[5] Goodly Creatures

The forest of Flanz-le-Flore burst brightly, bristling awake to new friends who plodded along a padded-down path, ecstatic of their cautious careful intrusion, overflowing mirth from the thorny throats of flowers. One tree, a giant—although every tree was now expanding—opened wide its mouth to bellow raucous laughter and thick sap spittle. Red leaves emerged from orange emerged from yellow. A hollow log spread across a brook whistled: "How d'ye do! How d'ye do! How d'ye do!" and the sentiment echoed along the vast, teeming canopy, within the songs of unseen birds. All existed in aimless, restless, delusional animation.

Into the chorus cut Sansaime: "Keep to the road." She led, stooped over her dour roan horse, and had been muttering about the dangers of letting Jay and Olliebollen tag along ever since they entered. "Keep to the road, but don't trust it. It may've been made by man, but for the right price they can tempt it to their side for a time."

Makepeace, who in contrast to Sansaime's earthy cloak wore over his armor bright and patterned fabrics, checkerboards and fleurs-de-lis, and as such blended much better into the environs, tilted his head back toward Jay and gave his trademark wink. "Incredible time these faeries seem to have, eh?" he said. Jay forbore the company, thoughts occupied by the Staff of Lazarus as he trained his eyes on the sane image that was the backside of Makepeace's horse.

The final and tiniest member of their company waved her arms merrily at every passing tree, log, vine, shrub, flower, bird, squirrel, and leaf, repeating back to them their jubilant how-d'ye-dos. Every so often she managed enough space to first breathe and then babble some tidbit of information about enchanted woods, but the trivia broke into fragments as some new piece of foliage sprouted beside the path to speak its first words in greeting to her.

No other fairies appeared. Unless they were the colored orbs, drifting, that either lurked deep in the woods or were seared onto the surface of Jay's eyeballs.

He squeezed his eyes shut to try and crush out the lightshow and instantly walked into the horse's ass, saved only by the brim of his hat eating the brunt of the impact. The horse itself gave no shits and stood statuesque. Makepeace and Sansaime took in what lay ahead:

A spiderweb.

It stretched across the path, strung from one tree to another, its wispy strands bunched tight to form a full wall barring passage. The forest around it was dead. An abrupt transition changed the landscape from bright and cheerful to black and solemn, where ancient moss-covered trunks disappeared into a sea of dark leaves.

No how-d'ye-dos. No whistles, no songs. Only a syrup silence, dense, imbued in the air itself, which smelled of long-dead decrepitude, when there is nothing left to decompose. Jay readjusted his hat and, fighting through tightening lungs in response to this grimy air, brought his gaze from the spiderweb to the forest beyond it and finally over his shoulder at where they came from. Everything was dark leaves and half-shadowed wood, and the road dropped out of vision a few feet back.

"That's not supposed to be there!" Olliebollen said of the web.

"No shit," said Jay.

"So much for the warm welcome," said Makepeace. "Fae are a fickle sort, huh?"

But Sansaime shook her head. "That's not fae doing."

"I already said that!" Olliebollen shouted, despite being wrong. Then quickly, as though trying to get it out before someone else did first: "It's gotta be the work of the archbishop's twisted women!"

Immediately, the strands of the spiderweb shifted, rearranged. Parts came together in long, interconnected clumps to spell the word: HI.

"Hello there, my good lady!" Makepeace replied, doffing a hat sort of like a tricorn, but with a big red feather sticking out of it.

The spiderweb shifted again, not spelling a word this time, but forming a woman's face, drawn with surprising artfulness—three-quarters perspective and as much depth as white lines on white background allowed. The face blushed and looked away bashfully, then a jagged series of lines scratched it out and words, some misspelled, replaced it:

WE WERE CENT TO STOPP YOU SORRY

From her mouth Sansaime deftly plucked her pipe and tucked it within her cloak. In the span of that motion, out of the corner of her mouth, she said only barely loud enough to carry and even then seemingly underwater in the oppressive aura of the forest: "Behind."

Makepeace and Jay glanced as inconspicuously as possible. Perched side-by-side on a high branch in a gnarled tree, visible in this darkness only due to the once-white color of their nun's habits, were the winged twins from the cemetery. Charisma scowling, Charm streaked by black tears.

"Toldja you shoulda killed em," Olliebollen said.

Maybe. But Jay beat the twins before, and now he had help. The issue was whoever made the spiderweb, what she could do. And if they brought anyone else.

