A Midwinter Fantasy

by Leanna Renee Hieber; L. J. McDonald; Helen Scott Taylor

  Ruffles crouched low to the ground, her ears flat and her tail stiff. She started to growl, glaring at the bushes where the sentries were hiding. Mace felt their intentions toward the dog and swung his head toward her.

  “Evade,” he grunted.

  Ruffles stared at him, her ears coming forward at the command, and then she turned and ran, vanishing over the edge of the ridge and back the way they’d come. Her training included this command to save herself. She couldn’t feed a sylph if she was dead, and any threat a battle sylph couldn’t handle alone would be far too much for her. She’d find a place to hide and wait for him to find her.

  That took care of Ruffles, but not Sally. He never should have brought her here, he realized. He just hadn’t expected a group of bandits to actually be a problem, even with Lily’s order not to kill. But as Sally sat up, a little stunned and covered in pine needles, the two sentries came out of the woods toward her. They were both dressed in dirty, patched clothes; their faces were unshaven. They leered at her, one already rubbing his crotch and licking his lips. Sally gaped at them, white-faced.

  There were things Mace could do, even without killing. He heaved himself out of the pit, pulling his forelegs free and rearing back, blasting both men with his hate aura as he did. The two reeled in shock. Halfway through rearing, Mace turned and threw himself forward, taking two steps and changing shape to human.

  As the loathing hit them, overwhelming and unstoppable, one of the men ducked and ran, screaming. The one who’d been grabbing his crotch and planning to rape Sally simply gaped, his mouth hanging open. Mace slapped his hand over the man’s face and pushed, sending the bandit flying backward into the trees. The other bandit vanished over the far edge of the ridge, though Mace could track his pattern. He could unfortunately hear him just as clearly when the man screamed for help.

  It likely wouldn’t have mattered whether he screamed or not. Mace had announced himself far too well already. Many battle sylphs could refine their hate aura to be felt only by a specific individual—someone standing right beside their target wouldn’t feel any of it—and there were even battlers who could project an entirely different emotion to that second individual. Mace was more than old enough to have developed that kind of skill, but he’d never bothered. If he was irritated, he wanted everyone to know. Instead, he’d spent his years of enslavement perfecting the art of projecting his hate as far and to as many people as possible. Now was no different, and Mace’s hate had been an even better alarm for the brigand camp than their sentry’s screams.

  He felt their familiar horror as the bandits were hit by his aura and their panic started to rise. He also felt hope and relief—Jayden, he realized. The boy thought he was being rescued after all.

  For once the boy was right. Mace went to Sally and offered her a hand, helping her to her feet as he kept the aura strong; likely the bandits would run away out of terror and he wouldn’t have to deal with them. He tried at the same time not to project it to Sally, but he wasn’t entirely successful, and the smile she gave him was wan.

  “Come on,” he told her. “This shouldn’t take long.”

  Mace led her toward the camp, confident that the bandits would retreat ahead of them. Sally followed, hand tight against his own, both afraid and determined. Ruffles was a distant flicker in the back of his mind, still running as she’d been trained.

  On the other side of the ridge, a path led down into the narrow valley where the bandits had made camp, well worn by foot traffic. This was more of a gorge than a valley, surrounded on three sides by rock walls. The river flowed over the ridge from the east, making a narrow waterfall before pouring down the length of the gorge and out. The camp was well hidden, with the nearby walls scalable enough that the bandits could flee in any direction if needed. There also appeared to be caves into which they could retreat, some of which likely exited on the other side of the ridge.

  Right now, a lot of the bandits were splashing across the shallow river to climb the ridges or vanish into the caves, though not all did. Some hid where they were. Mace saw a half dozen rough buildings on the wide bank of the river, all weathered enough that he suspected the bandits had taken this place over from someone else instead of building it themselves. There were old racks for drying hides out in the open, evidence that trappers might originally have owned the camp.

