At the top of the first flight, the hunter cursed. An archway had collapsed, blocking the corridor beyond with stone rubble. Dust billowed around the debris, still settling from its fall.
“Any chance we can crawl over it?” I asked. “Or find a way through?”
“There’s no time. We’ll have to go farther up.”
The toad squirmed and wriggled in my grip. I clutched it closer as I followed the hunter up the increasingly precarious stairway. I took her word for it that there was another exit. I hadn’t paid much attention to details when I’d been unceremoniously tossed into the dungeon, half off my head with fever.
A set of five steps in a row had broken off. We’d climbed over their shattered fragments a floor below. Here, there were only stubs stubbornly clinging to the side of the stairwell. We pressed against the wall and picked our way across sideways, careful of our footing on the narrow surface. I slipped halfway through. I would have fallen if the hunter hadn’t grabbed my shoulder and shoved me against the wall.
The disquieting noises from outside were growing louder. The toad was thrashing spasmodically, doing its level best to escape my grasp. I don’t know why it was so bent on committing toad suicide on the rocks below.
Once we’d cleared the broken stairs, we went around another turn and stepped through an arch into the morning sunlight. And also, as it turned out, straight into a war.
We had emerged at the top of the castle wall. Across the bay, monsters were arrayed along the seashore.
Hundreds of them.
Many were indistinguishable because of the distance, although I could make out the distinctive scuttle of the eight-legged spider wolves. Others were hard to miss, like the misshapen giants made of stone and the huge worm whose maw was an abyss filled with curving teeth. There were six-winged bats walking on wrinkled elephant legs. Oversized leopard-like animals with thorns poking out of their flesh. A roiling, wriggling mass I thought might be a pack of the poisonous furred snakes.
The toad fought its way free of my suddenly nerveless fingers. It plopped to the ground and hopped away as rapidly as possible.
On the mainland, the walls of the gatehouse had been smashed to pieces. Their stones lay scattered across the beach, the great doors torn from their hinges and cast aside. The only reason the horde hadn’t swarmed across the bridge was that the bridge was half-demolished. The broad, graceful arches extended from the castle out to empty air. Beyond, only a few pilings remained, lapped by the surging waters of the bay. It crossed my mind that the castle’s defenders might have shattered it themselves as a delaying tactic.
The monstrous army, however, had hardly been thwarted. Shrieking beasts flew overhead, diving and attacking with their talons and fangs. A soldier on the wall flailed in the claws of a massive half bird, half weasel. It lifted him a dozen feet into the air before an arrow took the creature in the eye and sent them both crashing down. The larger monsters across the water were hurling whatever they could find—rocks on the shore, masonry from the gatehouse, uprooted trees. The tower I’d been imprisoned in, the one nearest to the castle gates, had been hit more than once. The roof was partly staved in by a pine tree, and the whole upper structure tilted at an alarming angle.
I looked into the courtyard, expecting death and devastation in the packed grounds, bodies crushed under boulders or torn to pieces by flying horrors. To my surprise, little of the damage appeared to have reached the masses below. Soldiers were ushering the villagers out of the unroofed area and into the castle buildings.
The reason for the courtyard’s relative safety became evident when a thrown boulder seemed to hover in midair before being blown back against the stone giant that had hurled it. It slammed into the monster’s granite shoulder, sending sharp fragments of rock flying from both. Not far from us, a masked hunter raced back and forth along the wall. She held one nostril shut and blew through the other whenever she saw somethinghurtling her way. On a different part of the wall, a hunter with a bow led a cohort of archers. They turned any winged foes into pincushions if they ventured too near.
But even with Kit and Clem doing everything they could—and with the other hunters surely using their tricks to defend the castle as well—the wall underfoot shuddered as a missile flew under Kit’s guard. In the very next moment, a hapless archer was snatched off the walkway by a dark cloud of tentacles and feathers. It shot straight up in the air, and then blood splashed the ramparts as it wrung the archer’s body like a dishrag.
It was only a matter of time before the defenders were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Or until the enemy found another way to get over the wall. Across the bay, some enormous rodent, four times my height if not more, slipped into the water and began paddling across. It made it halfway to the castle before Clem was able to redirect the archers and a shower of arrows thudded into its back. Howling in agony, the creature turned back and swam for shore.
I peered at its retreating shape. “That’s a hamster,” I said.
“Are they yours?” the hunter beside me asked once again. “Did you summon them here?”
Definitely Jack. Of course it was Jack. I swung around to face her. “No, they’re not mine! They nearly dropped the tower on my head.”
“They might be trying to rescue you,” she said, not sounding convinced of it herself. “Kill the king and get you out in one fell—”
“Jack,” I cut her off, shaking my head in disbelief. “Think about what you’ve seen me do. If I wanted Gervase dead, I’d have drowned him. And you right along with him.”
“You…” Her voice trailed off. She looked thunderstruck. Had that really never occurred to her? To any of them?
My magic had turned them into birds to protect them. If I hadn’t cared, they’d have sunk into my vast depths along with the stone giants, until the air bubbled up from their lungs.
“So you don’t control them,” Jack said. “You can’t call them off.” She slumped, deflated, her sword dangling limply at her side.
She’d been hoping I was the one behind it, I realized. I’m not sure she ever truly believed it was me, in her heart. But as long as the possibility existed, there’d been someone tangible, present, she could accuse. Now, once again, there was no one. Nothing but month after month of incomprehensible attacks. They’d taken their toll.
“Jack, listen—” I began. But then something with a segmented body and too many membranous wings grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me off the wall.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ice Capade
I shrieked. The creature shook me like a dog killing a squirrel as it swerved left and right to evade the arrows zipping past. I tried to think up some means of escape, but all I managed to do was thrash in its grip. I couldn’t form a single coherent thought.
