Blood for Magic

Chapter 2: A Shareblood Something-1

Chapter 2: A Shareblood SomethingSouthwind was fast, despite his extra passenger, but in the end it made no difference.

Tarquin had made so many hearth lights to guard their way, it was like traveling under a candelabra, and very easy to see the bright red of the frozen blood in the snow.

The first person they saw was the village matriarch, her expression grim on a face as white as the icy ground. Her head lay several lengths from her body. A man Tarquin vaguely remembered had probably died trying to protect the children, given where his body lay. Tarquin tried not to look at the five small bodies in their blood-soaked hats and coats. There was a young woman with a crossbow who had managed to fire it, but he couldn’t see where the arrow might have flown. He hoped it was stuck in the haldur’s eye. The girl was lying across the body of another woman as if she’d been thrown there. The two of them looked peaceful, like friends embracing. Except for the blood. There was blood everywhere.

“We should search the houses,” Tarquin said thickly. “Look for survivors.”

“There won’t be any,” Ainya said. She looked around, squinting into the darkness beyond the floating nest of hearth lights. “We should go. Come back in daylight. The haldur could—”

The haldur’s bellow cut through her words, as loud and enraged as a demon in hell.

“There! Over there!” Tarquin pointed, but Ainya was already reining her horse in the same direction. Southwind sprang into a gallop toward the stable.

Tarquin released his death grip on Ainya’s waist long enough to yank her dagger from its sheath. It hadn’t been purified like his mage knife, but it was well made and sharp, and it would definitely do. Ainya didn’t even glance back at him when he took it.

They hadn’t heard another yell, but the life-or-death struggle going on in the stable was obvious by the noise even before they reached the door. Both panels had been kicked off their hinges.

Ainya yelled, “Duck!” as she bent, and Tarquin pulled his head down in time to keep it on his shoulders as Southwind carried them straight through the doorway. Instantly he could smell the musty reek of old, wet straw and the metallic tang of blood.

Someone cried out, and there was a terrible crash. The stable wasn’t large, and Tarquin’s blaze of hearth magic lights lit up the building from wall to wall. Southwind splashed through a horrifyingly large puddle of red that spattered up his sides and onto Tarquin’s and Ainya’s clothing. Tarquin could barely see anything around Ainya, but he was certain the haldur with its back to them had just thrown someone into a far corner.

The haldur heard them and whirled.

Ainya drew her sword, turning Southwind sideways so she could face the haldur with her sword arm. “Off! Get off!” she yelled at Tarquin, but before he could move, she shoved him off Southwind’s back.

She’d done it to save him, he knew, which didn’t mean he appreciated it. He could tell by the distant pain he’d hurt himself—again—but was currently too busy to notice how. His cloak kept dragging at him, so he used Ainya’s knife to slice through the collar instead of taking the time to unclasp it.

Ainya wasn’t dead yet, but that was only because the haldur was squinting in the hearth lights and kept missing her. This one was also too stupid to kill Southwind, so it just kept losing bits of flesh as Ainya hacked at it. It was so big it barely seemed to notice the blood pouring from its many wounds. Now Tarquin knew where the puddle came from.

He could hear Ainya crying out with effort and pain every time she swung her sword. Wounded as she was, he was horribly certain she couldn’t keep this fight up for long.

Tarquin knelt on the filthy remains of his cloak and bared his left arm again. The earlier cut was clotted now, itchy with drying blood and crusted with dirt. It was likely already infected, but there was nothing he could do about it until later. If he survived.

He gritted his teeth, turned his arm over, and used Ainya’s dagger to cut himself again, this time from the knob of his wrist down to his elbow point.

It hurt a great deal, but that was the sign of a good sacrifice. Tarquin made a mage ward for Ainya automatically, but that wouldn’t save their lives. Now he needed to figure out what would.

Haldur hated light. They also hated fire, but that was an idiotic thing to make in a wooden building full of straw.

Of course, haldur hated firu more than anything.

Tarquin was sure the glamour of a firu that he created barely looked like the shareblood, considering all he could remember clearly was the young woman’s coppery hair and bright amber eyes. And the amber wings, which Tarquin made certain to show spread wide and glorious from his imaginary firu’s back. Hearth lights reflected off the wicked edges of the short sword the shareblood girl’s image held high, about to bring down on the haldur’s head.

The haldur snarled and immediately leaped for the firu’s throat. It ignored Ainya completely, which gave her the opportunity to thrust her sword through its heart as the haldur went through the glamour and sailed right over her. It crashed to the ground headfirst on the opposite side of Southwind, dragging Ainya’s sword with it and nearly yanking her out of the saddle before she let the weapon go. The haldur flopped onto its back like a felled tree, snarling sightlessly up at the rafters. Finally dead.

Ainya and Tarquin looked at each other in the sudden silence. Southwind stood blowing and trembling, froth gathering at his mouth and haldur blood running down his sides. Ainya didn’t look much better. The strength that had sustained her through the fight seemed to have deserted her all at once. She shook so hard with the remnants of effort that she couldn’t hold her horse’s reins.

Ainya stared at Tarquin dully, as if she wasn’t sure why he was bleeding and kneeling on his cloak. She clenched her eyes shut and shook her head to clear it, then looked like she really regretted doing that. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and then pulled her feet out of the stirrups.

