Chapter III.21
Chapter Twenty-One
Two Days Before the Wedding, Continued
Miria felt the thing before she saw it. A cold, slimy kind of power slithered over her, reminding her of congealed fat at the bottom of a dirty cookpot.
Foul magic. Magic like she’d never experienced before.
Yet beneath that terrible layer was something familiar, the building blocks of a spell Miria recognized even if she couldn’t place it.
The mechanism for the spell was not unknown to her, even if the source of its power felt wholly wrong.
Whatever it was, it was aiming straight for her.
For the cottage. All of Miria’s wards, the concealment spells—they were meant to keep out unwanted people or dangerous animals or violent weather.
A magical attack had never been something she’d considered, nor had Yali before her.
There had never been a need to protect the cottage from another witch.
“Do you smell that?” Adaline asked, and it was Miria’s first clue that some of the foulness she was experiencing wasn’t magical in nature at all. Whatever was coming was fueled by magic, but it was no ethereal spell.
Then the creature burst through the trees, and fear and shock wrapped icy fingers around Miria’s heart. Adaline screamed out in language that certainly no lady was supposed to use, but Miria could not find words. There were no words for this thing, except perhaps one—abomination.
That was why Adaline could smell its rot and Miria recognized the spells beneath the twisted magic. Someone had created a construct. But unlike Tuli with his clay body and loving heart made of a cherished ribbon, whoever had done this had set out to create a nightmare and powered it with hate.
It wasn’t large. It stood no taller than Miria herself, but somehow that made it all the more horrifying. Size, Miria understood. An imposing presence was naturally something that could be fearsome. But the fear and disgust this construct engendered were nothing natural.
It wore the head of a boar over the decaying torso of what might have once been a brown bear.
Its left eye was missing, and its mouth was pulled wide to display a set of mismatched teeth.
One leg was gray fur. Another brown. A third had no fur left at all, just flesh peeling off bleached-white bone.
Flies hovered about it, and squirming patches in its filthy fur suggested colonies of maggots had made it their homes.
It stood on its haunches, more humanoid than animal, a creature of a dozen or more corpses. Hooves and claws. Bones and rotting flesh held together by unseen bonds and rage. It let out a howl of triumph and focused its single eye in Miria’s direction.
Vomit rose up Miria’s throat. But fear and revulsion, probably shock, had left her too stunned to move.
For a moment, her world narrowed to nothing more than herself and the abomination.
She forgot Adaline. Forgot Tuli. Forgot why this thing might be here in the first place.
There was only it and the certainty of death.
But Tuli, either sensing the evil that swarmed around the construct like the cloud of flies or Miria’s reaction to it, didn’t hesitate, and Miria’s world expanded once more.
Her golem picked up a large, fallen tree branch and charged forward, a clay knight to the rescue.
Miria marveled for a second before remembering that this was literally one of the tasks she’d created him for.
One of the first commands she’d given him after obeying her was to protect her, her nana, and the cottage.
The marvel was merely that Tuli didn’t need a reminder after so many years of never being called upon to do so, nor did he need explicit instructions.
Miria felt a surge of pride, less so for her magical skills and more so for Tuli himself.
If Yali were here, Miria knew her nana would tell her she was ridiculous, that a golem was nothing more than an extension of her power.
But Miria had considered Tuli (and Aza) family for as long as she’d known them.
What her adult mind knew couldn’t override what her child’s heart felt.
And in that heart, she recalled her power and her reason for fighting.
Tuli swung at the construct and landed a solid hit on its side. Bones cracked and flesh splattered, splinters and viscera falling to the dirt. But though the creature stuttered, it did not fall. It fought back. One claw-like appendage reached out, swiping at Tuli, who batted it away.
Seeing the construct attack Tuli roused Miria the rest of the way out of her stupor. Whatever magic powered that thing was clearly strong, possibly as strong or stronger than her own. She needed to act, not gawk. That meant she needed supplies.
In her years studying under Yali, Miria had cast many kinds of spells, but never ones meant directly to harm.