The web changed: GIVE UP NOW AND WE WONT HURT NOBODDY PROMISS

Makepeace exchanged a potent glance with Sansaime and reached onto his back to grab the lance and shield strapped there. The red shield was emblazoned with—what else—a white cross. Sansaime's hands slinked into the folds of her cloak.

WE ONLY WANT THE HERO, said the web. Then it scratched out the words and reproduced an image of the bashful woman from before, this time with her head bowed and her hands pressed together in prayer. GOD LOVES YOU, it wrote under the image.

"You won't be getting the hero," said Makepeace. "And you won't stop me from bringing Mayfair home."

Nothing happened for a long time. The image of the woman weaved in web continued to pray solemnly. But strand by strand the image fell away, dissolving more than breaking apart, until only the following words replaced it:

THEN I AM SORRY FOR WHAT WE MUST DO.

A rumbling began. The horses noticed it first, stamping and shifting restlessly, kept from more only by the steadiness of their riders. Jay adopted a ready stance. He faced the spiderweb, but angled his body so that with only a quick slant of his eyes he could check the twins. Neither moved from their branch. The sad one gnawed mindlessly on her own hand.

"Where's it coming from Sansaime," said Makepeace. The rumbling now felt like a constant pulse along the ground. But it seemed to come from everywhere. Makepeace's horse whinnied fearfully.

Sansaime remained a motionless obelisk within the dark. Her head inclined one direction, then the other. Building and building the rumble rose, stronger and stronger, and she suddenly whipped a gleaming sliver of steel from her cloak and shouted:

"There."

It shocked Jay that whatever had been rumbling toward them was so close, because he heard nothing, no snapping branches, no cascade of leaves, until the thing burst between the nearest layer of black trees, twice Jay's height at least, looming over even the riders, a massive five-fingered claw raised.

A bear. Shaggy, its fur a filthy bleached white streaked with worse colors, tatters of a nun's habit running down its belly. But it was also a human, a hulk of a human, revealed only through its narrower and more human proportions, and the human head that lolled awkwardly on its broad and muscular shoulders. The head of a woman, with long and matted hair, and a vacant gaze.

Its claw came down. Faster than any of them, even Sansaime, were prepared to react to. The head of Sansaime's horse disappeared. The rest of the horse remained standing, its legs twitching and buckling, but the head was no longer there. An arc of bright red blood splattered the grass.

Sansaime was also no longer there, as the decapitated horse finally dropped. Her body bounced against the ground, twisted, and rolled to a stop at the base of a tree. She dropped her dagger, which wound up embedded in the center of the blood splatter.

"Hyaa—Hyaa!" Makepeace shouted as he spurred his rearing and horrified mount into an immediate charge while Jay remained rooted in place. Only the striking grandeur of the figure Makepeace cut tore Jay's eyes away from the gore displayed before him. Trapped in the silence of this space, where even the bear-woman's roar emerged only as a muted and even reserved exhalation, the superfluous components of Makepeace stripped away and he became nothing more than the image of a fantasy prince, adorned with both beauty and power.

The bear's other claw swept and Makepeace leaned hard on his horse and the horse darted sharply to the side so that the clawtips only raked ineffectually against Makepeace's shield. His spear lashed out like lightning and drove deep into the bear's shoulder. The bear loosed another quiet roar while its oddly delicate facial features contorted into a clay engraving of pain and anger, but Makepeace's own winsome grin faded the instant he realized that despite the deepness of his strike he hadn't felled the beast outright. He managed to only just barely raise his shield in time to block the brunt of an immediate swipe and even blocking it the force unseated him and launched him between the trees.

As Makepeace hit the ground and rolled, his horse toppled over, thrashing all limbs in an arachnid tangle to right itself and flee—in Jay's direction. Big and dark the horse loomed over him, its legs a maniacal churn of dirt and leaves, and Jay only managed to stumble far enough aside that the horse clipped him instead of trampling him outright. He span, his legs operated like a machine beyond his comprehension, and he only stopped when the solid bark of a tree stopped him. Once again his hat protected him from slamming his face.

Recovering, Jay gripped the tree for stability and turned to see the bear staring straight at him.

It heaved laborious breaths, its long arms dangling all the way to the ground so that its bloody claws rested amid clumps of dry leaves. Something in its eyes belied disbelief, a stupid animal incomprehension, as it took its first slow, lumbering step toward him. One claw reached up, ripped the spear out of its shoulder, and snapped it in half with only a clenching of the fingers.

