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O Happy Dagger (Briony, Red, Chase's Story)
🕑 Added 2023-05-31 19:00:02 +0000 UTC[Content warning: this story features heavy discussion of murder, demonic possessions, murder investigations, racial discrimination in a fantasy context, violence, death, and descriptions of dead bodies. There were also mentions in previous chapters of pregnancy, birth, sororicide, torture, abuse, and forced captivity.]
Part V: Strangled Roots
It was the middle of the night by the time they translocated back to Theydon-Prum, the main Talward house—the one safe location Red had managed to fix in his mind reliably enough to teleport back to—dark and silent, as all of its occupants had shuttered themselves up against the rain. Here in the outlying farmlands, the rain was more of a miserable drip than the torrential downpour it had been in the city, the droplets warm and almost the consistency of sticky sap as it slipped down their necks.
Briony took hardly any notice of the weather. It felt as if her mind had clouded over, and the familiar burning, thrashing feeling was writhing in her gut again, and she was preoccupied enough trying to keep it clamped down. The desire to tear Ovozin Typhaine to pieces with her bare hands was almost overwhelming, but she told herself to stay calm. Chase needed them to have clear heads if they were going to—she tried not to falter at the thought—find him in time.
No, she told herself. Find him at all. What could be happening to him now—what could make them find him too late—did not bear thinking about.
They started at the Typhaine homestead, which lay deserted and darkened, showing no signs that the Mage had ever returned there since leaving for Ambryn. Briony’s heart sank, and from the look on Red’s face, his thoughts lay along the same grim tracks as hers: if they were wrong and the Enchanter hadn’t come back to Prum, their chances of finding him had dropped to almost nothing. But Red only said woodenly, “Search everything in his house, especially his desks and paperwork. Contracts, bills of sale, land deeds—we may find some evidence of places where he could hide.”
So that was what they did, though every minute that crept by with the rain tapping away at the windows and Briony fumbling through sheafs of paper as thin and translucent as dragonfly wings made her want to scream. Her eyes blurred hotly as she scoured through dizzying account books with confusing, disconnected chains of debts and interest and tallies, only a few guttering candle-stubs and a ball of magelight lighting the columns of tiny cramped numbers. And still nothing seemed of surefire interest except when she heard Red make a startled, inarticulate noise from Ovozin’s bedroom.
“What is it?” she asked, poking her head through the doorway. The bedroom matched the rest of the richly-built farmhouse: tastefully-decorated, with well-made furnishings imported from Ambryn, but there was a restrained arrogance to it all that made her instinctively mislike the place, even ignoring the fact that she already thought its owner was a villain. It reminded her, somehow, of the Sponsor’s private suites at the top of the Heroes’ Arena. But her mouth dropped open when she saw what Red had uncovered: a hinged, swinging bookcase filled with farmer almanacs and reference texts, behind which was concealed an enormous stash of illegal spellbooks.
Red was already riffling through several tomes with eager hands, heedless of any protections or boobytraps that could be placed on them. “These are obscure,” he was saying, although she couldn’t even be sure he’d heard her enter the room, “you’d need to have deep pockets and a lot of courage—or a total lack of concern over getting caught, anyway—to have hunted them down.”
“Well, now we know how he’s so powerful without having attended a Circle,” Briony remarked, frowning and flipping open a text of her own. “And what are the chances that his sister learned from these, too? These aren’t just books on Enchanting, there’s everything, Elementalism and Divination and—”
She stopped talking, abruptly. One of the spines on the shelf was in Mizunh, which she’d only barely started to learn, but the title had been referenced in enough other texts that she recognized it immediately: The Book of Hunger.
Red noticed her silence and glanced over, catching sight of the black, cracked volume too. Briony watched the color drain from his tanned face. The Book of Hunger, although more commonly-distributed than even Mages liked to admit, was one of those forbidden texts that students were always taught to avoid or turn in should they ever come across a copy. It was an ancient sorcerer’s ledger, detailing various occult rituals and profane spells—and it included a list of demonic names that had been confirmed, in some way or another, to successfully summon Endarkened “servants” from Hael.
