“Even if we do manage to get you up there,” she said reluctantly. “Can you do it?”
He grunted. “I’m a bit out of practice, I’ll admit, but…do we have any choice?”
Well, there was no real argument to that, so she sighed. “Don’t get yourself killed, alright?”
He gave her a sickly smile. “I’ll try my best.”
They spent the next few minutes trying to lever the heavy-set man up, the priest giving him whispered instructions for where he should put his hands as they did. It was a miserable, sweaty, straining experience, but eventually the mage was in place, and Maeve was able to dismiss the fear—which had grown with each groaning moment—that the wall, assuming they got the man up there, would buckle beneath his weight.
Thankfully, though, the wall held, which meant that out of all the thousands of ways they might die in the next few minutes, they’d at least avoided death by a crumbling wall.
“So he…he’s going to cast a spell then?”
Maeve glanced over at the boy and was reminded, once more, that while she and Priest and Chall had done this a thousand times, been in these sort of situations and survived far more times than anyone had a right to, it was largely new to him. “Yes, lad,” she said, softly, “he’s going to cast a spell.” Or at least, she hoped he was. From what she’d seen of the mage, the only magic he’d performed in the last fifteen years or so was increasing his belly size and, of course, managing to not get knifed in the back by someone he pissed off. Which, of course, was everyone that he met.
“How…how will we know when he does it?”
If he does it, Maeve thought. “Oh, lad, you’ll know,” she said. “Trust me.” An easy thing to say, perhaps, but not so easy to do judging by the youth’s troubled expression. Not that she could blame him—the fact was, she didn’t wholly trust herself.
***
Matt’s hands were sweaty, his body tense. He was more scared than he had ever been. Even in the days spent fleeing into the Black Woods with Cutter, he had been too busy running and being exhausted to be as scared as he might have been, too busy reacting. But now they were not reacting but acting. They were here because of him and him alone. If he had said nothing, only followed, then he and the others would be safely away, leaving the village to its fate, which meant that if any of them died here—if all of them died—it would be his fault.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done, crouching there and waiting, and it was all he could do to avoid asking Maeve anymore questions. Instead, he peeked around the corner, watching the soldiers stationed at the inn door. There were four of them there, and others moving around the edges of the inn, stacking pieces of wood along the walls.
He watched the men, wondering how anyone would be willing to kill an entire village of people, and as he did, he remembered what Cutter had said, how he had scolded him when he’d said he wanted to become a soldier. The man had been angry, and he had been surprised by that anger. Now, though, he was not so surprised. He was thinking of that, looking at the grim expressions on the soldiers’ faces, when he became aware of an odd sound. It was a sharp, screeching keening, low at first, so low that he could almost think he’d imagined it.
But slowly, it began to rise. It was a terrible, somehow unnatural sound, and a chill ran up Matt’s spine. And it was not only the sound, as terrible as it was, that unnerved him, that made him begin to shake, for while that was bad, what happened next was worse. Mist started to gather around them, a frigid mist that stole the heat from him where it touched his skin, so cold that it almost seemed to burn.
“Oh, t-that bastard,” Maeve said, the words coming out broken as she shivered.
“I-I don’t u-understand,” Matt managed, his own teeth chattering, “Maeve, wh-what’s happening?”
There was a hand on his shoulder, and Matt nearly screamed before he turned and saw the man, Priest, watching him. “Relax, lad. It isn’t real, not any of it. Keep telling yourself that.”
“B-but the mist,” Matt managed, looking all around him, seeing that in the space of seconds, the mist had risen so that it was taller than a man, obscuring the soldiers posted at the back door to the inn from his view, making of them little more than vague shadows.
“They come with the mist,” Maeve said, her voice grim.
“W-who?” Matt asked, struggling with a budding panic growing within him. “W-who does?”
Maeve turned to look at him, her expression grim. “The Skaalden, lad. The Skaalden.”
Another surge of fear ran through him at that. Matt had never seen the Skaalden, for he had been born here, in the Known Lands. But he had heard some bit of the frost creatures, the monsters who had so easily overridden his people’s homeland and forced them to flee to this place. And always, when he did, they were spoken of in hushed whispers. Whispers from men who would not hesitate to talk in raised, angry voices about the Fey.
“B-but they’re not here,” Matt said, the cold and his own fear making it a struggle to speak, “th-they can’t be here—” But then he cut off, the words getting strangled in his throat as he noticed figures moving in the mist. He could not make them out well, no more than vague shadows as they were, but what he could see was enough to know that they were not
