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A pattern emerged, once I looked for it.
I slipped out of my shadows to report to the captain, who was sheltering behind a broken door propped between two trees. “Captain Tira! All of their musket fire is coming from the western corner. That means the eastern gate and the house are where the cold mages stand.”
“Of course it is,” shouted the captain. It was hard to hear her even though I could have reached out to touch her. “Do you see that reflection of light in the tower window? It’s a spyglass. They’re directing their forces from up in the tower.”
A body fell not ten strides from me. A cloud of wasps swirled over the corpse, but there were no wasps, only grit in my eyes.
A man ran up from the outer gate and crouched beside Captain Tira. I pulled the shadows around me just in time, as I realized it was Drake. He did not notice me. His lean face shone as pale as if he never got any sun, but I thought it was just that he was sweating. His blue eyes were so bright they gleamed like polished gems on the edge of burning.
“There are four cold mages,” he shouted, already hoarse as he struggled to be heard above the din. “Three in the tower and one at the carriage gate. I will burn the carriage gate using the one at the gate as my catch-fire. I’ll also set the roofs of the stables on fire. You’ll have to move fast to break through once I do, or their arrows will kill you regardless.”
“Why did your mages not set fire to the stables before this?” the captain asked.
“They’re young and inexperienced,” said Drake. “Also, there’s a mage in the tower who is the strongest mage I’ve ever touched. He’s the one we must defeat. His reach covers all but that one corner of the enclosure, where they’ve focused their muskets. Do you see?”
“Yes, I already know.” Captain Tira smiled as to herself. “Very well, Drake. At your signal, we’ll advance. You rid us of the cold mages, and we’ll kill the officers.”
She lifted a hand to give the command for forward, just as she nodded toward where she had last seen me. Thus was I given my orders: Kill the officers.
Drummers beat the roll of advance. A cadre of Amazons shielded Drake as the line pressed forward pace by pace through the trees into withering flights of arrows and the sting of musket balls. I could hear nothing but the shattering thunder of rifles around me. After an eternity we had made it halfway along the trees.
In my veil of shadows, the path I crept seemed to weave in and out of the interstices that bind the world. Threads stitch the world together. Every substance, solid or liquid or air, moves with the quivering resonance of a struck bell. I saw with altered eyes: Behind the closed carriage gates lay the bright well of a cold mage.
Rifles cracked in my ear. Beside me an Amazon collapsed, bleeding into the dirt. I flung myself down to use the fallen woman as a shield, but I had to roll away quickly when her body writhed and glowed. Drake was pouring the backlash of his magic into the wounded.
The carriage gates burst into fire so bright that its light speared into the sky. In answer a wash of ice slumped over all, and the flames died. I was close enough that my sword bloomed, so I twisted its hilt and drew the blade out of the spirit world.
Fresh fire tore into the roof of the stables as Drake poured the backlash into the mage at the gate. The magister flared like a candle, too weak to channel so much power, and his light snuffed out: He was dead. Within a fire blazing with doubled force, the carriage gate was consumed. This time, when the fire was killed by cold magic, the damage was already done, the gate demolished.
With a shout the Amazons pressed through the smoking ruins of the gate. The sound of a desperate melee rang on the air, groans and shouts and bayonets striking and the clatter and thunk of crossbows and the incessant fire of rifles. Just as I reached the gate, a hammer of cold killed every rifle in the orchard mid-fire and doused the flames on every roof. Still in shadow, I plunged through the charred planks and beams of the gate. The dead cold mage lay twisted in the wreckage, smoke pooling in his open mouth: He was not Vai.
I stared across a gravel-paved courtyard churned with smoke and bodies. A rifle cracked, and a man in Tarrant green who had taken cover in a stone arch went down as blood sprayed his head. A snarling cat as insubstantial as darkness clawed the bright spark of his soul out of his chest. A wolf sewn of mist leaped upon a woman who had a bayonet in her gut and swallowed her unmoored soul.
As the skirmish boiled across the courtyard, spirit hunters nipped at the fallen.
The Wild Hunt rides on Hallows’ Eve, but its shadows linger all the year long: It is the Hunt that consumes the souls of the dying at the moment of death. There they prowled, my brothers and sisters, a glint of teeth in the smoke, a sliver of light on the wind. Because I stood with a foot anchored in each world, I could see the whole.
The Hunt does not take blood, only souls. For the Hunt itself is the gate through which the souls of the dead pass from the mortal world into the spirit world.
A bolt shot from the tower skimmed my hat’s feather, jostling the cap off. Even invisible, I was not immune to death. No one in the mortal world is immune.
I ran for the stone house, dodging and ducking. I had to reach the tower before Drake did. The ribbon of his fire weaving spun up into the tower to splash into the well of the cold mage who sheltered there. Whoever that cold mage was, he was immensely powerful, able to absorb every bit of the backlash that Drake channeled into him. In a burst of heat, flames skimmed along the roof of the stables and sheds as Drake wakened more fire.
The stronger the cold mage, the better for Drake!
The door to the stone house was shut tight. Window slits gave cover for defensive shooting. A bolt loosed from within kissed my hair, just missing my ear. I slammed up against the wall of the house, now inside their range. How to get in?
The door burst into searing flames that chewed through it with such ferocity I had to retreat from its billowing heat. Men shouted inside, but not in panic. They sounded like soldiers sure of their strength and their good defensive position. In the courtyard and stables and orchard the battle raged on, a chaotic ferment of blood, noise, panic, and determination. Half the roofs in the compound were on fire.
A rising breath of cold magic warned me. I dropped to my knees.
Cold hammered down. Every soldier in the courtyard hit the ground as if felled by an axe blow. Where Drake was I did not know, but all the fires went out. The door of the stone house opened, half fallen off its hinges. Soldiers poured out. So intent were they on their foes that one stumbled over my back, knocking me sideways without even noticing I was a stone in their path. I dodged into the house as, behind me, the Amazons tried to rise before they got cut down.
I could not look back. I had my orders.
A Tarrant captain stood by an old-fashioned brick fireplace. He had a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.
“The officers wear feathers in their caps. Aim for them,” he said to his soldiers, who were standing calm and collected at the window slits leveling their crossbows.
