head was tilted back at an impossible angle, but he shoved his head back onto his neck with a crack, and the protruding bone slowly pulled itself back into his chest as he gasped and shook and groaned. But then it was over, and he stood up straight, and lifted his sword.
Ivar screamed and hurled himself at the man, both enormous claws reaching out, his bright fangs yawning wide and his black tongue rising in his open maw.
The white blade slashed in three luminous arcs across the monster’s body, and then Omar grabbed her and jumped down the slope. They crashed down the icy patch that Freya had trampled a moment ago, and they slid headfirst into the body of the reaver she had stabbed.
But they both rose to their knees and looked up the slope in time to see the demon king’s arms peel off his body at the shoulders with a sick, wet sucking sound and thump down into the snow. The beast’s body leaned forward and crashed to the ground. As the shoulders struck the earth, the impact shook its fur and the head tore free of the neck and rolled down the ravine floor until it bumped up against Freya’s boot. She saw the burnt and blackened stump at the severed throat, and the only blood trickling out of the head came through the mouth, not the wound.
For a moment she couldn’t quite accept that it was simply over, that the huge beast was already dead, and that she was still alive without a scratch on her.
“You saved my life,” she said softly. “That was… amazing.”
He nodded and smiled. “Why thank you, fair lady. It was, wasn’t it?” They rose to their feet and stood together for a moment to catch their breath.
“You were dead?” she asked.
He nodded. “Momentarily, I suppose. I hit a rock under the snow. Out like a light. Sorry. Did I miss much?”
“Not really.”
Freya moved first, stepping over the glaring head of the dead king to trudge back up the slope one more time. She paused just one step away from the body. Even dead, even headless, even with its arms lying apart from its shoulders, the corpse was still enormous, unnatural, and terrifying. It looked like four bears sleeping together in a den, stretching on and on, mound after mound of flesh and fur in the snow.
She head Omar’s boots crunching up the path behind her and she started forward again. A quick glance at the claw at her foot showed no hint of rinegold so she circled around the body to the other severed arm and kicked the snow from the long, bony fingers. The light from Omar’s sword came closer and fell upon the body.
“It’s here.” She stared at the metallic gleam between the fox-fur and the ice. “It’s actually here.”
Omar stepped up beside her and looked down. “Of course. Did you really doubt it?”
“Every minute,” she said. “I mean, what were the chances that it would still be on his finger? After five years in the wilderness, shouldn’t it have been smashed or lost by now?”
Omar grinned as he knelt down and lifted the claw. It was three times the size of his own brown hand. “You call it rinegold, for the color of course, but it’s not any sort of gold at all. It’s nothing so soft or malleable as that. Forging raw sun-steel is very similar to forging common steel from iron ore. Challenging, but not impossible. However, once the sun-steel is charged with aether and souls, once it begins to glow with this light and heat, it becomes far harder than steel. When that happens, the sun-steel cannot be reforged or unmade by any common fire or forge.”
Freya nodded at the ring on Ivar’s claw. “That’s not glowing.”
“No, it isn’t. A sword needs about fifty souls to have a steady light in it, and even then it’s a dull orange sort of gleam. This old thing has about ten thousand souls in it.” He glanced at his sword a moment, and then slipped it away into its clay-lined scabbard. With the blade’s light shielded, the ravine was plunged back into the shadows of the night and the pale shine of the stars.
Freya blinked in the sudden gloom, trying to restore her night vision.
“This little trinket probably only has a dozen or so souls in it, and all of them valas, I suppose.” Omar cracked the claw back and forth as he worked the ring of Rekavik off it. He grunted at the task for a moment before Freya offered him a knife, which he used to remove the claw and then he slid the ring easily off the stump. He handed the knife back. “Thank you. You see? Even though his finger grew to be twice as thick, the ring is still perfectly round. It must have pinched off the blood and nerves in this finger though. Ah well.” He tossed the claw aside and straightened up.
Freya sighed.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to kill any more of them. They’re people. They’re all victims, like Katja and Erik. Someone’s sister, someone’s husband. How many did you kill on the hilltop tonight?”
“Six.”
She nodded. “And he spoke. He spoke to me. He wasn’t quite sane, I don’t think. He was in heat, and very much so. I can’t imagine what that did him, year after year. But he could still think and speak, and… and we just killed him.”
“He must still have so much of the fox’s soul in him,” Omar said. “Enough to transform him so completely into this prehistoric animal, a giant three-tailed summer fox. But also enough for him to understand his fox-soul. These others, the reavers, they’re just tainted a little bit. It must be like a splinter in their minds, just enough fox instincts to confuse them and keep them raving. But Ivar had enough fox in him to be both a fox, and on some level, a man at the same time. He was still in control, to some extent. Fascinating.”
Freya shrugged. “I guess.”
“I’m a little curious what you planned to do with that.” Omar pointed up at the rock poking out over the edge of the ravine wall and the woven hair cord tied to the small stone under it.
Freya looked up and sighed again as she touched the back of her head and felt the strange new shape of her hair.
What a waste.
“After Ivar’s leg was caught in the snare, I was going to throw a loop of this cord over his hand,” she said. “When he yanked the stone off the ledge, it would roll down the slope, pinning him down and stretching him over the ground out so I could get the ring off his hand without killing him.”
“Ah. Well, there’s an old saying among generals. No plan survives first contact with a giant transgendered fox monster.” He smiled.
She nodded back.
What a strange man.
“Come on,” she said, trotting down the path to retrieve the king’s huge deformed head. “We still have a lot of work to do.”
She reached for the head, but froze. There had been a sound. The crunch of fresh snow.
“Omar!”
A small reaver leapt down from the ravine wall directly onto the unsuspecting man, knocking him back over one of Ivar’s arms and pinning Omar on his shoulders.
Freya ran up the slope, snatched her dangling hair cord, and jumped onto the reaver’s haunches. It reared back with a scream that was almost human. She wrapped the cord around the beast’s throat and fumbled a single loose knot before a bony elbow smashed her in the ribs and threw her back into the snow with the wind knocked from her lungs. Gasping and wheezing, she reached up and yanked on the cord.
The tiny stone popped free of the wall and the large, round stone rolled smoothly over the edge and smashed down onto the reaver’s head. Stone and bone crashed into the ground with a muted crackle, and the creature stopped moving.
Freya straightened up slowly, clutching her ribs as she regained the ability to breathe. Omar climbed back over the severed arm and wiped at the bloody gashes on his face, which were already knitting themselves back together again.
He gestured at the stone. “I thought it was supposed to roll down the hill.”
Freya looked down at the fresh body. It almost looked human in its hairy nudity, almost like a boyish woman with freakish hands and knobby knees, but she was just too tired to feel anything except the cold relief that she was still alive. There had been too many shocks, too many floods of fear and adrenaline, too many strange sights and sounds, and too many long hours in the dark and the cold. All the sad words she had just spoken over the king’s
