thrust an anger as sharp as the blade into me. I closed my eyes and silently asked for Giba’s strength.
“Don’t,” the man shouted.
But a door to the ethereal slammed open and I welled with majic as I visualized the hilt of the man’s sword meltin’ in a smith’s forge. Blister-face screamed in agony and lurched away. I didn’t move for a moment, either frozen by muscles still unable to function from the bolt that struck me, or shock that the image I created on the fly, worked.
The man stumbled backward, eyes bulgin’, flingin’ his ‘good’ arm, tryin’ to let go of his sword. It finally came loose, flyin’ further into the forest, along with every inch of the man’s flesh, an inch deep, that had been in contact with the molten steel. He fell to his knees, his scream weakenin’ to a hiss. He vibrated in agony, watchin’ the blood pour down the exposed bones of his hand. He held his wrist in the hand already hung in a sling, ineffectively tryin’ to stanch the blood spillin’ into the pine needles.
Burnt flesh, somethin’ I hoped yesterday I’d never have to smell ever again, stung my nostrils. It musta been drivin’ Louisa nuts too. She stood facin’ Blister-face, one man danglin’ by the neck from her left hand, another in her right, hangin’ like chickens ready to be plucked for dinner. They gripped her forearms tryin’ to lessen the pressure against their throats. But she continued to expel air out her nose with a fugh, fugh, fugh. She faced me. Her tusks twitched up and down against her upper lip.
“Ahh,” I shrieked. “Ya are bleedin’.” A gash reached from just below her ear to the front of her throat.
She looked down at the blood flowin’ down her chest, saturatin’ what was left of her torched blouse. She blinked, as though strugglin’ to make the sight real to her.
~
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