Chapter Three #2
She tore at the thatch, breaking her nails, scratching her skin even with the help of the dagger at her belt. It was foolish enough to come alone, so she had tried to arm herself as best as she could. Despite the opinions of certain people in her life. And her grandmother’s sartorial advice.
Someone stirred below her and looked up, a large, green, otherworldly eye fixing on her. She pressed her finger to her lips. It blinked at her. Since there was no cry of alarm to give her away, she took it as a good sign. Still, best not to linger.
Magic tingled through the witch knot of her scraped hand. But as communication with birds and winged creatures was Sorcha’s natural magic, her current work did not affect it much. Just a reminder that nothing was free, not even magic.
But the extra spell to keep her balance on walls and rooftops, on the other hand, made her taste boiled turnips on the back of her tongue.
She hated boiled turnips.
Come out now, if you please. She sent the request to the wasps sleeping in the corner of the stables.
There were always wasp nests in abandoned stables.
I’ve brought you some lovely sweetwater, she added.
It seemed only fair. A little sugar in water or a spoonful of honey was a small price for their cooperation.
There was a yelp when the wasps agreed to Sorcha’s plan. A very strangled yelp.
The sound of scuffling, buzzing, another yelp.
And then the door burst open and the stable master, for lack of a better term, charged out of the stables.
He was a very large man, with no hair at all and muscles the size of ham hocks.
He was rather brutal looking. Or he might have been if there weren’t currently a swarm of wasps surrounding him like a black cloud.
They stung his head, his hands, his backside.
There was little more unnerving than a sudden, calculated swarm of wasps. It worked every time.
He kept running, shouting, eyes wide. He did not see her flattened on the roof, would not have thought to look up.
He batted at himself as blood stained his shirt.
Sorcha heard one of the wasps make a sound in her head that could only be described as a laugh.
She waited one more breath to make sure he would not run back in her direction, watching him tear into the darkness before she lowered herself down through the roof.
She landed in a pile of hay that smelled questionable.
It could have been so much worse. She had once landed in a river that belonged to a Shellycoat.
Shellycoats enjoyed eating berries, skipping stones, and murdering uninvited guests by ripping them apart with their horselike teeth.
Or by drowning. In varying orders. Sorcha had lost a boot, the hem of her dress, and the end of her braid.
But she had managed to climb back onto the shore, shouting obscenities all the while.
She hadn’t taken it personally. A Shellycoat was a Shellycoat and did what Shellycoats did by nature.
There was no use expecting them to act like a spoiled house pet who napped in the kitchen window.
But what the witches here did to the animals and magical beings they trapped was not natural.
And so Sorcha held a grudge. A violent one.
And she was not sorry about it, despite a great many lectures on the virtues of forgiveness from a great many vicars and governesses throughout her childhood.
This was the fourth Cauldron location she had found.
The first was inside a cellar and an experience she’d tried hard to forget; the second was held in another set of stables closer to the edge of the moors.
And this castle, where she had caught them once before.
She knew they were attempting to find a more permanent location, something they could hide or at least defend from the Order of the Iron Nail, who kept the laws between witches.
But Sorcha had no intention of letting that happen.
These stables were in reasonable condition, given the circumstances.
The rain gathered in murky puddles, and the smell of wet hay and sweat and bodily functions was thick.
Nearly as thick as the smell of despair and rage.
She had never known, before the fighting pits, that such emotions carried a scent, but they were palpable.
There was a barn swallow trapped as well, flitting around the ceiling.
She could hear it whimpering in the back of her head.
While the swallow ignored her, the others did not.
The otherworldly green eye belonged to a hippogriff.
It had an eagle’s head and wings, and the body of a horse.
The green eyes were mournful and there was blood in its fur.
In the far stall was a Pegasus with its wings pinned with rope and iron thorns.
There were three wolf shifters, bound by bewitched silver chains so they could not shift back into their human form.
The Collector was starting to favor wolves for his fighters.
“Right,” she said briskly, because the other options were weeping or screaming, and neither would do anyone any good. The rain would let up soon or the stable master would run into someone who would think to check on the captives when the wasps stopped swarming.
