I cry out, white hot pain lancing through me. “Lir!” Freya shouts, starting toward me.
“No!” I choke. “Stand ba--”
The words die in my throat as the bear comes at me. I barely get my shield up to block her. She hammers it down on me, and then again, and again. I lay on the ice, writhing in agony.
Then the pain fades, my bones knit, and I scream at the familiar pain of the healing. The golden glow fades, and somehow, the shield still protects me as the bear smashes down on me, over and over. She’s balancing on back paws now, bringing both her forelegs down on my shield, and every time she does, black cracks race along Svallin. It’s almost done for.
Somehow, my blade is still in my hand. I don’t want to hurt her or kill her, but I can’t take this. I swing. She lunges again; I score a line down her leg, painting us with dark blood.
The bear stands, howls in pain, and then comes back down, recovers faster than I’m ready for. Her paws don’t descend on the shield this time, but come down around it, and her bulk presses it to my chest. Her paw comes down on my wrist, bones shatter, and my sword drops from numb fingers.
She wraps me, lifts, and I’m airborne, legs dangling along her chest. The shield is between us, but her arms band my back, straining ominously.
This is going to be bad.
I can hear Freya behind the bear, her staff singing in the air. But standing, the bear is too tall, and she can’t reach its head. She hammers it in the legs as I kick, writhe, but neither of us have an effect. She’s too strong, a force of the earth, immovable, like a mountain.
And then, she squeezes.
The shield screams, lances of light flickering along its surface as she pulls my body into hers. My ribs crack, snap, and I feel my insides puncturing, rupturing. The bracer cracks, so loud its audible even buried between our bodies, and the pressure is so great that it explodes, dissipating into stars of radiance, and Svallin crumbles.
I don’t have time to regret the loss of the priceless artifact, or even care. My face is suddenly buried in her fur. She smells like musky, like incense, and the brine of the sea. I open my mouth to scream, but there’s nothing but her chest, and all I can see, can taste, is her.
Healing. Golden light suffuses me, begins to fight the pressure. I cry out into the artifact’s chest as the mortal damage to my ribs tries to knit, and fails, unable to reform because I’m still being crushed.
But then, I’m not. I fall, thud on the ice, curl into a ball. Through the haze of tears I hear the bear roaring, crying out, glowing where the healing touched her chest.
Freya kneels beside me, hand restoring me as the bear thrashes, falls into the snow.
We exchange puzzled glances. “Your healing?”
She looks away. “Maybe it’s cursed, in this place.”
“Still works on me.” I rub my chest and give her a crooked smile.
I find my blade as I rise and pull the other. We move forward, slowly, searching.
It doesn’t take us long to find where the artifact came to rest. A crater of melted ice hisses, sending mist like smoke into the night.
The bear lays at its center, and she’s not a bear anymore. A woman, the largest I’ve ever seen, crouches braced on her hands. Wickedly curved axes rest close.
She rises, coming up like a storm. I can see the bear in her. She’s staggeringly beautiful, but hard, a warrior. Her thighs, her bare abdomen, and her arms and shoulders bunch with the muscles of a powerful beast. Her hair sways in a wild white main streaked with sable strands; the soft half-circles of her furred ears almost blend in.
Freya takes a tentative step forward. “Hello? Are you alright?”
The woman stands with chest heaving, her dark eyes fixed on us. What I see in them dashes my hopes that she’s on our side. The same consuming rage I saw in the bear heats her gaze.
Her axes come up.
“Get ready!” I shout.
Freya darts away, staff up. I charge forward to meet the artaois’ attack. She curses in a language I’ve never heard as her arms come around, and her war cry is piercing. Our blades meet, metal shrieks, and her blows numb my hands.
Gods, she’s strong.
But I’m faster, and despite her being taller, she’s human. She doesn’t have the reach of bear, the raw power. But now I hesitate to hit her, wound or do worse. No more fur to absorb my strikes. Her armor exposes so much golden skin.
