Flat blue skies gave way to dark wallpaper, and the floorboards levered themselves beneath Pyrrha's boots. A pair of shaking hands steadied her at the shoulders. Her vision swam with golden hair and wide brown eyes.
"—something, please—what's happening, what's she done to you now—?"
"Caerialto—" Pyrrha tried to continue but the word had expended her last breath, and she came back to herself with a sharp inhale. "It was Morrigan. She's returned to Ireland to destroy Caerialto."
The click of her boots rapped up and down the room while she strode first for the armoire, turned away toward the nightstand, and back again for a bookshelf roofed with an elegant lancet arch, lined end to end with weathered spines. She snatched Temerity in the Face of Life: Occlumentic Countertheories in Practise from its place on the second row.
"Hell!" Daisy said. "Damn it all, we're that bloody close! Why now? What's a shopping plaza got to do with any of this?"
"It's precisely because we're close she's compelled to act. She felt my triumph, finding the stone; I can't know how much she's gleaned from me all this time, but it's evidently more than enough." Pyrrha replaced the book and turned over the substitute wand in her fingers. Wrought of pine and dragon heartstring, it rested uncertainly in her hand like a long-neglected instrument. "As for her choice of target . . . she's accepted she can't run me down while I control the Lodge. She means to draw me out by razing my home, starting at a hub with more population density than anywhere else in magical Ireland. The only question is why she didn't resort to this sooner."
"God. All those people . . ."
"They'll be fine. I'm going to stop her."
Her tranquil answer belied fire in her scar and in her stomach, mind racing with half-formed plans and considerations that all fell short of the enormity of the undertaking now thrust upon her. Beneath her resolve a slow dread thumped along with her leaden heart; it was the telltale sense of declension that came of her magics, each sluggish beat less sure of the next until she wrung from it more than it could let. Cold sweat cleaved her dark robes to her skin.
"Stop her?" Daisy's voice ascended an octave. "What—you're going? You've just said it's bait! You can't beat her, not in the state you're in!"
Pyrrha stowed the wand and turned to approach Daisy. "No, but I can draw her away, dangle myself before her in turn. I can survive her. And you," she said, taking Daisy's hand in hers, "can see our plan through. I need you to take Wasila the instant she returns and use her, use the harp to locate Dagda's cauldron. Move as quickly as you dare, but don't dive in over your head; if you reach an impasse, wait for me, and I'll find you."
Daisy stood stunned when Pyrrha withdrew, looking down at the glossy blue stone in her palm. "W-what's this?"
Relinquishing the stone and everything it could mean, even into Daisy's care, felt more terrible than bestowing her own naked soul. "I don't dare carry it near Morrigan. Keep it safe for us."
White fingers curled around the stone, but Daisy didn't pocket it. She cupped a hand over her mouth, arms quivering, eyes wet, and she heaved at the air in a familiar soft pattern that worked to withhold her powerful emotion. "Oh, oh my—is this it? Is this happening? Now? It's all happening right now. Oh my God. Oh my God."
"It's happening," Pyrrha said, projecting her voice that it would pierce Daisy's panic and temper her resolve. "But this time, it's we who are happening to Morrigan. Her secrets are slipping away from her and she knows it. She's desperate. And there is every reason for her to feel that; with your help, I can make this day her very last. This is all for Ashlin."
"Ashlin." Daisy wiped her eyes with a wrist and nodded, expression hardening just as Pyrrha knew it would. "For her and all the rest who that horrible thing's hurt . . ." Her gaze drifted back to the stone glinting in her hand, and her eyes widened, other arm shooting out to grab Pyrrha. "Hang on, look, I can't take this yet—"
"The risk is—"
"No, listen—Fionn!" Daisy pressed the stone back into Pyrrha's hand, voice near frantic. "If anyone knows how to stop her, it's him—we may not even need the cauldron!"
The stone laid so delicately Pyrrha couldn't look away; if she left it absent her senses for even an instant she felt it would flicker out of being like all else that had ever kindled hope. It called in the voices of her own family, just beyond hearing.
More than anything Pyrrha ached to summon them and drown out from her ears the mimic cries that still rang from the ruins of their home, the legion dolls in stolen likeness, shrieking over her last treasured echoes of true recollection. She longed to find affection in their eyes, hear heartbreak in their words for all their family had suffered, all Pyrrha had suffered for them. She wanted them to tell her she had done so well, and that because of her everything would turn out right in the end.
Above all Pyrrha yearned to return their love like she never had while they lived. Lifetimes of introspection wouldn't let her articulate all that they meant to her, but they had died before she ever tried. The stone promised her a second chance.
But those were fantasies. There would be no such reception for the curse on their family, the failure, the numb-hearted stranger. Pyrrha had lost Ashlin; while she had breath in her body she would never face her parents for that. The scar throbbed.
"Pyrrha." Daisy gave a gentle nudge.
"And I wouldn't be any more charitable," Ashlin said evenly. Heat pulsed, unsteady. "You did end up reuniting her with her parents, in your own way. It's no mystery how she'd feel about your plans now; still ruining her life even after you've ended it. But that won't stop you, right?"
"I . . . forgive me." Pyrrha tore her stare from the captivating deep blue that mirrored dear eyes. "There's little time for talk if I'm to avert a massacre. That aside, I'm not fluent in old Irish."
"Try." Daisy squeezed her hands together. "Try for something. Anything."
Though Pyrrha relented with a sigh, exhilaration flared in her breast at the opportunity to harness the artifact, and cement in reality what limitless power she must now possess. Turning in her fingers was her missing key to human life remade, and to wisdom of ages near and gone. The potential she wielded set her mind afire.
Still cool to the touch after all their handling, the stone shifted under Pyrrha's thumb while she cast her thoughts toward her distant ancestor. There was no change in the air, no surge of strange sensation; where nothing was before, a tall, diaphanous figure now stood a few inches above the floor.
The resemblance to her mother's line was immediately evident in Fionn McCoul's proud, haughty bearing, with narrow eyes staring down over imperious wide cheekbones. The well-tamed mane framing his features would appear in darkest red, were it not the same otherworldly pallor as the rest of his apparition. A cloak with intricate embroidery along the hems draped his vigorous figure.
For a minute his slitted gaze searched Pyrrha up and down without a crack in his ironbound countenance. Then he barely tilted his head back and let out a deep hum; he spoke with a low voice that seemed to force the chamber's boundaries further apart that it might hope to accommodate the sound. The address cut off as suddenly as it had begun, and the whole of it had passed Pyrrha by to impart no meaning at all.
Pyrrha crushed the stone in her fist. "I expect you know who I am. But I don't understand you."
A contemptuous noise rumbled up from Fionn's chest. "Pyrrha . . . Clay," he said thickly, followed by yet more sentiments that carried on longer than the first. While the meanings were lost, the disdainful tone bearing them was unmistakable. He fell silent and crossed thick arms under his cloak. The quiet smothered them. He watched her beneath clenched brows, eyes lit in a knowing search for further disappointments.
"Hm." Pyrrha paced around the wizard, slow and thoughtful; he rewarded her with the irritated backward glance she'd sought as she came back around. "I'm not altogether impressed by the likes of you, either. You should have swallowed your baseless pride and held to your pact." She found her voice heating with every word. "At the very least you might've shown the sense to end Morrigan while she was at your mercy—but no, you hadn't sunk quite low enough. I discovered our shared bloodline." Pyrrha came a finger's breadth away and stared her disgust up at him. "You held her prisoner and raped her the remainder of your pathetic life. I dare you to deny it."
A deep, incredulous chuckle came in response. Fionn took one prim step backward and gave a small shake of his head, then engaged again in a string of statements Pyrrha had no hope of deciphering. He concluded his thoughts along with a sweeping gesture down at himself that became a dismissive flick her way.
"Oh, I'd be more than happy to register my discontent in person . . ." Pyrrha turned a baleful look down at the stone in her hand. "Perhaps I'll do just that, after the dust settles."
Fionn's heavy-lidded eyes flicked wide open, and Pyrrha felt a rush of hateful pleasure.
"Yes, you know precisely what I've been studying, don't you? If you'd prefer to opt out of a firsthand experience, cease your bloviating and tell me how to lift the curse."
The ancient wizard's look of startled outrage slowly sank and settled into a stone mask. His gaze dropped to the floor, and he glowered down at the boards for an eternal stretch of seconds, a look that communicated plainly to Pyrrha that the answer was a known, unhappy quantity. Before she could press him Fionn met her eyes, lifted an arm to point at her, and uttered one laconic answer. He disappeared, a somber sense of finality left in his wake.
