42 No more arrows through body parts, please
Antal shoved Fi backward. She tripped over a charred beam, smacked into another, her elbow shouting at the impact. Her curses shouted louder.
A trap. They’d stumbled into it like two hares drawn to a carrot—only, she’d not expected an aedari to be the one leaving bait.
The immortal hit the clearing like a meteor. Her wings splayed energetic gold, searing Fi’s cheeks. Tattooed glyphs gilded her arms. A quiver of metal arrows hung at her back, not an accessory she’d worn before. How well-rounded.
Fi might as well have been a snow flea. The aedari’s glower fell on her sworn enemy, Antal kneeling in the snow, a golden arrow burning a hole through his chest. What a truly abominable combination of words. Fi would like to never think them again.
Antal tried to pull the arrow out. It halted when the aedari clenched her fist. The creature grabbed his arm and, no, there would be no more touching of Fi’s daeyari tonight. Thank you.
Fi pocketed the antler piece Antal had dropped to the snow. Heat ripped through her forearm as she Shaped her sword.
The aedari evaded Fi’s swing, like dandelion fluff on a Summer breeze. Energy wings beat the air. Fi dodged the molten plumes, a smell of burnt hair providing insult enough, the open-handed slap to her cheek turning her feral. An honest-to-Void slap. What kind of bitchy immortal fought like that?
Cheek hot and stinging, Fi charged again.
Glyphs snapped at the aedari’s fingers. A spark of gold through the air. Fi hit the ground like a boulder had slammed into her back.
The impact winded her. She gasped, air thick with ice and ash. Fi tried to push herself up, but couldn’t. She writhed on her stomach, clawed the snow, but couldn’t stand. Golden symbols glowed on the ground beneath her. No restraints, but every limb felt too heavy, too dense to lift.
The aedari stood between Fi and Antal, two fists clenched with glyphs, holding both adversaries against the ground.
Fi couldn’t tell if the immortal’s hands shook with strain, or with rage.
Before, the aedari had oozed conceited composure. Now, her dark hair slipped free of its bindings, silken strands messy against her neck. Her eyes burned gold, bright as direct sunlight. The heat off her wings made Fi wince.
“I hoped to catch someone out here,” the aedari said. “You’re not who I expected.”
Fi understood the words. Heat bloomed on her cheek, remnants of a slap—plus the translating glyphs the magician must have stuck on her.
The aedari’s feathered ears angled furiously low. “I thought that other daeyari would want his antler back.”
By Fi’s estimation, she currently—magically—weighed several hundred pounds. She still felt lead drop in her stomach. Antal paused his writhing against the arrow in his chest, lifting crimson eyes to his captor.
“I thought I saw it before,” the aedari said with a sneer. “You look like him. That coward fled from me once already. Now he sends children in his place?”
Antal’s eyes were wide as a child cradling a skinned knee—the confirmation that all they’d suspected of Avroz was true. Fi watched his heart shatter from a distance.
Her heart stirred like a battle chant, heavy in her chest. Avroz had never fought the aedari alongside them. He’d managed to be absent for every skirmish—no chance of being recognized.
That sack of conniving Void flesh.
He’d let two immortal parasites feast upon the humans of the Season-Locked Planes.
He’d thrown Antal into the fray like a fledgling bird shoved out of the nest.
Golden eyes snapped onto Fi. “And you.”
There was such a particular, spine-tingling way immortals said you. You tiny thing. You inconvenience. You stepping stone that had the gall not to fit into place.
“We offered to help you,” the aedari said, flashing long canines. “We offered salvation.”
“Fuck you,” Fi spat through her uncomfortably heavy tongue. Energy simmered through her muscles, shoving at the counter magic, but this wasn’t Shaping. The aedari’s glyphs held fast as nails through flesh.