Her blows come hard, and the stars reflect from her axes as they cut the night. She comes in low, a slice to my stomach that would split me crotch to chin, but I dance back, turn her stroke. Her other axe screams in on a cross strike, hungry to bite my skull. At the last moment I flow around it, let it pass, and she stumbles as her momentum carries her forward. I snap a glancing blow at the back of her head. One of her blades beats me, blocking my strike.
She spins in place, axes sweeping the ground. I jump, barely clearing as they pass beneath. I land and she’s on me, roaring in my face. She cuts again, and again. My swords meet her every time. I can see her moves in her eyes, her stance, as she makes them. Block, turn, parry.
But I can’t keep this up. She’s so fucking powerful. I’m faster but she doesn’t need speed if she can beat me into the ground with strength.
Freya’s rotating around us, watching for an opening, her staff spinning above her head.
I keep the artifact’s attention on me and Freya sees her chance. She swings to stun.
Impossibly, the artaois blocks it. An axe comes up and she spins in place, deflecting my sword and knocking aside Freya’s staff in the same moment. She kicks out, and Freya tumbles across the ice with a cry.
My blades hum, move like liquid, and now the artaois is on the defensive. She blocks, grunting at the power of my strikes, her blades meeting mine, but barely. I’m too quick for her, and I slide between her axes.
My blade kisses her throat.
But I can’t kill her, won’t, and at the last moment, I pull the blow.
And she knows it.
Her grin is triumphant, and the bloodlust in her eyes is an inferno.
She comes again, unstoppable, an avalanche of blades and anger, and I’m retreating. Her blows rain down on me, and they’re like hammers. I can’t keep absorbing them. I can’t feel my hands, my arms.
And then cold iron skitters across the ice, wrenched from my grip. Her axe comes in behind, scoring a line of blood across my chest. The burn steals my breath.
Freya’s healing is instant. She’s still down on one arm, blood sheeting her face. But her staff is up, and my body hums.
The artaois rears back, shielding her face.
Like she’s afraid. Afraid of Freya’s healing.
Freya’s eyes meet mine; she’s seen it, too.
The artaois recovers, flies at me, axes whizzing at my head. I dive back, roll, as Freya staggers to her feet.
She heals again, but not me this time.
Fireflies of golden radiance surround the woman. She throws her head back, screams into the night loud enough to pierce the heavens.
Then she’s silent, falling to her knees as Freya’s healing swirls around her, enveloping her body.
It’s working.
Freya’s knuckles whiten on her staff. She shakes, her teeth grit, almost spent from battling Mordenn’s influence.
I reach her side just as she exhausts. She falls into my arms.
The artaois sprawls too, writhing. She struggles to her feet. I measure her, the look in her eyes and the tension of her muscles. She’s a woman now, wild and disoriented, but the taint is gone.
“Name?” she pants, eyes darting over the landscape.
“Tamlir. Or Lir.”
“You are not of Verdaljn.” She’s not asking. My voice, my clothes, her instincts; she already knows.
“I’m not here to fight the artaois. Or the selkie.”
“Only one artaois.” She exhales, launches into a ragged cough and bends a moment, winded. “Callista. The last.”
/> The portal appears below, outside the den. I’m so fucking relieved.
I carry Freya down, Callista at my heels. “Ready?” I ask her.
She hasn’t moved. She watches me with the dark eyes of a reluctant predator, measuring, but holds her ground. “I’m not going with you.”
“Why…what…?” I’ve never considered what would happen if an artifact refused to come. “You don’t have to do anything to the villagers. Mordenn will see to them.” Probably the only time he and I will ever be on the same side.
She looks away. “We swore an oath to the selkie. I can’t leave without knowing they’ve been avenged. If their skins are destroyed along with the village…I’ll carry that disgrace.”
Shite. No part of me wants to trudge back to that fucking village. But I need her, and I suspect she needs me, or she wouldn’t still be standing here. She’d have left me behind already.
I hold Freya closer, weighing.
“My den is safe. No mortal has your ability; none have ever discovered it.”