  Horses screamed where they were tied to a long line strung between two of the buildings, ignoring the efforts of two men who tried to calm them before they could break their leads. Goats and even a few cows were panicking in a fenced-off corral. The center of the camp was dirt that would turn into mud whenever it rained. Right now it was frozen, the mud ridged and rough. Everywhere there were crates of items, all clearly stolen.

  Mace walked right into the center of it all, still projecting his hatred with Sally at his side. He could feel Jayden and Travish, and he focused on them, ignoring the rest of the bandits. The few women here he’d have liked to take with him, along with the boys, but the rest of the men could go hang. Perhaps the queen would let him bring some of the other battlers here after he returned, just to make sure that these villains didn’t cause any problems in the future. She didn’t like fighting, but for the right reasons she could be convinced.

  “Fire!” a voice shouted, to his intense surprise.

  Shapes armed with crossbows appeared around the sides of buildings and from behind the stacks of plunder. They were all male. Mace had already sensed and dismissed them, as he’d thought they were hiding. He hadn’t thought they’d shoot at him, or more importantly, at Sally.

  They were surrounded. As the bolts were launched at him and Sally, Mace changed shape, forming a solid wall of black flesh that completely surrounded her. Crossbow bolts struck him, causing great pain, but none went through. They hurt, though. Mace was surprised by how much. He’d never been harmed by a human in this way, and honestly he hadn’t thought that he could be. But the sheer number of bolts now jutting out of him was as agonizing as the claws of another battle sylph, and he roared in pain, the hate he projected only increasing.

  Men who should have run in terror didn’t, obeying their leader instead. “Attack!” that voice shouted again.

  Dropping their crossbows, which took too long to reload anyway, the bandits charged, howling as they came down at him with short swords. Eyeless, Mace sensed them, and he sensed as well how many there were. He was a fool. If he stayed wrapped around Sally, they’d cut him to pieces. If he changed form to fight back, one of them might hurt her. He felt her terror, along with her absolute certainty that he would protect her.

  Mace lifted straight up into the air. Forget about pride, forget about expectations, forget about political missteps with Eferem—he had a woman to protect and a lot of personal stupidity to make up for. The queen had given her permission when it came to emergencies. He just wished she’d given the same exception when it came to killing. Changing to his natural shape, he retreated, rising dozens of feet into the air in seconds. Sally was safely inside him. The crossbow bolts that had struck him clattered to the ground.

  He crested the ridge, then moved as fast and low to the ground as he could toward the valley on the far side, just in case his bad luck kept up and an Eferem battler saw him. From behind, he sensed the triumph of a group of bandits who shouldn’t have been victorious, and the despair of a boy who’d once again been left behind.

  Chapter Eight

  Mace caught up with Ruffles only a mile from the ridge, out in the middle of the valley they’d so blithely traversed. He scooped the dog up into his mantle without slowing and fled to the hills on the far side, carrying both the animal and Sally to a covered grove not so dissimilar from the one in which they’d spent the previous night. It was far enough away that they wouldn’t be in danger anytime soon.

  He set both passengers down, the dog shaking and Sally stumbling at the sudden change, and became human, crashing to his knees in the thick bed of pine needles. His form appeared perfect, bu
t he’d been hurt by those crossbow bolts, hurt far more than expected.

  “Mace!” Sally gasped, dropping to her knees beside him and grabbing his arm. Ruffles frantically leaped up on the other side to lick his face.

  “I’m fine,” he told her, even as he let her ease him back onto the ground. Her quickly doffed cloak was wadded up and shoved under his head.

  Mace looped an arm around Ruffles’s neck, scratching her ears as he drew deeply from the dog’s energy. He wasn’t a healer, though; he could only fix his own wounds to a degree. They’d get better or they wouldn’t, or he’d find a healer sylph. There weren’t many options in between.

