Chapter Twenty-Eight

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It made sense, I thought dully, as I watched Andrew realizing what had just happened. That was the worst part in some ways. It made total sense. I could have seen it coming a mile away if I’d stopped and thought about it. Andrew looked down at the sword now protruding from his chest. He was dead; his body just hadn’t figured it out yet. The strike was placed well, cutting through the spine. I was betting it was charged silver, too. Coming on top of all the other injuries, I was quite sure he was dead.

Audgrim, who had only ever agreed to work together until the hunt was concluded, pushed the dying werewolf off of his sword. Andrew fell to the grass. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Audgrim turned on Jack next, while the exhausted druid was just beginning to process what had happened. He didn’t stab Jack, though, perhaps feeling like he wouldn’t be able to cut through that magically reinforced coat. He just punched the other man hard in the face.

It was enough. Jack was already injured and running on fumes, and at the end of the day, as strong as Jack Tar was, underneath all the magic he was only human. Audgrim was stronger than a human, wearing heavy steel gauntlets. Jack went down hard, and he didn’t get back up. Audgrim, as I’d known he would, turned towards me next.

“Hunting accident, is it? Use us to take care of the thieves and then turn on us?” I was surprised to hear myself talking. My voice sounded eerily calm, level and lacking any real emotion.

“Yes.” Audgrim’s voice was also level, though it was less calm than it was grim and grey and tired. “It’s the simplest way.” It was almost fully dark, now, and I couldn’t see his expression; my eyes were keener than a human’s, but there were limits.

“Why? What are you gaining here?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I wanted to keep him talking, buy myself time to think.

“My uncle was going to kill me,” Audgrim said, stepping closer to me. I was still on the ground. He was less injured than any of the rest of us, and I knew I couldn’t move fast enough right now to outrun him. “It wasn’t official yet, but I know how these things work. As soon as I let these people get their hands on that key I was dead to him. But this ritual is still primed and active. I can hand him the sword and the sickle both.”

Buying his way back into his family’s good graces. Of course. Would it work? I sort of doubted it. Oh, the dvergar would be thrilled to get those weapons. The dwarves were famously materialistic. His mother and uncle would probably love to add those treasures to their hoard. But I highly doubted they would spare Audgrim as a reward for having returned them. If nothing else, this would be terrible for their reputation.

Sure, he could kill all of us and present it as a tragic loss while we were fighting the mages. And he’d been careful enough that this wasn’t actually breaking any oaths. But they would know, or at least suspect, and they wouldn’t want to risk being associated with what he’d done. He would still be a liability. He would still die.

I didn’t bother saying that. It didn’t matter whether he was right, not anymore. He was committed to this course of action, had been the moment he’d stabbed Andrew in the back. If he let any witnesses to that act survive, he would die a horrible death very soon, and he knew it.

“You are such a petty, manipulative coward,” I said instead, still in that calm, quiet voice. And then, without even really meaning to, I added, “You’re a nithing and we both know it.”

He flinched at that. I didn’t know many words in Icelandic, but I knew that one, if only because it was infamously hard to translate and I was drawn to such words. And this was exactly the kind of situation it existed to describe, too. This kind of manipulative, cowardly murder, dishonorable and treacherous, was precisely what the idea of nith meant. And in the old days, Norse culture saw these traits as so vile, so debased, that what I’d just said to him would have been grounds for him to challenge me to a duel to the death.

The dvergar were traditionalists. He knew that word too. And he did, in fact, know that in this moment it was true. He flinched.

But he recovered, and stepped up to stand over me. He had his sword raised, still dripping with Andrew’s blood. He paused there, and said, “For what it’s worth, Kyoko, I’m sorry.”

It was the pause that did it. If he’d just gone through with it immediately, I was pretty sure he’d have killed me with no difficulty at all.

But he didn’t. He hesitated. Just for a moment, but sometimes a moment is all it takes. And we’d both forgotten that we weren’t the only people still conscious in that canyon.

The tree spirit next to me had been bound. Those mages had wrapped him in such intense magical compulsions that he’d been utterly helpless to resist. He’d been forced to just lie there and wait while the people who had already murdered him got to the part of their ritual where they were going to finish the job. That was what serious magical compulsions were like. There was no resisting that command.

But those mages were dead now. Those compulsions didn’t matter anymore. And while he was sick unto dying, weak and broken, he wasn’t dead yet, not quite. As Audgrim hesitated, the spirit lunged forward like the wolf he resembled, teeth closing on Audgrim’s ankle. And with what had to be the very last of his strength, he wrenched on it.