Faced with this behemoth, Jay suddenly felt like his aluminum baseball bat was not the impressive weapon he once thought it was. What would even his strongest swing do except sink into the deep fur and fat of a creature that big? A few thwacks to the skull might work—but the thing was so tall reaching it was out of the question. The wound on its shoulder bubbled bright blood. Maybe a hit there?

His eyes darted to the rest of the scene. Charm and Charisma remained motionless, watching like vultures. Sansaime had still not moved. Makepeace did move, and he reached for the hilt of a sword sheathed on his hip, eyes trained on the back of the bear. But the sword only made it halfway out. The bear hadn't launched him to just anywhere—it launched him directly at the wall of webbing, and many strands already stuck to his gallantly rugged hair. The rest of the strands started moving, started attaching themselves to his armor, wrapping around his arms to bind them, preventing him from drawing his weapon as he was quickly enveloped.

That left Sansaime's fallen dagger, which might as well have been on another planet given how far away it was, and the broken spear at the bear's foot. Jay's mind whirred. Swaying the tip of his baseball bat back and forth in some vain hope it might keep the bear hypnotized long enough for him to strategize, he whispered to Olliebollen: "Can you fix that spear?"

"Huh?"

"When you healed me at the cemetery, you also repaired my clothes. So can you fix broken things?"

"Of course! I'm the Faerie of Rejuvenation, after all. I—"

"How close do all the pieces need to be for you to put them together?"

"Huh? Never thought about that. Guess it doesn't matter!"

Jay whipped around the tree, putting it between him and the bear, and that sudden motion prompted the bear to emerge from its stupor and charge. All he needed was to get onto the other side of the bear and grab the broken spear. The bear was probably stupid—it would almost certainly try to round the tree the same direction he initially went behind it. So if he moved the other direction—

The tree exploded. Jay had been in the process of turning, and he got to watch as the trunk, too thick for him to have touched his fingertips together if he reached around it, ripped in half. Jagged, long wooden chips rose in a sandstorm around him as he felt himself hefted bodily off the ground, into the air, into a few low-lying branches, and down to the ground.

Out of the stultified silence finally arose a vast rustling as the top half of the broken tree came crashing through the canopy and hit the floor.

Okay. So the bear did not need to worry about such insignificant considerations as "which side of the tree to go around." Jay decided to note that for the future, except when he tried to lift himself off the ground, his body refused to cooperate. He glanced down and saw his chest transformed into a mess of jagged red slashes and blood-drenched bits of jacket stuffing.

He attempted to draw a breath and couldn't, and that was when he realized the pain. His head fell back and his hands gripped the air he could not draw into his lungs. Onto his hooked fingers, the fairy Olliebollen descended.

"Now! I want you to think about this moment very very carefully, hero."

Jay gaped, choking, gurgling blood. Elsewhere, another voice picked up, one that wasn't speaking to him. The voice of one of the twins—the angry one, Charisma. Like a blur: "Pluxie you ignorant dullard! You big, brainless brute! I told you not to kill that one, didn't I? We need him alive!"

"Nnnnngh... sorry..." said the bear.

Dust flicked into Jay's eye, redirecting his attention to Olliebollen.

"Hero! Remember this moment, okay? Remember it the next time you even think about selling me off. Got it? GOT IT YOU BASTARD? Don't you ever do anything like that to me ever, ever, EVER again!"

Jay tried to nod. As Charisma continued to batter Pluxie the bear with invective, the sad twin—Charm—dropped down with its tear-stricken eyes focused on him. Or focused on Olliebollen. And Olliebollen didn't notice, wrapped as she was in sanctimony.

"You're doing this whole thing wrong anyway," Charisma said. "You, Pluxie, oughtta be fighting the prince. We can kill the prince. Lalum needs to be the one down here fighting the hero―she can tie him up without hurting him. Why've I even gotta explain this to you blocks of wood!"

"I hope you've learned a valuable lesson hero! And I hope next time you'll say 'thank you' in face of my overwhelming generosity and love!" said Olliebollen, sprinkling pixie dust the moment Charm bolted forward with speed unfitting her demeanor and snatched the fairy in both hands.

As Olliebollen squeaked, Charm's mouth unhinged into a broad blackness out of which pointed teeth and dripping saliva gleamed. But the dust settled and Jay felt the wounds on his chest heal and he rose up swinging his bat as hard as he could into Charm's elbow. The metal struck the bend, the exact worst place to bang yourself: the funny bone.