  “You’re hurt,” Sally said, sitting by his side and cupping his cheek with one hand. She turned those beautiful eyes on him, and he mourned that he hadn’t brought her son out. He shouldn’t have taken her in. He couldn’t have left her with her family, but he should have taken her to Lily and made sure she was safe before he tried this. He should have asked Lily to remove the no-kill order. There wasn’t a mark on Sally, but it was his fault she was scared.

  “I’m sorry about your son,” he said. “I’ll get him out.”

  “Shh,” she soothed. She swallowed. “Thank you for trying.”

  “I haven’t given up yet.”

  She smiled, filled with love for him, her hand still caressing his cheek. “I know.” She paused. “I dreamed about you, you know. All those years I did, wondering what you were doing, what you were like, and if I’d ever see you again. I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you and I didn’t know anything about you. Now I’m with you again and you turn out to be such a good man.”

  Mace blinked. “I’m not a good man.” He wasn’t a man at all.

  Tears filled her eyes. “You are. You came back. I know it wasn’t for me, but you came, and once you knew about me, you didn’t leave me, any more than you’re giving up on Travish or that poor boy you did come for.”

  Mace stared at the pine branches overhead. They were so tightly woven that even though it was daylight he couldn’t see the sky through them. He could feel Sally’s soul reaching for him, loving him so much it was almost frightening. He’d never felt such a thing before and felt like a hatchling, unsure of what to do. “Jayden was waiting for me,” he told her. “I could feel how relieved he was.”

  “Of course he was. You’re the closest thing he has to a father. He knew you’d come for him.”

  Mace was confused. “How? I was never there for him when he was growing up . . .”

  “Never?” Her emotions were steady, her belief in him far more absolute than his own.

  “Well, I was there, but I never did anything for him. I never did anything for the boys. Lily had so many, and I didn’t really care.”

  “But you were there, showing him what a strong man should be.” She smiled sadly. “Sometimes a boy doesn’t need anything more.”

  She was quiet for a moment, just stroking his cheek and feeling her love and thinking. “It’s sad,” she said at last. “And strange. Our son fell in with those bandits because he didn’t have you as a father. Your boy went because he did.”

  Mace watched her. The guilt he felt was somehow worse than the crossbow bolts, but the pain of both was easing under the strength of her emotions. Those feelings saturated him, drawing him to her, and he wondered if this was what Heyou had felt when he first met Solie. “I make a pretty piss-poor father.”

  “No one’s perfect,” she promised. “Even the Gift Giver from the Winter Festival. We just have to keep trying.” That said, she leaned down to kiss him.

  It was a soft kiss and comforting, not filled this time with years of passion and frustration. With her love singing to him it was a thousand times better, and he lifted his head toward hers, their mouths working together. She was happy that he was alive, he realized. She’d been just as convinced as he that he was invincible, and now she felt her remorse at his being hurt. She had loved him for years, and this kiss was partly her need to make up for causing him harm.

  Mace didn’t agree that she was to blame. She got enough of that from her family and he would have come out here anyway, for Jayden—for Lily—but now, thanks to Sally, he was finally doing it for the right reasons. He didn’t mind a little bit of delightful payback, though, and so he reached up to stroke her as she lifted her dress over her head. She opened his breeches so that she could sit astride him and take him inside her, and she moved gently upon him, biting her lip as she looked up toward the sky.

  He let her ride him to completion, too tired to do more and also too sobered by the depth of their connection. He could feel her, could become drunk on her, and he hadn’t known until now how incomplete he’d always been. Neither of them expected anything of the other, but suddenly he knew that he wanted her for his master. He wanted her for the soul tie she could give him. She was his Winter Festival gift, and he was hers.

  He didn’t say any of that to her, though. They just shared her pleasure, and the climax when it came shook Mace to his core.

  “I’ll find Travish for you,” he promised, cradling her afterward to his broad chest. “I’ll find Jayden and I’ll save him. I’ll find my sons.”

