She dodges, but she’s not fast enough to avoid his fist as he punches her square across the cheek. Bone shatters, and she falls hard to the ground, vision going black. She tries to move, but the man is on top of her, his knees pinning her elbows. The pain that sparks through her tells her he’s broken one of them. Rough fingers close around her neck. If a witch can’t speak, she can’t cast, not that it matters in her case. He’s savoring this, and it sickens her that she couldn’t hold her own against some second-rate knife for hire. All those assassination attempts and not a single time did she save herself. The image of her father’s face as he lay dying comes unbidden. The laughter lines around his eyes creased in pain, the blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth that she wiped away with a sleeve. His familiar’s too-still body beside him. She was useless then, and she’s useless now.
The panic she feels is beginning to abandon her.It’s okay, she tells herself. It’s easier this way. Her mother and Jessa don’t have to watch. She doesn’t have to humiliate herself in front of a crowd. Better to die now than in a Stars-forsaken duel.
But her heartbeat is a battle drum.Fight, fight, fightit sings to her. And she’s trying to fight—it’s just that her body has no fight left to give. She wishes she’d had a bit longer to help her queendom before she died. To stop the Blight ravaging it. Tears roll down her cheeks as she finally thinks of him. Her soul-bonded familiar. That he isn’t with her in their final moments. That he’ll die alone, no one but Astrid ever knowing he existed.
The assassin tightens his grip.
And chokes the air out of Astrid.
A voice carries through the trees, the ethereal song a balm to Astrid’s pain, and the man’s fingers loosen as he starts to sway above her. She can breathe again and every gulp is torture. Bliss.
An inhuman scream rends the air. The man is no longer on top of her. Her arms and hands are tingling, the feeling coming back to them as blood rushes in. The screaming becomes a sickening, wet gargle and she wonders for a moment if it’s her. But, no. It’s the assassin.
The man’s cries cease and there’s an odd lapping sound, like an animal supping from a pool of water. Astrid slowly lifts her head toward the noise.
A giant white fox—larger than a mountain lion—is gorging on the man’s body.
The fox turns his massive head, looking over a powerful shoulder. Red, bright as a berry, stains his salivating maw.
Astrid breathes a sigh of relief. A very painful sigh of relief.
“Thank the Stars.” She clutches her neck. “You—” She coughs. It hurts too much to speak.You could have come before he destroyed my larynx, she wants to say. But it would be ungrateful. She’s alive, after all.
“I’d say it serves you right for sneaking out and ditching your pendant.” Her personal guard, Jessa, strides into the forest clearing, looking murderous, the handle of her golden whip in one hand, its tail snaking around her hips, the pendant that allows her to track Astrid in her other hand.
“Well, that explains the music,” Astrid rasps. Jessa’s Witch Gift is her song—her power able to lull anyone to sleep. Astrid shakes off the grogginess. The magic hadn’t been directed at her, so she wasn’t hit with the full force of it, but she still feels like she could sleep for a week. Or maybe that’s because she was strangled.
“Gods, you’re a mess.” A look of concern breaks through the anger in Jessa’s spring-green eyes. She bends down and grasps Astrid beneath the shoulders, heaving her up. Astrid gasps, wobbling on her ankle. Her broken arm is at an odd angle.
“I’m sorry.” Astrid winces.
Jessa quirks a brow. “Are you?”
“Of course I am. I just”—she sighs—“I needed this. Needed one last night in these woods before… well, you know.” Jessa’s expressionsoftens, and Astrid can’t bear the pitying look she’s giving her. “Your timing is impeccable, by the way. Was that to teach me a lesson?”
Jessa snorts. “Hardly. We came as soon as Quince picked up the guy’s scent.” She nods to her fox. This is why having a familiar like Quincy would be so useful. Not only because of all those sharp teeth but because he’s a tracker, his senses amplified by his Gift. He can hear the flapping of a tern’s wings from half a mile away. “Never seen the beast move so fast. I started singing and then Quincy finished him off.”
Quincy’s voice is gruff as he says, HE TASTES AS BAD AS HE SMELLS.
“Then why did you eat— Actually, never mind,” Astrid says, fighting the nausea as she notices the man’s intestines strewn across the ground.
“You know Quince. Always hungry,” Jessa says.
Astrid tentatively strokes her neck. “How bad is it?”
“Not as bad as your face.” Jessa cups her cheek and a warmth spreads through her as Jessa mutters, “Helbre,” a healing spell that Astrid hasn’t quite mastered—not that she needs to when she can brew the most powerful healing solution in Arturea. Next Jessa heals her arm, ankle, and finally her neck, the evidence that someone tried to kill her now only a few yellow bruises.
“Did you even try to cast?” Jessa asks.
“Of course I did.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Not a whisper.” Astrid just can’t get past this block on her power. It’s as if when her dad died, her ability to battle cast died with him. General spell work—or craft casting as they called it—no problem, even if she isn’t the most powerful witch. But ask her to cast any offensive or defensive spell, it’s like someone’s turned off the faucet and stopped all the magic flowing.
“Why didn’t you use your vials?” Jessa picks up Astrid’s cloak and fixes it around her shoulders.
“They’re at the bottom of my pack, which is somewhere in those bushes.”