Charm released Olliebollen reflexively and backpedaled in a silent wail of agony. Jay rushed forward, swinging again, but even if Charm occupied herself by gripping and rubbing her hurt spot, her wings remained free enough to beat the stagnant air and push herself off the ground and out of Jay's reach, trailing loose feathers and grimy black tears behind as she retreated to the safety of the higher branches.

Fine with Jay. He had worse to worry about. That bear-woman, Pluxie—even hitting him through a tree she did enough damage to mortally wound him. If she ever struck him directly, he'd wind up like Sansaime's horse: dead instantly. No chance of Olliebollen healing him. He needed to avoid that above all else.

Ignoring Olliebollen's effusive praise for saving her, he bent into a sprinter's stance and ran. Charisma remained flapping around Pluxie's head, shouting and confusing her, and that gave Jay a chance. The broken halves of the spear were his focus.

Pluxie turned her vacant gaze. She was tracking him. The moment Charisma quit buzzing around her she was ready to charge. But she wasn't the only threat. As Jay closed on the spear at full sprint he glanced at Makepeace struggling within a mass of webbing, hoisted up so that his feet scraped faintly at the ground. And clutched higher up, to one of the trees, Jay saw her, or part of her at least—a few long spindly spider legs. The one Charisma called Lalum. Letting her get her web around him was nearly as bad as being killed in one hit by the bear, in terms of what Olliebollen could do about it.

Charisma screeched: "Lalum. LALUM! You milksop! Stop him. Stop him now!"

The spider legs scuttled but Jay had already cleared the distance. He slid onto his side and seized the pointy half of the broken spear. Olliebollen flitted toward it trailing dust but Jay spat a sharp "No" to stop her as he rammed the spearpoint into the bark of the nearest tree. It stuck there, the broken shaft quivering, as he picked up the other half and pulled himself to his feet.

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Even with the complete spear he couldn't do a thing against Pluxie. Makepeace only annoyed her with a thrust backed by the full momentum of a horse's charge, after all. But if this worked...

He ran away from the part of the spear embedded in the tree. Now that Charisma turned her ire onto Lalum, Pluxie again lumbered toward him, only slightly more hesitant than before. Charisma told her not to kill him, and while Jay doubted for a moment she possessed the intelligence or even physical capability to intentionally follow that order, she did move slower. That made the difference as he dove away from her sweeping lunge, rolled to his feet, held out the broken half of the shaft, and shouted to Olliebollen: "Now!"

Colored dust dropped quick. Pluxie's lunge placed her exactly where Jay had been only moments before—directly between the tree and Jay's current position. Directly between the two halves of the spear.

Olliebollen said it didn't matter how close the pieces were to put them back together. As the dust sparkled on the splinters of the shaft, Jay thought: she better be right.

The shaft left his hand. Not, as he had envisioned in his head, like a rocket, shooting to reattach to its other half. It drifted through the air at a ponderous pace, as though suspended by wires. But when it touched Pluxie's side, it did not stop moving. It did not slow down. It kept going, straight through hundreds of pounds of thick animal fat and muscle and bone, at the exact speed it traveled through air.

It took for the shaft to be half buried for Pluxie to realize; when she swept her claw it already disappeared inside her. Howling, full bulk bristling, Pluxie rolled against the ground, writhing and clenching claws to dredge up chunks of fleshy soil. Her twisting motions reoriented her in relation to the other half of the spear struck to the tree, but the shaft did not care. It moved utterly straight and true and exited out of her gut full red with blood to reattach to its other half. It carried with it strands of gristle and integument, gooey pieces of Pluxie.

The entry and exit wounds were narrow compared to Pluxie's bulk. Didn't matter. Nothing could withstand that kind of internal damage. Jay felt his fingers trembling. Felt inside him spreading something, a surge, an emotion, and without warning even to himself he clenched one hand into a fist and pumped it, elbow bent acutely. "YES!" he shouted like a knife to the dead air. "YES, YES, FUCKING YES!"

"You did it. You really did it!" Olliebollen danced and cheered too. "I never woulda thought of a plan like that in a million billion trillion years!"

"Great show Jay!" yelled Makepeace from his bundle of webbing. "Now why don't you cut me out of this mess so I might give you a fine clap on the back?"

Jay nodded and was already halfway to Sansaime's fallen dagger by the time he had a chance to wonder why he so blindly followed that order. He already took down the main threat. With Olliebollen's healing he could handle the small fry alone. The thought bounced like a single bitter pang against the enormity of his elation. He realized as he wrenched the dagger out of the ground and turned to see Charm and Charisma both stalking to intercept him that he was grinning broadly, so broadly it hurt. What was this? Adrenaline again? A fleeting thing? Something he'd forget by the time his internal chemistry rebalanced itself? Or was this it, what he wanted, the feeling of mattering, the feeling of being the hero?