“Shit,” Briony breathed. The animal killings, Fawn Woodsbury’s death. Was Ovozin dabbling in the dark arts, on top of all his other crimes? “You don’t think…”
Red shook his head and snapped the spellbook he was holding shut decisively. “We need to keep looking,” was all he said.
Briony supposed there was nothing else to say.
They could not make the question of Ève Typhaine fit into their understanding of things. So she was very likely still alive—but what did that mean for the case? It seemed probable that she was her brother’s accomplice rather than his victim: that flood had been magical, and based on timing, it was doubtful that Ovozin himself could have summoned it. And it made more sense that a Mage who was skilled enough to raise a flood could have been the one to heal the crops around Theydon-Prum—so Ève must have been behind the majority of the magic in this little family operation, whereas Ovozin’s talents clearly lay in Enchantment, if he was skilled enough to maintain the illusion of her corpse in such detail that he could fool even practiced morticians. But why fake her death in the first place, and why kidnap Chase? How did her apparent long illness factor into it?
Once dawn began to smudge the dark ink of the sky with dull, angry pink, however, the questions ceased to matter. The financial histories detailed in Ovozin’s account books were too complex for Briony and Red alone to parse; none of it pointed to an obvious trail, and they didn’t have the time to read through the piles and piles of ledgers more thoroughly. Red glanced out at the faint, simmering horizon—the rain had eased a little, and the sullen clouds of night were breaking way for a pale, wan morning—and said, blinking wearily, “I think we can give this up as a lost case. Maybe if we had more time…”
Briony had been thinking the same thing. “We should go knocking on doors,” she concluded. “Better yet, we should ask the villagers to help us search. Two dozen hands—and eyes—are surely better than ours alone.”
Red nodded slowly, but his tone was careful—as if he were bringing up an indelicate subject—when he said, “I think the Talwards would help us, but the rest of the town hasn’t proved nearly as cooperative. Many of them will have their own reasons to protect Ovozin, even if they personally have no love of him: their livelihoods count on his continued services. And we’re outsiders, who they’re already suspicious of, and also… Mages.”
And Briony knew then that he was remembering what had happened with Kaitrin’s father and the little Mage baby, and how she’d set the man afire and probably earned the fear and enmity of everyone in the town who already had reason to believe that Mages were soulless devils. She felt heat touch her face and neck, but she said firmly, “They’ll do it if we tell them he’s responsible for Fawn Woodsbury’s death, and if we promise to heal their crops and remove his yoke from their backs. As soon as they’re not dependent on him, they’ll turn on him.”
Red was watching her steadily. “Are we authorized to promise something like that?” he asked, his tone mild and inquisitive rather than reproachful.
Briony shook her head. She was team captain for this mission, so if there were consequences for this, it would come down on her. But with Chase missing, it didn’t matter. “I’ll make that call,” she said. “If it’s necessary to catch this rogue Mage, or… or an Endarkened, promising something that’s within our power to do seems justified, especially if it will help save Chase’s life. I doubt Blade—or the Autarch’s Inquisitors, if it comes to that—will really put up a fight about it, not when it’s indirectly freeing a nice Norm town from the clutches of an evil Mage. And what Ovozin’s done to these people is evil. I’d have come back on my next day off to heal their plants in secret, anyway, if only to rectify some of the harm that’s been done to them at his hand.”
Red smiled, though the expression was a bit strained. “Better not to tell them that, I think. They’ll be less likely to stir themselves and help us search if they knew that part.” Then he shook his head. “I can’t say it’s exactly comfortable, rounding up an angry mob to hunt down a Mage, but I don’t think we have any other option. And if things get out of hand, and they decide they want to string Ovozin up once they find him?”
“Let them,” Briony said dourly. “After we make him tell us where Chase is.”