“But a god of death?”
“His vision is obscured when it comes to the living. That’s why he uses mortals and thralls. If Mordenn could find me, we’d have been extinct before the Verdajln learned a language.”
This makes me feel a little better. I settle Freya by the fire and she burrows into furs that are piled beside it.
“Fur?” I ask Callista, curious.
“Mine. Molting once a year. What did you think, I’d hunted them?” Her smile is grim. “The selkie would punish me if I dared.”
I bet they would. “I’m ready,” I fib, because I’m fucking exhausted and the astratempus ticks away, but I’m committed. “Tell me how to help.”
“The selkie can hide in the tides but they can’t return to the ocean without their skins. Ten of them.”
A word jumps out. “Ten is a very even number.”
Callista chucks her chin toward the entrance and we start up the crevasse. “You’re a quick one. Mordenn is called god of death, but what is a being who gathers the dead but a collector? His purview is to have all of something; a race, a species, a family. He completes collections and places them in his skáli to be admired at demon feasts.”
Night and cold make it easy to imagine an endless banquet hall divided by pedestals where paralyzed corpses wait to be ogled. Heads of beasts like the artaois mounted above fireplaces gaping like green-flamed maws of damnation. “He’ll have to wait on at least one of those collections.”
Her grin is wild, triumphant, breaths puffing. “A very long time.”
“At the village…” I can’t bring myself to recount what happened at the pyre. “I’m surprised he hasn’t interfered again.”
“You don’t see?” Callista shakes her head, ash-and-walnut locks ruffling around her shoulders. “He takes all the artaois by the blood and sweat of the Verdajln. And lets the Verdajln gather the selkie. What do you think would have happened to the villagers if they’d caught me?” She crouches now that we’ve reached the shore. Callista’s smile is filled with bitterness and reckoning. Her teeth gleam white and almost demonic in the moonlight.
“He gets them to gather all of your kind, and they’ve also caught all the selkie, so he takes them, too.” My head aches.
“So strange to me, the youngest thing in any realm thinks itself the most clever, the most devious. Equal to making bargains with gods who crushed out the race of men for sport in ages past. It’s to your credit you keep sprouting. But you never gain wisdom. Like barnacles,” she spits.
“Oof.” Fair. Hurtful, but fair. “Maybe we gain something else. I made my bargain with the Mad God with no expectation of surviving. Just getting revenge.”
She raises from her crouch. “You came to this contest knowing you would die?”
Bitterness twists my insides. “I used to hope I would.”
Callista’s sniffs deep, and this time her grin his hot and hungry. For a second, I’m afraid she’ll devour me, but not like she did the hersir. When I start west across the floe she grabs my furs, dragging me like a child onto my heels. “You don’t have to travel beneath the ice. You were hiding from me, remember?” Her eyes gleam, and she’s fucking terrifying, and her beauty is breathtaking. Instinct wars in me, to take her, bond with her, and to escape before she claims me.
Later on. I force myself to turn back to the village. Not having to deal with the dark, the tide, and admittedly the selkie is a relief. We cross the ice, and I’m unapologetically cocky.
Verdajln’s west gate stands wide open to the boat launch. Flames blaze in the center of town. Not the pyre; they’ve lit a bonfire, and I can see the silhouettes of villagers hovered around it.
“I think they’re expecting us.”
“If they weren’t they’re bigger idiots than I thought,” utters Callista, axes gripped tight.
Women, children. My stomach turns. In Loria women they were never agents of war, just victims. I know these women, most of them, must be complicit, but it’s not in my nature to be ruthless like this. “What about the children?” I whisper as we approach the gates.
“They are selkie born. Their mothers will skin them up and take them back to the ocean. They will forget their mortal half, after a time.”
After what happened here, that’s probably for the best.
Hersir ring the close side of the fire. On the far side village women clutch children into their skirts with pale hands. One holds a baby to her breast, long blond hair curtaining it from what’s happening.
Between us and the hersir, heaped on the snowpack, lays a pile of skins. Pewter gray and glossy, dappled with sable spots.