After a pause Pyrrha turned to pass the stone back to Daisy. "About as useful as I anticipated, but you were right to have me try."
"I'm sorry it didn't work out," Daisy said, frowning down at the Hallow before placing it carefully in her breast pocket. "Did he seem regretful at all?"
"Not in the least."
Pyrrha swept across the room and threw open the armoire several times, each pass displaying a different array of contents. She stopped at the sight of several tiered racks and shelves stacked with potion vials in every hue. Rattles and clinks rang as she rummaged through her stores and downed several different potions, a vile mix that smoked in her throat and shriveled her tongue; she slipped a few more into her bottomless pouch and shut the doors. The blood in her brain sang with renewed stamina.
"Has—?" Pyrrha hacked into her elbow, voice reduced to a low rasp. She faced Daisy. "Has the Amorphity Potion taken effect?"
Daisy flinched back and clutched at her robes. "Blimey, I'd say so. Your face is changing so quickly, it's—it's nearly making me sick, like vertigo or something. Is it really necessary to arrive like that? You, erm, you might scare people . . ." She trailed off uncertainly. "Of course, they'll be terrified out of their wits already, but, y'know. They need to realise you're there to help, right?"
With a whisper of air Pyrrha conjured a hooded cloak the same bleak shade as her robes and draped herself within. The thin shroud instilled a sense of security she disliked to entertain, for the suggestion that being seen as she was would do her ill, would expose some obvious vulnerability. It was the same reason she never let her hair veil her face, though it might frustrate unwanted attention. To smother her insecurities and dare the world to try her suited far better.
In light of her newfound notoriety, Pyrrha had now to proceed with care everywhere she went; if she was to restore her family to some semblance of normal, she would need to extricate herself, and them by extension, from public consciousness. Though the Tribunal and their laws were the very least of Pyrrha's immediate concerns, there was no reason to further bury herself if she could avoid it.
Wax drips plinked at the ceiling like drowsy morning rain. Pyrrha folded herself into the cloak, settled deep in the hood to shadow her shifting features. Her voice, still hoarse, needed no further manipulation to mask. "How is this?"
Daisy blinked hard and then stifled a snort behind her knuckles. "No, I'm sorry, it's—er—if we were strangers, you'd be very intimidating." Her tone verged on patronizing, drawing out a little annoyance. "But that's what we need to fix, yeah? Let me see . . ."
"We're out of time, Daisy." Pyrrha could feel the sickness stirring in her blood, a macabre magnetism pulling her toward the nearing confrontation. "It doesn't matter how they regard me, so long as they stay out of the way."
"Nonsense."
Daisy frowned and tapped her foot, arms crossed tight, hands pink and clenched at the upper sleeves. The delay was such that it bordered on stalling. Then before Pyrrha could speak, Daisy drew her wand and flourished it once, gracefully upward; from hem to hood Pyrrha's attire paled to a virgin white.
The space between them seemed to broaden by the moment as the last barrier to Pyrrha's departure gave way. She looked down at her ashen robes and gave a thoughtful hum, a small shrug. It would certainly contrast with Morrigan's putrid form.
"You're the good one," Daisy said, her voice thick. Worry and sorrow shined from her warm brown eyes, the sight like that of a rain-streaked window into home. "That means you save the day and come back all right. Got it?"
"I understand." At a gesture a full vial the color of wine glided from Pyrrha's pouch into Daisy's trembling fingers. "Keep that near at hand. When you drink it, I'll know, and I'll find you." She turned and strode for the door before their prolonged parting inspired anything more. "Let's finish this."
The screams of crows mingled with those ringing from the castle's apertures. Though Caerialto hung several miles skyward, stuck between vast dusky clouds like a child's toy cast into cold mud, overlapping horrors spilled down from the windows and rippled across the low hills and ponds that formed the marshlands. A flittering black swarm surged about the sweeping stonework and enveloped all shapes that escaped its boundaries.
Beneath, Pyrrha stood at the edge of the widest pond and listened a moment longer, but she could glean nothing beyond the animalistic sounds of suffering tearing the air. Everywhere behind her were scattered sobs and cries and flashes of light, the clicks of cameras and the crack and snap of apparitions. Torpid wind crept over the hills and meddled with the edges of her white cloak.
She paced along the lip of the pond, boots crunching on grit and rubble, smacking through thick patches of mud spotting the banks like foul spittle. The desperate voices filling the air began to aim themselves at her back; distressed questions, alarmed demands, grieving pleas. Pyrrha walked on until she found a stone the size of a luggage trunk jutting from the earth.
Her wand appeared in her fingers mid-flourish, and it cast her blood out like a spray of sea foam. While nearby onlookers gasped and muttered she performed a few intricate gestures, one leading smoothly into the next, until the blood staining the air swirled down and impressed itself upon the face of the stone. The rebirth mark burned black and coiled in ways the eye couldn't quite trace, like a furtive brand of the occult. A throbbing hollowness followed the spell.
"Just what are you doing over there?" The voice slid nearer, cool and dry yet taut with stress. "There's a crisis unfolding right above our heads, in case you hadn't noticed. Stand well back from the pond."
Pyrrha turned to face a wizard with neat blonde hair and only one ear. He and the aurors flanking him were sallow in the cursed gloom, twitching and restless, their shell-shocked gazes flicking upward every few seconds. They winced at a visceral cry that pierced through the din and died soon after.
"I'm going inside to stop this." Pyrrha's voice still clawed from her throat; she coughed. "What are you doing, auror MacLeod?"
"What? You'll do no such thing. My team and I, we—" He ran a hand across his face. "We'll get this under control the instant our backup arrives. Please, make your way back beyond the cordon, or better yet—"
"You're spending their lives for your cowardice every minute you delay."
The aurors erupted into outraged exclamations that MacLeod waved down at length, looking furious himself.
"Do you think I'm deaf to the screams? I'd love nothing more than to charge in and stop this madness, but this is the most dangerous dark magic I've ever encountered. We'll do those people no good getting ourselves killed by acting before we're fully prepared. These aurors," he said, casting an arm back at the half dozen grim witches and wizards at his heels, "are the only ones both willing and able to withstand this sort of . . . mental onslaught. It's a killing field inside," he finished quietly. "We're not enough."
"Then wait beyond the cordon."
Pyrrha spun around and shot one more glance up at Caerialto as she crossed into the water. The foundation of clouds beneath trailed away at the edges, like wisps of winter breath. The castle listed to one side.
After shouts of protest she felt the spells incoming and repelled them without looking back; the air cracked sharply and several wet thumps marked bodies toppling into the muck. An uproar followed, cameras strobing and clicking between the clamor of confusion and dismay that pealed against the calm surface of the pond. Pyrrha kept wading until the water submerged her entirely, swallowed her away from all sound save for her pounding heart.
For a timeless length she pressed ahead, needles of anxiety ticking along her skin like the barbed limbs of so many purposeful insects. The water, stagnant and hazy with disturbed muck, made way for Pyrrha with a hair's breadth of room to spare. Though she had air, every other breath seemed to lose its way to her heaving chest.
The faint trickles of sunlight filtering in receded as if siphoned away, and there was nothing beneath her feet. Abyssal water crushed inward from all sides. Black, cold, inexorable as death, it consumed sound and sight and sought the same for Pyrrha, held at bay with no more than a charm. A bead of moisture down the bridge of her nose made her heart jolt; that it was sweat and not the pond devouring her whole made no matter to her body's erratic rhythms.
A portal formed from the blackness overhead, a rippling ring of weak sunlight cut by brilliant flashes and streaks of magic slashing back and forth. Pyrrha's feet found solid stone and she launched herself upward through the water. Her fingers tingled. She reached the rim of the portal, gripped cold wet stone—stump slipping uselessly—and hauled herself out of the fountain against a yank at the hem of her robes.
Caerialto's vast courtyard burned with curses. The air stung to breathe, sharp with ozone, thick with smoke. Pyrrha whirled to take in the scope of the battlefield and turned away several spells at once with a swipe. There was time for naught but the briefest impressions of the ruined warzone made of the castle's enclosed grounds; scored trees and burning flora, gouged and melted stonework, wailing crows diving through the smoke as legion pairs of glowing yellow eyes, or else perched and bobbing greedily over prone forms, beaks dripping with gore.
Human shapes thrashed and swung their wands with abandon, too many to count, too many to let even a glimpse of the distant walls between their colliding bodies. Each of them issued a shriek, a sob, a roar of anguish piercing through the resounding bursts of magic called forth. The better part of the demented throng returned Pyrrha's attention with wordless howls and unstrung gibbering. Curses flew in from all sides.
