I'd been wrong. It was all Excalibur. It was the price the Lady of the Lake had said I would pay to wield the legendary blade.
Wielding it was as frightening as it was exhilarating. And maybe that was why she'd chosen me. Perhaps the only person who could hold a weapon like Excalibur was someone who could successfully shut down their emotions.
Or maybe the fact that I had shut them down was the reason Excalibur had chosen me. Perhaps it was an individual price that had to be paid based on the greatest burden its owner carried, the greatest penance. I wondered what it might have been like for Arthur. What had been the price he had to pay?
I cut down the men who came at me and I stole a glance at Marlin as he hunkered against the wall, muttering to himself as though he were praying. None of the armed men had noticed him. He was so deep in the shadows past the light, that even I could barely make out his outline against the shaft wall.
A furtive glance around me told me that we were all still alive, all still fighting.
And yet the attackers still came at us in waves. I mentally tried to reel myself back to Chas's intelligence. Had he told me how many men Hunter had left with Colton? And where was Colton, anyway? Was he at the other end of the tunnel, blissfully unaware that the front end of his crew was fighting and dying as he forged ahead, confident in his success.
Gal was beside me and I felt the press of her shoulders against me as she fought one more opponent. I turned back to, giving her some cover, thrusting Excalibur deep into something soft as it surged at me.
A man cried out and my mind filled with images of a lovely woman, belly round with pregnancy.
He died sobbing at my feet.
And still they came.
"Where the hell is Marlin?" I said as the surge died for one moment. I could see more shadows racing toward us and I sucked in a breath, struggling to fuel my lungs.
"Why isn't he doing something?"
Gal's response from behind me was breathless and broken.
"I can't see him," she said then grunted as she held off another blow.
I thought she had struck out at her attacker, but I was wrong. That grunt was one of pain.
I felt her sink downward. I twisted around, trying to catch sight of her as she fell. Her arm struck out as she hit the floor and the lantern light revealed a gash across her forearm. The knife she'd been holding clattered to the tunnel floor.
I screamed and spun as I saw another assailant surging from the darkness at her. I leapt, Excalibur held high above me and I came down with it stabbing downward.
It lodged in something hard and unyielding.
But I didn't stop to pull it out.
Instead, I rolled sideways, using the momentum of my thrust to help spin my victim sideways, crashing him into the other man seeking to slash her chest with one sweeping arc.
They both fell. I heard the telltale gurgle of final breaths, the rattle that ended their heartbeats.
I was only vaguely aware that I was still yelling as I pulled Excalibur free of the man's back.
I lifted my head to stare down the tunnel. I staggered to my feet, an automaton weaving beneath the weight of the remorse that wanted to overtake me.
The flickering of the lanterns was but an orange pattern of light on the side of the walls. The shadows writhed in the glow.
"Get up," I said to Gal.
She'd die if she stayed there.
I reached down to help her up.
Her eyes went wide and she shook her head. I thought I heard her gasp.
I had enough time to turn and see three men lunging for us.
I didn't have time to lift Excalibur.
I didn't have time cry out for help.
I braced for impact, praying the sword would do its magic, but just when I doubted Excalibur would have the time and expected to feel the hot sting of metal slicing through my flesh, each of them, one by one crumpled to their knees.
I blinked stupidly as their hair caught fire.
In the blaze of flame and firelight, Marlin stood behind them. His hands were still curved in the position they must have been in when he touched their heads.
"That's new," I said.
"It's also all I've got," he said then he disappeared back again into the shadows.
We were alone, Gal and I. I stared at her, trying to figure out what else should be racing through my mind.
It struck like a bolt of bad whiskey burning its way down your throat.
"Where is Lance?" I said and circled around, scanning the tunnel, searching for his familiar face in the bodies lit by the lamplight or his all-too-familiar size and the heaps of shadowed bodies around me.
I heard a scuffle coming from deeper beyond us in the mineshaft.
"There," I said. "He's there."
"Help him," Gal said. "I'll stay with the magician."
I sprinted off toward the noise, knowing full well that I couldn't see in the dark unless I got close enough for my night vision to shutter down the light pollution. I stumbled against the wall multiple times as I miscalculated my depth perception.
The light from the lanterns fingered its way along the walls. Somewhere in the darkness I could make out two shapes in the shadows.
They fell as one to the floor and rolled.
I wasn't sure which person was which, but I knew that one of them was Lance.
I flung myself headlong into the shadows. Excalibur would know the enemy. It had to.
I swung, praying out loud at the same time.
It contacted something, biting down into soft and pliant material.
I heard a moan.
I stood back, swaying on my feet.
"There's no memory," I said out loud. "Dear sweet God, there's no memory."
It was true. No image ran to my mind. I was terrified in the moment that I had cut through Lance's stomach. That he was lying at my feet dying.
"Lance," I yelled. "Lance."
A hand gripped my ankle and I shrieked.
"It's me," Lance said. "It's me."
I sank into a squat, feeling for his face. I thought someone had poured fire in my eyes. They stung so bad they leaked.
