I halt, my heart riotous, my thoughts rushing to the mystings from the night before. I grab a crown of oon berry from my basket and settle it over my head. My dress is washed in lavender. I fear it will not be enough.
I hurry toward the clearing, knowing I’ll never make it before I’m overtaken, and grab my Telling Stone and my dagger in slick hands. The stone is cold, so very cold, and it whispers the word I fear most.
Grinlers.
The irony of my ready lie strikes me enough to bring tears. Visiting my grandmother. My mother had been doing that very thing, with this very knife, when grinlers tore her apart. How utterly foolish I have become, to have treated the wildwood so casually.
I run.
The Telling Stone chills to the point where I must drop it or have a hole burned through my hand. I stumble on something, but don’t fall, and keep running. If I can just get to Maekallus. If I can just make it to the glade—
I hear them. It is not just the grunts and snorts once described to me by my grandmother, but a mad giggle, high pitched and half-swallowed. The quick, brushing steps of their feet startle two quail from a nearby thicket. The grinlers are closing in. Oh gods above, I can smell them. Subtle and sour, like decaying mushrooms.
Tears stream down my face. “Help!” I cry through my burning throat. Anyone. A hunter, Tennith, even a pack of wolves. The furry creatures appear between the trees, and I stop short, digging my toes into mud. I turn, but there are more charging toward me from behind, giggling and snorting, their marble eyes blazing with hunger, their clawed hands raised.
I will die just like she did.
Tears fall from my chin, and I lift my dagger in my bleeding, shaking hand. “Maekallus,” I whisper, my throat tight.
Help me.
The cut on Maekallus’s hand burns fiercely enough that he loses his grip on the branch and falls back to the earth, knocking his horn on the way down. Pain shoots up his tailbone and across his forehead. Cursing, he examines the bandage Enna tied around his palm, which is now mottled and sore from the black bruising of the mortal realm. Blood seeps through the gauze, two drops rolling down the curve of his wrist.
Within him, the fragments of her soul whirl, panicked.
He stands, ignoring the cut on his hand as he presses it against his chest.
And then a tugging, stronger even than that of the binding spell, jerks him south. He knows that feeling. It’s the same compulsion he felt upon first meeting Enna. It’s why he’d answered when she asked his name. Why he stupidly accepted those two gold medallions in exchange for killing the gobler.
This same force had been used to control Maekallus twenty years ago, in the War That Almost Was.
The urge is strong, and without thinking, he charges toward the south edge of the glade, then past it, to the binding spell’s limit.
The soul swirls. The urge pulls.
He takes another step. Then another.
The binding spell, still bright and implanted in his chest, doesn’t pull back. He would laugh, but the need propels him forward until he is running with his head down and horn pointed forward, deep into forest he doesn’t recognize, the uneven floor biting his softening hooves. Blood whips from the soaked bandage on his hand. Black corruption seeps over his hip, his abdomen.
He runs, not understanding how, but knowing it is her.
The grinlers are more intelligent than I ever gave them credit for. It’s no wonder my mother couldn’t escape them.
There are a dozen of them. They’ve surrounded me, blocking every escape—assuming I possessed the ability to outrun them. The beasts march forward like trained soldiers, leading with the left foot, holding out their razor-edged hands, creating an impenetrable fence. A few cringe at the oon berry, or maybe the lavender. No worry. They’ll start at my feet, discard my clothes, and save my head for last. They’ll eat me alive, too hungry to wait for my death, too monstrous to give me a swift end.
They hardly notice my silver dagger, even when I swipe toward them. I drop my basket and hold the blade with both hands. Point it at one, and then another. Maybe I can kill one before the others take me down. They’ll leap all at once, I’m sure of it, and . . . and . . .
I’m sorry, Papa.
I’ve never been so cold. I’m shaking all over. I pick one grinler, one that giggles louder than the rest, and point the dagger for the narrow, furry space between its eyes. I will . . . I will focus on that one, even when the others sink their teeth into my skin and chew through my muscle. Even when their bodies blind me—
I’m wrong—they don’t all strike at once. One attacks before the rest, vaulting over the space between us. My courage fails me. The knife drops to the ground, and so do I, arms over my head.
Just before the grinler strikes, a blur knocks it aside, sending it flying beyond the pack. I know instantly, even before I see the horn or the yellow eyes.
Maekallus.
Maekallus.
Maekallus.
He is swift, though weaponless. He grabs a grinler by its upper arm, lifts it, and slams it into another as a third jumps onto his back and rips into his blackening flesh with its claws. I cry out. The mystings have focused on him, save for one, which charges me.
I scream and fumble for my dagger. Help me!
And he is there, grabbing the demon by the head and twisting it until the cracking of its spine echoes against the silent trees. Two grinlers brutalize his back. One clings to his leg. Blood rivers down the side of his neck. Three more strike. He knocks one away, but the other two grab his arms. He cries out when one sinks its teeth into the blackened pit of his elbow, sending a splatter of blood across my face.
I’m frozen. So cold. So . . .
They’re going to kill him. Gods above, they’re going to kill him.
Every fiber of my broken soul screams at them to die, to leave, to stop.
A wave of ice washes through me, the lancing of a thousand needles, the sensation rushing outward from my left wrist—up my arm and down to the tips of my fingers.
The grinlers stop. Claws, teeth, the maddening giggles. They fall away from Maekallus, dripping with his blood. Ignoring their dead companions, and me, they look around for a moment, as though blind, and then rush off into the wildwood until the Telling Stone warms once again.
Maekallus drops to his knees, blood glistening against peach-and-black skin. A bubble of corruption rolls across his ribs, deflating near his shoulder.
My voice. Where is my voice? The Telling Stone has warmed, yet I tremble as if just pulled from the broken ice of a pond.
The red line of the binding spell shimmers through the carnage, pointing back toward the glade.
“M-Maekallus?”
His breath is wet and raspy. He looks up at me, blood flowing from his hairline over one of his eyes. His cheek turns black beneath it. “How?”
I reach out and touch the dark spot, then wipe the blood off his eyebrow with my thumb. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, new tears tracing the paths of the old. “You saved me. How? How are you here?”
He starts to shake his head, then winces. Hot blood pours from a deep gash on his shoulder. So many gashes. A network of them across his back. Blood and tar patter in droplets against the forest floor.