Pyrrha repelled them in an endless chain of swipes, flicks and twirls, trails of light streaking sparks across her vision, wand radiating heat up her fingers. Her arm moved at the speed of thought, darting behind to defend her back when she sensed the need. A few at a time she subdued the insane within hard-won intervals, turning slowly on her heel as she progressed, but the battle drew further attention from the greater mass every moment. Crows cawed hoarsely and gathered to descend on her with beaks and talons, numbers blotting out the clouded sky.
A wild current of wind blasted the birds back, scattered them and snapped their wings. Out of the corner of her eye Pyrrha saw MacLeod, wand arm high, and his contingent of aurors leaping from the fountain, their own wands leveled and beaming with spells. They shouted curses and warnings over the din and battled their way to Pyrrha.
"I need time," Pyrrha called, not sparing them a glance amidst the onslaught still focused on her. "Seconds."
"Form up!" MacLeod shouted. "Cover her, but stay out of her damned way!"
The aurors encircled Pyrrha and matched her movement while she edged further toward the epicenter of the bloodbath. Bodies flung toward them often as curses, arms splayed, swinging, clawing, and MacLeod's people sent them spinning away or planted them hard in the sodden dirt. Crows cast their curse with harsh rattling caws that rang without need for breath, whether they lay broken and twitching on the grass or flew ungainly over waves of fire straining up from the ash trees, feathers smouldering, trailing smoke overhead.
At a stretch of open ground Pyrrha stopped, looked on the teeming courtyard at every side, and began an ascending circular gesture with her wand. "Mind your footing."
Along the edges of their loose circle, the turf heaved up and countless roots ripped from beneath like wiry fingers scraping from the grave. They tore the earth back and made way for more, cascading outward across the courtyard, from thinnest distant tendril to the broad anchors stemming from the base of each trunk. The ground shuddered as if it may give way to the skies below.
In their insanity the bewitched took no notice. They tripped and caught on bodies and cirri, clamoring for each other, or else crying for deliverance from their own thoughts. Even as yet more roots turned the dirt beneath their feet and felled them they scrambled, staggered, slaughtered and laughed.
With wide sweeping gestures Pyrrha pulled the roots further from the soil, and they waved and writhed as if reveling in their freedom, whipping crows from the air. The throngs stumbled apart and broke into loose skirmishes throughout the tendrils hemming them in. A jet of fire surged out from somewhere in the crowds and engulfed huge swathes of the courtyard, the stream slashing around without focus; hysterical screams overcame all sound; Pyrrha whirled her wand at the origin.
Roots lunged like striking serpents and slithered around each person in reach, wove and twined themselves together, ensnared every inch of the enthralled in a widening area. Some were burning. Pyrrha channeled the spell with encompassing motions while it sent hundreds more tendrils to stretch, clasp, layered such that the gardens took on the look of one great tangled organism. From all sides the aurors' barriers flared up against a staccato of hexes, dashing sparks into the air.
Pyrrha kept casting until the whole of the yard brimmed with bodies bound up, tied down, marked only by the contours of limbs lashed tight. The people trapped within could only curse and bellow and sob until the roots wrapped them away. When she finally lowered her arm, the only noises came of devouring flames and thready cawing.
Inside their untouched circle of turf, the aurors stared around. One reedy man, leaning heavily on the witch beside him, let out a stunned laugh.
"That was some fuckin' spellwork," another wizard said, to subdued chuckles and murmurs of agreement.
"Screw your heads back on!" A spout of water erupted from MacLeod's wand to arc over the spreading blaze, sending up hissing steam. "They're burning!"
The aurors hastened to follow suit, but Pyrrha looked past them at what she'd made of Caerialto. What she'd destroyed. Where there had been flowers, trees, bustling vibrant lives, there was scorched earth and streaked blood. Lives imperiled and damaged, near suffocated to salvage what was left.
Through the smoke and flowing roots an ash tree still stood where Pyrrha remembered it. Ashlin sat on the lowest bough, kicking her feet, up where no one could miss her new trainers if a friend happened by. She focused on a fresh canvas suspended before her. Wand working with surgical care, she drew out the charmed pigments infused within and gave them shape, glancing past her project intently every several seconds.
"Smile, you git!" she'd called. "It's a family portrait, not Professor Pyrrha's bloody textbook jacket!"
Pyrrha almost did when she recalled her retort—that she'd hoped to spare her 'likeness' another ghoulish grimace at Ashlin's hands—and the way her sister had laughed hard enough to slip from her perch. There was no defining the feeling it brought to have wrought that delight, to have done one fleeting thing right for Ashlin.
"You see it too?" MacLeod said at Pyrrha's shoulder, making her jolt. "Sorry. It's leaning," he said, nodding toward the constricted masses beneath smoking trees. "All of it. You can feel it tilting beneath us . . . Caerialto's enchantments are failing—" his eyes went wider "—or they're being sabotaged. We need—" he whirled away and shouted at his contingent "—we need to fight our way to the house elves! Check your partners fast, we're moving! You," he added to Pyrrha, "clear us a path to that set of doors. The cellars are nearby."
"Caerialto is staffed by elves? Why do they matter now?"
"They maintain the enchantments that are keeping us airborne," MacLeod said. He threw an arm back at the courtyard. "If this bloodbath is anything to go by, they're losing their minds as we speak, tearing down their own charmwork. We can't waste time. Clear the way."
A few flitting shadows still crossed the skies, golden eyes tracing hypnotic patterns against the clouds. Flames ate away the pennants and banners that clung to the poles atop the walls. Their faint crinkling faded beneath yet more desperate voices, insane cries escaping distant apertures, echoes that would electrify the nerves of a working heart.
Caerialto lurched as if cresting a wave.
The aurors shouted and MacLeod hollered over them, arms thrown out for balance. The twisted grove divided beneath Pyrrha's wand, curling inward or up and away, retracting like Devil's Snare stung by light, and a path wound its way through the roots to the outskirts of the garden. MacLeod led the charge ahead, his contingent matching his footsteps carefully over the tangles of plant matter, hauling themselves on hanging cirri across the slanted ground. He turned and beckoned Pyrrha along as the overgrowth wove closed behind them.
Pyrrha traversed the courtyard in another direction, chasing the dull sickness pulling at her chest, the dreadful yowling of broken humanity. The aurors might rescue the elves and they might not. What was certain to curtail the madness entirely was to see off the Nightmare Queen, to recapture her attention and carry it away. One more clean escape, and then Dagda's cauldron would confer what was needed to destroy Morrigan.
A stout gateway fed into the outdoor district of Caerialto's western bazaar, another courtyard set with flesh-strewn stone tiles instead of grass, populated with what once were multi-tiered stalls and tents and stages in place of trees. The bazaar resembled little more than so many haphazard stacks of kindling, scraps of scorched cloth caught on poles and stakes and heaps of wreck that fluttered in the smoking winds like war banners proclaiming victory to no one, for no one.
The bodies interspersed were still. Huddled in piles, draped and dripping over broken stands, a few hanging by their robes from the flagpoles. Ashen muck clung to Pyrrha's boots while she strode through the heart of the bazaar, sticking and splashing in black puddles of gore. Charred flesh, cursed flesh, burned in her nose and throat. The sight of it all, the empty silence, ate further away at something in her that had already frayed. She could feel the stimulants ebbing.
Passing a stilted dais buried in broken glass, Pyrrha heard wet sounds slobbering, and she stopped and knelt. The wizard sprawled beneath the stage had no mind to pay her. He gulped and tore at the exposed flesh of his arm, what remained of it, as if it were a transcendent feast that might deplete at any moment. Like a dog he lapped up stray rivulets, clotted beard soaking in what he couldn't.
A jet of red light saw the man slump down, unconscious. Pyrrha sealed his wound and moved on, driving off carrion crows with sparks of heat, parting foul smoke with wide swishes.
The presence of Morrigan thumped in Pyrrha's chest like a phantom heartbeat. It drew her out of the courtyard by a set of double doors, down a wide torchlit hallway that led to the galleria proper. The hall channeled wild voices toward her, thrumming with terrible intensities of emotion. Ashlin's brisk footsteps matched her own.
"Something's odd," Ashlin said quietly. "She's never been this easy to pinpoint."
"Can you sense—?" Pyrrha cut off at the sight of someone hunched against the wall further along, motionless but for mechanical breathing.
