For their master.A fae from below.
Their master was certain death.
Faun understood in the same moment I did.
“No.” Her hand flicked, and a branch from the nearby brush snaked across the cave’s floor and wrapped itself tight around one wolf’s leg. It yanked, and the creature’s leg rose from the ground before it realized it was caught.
Magic. That was earth magic, like Dorian’s.
The wolf landed on its side and was pulled with a growl toward the waterfall. Its claws scraped for purchase before it was flung through the water and disappeared from sight.
An arrow couldn’t touch it, but magic could.
A second branch snaked toward the other wolf. This one dodged with a leap backward, but it was buffeted by a gust of wind from deep in the cave. Beside Faun, her partner’s fingers were in motion.
The two fae were working in synchrony.
The branch caught the wolf’s leg, twined around it, and flung the wolf in the same direction as the first.
Faun’s eyes met mine. For the first time, I saw something new there—not pity, but a sharp, measured look. The way Isa the nurse had looked at me after I told her how I’d gotten a broken nose.
“Run.” Faun gestured deeper into the cave where the light did not reach.
She had only turned toward me a second before something long, slender, and pointed pierced the water and drove itself into her shoulder. She was thrown face-first against the cave’s wall and pinned there with a cry.
A spear. Impaled by a spear some twenty hands long. Its length shimmered with a strange iridescence, and it had flown so fast and straight it had pierced straight into rock. Now it remained horizontal above the ground, its point driven into the wall and the shaft emerging from Faun’s shoulder.
Beneath the waterfall’s surge, footsteps sounded. No—hoofbeats. Faun’s partner and I turned slowly, even as Faun herself let out a low, serrated wail.
A horse’s white head appeared, pushing past the brush along the narrow path. Its hooves echoed off the stone as it entered the cave. Legs thick around as trunks, hooves bigger than my head, withers so high up my eyes lifted and lifted.
Beside the creature stalked two white wolves. And atop it sat a woman with alabaster skin and no eyes.
The horse’s hooves clopped,each strike deliberate, echoing to the sound of Faun’s groans. The woman’s white hair hung in long waves from her crown to the ground, flowing over her naked body and merging with the horse’s tail. Full, pale lips, prominent cheekbones. She rode without a bridle or saddle, just one long-fingered hand wound into the horse’s thick mane.
Where her eyes should have been lay two burnt-out charcoal pits.
When the horse had fully entered the cave, she sat back. All fourcreatures of the Wild Hunt—horse, the two wolves, and the eyeless woman seated high above them—came to a stop.
She considered the three of us.
Faun, still moaning with her face to the rock and the spear sticking out of her bleeding shoulder.
Faun’s partner, who now stood on quavering legs.
And me, the human with one eye poisoned shut, who bled from her puffy face and shoulder and held her sword with an offhand grip.
The woman dismounted, bare feet slapping stone. Slap, slap, slap. She walked with the same slow certainty as the horse had. She crossed the cave to Faun, set both hands around the shaft of the spear, and yanked it free. Faun’s scream ripped the air and she crumpled to the ground, blood pouring from the hole in her shoulder.
Faun’s face turned up toward the spectral woman, agonized and furious.
The tendrils came first, snaking across the cave’s floor from the walls and brush—the first wave of Faun’s anger. But more followed.
Roots burst through the cracks in the stone. Vines from the thicket behind the falls pushed through the cave’s mouth, clawing for the spectral woman’s bare feet. The very earth seemed to answer Faun’s rage.
Power. So much power.
Faun’s face twisted, teeth bared in a silent snarl. She lifted one hand, trembling but defiant, as if she might tear the Wild Hunt itself from the world.
