Our eyes are locked for too long. He turns away first, focusing on the task at hand. I hug myself and soothe the chill bumps beneath my long sleeves. Turning to my basket, I retrieve my notes, open to a fresh page, and write, The Question of Souls, across the top of it. I needn’t worry about Maekallus looking over my shoulder, since he has already confessed his inability to read mortal script.
I write, What does one call a mysting with a soul? Do they exist?
What would one call a human with only part of a soul? And how large is each portion? How many times can my own soul be divided before there is nothing left?
Oddly, the old saying of my grandmother’s springs to mind. I’m not sure how pertinent it is, so I write it in small letters in the bottom corner of the page. What is a soul if not an extension of the heart?
My heart beats inside me still. Granted, Grandmother more than likely meant it metaphorically.
I don’t dwell on the philosophy of it long, for soon the summoning circle is soaked crimson. I close my book. The moment Maekallus completes the eight-pointed star, the circle flashes pale blue.
“I don’t suppose you brought a weapon for me?” he asks.
I eye the dagger beside me. I hadn’t considered it. I offer the silver weapon to him, but he shakes his head and points to the wood behind me as he backs away from the circle. “Best to hide.”
I hesitate, eyeing the edge of the glade. Snatching my basket, I rise and dart behind an old pine, clutching the dagger in my hand. My mind itches to experience whatever it is that’s about to happen. To document it. To know it. Maekallus grips the base of his horn and pulls on it for some reason. He tries twice more, pulling harder each time, until frustration paints his face red—or perhaps that’s the light of the setting sun. He backs away, out of my line of sight.
I crouch behind the tree, peering around its rough bark just enough to watch the circle.
For a long moment, nothing happens. Without woodland creatures to occupy this space, it is utterly silent. My gooseflesh returns. My Telling Stone turns bitterly cold beneath my fingers, and it speaks of so many mystings I can’t decipher a single one.
The circle glows again, and I cringe as a grinler emerges—the very kind of mysting that slaughtered my mother, uncaring for the life inside her belly. It’s a foul creature with a round, furry body and pointed tusks jutting from the bottom half of its jaw. The teeth in between are sharp as sickles, as are its long claws.
Grinlers travel in packs, but this one comes alone. It’s only in the glade a second before the circle flashes again and a mysting I’ve never beheld pushes through—a long, serpentine being. Several holes line either side of its head—ears?—and I hold my breath in macabre fascination, fearing it will hear me.
The grinler grunts, and the serpent rasps something foreign in response. Terror overpowers captivation as my imagination fills in their words. Who made this circle? Where are they? Are you hungry? I smell mortal flesh.
And then my eyes dart to the binding spell, the red bit of light that points directly to where Maekallus is hiding. I’ve grown so used to the ethereal magic I’d forgotten it was there. Surely these creatures can see it.
A chill consumes my body. My hand is glass around the Telling Stone. I feel my mind starting to blank, and I dig my nails into the pine tree to keep from slipping under. The cut on my hand warms as new blood seeps from it.
Another mysting ascends, then another. The fourth is a freblon, a humanoid mysting only hip high, just taller than the grinler. Its face is mutated and ugly, half man and half bovine. Its human arms end in bearlike hands. It’s naked, though thick fur curls about its thighs and genitalia.
As one, the mystings notice the beam—only the width of a hair, but to me it looks like a beacon—and turn toward Maekallus’s hiding spot.
I can’t hold my breath anymore. I try to let it seep out slowly, but my lungs are desperate for air. The serpent’s head snaps toward me.
Then I hear a sickening crunch, followed by a wet moan.
I force my shivering body to move so I can look out again. Maekallus jerks a sharpened stick from the body of the freblon. The grinler snarls and leaps. One of the creatures, the third to emerge, runs off into the forest, swift as a swallow. Maekallus grabs the hair at the back of the grinler’s head as the smaller mysting sinks its nasty teeth into his arm. My right hand stings with the sensation.
The serpent moves to strike—gods, anyone, help him!—and misses. Maekallus throws the grinler hard into a trunk, then stabs the serpent in the back of its head with his makeshift spear. Its tail touches the summoning circle. Its death, or perhaps Maekallus, activates the thing, and in a flash of blue, the serpent is gone.
Maekallus’s hoof slices through the spell, and the circle becomes dull, nothing more than a broken, bloody drawing on the ground.
Blood runs down his arm as he stalks to the grinler. He watches it for several long seconds before turning away. I know it’s dead. Not only because of Maekallus, but because the icy pain in my hand is receding, enough so that I can force my fingers open and let the stone drop from my palm. For now, the stone whispers only of the runaway mysting, who continues to distance itself from the glade, and Maekallus.
I’m shaking. I try to calm myself, but I cannot. I rub warmth back into my left hand, though it hurts my right to do so.
“Enna. There are no more.”
I keep massaging my fingers. Mutter a verse for protection against the supernatural.
“Enna.”
He’s standing at my tree. Reaches past my right hand—perhaps because of the newly bloodied bandage—and grabs my left. He pulls me to my feet with shocking strength, and releases me just as quickly.
“You’re freezing. I’ve never felt a living thing so cold.”
I pull my sleeve up over the bracelet. “I was . . . There were so many . . . I . . . You killed them. Thank you. But that one . . .”
Maekallus snorted. “Beuhgers are cowards. She won’t be back.”
Beuhger. So that was the word the Telling Stone murmured. I wonder what makes the mysting a she, but keep the question to myself. Maekallus studies the broken summoning circle, his red-tinted brows drawn, his tail writhing like a cat’s. A splotch of corruption blooms between his shoulder blades.
“Those mystings were close,” he says, “very close, to come up so quickly. The more that press against a portal, the harder it is to cross over.”
The statement reminds me of something similar my father said once, when I asked him about the War That Almost Was. “It’s difficult for large numbers on either side to cross over at once, and neither side can keep an occupying force. It’s what makes a war between realms so unfeasible.”
Maekallus nods. “There was someone who didn’t think so once.”
The words send new tremors across my shoulders. “Who?”
But Maekallus doesn’t hear me, or chooses not to. He’s watching the circle. I touch my Telling Stone, but there’s no danger. The beuhger must have descended elsewhere.
I eye the thin rivers of blood drying in the crook of his elbow. Coming to myself, I rush to the basket for the bandages I brought. I wet a cloth with water from a canteen and hurry to Maekallus’s side.
He grabs my forearm before I can administer to him. Holds me tightly, pulls me close. For a moment I think he intends to kiss me again, to relieve the disease spotting him, but instead he says, “It’s like they wanted to come here.” His voice is low, his eyes searching. “The same place the gobler was. Why?”