Across a wide smear of blood and bile with no discernible origin Pyrrha paced, pausing several feet away. There were two of them, sunken in the bleary shade between torches, a blonde witch clutching a boy in her lap. The whites of her eyes shone, wide and bulging, fixed far past their surroundings. Her rigid body seemed to begrudge her each breath, with long pauses from one to the next.
The boy, with a shock of fair hair like the mother's, looked no more than five—the same age that Pyrrha had let Ashlin down from her hip and never picked her up again. His little fingers curled around the sheltering arms crossing his neck. Too tight.
"No." The burn barely registered beneath boiling rage; Pyrrha punctuated each denial with a deafening gouge in the wall, white light flashing. "No. No. No. No."
"Why feel now?" Ashlin gave the boy a solemn look. "How many hundreds like him burned up at Leitrim?"
"No!" The next curse ripped the stone beneath Ashlin's feet to send slabs slamming into the low ceiling, skimming off the walls. Pyrrha stopped, breathed lungfuls of dust, blinked grit from her eyes. "What can I do?" She walked a circle, looked from the boy to Ashlin, from the courtyard massacre to the madness ahead. To Morrigan. Everything was in pieces. "What can I do?"
"You can stop this from happening ever again." Ashlin appeared in the way, hands gently catching Pyrrha's face. She nodded at the mother. "You can help her."
Pyrrha laughed. Her voice reverberated down the corridor to blend with the madness ringing out from the galleria.
"You can," Ashlin said. She released Pyrrha and gestured over the two, blue eyes glimmering. "She doesn't want to live anymore."
The witch looked hollow as Pyrrha felt. She thought if she could reach inward for the place her soul languished, it would prove slight enough to snuff out with two fingers.
"I'm sorry."
Pyrrha leveled her wand and called upon a blood curse. Nothing came of it. Another attempt, another, struggling with the disorder of her mind, until she hissed the incantation and broke the years of silence that had connoted her focus.
"Haurio!"
Blood beaded from the pores of the witch's skin, welled from her tear ducts, her ears and nose and slack mouth, and formed a stream in the air that met the tip of Pyrrha's wand and trickled in. Tingling warmth shot up her arm into her chest.
The stream flowed and the witch shook as if she coursed with electricity, but her arms remained locked around the boy until her body gave one last spasm and went limp. What was left of her face resting against the wall was a blotchy bruised mask with lips drawn past her teeth. Ashlin's skin briefly matched the witch as she frowned down, back to dessicated black, and Pyrrha's heart chilled.
No rush of stamina followed the curse. Though it had bolstered her body's reservoir, she still felt weak. Faint. Another sacrifice incurred for nothing.
"She didn't suffer for nothing, no," Ashlin said, cool hand folding over Pyrrha's. "You'll need her strength."
Pyrrha yanked herself away and stormed up the hall toward the galleria. The burn pulsed hot. Shrill curses carved at the air ahead, bursts of blinding light flashed by the nearing mouth of the corridor, and shrieks rang ceaseless, heedless, fruit of the nightmares Morrigan sowed. The endless amber gaze drew nearer every stride; Pyrrha sped up.
The landing she emerged upon was situated near halfway up the galleria's western floors; there were broad staircases in several directions leading upward and down, set in the interstices of the myriad storefronts and attractions ringing the breadth of the landing. Within inconspicuous corners and alcoves, at the feet of high carven pillars, dozens of shrubs and trees flowed from one shape to another in a steady dance. Multicolored starflies fluttered after their graceful limbs in pursuit of a perch, bathing the galleria in warm light.
Resounding bangs and detonations of color erupted from the windows of a nearby shop, followed moments later by screams and cackling. Pyrrha went the other direction, granting a wide berth to a pink, glowing, gelatinous mass crawling out of an apothecary. Between the blunt features of the galleria's stonework a lofty constellation of light gleamed and swirled, marking the distant atrium at the heart of the galleria.
As Pyrrha drew nearer the cries of dry-throated crows stirred in the air, declaring Morrigan's challenge, and the low hum of hysteria throughout Caerialto came to another crescendo. An explosion rocked the level below; Pyrrha caught her balance on a sculpted oilliphéist, ears ringing, and waited for the castle to balance out.
It never did. Caerialto keeled even further, nearly far enough to send her sliding; a blast of noise preceded splinters and glass raining on Pyrrha from upslope; she cast on the statue and it coiled around her as hollow ringing impacts rained over them. Through the serpent's many fins she watched a battery of brass pottery tumble and crash down the slant of the landing, petulant wails escaping when their lids popped off.
The crows' cawing came incessant, piercing, setting the rapid pace of Pyrrha's pulse. She disentangled herself from the oilliphéist and set upon its formidable shape with her wand: the angular shoulder blades flared wider; the sinuous body arched and broadened; the dozens of sidelong fins enlongated into sturdy, spiderlike limbs honed to barbed points. It looked down and ground out a hiss like rasping rock while Pyrrha bowed and bent the legs.
What she made of the sea dragon was a warped and ghoulish creature she could liken to nothing. But it speared the floor with noisy cracks and stood immotile against the lean of the castle; she knelt it and settled onto its shoulders, then sent it trampling down the slope toward the atrium.
In short order they found the western concourse, the inside edge of the galleria, replete with rows of benches, potted starfly plants, and fireplaces stacked in neat tiers with wide steps stretching down. Emerald flickers played across the mirror polish of stone floor tiles and ridged support columns. Around the curve of the concourse's innermost edge ran a slate balustrade formed of parading creatures, magical and mundane, prancing at the precipice of the atrium proper.
Far above, past several more massive floors, dozens of shallow braziers hung from swaying chains or nestled in the hollows of Caerialto's highest vaulted spaces. Wrought of gleaming gold, of shining silver, of burnished brass and incandescent iron, the bowls' broad metal bellies upheld innumerable wisps. The gleaming beads burned misty shades of white and blue. They flitted and streaked between braziers like lost stars desperate to restore their proper alignment, casting wide ripples of light that left gloom in their wake for one moment at a time, always washed away by another wave.
At Pyrrha's urging her animation stampeded toward the inner edge of the concourse, each step punching through stone with deafening cracks. The harsh barks of crows battered at her, and she twisted on her perch in search of them. The burn throbbed with a pain that dimmed everything.
When Pyrrha's vision cleared they were diving, black blots bursting from shadows around the chamber. Hundreds of shining citrine eyes closed in.
A beak cut her cheek as she slid off the statue and hurled up a circular gesture, her arm battering away another cawing maw. The landing drove her to her knees, and darkness enveloped her when the statue did. Between every gap in its coils beaks and talons scored and slashed, a thousand shrill rasps against stone, commingled with cawing that drowned her shelter in keening sound. Razor talons scrabbled at Pyrrha's wrist; she jerked her arm away and ran her wand along a coil in an intricate pattern.
Hair-thin cracks split the stone where she traced, glowing with soft white light. At a final flourish the cracks snaked the full length of the statue, every inch split countless ways, and the glow flared into blinding rays; Pyrrha shut her eyes; the statue flew apart in every direction with a blast and a rush of wind. The air beat with heavy impacts, gouging and crashing, along with wet bursts of shredding flesh that sent a chill up Pyrrha's spine. The smell of blood enswathed her.
Pyrrha opened her eyes. Where crows should have fallen and scattered to pieces instead were the dripping remains of witches and wizards. Little more than a stray arm or head distinguished one dead from the next, scraps of flesh plastered to benches or dashed into pillars, smashed across the floor. Blood streamed toward her down the castle's decline.
The crows still screamed; the uproar came deafening when they descended in a twister of black feathers. Before Pyrrha could move they consumed her. Every inch of her body met with rending appendages, and she swung her wand about, buffeted by brittle wings; they knocked her off course and the curse misfired in a burst of violet, splintering the bones of her wrist; her wand flung out from the hole torn in the swarm, and they closed around her again.
Talons hooked her flesh by the arms and shoulders, clutched her hair and clamped her legs, punctures all over searing like the scar. The crows beat their wings and hauled Pyrrha's thrashing body into the air. Death choked her lungs when she tried to breathe, shined endless yellow lights when she tried to see. Ceaseless cawing pounded at her head until it rang from inside.
Pyrrha struggled and bled, robes soaked and shredded and catching in the crows' storm of claws. She ripped her arm free and flung out a gesture, blood spraying after.
"Inficio!"
Every drop of her blood that touched the air turned to black smoke, oily and billowing; it rolled off the crows' smeared beaks and claws, off her savaged body, in a thick plume that enveloped the flock and saw them drop from the air, eyes white and empty.