It was like Charm and Charisma weren't there. They were, but they didn't matter. Charisma stood turned so that she held her monstrous claw in front of her and kept her ordinary arm behind. That she did this in response to how he beat her in the cemetery didn't even register―Jay targeted her first. He swung his bat and she caught it and he kept plowing forward and drove Sansaime's dagger at her throat. At the last moment Charisma tensed her shoulder and caught the blade just under her collarbone and it hardly mattered. Twirling, ripping out the blade and leaving her to dangle in bloody suspended animation, he wrenched his bat from her grasp and swung it in one uninterrupted motion into Charm's spine. He didn't care that the movement took him into one of her wings and he received a mouthful of feathers, he spat them out and kept running without even looking as the sisters fell.

Only one more stood in front of him. The spider, Lalum, rendered insignificantly tiny beside Pluxie's still-writhing body as she wrangled with several silvery strings in an attempt to stitch up the wounds. Like the others, she was an abominable combination of human and animal: bottom half a bulbous spider abdomen with eight needlelike limbs, upper half a human torso, dressed in a nun's habit notably more clean and intact than those of her companions. Around her waist hung two of the same small cages Charm wore, one empty and one with a sad-looking fairy that sat with its legs folded in abject surrender.

But what struck Jay, strong enough to momentarily bump him out of the obscene high pervading every facet of his being, was her mouth. A series of crosswise stitches of her own white webbing stitched it shut. Somehow, that hadn't stopped her from devouring half the fairy in her hand; blood burbled between the stitches.

Jay lifted the bat high and held the dagger ready. She would attempt to stop him with the webbing, that seemed to be her main ability, but since she was eating a fairy he also had to watch out for some kind of magic. If he cut through the web quick with the dagger and came down with a single blow to the head—

Lalum loosed a muffled yelp, scampered over Pluxie's body, and disappeared out of his sight.

Problem solved. Jay reached Makepeace and hacked at the webbing with Sansaime's dagger, not caring if he cut too deep—Olliebollen could clear any scratches. Jay thought spiderwebs were supposed to be stronger than steel, but the dagger cleaved through the thick bundle like cotton, squealing with resistance only when Jay dragged the blade too far and struck Makepeace's shield, which had gotten bundled with the rest of him.

It didn't take long until the threads that remained couldn't shoulder the burden of those severed and Makepeace tumbled out into a kneeling position. He rose and immediately grabbed Jay by the shoulder, jostling him with warm feeling, a warm smile, nothing save genuine happiness at what Jay managed to do. He said something, the actual words played no more distinctly than a buzz, but they didn't matter. Somehow, Jay discovered himself smiling back, grabbing Makepeace's shoulder in return, a moment of mutual celebration uncomplicated by any doubts or cynical thoughts—sheer, unfettered triumph.

"I did it," Jay said.

"Indeed you did my good, good man," said Makepeace. "Now what say you we clean up these—Back!"

The congratulatory hand on Jay's shoulder became a deathgrip that tugged Jay with such force that he stumbled behind Makepeace the same moment Makepeace hefted his shield and the full brunt of Pluxie's power hit it.

Jay could only think, as he and Makepeace skidded back—what the hell? Pluxie rose to her full height and her eyes shone crimson even as her head became shadowed in the forest canopy. The wound on her shoulder when Makepeace speared her, and the wounds on her side and stomach where the broken shaft entered and exited—all were sealed by white stitches. But that shouldn't matter. Sealing the wounds wouldn't do a thing for the obliterated internal organs. At best it would slow the bleeding.

Did Pluxie concentrate all her remaining strength into one final, rage-induced lunge? But that didn't fit the way she reared up now, already prepared to attack again, as though she wasn't inhibited at all. Lalum's thread—could she—

"Oh! I get it," Olliebollen said cheerfully. "That gross spider girl can heal too. (Just not as good as me of course.)"

Of course. (Lalum herself, barely visible behind Pluxie, slinked away covering her face the moment Olliebollen called her gross.) It completely slipped Jay's mind that her magic might be something like that. Fuck! Why didn't he go on the offensive when he first brought down the bear? Why did he run for the dagger to free Makepeace? If he attacked first, he could've won the fight against the three and made sure they stayed down.

