Suddenly, freezing air brushed her mouth like a kiss. She might have cried out and recoiled if she still had a living woman’s susceptibility to cold. Then the same breeze insinuated itself inside her hood to play around her ear.
“ ‘Restless wanderers who harry mortals for sport,’ ” whispered a husky feminine voice. “Perhaps I should continue the sport with you.”
“I’m no mortal,” Nyevarra whispered back. “In fact, if I’m perceiving you clearly, you and I are somewhat alike.”
“You flatter yourself. No woman of flesh and blood, even cold flesh and stolen blood, can claim to be more than a feeble mockery of me.”
“A ‘feeble mockery’ who pulled you to me like a fish on a line. Now that you’re here, I’d prefer to speak in terms of friendship and barter, as befits a witch treating with a spirit. But I’m prepared to resort to torment and compulsion if necessary.”
Beneath her robes, cold air slid over her skin like the elemental was assessing for itself just what punishments and coercions she might be capable of. Then, caressing Nyevarra’s ear again, she asked, “What do you want?”
“Yhelbruna, there, aims to summon a wind. I want to give her one and then make her sorry she asked.”
The spirit hesitated. “I’ve heard of Yhelbruna.”
“Whatever you’ve heard, surely she too is ‘feeble’ compared to a princess of Sky Home.”
“You mock me, but you’re right. Still, if I kill someone humans consider mighty, what will you give in return?”
“Soon, my sisters and I will rule Rashemen. Then I’ll sacrifice someone to you at the start of every tenday for a year.”
“I want them big and strong,” the spirit replied. “No children and no sick, old codgers either.”
“Done.”
The elemental rose into the air, and perhaps as a way of announcing itself, descended again as a screaming whirlwind that spun bits of snow and broken twigs around and around. Assuming they’d accomplished their purpose, the witches stopped chanting. Nyevarra grinned to see that even Yhelbruna was taken in.
“We thank you for answering our call,” the senior hathran said. “It’s urgent that we discover-”
The spirit gathered itself into the hazy, transparent shape of a floating woman. Suddenly, the eyes in its blur of a face flared red, and it struck at Yhelbruna with its open hand. The harmless-looking slap triggered another shriek of wind.
Caught by surprise, Yhelbruna still almostmanaged to speak a word of warding. But the elemental’s blow caught her and slammed her backward.
Other hathrans raised their wands and talismans and cried the opening words of spells of slaying and banishment. Spinning, the spirit raked them with its burning crimson gaze, and they froze in terror.
Ideally, the breathdrinker should then have gone after Yhelbruna without another instant of delay. But, succumbing to its urges in a way any vampire would recognize, it grabbed one of the paralyzed women, tore her brazen mask off, and kissed her.
The hathran flailed, struggling to break free, but not for long. It took her attacker only a few heartbeats to suck all the breath from her lungs.
Its thirst assuaged, the breathdrinker whirled back toward Yhelbruna, and Nyevarra was glad to see that the latter lay motionless on her back in a snowdrift. Apparently that initial blow had landed hard.
Amid another howl of wind, the breathdrinker sprang in Yhelbruna’s direction. Some of the other hathrans cried words of power to protect their fallen sister.
But those hathrans lacked Nyevarra’s extensive experience in battle, and when, still whispering, she rattled off a spell to counter their efforts, she finished ahead of them. Terror jolted them and in some cases made them recoil from the breathdrinker, while even those whose wills were strong stumbled over their incantations. Nyevarra could feel their half-made magic dissolve.
But as the breathdrinker plunged down at Yhelbruna, the hathran’s eyes popped open. Yhelbruna spoke a word of power and jabbed her staff at her foe.
A streamer of snow leaped up from the ground and in the process hardened from powder into ice. Pointed and straight, its base frozen to the ground, it jutted upward at the perfect angle to catch the elemental.
Stabbed through the torso, the breathdrinker slid partway down the icicle spear. Screaming in the way a wind screams, it thrashed but seemed unable to free itself. An ordinary spike wouldn’t have impaled a creature made only of air and malice, but the magic infusing this one accomplished what mere solid matter couldn’t.
Yhelbruna scrambled back from her foe. Its misty arm stretching, the breathdrinker struck another howling, openhanded blow. But the hathran did somethingto ward herself-even Nyevarra couldn’t tell what, though she felt power surge at the living witch’s behest-and the blast of air simply failed to find its target.
Chanting, Yhelbruna spun her staff and then jabbed with it. Darts of emerald light leaped from the head to riddle the spirit’s form, blinking out of existence as they hurtled through.
With another shriek, the breathdrinker resumed its whirlwind form as snow spiraled up from the earth. The frozen spike shattered, freeing it, and it gathered itself into its transparent, red-eyed feminine form once more.
Yhelbruna started reciting another spell and shifting her staff back and forth in time to the cadence. The breathdrinker shot forward and slapped.
The witch sidestepped, and once again, the spirit’s blow didn’t quite connect. But it did tear the staff from Yhelbruna’s hands, and Nyevarra grinned because that ought to be good enough. It should ruin the spell the hathran was attempting to cast, and with the enraged breathdrinker right on top of her, she didn’t have time for a second try.
Except that the loss of the staff didn’tspoil the casting. Yhelbruna didn’t stumble over the incantation, and she moved her empty hands like a weaver working at a loom, improvising a conclusion to the pattern the rod had begun.
Snow exploded up around the breathdrinker and, in that same instant, hardened into an enormous hand of ice. The clawed fingers grabbed the spirit and squeezed.
Shrieking, the breathdrinker became invisible. Perhaps that was an instinctive response, but the defense couldn’t help it when the hand already had it in its grasp.
Next, Nyevarra sensed the elemental trying to blow out through the cracks between the fingers, then seeking to become a whirlwind and shatter its prison, but the strength of Yhelbruna’s spell prevented either. The hand kept squeezing until the howling died, and the breathdrinker with it.
A hathran in a white unicorn mask hurried toward Yhelbruna. “Are you all right?” Mielikki’s servant asked.
“Yes.” Not even bothering to retrieve her staff, Yhelbruna strode past the other witch to the woman the spirit had drained of breath.
Kneeling, Yhelbruna held her hand in front of the fallen hathran’s nose and mouth and touched her fingertips to the side of her neck. Then she sighed and closed the corpse’s eyes. “Go to our mothers, Sister. Blessed be.”
As she rose again, the other witches clustered around. “What happened?” whined one of the younger ones.
“I don’t know,” Yhelbruna answered, and for once, a trace of distress compromised that steely voice. “I don’t understand why the wind was angry.”
If not for the need to keep up her impersonation, Nyevarra might have slumped and heaved a sigh of relief. It was regrettable that the breathdrinker hadn’t succeeded in putting an end to Yhelbruna, but if the hathran didn’t comprehend what had gone awry, then things were still under control.
“I don’t know why a number of things aren’t happening as they should or just seem off,” Yhelbruna continued, and already she was all cold strength once more. “But I’m going to find out.”