marshes, moving with steady, inhumane precision. Even under a slate sky, their bronze swords and helms glittered. Like wasps swarming, Nora thought.
She looked around frantically for their own side, and found it. The human soldiers mustered in ragged bands against the encroaching sea of bronze. Their armor was pewter in this light. Not everyone had armor.
In the distance, a cloud of something like smoke suddenly descended on one section of the Faitoren army —a flock of birds, she realized—and it seemed to her those Faitoren ranks thinned slightly. Aruendiel’s iron birds.
“It’s not real, that army,” Nora reminded herself and Perin. “Not all of it. They’re just mice. A lot of mice.”
“Right,” Perin said. “Do our men know that?” He studied the scene before them for a minute, then pointed out what appeared to be the tents of the human army, about a mile to the west. The frozen marshland that lay between them and the camp was mostly empty, Nora was relieved to see. “We’ll be at the camp in a quarter of an hour,” Perin said. “You’ll be safe there.” He was eager to join the battle, she could tell.
They reached the stone quay at the foot of the hill and started across the marsh. Rain had mashed the snow into a heavy, slippery sludge, and it was slower going than Perin had predicted. Nora slipped once, but was up again in an instant. The main fighting was going on several hundred yards to the left. Massed shouts were punctuated by the crunch of metal on metal, over and over again. It was odd to be walking past a battle in progress; Nora was reminded of the peculiar isolation she used to feel when she went past the stadium on Saturday afternoons in football season on her way to the library.
Something made her look up. Pure instinct—there was no shadow to alert her.
“Run!” she screamed at Perin. Absurdly, she flung up her hands and waved them around her head as she ran, the way you might try to shoo away flies. Perin, running beside her, said something about a dragon; he sounded both worried and excited. “Worse than that,” Nora panted.
She splashed through a patch of red slush, and almost stumbled over something soft. A man cried out. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, wincing. Running, she was finding it a little hard to navigate, her sight skewed by Aruendiel’s protection spell. The ground looked very far away. She dodged past another red spot with a dark, huddled mass in the center.
The protection spell. Nora stopped in her tracks. She didn’t have to run from Raclin, not this time. Of course, Perin didn’t have a protection spell, but he did have a sword. Nora turned and scanned the sky with a sense of righteous indignation, as though she might well summon Raclin down and finally have it out with him.
But Raclin was just a pair of distant wings against the clouds. Like a tea tray in the sky, and just as harmless-seeming. Vaguely annoyed, Nora lowered her gaze, just in time to see the looming bulk of a galloping horse and the golden flash of a Faitoren sword—missing her, not by much. The protection spell cuts it close, she thought, and then saw where she was. Human and Faitoren soldiers were on all sides of her.
A Faitoren knight swung his blade at the belly of a young soldier with curly black hair, and it came back trailing pink and red ribbons, as the black-haired boy crumpled. Another pair of soldiers, better matched, were trading sword blows—Nora had to scramble out of their way—until the human pinked the Faitoren on the shoulder. Looking greenish, the Faitoren dropped his weapon and staggered backward; his opponent stepped forward confidently and hacked through the Faitoren’s windpipe. Another horse ran past, this one riderless. A couple of human soldiers bore down on a Faitoren—he looked familiar, Nora was sure she had danced with him once—but the Faitoren did something that made one of them go down on one knee, and then he slashed heavily at the second’s man’s face, under his helmet. The soldier’s jaw fell down, all the way to his collarbone. He screamed and gurgled. Broken teeth flew.
“Mistress Nora, this is no place for you.” Perin, coming up behind her, his sword drawn, the tip stained dark.
No place for anyone, Nora thought, but all she said was “Where?” All directions were the same, a maze of men trying to kill one another. But Perin seemed to have an instinct for threading his way through the fighting. He took Nora’s hand and they gave a wide berth to two more knights swinging swords, halted until several mounted knights had swept past, and then ran through an area where the fighting was sparser and wounded men had left mushy red trails in the snow.
