Four
Calypso
I never got an answer.
“I’ll be the bait,” the pooka volunteered as he moved to the right. “This way, you big blob of lard!” He flashed an eye-catching spell toward that ogre that produced a cloud of sparkles.
The ogre grunted and lumbered forward, his torch bobbing with each step.
“Are we going for his knees or—” I turned to ask Azulin, but he wasn’t there. The blue flame continued to burn dimly above me, but I was alone within its glow.
“You’re so slow and bumbling a snail could outpace you, detestable monster.” The pooka set off another distraction spell, trotting closer to the ogre. The monster took a swipe at the pooka, missing when his quarry ran out of reach.
I peered into the darkness to the left as the pooka continued to taunt the monster. “Not even your mother could love such a disgusting face as yours.”
Dimly, I caught movement in the shadows and the faint illumination of Azulin’s sword as he circled behind the giant.
“I’m running out of room, lummox. You giant toad with feet like warty meatloaf.” The pooka darted closer to the wall, and the ogre’s massive fist came down inches away from the pooka’s hastily retreating boots.
Just as the ogre cornered the pooka, the monster paused and shook himself like a dog. Then, letting out a shout of pain, he dropped his torch. The flames flared briefly, shedding light on the ogre’s frantic attempts to detach Azulin from his back.
The pooka picked up the torch moments before it extinguished completely, scrambling back to make room for the staggering ogre.
Azulin clung to the ogre’s shoulders, one arm partially wrapped around the creature’s neck as he tried to gain purchase with his feet. The ogre roared in frustration and reached back to grab Azulin’s arm, but a moment too late.
Azulin swung out of reach, twisted midair, and landed on the ogre’s shoulder. Then in one smooth jab, he stabbed the creature through the back of its neck.
The ogre let out a squeal of confusion and pain before its bloodshot eyes unfocused.
Azulin yanked his weapon free, leaping away as the giant fell. The ground shook, and suddenly, the stench of rotting meat and spoiled milk increased tenfold.
“Ogre blood is the worst.” The pooka gagged behind his makeshift mask.
I breathed through my mouth, hoping to suppress the odoriferous fumes, but to no avail. My stomach recoiled.
“No way to avoid it,” Azulin pointed out with a grimace as he cleaned his sword with a cloth. When he was done, he incinerated the blood-stained fabric in a puff of flame and smoke. “We should move on before the scent attaches to our clothing and ruins any chance at stealth.” He eyed the pooka’s stolen torch. “Are you keeping that?”
“Of course.” The pooka grinned. “Who knows when I might need some extra light. I don’t have a handy spell like yours to help me.”
“Just keep it away from her and anything of value that might be flammable.”
My stomach still threatened to rebel. Pulling in slow deep breaths through my mouth, I tried to calm it.
Azulin regarded me, concern narrowing his gaze. “Are you well?”
“Obviously she isn’t.” The pooka swung the torch closer to me so that the heat bathed my face, intensifying the nausea. “Humans aren’t supposed to be that shade of green.”
Azulin fumbled with his spell and moments later, he thrust a small, corked bottle under my nose. “Drink it.”
“What—” I clamped my mouth shut lest something happen.
Azulin caught my hand—I ignored the zing of magic—opened the bottle and pressed it into my palm. Leaning over me, he crowded out the pooka and risked getting singed by the torch. “Drink it. It will help.”
Despite my fear that it would only come heaving back up, I swallowed the contents of the bottle in one gulp. An aggressive punch of honey and mint hit the back of my throat and filled my nose, eradicating the stench. In a matter of moments, my stomach calmed and settled.
“What was that?” I asked, offering him the empty bottle.
“An elven draught for stomach illnesses that an acquaintance gave me awhile back.” He studied me. “Are you feeling better?”
I nodded as the pooka circled us.
“Do you have another of those?” he asked. “My stomach is feeling a mite sensitive.”
“No.” Azulin glared at him and turned away to sheath his weapon. “Time to move.”
I gathered up the cloak dragging at my feet and rushed to follow him as Azulin walked around the dead ogre and strode off into the darkness. The light continued to bob along above my head instead of his, which was strange. The pooka—with the ogre’s torch flaming above his head—brought up the rear of our trio.
The path ahead only extended for a short distance before we came upon a three-way intersection.
The pooka lifted his torch higher, but nothing appeared beyond more of the same kind of passageway in all three directions. “This wasn’t here when I was running from the ogre.”
“How can you tell?” I asked. “All of these corridors appear exactly the same.”
“Not all exactly,” Azulin contradicted me. “The one to the right has a breeze coming from it. The one to the left smells of sulfur, and the floor of the one straight ahead is moving, ever so slightly. I suspect an illusion.”
“I didn’t come through any of them,” the pooka declared.
None of them sounded appealing to me. “This maze doesn’t play fair.”
“The Unseelie king isn’t known for his fairness,” the pooka commented. “Neither, by the way, is the Seelie king.” He shot Azulin a side-eyed glance. “Any insight into which way we should go, fae lord?”
