Something is coming.
“Run!” he shouts at the troll. It leans away as if his voice has shocked it. Spins the sling. He drops the staff and raises his hands to show it he means no harm.
The rumbling grows. He glances up the hill. The troll does the same.
Suddenly, coming over the side of the tor, an Yvag warrior appears. The bone-white charger’s three-toed hooves explode the whin, making along the same path straight for him and the troll . . . except that the troll is gone, nowhere to be seen, vanished back into the shadows or into the earth.
The knight has drawn a sword and holds it vertically. The black blade scintillates. The pose is one he’s witnessed on a dozen battlefields: a charging knight thundering in for the kill.
The troll isn’t the target. He is.
He turns then, sweeps up his staff as he springs over a fallen pillar, over jagged chunks that were once part of a building, and races for the remains of a standing wall, knowing that he can’t outrun that charging beast for long. He’s in battle again, reading the landscape, noting perilous holes, craters that could break an ankle, gauging distances as he reaches the piece of wall and dives over it headlong, tumbles, gouged and cut by stones as he rolls. His uniform tears and instantly the color and form flicker and go out of it. It becomes gray, shapeless, spongy. He’s up and dodging around a canted floor still halfway attached to another hunk of wall, the ground having given way beneath it.
The hooves overtake him while he’s scrambling past the chunk of floor, nothing but another wall ahead. The blade sweeps the air like a scythe. He hears it and throws himself to one side, the blade cutting emptily past with a whoosh. Lands and slides on the slanted floor, falls among debris, tearing his palms, knees. His beater’s stick clatters away, but he grabs at it, and picks up a stone in his other hand. He’s gasping.
The grotesque charger rises up on its back legs. The black-helmed warrior’s arm raises. Thomas, on his knees, flings the stone for all he’s worth. The flat of the sword slaps it aside almost casually. Sparks crackle at the contact, but at least it isn’t cutting him in half yet.
Backed into a corner of the low wall, he has nowhere to veer in either direction.
The knight’s free hand drops the reins and pushes back the helmet, which becomes pliable and sacklike, folding around the Yvag’s neck. Long silver-white hair spills out. Even in the ruin’s shadows, Thomas recognizes the hulking Ađalbrandr. Grinning, eager for the kill. The Yvag dismounts, stands higher up on the canted floor, brings the blade up in both hands again with the cool certainty of the kill looking it in the face.
When it cuts, Thomas thrusts up with his beater’s stick, catches the blade against the metal cap, arms vibrating from the force of the blow, and twists to shove it into the wall. The tip cuts chips out of the stone instead of out of Thomas.
He presses back. The stick might withstand one more blow, but he’s trapped here and Ađalbrandr will never give him quarter. Then the harsh voice is in his head:
“Mayfly,” she calls you. You think that’s a term of affection? You are an insect. What does she even see in your kind? Your astralis is useless.
The sword comes up again, patient, determined. Thomas’s only move now is to throw himself forward and under the cut across the tilted floor, but that will require such precise timing that he doubts he can do it. The canted floor, the wall—he’s hemmed in and clutching at straw.
And then a chunk of the dark ruin comes to life, rising up on the broken wall behind Ađalbrandr.
Thomas can’t help but look. The Yvag starts to turn. There’s a whipping sound, and a stone flies into Ađalbrandr’s forehead, knocking the knight half off its feet and back against its mount. The troll springs then and lands upon the knight’s back. Large filthy fingers with broken nails curl around Ađalbrandr’s head, dig at the Yvag’s eye sockets. Ađalbrandr screams as one of the hands slips, and thick fingers rip down to tear at its mouth instead, but the other fingers gouge deep into its eye. Finally the knight drops the sword, spins about to throw the troll off, slips and stumbles onto the canted floor, where it drops down on one knee and throws the troll over its shoulder, into the wall. Thomas leaps out of the way. He grabs for the sword, but Ađalbrandr snatches it first, thrusts at Thomas, slicing across his bicep before whirling about to swing the blade at the troll. The creature bellows at Thomas. He doesn’t know the language, but he understands the meaning, the same as his to it: “Run!”