There was also a cage with three goblins who spat at her when she drew closer.
“None of that,” she snapped. “I’m trying to help.
” Boggart spit burned through clothing and sometimes skin.
Goblin saliva hardened like iron. Another glob landed near her boot.
“No, thank you,” she added sternly, with a glower.
The closest goblin blinked and then grinned at her. His teeth were as sharp as a shark’s. “Begging your pardon, my lady. These two are still three sheets to the wind. They plucked us out of the alley behind a tavern.”
She did not ask what they had been doing. Goblin activities were not for the faint of heart. “I promise to let you go as soon as the others are free.”
“Why not let us go now, lovely?”
“Because you are not the first goblin I have met.”
The goblin sighed, grumbling. “That’s fair.”
She already knew the ropes were not ordinary ropes and the chains were not ordinary chains. The burning of fennel seeds and salt seared the air, magic layered upon magic. These were simple, brutal spells, but effective.
There was a bear shifter in his human form, wearing the iron collar of the Order of the Iron Nail.
It had definitely been stolen—the Keepers were strict about their use.
He wilted, exhausted, but still bared his teeth when she approached.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Sorcha said. “I’m here to get you out.”
“No one gets out,” he said hoarsely. “You fight, you die.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Not tonight.”
He tilted his head at something he saw in her expression and nodded once. She might be too feral for Mayfair, but she was just feral enough for this. “I’m Fergus,” he said.
“Fergus, when the chains break, head for that hole in the roof.”
“You can’t break these chains. We’ve all tried.”
She lifted her chin. “Watch me.”
She had paid dearly for this spell. It had cost her a pile of coins, three strands of her hair, and the memory of her first kiss.
She had a hazy concept of a garden behind a ballroom but nothing else.
Not who, or even if it had been any good.
Was it with her friend Allegra? An earl’s son she fancied? A footman?
Her kiss with Aidan she remembered.
Vividly.
If this spell did not work, she would hunt down the Iron Crow who had sold it to her and shove her into the ocean. Preferably into a herd of kelpies, who enjoyed a watery murder as much as a Shellycoat.
The spell looked innocuous, easily carried, easily hidden.
It was a simple knotted cord, soaked in water gathered under lightning, buried for three days and three nights under a sword driven into the earth.
The real magic was in the flint knife taken from a cove off the Cornish coast that only the Iron Crows knew how to find. Sorcha used it to sever the cord.
A burst of light.
The smell of salt and fennel and lightning.
It was a bigger burst than she had expected.
The chains snapped. All at once. Including the lock to the goblin cage, which she had also not expected. And they were exactly as helpful as she would have expected.
That was, not at all.
They screeched with triumph, so loudly that the sound of the rain could not hope to muffle it. And then they raced up toward their escape, knocking over two lanterns as they went.
The straw caught fire almost immediately.
Smoke choked the stable. Sorcha found a bucket of water and splashed the flames.
It helped, but not enough. She’d had every plan to burn it down, but only after she had gotten everyone safely out.
Bloody goblins. The others would arrive any moment now, alerted by the smoke and the flickering light and the frantic, neighing screams of the Pegasus.
Sorcha rushed toward the water trough with the bucket. “Go up through the roof,” she told Fergus, giving the bear shifter a moment to catch his breath. It was all he could afford. He had a nasty wound dripping down his arm and burns everywhere else. “They’ll be at the door soon.”
“Come on,” he said gruffly to the hippogriff.
The hippogriff did not oblige. When he only curled tighter into himself, Fergus hauled him over his shoulders like a wandering sheep, some of the cuts on his arms opening under the strain.
He managed to climb the ladder with him, shoving through the hole to the freedom of the roof trusses. The wood creaked alarmingly.
Fergus dropped his head back through the opening. “Come on, lass.”
“Can’t. Not done yet. Jump down on the opposite side of the courtyard,” Sorcha called up, biting back a cough. “There’s a gap in the wall there. Follow the paper birds if you’ve nowhere to go.”
Fergus shook his head and disappeared.