The blade still came down, but it was out of control, and Audgrim was falling with it. I was able to roll away, and rather than decapitate me, both he and the blade ended up on the ground. I forced myself to my hands and knees, desperate and angry and scared and empty.

I couldn’t explain why I did what I did next. It wasn’t a rational, conscious decision. I was running on impulse at this point, too tired and too hollow for clear thought. Maybe I was just desperate. Maybe it was the same subconscious impulse that had known what to say, exactly what would get to Audgrim, make him flinch and hesitate for that one, pivotal moment.

Regardless, with all four limbs and a whimper of pain, I flung myself forward. Not towards Audgrim. Not towards the sword he was reaching for.

Towards the tree.

I ended up crumpled at the foot of the tree. My whole body hurt. I was at this point guessing that at least one rib was broken rather than just cracked. The stunt I’d just pulled hurt like hell on my sprained wrist. But pain was a familiar thing for me, and I had a hell of a lot of motivation. Leaning heavily on the tree, I pulled myself upright, and I reached out for the blade embedded in it. My hand closed on the grip, and I pulled.

I couldn’t have explained it. Logically, I knew that the mages hadn’t actually completed their ritual. I knew that this tree was still as intact as ever, that it would resist any effort to take that sword. I knew that the mages would hardly have gone to all this effort if it were that easy.

But it felt right. And when I grabbed it, that felt right too. The grip fit into my hand like they were made for each other. The blade slid out effortlessly. And as it did, the exact moment the blade was fully freed, things…changed.

There was a strange sort of euphoria that washed over me. This felt right. The weapon in my hand was a relatively short sword, perfectly sized for me. It felt strange in my hand; the weight was off, though I couldn’t have said whether it felt like it was too light or too heavy for its size. But that strangeness was easily forgotten in the heat of the moment. I could feel a surge of euphoric glee, and I could feel bloodlust rising to meet it.

It wasn’t that I stopped being in pain, or that I stopped being afraid. Those things were still there, still just as intense. They just stopped mattering as much. They were lost in the storm of magic and bloodlust that was suddenly raging inside me. There was much less magic flying around now that the mages were dead, and as a result I could very clearly feel the power in that sword once it was drawn. It smelled overpoweringly of blood and sweet flowers; it burned with a cold, dark flame; it sent shivers down my spine and across the rest of my body.

The sword itself, I noticed absently as I turned to face towards Audgrim again, was beautiful. It was a strange sort of beauty, though. The blade was a little longer than my forearm from elbow to fingertip, and it was curved forward, like a claw. Sharpened on both sides, though the canted hilt and the way it was weighted would make it easier to use the inner edge of the curve. It was an odd blade profile, to go with the odd weight. And while it was nothing like them in shape, something about the claw-like blade reminded me of a gladius, or maybe a Chinese dao.

A teacher had once explained to me the difference between the dao, or broadsword, and the jian, the straight longsword once prevalent in Chinese culture. The jian, he had said, was the gentleman’s sword. It was beautiful. It was elegant, graceful, and precise. The dao, on the other hand, was a sword for killing people. You could give someone a dao and within a week they’d be able to chop someone into pieces with it. It might still be beautiful, but there was never any ambiguity or pretense about it. It was a simple, straightforward tool made for killing people, and that was always apparent in its design and its use.

Similarly, I thought, this sword was very obviously a weapon, would never pretend otherwise. But it was undeniably beautiful. The blade was so brightly polished it looked like a mirror. There were subtle patterns worked into the steel in even brighter silver, flowers and wolves, and more obvious inlay that looked like amber and looked like writing.

I had time to see that much, because everything seemed to pause for just a moment when the blade was drawn. It was like the sheer power, the intensity of the magic now spilling out into that little canyon, was such that it demanded one pause for a moment to recognize it. I was still for a moment looking at it. Audgrim, in the process of picking up his own sword, was still for a moment as well. Even the breeze seemed to go still for the span of a breath.

And then the moment was over. He was stepping forward to go back to killing me. I was stepping out to meet him, moving slightly better now. The pain from the broken ribs was there, but it felt less important, less urgent. It felt like I was in a sort of waking dream, unreal and drifting within the storm. Exhaustion and stress and pain, when mixed with my justified outrage and the separate surge of bloodthirsty euphoria and thrill coming from the sword, became something very different. I had no name for what I was feeling now, but it wasn’t anything as simple as pain.

I was in fur, had been for quite a while now, and there was lightning playing through it. As always, that lightning was a vivid, unnatural green in tone, the same as my eyes. Now, it was also dancing down the blade of the sword, playing across the mirror-bright surface, a stark contrast to the amber inlay. It was the only light in that bloody little canyon, lending the whole scene a surreal, flickering cast. I was laughing. It didn’t sound happy at all. It sounded harsh and jagged, like broken glass.