She fell. With a beckon Pyrrha summoned her wand—
Her spine struck the balustrade and gave way with a dull snap; she spilled backward into the empty air over the atrium.
Terror spiked her heart. Smoke still bled from her body, choking dark coils unfurling beneath the atrium's swirling wisps; she hurtled headfirst through slashes of black, flashes of light—she raised her arm—
Everything stopped when she heard the crunch of her bones and the hollow crack of her skull. All her eyes could follow was a scatter of dim sparks, burning faint tracks through black nothing. On the heels of one slow nerveless heartbeat hot agony poured down from her crown, her arm and shoulder; she dragged back her breath and shrieked after the fading motes of light that marked the death of her sight.
Her voice struck across the walls and pillars and hewed her pain into every inch; it swelled in the air above and below. Then Pyrrha knew that the atrium's crossway had caught her fall, and she was not dying on the floor of Caerialto's main concourse.
Though she saw nothing she could picture the great four-point bridge that adjoined the cardinal wings of the castle, designed to resemble a celtic knot wrought in stone. She dragged herself across its intricate flutes and ridges, over nidorous heaps of stiff brittle feathers and clenched talons. They brushed aside readily as dead leaves. Every flexion of Pyrrha's body built upon the revolt pulsing in her skull.
The thick balusters of the crossway's railing found Pyrrha's jittering fingertips, and she shoved her head between and vomited over the side. Each convulsion came stronger than the last and ripped her open from head to groin, again and again, her flesh desperate to expel the poisonous influence of her soul—all it would produce was blood and bile, then nothing at all, squeezing and crushing her empty chest—
YOU ARE MINE
The voice pealed from Pyrrha's head and pared her skin with cold metal; she gasped a full breath at last, brain tingling with relief and horror. She hauled at the railing but couldn't set her legs beneath her. There was no sensation below the waist.
Two burning yellow eyes shined out of the void.
Then came a profound lurch and a sense of weightlessness, the castle skewing further. Caerialto had slipped into free fall.
Wrist stiff and throbbing, Pyrrha gestured and felt the flesh of her arm bubble and melt, and her wand found form in her hand even as she began to slide down toward Morrigan's deathly patient stare. A flick produced glaring werelight that threw shades of red into her blank reality and etched the outlines of all in its reach.
Citrine pits seared from eye level where she lay back; a low mass of fur prowling nearer, growling deep and hoarse, claws dragging at the floor with each pace up the incline. Hati's muzzle, scorched and contorted, bared long fangs out of a gaping tongueless mouth.
Morrigan's power radiated from him alone.
AWAIT ME
"No, no—!" Pyrrha lashed out, struck at her blood in Hati's veins, the sustained chain that bound them all. The wolf yelped and flinched back; the attack lanced beyond and stole a flash of thought, a brief image, the satisfaction of the Nightmare Queen while she waited in the sky above a forested canyon.
Her endless stare tracked two miniscule figures flying nearer with a softly glowing object sat between them.
With a choked snarl the wolf sped up along the bridge, long claws scraping, dripping jaws hung open. As Pyrrha kept sliding closer the stench of decay swept over her, and sorrow bolted through her heart.
She turned her wand on her ruined limb. Hati's foreleg tore away in a spray of gore and he whined, a sharp rasp that hurt to hear; he reared and hacked out weak huffs, his bloodied claws slipped free of the stone, and he tumbled over backward and out of Pyrrha's sanguine light.
Pyrrha hooked a baluster in the crook of her elbow and watched Hati's golden eyes plummet further away in the dark; a sudden stop and a last high yelp, and his light went out.
An immense pressure lifted from the atmosphere, and all Pyrrha could hear was the thin flutter of her own breathing—no more screams, no more caws. The witch's power over the castle had broken with Hati.
Before the torment coursing through her could take root she cast out for her mark, a faraway spark of warmth, and tethered herself there. At a final gesture she dissolved into nothing and passed through the deep channels that ran in between.
Even as she traversed nothingness she felt the pull at her core that signalled Daisy's need.
Pyrrha spurted from the marked stone at the pond's edge and staggered out sopping and half-formed. Shouts and sobs rose up all around, waves of voices overlapping through the blackness to crash upon her.
"Good Lord, what on earth happened to—?"
"—covered in blood—"
"—why the castle's falling—?"
"—wrong with her face, it keeps changing, look!"
Every word, charged with ardent emotion, built and piled on Pyrrha such that she felt she must soon explode and silence them all before they smothered the breath from her body. Her flesh finished its weaving and she shuddered at the sensation, shedding drops from her robes.
Behind her Caerialto was less than a minute from obliterating itself against the earth—this gathered from the ascending panic of the crowd, their garbled thoughts. Pyrrha could see it land safely. By the hollow hurt radiating from her chest, she knew the task would take everything left in her.
Hadn't that always been what she wanted? An escape, a fitting end, but one that meant something, one that set things right as she could make them?
"Daisy will die," Ashlin said. "I'll die."
The bystanders' cries devolved into a wordless despair that Pyrrha felt setting into her, suffering made sound, another horror to carry along always.
Once more she dissipated and fell into a dreamlike abyss, seeking Daisy at the end.
Daisy almost felt at peace soaring over the gentle hills and forests of Ireland's most remote countryside, nearly skimming the endless sheet of puffy grey clouds obscuring the skies as far as the eye could see. The harp serenaded them of its own accord with an unbroken meandering of notes that made music more ethereal than she had ever been capable of imagining. Steady wind streamed cool and refreshing against them.
But peace couldn't touch her while Pyrrha was gone. Terrible images surfaced, awful thoughts and worries welled up and filled her with a distress that sat cold and heavy as a great stone in her stomach.
The harp gave an unpleasant twang, and Wasila altered their course little by little until the harmony stabilized. The formless witch had returned to the Lodge with another new face, all red cheeks, blue eyes and curly blonde hair. Though at first disheveled and smelling of hot metal, she'd composed herself in moments at Daisy's word.
Wasila flashed a grin back and took in Daisy's state. "Do try to relax, love. I can almost hear your vertebrae fusing together."
"I'll relax when this nightmare is done with." Daisy twined her fingers. "How are you so bloody calm?"
"Who says I am?" Wasila's eyes glittered. "What you see and what's me are two different beasts."
"Right." Unsure how to reply, Daisy looked down at the forests roving below, shallow hills and valleys sown with wiry trees waving coppery leaves, their dull sheen streaked with rust greens and browns that blended with the grassy ground. A pale river snaked around a distant knoll.
"Why, er . . ." Daisy found herself speaking over the thoughts she wanted not to hear, and formed a question as she went. "Why is it you change your appearance, your voice each day? Do all metamorphs do that?"
Wasila had faced away to mind the harp. She said over her shoulder, "I'm not a metamorphmagus. Rather a shame, that; there've been more than a few occasions a quick change would have done me a world of good." A high laugh escaped her. "Imagine having magic and still lamenting your birth. How silly of me."
After a few moments it seemed no proper answer was forthcoming, so Daisy ventured, ". . . Yeah. So, what, Polyjuice? Transfiguration?"
"The latter."
"That's . . . risky. I assisted with a few long-term cases at St. Mungo's, every sort of awful consequence you could think up; chronic pain, disfigurement, sensory damage, radical dissociation . . . all permanent. Irreversible." Daisy shivered.
"Yes, well, the potion's preparation is intolerably arduous and sweaty, and its chancy flavorings make for a poor payoff." Wasila turned halfway around on her knees, smile bright and devious. "Though something tells me you might bring a heady sweetness, yourself."
There was a stretch of silence in which Wasila seemed to be awaiting a response to some unvoiced question, her expression light and inviting. Daisy wrung at her hands and said, "Erm, sorry?"
Wasila's laugh skated by on the wind. Turning round to face Daisy directly, she set her palms on her thighs and leaned in a little. Her voice came gentle. "We've some miles yet before we reach our destination, love. This is me asking for a taste of you. I propose we take this small window of time to forget ourselves . . . to, ah . . ." She twined a lock of hair about her finger, then let it bounce free. ". . . to unwind, bind ourselves together, and come apart with lighter hearts." Wasila's smile was soft and eager. "I perform much like our quarry; you'll walk away quite satisfied," she said, "if you can still manage it."
"Oh! Er, I don't—thank you? I mean," Daisy said, scrambling to arrange her words in a sensible order, "I mean to say I'm flattered, but no, not interested."
