With a harsh curse, he stepped back to catch his balance. I grinned, too wildly, I am sure, for in a battle for one’s life, one learns to treasure each reprieve and indeed each breath. The standing stone covered my back, but being at my back, it also limited my movement. I leaped sideways, onto the path, and he charged after me.
I was lighter and quicker and my technique was cleaner, heritage of a childhood spent training with the sword, but he was bigger and stronger, and he had reach. All he needed was reach. Cold steel in the hands of a cold mage needs only to draw blood in mortal flesh to cut spirit from body. How easily he could kill me!
Because I was left-handed, I backed around, keeping the stone to my right shoulder. While he had the grace of a man who knows how to dance, he did not have my fine-tuned control or, evidently, my ability to read in his body his next move. I made sure the stone got in his way more than it got in mine. I thrust, prodded, and slashed; he parried too easily, for I was already tired, and he had ridden while I had walked and was therefore fresher. If I ran, he would catch me. All I could do was fight for my life.
I shifted preparatory to a more desperate attack, but he fell back to test his right shoulder where my blade had cut. A thread of blood seeped through. I’d taken first blood, much good it would do me: Cold steel in my hand did not sever spirit from flesh with first blood. Yet because he was right-handed, the injury might give me an opening. I measured his stance for an opening.
“Look out!” shouted Kayleigh.
Blessed Tanit, I was wearying fast. The old trick caught me: I glanced toward her. His blade flashed forward. Instinct carried me; I slammed right, my shoulder meeting stone, trapping me. My blade shivered against his, my strength not enough to hold him off as he pressed forward. He halted as our hilts caught, so close I could have kissed his lips, which were slightly parted with intense concentration as he stared into my face. My trembling arms and exhausted body were about to fail me.
“Blessed Tanit,” I murmured, “accept your daughter’s spirit with love.”
His expression changed, flooding with an emotion I could not name.
“No,” he said, not to me. He jerked back, pulling his sword out from the tangle between us. Giving way. Giving up.
Somehow in the breath of his retreat, the edge of his cold steel caught under my chin and parted my skin as gently as a summer’s breeze parts the petals of a blooming rose with the merest flutter as it passes.
Such a weakness of limb and heart assailed me that I sagged against the stone.
He gasped, eyes widening with an expression I could not possibly interpret or comprehend as he leaped out of range.
Languid, I raised my right hand and with its back brushed my glove against the curve of my jaw. When I lowered the glove, a moist line glittered on the smooth leather.
“Catherine,” he cried. “Your blood!”
“Am I not falling dead quickly enough?” I cried. A spark of such fury roused me that I was determined to drive him back until I stuck him through and pierced his selfish, vain heart.
Blood dripped from my jawline to spatter on my glove. Without meaning to, I flinched, and so the next drops falling split the air with the heat and life that abides in the blood of all living things. They fell like raindrops onto the base of the stone against which I still leaned, and when the drops splashed, too faint to be seen and yet thundering like a storm across the heights, the stone turned to mist against my shoulder and I fell through.
23
Into summer.
I broke into a sweat. Birds warbled and chirped and shrilled around me in a melodic uproar, and a huge crow fluttered down to earth a sword’s length from me. It tilted its head to peruse me first out of one eye and then the other in a way that reminded me oddly of the troll and solicitor Chartji, from the Griffin Inn. As I climbed to my feet, it cawed loudly and flapped away. I paced a circle around the standing stone to take in my surroundings.
That I had landed in the spirit world I did not doubt. Hillside rolled away on all sides into a green summer forest dense with trees I could not identify, although I recognized beech and ash. Was that a river glimmering far off to my left? I supposed that direction to be the east, but I could not be certain, because although the sky was not precisely cloudy, the heavens were veiled by a strange haze that concealed the sun. Yet the air held as much heat as if the sun were shining. Birds flitted over banks of flowering shrubs and waving grass that carpeted the open ground between the crest, where I stood, and the beginning of forest fifty or more paces below. Butterflies bright with blues and yellows and reds made the air seem alive with color, and the place smelled so overwhelmingly of life that I wondered if I might choke on it.
