Chapter 27 #2
She was too late. The clouds descended towards the street, then burst like overripe fruit, spilling a strange conglomeration of limbs, reins, and trailing hair, which eventually shaped itself into a herd of phantasmal horses.
They seemed made from snow and ice, and were imperfectly formed, their limbs bearing only the suggestion of hooves, their manes fading into cloud.
They looked like the carousel horses, hints of silver sparkling here and there—some even had thin poles jutting from their backs—and were of indeterminate size, ranging from overlarge to immensely large.
I had only a moment to take in the horror and beauty of them—because they were undeniably beautiful—before they flew towards the shop, dashing themselves against the windows.
I shrieked and fell backwards, off-balance from élise’s grip, landing with a thump that knocked the wind out of me. The horses exploded like the lip of a massive wave striking shore, flinging a cloud of snow into the air, and screams filled the street. The cats yowled and hissed.
I dragged myself to my feet, still struggling to find my breath. I gave a gasp of laughter, because the shop seemed intact—Havelock’s wards had held.
Or almost intact. One of the windows had shattered, the glass scattered across the floorboards in a fine dust, as if it had not merely broken, but disintegrated.
And upon the threshold, just inside the shop, were a handful of snowflakes and what looked revoltingly like a severed hoof, already beginning to melt.
One of the apprentices laughed, and several others applauded.
“Oh, hush,” Valérie said. Her hands were in her pockets again and her expression was full of mischief.
One of the other magicians called something to her in a teasing tone, and she turned to smile at him.
She came forward in a casual lope, stopping at the threshold and reaching a hand out to brush the empty air.
“Not yet,” she murmured. “Almost there. He didn’t think I’d come at him with magics from the Fourth Fathom—poor Havelock. He likes to be the only living magician to have ventured there.”
Her expression was one of barely contained ecstasy, and I understood: Valérie loved magic as much as Havelock did.
No doubt she could have thrown magic at the shop in a far more utilitarian fashion, without bothering to shape horses out of snow, but she could not resist making her enchantments beautiful.
Yet in Valérie, this ecstasy was paired with a hunger that was almost bestial.
Like her apprentices, there was a sense of absence about her, a hollowness behind her eyes, but in Valérie, this absence seemed filled with something dark, uncanny, and insatiable.
She removed a ring from her hand. The ring was lovely, a gold-and-emerald coil of vines and roses that had stretched from her first knuckle to her second.
“élise,” I said, pulling her to her feet, for she too had fallen over backwards when the horses charged. “Find Banshee and throw her out the back door. I’ll—”
I was about to say that I would open the cages and release the shelter cats, who would hopefully follow Banshee’s lead and flee through the back.
I didn’t know what Valérie was planning, but it didn’t matter—whatever it was, she was convinced she would succeed.
But I had barely reached the first cage before Valérie’s enchantment exploded through the remaining windows.
They were wild roses, shaped from ice and snow like the horses, and they clambered hungrily through the windows, spreading across the ceiling and burrowing into it with their thorns, unleashing a hail of plaster upon us.
I had opened the first cage, though its occupant, a grey tabby named Brume, only spat at me and crouched in the corner, but élise had been struck by a piece of plaster and had fallen against the counter.
I dashed to her side and helped her up, brushing her dust-covered hair from her face. But she didn’t even look at me.
“What is that?” she cried, staring through the broken windows.
The view was partially obstructed by the roses, which swayed gently in the winter wind, a wind that was now funneling through the shop, heedless of Havelock’s wards.
Did any of the wards remain? I had only a sliver of a second to wonder about it before I saw what élise did.
We lurched forward and gazed upon the window of darkness that had opened in the sky, through which a landscape of dark trees and forbidding mountains was dimly visible.
From this, Havelock emerged in his spectral form, trailing shadows like a nightmare, and landed—far too gracefully—upon the snow, whereupon he became himself again.
Screams erupted from among the crowd—which was, remarkably, still a crowd, though the more sensible half had fled—and a cry of “The Witch King!” followed by more screaming.
I wondered at that for a moment, given how few knew what Havelock looked like, before recognizing the absurdity of my confusion.
Havelock’s horrifying manner of making an entrance was introduction enough.
One of Valérie’s apprentices raised a heavily ringed hand and shouted an enchantment.
Something flew towards Havelock—a fierce wind, laced with fallen snow and shards of ice.
And yet it did not blast him backwards, as I would have expected; it passed through him, as if he were not wholly there.