And so they went around pounding on doors, a low, uneasy mist clinging to their calves and blanketing the rowed, tilled fields in blue-white as the sun crept reluctantly towards the top of the surrounding foothills. Luckily, farmers were early-risers, so there were plenty of people at hand to answer their front doors, though they gawked and stared uncomprehendingly while Red and Briony barked orders at them, all but demanding any able body in their household to pitch in for the search for Ovozin Typhaine.
Word really began to spread, though, once they reached the central square in town, where some of the most prominent families—Fawn Woodsbury’s folk included—resided. Briony raised her voice like a town crier or one of the newsboys in Haven, bawling, “We know what’s been going on with Ovozin Typhaine, and how he’s been throttling your livelihood all these years! None of you are in trouble—we don’t care—but he’s taken our comrade and we need to find him. We don’t know this place, and you do! If he’s found, and our teammate recovered, we can prosecute him, and the money he’s taken from you can be accounted for and returned! We’re Mages, we can heal your crops just as well as he can, even better, because we don’t want your money, we just want to find him and bring him to justice—but we need your help to do it!”
There was some skepticism at first, wary faces peering from high windows and sullen, sardonic questions posed, but something in the urgency of her voice eventually caught on, and by the time Wintry Talward and her relatives arrived to join the effort, a fervor had sparked in the town square and began spreading outwards like wildfire. Briony and Red soon found themselves in charge of organizing a search party that was growing by the dozen with each passing quarter-hour. Red directed half of the group to search in the eight or so likeliest places the locals proposed Ovozin could be hiding in—“he owns the old Thackery farm now, doesn’t he?” an enthusiastic housewife said. “Yes, and he uses that shed the fletcher once built for storage!” cried another—while the others were to comb the area in a methodical grid pattern. It was all a bit chaotic, and Briony, looking around at the once-haggard faces now bright with excitement and something like hatred, thought with a clutch of dismay that perhaps she was inciting a bloodthirst for Ovozin’s punishment rather than an erstwhile altruism borne out of concern for Chase. But the urgency was needed, however they ignited it, and soon enough people were scrambling in a mad dash to find the errant Mage, calling out eagerly to each other the way hunters did as they combed the forest for a lamed deer.
“And if you see him,” she tried to add over the commotion, thinking of cornered animals and how likely they were to turn and kick, “please, send someone right away to find us—he could be dangerous, so don’t approach him directly!”
But she was not sure anyone listened, and—as she allowed one of the Woodsbury sons to lead her towards a fallow acreage he claimed Ovozin often rode to—she sent up a prayer to any gods that might be listening, even if people did say they were absent or asleep. Please, please don’t let anyone get killed because I spurred them on. And please let them find Chase safely.
The Woodsbury son—Fawn’s brother, Bill, or something, who was referred to as Blue—was watching her out of the corner of his eye, like a rider whose ahfuri had put her ears back and seemed unlikely to behave. “You really going to bless our fields, miss?” he asked in a low voice as they crashed unceremoniously through a wilted pumpkin patch he said belonged to Ovozin. “All of them?”
“If not me, then I’ll find a plant-Mage to do it,” she answered grimly, shading her eyes against the brightening sun and scanning the horizon for any sign of either Typhaine. Out in the distance, she could see a group of three young men dragging the cover off of a well, but it didn’t seem as if they’d found anything. “We think Ovozin was only half-healing your crops, you know—so they’d eventually sicken again and he could come back and charge you twice or thrice. If we do it, they should stay free of the blight, though they won’t be any different from any other kind of crop. It’ll still be up to you to tend to them.”
Blue was silent for a while, absorbing this. But rather than asking what she expected next, he said, “He really kill my sister? And his own, too?”
Briony shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s—less clear. But he’s behind it all somehow.”
The man’s brows dropped, as heavy as thunderclouds, and his voice went even lower. “And you’re gonna make him pay?”