His goodwill depleted in an instant. He didn't even give a shit that Makepeace raised his shield and blocked another berserker swing from Pluxie's enormous claws. That oaf, that smiling piece of shit, unable to think for a second what made the most tactical sense, concerned only with breaking free himself so he could steal the glory. And Jay went along with it, duped by positive feeling, the moment he let his guard down for one fucking second!

He didn't have time to berate himself. So far Makepeace managed to, almost absurdly, keep the bear from breaking through the meager defense of his shield, even though he had to grip the shield steady with both hands and brace his legs against the ground and even then got pushed back a full foot with each strike. It didn't seem like such an ordinary-sized shield should've been able to block attacks from a monster that took down entire trees, but Jay didn't question that either—he focused on the opportunity in front of him.

His hand dropped the dagger and went for the sword sheathed on Makepeace's hip. The moment it gripped the hilt, though, a single piercing word from Makepeace stopped him: "No."

Stopped him only for a moment. He refused to blindly obey what Makepeace told him. He tugged and the blade began to slither from its sheath.

"I SAID NO."

Makepeace released one hand from his shield to bat Jay's hand from his sword. At the same moment Pluxie struck again and this time, without the full resistance of every bit of his musculature behind it, Makepeace's defense broke. He rocketed backward, into Jay, and the both of them together soared through the air in a howling glob until they struck shatteringly hard the first thing that rose to stop them: a tree.

By the time they bounced off and hit the ground Jay already knew he had at least seven broken bones, or at least searing pain speared him in seven distinct locations. He landed with Makepeace sprawled on top of him, and so his eyes were riveted to Makepeace's arm, which existed in three pieces, tethered only by single sinewy strands of tendon.

"Don't give up! You can do it!" Olliebollen pixie dusted them back to perfect condition as they rolled away from each other and only stopped themselves from furiously demanding to know what the fuck the other was doing thanks to the omnipresent tremble caused by Pluxie's thrashing as she plowed through trees after them.

The trees she destroyed wound up getting in her way as their big bushy tops collapsed all around her. That slowed her down enough for Makepeace to leap to his feet, pull a small silver chime from around his neck, and blow the sharpest and loudest whistle Jay had ever heard.

Nothing happened.

Pluxie kept bulldozing forward. Trees cascaded but her red eyes remained rooted upon them, and her claws flashed with razor sharpness as the distance closed. Still Makepeace refused to reach for his sheathed sword and Jay shouted: "Why?!"

"It's not the bear we're fighting," Makepeace said.

At that moment, as Pluxie burst through the final layer of trees and hurtled unimpeded toward them, something rushed from the side. Primed by Makepeace's last comment, Jay raised his bat, but it wasn't Charm or Charisma or even Lalum charging them, it was Makepeace's big black horse, which in a single deft and semicircular arc Makepeace managed to mount while seizing Jay by his jacket collar and hoisting him aboard. If "aboard" was how you referred to being on a horse.

Didn't matter. Instantly they were galloping away, Makepeace shouting "Hyaa!" as he leaned over the pommel of his saddle, Jay with no option but to wrap his arms around Makepeace's waist and hold on, his bat awkwardly lodged against Makepeace's chest.

Then he realized Olliebollen didn't make it onto the horse with them.

He looked over his shoulder to try and spot her receding into the distance but only the gigantic form of Pluxie swelled in his view, barreling behind them without losing an inch of ground despite the full tilt gallop of Makepeace's horse. No—it was gaining ground. The horse couldn't run fast enough, not with two people riding it.

Jay noticed something else about Pluxie from his new vantage. Above her shone three silvery strings, stretching from her back into the trees like marionette strings. Lalum's webbing―although Lalum herself was nowhere to be found. For several sheer seconds Jay stared dumbfounded until everything snapped cleanly into place and every confusion resolved at once. Lalum didn't heal Pluxie. She was maneuvering her body with webs. Pluxie still roared, but everything else, her running, her rearing, her swiping of claws—that was Lalum's doing.

Which was why Makepeace refused to attack Pluxie with the sword. Even if he finished the bear cleanly with a single stroke, that wouldn't stop the claws from retaliating—in fact, it would leave him open, because he needed to lower his shield to attack. The idea of running away, then, possessed a certain degree of intelligence.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Jay guessed he could give Makepeace credit for that.

Partial credit. Were the strings manipulating Pluxie ruled by physical reality, it would've been smart to escape her range entirely. But three strings, no matter how tough, couldn't have moved Pluxie with such perfect finesse. As they galloped farther and farther away and Pluxie kept gradually gaining, Jay knew that what Lalum was doing could not possibly operate under such logical rules. All they were doing was slowly running out of time.

