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Like everyone else, Isobel stood rooted to the spot, mesmerized by the otherworldly battle taking place before her. At least until one of Reynolds’s blades sailed in her direction. It pierced the floor right next to her foot. She jumped, staggering back.
“Go!” he boomed.
Thinking she shouldn’t wait to see if he’d send the other one after her, she turned and sped pell-mell through the throng of hapless spectators. She shoved and nudged her way past countless empty stares from innumerable masks.
But where was she going?
The answer came when something caught her foot, and she tripped. She met the floor palms-first with a smack.
“Whoops. Need a hand?”
That voice. Isobel twisted around to find him hovering over her, the hollow, jagged portion of his lost arm held out to her. “Oh, wait,” Pinfeathers said, withdrawing the lacking appendage. “Already gave you one of those today, didn’t I?”
Isobel pushed up from the floor, ready to run. He shoved her down again with one foot. She fell with a sharp gasp of pain, and he flipped her to sprawl flat onto her back. A squall of fluttering appeared behind him, and one by one, the other Nocs took their true forms until, like a flock of ravenous vultures, they encircled her.
With one black boot, Pinfeathers trapped her outstretched arm against the floor. With his remaining hand, and to the delight of the other Nocs, he lifted something curved, sharp, and gleaming to rest on his shoulder. Isobel’s eyes widened at the sight of Reynolds’s cutlass, the one he’d thrown at her. Only now did she realize that he must have meant for her to take it, only now did she see how stupid she’d been for leaving it there, open for grabs.
“Well.” Pinfeathers sighed, twisting the blade, letting it catch the light. “You know what they say—eye for an eye and all that.”
The Nocs barked with raucous laughter.
“No!” She twisted at the waist, sending a fierce kick into Pinfeathers’s side. To her surprise, her aim landed true, and under the snug fabric of his jacket, she felt part of his torso cave in with an audible crunch. He roared at her, though more out of fury, it seemed, than from pain.
The other Nocs, their laughter transforming into sympathetic hisses, writhed and withered away from her, cringing and clutching into themselves like snakes.
“Hold her!” Pinfeathers ordered with a stern point of the cutlass. As one, the other Nocs obeyed. Cold clay hands fastened to her free arm, claws dug into her legs as they pinned her.
Isobel wrenched and thrashed beneath their grip, her gaze darting. But there was nothing she could grab, nothing to use as a weapon, no one who could help her.
She held her breath and shut her eyes, braced for the pain. In her mind, she groped through her thoughts and formed the image of a door. She thought of one that would take her to the woodlands. Make a way, Reynolds had said. She pictured the door behind her, right at her back, pressed against her the way the floor was now. With the hand held closest at her side, she felt with her fingertips for the doorknob in her imagination . . . and touched something solid.
She gasped, her eyes springing open.
In a split second, the cutlass came down, whistling as it divided the air in its path. Isobel clenched every muscle, ready to feel the severing of her arm from her body. She gripped the doorknob that it was now too late to turn. The blade rained down, and with a clank, she felt it—break?
Low whispers erupted from the Nocs, the sound of suspicion and fear. They released her and shrank back at once, unanimous in their recoil.
Isobel had to raise her head from the floor to look, to make sure that her mind hadn’t simply blocked the pain. It was the cutlass that lay broken and detached, though, and not any part of her. Her widened gaze shot immediately to Pinfeathers, who, still looming over her, raised the fractured hilt to his scrutiny.
“Hmm,” he said, “I was afraid that might be the case.”
Isobel took her chance. She grabbed the doorknob she’d made in the floor and twisted it. The ground beneath her swung free, and they toppled through.
Taken by surprise, Pinfeathers tumbled past her, while Isobel held tightly to the knob. She opened her mouth in a silent scream as her body jerked to a halt and she dangled above a world of ash, of withered leaves and black charcoal trees. She looked down between her feet in time to see Pinfeathers dispel into thick spirals of ink before he could shatter against the ground that lay no more than ten feet below.
It had worked, she realized, casting a quick glance around her. She was back! She’d made it to the woodlands.
The heads of the other Nocs appeared in a circle around the open door above her. Their whispers continued, and they turned their heads to look at one another, though not a one of them made even the slightest move to grab her.
Isobel’s grip on the doorknob began to slip. She let go and, prepared for the drop, landed squarely on her feet. Pinfeathers gathered himself once more into his humanoid form. He stood at a distance from her while other Nocs, morphing into birds, poured themselves through the open doorway. They lighted on the barren, swaying branches of the skeletal trees, watching, waiting.
Ash rained around them, heavy and thick enough to collect on the shoulders of Varen’s jacket. By now, Isobel’s hair had become completely unraveled, and it whipped about her face in a flurry of cold winds.
The purple sky overhead swirled and roiled like the eye of a hurricane. The door that hung open and suspended in the sky swung shut with the next gust of air. She peered through the trees, and there she saw another door. This one was narrower, familiar to her, and she knew it at once as the one she sought. It was almost, she dared to think, as if the door had been seeking her.
Or lying in wait.
As she approached, her eyes went to the two signs taped to the door’s surface. The words on the signs were written backward, but she didn’t need to read them to know what they said.