A drooping, clinging bush slapped at her thigh as she passed. Briony’s fist tightened, and she thought again of Chase, of his sly eyes and easy smile and his light-handed jokes. An Enchanter could do a lot of things to a victim, given enough time. What if his mind was already broken by the time they found him? She didn’t know if that was worse than finding him dead, and fear turned her heart over and left a copper, acid coating on her tongue. Though fellow slaves had died in the arena, she had not, so far, ever experienced the death of a friend, and she did not remember if she had felt that kind of loss in her old life, either. Anticipating it now made her thoughts reel crazily, as if she had tumbled off a mountain peak and was in freefall, plummeting so quickly that she would barely even foresee hitting the ground before the actual impact.
“Yeah,” she said thickly, her bones humming with something hot and thready. Gonturan, too, was ringing its subliminal song of restrained power. “I’ll make him pay.”
Ovozin was not at the property that Blue took her to, but they were just heading to the next when a young girl in pigtails came panting up, flush with exertion and something akin to panic. Briony could hardly understand her babbled explanation, but Blue took off running, back towards the town square where his house was. When Briony caught up to him, he translated the girl’s message: a group of farmers, led by Wintry’s brother-in-law, had found Ovozin at “the Greentree chapel,” had promptly wrestled him into submission (and apparently given him a beating, too), and were currently dragging him back to the town square to await judgment.
Briony swore and put on a burst of speed, leaving Blue behind as she began to sprint. Not good. And the fact that they’d made no mention of Chase was unnerving, too. Where could he be?
By the time she arrived back at the square, Red had gotten there first, and had thankfully cleared the villagers out so that the plaza was mostly empty, any onlookers standing a healthy distance away and out of the reach of most spells. It was standard protocol for any Shepherd dealing with a magical or Endarkened threat: evacuate any civilians first, lest they be used as fodder or hostages or distractions or shields or, gods forbid, as vessels for a demon to jump into at some unexpected moment.
Thus, Red was alone when she drew up to him, interrogating Ovozin sharply on Chase’s whereabouts. He’d bound the other Mage up with conjured rope, the Enchanter suspended and pinned against a high stone wall with his feet dangling and his head lolling. One side of his face was bruised and badly swelling, and his lip was bleeding. Briony probed his condition from afar—it felt as if Red’s rope was somehow suppressing his magic, so she lent some of her power to make it more ironclad—and noticed that someone had kicked Ovozin’s ribs in with some relish. But he was alive and intact, which was something to be thankful for; it would have been a disaster if some angry farmer had slid a knife between his ribs before they could find out what happened to Chase.
But the beating had not, unfortunately, made him any meeker, because he was refusing to answer any of Red’s questions.
“What did you do with Chase?” Red demanded again, his face hard and set and a muscle ticking in his jaw. Drawn up to his full height like this, his hair like a flame in the pearl-touched morning and his eyes cold with anger, he seemed like an intimidating stranger, not the easygoing and mild-mannered scholar she knew.
Ovozin’s neck was having trouble holding up his head. His mouth worked like a fish’s, puckering uselessly as he squinted through ruined eyes, and Briony’s blood began to beat fast and hot as he tried to eke out his next words, making soft, inarticulate noises. Finally he slurred, “Don’t… know what you’re talking about.”
Briony took in a hiss of breath, but it was Red who continued, “Don’t play stupid. He tailed you to that party and you did something to him. Where is he?”
“Not here.”
“Then where?”
And Ovozin observed them for some long moments, and some slow, dark emotion moved across his face, though Briony could not say what it was; he seemed to be weighing his options. Finally he lifted his eyes and looked, first at Red and then at her, and his gaze was hard and bright with loathing. He rolled the bloody saliva in his mouth and then spat, very softly, on Red’s shoe.
Something in Briony’s head snapped. She rushed forward, Gonturan’s song in her head now a high clear scream.
Red yelled something as she darted past—it sounded something like, “Don’t kill him!”—but the heat was already gathering in her fist, burning like a star.
#
Ovozin had always thought there was something to admire in the tenacity of rats.