Audgrim was done talking, now. And I really was out of allies at this point; that sudden attack had been the last that the tree spirit had in it, and it had collapsed to the grass motionless. Strangely, though, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Audgrim was dangerous, sure, but there was a reason he’d done it like this, why he’d hung back and let others take the brunt of the fighting. A reason why he’d waited for everyone else to be broken after the battle, and even then had attacked by sudden treachery. He knew how to fight, but that wasn’t the same thing as being a fighter, not quite.

He went for a simple, aggressive opening, slashing at my torso. I slipped aside, faster than I should ever have been able to move with how severely injured I was. Still acting on impulse, as his sword went past, I lashed out at it.

His weapon was forged by a dvergr smith. It was of excellent quality, better than any mortal blacksmith could match. But as I’d been told, the blade currently in my hand was the sort of weapon that people wrote sagas about, a peer to fucking Excalibur. It barely even slowed down as it passed through his sword, and suddenly half his blade was lying in the grass.

He pulled up short at that, and opened his mouth to say something. But I was done talking, too. The blade cut through his neck just as easily on the backswing, and that was that. I collapsed to the grass next to his body, with his blood both literally and figuratively on my hands.

And so died Auðgrímr, son of Eyvindr. He was a treacherous, cowardly man, and he never really was my friend. And yet we had liked each other, in our way. I understood him. I genuinely believed he would have been sorry to kill me, and if I’d had a choice I wouldn’t have killed him.

---

“I’ve never done this before,” I said to no one in particular, sitting there in the bloody grass on top of a broken ritual circle. “I mean, obviously I’ve participated. I must have helped to kill a dozen people today alone. I’ve killed people myself. But when I did that I was so far out of my mind I’m not sure it even counts as ‘me.’ I’ve never actually made the conscious choice to kill someone before.”

It felt both ironic and strangely appropriate, I thought, that my first had been someone who was almost a friend. There was a sort of poetry in that.

I became aware of a presence next to me, looked over and found the other tree spirit standing there. I had one on either side now, the first dying and the second finally able to move again. Apparently some part of what just happened had broken the half-formed bindings being placed on her. She was beautiful in a way no human woman could hope to match, and smelled like golden apples.

“It is a hard thing,” she said quietly, in a voice like rustling leaves.

I nodded. Then, remembering, I offered her the sword, noting idly that it was perfectly clean, like blood just couldn’t stain it. “This is yours, I think.”

She took it. But she only kept it long enough to slip it into a sheath. I wasn’t sure where she’d been keeping that; it wasn’t like she was wearing clothes to have pockets. As soon as the sword was sheathed, though, she was handing it back to me.

“It is yours, now,” she murmured. “A gift for she who can retrieve it, and rightly claimed. Thorn will always find its way back to your hand, now.”

I sighed, and nodded. Figured, really. All these people dead, all this bloodshed over who got to take the damn thing, and I ended up keeping it when I didn’t even want it. At least the overpowering hum of its magic had shut off like a light switch once it was sheathed. The sheath itself was apparently immune to its edge, so maybe it had its own sort of magic with which to contain the blade. It even had a little restraining strap to keep the sword from coming free by accident, which in my slightly hysterical state I found bizarrely amusing. The sheath, too, was beautiful, black leather with subtle patterns of wolves and flowers and skulls. None of the images were wholly visible, but it was easy enough to tell what was being depicted.

I took the sword from her, feeling a little bit silly, like a macabre caricature of the normal myth. The lady of the sword was giving it away, but rather than a heroic knight or noble warrior, she was handing it to a battered lupine monster too tired to stand up while claiming the relic. It felt heavy in my hand.

I sat and looked around the little canyon. So much death. It felt like such a waste. I realized that a fair number of these people might still be alive, and soon we’d need to figure out how to get everyone out of here and back to the city. But not quite yet. I didn’t have it in me to work on that quite yet.

I found myself petting the other tree spirit’s head again instead. He wasn’t quite dead yet. He twitched a little at my touch, a tiny movement. It would take a little more time before that severed connection to the tree he’d been linked to finished draining his life away. He’d probably burned through some of that time to fuel that last, desperate attack that had saved my life. This, too, seemed like such a tragic, pointless waste.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way he could be saved?” I asked the other spirit. I didn’t sound hopeful, because I wasn’t hopeful, but I felt I had to ask.

She sighed, a gentle sound like wind passing through barren branches. “His body cannot sustain itself without his tree. It will wither and die, slowly but surely.”

