The temperature was dropping. She couldn’t stay here.
She walked into the woods, to where she’d abandoned the wood she’d gathered. She brought it a little further in, thinking vaguely about bloodwyrms, but her heart was so full and suffocating that she could hardly think straight about anything at all. She built up a small fire – it took her ages, her own flint kit unfamiliar in her hands, having only seen it done but never having done it herself, each frustrating strike on the flint stone bringing her near again to tears.
One thing at a time, she told herself.
Once the fire was going she dug through her pack. She should eat. But her stomach was churning.
Slewfoot.
She hummed the warming tune so her cheese would not be ice. She bit into it and gagged at the briny taste, but forced herself to swallow it down.
She brought her hand to her belt, realizing she still had the little dagger Mallow had leant her. Perhaps he would come back. Surely he’d want to come back for it.
Surely he’d want to come back for her.
The Dawn Litany shuddered in her lungs.
Fold the spine. Sink the weight.
She curled up in her bedroll, feeding the fire a few branches before burrowing deeper.
Give no name to pain.
There was no name for this pain. How could she name a hurt so full? It wasn’t a void, like the thing she’d felt beneath her family’s shrine. It wasn’t the pain of knowing Elder Tanel was not attending her death. It wasn’t even the pain of the Brighthand’s sword to her throat. In all of those she’d resigned herself. She’d expected to die.
But this wasn’t death. It was some other thing, some greater nameless ending.
Give no shape to want.
The shape of her want was Mallow. His hand in hers, his voice whispered in her ear as he guided her, his laugh, the shape of his mouth when it met her own. The wanting was shapeful, impossible to make shapeless.
Hold nothing. Cling to nothing.
That she could do. There was no one to be held. She was alone.
Cast the eyes inward. Cast the tone downward.
She pressed her hand to her belt pouch, where the Starbloom lay close to hand. What would Mallow do now, without her and without the bloom? If he meant to kill the Underserpent, he’d have a hard time without the Starbloom.
What would she do, without him?
By some miracle, the darkness descended, and sleep came with it.
It was nearly dawn when some sound split her sleep in two.
It began with a shiver under the snow. A sound so low it might have been the wind, until the ground itself exhaled. The air turned wet and metallic. The faint, sickly scent of blood rose from the drifts.
Lain stiffened, ears raised. She got to her feet at once. The wyrm hum she’d carried since the grove twisted, wrong now, distorted into something hungrier.
She crept toward the sound, as quiet as she could be in the near darkness.
The first one broke the snow less than ten paces away from her place in the woods. It rose like a nightmare dragging itself from a mind: black feathers latticed with frost, scales gleaming oil-slick beneath the down. Its face was a ruin of bone and teeth, its breath steaming. Another shape followed. A third.
Bloodwyrms. Drawn by the scent of death.
They circled the fallen men, shuffling forward on clawed forelimbs. The air filled with the wet sounds of tearing. The snow darkened.
Lain stumbled backward, the crunch of her hooves impossibly loud. One of the creatures lifted its cat-like head. Its nostrils flared, and it shrieked, a sound like iron screaming. The others turned at once.
They came for her.
Freeze.
They were close, closer, she could see the roped saliva oozing from their jaws –
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
With all the force she could muster she fought that frightened animal inside her and ran.
Branches whipped her shoulders, snow blinding her eyes. The forest blurred into a rush of white and black. The nearest wyrm bounded after her, a blur of muscle and feathers, claws gouging the earth.
A heartbeat later it rammed its face against her back. The impact sent her face first to the gorund. Ice tore her palms. Pain seared through her leg as teeth closed around her shank. She screamed, kicking, rolling to face it, feeling the hot rush of blood soak through her wool. The creature’s breath reeked of rot and iron and burnt meat.
She scrabbled for the pouch at her side, digging into it – and struck one of the sigil scales gifted by Soryn. She wrenched it free and thrust it toward the beast.
The wyrm reared back with a shriek, smoke rising from the place where the sigil’s edge touched its snout. The stench of burning flesh filled the air. It hissed, backing away, feathered mane mantling.
Lain lurched to her hooves, clutching the sigil like a torch before her. She staggered deeper into the forest, hopping on her wounded leg, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. The trees thickened, but the creature followed, its body a blur between the trunks, circling, readying for another strike.
She turned, gasping. There was nowhere to run.
She tugged her bell from the bandolier and gave one ring.
Somewhere below her, a wyrm turned its weary head. She opened her mouth to sing.