The landscape of the forest shifted, the air became damper and Jay felt cold pricks of condensation while watching Pluxie claw ever closer. The trees grew sparse, replaced by big fluorescent mushrooms and sheets of mossy ivy that dangled and drifted. The solid clop-clop of the horse's hooves turned to a mushier, wetter noise. Where once was only impenetrable darkness rose a pale aura conducted along rising white mist, and although Makepeace shouted, "Hold on! I have a plan," Jay hardly cared, mired as he was in mental invective, toward stupid Makepeace who gambled everything on running away and separated them from their healer, toward stupid himself for not noticing Lalum's strings earlier, toward this whole stupid farce of a fight—the ghost of his previous triumph just that, a ghost—and in the midst of these and more thoughts far too clear for his liking they jumped.

In that suspended moment, with the whole bundle of Jay's insides hefted up into his ribcage via the odd intersection of multiple forces of movement, the bitter and biting thoughts ceased. Jay watched the mist that rose beneath them and the sea of shiny wet mud that underpinned it, mud so thin it seemed to slosh. Then, Makepeace was no longer in front of him. Jay's arms wrapped around nothing and he pitched forward as he watched Makepeace disappear upward, dangling from a thick hanging vine as his other hand finally reached for the hilt of his sword.

Everything ended before the horse—and Jay—hit the ground.

Pluxie, at Lalum's beck, continued close enough behind that Jay felt her hot snorting breath brush the hairs poking out from under his hat. But Makepeace was now above her, and it took only a single slash, a slash Jay heard more than saw, to sever all three of Lalum's strands.

The horse landed, awkwardly amid a bramble of broken branches, and tossed Jay off. He flipped through the air, through a bundle of hanging ivy that slapped and then slowed him, until a bulbously withered tree stopped him, but thankfully not fatally or even bone-breakingly so. In fact, he wasn't even scratched. But he rolled over, braced against the knobby roots at the base of the tree, and expelled an exhausted and strangely relieved puff of pent-up breath as he watched Pluxie lie within the mud.

She was not dead, still, but without the strings her movements became arduous as the mud seeped into her white fur and billowed up all around her. Limbs dragged wretched. The great body swelled without managing any meaningful change and even that exertion wrenched from Pluxie an agonized cry, no longer describable as a roar, a jagged thing that brought up with it chunks of her devastated interior. Her head lolled and her eyes, a fading sheen, peered tearfully toward Jay as he sat and watched, aware more and more of the full and haggard breaths that filled and then depleted his chest.

Her body slowly sank. A bubbling rose about her as the liquid mud shifted into a quicksand pit, but even still she retained her stagnant slowness, her sense of suspended animation. Jay couldn't stop watching, even after a much sharper and more lively sound of pain from Makepeace's horse not far away, even after Makepeace himself slid down a vine and landed with a lot of clanking metal.

"Where's that faerie friend of yours? My horse's leg is broken. That thing can heal horses yes? Not simply people?"

Only the shoulders, one arm, and head of the bear remained now, the rest more quickly subsumed into the mud than Jay would've expected given the torpor of its movements.

Pluxie said: "Help..."

Makepeace turned his head toward her, glanced at Jay, and sighed. "If your faerie was here we could help her too I suppose."

"Help her?"

"Help... me..." Pluxie whispered, straining its neck with the last of its strength to keep above the swamp. "I'm sorry... I'm so sorry... Lord Jesus... Oh, Lord Jesus...!"

Then Pluxie's head vanished into the mud. Other than a few bubbles, not a thing remained on the surface.

That broke the thread. Jay gripped the side of the tree and pulled himself up. Messing up the fight left him feeling like shit already, and he didn't care for the implication of what Makepeace said, as though there was something to feel about letting Pluxie die. A pointless, meaningless moral quibble dredged out of the dirt. "Why would we help that thing? She tried to kill us."

"Do you think those girls look like monsters by choice? They're victims too. Victims of the archbishop." Makepeace stroked his horse's snout, calming it, a gesture unnecessary because it was already oddly calm despite its devastated foreleg. "Well. It doesn't matter now, does it. She's dead." He fired off a sign of the cross toward the now placid spot where Pluxie's gigantic body had been. "God rest that poor girl's soul."