But Azulin didn’t respond. His gaze, dark and intense, fixed on me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I understand the purpose of the mimick, the ogre, and even the pooka, perhaps—actually, no. The pooka makes no sense.”
“I am not speaking gibberish,” the pooka protested.
Azulin’s brows lowered, and he continued to study my features as he wrestled through something. “But if you…if you are the key, the pooka makes sense.”
“What are you talking about?” the pooka demanded.
“My curse.” Azulin turned abruptly and glared at the pooka, who jumped back at the sudden intensity in Azulin’s gaze. “Out with it, pooka. You’ve been hinting around it. You might as well come out and say it. Who do you think I am?”
“You are the Seelie king.” The pooka didn’t appear pleased. “My apologies for outing you, Your Majesty.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Azulin turned to eye me expectantly.
“If you are expecting me to fill in the rest of the pieces, you’re going to be waiting a long time.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m just along for the ride.”
“Every time the curse has forced constraints upon me before, I was always provided with an opportunity to break it. The provision was built into the curse. When I was forced to ride in the Wild Hunt, mortals were available for capturing. And now here you are, served on a platter for my use.”
“I am not here for your consumption,” I informed him.
The pooka snorted his amusement, but Azulin’s attention didn’t shift from studying my features.
“But what am I supposed to do with you?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Don’t look to me for answers. You know more than I do.”
Azulin groaned.
“How about we address the more pressing problem?” The pooka thrust his torch toward the crossroads we faced. “I propose we choose before the labyrinth starts rumbling again and forces us to choose. Which direction, Your Majesty?”
“By the sulfur smell, I would suspect a crazed dragon shifter stalks in that direction. And any creature capable of illusion beyond a mimick would be more than I wish to handle at this point.”
“Agreed.” The pooka swung the torch around to illuminate the passage to the right. “Care to wager on what we shall find?” he asked me.
“No.”
As the pooka took the lead, Azulin came alongside me. He claimed my hand as though he owned it. Magic flared between us and wound up my arm, sending tingles to my elbow when he laced his long fingers through mine. “Stay close,” he cautioned in a lowered voice.
I nodded. “So, how can I be connected to your curse?”
“I’m not sure.” He frowned at our joined hands. “I just have an intuition you were chosen to be part of this labyrinth. I wasn’t present when the curse was cast, and all Ghost was able to discover was that a mortal woman would be the key to my freedom.”
“Ghost?” The air turned humid and the soft sound of water lapping filled the tunnel.
“My enforcer,” Azulin replied as though this cleared up every aspect of his relationship with the mysterious Ghost. “Do you feel something when we touch?”
I frowned up at him as he loomed over me. “The tingle?”
He lifted our joined hands. My sleeve—which must’ve been ripped at some point—fell back, revealing my forearm to the light of the flame above my head.
Azulin uttered a sharp exclamation. Our skin contrasted harshly—mine warm and sun-browned, his cool and pale—but woven over both our forearms was a pattern of golden leaves. The vine curled up my arm to reach just above my elbow, but his vine only reached about halfway up his forearm. As we stared at it, the golden vines appeared to breathe and ripple as though alive.
“What is it?” I asked, trying not to panic. The strange tattoo-like marking didn’t hurt, but it did tingle and warm my skin.
“You are the key,” Azulin confirmed, his voice lowering to a rumble that buzzed in my bones.
For a moment, I couldn’t catch my breath.
Suddenly the pooka yelled from somewhere ahead. “I found the turn. Hopefully, everyone knows how to swim?”
∞∞∞
Azulin
She was my way out. The mating vine on our arms declared it in no uncertain terms. We were magically compatible, and our joint magic would free both of us from this maze of a prison. I just had to figure out how.
Even in the brief time we’d had held hands, my magic had stabilized. It no longer hid from me. And when I reached for it, my magic responded readily—eagerly, even, as though no curse bound me at all.
However, the curse yet pressed on me. It hemmed me in, threatening to barge in and disrupt my connection to my magic the moment I let go of Calypso.
“Did you two hear me?” The pooka’s voice came from farther ahead. The sounds of splashing accompanied it. “This way ends in water. If one of you can’t swim, I suggest we head back to the last intersection.”
As though on cue, the rumbling of the maze vibrated through the floor beneath our feet. Gripping Calypso’s hand more tightly, I turned us to face where we had come. As I suspected, the passage walls were moving, closing us in again.
“Run,” I instructed, turning toward the pooka’s voice and the watery passage he had found.
For the first few moments, Calypso kept up, but then she stumbled and her fingers slipped from mine. I skidded to a halt and reversed direction.
“My apologies,” I muttered before I scooped her up, hauling her over my shoulder. The cloak fell off her shoulders as she braced herself against my back, just missing tangling in my feet. I ran for our lives toward the end of the passage, leaving the cloak behind.
“Watch out!” I yelled moments before we reached the corner and slid around it as the wall snapped shut behind us. My boots skidded on the water-slick stone, and I barely managed to swing us around. Dropping Calypso’s body against my chest, I cushioned her with my body as best I could when my back hit the far wall hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs.