Rats—or any animal, really—did not know when to admit defeat. They did not suffer resignation, or surrender, or had their spirits broken to submission. When you cornered a rat—even when you had it caught by its tail—it struggled to the last. It fought. It bit and scratched and clawed, even when a higher intelligence would have seen that its end was nigh and that the thrashing was futile and useless.
And sometimes, it even escaped its trap.
So it had been when the death of his parents snatched away his dreams of leaving Theydon-Prum and becoming a great Mage. So he had fought even when the foreclosure of the farm seemed inevitable. So he had pressed grimly onward even when Ève had argued with him, so that he’d had to subsume her will with his own; then ran away, so that he’d had to hobble her; then—read from that book—
He had never accepted failure. There was always some way out, if only he could press hard enough on the walls around him and find the weakness that would make one give way. He had thought, when faced with the tall red Longshanks, that simply remaining silent would buy him enough time to work out some kind of escape plan…
…But that was before the pink-haired bitch had charged at him, her eyes blank and furious and seemingly possessed by a demon of her own, and punched a hole in the wall next to his head the size of a man-high crater. Hot stone-powder, debris, and chips of solid granite blew past him in a choking cloud; Ovozin’s eyes and throat stung, and he twisted away helplessly from the thick layer of chalky dust that slapped against his face. But he could not move too much, both because he was bound and because he feared that she would strike again at his movement, and this time the crater would be in his chest and not the wall.
She was still staring at him now with that blank, wild look in her eyes, her head cocked to the side slightly, her chest heaving and the color high in her face. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a fierce, otherworldly grimace. The tall Mage behind her was gaping, and Ovozin did not trust that he would be able to restrain his companion a second time. She said in a soft, dry, mechanical voice: “Tell me where you’re keeping him, or I’ll pull your guts out through your fucking throat.”
And Ovozin decided to revise his strategy; he was, after all, nothing if not adaptable. It would do him no good if this mad, broken witch made good on her threats and killed him, as stupid and brainless as such a move would be. So what were his options? He was no match for the two of them alone—they weren’t like the Norm thief, they were Mages in their own right, and the red-haired one was binding him besides—but if he could lead them to the demon, perhaps the thing that had taken Ève’s body would see the opportunity he was presenting it and strike. A team of three had been too powerful for either of them, but now the thief was out of the picture. And if the demon attacked Longshanks, Ovozin could slip his spell and paralyze the pink-haired berserker, and that would be the end of them both.
And after that? Well. Perhaps the demon would be pleased with his offerings—with the opportunity to slaughter or possess three Shepherds—and it would finally release him. It had proven reluctant to kill him thus far, perhaps because he was willing to make himself useful to it.
So he feigned watery-kneed terror, being sure to make himself quail and flinch and shake, and he cried, “All right, j-just stay away from me! He’s hidden in the fields by the Greentree chapel, but the passage that leads to him is concealed—you’ll need me to get to him.”
The pink-haired bitch cocked her head further to the side, watching him, her dark eyes huge in her face; but her red companion drew her gently back by the shoulder and said to Ovozin, “Alive?”
Hael if I know. For all Ovozin cared, the demon wearing his sister’s body could have painted the cellar walls with the thief’s innards by now. Ovozin had heard him screaming. But he nodded faintly.
The sword-hilt over the warrior’s shoulder was glinting oddly in the morning light. She shook her head slightly, as if to rid her ears of water, then said flatly, “Show us.” The other Mage made a gesture and lowered him to the ground.
Ovozin had to conceal his smile as he turned away towards the chapel. Gladly, he thought.
#
Red suspected a trap as soon as Ovozin agreed to take them to Chase. Yes, there was always the chance that Briony’s strength—that destructive threat that had made lesser men evacuate their bowels—had truly cowed the Enchanter into cooperating with them. But he was cunning, too, and he’d had time to plan, to prepare. And there was still the matter of his sister.