She didn’t even know ones like that. But like a fallen tree branch could provide a handy seat for a woman or be turned into cudgel for a golem, so too could many normally harmless spells be used offensively.
She just had to think this through and choose wisely.
Her power was stronger than it had been, but she was far from her best self.
“Ada!” Miria threw open the cottage door, but she needn’t have worried. Adaline was right behind her. “Tuli should be able to hold that thing off,” Miria said, searching her supplies and hoping that was true, “but I’m going to give him some help.”
“So am I.” Adaline unsheathed the sword she’d insisted on bringing with her yesterday, her face determined.
“You should—” The words faded on Miria’s tongue. Telling Adaline to stay inside was pointless. “Have you ever fought something for real?”
Adaline flexed her hands and arms a couple of times. “Something like that? Never. Should be exciting!” Then she was out the door before Miria could question her word choice.
Miria took a deep breath. Two against one was better odds, but now her two favorite people in the world were locked in battle with powerful magic. She had to get out there and help them. All she needed was some nettle and twine.
There. Miria grabbed the piece of rope that she’d packed into her satchel earlier and charged for the cottage door, but she never made it.
All around her, the cottage was dissolving, swirling away like dirt in a stream.
First the door, then the walls, even the floor.
Miria reached out a hand, as though she could seize whatever magic was doing this, but nothing about this spell was recognizable in the way the horrible construct’s magic was.
That had been simple to understand—a spell twisted and turned vile.
This was something else altogether—an amalgam of spells, each a whisper in Miria’s mind.
Each too small to grasp on their own and untangle.
Miria cried out as she fell to her knees, a floor—a new, strange floor—forming beneath her. Frantically, she scrambled to her feet, searching for the person who had done this, but she appeared to be alone.
But where was she? Miria wracked her memory, trying to recapture the sense of magic as the spell had wrapped around her. It hadn’t felt like a transport spell, like the sort of thing she and the other witches used to traverse distances. And yet the cottage and her woods, they were gone.
She stood in a small, sparsely furnished room.
A single table took up the bulk of the space, its top polished from use but roughly made.
It had no chairs, but benches were on either side.
The hearth was simple and unadorned. A set of unpainted shelves filled with cooking implements sat to one side, and Miria ran her finger over a ladle, wondering why it seemed familiar.
Behind her, near the door sat a pair of well-used, heavy boots that had seen better days, and hanging above them … She inhaled sharply. A set of axes.
Now, she thought she understood. She remembered.
“So it’s not real,” she said, wanting to hear her own voice. “You took me nowhere except into my memories.”
Whoever was doing this to her was powerful, but perhaps not powerful enough to transport Miria against her will.
She took some confidence from that. Her fingers pressed into the gouged tabletop.
It felt solid beneath her skin, but that, too, was a memory.
If she focused, she could tell how distorted her former home was as the spell struggled to make sense of a child’s perspective merged with a twenty-year-old’s body.
Hunger. Cold. A hole in her heart as she snuggled inside scratchy wool blankets, pretending they were a grandmother’s loving arms, someone to hold her and love her. Somone who cared.
“You’re a useless girl. What have you done to help us today? Stop your crying and go fetch some water. Move faster.”
The memories surfaced again and again, ripples in a pond cascading out, each triggering a new one.
But they were less than water, easy to let slide between her fingers.
Miria acknowledged the pain, and it passed.
That girl had food now and warmth. That girl had found someone to snuggle against on a winter’s night.
She had people who cared. She did not have to be sad anymore. Sadness was not helpful.
Miria wrapped her fingers around her red charm. That girl had abandoned sadness for her anger, and her temper was rising. She was sick of this game.
“Show yourself, you coward,” Miria said. “Or are you incapable of it?”
Truly, she had no idea what was possible with a spell like this.
She was beginning to put together the pieces of how this one had been constructed, but she’d never attempted anything like it.
A little goading, however, felt good. It gave her a sense of control, and if it cost the person behind the spell power to call Miria’s bluff and show themselves, even better.
That could make it easier for Miria to break the spell.