Abruptly the rumbling ceased, and the walls stilled.
Calypso sagged against me, resting her forehead against my chest. My heart’s violent pace stuttered strangely for a moment. I tightened my hold on the small human briefly before dropping my arms from around her.
“You certainly know how to make an entrance,” the pooka declared as he waded through the calf-high water to join us. “Do you delight in skin-of-the-teeth entrances?”
“No.” I glared at him before straightening and surveying our new environment.
“How deep does the water go?” Calypso asked as she stepped away from me cautiously. Her kirtle skirt dragged in the water, pulling the garment down to hug her hips. More curls had escaped her rapidly deteriorating braid. The escapees danced endearingly around her face, teasing the curve of her cheek and resting against the upper arch of her eyebrow. I forced myself to look away from the sight and focus on the task at hand.
Black water lay before us, rippling with the remnant vibrations caused by the rumbling tunnel’s movements.
“There’s a wall to the left.” The pooka lifted his torch. The light barely brushed the surfaces of a wall perhaps twenty feet or so away. “But I can’t see anything ahead of us. I wandered in that direction, and the depth seems to remain the same for at least a bit.” He eyed the water suspiciously. “I am not too pleased with our inability to see beneath the surface. There’s no way to tell if there’s anything in the water before we step on it.”
My thoughts went instantly to Calypso’s bare feet. Both the pooka’s and my boots would protect us, but Calypso—
“There appears to be an edge here.” My attention snapped around to spot the human. She’d moved faster than I had expected. Calypso wandered farther out into the center of the tunnel, apparently feeling something beneath the surface of the water with her foot.
“Ca—” I swallowed the rest of her name. “Callie, you need to come back. It isn’t safe.”
She turned and wrinkled her nose at me. “Only my sister’s family calls me that.”
“Fine, I will call you something else. Just come back this way.” I started to move toward her when something brushed past my boot, making my heart rate jump.
“Did you feel that?” the pooka asked.
Calypso’s scream cut him off as she jumped backward. “Something bit me!”
I started a spell, reaching for my sword as I plowed through the black water toward her. The pooka lunged forward, his borrowed sword out and the torch raised above his head as he peered into the water.
“Move back from the edge,” I ordered Calypso.
She complied, limping. “I don’t know what it could’ve been. Maybe I stepped on something.”
“Or there’s something in the water we can’t see.” The pooka waved his torch over the surface. A flurry of movement beneath the water caused a profusion of ripples. “Definitely something in the water.”
“She needs to have her feet out of the water,” I declared.
“I can transform into a horse and carry her on my back,” the pooka suggested.
I spared an assessing glance his way. His worried expression did appear genuine.
“Very well.”
“I’ll have to drop my torch, though.”
Calypso suppressed a squeak and edged closer to me. “Something keeps brushing my ankles,” she whispered. “My foot is burning.”
“Transform,” I ordered the pooka. “If your torch goes out, I will relight it.” One instant the pooka was a man and the next a horse stood in the water beside us. The magic was instantaneous and impressively precise now that I was observing it up close.
Not waiting for permission, I swung Calypso up onto the pooka’s back. She hooked her left leg over and settled into an astride position, putting her injured foot in easy view. One glimpse was enough to verify she had been bitten, and whatever had bitten her was probably venomous.
I reached out and caught her rapidly swelling ankle. She cried out softly with pain and instinctively tried to pull it free, but I held on.
“Hush now. I can help.” The slender foot that I had glimpsed merely hours ago had turned black and blue around the two puncture wounds caused by a viper’s fangs.
“Can you heal it?” she asked as she leaned over the pooka’s neck.
“Not until I know which kind of viper bit you. However, I can slow the poison’s progress until I can do more.” Reaching into the folded space of the elven storage spell with surprising ease, I pulled forth a roll of enchanted bandage. I always carried it with me these days after spraining my ankle during my first ride with the Wild Hunt.
“Hurry,” the pooka pleaded, prancing in place. “There is a massive amount of movement past the drop-off point. I fear we’ll soon be facing more than a bunch of vipers.” His ears were pinned back, and he pawed the ground, splashing water around us.
“Hold still,” I ordered. “I’ll deal with whatever it is once I have this bandage on her.”
The pooka snorted but held still.
I caught Calypso’s ankle again, causing her to hiss in pain. Beginning above the point of discoloration, I wrapped the bandage around her leg, speaking the activating phrases for the different aspects of the bandage’s spell.
“Should I expect more vines?”
I glanced up to find Calypso lying on her stomach along the pooka’s back and watching my work. The paleness to her face concerned me, but I couldn’t do anything about it now.
“No.” I smoothed the end of the bandage over itself, and it sealed, hardening into a plaster-like consistency.
The pooka flicked his ears. “Where do you want me?”
“A fair distance behind me. Keep her safe and out of the water if possible.” I drew my sword before turning to face the rapidly growing agitation in the water.
Thankfully, the moon’s power was waning. Hopefully, I could risk using more of my magic than I had when the moon was at its peak strength.