“I don’t think a torch is gonna help this time,” replied Breadlee.
The verdigaunt dropped its hands to the road and charged on all fours, the wicked tines of its antlers advancing like a phalanx of spear points. The bottommost points carved squiggling furrows in the road. Astryx lunged to the side, but not fast enough. One outer spike caught her in the right shoulder and spun her off-balance.
She did not cry out, but Fern thought she saw a fringe of blood cast into the night from the impact, and she clapped both paws to her mouth.
The creature sensed the strike and dug its digits and hooves into the earth, skidding to a stop and wrenching its head, still held low, in her direction.
Astryx tossed Nigel to her left hand and continued the motion into a vertical spin of the blade that lopped the ends off half the verdigaunt’s antlers. The tines spun away into the darkness like severed fingers, trailing ribbons of dark fluid.
It bellowed, bunching its shoulders to lunge again, but the Blademistress dashed forward, sprintingupits lowered skull, between the tangled thorns that flanked it, and onto its back where she brought her blade up in both hands, point downward, and drove it between the verdigaunt’s shoulder blades.
With a reverberant roar it threw itself upright. Astryx crouched to maintain her footing, both hands still on the blade, but her eyes flew wide as her fingers slipped from his hilt and she was hurled away.
As the Oathmaiden hit the dirt and rolled, Nigel remained buried in the verdigaunt’s back. It bayed with pain, flailing its blunt-fingered hands at its shoulders, trying to reach the steel planted next to its spine, and shifting its prodigious weight from hoof to hoof.
Astryx moaned, pushing herself to her feet with her hand once more at her side.
Fern reached her in seconds. “Come on, come on, you’ve got to get back!” she cried, putting her shoulder under Astryx’s unwounded one. Fern could see a dark stain leaching through her jerkin where the verdigaunt’s antler had caught the elf.
“You shouldn’t be here,” grunted Astryx. Then she hauled herself the rest of the way to her feet, blowing out a pained breath at the end.
“Neither should you!” retorted Fern, glancing up at where Nigel still stood in the back of the flailing monster.
Then, a flash of patchwork color in the torchlight.
Zyll scurried out of the darkness, leapt, and caught her fists in the shaggy hair of the verdigaunt’s back.
Astryx and Fern stared agog as the goblin scrambled up to the Elder Blade. The beast seemed not to perceive her.
At least, until Zyll flung herself into the air, snatching hold of Nigel’s grip as she went. Her weight and momentum dragged him free with an awful tearing sound, and then the blade cartwheeled over her head as she released him at the forward point of his spin.
Nigel whickered through the air, shedding black blood, until he thudded, point-first, into the ground.
Zyll disappeared once again into the darkness.
The verdigaunt cast about, bewildered and huffing in pain.
Astryx pushed off of Fern’s shoulders and ran, curving her path past Nigel’s still wobbling length. Without stopping, she jerked him from the ground and veered toward the towering beast.
It noticed her at the last, snarling and lowering its head again.
The Oathmaiden screamed, raw and ragged, and drove Nigel like a spear directly into the center of its skull.
Her momentum carried through and she slammed into its head with one shoulder, bounced back, and tumbled to the roadway as, with an awful groan, the verdigaunt dropped like a wagonload of boulders.
“Take this, Oathmaiden,” said Finny, pressing a cup of something hot and fragrantly nasty into Astryx’s hands.
“Oh, leave off, woman. That mend-all of yours is like to kill her as soon as cure her,” groused Booth.
Astryx accepted it anyway, bemused and ensconced in a wooden chair draped with what seemed like every blanket the villagers could find. Her shoulder had been thoroughly bandaged and Nigel leaned, unsheathed, against the arm of her chair. The old woman in the raggedy dress fretted over a pair of cushions which she kept trying to jam behind the elf’s back. The Elder Blade tutted in annoyance every time she bumped into him.
They had parked the Oathmaiden before the hearth, now loaded with logs that burned cheerfully.
Fern thought that while the elf looked rightfully exhausted—her cheeks and neck still smudged with soot, hair a messy tangle—there was something in her expression she hadn’t seen before.
Her quiet, steely reserve had been replaced by something simpler and more open.
The tired smile on her face was disarmingly genuine.
