The Huntress frowned.Through her glamour, she seemed no more threatening than an impatient child, yet he felt the ferocity roiling underneath.‘You do not understand, it seems,’ she said.‘You can neither save yourself nor the abomination you saw fit to unleash upon the world.’
‘She is only a child,’ Llewyn said, echoing Afanan, feeling the powerlessness of the words as they fell from his tongue.No world existed in which he convinced the Grey Lady to divert her course.Yet the longer they talked, the more time Damon and the others had to reach the camp, convince the troupe to dissolve, and spirit Siwan away to Fola.Who knew what use the sorceress would have for her.Llewyn trusted only that it would be better than death.‘Why not find a way to destroy the fiend without destroying her?’
‘Put on the ring,’ the Huntress snapped.With a flick like a damselfly’s wing, the white wood of her blade flattened and narrowed to a razor edge.
The dog stalked towards him, jowls peeled and hackles high.Llewyn took a slow step backwards.If he fled, little would stop the Huntress from finding Siwan.Yet if he stood and fought, he had no hope of survival, let alone victory.The Huntress had her rimewolf and whatever other powers the Grey Lady had granted her—at the very least, the same minor skill with magic that Llewyn had once possessed.
He cast about for anything he might turn to his advantage.A group had gathered at the edge of the nearby beer garden to watch, anticipating the drama of a duel.One of their number wore a farrier’s apron with a tack hammer hanging from his belt.
In the further corners of the kingdom, folks still made horseshoes from iron dug from the earth.Llewyn was sure the king and his druids conjured their own metal for such mundane uses, reserving raw, true iron for the steel of the swords and spears sent north to face down packs of rimewolves on the tundra of Cilbran.But there was a chance, however slim.
‘Looking for a place to run, Llewyn?’The Huntress sneered.‘There is nowhere in this world where she will not find you.If you cooperate, if you put on the ring, she may forgive enough to grant you a quick death.’
‘Is she so desperate to speak with me?’Llewyn said.There, a thin trickle of dark smoke rose from an open space on the other side of the beer garden.He began to circle, taking slow steps to put himself between the Huntress and the farrier’s shop.
‘She would have what is hers,’ the Huntress said.‘Even if only to destroy it.’
She put fingers to her lips and whistled.Her monstrous dog charged, its claws tearing divots in the earth, a growl burning in its throat.Llewyn swung his hammer in a rising arc, hoping to smash the beast’s jawbone.Too-intelligent eyes caught his motion.At the last moment, it shut its slavering maw and turned.The hammer slammed into the dog’s shoulder.It staggered back a step and screamed in pain and rage.The stink of burnt flesh filled the air and tufts of bloodied white fur, torn free of the rimewolf’s body and the reach of the Grey Lady’s glamour, clung to the chisel head of the hammer.
Llewyn turned and ran, hoping the blow would infuriate the beast and draw it after him.Hoping, too, that the Huntress would not simply abandon her pursuit of him in favour of Siwan, the greater prize.
The little gathering of bystanders in the beer garden shouted in alarm and scattered as the duel they had come to spectate threatened to engulf them.The rimewolf howled, which turned those shouts of alarm into screams of panic, then splintering wood as the beast barrelled through tables and chairs after Llewyn.
The rimewolf’s snarl grew louder as it gained on him.He zagged to the left, then whirled and lashed out again with the hammer.Too slow.The steel-hard plate of the monster’s forehead slammed into his middle, launching him a dozen paces.A crack and a sickening pop sounded from his torso as he landed and rolled to a stop between the beer garden and the farrier’s tent.Somehow, he had managed to keep a grip on his ghostwood blade, but his other hand sprawled empty beside him, the hammer lost from sight.
His breath came in an agonised wheeze as he struggled to his feet.A sudden certainty that these were his last moments settled into him, with the odd effect of dulling his pain.If it were only for his own sake, he might simply lie there, give up, let the rimewolf’s jaws or the Huntress’s blade trim the thread of his life.
