A gust of icy wind blew past Oliver, so cold that it froze the moisture at the corners of his eyes and seared his left cheek. He stole a glance and saw the two leading Perytons freeze almost solid, ice cracking as they tried to free themselves. The light in their eyes extinguished as they died, and then the third charged through them and their bodies shattered into hideously frozen shards of wing and flesh.
Frost carved himself a shape out of the air. The last Peryton charged at him, antlers down.
The winter man let him come.
The Peryton’s antlers punched through the ice of his torso, shattering his body. Frost screamed in pain, and a burst of white, icy mist that might have been the essence of his spirit exploded around him in a cloud. Shuddering and thrashing, his upper body stuck to the Peryton’s antlers, Frost gripped the creature’s head with one hand and he raised the other. His fingers lengthened to foot-long icicles and he drove them into the side of the Peryton’s head with a final cry.
The Hunter fell dead on the floor of the chamber.
Oliver parried the dagger thrust of the nearest soldier, twisted, and drove his elbow into the Atlantean’s gut. He spun and swung the Sword of Hunyadi and the magnificently sharp blade separated the man’s head from his body with a clean, swift cut, showering greenish-black blood onto the floor, where it froze into a puddle of ice.
Across from him, a streak of copper-red darted through the air and he glimpsed Kitsune, the fox, tearing the throat out of another Atlantean.
Julianna defended herself from a soldier, but only barely. With a cry of anguish, Collette drove her stolen sword through the soldier’s back, the point erupting from his chest and spattering Julianna with his blood.
They and Kitsune would have to take care of themselves for the moment.
Ty’Lis sat grinning in his chair.
On the floor, pieces of the winter man had begun to melt, but a cold wind eddied around them and some of the largest shards disintegrated into snow and began to whip up into the air.
The black light that pulsed around the sorcerer flashed once and Ty’Lis stood. He held his hands out, palms down, and like fire the bruise-black light spread, enveloping what remained of Frost. The wind died, the snowflakes frozen in place, neither falling nor drifting.
Frost might not be dead yet, but Ty’Lis was about to put an end to his legend forever.
Oliver raised the Sword of Hunyadi. Questions of his own heritage raced through his mind as he ran toward the sorcerer. He screamed as he lunged and thrust the blade at the Atlantean’s chest. It shook in his grip as it pierced muscle and flesh and cracked bone.
Ty’Lis screamed and staggered back with the force of the attack. Oliver lifted his boot and kicked the sorcerer’s body off of his blade, then raised the Sword of Hunyadi again. Ty’Lis fell to his knees and Oliver brought the blade down with a strength and savagery he would never have guessed he possessed. As though it were an axe, he hacked downward with it and cleaved the sorcerer’s skull in two. It wedged in bone, and this time, as the corpse fell, he let the grip of the sword slip from his hands, lodged in the dead man’s head.
“Oliver!” Kitsune screamed. She had taken the form of a woman again. “What have you done?”
He blinked and stepped back.
The first thing he noticed was that the black aura still surrounded the shattered fragments of the winter man. The gusting wind and the snow and the broken pieces of Frost’s head were still suspended there as though frozen in time.
But the black umbilical of that sorcery did not stretch to the corpse that lay before Oliver.
It was attached to the man in the other chair, to the fingers of King Mahacuhta.
Yet even as Oliver saw this, the image of the man shimmered and the chains that had pulsed with magic vanished as though they had never been there. Instead, those same chains gleamed around the corpse that lay at Oliver’s feet. Now they too faded, even as the body seemed to shift, the flesh running like hot wax.
His sword, the Sword of Hunyadi, was lodged in the cloven skull of the king.
Ty’Lis sat in the king’s chair in his lush crimson robes, grinning and unharmed.
“No,” Oliver whispered.
“I do so love my puppets,” Ty’Lis murmured, as if to himself.
The door to the king’s bedroom crashed open and more Atlantean soldiers thundered into the antechamber. Shouts came from out in the corridor and more soldiers-the king’s own guard-appeared, herding into the room, angry and brutal.
Collette had already been caught, held by a pair of Atlanteans. Julianna stood in a corner, sword raised, but she had no hope as they gathered round her.
“Murder!” Ty’Lis cried, voice shrill as he leaped to his feet. “They’ve slain the king! Arrest them!”
Kitsune and Oliver stared at one another across the room. For a moment her eyes were full of love and sadness and regret. He saw it all, just as he saw all of those emotions drain from her. The fox-woman reached out and touched the fabric of the Veil, the air at her fingertips shimmered and opened, and she went to step through.
“Wait!” Julianna shouted. “You can’t leave without us!”
Oliver called to her to stop, but Julianna clashed swords with the guard in front of her, then kept going forward. She knocked him down and let go of her blade, skirting around the fallen man even as he tried to grab her long legs. Julianna dodged the hands of two other guards and reached for Kitsune.
She could not pass through the Veil. Julianna was one of the Lost Ones. With her in tow, Kitsune would never have been able to escape.
Even so, Oliver flinched as Kitsune struck her with the back of her hand, splitting Julianna’s lip and staining her own knuckles with blood.
Oliver called her name.
Julianna’s name.
Kitsune sneered at him, eyes cold. She stepped through the Veil, the air shimmered and closed, and she was gone.
Oliver stood staring mutely at the place where she had been as the king’s guard surrounded him. His hands flexed instinctively, but fighting now would be suicide and mean death for Collette and Julianna. They were all disarmed.
They were prisoners.
Ty’Lis strode toward Oliver, picking his way delicately around the dead guards and shattered fragments of frozen Perytons. The aura no longer surrounded him, but it pulsed now around what remained of Frost, and Oliver did not know if that sorcery was his prison or his final destruction.
“Bascombe,” Ty’Lis said, glancing from Oliver to Collette, ignoring Julianna completely. He leaned in toward Oliver and his voice lowered to a whisper. “Legend-Born.”
Oliver gritted his teeth and shook his head. “I don’t even know what that means.”
Ty’Lis blinked and glanced at him. “No? Truly? None of your myth friends ever told you?”
Unwilling to play along, Oliver looked away, staring instead at Julianna and then at Collette, trying to assure them that everything would be all right. Somehow.
“You and your sister, boy, you’re half of this world and half of that. An uncommon breed, and an unwelcome one.”
Collette screamed at him, “You hideous freak! What the fuck are you talking about?”
Ty’Lis ran his fingers over the braids of his beard. “Idiot girl. You haven’t an inkling, have you?” And now he whispered so that only Oliver could hear, so that none of the soldiers, Atlantean or Yucatazcan, could make out a word.
“We made the Veil to separate the ordinary from the legendary. From time to time, couplings between Borderkind and humans have produced creatures that are both. You are the opposite of the Veil in every way, anathema to the magic used to create it. The stories the Lost Ones tell say that one day a Legend-Born will tear the Veil down, reuniting the two worlds, so that at last they can all go home again.”
Ty’Lis pressed his forehead to Oliver’s, heat pulsing on the sorcerer’s clammy skin, and stared into his eyes.