I started to nod, and then paused. She hadn’t actually answered my question, not quite. And if she was even vaguely associated with the fae, that was important. They didn’t, couldn’t, lie. But that didn’t mean they were going to tell you the truth, either. Much as Martin had demonstrated to us, you could be extremely effective at deception without ever saying an outright, factual lie at all.

It was hard to think through the haze of exhaustion. I forced myself to focus, though, to push through that haze. “His body will wither,” I said slowly. “That’s inevitable. But it’s not the same thing as his death being inevitable, not intrinsically.”

She smiled sadly down at me, and said nothing at all.

“Is there a way,” I said, slowly, trying to pick my words very carefully. “A means by which he could be preserved through that death of his body?”

“The mind, the spirit, these things have their own nature,” she murmured. “They are not wholly the same as the body, only tied to it, and mediated by it. But without that tether, they cannot exist; they are too fragile. A person’s spirit must be anchored within the world, or it will dissipate into the aether.”

I nodded, thinking. Again, not actually answering my question, but she didn’t seem hostile at all. My guess was that either she was incapable of answering my questions directly, perhaps from some binding oath or constraint on her, or she just wanted me to work through it and find the answer myself. Still, what she had said was telling. The spirit required an anchor, a physical host, in order to keep itself intact. That didn’t mean the host had to be the same body he was currently in, though.

But what would work instead? It couldn’t be another tree, I was guessing. He wasn’t the same as that tree, was not himself a cypress. He was linked to it, sure, but separate. The being currently shuddering and dying next to me wasn’t a tree, for all that he had some of the same traits. He was an animate being, and to the extent that he expressed the traits of a mortal organism at all, they were as much those of a wolf as of a plant.

And as simply as that, I understood. I looked up at the golden-apple dryad, and smiled a little. “Thank you,” I said, simply. She smiled back, and said nothing.

I had to roll Audgrim’s body over to get the sickle. It hummed in my hand, cold and dark and quiet, and nothing like rot at all. It wasn’t as powerful as the sword—as Thorn, I reminded myself; the sword had a name, and if I was going to have to keep it, it seemed polite to use that name. I didn’t for a moment imagine that I could get rid of it, either. When someone tells you that a relic of legendary proportion will always find its way back to your hand, they probably aren’t exaggerating. Thorn was mine now, like it or not.

Anyway, the sickle wasn’t as powerful as Thorn. But it was plenty powerful enough, humming with a cold power that felt a great deal like Cerdinen himself. No surprise there.

A tool to guide the forest, he’d said. The wildfire that prunes away the weak, and leaves the strong stronger. It wasn’t an evil thing. It was harsh, cold, and ruthless, sure, but the simple reality was that wildfire was necessary for the health of the forest. Similarly, the sickle was dangerous, but it wasn’t evil. It wasn’t even destructive as such.

I turned back to the tree spirit. The other, I noted, the one that looked like a woman rather than a wolf, was gone. This didn’t surprise me. I sat beside the creature that was still here, still dying, and rested my hand on his head. Something a little like fur and a little like ferns, soft under my hand.

He wasn’t quite a plant, but he had much the same nature in some ways. And for reasons entirely unknown to me, I could apparently talk to plants now. It wasn’t a huge leap of logic to guess that I might be able to communicate with him as well. It was, if nothing else, worth a try.

“Hey,” I said to him, soft and gentle. “I don’t know if I can save you. I’m not sure how any of this works, not really. And even if I can, it won’t be the same as what you are now. I think you’ll probably have to share a body with someone; I’m not sure if it’ll be me or someone else, long term, but I don’t have an empty one to give you, so it’ll be some kind of sharing. I understand if you’d rather I not try. But the offer’s open.”

There were still no words in response. I suspected that actually talking wasn’t what he was able to understand from me. But the emotions I could feel from him were far more nuanced, far more complex than those I felt from actual plants. Unsurprising; he had an actual mind. There was sorrow, contemplation, gratitude, uncertainty, fury, and respect, all woven into an enormously complex web. And then, at last, there was acceptance.

I nodded, leaned closer. I reached out and cut his throat with the sickle. And as something that wasn’t quite blood and wasn’t quite sap flowed over my hands, I reached out in another way, one I didn’t understand but instinctively knew how to do. I found the mind and the spirit of something that wasn’t quite a tree and wasn’t quite a wolf, and invited them into my own.

It didn’t take long. Within moments I was sitting on the ground next to the bodies of two people whose throats I’d cut with magic blades. At first, I wasn’t sure whether it had worked. But then I felt something, a sort of hum in the back of my mind, an awareness of presence. I smiled, relieved. Tonight had been a bloody, horrifying mess, but at least I’d saved one person, at least a little bit.

I wiped the sickle clean, and started to work on getting us home.

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