In no universe would Jay be tricked into sentimentality for a slain monster. Yes, in an ideal world nobody would ever have to die, and he didn't intend to kill anyone more than he had to—he let those fucking harpies live in the graveyard, hadn't he? He felt sorry enough for them to do that, hadn't he?—but that bear needed only one clean swipe to erase their entire torsos. He'd needed to hit it, and hit it hard. Why was Makepeace trying to guilt him?

"If you really care I can bring her back with the Staff of Lazarus when I get it," Jay said.

Makepeace stared at him, a surprised expression on his face. "Jay—"

"Anyway, you don't seem to care that the 'poor girl' probably killed your girlfriend."

"Who?" Makepeace's surprise transformed into an instant of genuine confusion before he realized. "Oh, that. Sansy's fine—most likely."

Unbelievable. First Makepeace tried to guilt trip and then he talked about Sansaime like that, Jay didn't know what to say. It wasn't like Jay cared about Sansaime either but the hypocrisy floored him, emblematized by that dopey doofus expression on Makepeace's immaculately punchworthy face. Jay advanced, not sure what he intended to do, a roiling glut of pissed-offness and shame and embarrassment all merging together, that stupid bear-woman pleading as she sank into the mud and him fucking up the fight and—and Jay didn't do anything. He stood there, breathing heavily.

Makepeace's befuddlement broke into a smile. "Jay. Jay, my good man. I meant no offense. Truth be told, I care not one whit what happens to these wretched women. If you ask me, they're all better off dead, the state they've fallen to."

"Then why did you say—"

"To be polite," Makepeace said simply.

Jay tried to parse what exactly that meant but found his thoughts muddled. He realized that for some reason he'd gotten emotional over basically nothing and he didn't know why. He scratched under his chin, where one day's worth of stubble scratched back.

"My sister, Mayfair," Makepeace said to fill the void, "she's quite the bleeding heart in regards to such somber affairs as life and death. Always seeking some way to find for us all salvation. Didn't I say yesterday you reminded me of her? I thought I might look rather callous if I didn't extend at least a token gesture of mercy."

What exactly had Jay ever done to give Makepeace the impression he'd care about something like that? All Makepeace ever saw Jay do was try to pawn Olliebollen to a fairy organ harvester. Even if Jay did call off the deal the moment it had a chance to actually materialize. Shit.

Because Jay still wasn't talking, Makepeace shrugged. "Maybe you're more similar to me than I thought."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

Makepeace's hands went up in a humble, almost mock supplication that did nothing to supplicate. "Nothing. I simply talk too much for my own good. I do have a penchant for getting myself into bloody noses. Forget all that, if I truly wanted to be polite I ought to have started with this: Thank you."

"For what?"

"For saving my life of course! I was a great big buffoon and got myself stuck in a web right away, but you kept your head and pulled off some truly impressive maneuvers. Were it not for you, those women would've gotten the better of me and Sansy both. For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart."

No irony. No smirk. No quip as garnish, only that full stop, and even melancholy etched into those features, so at odds with the oppressively jovial douchebag Jay had taken Makepeace for from the start.

Embarrassing. Not for Makepeace—for Jay. Because now Jay felt like the worse person. That must've been Makepeace's whole point in apologizing. To jam the knife deep. Not to mention, reminding Jay of what he did right only made him remember more what he did wrong. When the failures blot out the victories like that, why bother trying?

Anyway, continued aggression would only make him look even more foolish, so his anger oozed out instantly, leaving only the sensation of labored breathing in its gradual return to normalcy. He shifted his glance slightly to avoid staring Makepeace back in the eye.

"Thanks. You saved me too. I guess."

Silence. Makepeace didn't seem fully satisfied by the response—he must've expected Jay to lash out so he could maintain the superior position—but he made no attempt to erase the moment with a joke. They both stood there, a few feet from where the corpse of a poor girl lay buried in virulent mud.

The moment persisted until a shaft of light sheared through the trees and landed between them. They both looked up as from the light descended a spiral of butterflies, wings arrayed in rainbow patterns, butterflies who as Jay tilted the brim of his hat and squinted understood not to be butterflies at all, but fairies. Hundreds and hundreds of fairies.

"Welcome, esteemed guests!" the fairies spoke in chorus, their multitudinous voice one singular and harmonic chime. "Welcome, to where love blossoms in eternal spring! Welcome, to where all is mirth and concord! Welcome, to where those who wander never wish to leave! Welcome—welcome—welcome, to the court of Flanz-le-Flore!"

"Ah," said Makepeace cheerily, "now we're truly fucked."