So the three of them were silent as they all but frog-marched Ovozin back to the chapel where the villagers had found him hiding, warning the silent farmers to stay well away until the danger was over; and Red was on high alert, his hand on the handle of his warhammer as he scanned their surroundings for any sign of ambush. To Ovozin he said, “Anyone who gets it into their head to try and rescue you should know that, at the first sign of trouble, it would take nothing for me to throttle you with those ropes until all your bones are crushed.”
Ovozin gifted him a sardonic glance. They were in the middle of the field behind the chapel now, surrounded by tall, rustling stalks of corn. “No one is left to rescue me. You made sure of that when you promised to heal their farms in my stead. I didn’t realize that agricultural concerns were within the domain of the Shepherds, by the way. I’m surprised farming valleys the world over don’t petition you for your aid, crying out for your intervention any time a famine or a plague of locusts come through to terrorize their crop.”
Briony made a soft, impatient sound, glaring so fiercely at Ovozin that Red had to put up a hand to forestall her. (But at least she had kept a leash on her temper enough not to kill him, thank the gods; and for once her destructive power had led to something useful. He did not think Ovozin would have spoken if he hadn't believed she'd really pull his guts out). Red ignored the Enchanter's sarcastic remark and said, “We know your sister isn’t dead; we found the bespelled log you left in the morgue. So where is she? In the cellar with Chase?”
Ovozin’s shuffling walk—he was still half-floating, guided by Red’s conjured ropes, and half-stepping of his own accord, like a dog paddling through deep water—paused, for just the briefest instance. Then he said steadily, “It’s true that I left the log, but my sister is dead and gone from this world, just the same as Fawn Woodsbury.”
Something in his tone or expression indicated to Red that he was telling the truth—but still, Red couldn’t help but feel wary. “Then where is her body?”
“I destroyed it.”
Briony glanced at him sharply; meanwhile, Red’s gorge rose a little, hearing the cool indifference in Ovozin’s voice over the destruction of his own sister’s remains. “Why?”
“There were things about her condition that would have cast—suspicion on me,” the Enchanter continued calmly, his eyes half-lidded. He regarded Red, as if sussing him out for some weakness, or an indication that he was liable to snap like Briony. Did he sense, perhaps, Red’s honest appalment when it came to things like sisters? “So it was more convenient to pretend that she had been a victim like Fawn was, and to tally up her disappearance to the murderous actions of a stranger, rather than having anyone look too closely at the real thing.”
Good gods, had the man really killed his own sister? “She was ill for about a year or so,” Red said flatly. “Or so you told others in Prum. Was she already dead by then, and you were just concealing her absence, or were you doing something worse to her without anyone knowing?” His skin crawled with gooseflesh, revulsion leaving a bitter, acrid sting on his tongue; the back of his neck prickled uneasily, as if to warn him that he didn’t truly want to know. But he always had to know, so he pressed on. “You’re an Enchanter; don’t tell me you were forcing her to magic the crops by leashing her mind? And then—what, she broke free of your control, or challenged you, or proved less docile than you would have liked, so you had to physically lock her up? And then killed her when she became more of an inconvenience than a boon?”
Ovozin gave an oily kind of smile. “In the end, she killed herself,” he said, almost conversationally, as if they were discussing tomato plants that hadn’t thrived very well in his garden. “Which is not a criminal offense. But I still did not want anyone to see her body. It is not a crime to hobble your own horse, but I probably would have lost some business over it.”
Red reeled around towards him then, his usually long temper at its end, and he wasn’t sure what he intended to do—punch Ovozin, maybe, though it would be a normal sock between the eyes to give him a broken nose rather than a devastating killing-blow like Briony’s—but just then something flashed in the corner of his vision—Gonturan, he thought, blaring an angry orange—and Briony gave a startled cry of warning, and then suddenly heat touched his back, the tiniest prelude of hot air before his body was swallowed by a huge gout of flame.
