I wouldn’t bargain their lives.
I kept three feet between us and my hand on my sword and my mind on the queen’s voice.
Tonight, I will raise three mortals.
The first monster found us in the second tunnel, and it was not a Skein but something else entirely, its back armored in ridged plates that caught the torchlight like wet stone.
“Rockshell.” Fear did not look at me, his eyes tracking the creature’s movement. “Aim for the throat. The joints where each leg connects to the underbody. That’s where it’s soft.”
We fought without speaking, which suited me. Fear moved with his unhurried precision. I was awkward and weak, comparatively, but powered by anger.
At any rate, the Rockshell went down, and we kept moving.
And then we were at a branch of a tunnel.
Something pressed at the edges of my perception, with the animal awareness of movement just outside the light’s reach. There and then gone. The skittering of too many legs against stone. Up high. Not on the ground.
It dropped from the ceiling in the time it took me to register where the sound was coming from. Dark, fast, huge. Its fangs dripped venom.
“What’s the lesson here?” I demanded, because there was no pretending that he was not tutoring me at every turn.
“Don’t let the Spiderwolf close. Strike for the eyes.” He moved in front of me, taking the lead. “And watch my back. They like to work in packs.”
“Packs?” I demanded, and then I cringed, my body reacting before my mind caught up to something above me in the dark, even before a drop of something liquid landed on my cheek. I let out a cry as the eyes opened, a dozen gleaming eyes just above me, and I lashed out at it with my sword.
For a few moments there was nothing that mattered for me but surviving. Then we were surrounded by what was left ofthe things, and there was nothing else moving in the dark but the last one that Fear was fighting. I scrubbed my face with my sleeve.
“Talk to me.” Fear’s voice, from my left, between one slash and the next. Unhurried. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re fighting for our lives.”
“Cara.”
“Not now.”
His gaze found me in the flickering light with its usual thoroughness, trying to read what I had decided not to show him. “I won’t let any monster touch you.”
The sound that came out of me was short and sharp and not quite a laugh.
I won’t let any monster touch you.
I’d let a monster touch me. I had wanted his hands on me.
The Spiderwolf collapsed as he pulled his blade free. Its enormous body blocked the branch to our right.
Fear shrugged and went left; what did it matter which way we went now?
But I felt it matter. “Fear. We’re being herded.”
He glanced at me, then away to the tunnel. “You’re right.”
He stared around us, that relentless, brilliant mind grinding away at the problem.
“We’re in a blind spot in the magic. That mirror—” He nodded at the surface at the tunnel’s end, flat and dark. “It’s gone dead.”
“A trap.”
“A trap,” he confirmed as he moved closer. Not to me so much as around me, the instinct of a man who puts himself between threats and those he’s decided to protect. His shoulder near mine. The warmth of him in the cold of the cavern. “The queen doesn’t want anyone to see what happens here.”