“Take them,” shouts one of the men. “Take the cursed things and go.”
Cold pricks up my back. Why did they build a fire when the lamps give plenty of light? Why offer the pelts so freely?
“Something isn’t right,” I breathe to Callista. Her bronze skin bunches over taut muscles. I’m not telling her anything she doesn’t know.
Behind the fire, almost obscured by bright flames and thin smoke, a hersir begins to shoo the children together. A woman’s sob breaks the tight stillness.
“You must go now,” he says to the children in a low grunt to. “You must go back.”
The woman with the babe clutches it, cants her body, and begins backing away. The hersir grabs her bib, her sleeve. They struggle, and the baby begins to fuss.
She turns to run and the hersir takes a handful of her hair. She screams now, feet punching the snow, slipping.
He grabs the baby by fragile limbs, tearing.
My eyes fall on the bonfire. “They’re not giving the children back.”
Callista sees the picture now, too. I hear it in the growl vibrating her chest.
Small things snap together. Thin clouds of breath from behind the gate halves, guards hiding, ready to spring forward. A yellow and gold sheen of oil on the ice, around the selkie skins and the bonfire, ringing the children. The way the hersir grabs for the baby like a hound after meat.
“It’s a trap, for us, the selkies. They’re going to burn it all. Us, the skins, the babes,” says Callista, her voice raising by octaves.
She doesn’t hide our discovery from the men. Their faces change from guarded and wary to twisted in the firelight.
The hersir kicks the woman to the ground, grabs the baby and flings it.
Callista crouches, but it's a massive white beast who sails over the flame-tops, catching the baby in its jaws. Bile rises in my throat.
She skids to a stop and rounds on the hersir. The baby screams when she deposits it on the ice, flails tiny fists, but he’s angry, not injured.
I’m stunned. But not for long. The gates creak. I lunge, kick off and flip myself behind one door. My blade comes around as I do, opening the guard into a steaming gut pile.
His companion charges out. He’s fast, as big men go, but too slow for me. He leads with his axe, but after fighting Callista, this is laughable. I lean t
o one side, turn, the blade passing a finger’s width from my face, then thrust. He’s skewered on cold steel before his war cry has finished. I kick him to the ice where he lies still.
Callista can’t hold her form; she twists, morphing into her human shape. But she stands over the baby, axes at the ready the whole time.
The hersir smirks at what he thinks is her weakness, grabs a limb from the fire, and hurls it onto the oil slick before him.
The fire spreads, hissing as it melts the ice, the oil to hungry to extinguish. It races in a semicircle, converging on the innocents. Women beyond the conflagration turn to run. Some try to reach the children, crying out and cradling burned arms to their chests.
An arc of Callista’s weapon send’s the hersir’s head into the bonfire.
I run. Through smoke and flame, ignoring searing heat and flesh that tightens, splits beneath immediate blisters.
The children stand screaming, babies wailing in the last blank space before the inferno spikes to the night sky.
I can just reach the pelts. I gather them, trying not to moan at the pain of my burns, even as they heal. I spy a thin patch of flame I can dive through. Ice melt from the fire has slowed the burning oil there, but not for long. Heat chaps my lips and face like desert sun. Fast as I heal, I’m still gripped by animal hysteria as I run, reaching the children and falling to my knees.
The ground shudders. No small tremor of sea ice. It moves like the halves of the world being sundered. A crack splits the air, a sound of ancient wood breaking or a glacier being cleft. A dark bolt runs along the ground, over the main road down the village center. It gapes; the bonfire shifts and slips into the crack on a hiss of steam and momentarily boiling water.
Callista bobs, weaves, holding back hersir. They come at her in twos, threes, and then they die. She looks annoyed, but not worried by what’s happening. “It’s Cetus!” she shouts, burying her blade in a man’s face with a smooth swipe of her arm.
I usher the children into a tight circle. “Who?”
Temple of Cocidius: A Monster Girl Harem Adventure: Book 3 Page 5
