“But-,” Sicard began.
“Trust me!”
“Trust her,” Julien insisted. “Do it.”
The bishop jogged back to where he'd left the iron brazier and began scooping up the last of his stock of herbs and incense. Julien trailed behind, his rapier drawn, watching the ongoing melee.
“Awake, awake, our little girl's awake!” Iruoch actually clapped his hands with glee as he bent over backward and stepped to the left, allowing both Renard's and Evrard's blades to pass harmlessly through the space he'd just vacated. “Oh, I'm so happy!” He straightened with impossible speed, a living catapult snapping upright, with one arm outstretched. The creature's palm slapped against Renard's wounded shoulder, sending him tumbling-and screaming-across the grass, leaving a serpentine trail of blood behind him.
“If you're not awake,” Iruoch continued, his voice dropping in mock disappointment, “you don't actually feel anything.” The fingers of his left hand twitched and flexed, parrying even the fastest and most ornate of Evrard's thrusts. “And that's no fun at all!”
The children booed at the very idea.
“Yep, I'm awake!” Widdershins scooped her rapier up from where it had fallen, slashed the air before her a time or two. “Not feeling anything, though. Why don't you come get me?” Even before the creature took a step, she had begun to fall back, retreating with a slow but steady pace, trusting Olgun to warn her if she was about to back into an obstacle of any sort.
“Aww…Step and dance and run away, thiefie doesn't want to play?” Iruoch took a pace toward her, a second, and then, “Thiefie thinks I'm really, really stupid.”
Rotating so swiftly that it should have neatly snapped his knees, Iruoch bounded back toward the others. Evrard took a desperate swing, but again caught nothing but the hem of the filthy coat. The creature landed beside Igraine, flinched away from the holy symbol, and then kicked her in the gut with the toe of his boot. The priestess doubled over, tumbling to the earth and spitting blood-tinged vomit.
Their trick with the tombstone, and the mass of injuries they'd inflicted, had left some enduring effect. His leap was less steady, his pace not quite as swift as Widdershins remembered it. Even so, as she broke into another run, ignoring the growing pain in her sides and the exhausted patina that lay across every one of Olgun's emotions, she knew that she could never reach the creature before he reached Julien and Sicard.
The volume of the bishop's incantation grew louder, the tension in the major's shoulders more obvious, but neither of them could do anything but press on, and hope.
Because she'd told them to. Because they trusted her.
“Olgun! Olgun, it has to be now!” She was gasping, forcing each word out between harsh breaths and pounding steps. “It has to be now!”
The god's power lashed outward, a whip of sheer, stubborn intent. Widdershins had never felt anything quite like it, and stumbled as she ran. She felt her god reach out, snagging the raw strands of the mystical link that were only beginning to form around Julien, the earliest stages of Sicard's spell. She felt him grasping the remnants of the prior spell that clung to her, the broken link that had joined her with the late and lamented Brother Ferrand; felt him sculpting it beneath his intangible touch, forcing it into a new form.
And she felt the two ends, of the two distinct but similar incomplete magics, touch and fuse into one.
Sicard could not have done it. Olgun could not have done it. But together, they forced the magics to meld. In perhaps a tenth the time it should have required, Widdershins and Julien were joined.
Again she felt a brief moment of disorientation, of overlapping memories and shared experiences, but it was gone half a heartbeat after it began. Widdershins had experienced the effect once already, and knew better how to work through it-and because she knew it, so, too, did Julien.
Iruoch was two steps away from him when Julien rose, faster than a striking serpent, and plunged his sword through Iruoch's throat.
It wasn't enough to kill the creature, not by far, but Iruoch stumbled to a sudden halt, gagging and coughing up rusty powder. He staggered back, pulling himself off the blade, hands clutching briefly at the wound.
Again Julien struck, the tip of his sword moving too swiftly even for Iruoch, and two of those spidery fingers tumbled through the air in an almost graceful arc to land, flopping and twitching, in the dust.
Everyone-Iruoch included-fell silent and stared at the thrashing digits for a moment, until they swiftly decomposed with a puff of grayish, peppermint-scented powder. Several of the beetles boring through the nearby soil abruptly metamorphosed into bright scarlet moths. They fluttered away on the summer breeze, their flight paths awkward and very, very confused.
Slowly, gradually, Iruoch turned to gawp at Julien. “Those were two of my favorites!”
“Um…” Julien sounded utterly at a loss. “I'm sorry?”
Iruoch lunged; the Guardsman parried. Back and forth, step and cross-step…And then, before the creature could even begin to wear his opponent down, Widdershins was there.
Finally, finally, it looked as though they might have a chance. The two of them shared not only in Olgun's gifts, as Widdershins and Ferrand had done, but in Julien's skill and experience in the Guard. Not only her speed, but his training, allowed them to block strokes that might otherwise have laid open their flesh; to stab through the tiniest openings in Iruoch's own defenses. Blood, both dusty and liquid, flew-but for the first time, there was far more of the former than the latter.
Renard and Evrard hovered around the edges, lunging when an opportunity presented itself but mostly keeping Iruoch from easily retreating out of the others' reach. Widdershins and Julien shared a grin-quite literally-at the thought that this might soon, finally, be over.
But again, Iruoch's implacability dashed those hopes even as they began to sprout. Yes, they pressed him hard, far harder than they had; yes, his injuries were many, slowing him down. Still, still they could not land any crippling or killing blows. Still all but the worst of his wounds knitted themselves closed in moments, the ragged edges interlacing with and grasping at each other. Widdershins tried every trick in her repertoire, from head-on dueling, to tumbles and twists that would shame an acrobat, to balancing on and bouncing off the tombstones and tree branches like a rubber ballet dancer. No technique worked better than any other.
The mortals verged on exhaustion, propped up only by the strength they borrowed from one another, or from Olgun. And the god, too, teetered on the edge of collapse, his energies coming more and more sporadically to even Widdershins's most urgent need.
And ultimately, as everyone knew they must, Widdershins and Olgun stumbled together once too often.
She'd just twirled aside from another of Iruoch's grabs, then kicked off with one foot against a drooping old tree in hopes of coming back at him before he was prepared. She twisted in the air, blade coming sharply down-and Iruoch sidestepped the blade and caught her. His injured hand wrapped her wrist, fingers and stumps digging into her flesh, holding her rapier at bay. The other closed around her neck.
“It always makes me a little sad,” he said conversationally, his shoulders leaning this way and that as he dodged her friends' attacks, “when I outgrow a playmate.”