Sleep no longer, heart of stone,
Stir the veins that bind the bone.
Wake, O wyrm beneath the deep,
Shake the world from holy sleep.
The wyrm shrugged its shoulders. The hillside rippled. She could feel the creature turning below her, like a dog smoothing the spot below it so it could curl about itself once more.
One turn.
The bloodwyrms held fast to the earth, their claws splayed in confusion. Their bodies swayed, the trees shuddering, birds summoning cries of warning and erupting from the forest in terror.
Lain fled, swaying, limping from one moving tree to the next –
Two turns.
A lunging wyrm cried out in confusion and fear as the ridge slipped out from under it. The tree to Lain’s left toppled, and then slid down a ravine that hadn’t been there moments before, a ravine opened by the breaking of the earth. She slipped, reaching for roots and grabbing fast to the edge of the ravine as the tree vanished into the opening maw below her.
After a third and final turn, the wyrm below settled in again, chuffing in annoyance at having been woken. It closed its eyes.
The earth shuddered, then stilled.
Lain reached for a now exposed set of roots as she clung to the edge of the ravine, the earth around her ichor-yellow and wet. In the distance were the sounds of things still falling, trees and branches shaken loose and cracking as they fell to the ground. Her useless bleeding leg couldn’t brace against the slick wall, and her arms were too weak to pull her up.
Then a bloodwyrm peered over the ravine, spotted her, and snagged her in its jaws.
She screamed. It had her by the back of the cowl, dragging her back and back from the ravine’s edge.
She unsheathed the knife and jammed it into the creature's face.
It yowled like a mountain lion and tossed her. She rolled away from the ravine, striking a half-collapsed tree, its branches swaying dangerously above her. She stumbled to her hooves but her leg gave way, the wound bleeding profusely now. She sat up, backing away as the bloodwyrm rounded on her once more. She put her hands up, bracing for the blow –
A branch snapped and dropped onto the bloodwyrm.
It landed smack in the middle of the monster’s back, and the creature yowled and writhed beneath it, catlike in its extended claws, flailing against its wooden attacker. It opened its mouth wide – wide like a snake’s, its jaw unhinging, its cry expressive with pain despite the horror of it.
Lain backed further and further away, but the last bloodwyrm had been summoned by the call, and loped toward her, its serpentine back rolling, its feathers splayed in threat. It rounded on her, preparing to pounce –
Until a voice ripped through the air like a bell tone struck underwater.
The wyrms froze. Even the trapped bloodwyrm stilled, panting. They bowed their heads, bodies quivering in submission, their tails lashing behind them.
A tall, pale man stepped from the shadows. He was dressed in black from collar to boot. His hair was dark, his silver eyes catching the weak dawn light. The bloodwyrm slunk away at a gesture from his hand, vanishing into the trees as silently as it had come.
The man approached the trapped bloodwyrm. The creature moaned, its eyes turned to stare at the man, the part of its back not crushed beneath the branch arched as if kneeling.
The man said something in a language Lain did not know, but the tone was obvious; he was trying to sooth the beast. He knelt, brought a hand to the creature’s feline face, stroked several times.
Then he stood, and did something with his hands – several quick swipes of the air, intentional and practiced, paired with a series of words in that foreign tongue.
The bloodwyrm collapsed into black smoke, swaying gently in the air. The man gestured for it, and the smoke came to his hand, coiled about his palm and arm, then flooded into his nose and mouth. He breathed deeply in until the last bit of smoke vanished like a fire put out.
Lain swayed, clutching her leg. The snow around her was pink with blood.
The man gazed east, where the earth had opened at her call. Then he crossed the distance between them in three strides. He knelt beside her, his cloak billowing out like a protective shield, his expression gentle, his voice calm but concerned. “You’re hurt,” he said in her tongue.
She tried to speak, but her throat only managed a rasp.
He touched her calf lightly, fingers cool. “Be still.”
The words he whispered were like the ones she knew, but different, somehow, a language worn thin by time. The wound shimmered beneath his palm. That same black smoke that had once been the bloodwyrm coiled about her wound. Warmth spread up her leg, a strange, electric pulse that made her vision blur. The pain dulled, then vanished entirely.
When he lifted his hand, the gash was gone. Only the blood remained, dark against the white.
She stared at him, dizzy. “Who are you?”
He smiled faintly. “Rest, singer. You’re safe.”
The world tilted as if he’d cast a spell. He caught her before she hit the ground. The last thing she saw before the dark took her was his face above hers, serene and beautiful, haloed by the slow fall of snow.