Mouse turned and ran. An arrow whizzed past his ear, then another and another. The whoosh of slingshots behind him gave warning seconds before a hail of metal barbs hissed by. Mouse threw himself behind the door, then glanced down. A barb stuck out of his ankle. Little more than a mess of fishhooks, the tips of each of the half-dozen hooks were barbed, and all of them stained a threatening purple.
Poison. Just great. He knelt and snapped the barb, wincing as the force of it breaking shuddered through his skin, then yanked it out of his ankle. Concerned, he checked over Felix, but aside from a growing bruise at his temple, the Mage-Emperor remained unharmed. Okay. He’s fine.
“Mouse! We’re he—huh?” Brittany froze at the sight of Mouse in disarray and an unconscious Mage-Emperor. Behind her, a half-dozen of the other princesses peered over her shoulder, all in bath towels, some clutching soaps or shampoos.
“Run!” Mouse shouted. He squinted at the other princesses behind Brittany. No Sabelyn, no Lilith. Ah, fuck. This is bad.
“There they are! Get them!” The winged demons rushed the hot springs’ building.
Brittany chucked a bar of soap at the nearest demon, then stepped in and elbowed him in the gut, shoving him back out of the doorway. “What happened to Felix?”
“The… they attacked so suddenly. There’s the demons, but also a darkfoe—Watch out! Their barbs are poisoned!” Mouse replied.
Bessemer, the dwarf, pulled an axe out of somewhere under her towel and let out a war cry. Clarita pushed out from deep in the crowd, hair bristling and wild, body swelling with muscle. Gawain leaped off an ornately-twisted towel and launched herself at one of the demons, who screamed in horror as a tiny nude green body latched onto his face. The wooden beams of the doorframe contorted and sprouted new, green buds, then burst out in branches, slamming the nearest demons back. Leaa smiled and stepped forward gracefully, a leafy hand out to protect the other princesses from the flying barbs. Eleda blasted beams of sun magic through the gaps in Leaa’s protective leaves, blazing holes in the demons
The demon Gawain had leaped on shook his head fiercely. She gripped onto his horns, but flew off and smacked into the wall. Dazed, Gawain held up her hands, where she still clutched the demon’s horns. “They came off?”
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Mouse stared at the ‘demon’ left behind. “They aren’t demons at all! They’re avians!”
“Wh—what?” Toni asked, taken aback. She pushed her way through the crowd to glare at the ‘demons’ through the doorway. “What? This is not… why? Working with… a darkfoe? But that’s…”
“It’s what you’ve driven us to.” Eran ripped a pair of horns off his head and threw them at Toni. “You nobility, lording it over us, never paused to think about how we felt, we, who face the blight daily, who lose family and friends to the blight. When you outlawed being blighted, when you executed anyone stained with blight, when you burned towns infected with the blight rather than trying to purify them, then looked down on us as scum for daring to get blighted—did you not think that we might fight back? That us lowly peasants might one day rise up?”
“I—it was necessary! The blight is a scourge! We can’t allow it to dirty us!”
Eran snorted. “Typical of you upper class scum. Can’t allow it to dirty you? Is that what you’re concerned about? Getting dirty?”
“Would you rather we allow the blight to spread, unstopped?” Toni shouted.
“Your kind executed my wife. Her blight was treatable, but in your eyes, she was already dirtied, unsalvageable. So you packed her in, her, our clutch, and the rest of our town, packed them into townhall and burned them all alive. I only escaped because I got waylaid rescuing a lost, young girl deserted on an island in the middle of our hunting grounds.”
Wait… is that… is that Sela? Mouse cast a glance at the mermaid princess from the corner of his eye. Talk about a small world…
“Since then, every day, every night, every month and year that crawls by… I have dreamed of only one thing: revenge. And I shall have it!” Eran pointed at Toni. “Hand her over, and the rest of you go free.”
Mouse laid Felix on the ground, out of the range of arrows and barbs, and stood. The poison made his foot burn when he put weight on it, but he ignored it. “No.”
“Do you deny that she—” Eran started.
“Toni has done wrong by you, doubtlessly, but the way to resolve it is not vigilante violence and seeking the aid of darkfoes. Bring your case before the Mage-Emperor. I guarantee he will listen with a fair ear, and distribute punishment as deserved.
Toni scowled at him. “You dare interfere in another nation’s governance?”
Mouse stared down his nose at Toni, disgusted. Killing your own citizens wholesale, and you still dare act haughty? “Under the Barrier Pact, the Mage-Emperor is, in fact, required to interfere. And it sounds like you and your people have much to answer for.”
“That—that…” Eran stumbled back, staring at his hands. He looked over his shoulder at the looming spider, then back at Mouse. All at once, he swiped his hand. “No! I won’t be deceived. It’ll be like before. Years, waiting. Years, while her nobles continue to massacre us commoners. I won’t wait! My revolution comes now!”
Behind him, the other avians cheered, a vicious, rowdy noise.
Mouse reached to his thigh again. This time, he found a blade waiting, and glanced back to find Brittany, grinning, offer him his sword. He unsheathed it and pointed it at Eran. “Then I am afraid we must battle.”