Dapplegrim sailed like a spirit risen from a battlefield grave, and landed with a resounding thud of hooves not more than a few paces from Athairdrost. The prince looked up. His face was wrenched by sudden fright and shock. He looked for a moment like some frightened half-grown gangly youth. But then he mastered himself a little, and took a single step backwards. He pinned Dapplegrim and Caewen with a glare of irritation and anger. A hand went to his side and he drew out a long, thin and jagged blade of a gleaming black metal. With a noise like a snarl, he spat out a twisting, squirming word: half-invisible barbs of curling mists manifested on the air. These stabbed towards Caewen and Dapplegrim, moving this way and that, weaving like a nest of tangled snakes. Dapplegrim danced aside and Caewen ducked. The mist-made spikes missed their mark, but recoiled to attack again.
She then set her own unkind, cold eyes on the prince.
A whisper of words.
A twist of a finger-made weird gesture.
She called up her own powers. And as she did, a movement stirred at her hip. The shadow-thing, Fetch, roused, then squirmed out of the bag where it had been hiding. It immediately jumped and perched on her shoulder, half-draping itself around her neck. The shadow-creature gave out a hiss that was long, resonant and full of strange undercurrents of syllables. It sounded as if a whole mad mass of words were hidden just beneath the sound of the shadow-thing’s voice. A mass of wild shadow-roses and brambles up-rushed from the earth; the white barbs of magic that the witch-prince had conjured were immediately entangled. A heartbeat later, the white mist-spears dissolved away to nothing. And a moment after that, the black leaves, flowers and coils of the shadow-made roses were gone too.
There was nothing but empty air between them now. The girl and her demons. The prince and his necromancies.
He snarled at her. “You dare assail a Prince of the Sorthe?” The effect of the boast might have been more impressive if Athairdrost’s voice hadn’t croaked half-way through. The rage on his face might have been more threatening if his pimples hadn’t all flushed red, until they stood out like rubies on yesterday’s snow.
The boy turned to Fleat. “Come on”. He started down the side of the waterfall, not sure what he could do but wanting to help. Fleat didn’t immediately follow, but when the boy looked back he saw why: Fleat was peeling off his clothing, and in a flickering of an eye, feathers sprouted and wings spread. He took to wing as an owl, and swooped low, nearly clipping the boy’s hair.
“Hey!” said the boy. “Watch it.” But Fleat flew on, perching himself on a leafless tree-limb above Athairdrost. He sat there for a moment, and stared, agitatedly easing himself from one talon to another. He was clearly waiting for an opportunity to come at Athairdrost from above.
The prince with his sword of jagged night-metal was now circling Caewen and Dapplegrim. Her own sword shone and flamed like sunlight on blue-green summer leaves, ablaze.
In an open field, Caewen and Dapplegrim would have easily overwhelmed the prince, but Dapplegrim was too big and heavy to move quickly among the close-set trees. Wherever Dapplegrim found a path for direct forward speed, the prince found an opening to jink and dodge behind a tree.
The boy wondered why the prince hadn’t summoned his white ghaists.
Maybe they simply weren’t nearby?
Athairdrost kept up his evasive weaving. He dodged one way, then another. He feigned with his sword, and tried to circle around a tree, but Dapplegrim finally managed to cut him off. Athairdrost was forced into a slightly more open area.
This was when Fleat dove at him.
The prince saw him coming just in time to avoid having his eyes raked out by talons.
As Fleat circled up and away, Athairdrost clearly realised he was out-matched.
His eyes darted to Caewen, then Dapplegrim, then up into the trees where the big brown-tawny owl was settled again, and looking predatory. A flicker of calculation passed over the prince’s expression. He was clearly trying to work out his chances.
Athairdrost took a few steps backwards, so that he was now much nearer the pool. For a moment, the boy thought he meant to jump in and swim. And who knows? Maybe that had been the prince’s plan. But when he cast a look over his shoulder and into the dark waters, he changed his mind. His whole face was pale and drawn.
A quick moment of thought passed.
He did not jump.
Instead, he squared his shoulders and faced the advancing Dapplegrim and Caewen. Now he raised his free hand, and moved the fingers through a sequence of patterns that the boy found difficult to follow with his eyes. A subtle noise grew on the air, like a flag snapping in the wind or a number of ropes breaking. Blood beaded at the wicks of Athairdrost’s fingernails, and ran down his hands, forming intertwining ribbons. The blood dripped. And when the first droplet hit the ground, a swirl of white stars and grey light suffused upwards. This mage-born luminance grew with each drop of blood. The pall of light turned a deep silvery-white colour, shot with threads of red. It looked very much like an echo of Athairdrost’s own pale skin traced with his blood. The shifting fog-of-light didn’t conceal Athairdrost or make a barrier. And it did not attack Caewen or Dapplegrim either. It was not clear what the magic was meant to do. Caewen and Dapplegrim waited. Fleat waited. Everyone was uneasy. Everyone expected the magic to do something. Instead it dissipated, harmlessly.
The boy wondered at that. Perhaps the spell had gone awry?
Athairdrost seemed to think so.
As soon as the bleedings of glowing fog vanished, he gave a harsh, frightened sounding cry and attacked. The sword in his hand flashed in a sweep of a night-hued arc. Dapplegrim and Caewen engaged at once… Dapplegrim prancing out of the way of the blade, snapping at the prince with his teeth, and Caewen cutting and hacking with her own sword. Fleat swooped again, diving back and forth, trying to get his claws into the prince’s skull. This went on for a good few moments. Everyone seemed suddenly a little too expert at dodging. Not a blow landed. The swords didn’t even connect.
There was no ring of metal-on-metal.
“That’s odd,” said the boy. A suspicion bubbled up inside him. He looked beyond the fight, and was searching the trees and woods when he saw a streak of something red and wet appear on a pine trunk, some little way off.
He stared hard. “Blood?” he said in a puzzle.
Now, some distance farther off a fern shook. Water droplets lit up the air as they fell.
“It’s a trick!” called the boy. “He’s made a trick!” It took him only a moment to think this through. “The glade with the horse skulls! Quick! Caewen! Caewen! Dapplegrim! Fleat! It’s a trick! An illusion!” He waved his hands and pointed. “He’s gone that way! That way!”
But either they were too engrossed in the fight, or the spell had some effect of fascination and mesmerism in its weavings.
“We have to stop him!”
But they just kept fighting, ignoring the boy.
He looked at the diminishing trail of disturbed leaves and splashes in muddy ruts.
Much more softly he said. “No. I have to stop him.”