Energy snapped like storm tide. She lunged for the door, aware of the prince running behind her. Three runes burned cold on her shoulders, like spots of mountain ice embedded into her skin. Inside, the crowd was half-frozen, half-moving, surging, beginning to run, men and women with panicked faces and in fancy dress holding onto skirts, plates, glasses, stumbling.
She dodged through the first few, then had to angle herself and shove. People attempted to jump out of her way, but moved too slow. She thumped straight into a noble, twisted, and kept going. Ahead, people were screaming, shouting. Someone—Treng—was calling her name.
“Catrin! Catrin! To me!”
A second growl—dark, angry, ancient—shook the air. The dark energy ramped up like a wave, tripping down her spine. Glass shattered. Another scream, more a whimper, quickly cut.
When she broke through the front of the crowd, she stopped dead in her tracks.
The hound was the size of a horse. Huge, snarling, with coarse, wiry brown hair and great claws that clicked and scraped on the checkered marble as it moved. It looked like someone had taken the meanest, mangiest wolf they could find and given it the muscles of a beef cow. Rough slabs of muscle rippled with tension, lean and hard, crisscrossed with bumps and scars. A particularly long and nasty one sliced across its bony hip, leaving a pale, twisting mark. Its long snout curved downward into a cruel jaw, showing two sharp rows of elongated teeth.
And, on its shoulder, branded so deep it seemed like the skin would never heal, was a symbol.
It looked like a Janessi ‘h’, except the top had three extra branches, two going straight out and one curling back over the left-side of the letter like the horn of a ram.
Though crude, even she could recognize the curve of the rentac.
Her eyes went wide.
Demon.
Black mist poured off its body, caustic to look at, dissolving like ground fog several inches from its body. The smell of sulfur caught at her nose, along with the fetid, overpowering scent of rotting gore.
Bellfort faced off against it, the broken shard of a glass punch bowl in his hands as a weapon and a flimsy metal serving tray for a shield. A rivulet of blood slipped down his hand where he held the shard, standing his ground.
Geneve stood behind him, shaking, cornered to the wall.
Another growl rose from the hound’s throat, the sound like a great, dragging stone, so loud and strong that it made the air tremble and sent vibrations through her bones. Bellfort dodged back as it snapped, lifting the shard and the platter, his steps quick and sure, face a mask of gritty concentration.
But he was clearly no match for it. The snap had been a feint, a test.
She watched in horror as its hindquarters bunched, gathering for a leap.
“No!” She threw out an arm, intending to defend him, for the instinctual mercari spell to spark through her runes and shove several spears of ice straight through the hound’s chest.
Instead, searing pain slammed through her skin. She yelled as it burned into her body. Her hand jerked to her arm, finding a slick of blood over the summoning runes.
She couldn’t feel Kodanh.
Helpless, she watched as the hellhound tore into Bellfort.
He didn’t stand a chance. With Geneve at his back, he could only retreat, not sidestep. He slashed the jagged piece of glass up and forward, shoved the tray into the beast’s snapping mouth, but it only aimed its jaws lower.
The hound’s teeth closed over his chest. Bone crunched. He went down with a strangled shout, the creature following him with another grating growl. Geneve shrieked, eyes wide in horror.
In the next second, Catrin was there. Its acrid stench beat at her eyes and mouth—sulfur, gore, and stale sweat that reminded her of an infected wound. She sliced a solid gash through the hound’s hamstring and danced away. A pained howl ripped the air like thunder. Its hindquarters dropped and flailed, the limb collapsed, flopping, claws scraping across the marble, muscles bunching grotesquely in its haunch. Black blood splattered the floor with a hiss.
She darted away another few steps, watching it, studying its movement. Then, when its biting jaws proved too slow, she raced in to take its other side.
The second hamstring snapped under the stroke of her blade, pulling a scream from the beast. She met its snarling backstrike with a twist and stab close to its eye, making it flinch, then went for its neck. It had thick skin, and she had to push harder, but she severed the tendons along its back and side in a smooth arc, then stabbed a blade deep into the side of its throat.
Its howl switched to a gurgle. Blood like liquid obsidian gushed from the wound, spreading across the floor, hot, sizzling where it touched the marble. She pulled her knife out and jerked out of its way. Wisps of thin smoke came from it, stinking like a foul river.
The dog thrashed like a mismanaged puppet.
Death throes. Her gaze went to the brand on its shoulder, now smeared with blood, staring at the symbol.
Where had it come from?
She kept her blades raised, just in case.
After half a minute, it was dead.
An unearthly silence spread over the hall. She felt eyes on her. Nobles and upper class merchants stared, shock clear on their faces. Most hung at the opposite end of the room where the veranda let out, bunched near the exits, but a dozen stood closer, makeshift weapons—broken bottles, table knives, the splintered-off leg of a chair—in their hands.
To her left, Treng had pulled Bellfort out of range and was hurriedly unwrapping his sash to use as a bandage. Geneve was there, too, cushioning his head with one hand, the other shaking as she helped Treng undo Bellfort’s jacket.
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From this far, she couldn’t see enough to detail his injuries, but he didn’t look good.
She found Prince Nales in the crowd and pointed a bloodied finger to him.
“Go to the kitchens, get the elf. He’s a healer.”
His face had gone a stark white, mouth slack in shock. He’d already taken several steps toward Bellfort, but his head snapped to her, eyes wide.
Then his boots were clomping hard on the marble, racing for the door.
As he left, it occurred to her that she’d just issued an order to a prince. And that she’d just sent him off alone.
Elrya’s tits.
On cue, a blood-chilling shriek reverberated through the castle.
She stopped dead, grip tightening on her blades.
Treng’s fierce gaze met hers across the space.
