If I was thewhatwho was supposed towhat?
“We have,” he continued, “more urgent matters to deal with.”
He motioned his head toward the spider wolves. They had given up on trying to make us run. Instead of circling, they crouched down, the joints of their spidery legs sticking up above their backs. Dozens of gleaming black eyes fixed on us. A low, constant growl came from all around, making the hairs on the back of my neck standup.
Clem loosed an arrow as they lunged for us. “Och, bugger m—” he began, but they were at our throats before he could finish.
Everything became a dizzying frenzy of motion. One of the monsters stumbled and dropped, an arrow in its throat. A sword flashed to my right, trailing dark blood as it carved deadly arcs through the air. Sam was suddenly in front of me, snatching two spider wolves out of the air midleap, one in each hand, and smashing them to the ground. A third sailed past him, though, its jaws wide and aimed at my face. Inside its mouth, sharp, chitinous ridges clicked together in anticipation.
I shoved the branch down its throat.
Black liquid bubbled up in its mouth. It made a strangled gagging noise as it crashed into me. Its momentum carried it forward, knocking me flat on my back. The air was forced out of my lungs. I struggled to breathe while the hairy limbs at the sides of the creature’s muzzle scrabbled at my face, and its four front paws raked my shoulders and sides, ripping gouges in my flesh. Then it shuddered and lay still.
The end of my stick was poking out of its skull. It had been driven through by the creature’s own immense weight. The weight that was, at that moment, pinning me to the ground, making me an easy target for the next one to come.
As I strove to wriggle out from under it, something lifted the monster off me and tossed it to the side. I looked up to see Sam smiling. He reached a hand out to help meup.
“Thanks,” I said, hauling myself to my feet. “Again.”
“We’re making a habit of rescuing each—”
The rest of what he was going to say was lost in a pained bellow as Sam went down under a torrent of fur and claws and fangs. I screamed. The attacking monsters were a tangle of limbs. How many were there? Four? Five? This time, I didn’t even have a few wet leaves.
As I flailed uselessly at one of the beasts with my fists, I saw a blur at the edge of my vision, like a flaw in a clear glass window. Before I could blink, the blur reached Sam, stabbing a spider wolf in one of its huge upper eyes. The beast shrieked and snapped at whatever it was, but the blur was never where the spider wolf expected it to be. It shifted out of reach with a speed that my eyes couldn’t follow.
A stiff wind blew out of nowhere, nearly toppling me over again. While I fought to keep my balance, I heard an odd crackling sound belowme.
Frost spread across the ground like a cascade of spilled milk, turning the black leaves white.
Someone grabbed hold of my arm, keeping me upright. Sam had somehow gotten free from the pile of spider wolves. He was covered with blood and nearly unrecognizable; I only knew it was him because he didn’t have a sword or a bow.
For a moment, I thought the monsters attacking him had vanished, but then I saw them rolling away, blown aside by the wind like so many tumbleweeds. Sam braced himself against a tree to keep us from tumbling right along after them.
The wind abated as abruptly as it had arrived. Bloody Knee rushed in, slashing at the dazed monsters. The blur zipped from one to another, leaving death in its wake. Within moments, the creatures besetting Sam had been hacked to pieces.
I looked around at a scene of unimaginable carnage. I was surrounded by slaughtered spider wolves—peppered with arrows, stabbed, or killed in far less natural ways. A few of them had been frozen in place mid-snarl like some strange new kind of taxidermy, their fur iced over. As I watched, a final one plummeted from a tree branch, crashed into the leaf litter, and lay still.
To my great surprise, we seemed to have won.
Chapter Six
In Which Everyone Lies a Lot
I shivered. The air had grown bitter cold, frigid as the plain of ice at the top of the world. My damp clothes had turned stiff and cracked when I moved.
Sam swayed on his feet, half-faint from shock and blood loss. Now I was the one lending a supportive hand.
“Is everyone all right?” the blur asked, flickering back and forth like a child who couldn’t keep still, its words as rapid as its movements.
“Take your leg off, Harry,” Bloody Knee said, limping up to join the rest of the group. “We can hardly see you. Where’s Kit got to?”
“Here.” Another masked man in green stepped from the trees.
“Good work with the wind there.” Bloody Knee’s Ecossic accent was lighter than the others’, with the faintest hint of a Tailliziani lilt. I wondered if he’d been in the country longer. “Max, put your hat on before we die of a chill.”
“Oh, right,” said another of them. “Sorry.” He pulled out a bycoket hat, pointed in the front like a bird’s beak, and jammed it down slantwise on one side of his head until it covered his left ear. The air temperature immediately began to rise, the aching cold warming to a normal autumn chill.
The blur, in the meantime, shifted a bit and resolved into yet another man in green, one leg detached from his body and clutched in his hands.
