Caewen glanced over at him, unsure what he was reacting to, then realised that from Dapplegrim’s perspective, the chair had presumably just moved on its own accord. Dapple’s skullish face looked genuinely intrigued now.
As Quinnya advanced, the pale man darted a hand under his cloak, and a moment later something sharp and bright glinted in his fingers. With a subtle movement of the wrist, he threw two knives at Quinnya, one rapidly after the other. The knives did not fly far. With a soft thwack, both daggers slapped into a spinning tumble, and then fell to the ground, a few feet from their target. A shimmer of light then spread upon the blades where they lay in the grass, so that they seemed to rapidly buckle, as if a blast furnace had been turned upon them. Each was soon a twisted, smoking piece of black metal, dully aglow. The magess looked down at the the heat-twisted knives, then up at the man in the white-grey cloak. If it was possible for a person to look less impressed than Quinnya did, Caewen couldn’t have imagined how.
The man backed up a step, bumping into the table as he did. He looked around, held perfectly still a moment, then broke to his left, away from Quinnya, and also away from the bulk of the dinkers. This was precisely what Caewen had guessed. She tried to look imposing as she moved towards him, sweeping her sword left and right in wide, low arcs. A wordless warning. Don’t try to get past me. This is no throwing knife. He did seem to slow for a moment. She saw a flicker of indecision in his eyes. But perhaps he was desperate. Or perhaps he could tell she had no real skill or training with her blade, even just at a glance. Either way, he not only kept coming, he increased his speed, even as he pulled out another of his knives, readying it in hand. This time, though, he didn’t throw it. Instead, he flipped it around in his palm, holding the weapon the way a knife fighter does, then lunged at Caewen.
She let out a sharp yelp of surprise, and felt immediately embarrassed. He moved left, struck at her, wove and stabbed again, but could not slip past. Although Caewen’s own native skill with a sword was sorely lacking, the blade had old runes cut into it, and there was a song of magic deep in the fabric of the bronze. The sword did its best to make up for her clumsiness. Sharp clangs and glances of metal-on-metal met his attacks. A look of realisation seemed to come over his features then. Whether or not the girl could stop him, the sword could. So, more than a bit confused looking now, and also more than a little worried, the pale man edged back, away from Caewen, glaring at her. What was he thinking? His eyes, in night-shadow under his hood gave nothing away. The lines around his mouth seemed to be set into permanent wrinkles of scowls, though a twitch at one corner of his lips suggested a smile. Was there a flicker of fatalistic humour in that expression? Had he begun to understand that his chance of escape was diminishing.
But just then, a new sound crested and trebled on the air, rolling over them from above. Caewen looked up. A cloud was swiftly manifesting out of the black night sky, spreading over them like spilled ink. No, she realised. It couldn’t be a cloud: it was moving against the wind. As the angry shrieks grew clearer, she understood. It was a mass of birds, black and thickly thronged together, so that they seemed almost like a bank of roiling murk.
Ducking, and covering her face, Caewen anticipated an attack that never came. The birds swirled overhead, and their voices became not a mad cacophony of screeching crows–which she had expected–but rather a mingled, deafening song of nightingales. How strange. She stood transfixed for a second. Her suspicion, of course, had been that the dark aspect of the three goddesses–the half-dead woman who kept a small hovel in the woods with the crows–that she was somehow working against her other selves. But these were not crows. They were songbirds made of shadow and rage. Three quick flashes of lightning leapt up from the ground into the air, reducing a vast mass of the creatures into flurries of scorched ash. Quinnya had done quick work, throwing bolts of storm-fire into the sky. But her spells of lightning did no good. The numbers of birds was too great.
And yet, for some reason, they did not descend on the storm magess. They didn’t go after Caewen, either, or any of the bystanders or drunkards. Instead, they gathered in a flock around the assassin, grabbed, clawed and bit at him, then started flapping madly. They lifted him off the ground. He struggled against the birds; as he rose up into the air he was clearly somewhere between being uncomfortable where the birds were grabbing hold of his clothing, and in pain where they were lifting him up by the hair. He gave out a wordless, awful sounding gurgle, but they simply lifted him higher, and higher, and then up into darkness, gone.
Taken aback, her mouth hanging slack, Caewen said, “Huh”, and looked over at Quinnya. The older woman was fuming, and in the case of a storm-witch, it turned out that fuming could be literal. Wisps and tendrils of smoke were curling up from under her feet, unfurling out of the hems of her sleeves and collar.
“Well, that was unexpected,” said Caewen, trying to understand what had just happened. “He didn’t seem… um, that didn’t seem entirely voluntary. I mean, he clearly wasn’t enjoying being carried off.”
Quinnya’s mouth had hardened into a chiselled line. Her eyes were hard jet stones. A fissure of lighting lit the sky, and outlined everything in an acid-etch of silver light. A moment later, the clouds let loose and rain came out of the sky. It was like standing under a thousand upturned buckets. A thick, drenching rain, with barely any space between the spears of water.
Soaked in moments, Caewen trod through the quickly developing mud over to Quinnya. She had to yell to raise her voice over the storm. “There’s no point being angry about it. He got away.”
“Oh no,” she replied, her voice low, cold and hard, iron-like. “He has not got away. Temporarily evaded the natural course of justice. That is all.”
“Then is the rainstorm necessary?”
She looked at Caewen. “There were certain magical potencies built and cemented within my breath and blood. They must have a way out. Would you prefer lightning?”
“Uh. No. That’s fine then. Rain it is. Dapplegrim?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we should go back to the tent after all?”
There were people running every which way for cover.
“Hurm. That seems sensible.”