A more astral-minded Mage would have conjured a shield, but Red—ever the Conjurer—blinked out of existence in surprise and alarm, and for a disorientating moment, he found himself scrambled: he hadn’t taken an account of his surroundings enough to know where to jump. After another micro-second he heaved himself sideways, praying he wouldn’t end up through a tree trunk or a wall, and flashed back into being just as the cascade of orange flame roared over his head. Red dove to the ground, feeling parts of his uniform smoking with the near contact, and in that moment his hold on Ovozin slackened, and the other Mage wriggled free, and somewhere he couldn’t see, Briony began to scream.
Red, still off-balance and caught half in a rolling dive, half in a stumble, could only keep scrambling to get out of the way of the deadly spout of fire, which he thought was being directed at him by a dirty, wild-eyed young woman who could have only been Ovozin’s sister. Ovozin himself was pointing at Briony, his eyes alight with pleasure; the gladiator had half-fallen to one knee, clutching her head and crying out as if the pressure in her skull had become unbearable and her brain might burst. Red couldn’t help her—he couldn’t even get the time to turn and stabilize himself, and at some point his boot slipped in rain-slick leaf litter and he tipped, about to fall, and he thought, That’s the end of it. Once he hit the ground, that would be all Ève Typhaine needed to burn him alive, and his lungs would fuse shut, and he would be dead.
Out of sheer desperation, he hurled his warhammer clumsily sideways as he fell, in a blind gesture one of his instructors at the Circle would have slapped him on the wrist with a sword-flat for, and the hammer flew through the air and smacked against the young woman’s shoulder with a meaty thud, knocking her off-balance. She grunted, more from surprise than pain—what is she, Red thought, a blow like that should have shattered her shoulder at least—but then he had to turn his attentions to Ovozin and Briony, whose arm had drawn Gonturan against her will and was now raising it up unwillingly towards her own throat.
Red lifted his hand to cast a spell at Ovozin—which one, he thought blurrily, even he wasn’t sure; safest to do something neither Ovozin or Ève could counter, but he couldn’t think of exactly what—but then the sister was there again, blowing more fire at him, and this time he had to pour so much of his concentration into shielding himself that he couldn’t help Briony: the effort of holding back Ève’s flame was so intense that Red sweated all the way through his uniform with it, and not all the sweat came from the heat that roared around him. His arms shook with the strain, and salt stung his eyes, and his jaw ached with how much he was clenching it. Ève Typhaine’s power was monstrously strong, the exertion of her fire pitiless and extreme, and Red thought, She’s going to wait me out. If she keeps this up, eventually my shield will fail, and I’m so preoccupied just trying to keep myself alive that I can’t do anything to counter her in the meantime.
He looked to Briony, whose wrist was shaking with the effort to resist Ovozin’s puppeteering, and Gonturan, too, was twisting away from the neck of its master, but he did not know how much longer either of them could withstand the onslaught. Then he looked to Ève, through the curtain of flame that hung between them, and saw that all of her sclera had turned black, and she was smiling the mad, delighted smile of a demon—
And then he saw a shadow rising behind Ève, and he thought it was the Endarkened essence rising out of her like the shimmering, oily miasma that you sometimes saw leaking out of demons, except something silvery flashed in the shadow’s hands before it wrapped the thing around Ève’s neck and pulled.
Ève gave a strangled scream, more of outrage than of true fear, and instantly her flame faltered and died. Chase, standing behind her with a strange cold light kindling in his eyes, his mouth twisted in a close-lipped snarl and his gaze clinical, tightened the chains wrapped around his wrists more ruthlessly, dragging Ève’s neck backward like a rider on a bucking horse. The sound the woman made was terrible, a raw gurgle as her crooked hands clawed uselessly at the chain currently strangling her. Chase caught Red’s eye and barked, “Now!”
Red, now free of Ève’s onslaught, turned to Ovozin and sent a hard bullet of air barreling towards him, knocking him off his feet and smashing through his hold on Briony; he felt the psionic thread between them snap like a taut, slashed rope.