My heart was beating as though it would jump out my throat.
I could barely talk. The adrenaline soaking through my tissues was making my bladder spasm. It had dried up every bit of liquid in my mouth.
While I thought I was helping him to his feet, I found his arms enveloping me. I melted against him, unable to stand any more.
Somehow he managed to help me stay on my feet.
"There was no memory," I said again. "I should feel the man's regrets. I should feel his pain."
"That was no man," he said. "It came out of nowhere and fighting it was like fighting a shadow."
"Not a man," I murmured. That explained why I felt nothing but it didn't explain why it looked like a man, why it took a man's shape in the darkness and looked so solid I couldn't tell it from Lance.
A gentle hum crept to my ears. Slow and small at first. Then it began to grow.
"Do you hear that?" I said. I tried to look down the tunnel. Had Colton finally arrived? Were there more men about to attack?
The humming intensified. It sounded like the buzzing of a swarm of bees.
"We need the lanterns," Lance said.
I nodded though he couldn't possibly see me do so.
"And Gal. And Marlin," I said. "We need to make sure they're alright."
"They made it?" Lance's voice sounded relieved.
"They had when I last saw them," I said but I was already heading backward, stumbling through the darkness and stepping large as I tried to peer through the gloom. I could see the lantern light ahead of us just a few yards away.
And there, in the light was Marlin crouching over Gal.
Helping her to her feet.
My breath came out in a whistling exhale.
"Thank God," I said.
I expected Marlin to be relieved when he saw us as well, but there was
a look of consternation on his face. He and Gal stood together, his arm around her, supporting her.
Yet he was looking past me, squinting into the darkness.
"Do you hear that?" he said.
-12-
At that moment, a swarm of black filled the cavern around us. It blotted out the light as it assembled into one large buzzing mass.
I recognized it immediately.
Marlin must have too because he swore.
The buzzing mass lifted to the ceiling and then crept along it like a shadow off in the direction of New Denver.
Before we could process what had happened or what we should do, a shout came from behind us. More men, and this time they ran at us en masse, not one by one. There were at least a dozen of them.
Metal struck metal.
We were pinned. All seemed lost.
Lance hollered at me. "Get out of here," he said. "I'll hold them. You need to blow the entrance."
"No," I said. I wasn't about to leave him there to die alone. Facing the enemy.
Marlin shoved me backwards, giving Lance space to fight.
"Take Gal," I said to Marlin. "Do what he says."
He shook his head.
"No time," he said and if he added more, it was lost to me as a rush of men came at me.
I heard Lance fighting his assailants beside me. I felt his frustration, his fear as keenly as I felt my own. We were only two. We couldn't hold them back for long. And the swarm, flying toward New Denver ahead of Marlin and Gal, as creepy and ominous as it was had to mean something worse was headed to the town we were dying to protect.
The thought was a terrifying one. Locusts could get through spaces that men couldn't.
It was that fear that I lost myself in.
Instead of just seeing the images of men's regrets as they fought me, sword to axe, knife to Excalibur, fists to feet, my thoughts went to a wooden cupboard and a bone-saw within... Instead of just feeling the impact as rocks were flung at me and deflected by the power of the sword, I saw something else.
I saw a man with rotted teeth. The front tooth a crooked line from a tumble he'd taken in my mother's larder. I saw him strike the butcher's table face first. Felt the impact as he was kicked from behind and fell awkwardly against the table.
But that wasn't the image that was the most terrifying. That wasn't the one that made me feel smothered by rage. No.
It was the recognition of the foot that kicked him. My own foot. Spasming in terror and striking out in panic at the thing—the man—I was was terrified of.
The sword was breaking down a solidly built wall that I had bricked up stone by stone over my past. I felt my own rage. My own sense of powerlessness.
I knew I was using hate to fight against these men now, and I was terrified that the emotion of the past would overcome me in the present, that it would bury me in an avalanche of pain and misery. That the carefully constructed room where I kept a vacuum of emptiness would collapse and that place I needed to retreat to would be gone.
What if I was left bare and vulnerable with no safe haven?
It was the room that Hunter had tapped into all those years ago. The place he told me to retreat to each time I felt the inconvenient sense of compassion trying to override that of justice.
In those moments I recognized what that swarm truly represented.
I knew what it was as surely as I knew the empty room within me. It was Hunter's rage and vengeance. It was his pain that seeped through his blood as I'd struck him with Lance's arrow in the field. His magician had created from the blood magic a swarm from the black vileness of Hunter's misery and it shape-shifted into a swarm of starving locusts.
I didn't need Marlin to tell me the danger of that swarm. I had no evidence of it, but I knew that if we didn't stop it, the blood magic that allowed it to happen, would also allow Hunter to reunite physically with his emotional pain.
And together they would devour anything that felt joy or hope.
And where would it be when that happened but in the midst of New Denver.
That meant it had to be stopped.
So I used my own pain and my own rage. I gave in to it and let Excalibur transmit every nasty image that I buried back into my psyche. If it cost me my sanity then so be it.
