The boy took to a run. He tore along the stream bank, crashing through the wet ferns and down the slippery muddy slopes. His calves were soon on fire. His lungs felt as if they were barely drawing new air at all. His windpipe burned. He could feel his heart beating harder and harder.
There was just enough clarity in his thoughts to leave him wondering: what was he supposed to do if he did catch up with the prince? What if Athairdrost was already in the middle of casting some evil spell? What if the prince turned and attacked with that malignant looking sword?
What could he actually do?
Ask the prince politely to stop?
Throw a rock at him?
A clod of earth?
But he pushed himself, all the same.
He wove and duck, sprinted, jumped and ran some more.
Then, unexpectedly, he broke through some straggles of damp leaves and was stumbling out into a familiar and unpleasant clearing. The horse skulls were hanging from ropes, swaying and cracking against one another in the low and stagnant breeze. Athairdrost was standing here too, now fully visible. If he had been using some trick to walk unseen, he must have cast it off. The young prince was a clear as day, hacking for breath, bleeding badly down his fingers. He might have been bleeding elsewhere too, but his back was turned. It wasn’t possible to tell.
A palpable, sad solidity wafted up off the bent-over and wheezing prince.
The boy took a careful step forward.
It seemed that he had not been noticed. Athairdrost remained hunched forward, with his back to the boy. The prince had clearly stopped to catch his breath, but was now recovering. Settling his shoulders and standing more fully upright, he raised his hands, and started up a shrill chant in words that did not quite seem to sit fully in the human range of hearing. The syllables slipped in and out of comprehension while still half-formed, and the noise made the boy’s skin crawl.
He did his best to think.
Any kind of close-up attack seemed foolish. Even if he might have snuck up unnoticed, it was obvious enough that the boy wouldn’t have been able to present any kind of real fight. The recollection of the black-and-starry sword alone gave him pause. He thought and he thought. The chanting continued, rising in urgency. With nothing else at hand, the boy resorted to throwing a stone after all. He couldn’t think of anything else.
Hunting around, he found one and picked it up. He was about to loose it at Athairdrost when he saw strange lights and shimmerings in the air.
He hesitated.
Dim and burning pricks of pallid light appeared in the sockets of the horse skulls. In that moment, the boy changed his mind. He wound up his arm in a different direction, and threw the stone at the nearest skull, hoping to upset the magic. He thought he might even crack the skull–but horses have heavy, solid skulls, and the stone merely thunked off, dropped to the ground, and set the skull swaying at the end of its rope.
The chanting continued. It seemed as is Athairdrost had not even noticed the assault.
“Very well then. That didn’t work. Back to the prince–“
The boy stooped for another stone, and let this one fly at Athairdrost instead. The stone cracked into the man’s left shoulder-blade, and made a strange ringing noise as it connected with armour under the cloak. The boy was reaching for another stone when he realised that Athairdrost’s chanting had ceased.
He looked up… hoping against hope that the sorcery–whatever it was–had been disrupted. But no. He could now see something that looked like a foul greenish white river-mist dripping from the skulls and forming shimmering pools on the ground. The eye sockets were still aglow. The spell was worming its way through the air.
The magic was gradually, irrevocably coming into being.
He looked over at Athairdrost.
And Athairdrost looked at him, cold rage burning in his eyes.
“Oh dear,” said the boy. “Hello there. Got your attention, I see.”
The witch-prince kept his slate-pale and chill gaze focused on the boy. He was inattentively rubbing his shoulder where the stone had struck him.
“I don’t know who you are,” said the prince, his voice creaking and broken from the chanting. “But you are about to join the hosts of the dead, you ugsome little child.”
He raised a hand, twisted his fingers so that they formed an unpleasant gesture, and brought the hand down in a sweep. It was much as if he were hacking the air with his palm, or trying to viciously swat at a fly. The boy thought he recognised the gesture and movement. It looked a lot like what Caewen had done with her hand when she caused that unfortunate boggart-champion to rupture and gush with blood. The boy felt the force gather around him and sweep past him. The air seemed to curdle. He felt death wash at him like water. Small insects dropped dead around him. The grass blackened and withered, twisting up on itself, and turning to ash. It felt as if the earth itself was trying to crawl away from the spell. But, the boy remained unharmed. He found himself standing in an ugly, oily smear of dead earth.
Athairdrot’s face froze. He looked for the first time like he might be really and deeply afraid.
This wasn’t the uncertainty and caution he’d shown when facing Caewen and Dapple.
This was real, true fear.
“What are you?” he said. “What manner of thing are you? That ought have killed you ten times over.” He withdrew a step, and wrapped his cloak more tightly around himself, as if it might provide some additional layer of protection.
Before the boy could think of what to say in reply–or even pick up another stone to throw–the dribblings of silvery-green murk started to run over the ground, and gather together. They coalesced into a form: it looked like a horse made of fog and ghost-stuff, heaving itself out of the ground, the way a living horse might pull itself from a wet morass. Struggling, thrashing, it came fully out of the earth. It stood quite still, not even twitching, but for its mane and tail: both of which drifted like fog on the air, rather than moving in any kind of semblance of equine behaviour.
The witch prince did not hesitate. He threw his cloak open, ran at once to the horse, and violently clawed himself up on top the phantom creature’s back. He then uttered one single high-pitched word, and the fog-made beast took off at once. It speed away, vanishing among the trees. It was faster than any mortal horse. Maybe faster even than Dapplegrim, thought the boy.
“It’s like it has the speed of ten horses,” said Fleat from up in the branches of a nearby tree.
The voice startled the boy.
“What? How long–“
“I shook meself out of the charm-stupor, but not quick enough. Saw through them little illusions, and then saw you running off. Flew quick-as-quick, but not quick enough.”
The boy looked around at the gently swaying skulls. “No,” he said, counting. “Fifteen. There are fifteen skulls. He conjured the ghosts, and made them into one ghost. We should have cut these all down and burnt this grotto after all.” He felt angry. But also apologetic. “Sorry,” he said. “You were right.”
Fleat stretched his arms. “I often am. Shall I fly after him for a bit? Watch and follow.”
“Yes. I think so. But be careful about it. He can throw death in a magic wind. And where’s Caewen and Dapple?”
“Probably still pitching themselves against that double-phantom” Fleat shook himself, feathers sprouted and he took off, then climbed upwards, cresting the treetops, and then glided away southwards.