“Go!” he snarled. “Kill it.”
She offered up one of her blades as she skipped back. “Knife?”
It wasn’t his usual Sarasvatani short sword, but it was better than nothing.
He gave a curt nod. She pressed the hilt into the hand of the nearest noble—an older man with a strong, determined expression who, after a quick flinch of surprise, clasped it with a firm grip.
“Give this to him,” she directed, then sprinted for the door.
The hallway enveloped her in a wave of warmth and dimness. Outside the great hall, wall sconces cast a shivering, tinted light over the hall’s finery. She paused by the first set to inspect the blood on her arm.
As far as she could tell, she hadn’t been hit. Though blood slicked the entire outside of her bicep, there were no obvious wounds or scratches—not that she saw, anyway. No obvious breaks.
But the rune still burned. It felt as if every piece of mercari was biting into her skin, needle-sharp, the pain prickling like the aftermath of a branding.
She called on it experimentally, attempting to pull the power of Kodanh to her as she ran—an act as natural as breathing.
The runes screamed in response. Pain smashed through her nerves, cold as an arctic frost. She snarled, stumbling to the side, clutching at the arm awkwardly with the hand that held her knife.
Okay, no magic, then. Not that spell, at least.
That was fine. She still had a blade.
The shriek sounded again—closer, this time, eerie, tipping up in pitch like a saslani deer. More to the left.
In the outer bailey?
She pushed more speed into her sprint, feeling her muscles stretch out. Her breaths came even and calm, the weight of her greaves and pauldrons snug and flexed to her body—Elrya, she longed for her breastplate. She dug in and angled for the next corner, almost smashing into a castle servant, female, blond hair, eyes wide with fright, one of the wine servers. She jerked only slightly and bowled past, heading for the back.
“The terrace!” The woman’s voice followed her up, breathless, shaking. “It’s on the East terrace!”
Catrin checked her pace and swerved, taking the next stair down—a servants’ niche, tight and cramped. At the base, she ripped into the next long, straight hallway, veered to the outer door, and slammed through.
The night opened around her.
Adrenaline shuddered through her body. Most of the light from before had gone, though some remained—like echoes of the northern aurora, except pure and pale, ghosts. Above, stars glimmered, cold and distant. Her breath huddled up in a chilled cloud of vapor. The air was still. Tense. Quiet. As if every stone and insect held themselves, waiting. Though she could still hear the mutterings and buzz of panic from the great hall and courtyard, the sound came to her from a distance—like it belonged to a different world.
The breeze lifted, pricking her skin, cooling the blood on her arm. The smell of cinnamon and roast lingered, still warm, along with the bitter cut of triskan wine.
Then, sulfur.
She tightened her grip on the knife, steeled herself, and stalked toward the terrace.
The castle was old. Very old. Seven hundred years’ worth of additions had bumped and bungled their way into its design, leaving some serious quirks. The terrace was leftover from Lord Stanek’s great-grandfather, who had courted himself a bride from Verona and built it to give her a piece of home. It stood against the inner wall, sculpted pillars catching the light like piano teeth, holding darkness between them. A smoothed balustrade rounded its far end where the garden dropped off, allowing a small lookout over a landscaped pond. Ivy ringed the structure. The fountain gurgled a quiet splash.
The smell of sulfur grew stronger.
The first body was a lump in the grass twenty feet from its entrance. A stablehand. Male. Young. Hardly past fifteen. His face, neck, and torso had been mauled beyond recognition, a wet, tattered, glistening mess. She only knew him by his clothes, which now lay bloody and shredded.
The moist scent of gore slid into her nose, so thick she could taste it. Around him, the dirt and grass had been trampled.
The second body lay only a few yards away, limp like a discarded doll, with long brown hair that splayed like a whip. She had a thick face, slack and untouched, as if she were asleep. A braided crown of triskan sat askew on her temple. Her throat and part of her chest had been slashed, blood darkening her clothes in a sheet. A wrapped sticky dumpling sat in the grass close to her abdomen.
Ahead, the entrance of the terrace loomed in darkness.
Catrin sank into the shadows of the castle wall and slipped toward it.
As she approached its threshold, the night quietened even more.
The dusty, green scent of Teilanni ivy came to her. She brushed under its overhanging leaves with barely a whisper, only the soft tap of her soles, the subtle creak of her armor, and the gentle slosh of water from the fountain at the end of the terrace breaking the tense quiet.
It was dark, but her elf eyes easily adjusted, used to the deep forest. Though the tilework had chipped and worn over the hundred years since the terrace’s commissioning, it still gave a soft, ambient reflection. The mosaic had been done in a series of dark stripes and bars, mottled with black, twelve-pointed stars against the paleness of its striking white background. It looked like jagged teeth, she thought, or a rough representation of a river valley. The square stonework curved over her head, forming a concave, domed ceiling. Thick supports crossed overhead every twelve feet, blocking her view of the other domes, but her caution, the smell, and the emptiness of the corridor kept her glancing up.
A knot of tension tightened across her shoulders when she came to the next pillar and spotted a smear of blood on the ground. She halted, feeling the warning churn into her gut like a wayward shiver. Fear coiled through her like a snake. She fought the urge to gag, straining to hear the slightest sound. To her left, and back, the distant murmur or the great hall came to her—but in the terrace, the air remained dead silent. Her breath hissed through her teeth, slow and shallow. The smell of sulfur had grown overpowering, pungent with death, clotting in the back of her throat. The demon’s presence lay thick in the air.
Dark. Choking.
Heavy.
Her gaze roved slowly over the scene, taking in every last inch and detail, following the smear to a second on the balustrade and a tangle of torn ivy at the side, then up, up—
And spotted a demon on the ceiling, staring straight at her.