“You choose to fight alongside beasts?” The aedari’s fist clenched, and Fi’s weight seemed to double, lungs straining for air. “You helped the daeyari ambush us.” A flare of golden wings, brighter than the sun. “Now he’s dead. Because of you!”
Now, that one was a different “you” entirely. Vicious. Vengeful. Through the agony of having her face crushed into the ground, Fi circled back to the familiar way the two aedari had spoken to each other, the subtle touches between them—
Oh… fuck.
This aedari wasn’t just livid. She was breaking, from the blinding edges of her feathers to the crack in her voice.
“We tracked that daeyari here,” the aedari seethed, a cruel and intentional taunt. “Found the antler he’d cut off, in this light-forsaken pit of the Shattered Planes. After you beasts caught our trail the first time, I thought he might return here. But you’ll do, instead.”
So the aedari had laid the antler in this trap recently? Did Avroz even know it was here?
Fi pushed against the magic holding her down, an effort like shoving concrete. On the aedari’s other side, Antal’s tail lashed snow, a smell of burnt ether as he tried to pull the arrow from his chest.
“He’s gone.” The aedari’s sunburst eyes raked back to Antal. “You killed him, you wretched beasts. You disgrace to immortality. I’ll carve out your bones and return them to the Void myself!”
Gold glowed at her knuckles. Fi heard the sizzle of flesh as the arrow through Antal’s chest burned brighter. His snarl started vicious, cracking into a whimper of pain as he hunched against the snow, tail coiled in agony.
Fi would kill this creature. She’d drive her sword through the heart of anyone who hurt her daeyari.
She supposed, then, she understood what the aedari must feel.
She understood the sharp twist in her belly, to even contemplate losing her partner.
She understood the heat of rage beneath her skin.
A terrible thing, to see one’s enemy as a creature capable of hurt—of love.
But Veshri himself had told her, not all aedari were the same. Not all of them need be her enemy.
In that moment, she hated Avroz all the more for what he’d done.
She hated that none of this had to happen this way.
“But first,” the aedari seethed at Antal, “tell me where your wretched home Plane is. I know we’re close. Give me something useful, beast, and I’ll consider killing you swifter.”
Fi’s knuckles tightened on her sword hilt. No one would touch him, so long as she had anything to say—not that she had much to say, pinned to the ground. The aedari loomed over her captives like the goddess she’d professed to be.
Her strain was so subtle, Fi almost missed it: the quivering fists. The way she planted her feet. When the aedari’s attention focused on Antal, the weight on Fi’s chest lightened.
Because it was hard, holding them both at once?
Could the aedari even strike at Antal, without letting Fi go?
He pushed to a kneel, pain-glazed eyes locking with Fi’s. Merciless Void, she loved knowing the same realization had clicked for both of them. She hated what it meant.
“You’re the one who ran, aedari,” Antal rasped. “You left your partner alone. We hung the corpse by its ankles, drained every precious drop and poured it out in shot glasses.”
A jolt went through the clearing.
Raging energy, blistering heat, both hit Fi in a wave radiating off golden wings. The aedari sucked in a hissing breath, all her ire levelled at the daeyari before her.
And why should she bother with Fi? Just a human. Just a pawn of her immortal rivals. A flick of the aedari’s wrist released Fi from the magic.
And that was her mistake—because she hadn’t seen half of what this human could do.
Fi surged to her feet. Energy scorched out of the daeyari capsule in her pocket, down her arm, the fastest blade she’d ever Shaped. A lighter current leached from the muscles of her left arm, gathered at her fingertips. Not much time. Seconds, maybe.
She watched the aedari grab an antler.
Then swiped a hand and pushed herself into the Void.
The shift from heat to cold struck her lungs with an urge to gasp. No air.
No time. Fi had one shot at a sneak attack, one chance to strike before the aedari learned this trick. She visualized the snow-covered clearing, the smell of old ash, the pattern of stone crumbling down the old hearth, Antal on his knees with an immortal reaching for him.