I fought in earnest then. I was blinded by the rage and I had no idea how hard I fought, how many men I had taken down until I stood there panting.
Sweat dripped down my face.
Excalibur dropped from my grasp to the shaft floor.
My chest was heaving, I couldn't catch enough breath. My lungs burned.
But no one else was fighting. Gal, Lance, Marlin and one prisoner were huddled next to the wall watching me.
I had forgotten them.
I swallowed down a mouthful of blood. The lamplight showed all around me piles of bodies.
It was Marlin who broke the silence.
"I guess that takes care of that," he said rather dryly.
I swung my gaze to his.
"The swarm," I said.
He nodded. "You don't need to tell me what it was. I know."
"How do we stop it?" I said. "We need to stop it. If we don't—"
"Good thing you brought me," he said then he turned to the prisoner that Lance gripped by the shoulder. He was a small man. With whiskers that covered most of his face as though he'd never learned to shave properly.
"I'm sorry," Marlin said and then grabbed him by the neck.
With surprising strength, he wrestled the man to the floor, squirreling him over to a pool of water that had gathered from a leak that traced itself into a crack in the stone.
With a callousness I didn't know he possessed, Marlin pressed the man's face into the puddle and held him down.
The man flailed about, struggling for air. Bubbles rose on the surface.
Then he stopped moving.
Marlin muttered to himself, whispering as though he were praying.
The dead-still surface of the puddle quivered as I watched.
"Holy hell," I heard Gal say.
The surface of the small pool grew a sort of skin that seemed to move of its own accord. It almost seemed sentient. Then it lifted to the air, breaking into a thousand tiny particles.
The particles whorled around Marlin, brushing across his face, burrowing down beneath his shirt. He squirmed as though it tickled and then he lifted his arms to the air and all of those particles that had buried inside his shirt flew out through his sleeves.
"Stop the swarm," he said to it.
And then as if their mere genesis wasn't shocking enough, the tiny particles flew past me, each one seeming to be a smaller part of the whole of half a dozen beautiful women with flowing blue hair.
Marlin faced me. There was an air of finality about him.
"What in the hell was that?" I said to him.
He sighed as though he were about to impart on a long journey that he knew would be the death of him.
"Let's just say I'm going to have to power up with a lot of protein in the next few hours because it's going to be a long, sweaty night."
We blew the entrance to the tunnel before we headed to New Denver. We felt victorious. The worst was done. We were safe. At least for the time being.
We discovered upon returning to the town that the swarm of black locusts had succumbed to an even larger swarm that folks swore looked like individual pinpricks of solid material in the center of a dozen ghostly looking women with long, trailing hair.
"Just ate those bugs right up," someone said. "Then just swept out of town toward the woods. Never seen anything like it."
Marlin, of course, was nowhere to be seen within moments of entering the town. One moment he was shuffling like a soldier coming back from war, the next he was just gone.
I suspected that what we'd all witnessed was a group of water nymphs obeying some intonation that bid them show themselves.
I kept that to myself. Although most folks might have seen some sort of
magic in their day, they might not be ready to accept the existence of strange women living in their dish water.
Besides, I suspected Marlin would let us know if he wanted us to know, and I had my suspicions that he'd return looking even leaner than he did after the fire.
For the most part, I was too exhausted to even bother to explain it anyway.
It took me several days before I ventured off the estate. I slept most of the time. I think Gal and Lance did too. Sadie had yet to return and Myste all but disappeared back to her property.
When I did leave the Musk property, it was because I intended to return home and collect some things to bring back with me.
I'd decided to live on the Musk estate. I felt like I earned it.
Plus the Musk estate had more light. And a library. If I had trouble sleeping, which I doubted I would, I'd have a bunch of books to keep me company.
But I wanted something from my home. I had clothes there. A few bits of memorabilia. All of it could burn or rot, but my grandmother's chair, that old rickety thing with a lever that made the chair into a lounge of sorts, that needed to come with me to town.
So I hitched a wagon in the early dawn and set out for home. It was a gorgeous morning. The birds chirped in the trees. Late butterflies lifted from rose bushes as I trundled down the path, bouncing over ruts and holes.
I avoided the butcher cupboard out of habit rather than residual memory, and scooped up the pickles and jerky from the larder into a basket.
I grunted the chair bit by bit to the door and pushed it up a makeshift ramp made of old planks into the back of the wagon.
I leaned against the side of it, listening to the horse blow its annoyance into the crisp air. It sent puffs of steam above us.
I decided if I was to take the chair, I might as well take the little table that sat next to it. I could already imagine myself enjoying a cup of sweet tea in Musk's library after a hard day of training new soldiers, or preparing the town. Even if it was only months, I had the feeling having those things as part of my life might make things seem normal. Like life could be a good thing.
I pushed off the wagon and headed back inside. The table waited where it always did, its three legs worn in places and showing bare wood beneath the stain.
Queen of Skye and Shadow complete box set : Queen of Skye and Shadow Omnibus books 1-3 Page 22
