The Iron Knight

my palm, washing everything in pale blue light. I sent the ball ahead of us, lighting the way down the channel, where it bobbed and weaved and cast weird shadows over the bristling tunnel walls.

Grimalkin sniffed. “I do hope that does not attract anything,” he mused, watching the bobbing light as if it was a bird, just out of his reach. “We are not will-o’-the-wisps, trying to get creatures to follow us, after all. Perhaps you should put it out?”

“No.” I shook my head. “If something comes at us in here, I want to see it.”

“Hmm. I suppose not everyone can have a cat’s perfect night vision, but still …”

Puck snorted. “Yeah, your perfect kitty vision does us no good if you don’t warn us that something is coming once in a while. Poofing away doesn’t count. This way, we can at least have a heads-up.”

The cat thumped his tail. “Additionally, you can paint a neon sign over our heads that says, ‘Easy meal, follow the flashing lights.’”

“Or we could use you for bait….”

“Does anyone else hear that?” Ariella asked.

We froze, falling silent.

The Briars were never still, always rustling, slithering or creaking around us, but over the thorns and the sloshing of water against the branches, I could hear something else. A faint chittering noise, like claws clicking over wood. Getting closer …

The Wolf growled low in his chest, the fur along his spine beginning to rise. “Something is coming,” he rumbled right before Grimalkin vanished.

I drew my sword. “Puck, get some light back there now.”

Faery fire exploded overhead, a flash of emerald-green, lighting the passageway behind us. In the flare, hundreds of shiny, eight-legged creatures scuttled back from the sudden light. The tunnel was full of them, pale and bulbous, with bodies the size of melons and multiple thin legs. But their faces, elven and beautiful, stared down at us coldly, and they bared mouthfuls of curved black fangs.

“Spiders,” Puck groaned, and drew his knives as the Wolf’s growls turned into snarls. “Why does it always have to be spiders?”

“Get ready,” I muttered, drawing glamour to me in a cold cloud, feeling Puck do the same. “This could get messy.”

Hissing, the swarm attacked, dropping from the ceiling with muffled thumps, legs clicking as they scuttled over the deck. They were surprisingly quick, leaping at us with bared fangs, legs uncurling as they flew through the air.

I hurled a flurry of ice shards at the attacking swarm, killing several in mid-leap, and raised my sword as the rest came on. I cut a spider out of the air, ducked as another flew at my face and speared a third rushing at my leg. Ariella stood behind me, firing arrows into the swarm, and the Wolf roared as he bounded and spun, ripping spiders from his pelt and crushing them in his jaws. Puck, covered in black ichor, dodged the spiders that sprang at him and kicked the ones that got too close, sending them flying into the waters below.

“Aggressive little buggers, aren’t they?” he called, yanking a spider from his leg and hurling it over the railing. “Kinda like redcap spawn, only uglier.” He ducked as a spider flew overhead, hissing, only to be snapped out of the air by the Wolf. “Hey, prince, remember that time we stumbled into a hydra nest, just as all the eggs were hatching? I didn’t know hydras could lay up to sixty eggs at a time.”

I sliced two spider creatures from the air at once, black ichor splattering my face and neck. “Now’s really not the time to reminisce, Goodfellow.”

Puck yelped and cursed, slapping away a spider on his neck, his hand coming away stained with red. “I wasn’t reminiscing, ice-boy,” he snapped, angrily kicking the spider away. “Remember that cool little trick we did? I think we should do that now!”

The spiders’ numbers were increasing; I’d cut one down only to have four others come at me from all sides. They were everywhere now, crawling over the railing and skittering across the roof. Ariella and I stood back-to-back, protecting each other, and the Wolf was going berserk, bucking and rolling as spiders crawled all over him like monster ticks.

“Come on, prince! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten!”

I hadn’t forgotten. I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. It was risky and dangerous and would take a lot out of us both, but if the spiders kept coming, we might not have a choice.

“Ash!”

“All right!” I yelled back. “Let’s do it. Ari, stay close. Everyone else, take cover now!”

I stopped fighting for an instant, feeling several of the creatures land on me, their slender legs scuttling up my clothes. Ignoring them, I knelt and drove the point of my sword into the wooden floor.

There was a flash of blue, and ice spread out from my blade, covering everything. In an instant, it had coated the deck, the railings, the benches, even some of the spider things, freezing them in place. It covered the branches of the thorns around us and spread a thin sheet of ice over the water around the boat. Though the spider things continued to pour out of the brambles, dropping onto the deck, for a moment, there was absolute, frozen silence.

“Now,” Puck muttered, and I pulled up my blade.

The ice shattered. With the sound of breaking glass, it fractured into thousands of razor-sharp edges, glinting in the darkness. And at that instant, Puck unleashed the whirlwind.

With a roar of Summer glamour, Puck’s cyclone whipped through the thorns and surrounded the boat, shrieking and causing the small craft to lurch sideways. It picked up debris in its wake, branches, spider bodies and thousands of fractured ice shards, spinning them through the air with the force of a tornado. I grabbed Ariella and pulled her close as the Wolf hunkered down beside us, hunching his shoulders against the wind.

When the winds finally ceased, we were surrounded by twigs, branches, melting ice and spider parts, oozing over everything. Icicles stuck out of the benches and walls like crystal shrapnel, and black ichor was splattered everywhere.

“Yes!” Puck cheered as I sat down on the floor, leaning against the railing. “Home team, one—spiders, zero!”

Ariella looked at me with wide eyes. “I never saw you two do that before.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said tiredly. “Before we ever met. When Puck and I …” I trailed off, remembering the years when Robin Goodfellow and Prince Ash thought they could take on the world. Reckless and defiant, spurning the laws of the courts, they sought out new and greater challenges, always reaching for more, and got into more scrapes than anyone had a right to come out of alive. I shook my head, dissolving the memories. “It was a long time ago,” I finished.

“Regardless.” Grimalkin abruptly materialized, sitting on a bench with not a hair out of place, his tail curled around himself. “If the two of them have any more tricks like that, they would do well to remember them. Summer and Winter glamour, when used in conjunction instead of against each other, can be a powerful thing. Thankfully, neither of the courts has ever figured this out.”

The Wolf shook himself, spraying ichor and spider parts everywhere, making Grimalkin lay back his ears. “Magic and parlor tricks,” the Wolf snorted, wrinkling his muzzle, “will not get us to the End of the World.”

“Well, duh,” Puck shot back. “That’s why we’re on a boat.”

The Wolf gave him a sinister look, then stalked to the front of the boat, not caring about the spider parts scattered about the deck. For a moment, he stood there, sniffing the air, ears pricked forward for any hints of trouble. Finding none, he curled up in a relatively clean spot and closed his eyes, ignoring us all.

Ariella looked down at me, then at Puck, who was yawning and scrubbing the back of his head. “That took a lot of power, didn’t it?” she mused, and I didn’t argue. Releasing an explosion like that would leave anyone drained. Ariella sighed and shook her head. “Get some rest, the both of you,” she ordered. “Grim and I will take last watch.”

I DIDN’T THINK I WOULD SLEEP, but I dozed fretfully as the ferry made its way through the endless tangle of brambles. Despite assurances from Ariella and the Wolf that nothing followed us, I found it impossible to relax. Often, I would be jerked awake by a splash or a snapping of twigs somewhere in the thorns, and every once in a while the scream of some unfortunate creature would echo through the branches. Eventually, everyone gave up trying to rest and spent the journey in a constant and exhausting state of high alert. Except Grimalkin, who