A roar filled Fi’s ears as she plummeted through the Void. A little easier each time.
She re-emerged on the Winter Plane mid-swing, bringing her sword down on the aedari’s elbow.
Of course she’d considered the neck. With how reinforced the last one had been, she didn’t trust herself to sever it, not with the aedari’s hand on Antal already.
Safer to remove the arm itself. Even that proved difficult, a momentary snag of her sword against energy, against immortal bone, an ache in her teeth as she pushed.
Then sliced through.
The aedari shrieked. Her wings came down like a superheated guillotine, but Fi shoved Antal clear, toppling together through the snow.
She could imagine his chastisement later.
The same thing you did to Verne, he’d say.
Too obsessed with dismembering hands, he’d say.
But hands were useful—especially for a magician, half her glyphs now lying on the ground.
Fi dug into her pocket. She grabbed the box Ixli had gifted her—a lifesaver. Metal claws slipped cool onto the fingers of her left hand, covering vulnerable flesh down to her knuckles. Better shielded, she grabbed the arrow in Antal’s chest.
“Like you mean it, daeyari!”
They yanked together. A smell of burnt flesh flooded her nose, the char of Antal’s palms, the seared skin of her fingers as energy sank through the metal claws. Fi screamed but didn’t waver. A sizzle. A shlunk.
The arrow slid free of his sternum.
Antal lunged for the aedari.
Still dripping black blood, the hole in his chest sparking as it healed, he sank his claws into the aedari’s flesh. Sank his teeth into her throat. Her cry came gurgled as she shoved the daeyari off her. Fi was ready in the opening, sword arcing for the aedari’s neck.
A pulse of glyph-sparked energy sent both Fi and Antal backward.
Antal snarled as he hit the ground. Fi hit something hard, rock or ice, leaving her dazed. She pushed through lightheadedness, unsteady as she regained her feet.
Several yards away, the aedari clutched her severed arm, golden blood dripping onto snow. Fi still didn’t know if immortals could regenerate limbs. Even if they could, that much healing would take time.
The aedari hissed, “A slow death, then!”
She pulled an arrow from the quiver at her back. Fi gave a cruel laugh. Not so dangerous with those arrows, if the aedari had no second hand to draw her bow.
This thought was followed a moment later by the realization… she didn’t have a bow?
The aedari dropped the arrow in front of her. A burst of glyphs on her fingers, and the projectile hovered midair. She pointed, and the arrow faced its target.
Well, that didn’t seem fair—
The aedari snapped her fingers. In a flash of gold, the arrow shot out.
It all happened so fast.
Antal swiped a hand in front of him, crimson energy solidifying into a shield. The arrow hit the barrier. A crack. The shatter of the energy shield slaked ozone across Fi’s tongue, static over skin, a flurry of snow as the arrow struck the ground.
The aedari was already lining up another.
It should have been enough time to teleport. But Antal hunched, red energy sparking at his chest, still attempting to heal.
The arrow flew.
Fi lunged.
There was a burst of heat in her mouth as she grabbed him, a stab of pressure as she pushed them both into the Void.
The cold was nice, sometimes.
The quiet was a reprieve, when everything was moving too fast. Fi, afloat in endless black, tried to be still a moment. To let her thoughts catch up.
She felt wrong.
This wasn’t the cold she was used to in the Void. Something burned in her head, that strange pressure against her skull. Everything, too slow now. She tried to think straight, fog blooming behind her eye.
It hurt.
Why did it hurt?
Antal floated at her side.
She’d pulled him into the Void with her, still had her hand clenched around his shirt. When she tried to look at him, that was wrong, too. Out of focus? She tried to blink. That hurt more.
He was staring at her.
Fi had never seen his eyes so wide, his face so ashen in the dim Void light. He reached for her, his hand shaking, his mouth forming the silent shape of her name.
Fi reached for her face as well.
And felt the arrow lodged in her skull.