Briony surged forward and ran Ève through with Gonturan, the blade exploding with fire and light, just as Chase put his boot against the demon’s back and used the leverage to neatly snap its neck. Red felt Briony pumping Ève Typhaine’s charred shell full of burning, caustic magic, felt the evil thing inside it dwindle and shred and die out, and then he turned to Ovozin Typhaine—who was watching it all from his sprawl on the ground, slack-jawed and staring—picked up his hammer, and clubbed the other Mage over the head. The man’s eyes rolled up into his head, and he crumpled. Red could barely be bothered to check if he was still breathing—but he was.
And then, for a moment, all three of them stood, breathing raggedly and simply looking at each other. Singed, trampled corn lay everywhere. Briony jerked Gonturan free, and the blackened, broken-necked husk of Ève Typhaine slumped to the hot dust underfoot. Chase, who had apparently crawled out of a nearby hatch in the ground, looked no worse for the wear as he remarked, calmly, “Good fucking riddance.” Unwinding the chain from around his hands, he eyed the dead Thrall, almost as if he regretted that the battle was over so soon; then he turned to Red and Briony. “How is it that the two of you look worse than me?”
Red laughed, weakly, and Briony ran forward and threw her arms around his neck with a sob. Chase patted the gladiator on the back awkwardly, looking surprised, while Red asked him, “Are you all right? Did they do anything to you?”
“Nothing that will leave any permanent damage,” the thief answered grimly as Briony pulled away, wiping her eyes and stooping to pick up her sword, which she’d dropped in the dirt to hug him. “Ovozin here thought it was a bright idea to offer me up to the demon that was possessing his sister’s body, thinking that such a prize might mollify it into leaving him alone. She summoned the demon into herself, you know, because he was holding her captive and she couldn’t take it anymore. And then the demon—did its usual thing. Tried to make me think it would be better to accept it into myself. Not a particularly imaginative one, either. Couldn’t do much worse to me than a nightmare would.”
What the Hael are your nightmares like? Red wondered, marveling at his casual tone—but he thought it better not to ask; and besides, at least there were Hunters and wards and security spells to scan him once they got back, just to be sure there wasn’t some lingering effect the thief had yet to notice. Then, abruptly, Chase sat down on the ground and swore.
“Ugh,” he said. “I feel like shit. I could sleep for a week.”
Briony sat down beside him, holding her arms and shivering. “I feel dirty,” she said absently, her eyes unfocused. “He was—in my head, whispering all sorts of things, and I saw into his head, and—” She shuddered. “It was not a nice thing to look at.”
And Red, looking down at them both, wondered how long it would take for the shadow of Ovozin Typhaine to lift from their team, and indeed from the entire town, for his misdeeds were long and numerous, and seemed to have sunk into the very earth of Theydon-Prum itself. But then there was no more time to think on it, because there was the commotion of distant voices, farmers hurrying to lend their help or see what the outcome of the confrontation had been, and later there would be explanations to give and reports to make and bodies to bury and prisoners to deliver and reparations to dole out and crops to heal and magistrates to strongarm, and suddenly he felt bone-weary and sat down beside them, too, putting his head tiredly between his knees.
But when the villagers of Prum came to them, at least, there were hands to help them up and a few tentative smiles and exclamations of relief here and there, and if anyone felt disgust at touching one of their ilk, they didn’t show it. Someone even brushed Red’s collar off and straightened it for him, with the brisk, businesslike familiarity of a neighbor, and Wintry Talward clasped their hands in thanks. And though tales of what had happened here, and of the Mage Ovozin Typhaine’s underhanded tyranny, would soon spread to the outside world at last, no ill word was spoken (or tolerated) of the Shepherd investigators, the two Mage officers and their city-slicker friend. In fact, the story would grow in both scope and virtue, until it sounded so unlikely that scarcely anyone in Ambryn cared to believe it. Even as they milled through the trampled field, discussing what to do with their unconscious prisoner and the tragic remains of his sister, who had at least been freed at last—it was agreed by all who were present that a healing rain began to fall just then, cleansing the scorched earth, even though the sky in that moment seemed to hold no clouds at all.