Wasila hummed, tilted her head, then slipped out her wand; Daisy froze up, but the witch paid her no mind, squinting off in the distance while she cast upon her own face. Gradually her features thinned and hollowed, her cheekbones widened, and her skin paled to a shade barely more lively than the overcast sky. Black eyes found Daisy's with a warm intensity. Stunned, Daisy could only watch as with a final flourish Wasila's dark red hair bound itself into a practical updo.
"I expect here is where your interest lies." Wasila spoke with Pyrrha's voice, low and soft. "This can be as real as you'd ever want, Daisy. I can confess," she said, parting Daisy's wringing hands with her own, "how much I truly care for you. I can tell you that I want more for us—I always have, since our time at school together. You feel the same, don't you?" She leaned over Daisy and breathed down her plea. "Accept me."
They were all the words Daisy never dared hope for, delivered as if her daydreams had escaped and distilled into something beautiful and true. Even the smell of her was authentic, a subtle mix of old parchment and sterile metal. Something in Daisy leapt up and she shoved it back down, guilt and outrage boiling in her body, and she yanked her hands away.
"That's enough! Get out of her bloody skin—get out of it right now."
Wasila sat back on her heels. The Cheshire cat smile that split Pyrrha's face, shattered the guise like glass, gave rise to a chill. "Of course. My apologies if I've aroused unpleasant feelings."
The witch seemed to know precisely what had taken place in Daisy's thoughts, which further stoked the flames of her shame. She averted her gaze to the countryside again while Wasila changed in silence. Restless heat crept down her limbs, and she drummed her fingers against her knee, head spinning with dreadful ideas that bled together in her mired mind in one long running panoply of fears.
The false face Wasila had shaped for her presented the Pyrrha she'd always known, before the scar, before Morrigan and Ashlin. Before the night their world upended. Though it had been less than a week the constant struggle against Morrigan and her influence had rendered Pyrrha a shadow, a ghost of her former strength, and even now she meant to clash with the creature again while nearly dead on her feet.
Daisy fingered the cold vial Pyrrha had left to her, fighting the urge to be sick. There in her pocket was a way she could save her friend—Pyrrha had promised to arrive straightaway. But it would mean the deaths of everyone she meant to rescue at Caerialto.
"I truly am sorry." Wasila's new voice gave Daisy a start. She followed Daisy's eyes toward the same sets of hills, and they watched the slopes climb and dive until it all bunched up into squat mountains gnashing together like uneven teeth, bristling with spindly pine or sweeping broad oak.
At length Wasila added, "I've never had a bond with anyone the way you and her do. I suppose I wanted to see what it felt like, that . . . trust?" She chuckled quietly. "I can still surprise me."
Around them the breeze picked up into whistling winds that breathed thin mists between the most distant trees. Daisy looked over. Wasila wore bronze freckled skin and a hooked nose, glossy black hair tied back. She flicked her wand and edged their carpet into a minute turn.
"I guess I get it. No harm done," Daisy said, unable to stem her flat tone. There was no distinguishing the genuine from the artifice, especially when she still hadn't a clue what the witch really wanted. The thought made her straighten. "Is that what you'll ask from Dagda's cauldron, then—a relationship, someone to rely on?"
"Now there's a cute idea," Wasila said lightly. "No." She rose up on her knees to peer out at a series of canyons and crevices hewn between the blunt peaks on their course. The harp trilled on, strings gleaming white even in the gloomy half light. "No, I don't give of myself. I take." She turned and smiled in a subdued sort of way Daisy had never seen from her, no flashing teeth, no laugh lines. "I think, at our foundations, we're all . . . manifestations of want, in one form or another, that we try to satisfy with the people around us. But human hunger is bottomless. Nothing offered nor taken—no support, no success, no secret knowledge—will ever truly be enough to complete someone. All it does to attain what we think we need is sharpen the sense that there's more yet to be gained. Loyalty," Wasila said, looking away toward the horizon, "like most everything else, is ultimately wasted on us. And I'll not misspend myself for anyone."
"That's a rather bleak outlook," Daisy said. "You think we're all doomed to carry wounds that no one can heal?"
"There's one way to seal them ourselves—so contrary to what we are that it's barely an idea." The wind shrieked, dragged at their threadbare craft; Wasila parted the gale, and her voice struck upon the sudden quiet. "Stop wanting."
Daisy drew her robes closer around her against the gnawing cold. "Seems to me that's not so much a solution as it is ignoring the problem."
"As I see it, it means embracing what we have, and what we lack. It's not a state of mind I've yet managed, though I believe in its potential. But I can tell you disagree—let's not talk in circles." Distant thunder rushed across the valleys beneath like unseeable tidal waves. "What is it you want from the cauldron, Daisy?"
The question brought Daisy up short. Somehow, she hadn't yet considered what Dagda's creation could offer her, but as she racked her brain for a worthy answer the truth became apparent. It gave her a slight giggle. "I dunno that I want anything, really. Honest," she went on at Wasila's skeptical glance, "there's nothing I need, except—well, I want Pyrrha to get what she wants, obviously. Does that count?"
"Definitely not!" Wasila gave them another measured turn and barely lowered their altitude. "Have another think about all we've heard, the promises made by Furnival's legends. Imagine a work of magic so omnipotent as to satisfy the deepest, most impossible desire of any who approach. There must be something you would ask of it."
"I dunno," Daisy said again, rubbing the cold from her hands, unable to relieve her nerves the same. "All—" Lightning branded the memory of Pyrrha's devastated home on Daisy's eyelids. She found herself short of breath. "All that power, it's—it's frightening to think about. Dangerous. We don't really get to decide what it is we want most, right? What if someone doesn't even realise what their desire is until it happens, and—and it goes horribly awry? Like, they never properly considered the consequences, because it had never been an actual possibility? And using something like that, raw potential, without laws or limits or anything—wielding it safely, responsibly—I'm just not smart enough to do it." Thunder shook the earth again, and Daisy leaned around the harp, the dread eating her insides turning ravenous. "Think what someone like Morrigan could make of . . ."
All across the jagged horizon the weak streams of sunlight leaking from the clouds further waned into sparse, narrow beams, reaching down for low mountain peaks, sinking to deplete in the fissures that fractured the landscape. Blast after blast of thunder struck like cannon fire. Air rushed about Daisy, eluded her lungs, and she clasped her hands together tight, gasping.
Wasila whipped around and returned Daisy's gaze with her own wide-eyed alarm. "She's beaten us to it!"
"God, oh God, Pyrrha," Daisy said, looking down everywhere her friend might suddenly emerge from the trees, unhurt and prepared to fight. She couldn't have failed to escape. "Pyrrha, we're here!"
"Is that how you were meant to summon her? She has an exceptional ear." Wasila set their carpet on a shallow downward trajectory, aiming for the unnatural white mists clinging to the bounds of a massive forested valley, nestled in the curve of a cramped mountain range. Another crack of thunder roared over the harp's electrified strains. "Pyrrha, be a dear," Wasila shouted into the squall, "fetch up a decanter of Tristine Red on your way!"
Daisy rammed a hand into her pocket and snatched out the vial, cold and solid in her fingers. She tore out the cork and tossed the concoction down in one.
Smoke and metal slicked down her throat and coated it; the taste was of suffocation in the frozen mire of a battlefield. Daisy convulsed, nearly heaved the substance straight back up. A sour coppery smell singed her sinuses, made her eyes water, and she coughed wetly into her robes. The sleeve came away red.
"We might be close to Dagda's territory—look there, the charmwork obscuring the treeline!" Wasila pointed ahead at the thick sheet of shifting white draped over a swathe of forested hills. Beyond the pale sea, blurred angular shadows shimmered with the winds, skeletal trees that seemed to twitch and stretch as if roused from slumber. "I think I see an empty patch further on. Could be a clearing. We'll touch down at the foot of that hill, where we'll be closest to it; if we can navigate through the thinnest bit of the border, it might be easier going from there out. What do you think?"
"Let's just keep flying!" Daisy cringed when lightning crashed against the crown of a nearby hill.
"We'll be easy targets," Wasila yelled, "for the witch and her birds, if not this blasted storm! With the harp it'll be safe in the mists—no one's meant to find the cauldron more than once, remember, she can't follow—!"
"Fine! Brilliant!" A hellish chorus of human screams keened beneath the rumbling storm, ascending with every second they soared. Needles pricked across Daisy's skin. "If we live long enough to land!"
"Have you summoned Pyrrha?"
"She's on her way," Daisy said. A glimmer from below made her peek down into the foliage to see hundreds of glowing yellow eyes crack open on all sides. "Bloody hell!"