Ađalbrandr chops into the troll’s shoulder, and it roars, springs upon the knight again, both hands raking the gray-green face. The sword clatters on the tilted floor.
Thomas leaps past them both. He should flee; he knows how this will end. But he takes the beater’s stick and swings it hard at the Yvag’s head. Ađalbrandr stumbles and the troll pounds both fists into its back, dropping the knight to its knees. The troll snarls at Thomas, and bounds over the wall.
Ađalbrandr’s face is a dark, bloody mess, one eye looks ruined from what Thomas can see. But it ignores Thomas now, snatches up the sword and charges after the troll. Both are swallowed up in the darkness of the ruins.
Certain that the knight won’t forget him once finished with the troll, Thomas flees the ruins with the intention of finding a cave in this hill into which he can crawl. The choker hasn’t activated yet, so maybe he can both disappear and escape the fate promised, at least for a while.
Before he can even begin to investigate the crevices, however, a full hunting party appears beside the tor above him. He’s fully exposed here. If he tries to flee for a cave now, they will know both where he is and that he’s attempting to escape. They will surely kill him.
The only thing he can do is wave the beater’s stick in the air to signal them and watch them descend. He takes advantage of the time to get his breath back.
It proves to be the Queen’s group, with three spiky knights in black, her in her finery, and a cluster of changeling beaters. None of the colorfully costumed Sluagh.
Before she reaches him, the Queen is already looking at Ađalbrandr’s mount standing idly in the ruins behind him. She takes in Thomas’s torn and bleeding condition, his ruined uniform.
“Tell me, did you manage to kill Ađalbrandr with only a stick? Impressive.” Before he can answer, there’s a roar from the ruins that ends abruptly.
Knowing what that cry likely foretells, he turns to watch with her.
“What is this situation?” asks the Queen, all amusement gone.
The truth seems like the best idea. He attempts to answer, then remembers he can’t speak. He concentrates on thinking it out. Your other beaters directed me here on purpose. In Ađalbrandr’s employ.
“Are they indeed?” She looks back at the changelings. They stand in a cluster, hanging back behind the mounted warriors. If they are trying not to look guilty, they’re doing a very bad job of it. “He knew where you were, I see. His was to be a different trophy than ours, hey-o,” she says, making light of his near-death. “But what I—”
Her question hangs as the figure of Ađalbrandr stumbles into view around the far end of the wall that had trapped Thomas. The knight’s silver hair is matted against its head and shot with blackish blood. In one hand it carries the sword. In the other, it’s gripping the severed head of a troll by the stringy black hair. Ađalbrandr’s own face is blue-black with blood, particularly the left side.
“Well. Ađalbrandr has won the Royal Hunt,” she says. “Whatever else he’s done.”
It’s not the troll you were hunting.
“That is of no consequence. He’ll have to share the prize with you as beater.” She seems to find the idea extremely amusing. “That will be awkward.”
Ađalbrandr reaches them without assistance, wobbly but determined. The long gray face is pale and sweaty, twitching with what must be agony. Raises up the troll’s head and manages to rasp, “Majesty.” Bows unsteadily. The troll has cost the Yvag dearly. The skin has been half-ripped from one side of its face almost to the ear. The gore of the gouged left eye is a black runnel down its cheek. It drops the head and finally collapses before Nicnevin. Two of the knights and the beaters rush to catch Ađalbrandr.
He plotted to kill me.
“Oh, we are in no doubt of it. It seems we have reached a discontinuance.”
A what?
“We have reveled in your passion, mayfly. It has been fun to use. But all things have an end. A queen has duties beyond gobbling up the occasional human lover. And I surmise it’s caused a rift in my court. I could punish the complicitous beaters, but it’s simpler all around for you to accept the penalty. Besides, you’ve given me what we desired most, what we needed from you.”
It’s a moment before he comprehends her meaning, and the first word that comes to him is Astralis?