Havelock’s mouth moved as he touched one of his earrings, and it was as if the apprentice’s human guise were wrenched from her like a cloak, revealing another monster of shadow and ember.
Havelock spoke another word, and the wind pummeled her, snuffing the embers and scattering the shadow like ash.
“They’re vulnerable when they’re like that,” I murmured.
Havelock did the same to the next apprentice, and then there were only three, in addition to Valérie—who had, bizarrely, turned away from the threat posed by her brother, and was staring down at a small, dark shape that had lunged at her leg.
“Your Majesty!” I shouted, but the cat paid me no heed.
His fur stood straight up, swelling him to twice his already intimidating size, so that he seemed closer to an actual panther than a house cat, and he lunged at Valérie again, hissing and snarling.
The woman fell back with a cry, and I saw that she was limping—His Majesty had clawed through her trousers below her knee, spilling her blood upon the snow.
He looked entirely unhinged, but I understood his motive: the shelter was his territory, and he would defend that territory from anyone foolish enough to threaten it, even if that person was one of the world’s most powerful magicians.
I hurled myself towards the door, desperate to grab hold of His Majesty before Valérie threw some dreadful enchantment at him, but élise had anticipated me.
She wrenched me back and pinned me against the window frame, yelling something.
One of Valérie’s apprentices seemed to have been inspired by her, and he unleashed a spell that ensnared Havelock in a towering thornbush of ice.
But Havelock only touched another one of his earrings in an almost absent gesture, and the man was drawn up into the storm clouds, screaming.
The thornbush collapsed, and for a moment Havelock stood amongst a swirl of ice crystals, as if he were caught in an overturned snow globe.
He glanced about him and then spread his arms and flung them forward again, which caused the snow lying on either side of the street in banks and valleys to rise up in a wave, growing in size until it was clear that Havelock had summoned all the snow in the street, and possibly the neighbouring streets as well.
It didn’t move like snow, but like some sort of creature, humping its way along the cobblestones, a crevasse opening at its forefront like a gaping mouth.
This horizontal avalanche slammed itself into the remaining apprentices and swept them away, buried beneath its depths.
Havelock turned to Valérie. His face was pale and cold, and in his eyes I saw only the darkness of the Rivenwood, nothing of Havelock himself.
He reached towards the sky, and churning ribbons of cloud lowered themselves towards his hand, crackling with lightning that steamed and fizzed when it touched the falling snow.
But Valérie was no longer outside the shop—she was running. Her boots pounded against the sidewalk as she fled towards the square, and she seemed to be clutching something to her chest—a large, dark shape, wriggling wildly.
“Your Majesty!” I screamed. “Put him down!”
Naturally, Valérie paid me no heed, if she even heard me.
At first, I thought she was going to charge into the crowd, which had been distracted by Havelock’s weather magic, mouths agape in identical looks of horror.
Whatever Havelock had summoned would not be able to reach her without risking the bystanders.
That thought made me still. Would Havelock risk the bystanders’ lives to get at Valérie? He wasn’t himself. I wrestled with élise, who was still maintaining her grip, though I was unsure if it was His Majesty or Havelock I wanted to reach.
But Valérie didn’t plunge into the crowd.
She shouted another incantation, and a door appeared before her, a door attached to nothing at all.
It was as beautiful as any of her other enchantments, blackened mahogany with eight intricately carved panels—a story, I thought, given their arrangement, but it was there for only a heartbeat before Valérie pushed through it and vanished, the door folding itself up and trailing behind her, as if it had been turned to cloth she had tugged from a clothesline.
A man standing at the forefront of the crowd gave a gasp and fell backwards into another man, clearly thinking Valérie would run through the door and into him, but she—and the door—were already gone.
For a moment, I was too stunned to comprehend it. Surely it hadn’t been His Majesty in her arms—what would she want with him? But when I looked back on the memory, I could see nothing but a single detail: a long black tail curved around Valérie’s side, thrashing wildly.
“Your Majesty!” I shouted, finally wrenching free of élise and charging into the street. “Your Majesty!”
Nobody paid me any attention—everyone was focused on either the place where Valérie had vanished or where Havelock stood.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him summon his own door and vanish through it, to another chorus of screams, but I was beyond caring about Havelock, or any other magician for that matter.
“Your Majesty!” I cried again, blundering down the sidewalk, now clear of every scrap of snow, for it had all been bundled into the avalanche Havelock had summoned. And though I called and called, there was no response, until élise caught up with me, and I collapsed into her arms and wept.