Rasping, retching caws raged at their eardrums, blending with endless more beastly shrieks from grounded figures flitting beneath. All manner of birds erupted from the undulant canopies and choked the sky with their numbers, dimmed the sunlight with their shining eyes, stirred the wind with their beating wings. Morrigan's cursed wailing worked its way further into Daisy's skull, excruciating but somehow blunted.
"The harp kindly shields our minds," Wasila said. "I'm afraid the rest is down to us!"
Daisy swept her wand around, and a shimmering barrier bubbled out to enfold them against a barrage of brittle beaks and battering wings. She said over the clamor, "Are you any good in a duel?"
"Not particularly!" Wasila slashed through the swarm ahead with streaks of violet fire, searching in vain for a gap to see by.
Daisy flung curses everywhere, panic pulsing through her body, throwing off her aim. "You've—got—to be—joking!"
"I win my battles before they begin!" Wasila jerked back when lightning hammered their barrier, shoulder bumping the harp; she steadied it and set her back to it. "If I end up in a fight for my life, it's only because several pivotal moments beforehand have gone so spectacularly wrong that I can't possibly cut and run, have another go later—in other words I won't be fending off the likes of Morrigan, if that's what you were getting at!"
"Really, so crash-apparating into the Lodge just ahead of a raving sphinx—is that the sort of 'win' you mean?"
"Not quite! Aldemena demonstrated more resolve than I expected. No matter," Wasila shouted, hand on the harp as she blasted a path ahead. "It all worked out fine!"
With a blinding white boom of lightning the barrier detonated and sent them careening sideways into a swarm of rot and feathers. Hollow bones broke against Daisy as she hurtled through a tempest of yowls and yellow eyes; she wrapped her arms around her head and added her own scream, clenching her wand tight.
Her shoulder took the landing on springy grass, hard enough to rattle her head and send her tumbling down the slope. Pain set in hot and stiff while she struggled for breath, still half blinded by the detonation, and she waved her free arm drunkenly about searching for which way was up and where was the earth; she had to push herself upright, had to make distance from the insane noises closing in with so many glowing eyes locked on her—
Daisy yelped when something hauled her up off the ground and planted her on her feet, so dazed she nearly tipped back over. The birds above had disappeared inside a massive impenetrable black cloud.
A face—Wasila's face filled her vision, bloodless and bellowing. Daisy couldn't hear over exploding thunder, over visceral sourceless human howls, over the distant earthquake of stampeding beasts bounding nearer. She looked back up and watched the inky churning fog resolve into the corroded body of the Nightmare Queen, golden eyes like cold stars fixed beyond them.
At a rough yank Daisy found herself spun around and running, then sprinting flat out down the hill, Wasila a blur of movement ahead outstripping her further each second. The witch pointed down to where Dagda's harp had taken on a silvery shine around its strings, and it floated unattended for the bounds of the turning mist like a ship coaxed along on a fair wind. Daisy pushed herself hard enough she barely kept to her feet.
Morrigan soared past them in a streak of flittering black smoke and tattered flesh and circled the harp like a bird of prey, gaze beaming down with a hatred that sucked away the air. The witch gurgled past her lolling tongue, then wailed, an otherworldly noise that promised to warp what was real if it went on too long.
Only when Wasila seized her hand did Daisy realize she'd stopped dead. They bolted away down the face of the hill, still watching as they rounded the harp at a distance; the witch never turned her head their way.
Morrigan lashed down with her staff and caught the harp in thick briars that struck from the earth and hooked wicked thorns into the wood, pulled at the strings, and the vines shriveled and burned to ash. The harp drifted on; dark water came down in a deluge of desperate eyeless faces and submersed it in a whirlpool that gave no sound but echoes of hopeless weeping. A sick shiver wracked Daisy, but she was unable to look away, and she prayed that she would not recognize one of the souls held captive within.
Pale light flared within the vortex and sent the curse up in grey steam, the harp untarnished beneath. The Nightmare Queen shuddered as one nearly undone by rage and swung her gnarled staff like a swiping claw; she flew apart and appeared again all around, slashing down with curses that manifested in ways Daisy couldn't comprehend, burned nameless colors into her eyes until she had to look away or lose her mind on the spot. The witch summoned powers even Pyrrha had not had to withstand, each spell landing with noises that would not fit in her ears, that gripped her guts and twisted.
The base of the hill sloped down into the outskirts of the larger forest, scattered slender trees bent against the wind. A few hundred feet in at the edge of the wilderness proper hung Dagda's enchantments in the form of ghostly white mist. Daisy followed at Wasila's heels over roots and under branches, lightning ripping the skies overhead, each strike making the world blink white, concussing the air that it shook with each impact.
"Wait!" Daisy caught Wasila by the arm, and they stumbled to a halt. She panted and said, "We can't—can't leave the harp behind."
"Certainly not." Wasila looked as if she'd done no more than take a leisurely walk about the countryside, peering back between the foliage at the contest bringing trembles to the earth. "But I don't see us getting near it without ending up smeared across the grass. We'll have to place our faith in Dagda's spellwork, I think, or in Pyr—oh dear."
Daisy stepped around to follow her line of sight and found the entirety of the hill overcome by wave after wave of galloping thralls. They charged in limitless numbers, infinite pairs of smouldering golden eyes highlighting the gaunt features of bears and wolves, deer and horses, bulls, badgers, foxes—roaring, screeching, yowling, they trampled through the clearing and converged on the vortex of bending light that warped the harp. They leapt and scrambled and clawed over one another and buried the harp under tons of dead flesh.
A piercing whine punctured the air, then came a noise like the crack of an enormous whip; a wave of force tossed up the horde and sent them scattering, scrambling to right themselves like so many agitated ants kicked over. Morrigan hung in the sky with her staff reaching its knotted hand up for the clouds, and lightning leapt at her beckon, spearing down to course through the wood strike after strike until she caught one continuous current. Heat and energy poured from the storm in an unending roar; Morrigan shrieked and the world ripped when she swung her staff down and channeled a surge of golden lightning.
The cursed thunderbolt rebounded and blasted the witch into tiny fragments, her staff spinning far off into the undergrowth. Her scream carried on as if she were the land itself crying out for pain that pervaded every grain of soil.
Breathless, Daisy kept watching, and spotted the gathering scraps of gritty black fog she'd hoped would not come. "Christ. She'll be back in minutes, maybe less, the awful bitch." Her mother's remonstrations rang in her memory, and she cast a look up at the smoky, groaning sky between the boughs. "Sorry, Mum."
"That might be all the time we need—look! Dagda's come through for us." Wasila nodded at the harp where it floated over scree and hillock, flickering strange silver light. "It's aiming for those oaks down the slope there. Let's go." Morrigan's cursed howling sunk low and guttural, and the beasts echoed her; Wasila skipped over a spiny spur of stone and ran. "Goodness," she said, weaving around brambles, "for a moment there I wished us help from Rosier! What a sorry state of affairs."
Daisy cast a parting glance through the outlying trees as she made to chase Wasila down the decline. The harp flew unhurried, and behind it the animals were a chaos of claws and fangs rending themselves apart against each other; Morrigan howled again from everywhere, as if all the buried dead through the ages raged up at the living. Her thralls disengaged and scattered, eyes flaring, turning to bear down again on the retreating harp. Driven by one mind they fanned out with eerie coordination, the outer edges angling inward to tie off the noose where they would soon meet—right at the cusp of Dagda's domain.
The hill rose out of sight while Daisy descended to the shallow belly of the dell, where the fog border foamed thick as billowing mists from a massive waterfall. Deep within, angular grey blurs moved in abrupt bursts and pauses, like poorly developed photographs. Daisy came near enough it was clear the shapes she'd taken for trees were something else that had no name.
"The animals are regrouping—they're still after the harp, trying to surround it!" Daisy called to Wasila. A sick chill curdled in her stomach; her heart leapt with relief, somehow knowing it meant Pyrrha neared. "We need to hold them off until it gets down here. I've got this side."
"So you do." Wasila's eyes glittered like the tips of honed knives. That too-wide smile settled in easily, her most comfortable mask. "I don't much like to have to earn my prize this way," she said quietly, flitting her wand across the brush ringing the top of the dell; roots and scrub wriggled up and knotted themselves together, snares pulled taut. She gave a little shrug and said more lively, "Too bad it had to be beasts, oblivious to the privilege of facing me directly!"
"Sometimes confrontation is all that's left, yeah?" Daisy set the silent mists several steps behind, its presence exerting a pressure she felt could prop her up, relieve her trembling knees, were she only to lean back and—she ousted the thought with a shudder, alarm needling her skin. She added breathlessly, "Builds character."