But his life was not his own.Had not been for eight years.In his mind’s eye he saw Siwan, exhausted and afraid, nonetheless smiling at Damon’s antics as she tucked a paper flower into his hair.
The rimewolf, its glamour broken at last by the blows of his hammer, padded closer.A rumbling growl shook Llewyn’s aching bones.He took a deep breath—it came with pain—and hauled himself to his feet.His legs held.He had one more sprint in him, maybe, but if he turned and ran the rimewolf would tear out the back of his neck.His free arm hugged his aching side while the other brought up his ghostwood blade.The rimewolf snarled, hunched, readied to lunge.Behind it, the Huntress emerged from the beer garden.
‘A shame,’ she said, reaching into the folds of her skirt to withdraw a piece of linarite.‘I was hoping you’d put up a fight, not dash away.But I suppose once a coward starts to run, it’s hard to stop.This will hold you still.’
She cracked the gemstone.Llewyn dived backwards as the ground where he had been standing transformed to sucking mud.He rolled, hissing as pain raked his injured ribs, then found his feet in the same moment the rimewolf leapt.He lashed out awkwardly with his ghostwood blade, hoping to knock the monster’s charge aside.Instead, he only cut a thin furrow on its cheek.Again, it bowled him over.He heard a sharpsnapas he struck the earth, and the ache in his ribs blossomed into agony.
Groaning and dazed, he flailed to find his feet, every moment sending a fresh wash of pain up his flank.Every moment he held on, every breath he took—no matter how it knifed at his broken ribs—bought Siwan a bit more time to get away.
He saw her on the altar stone.‘Papa… Please…’
That was his purpose, now.The singular focus of his existence.Spend his pain to buy her one more moment, and then another.As many as he could before collapsing.
Using his blade as a cane, he levered himself to his feet.The rimewolf circled, laughter in its eyes and its wounded jowls open wide in a cruel smile.It might have lunged and ripped him apart with little difficulty, as battered as he was.This taunting was odd.
As was, he realised, the Huntress’s insistence that he put on the Grey Lady’s ring.
He had assumed they were after Siwan.They must be.The Grey Lady would not abide such a threat to her domain—and no matter how far Llewyn took Siwan from the forest, no matter if they fled to the depths of the deserts of Kar, the Grey Lady would always see the raven fiend and what it had become as a threat.
Then why had the Huntress not simply ignored him and gone after her true quarry?
He glanced over his shoulder.The farrier’s forge was only a few paces behind him.Discarded horseshoes lay in a pile, waiting to be cleaned and sold as charms against the fae.If he could get to the far side of that pile…
‘Last chance,’ the Huntress said.She now held a scrap of anatase, ready to be broken and unleash a spirit of flame.‘Put on the ring, or I start carving you up.If I cauterise the wounds, you might speak to the Lady with only one finger left.’
Galloping hooves sounded.The watch, Llewyn assumed, come to investigate reports of a duel in the festival grounds.Little good they would do against a gwyddien and a rimewolf, unless they came armed with raw iron.
‘Llewyn!’Afanan’s voice sent an icy shock through him.She appeared from behind the beer garden, mounted on Midnight, her black palfrey.The Huntress’s gaze snapped to her, startled, and Llewyn took advantage.He lumbered, gasping and wincing, towards the farrier’s forge.The rimewolf snarled and lunged after him, churning the earth.It was nearly upon him when he turned—screaming as pain shot up and down his side—flattened his ghostwood blade into a broad paddle, and struck at the pile of horseshoes, launching a handful at the beast’s open maw.
The rimewolf’s snarl became a whine as smoke poured from sizzling flesh.It shook its head, spat, and coughed, trying to dislodge a horseshoe that had hooked around its jowl.Llewyn wasted no time assessing the damage.The Huntress walked towards him, her pace steady and determined as the march of time, the anatase held tight between her fingers.