“Ainya, stay put!” Tarquin forced himself to stand. His ankle throbbed like malevolent sprites were gnawing on it, and the rest of him felt nearly as shaky as Ainya looked. He was also weak and dizzy in that awful way that meant he might have bled more than was strictly intelligent. Tarquin’s chest ached on the side that had hit the stable floor first, making it uncomfortable to breathe. “Don’t get down. You won’t be able to remount.”

“I have to,” Ainya said. “The haldur hurt someone. We need to find them, and free the dead.”

“Oh.” Tarquin had forgotten about the crash he’d heard when they entered the stable, and he hadn’t even thought about all the bodies outside. A dismembered corpse trapped a soul. The bodies would have to be burned so the souls could escape and the collectors could find them to take them safely to the underworld.

Ainya slowly swung her leg over Southwind’s back. Her knees almost buckled when they took her weight on the stable’s dirt floor, but she stayed on her feet.

She turned around, squinting painfully in the light. “Whoever the haldur was after…they’re still in here.”

“They’re dead, too. They must be,” Tarquin said as he took a limping step toward her. He wanted to throw up, but he was so tired and sore, if he bent over, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up again. Ainya looked barely conscious; he had to help her. The brilliant red of the blood on her face all but glowed next to the ashen pallor of her skin.

“We need to get you to the healer’s house,” Tarquin said.

Ainya shook her head slowly. “No. Later. We have to help…” She looked at him blankly, and then her eyes rolled back as she fell.

“Ainya!” Tarquin sprang to catch her, terrified she’d just dropped dead. He forgot about his hurt ankle until he slipped in the bloody quagmire and it gave out on him again. He ended up on the floor with Ainya’s dead weight mostly on top of him and her bow digging into his already aching ribs. Thank the gods she was still breathing.

“Hells,” he murmured, once all the pain had dulled enough to let him retrieve his breath from where the impact had thrown it. Tarquin flopped onto his back so Ainya’s head was more or less on his stomach, grateful she was alive. He needed to get Ainya’s bow off her in case it was constricting her lungs, and he needed to get her off him so he could drag her somewhere warmer than this awful puddle of gore. But while Tarquin wasn’t small, he was only barely taller than his older cousin, and thinner besides. When he tried to gather his arms under him, his strength gave out and his hands skidded away from his sides. Almost all his hearth lights had vanished when he and Ainya hit the ground, but he was too exhausted to bring them back again.

He was extremely cold, and it occurred to him dimly that if he didn’t get up, it was quite possible he would die here, and Ainya with him. That at least got him sitting upright, with Ainya’s head on his very frozen lap instead of crushing his very painful torso.

“All right,” Tarquin panted. He licked his lips and tasted blood, but had no idea if it was his. “I’m sitting. Excellent.” Now he just had to get to his feet.

There was the solid thump of something hitting the ground behind him.

Fear, bright and sharp, slashed through his lethargy. Tarquin shoved Ainya off him and scrambled around and onto his knees, ignoring the breathtaking vertigo as he yanked Ainya’s sword from the haldur’s body.

But it wasn’t a grinning haldur about to rip out his throat. It was the monster, standing just far enough away to keep the glow from Tarquin’s remaining hearth lights out of his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Tarquin asked.

He wasn’t surprised when the monster didn’t answer. Instead he came closer, squinting as he crossed under the light, limping badly and favoring his side. He had dirty straw in his hair and stuck to what was left of his robe, which wasn’t much. He was bleeding everywhere, as badly as the haldur had been, but mostly from a thick line that soaked the side of his grubby robe and drenched his right foot. That was from Ainya’s arrow.

The sort of lizard-monster-person had his arms wrapped around his skinny red-stained body, and he was shaking like Ainya had before she fainted. Tarquin didn’t know how the monster was still standing.

The lizard person looked at Ainya, then back at Tarquin.

“My friend is badly injured. I need to get her off the floor and somewhere warm.” Tarquin pitched his voice to the same careful quiet he’d used at night in the seminary, when the youngest craftlings were too scared to sleep. “Can you help me, please? I can’t do it by myself.”

The monster blinked at him, and for a moment Tarquin wondered if he couldn’t understand. Then he lurched over to Ainya. The first thing he did was to grab her bow in both hands and break it in half. Tarquin gasped, but he didn’t say anything.

The monster was shorter and also slighter than Ainya, but he bent, grabbed Tarquin’s cousin, and threw her across his shoulders as if she weighed less than a child. Tarquin didn’t miss his grimace of pain, or how he weaved for a moment under Ainya’s weight. He was in worse shape than Tarquin was, possibly even worse shape than Ainya. Tarquin felt terrible asking him to do this, but he had no choice. He couldn’t leave Ainya unconscious on a freezing floor.

“I’ll find a dry stall,” he said to the lizard person’s unspoken question as he heaved himself to his feet.

The best place for Ainya would be the healer’s house, if any of it even still stood. But Tarquin doubted the monster could carry her that far, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to help him.

There were three stalls Tarquin guessed had been freshly done for their horses when he, Gretta, and Ainya had first arrived at the village. The straw looked thick and clean enough that Tarquin would’ve been happy to sleep on it himself. The walls also gave a welcome shelter from the winter air coming through the missing stable doors. It was still cold, but not nearly as icy as in the rest of the building.