Wasila laughed. "I've done plenty enough of that!"
Following Wasila's example, Daisy fished in her robes and drew out several potion vials between her fingers. With her wand she mixed and blended them in the air, shutting out the resounding storm, the pounding gallops of beasts roaring through the forest. The sizzles and smells, the singular focus, set her far back into classes past, where all commotion had faded away under her best friend's intrigued attention while she strove to impress. Soon four fizzing vials hung suspended, mossy green and emitting pale vapors.
Lightning cut down a distant tree, just visible over the valley as it fell streaming flames off splayed boughs that raked its fellows and shed hungry sparks. Beasts cried in terror and rage. Breathing in mechanical gasps—face aimed away—Daisy flicked her wand around to send the vials firing off across the lip of the dell, where they burst into sinister green smog that hung low and stagnant. The gas' texture was nigh identical to that of the surrounding underbrush. With careful wandwork Daisy teased the smog further along at each end and shored up the gaps.
Dozens of beaming yellow eyes poured over the ridge of the dell, creatures massive and lumbering or rushing deadly quick, tearing and trampling the brush. A broad swathe of the beasts barreled through the brewed smog and tumbled out as bleached skeletons clattering to the dirt. Some shot around and Daisy repelled them with huge plumes of fire, tried to corral them toward her trap, but there were too many, too scattered—she let up and aimed for the piled bones.
The curse's explosion rocked the earth and sent animals and bone shards flying; even as the shrapnel shredded those nearest Daisy snatched the fragments and shot them into the bears and boars bounding close. Gritty pink marrow lingered midair where she had drawn it out; she sent it into the potion she flung over the horde, then slung the vial down and struck it with lightning. A shrill blast unleashed a flash of white smoke that swept through the swarm and left all it touched dead still and calcified.
Fire raced up Daisy's leg—a badger clamped gnashing teeth into her calf, mad eyes gleaming. With a flare of purple she sent it sprawling away, neck broken, and she struck down countless more thralls while she limped toward Wasila's position. The valley boiled with fire-eyed bounding bodies bleating and braying, beating themselves senseless against the trees, against one another, and buried somewhere within was Wasila casting off luminous curses and laughing. Rot and ozone so thickened the air that breathing felt more like drinking, drowning.
An ashen glow tickled the undersides of the branches stretched over the edge of the valley. Daisy watched the harp crest the rise, its gleaming strings still softly singing; she nearly took a bull's horns to the stomach, instead lifting it with an upward flick to soar away, thrashing and snorting. Animals circled the harp and darted in by turns, struck down each time by Dagda's magic. It sank gracefully to the valley floor as if nothing at all were assailing it.
"It's nearly here! Wasila!" Daisy fired curse after curse and edged back toward the fog, where the harp would arrive to guide them inside. "Over here!"
The witch's laugh no longer rang out. A pack of howling wolves bolted through the chaos, around brambles and bodies and broad clefts of rock; they sought after Daisy's blood with hollow eyes and contorted snouts aimed cruel and unerring as death. She threw fire, and they burned up rather than frighten; she called and called again while she fought for her ground, more and more breathless as the valley further swelled with madness. More and more desperate while her cries went unanswered.
Silvery light outlined the trees' limbs like pulmonary veins throbbing with the breath of the storm. The harp's twisted neck craned in and out of view behind animals driven in all directions by rage, panic, desperate confusion—Morrigan's ceaseless scream pealed from the air and the trees and the stones to incite the nightmare writhing wild and free as if to conceive an inchoate hell on earth. Weeping underneath was the song wrung from gleaming strings, bleeding long hums meaning things that words never could.
Throughout Daisy's frame blazes raged; her calf, her lungs, her arm and shoulder. Golden eyes streaked and flashed across her vision and she lashed out with forked lightning, blasted with wicked curses and called for Wasila, gasping—she stumbled over something and landed on her back. The mist blew cold breath over the crown of her head.
With a stab Daisy turned a lunging dog into a doormat, then she rolled away from trampling hooves and sprang upright; a bear slammed against her shield charm. It roared and slobbered and gouged down at the barrier, staring with depthless citrine pits that whispered dismal truths in her ear. Daisy's body flagged, flotsam in a flood of lights silver and gold; she knew she could not react in time when the barrier broke and all she could think was failure and regret, sorrow and Pyrrha.
More—she should've done more, been more—hardly at all had she repaid life for all the wonderful things it had given her a part in. Toward the golden pits she began to tip and fall.
Like a remedy the nearing song simmered in Daisy's veins; she dropped the charm and stumbled under a mighty swing, and momentum sent the bear lurching past her; she spun and fired a spell that propelled it into the mist.
Extremities shaking at her second wind, Daisy panted and watched for retaliation. But there was no shadow, no outline, nor even a flicker in the fog, as if the animal had never disturbed a single pale mote. The angular grey shapes nearest had gone utterly still.
"Nicely done and all, but have a care—there are still plenty more about!" Wasila rode by sidesaddle on a broken branch, loosing spells into the swell of beasts beneath; she sank down and alit beside Daisy with a wide smile, a careless flick sending the stick spearing through a deer. "I had a good look over," she said beneath resonant screams. "The harp's nearly found us, we've only—"
"Where'd you—?"
A rush of air fled a blinding silver flare from inside the writhing horde; piercing notes thrummed over Morrigan's voice and made Daisy's bones vibrate and her teeth itch to their roots. The animals brayed, bleated and howled, fled in droves, tripping and scrambling. Scores of round beaming eyes tore toward the mist where they stood.
With only moments to react, half-blinded by the harp, Daisy cast out curses and heard Wasila do the same. They reduced a number to ash before the stampede reached them and Daisy cried out when they slammed her aside, another hit like a bludger to the hip sending her to the ground. Her knee crunched beneath a hoof and she gasped at the ascending shock, cast a shield charm over herself; she maintained it with all her will while creatures trampled over and past, each crashing step causing a violent flicker. All their drumming footfalls dropped out of hearing the moment they breached the mist.
The light shone stronger, the song rang nearer until Daisy glimpsed the harp's glimmering body between stampeding limbs. A stallion became a wooden rocking horse and Wasila pivoted around it, slinging a wide streak of violet fire that sent several ranks into a sprawling collapse. She sprang aside through a tree trunk as if it weren't there and felled a lynx with a jet of brilliant green light; a hulking elk caught her in the chest by its antlers and sent them both into the fog.
Feeling as if no air was left in the dell Daisy stared at the spot where they disappeared and waited for the witch to stagger out again, battered and bloodied but still grinning. Pale wisps and eddies of mist admitted nothing but a subtle radiating cold.
Blaring lightning blistered through the sky sending white flickers; when they abated Daisy could make out the valley again, empty of movement, animals lost to the fog or fled up the slopes and over the ridges. She sat up and dropped her barrier, breathing deep against the painful heat throbbing up her leg.
Only a dozen feet away Dagda's harp bobbed gently before the fog, argent sheen making a thick white screen of the mists. The way its strings plucked and strummed themselves seemed somehow preening. While Daisy mended her knee with a draught and a repeating flourish she came to recognize, in the back of her mind, the sight of finely twined veela hair.
Drowned out by the harp's haunting song Morrigan's wail still resonated, coming stronger and clearer the more attention Daisy paid it. She stood and made her way past bodies and brush into the harp's ethereal glow. In her awe she placed a hand upon its withered neck without a thought; the harp drifted ahead into the pale miasma, and with a panicked jolt Daisy limped along at its side before it could slip away. Around them the mist parted and shivered with faint grey shapes.
All sound but the song cut off when the fog enclosed her. Daisy glanced back and saw the same endless white that pressed in from every direction, no shadow or outline from the forest behind. There was no sky, no earth, only her and the harp drifting on like motes of dust through outermost space, the edge of God's creation where nothing was meant to exist.
"Wasila?" Daisy called out, more so that she could know she herself was still there. The fog swallowed her voice.
With her hand clamped to its neck Daisy followed the harp and kept calling, cold brume billowing barely out of reach. Something turned restless in her stomach. Louder she shouted, breath coming more and more shallow while she imagined Wasila stranded in nothingness, lost, blind, alone. Daisy's voice cracked, and she cried.
Inside her the ghastly sickness shivered and shook. Daisy clutched at her abdomen with her other hand and sobbed down into the clouds she walked on, voice strained with hope and dread. "Pyrrha?" She coughed, spraying red flecks into dead white. "Pyrrha?"