“And the camp is just over there,” Perin was saying when something came down like a curtain across their path.
“You again,” Nora said disgustedly to Raclin, who gave her a jagged, insinuating grin and rattled his wings at her. She stepped in front of Perin with the unformed hope that the protection spell might safeguard him as well. The air was warm from Raclin’s breath and smelled of burnt hair. Raclin himself—his long head, his yellow eye— kept swimming in and out of focus, so that it was hard to judge exactly how far away he was.
Then suddenly Nora’s vision cleared, and Raclin looked startlingly real and close. Her heart sank as she realized what that meant. “I think my protection spell ran out,” she said despairingly to Perin.
Behind her, a deep snarl that made her bones vibrate. She turned abruptly and found herself looking into the blank golden eyes and gaping, empty mouth of the Kavareen.
With an impatient swat of its paw, it batted Nora aside, then launched itself at Raclin. But Raclin, screaming in indignation, had already hauled himself into the air with a frantic flapping of wings. He circled low, hissing and baring his teeth. The Kavareen hissed back, gathered itself, and leaped upward; Raclin had to twist in midair to avoid the Kavareen’s claws. He shot upward, still scolding. The Kavareen crouched on the ground, ears back, tail lashing, and watched him climb until he disappeared among the lowering clouds.
Nora got up carefully from the icy patch where she had landed. The Kavareen turned its glassy gaze back to her. She didn’t recall being able to look at the Kavareen eye to eye. “My goodness, you’ve grown,” Nora said, trying to sound upbeat and friendly. “Remember me? We took a nap together once.” She saw with dismay that the creature’s tail was still snapping back and forth. Its mouth opened wider.
This time, it seemed to Nora, the darkness inside the Kavareen was dense, crowded, full of lost, shadowy things. Aruendiel had said that it liked to eat whole cities; perhaps he hadn’t been joking. A thin, wailing sound hovered maddeningly in her ears, like the whine of an unseen insect; she understood intuitively that, inside the dark mystery of the Kavareen, it would be a howling storm of trapped, desperate voices.
“Nora!” Then a string of fierce, unknown syllables.
The Kavareen shrank backward. Hirizjahkinis flung her arms around Nora. “Don’t mind the Kavareen,” Hirizjahkinis said, laughing. “He is excitable today, very greedy. I do not let him eat so much, usually. Nora, you found Aruendiel!” She hugged Nora tighter. “I did not believe it at first, when I saw him come. You did very, very well. That was not just good magic—that was you, your
“Oh, Hirizjahkinis,” Nora said, “I was so—” But Hirizjahkinis had already released her and was moving away.
“I must attend to Ilissa. We have turned the battle, now that Aruendiel is back. There he is, you see.” Hirizjahkinis pointed into the thick of the battle; Nora looked for him vainly. “I want to hear all about how you freed him, later. He would only tell me a little.” She called to the Kavareen—then called him a second time, more severely—and the two of them disappeared into the press of soldiers.
“Perin?” Nora started and looked around. There was no sign of him nearby. He’d been right behind her until the Kavareen came along—Nora was formulating a panicked thought in her mind until her eye fell on a pair of combatants at the edge of the battle line and she recognized Perin’s helmet. She relaxed only a little as she watched. He seemed to be holding his own—no, better than that, the Faitoren was being forced back. She began working through the spell to confuse an enemy’s sight.
Running footsteps and the clank of armor made her turn. A man in bronze ran staight at her, an axe lifted high.
Nora couldn’t move. But somehow she was working the levitation spell. The Faitoren soldier bounced into the air. And hung there, legs pumping vainly. She almost laughed with relief.
He threw the axe. She began to duck, not fast enough.
A black flutter in the air, the sound of clanking iron. The spinning axe disappeared in a bronze flash.
Pumping its wings awkwardly, Aruendiel’s iron bird landed heavily on the snow with another clank. Then it took to the air again, heading for the Faitoren.