  Chapter Nine

  He went back that night, with the moon shining through a finally clear sky. He would have gone sooner, but he’d needed to sleep. This was a rare thing for a healthy sylph to do, and nerve-racking in a lot of ways. He’d only slept a handful of times in his life, and to lose all awareness of his surroundings the way he did was frightening, especially when he knew there was danger nearby. It was wrong. He was supposed to be the guard, not Sally. But she and Ruffles watched him sleep, sitting by the fire he’d helped kindle, and nothing happened.

  Mace returned to the camp of brigands that night because he wanted the encounter done with. He wanted Travish and Jayden safe and all of them out of there. Moreover, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could wait for healing. His injuries weren’t fatal by any means, but he found it harder to hold energy and he was going though it much faster than he should. Ruffles was a good dog, but she didn’t have the reserves needed to keep going like this; she was sleeping like the dead when he left her, nose buried under her tail. What he really needed was the Valley’s healer, and he couldn’t go to her until he had the boys. Saving them was as vitally important now as guarding his queen.

  Leaving Sally in the safety of their camp with the fire to keep her warm, Mace shifted to cloud form and flew back toward the bandit camp, his attention focused ahead of him upon the men he could feel there. He hadn’t been sure they’d stay. He’d seen a lot of people abandon their homes before for the merest threat of a battler. More than once, he had been that threat.

  The bandits had already proven they weren’t so cowardly. Once he might have thought them stupid, but they had managed to drive him away. Battlers had lost their reputation for disaster, he guessed. Solie herself had encouraged that, not wanting people to fear them. It had been decades since a battle sylph even flared their hate in Eferem, and these men didn’t believe the stories of what they were supposed to be able to do. They understood the hate aura now, but they certainly didn’t seem to trust in the other stories that a battle sylph could destroy a mountain. Really, they were even right in that conviction, since Mace wasn’t allowed to.

  He arched high over the camp, sensing them below. They’d lit bonfires around the perimeter as well as in the main square. They provided light while they watched the woods all around. No one slept that Mace could feel, and tensions were high. He tasted a lot of anger in the camp, and not nearly as much fear as he was used to. One man didn’t feel fear at all, and Mace pinpointed him as the leader. He was the one who must have kept them fighting when Mace first arrived. Mace didn’t like to think about how much control he had over these men to stop them from fleeing an enraged battle sylph’s hate aura.

  He swooped in before they saw him against the dark sky and hit the camp with his hatred again. Shifting shape, he landed he
avily on one knee in the center of the open square, his face highlighted by the glow from the closest bonfire. Lifting his head, he stared across fifty feet of frozen mud to the man he’d sensed earlier, the one with no fear. He was a shaggy specimen, his face pockmarked by old scars and his hair greasy. He grimaced at Mace, mouth filled with missing or black teeth. His outrage was palpable.

  Mace stood, his eyes never leaving the man. “I want two things. Give them to me and I’ll leave. Don’t, and I’ll turn this camp into a crater filled with ash. You know what I am.”

  The bandits eyed each other nervously, some already retreating into the darkness, while their leader spat to one side. “What you want, freak?”

  Mace ignored the insult. “I want two boys you have. Jayden and Travish. Hand them over. Now.”

  The bandit laughed. “Way I hear it, you monsters got no use for menfolk. And one of those two ain’t a boy.”

  “He’s still a boy. Hand them over,” Mace repeated, increasing his hate.

  The aura had more in common with a flash of plumage than an actual weapon, and some people were just immune. The bandit leader appeared to be one of them. His men didn’t retreat, either. Mace knew this wasn’t because they were unaffected, but because they were more afraid of what their leader would do to them than a battle sylph. The fact that Mace hadn’t started off by simply killing everyone only helped reinforce that.

  The bandit rubbed his nose and snorted a wad of phlegm into the snow. “Now, don’t know if they’d be so interested in that. Why don’t you ask them?” He gestured with his chin that Mace should turn around.