Chapter Twenty-Seven Ice Capade
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ice Capade
I shrieked. The creature shook me like a dog killing a squirrel as it swerved left and right to evade the arrows zipping past. I tried to think up some means of escape, but all I managed to do was thrash in its grip. I couldn’t form a single coherent thought.
As the monster dodged, Jack leapt onto the battlements.
She lashed out with her sword, the blade passing so close to my face I saw my nose reflected in it.
It bit deep into the creature’s carapace.
A spray of ichor fanned out to join the other stains on my clothes.
The flickering wings halted, their strident buzzing silenced.
We dropped together, straight toward the jagged rocks at the island’s edge.
A hand grasped my wrist, nearly wrenching my arm out of its socket.
I swung sideways and smashed face-first into the wall.
My scream was cut off as the breath was forced out of my lungs.
The insectoid thing hung from me for a moment, its claw still hooked on the edge of my cloak.
Then the cloth tore, and the creature continued its final descent.
“If you could find a way to climb up,” came Jack’s strained voice from above me, “I’d appreciate it.”
I looked up to see her braced on a crenellation, trying her hardest to hold my weight with one arm.
I scrabbled to find handholds and footholds.
After a moment, I managed to get my fingers over the lip of the wall.
With a great heave, Jack pulled me up and over.
We both collapsed on the walkway, panting for breath.
“Thank you,” I said.
Jack gave a weary shrug. “I’ve been told it’s important I live up to my name.”
Behind us, an errant boulder slipped past Kit’s breath. It smashed into the tower. The roof disintegrated, showering rocks and timbers into the stairwell.
Just before the collapse, a black bird had launched itself from the highest window. I frowned as it banked and flew off into the distance. The first faint glimmerings of a suspicion began to form in my mind. Something that someone had said to me didn’t quite add up.
Jack dragged herself to her feet. As I started to do the same, a blurry figure dashed up to us and gibbered something in a voice too fast to decipher.
“Take your leg off or talk slowly, Harry,” Jack said. “We didn’t get a word of that.”
The blur resolved into the oddest of the masked hunters as she detached her leg and cradled it in her arms. “Sorry. Have a message for you. Summons from the court.”
“I already know about it,” Jack said. She jerked her chin in my direction. “I’m trying to get her there in one piece.”
Harry shook her head, bouncing on her foot as if impatient to be moving again. “It’s changed. Not just her. All the hunters, too.”
“What?” Jack’s eyebrows shot up into her messy bangs. “Has Gervase lost his mind?” She gestured at the ongoing battle.
I could make out other hunters in the mix now, wherever the fighting was thickest. One had wrapped a horn bird in a mass of morning glory vines.
Its struggles were weakening as the pretty flowers choked the life out of it.
Another hunter appeared to be grabbing not-quite-bats out of the air and shoving them into her mouth, which was open wider than seemed possible.
“We’re the only reason the castle is standing!” Jack said. “The moment we leave the wall, it’s over.”
Harry shrugged. Jack drew in a breath and closed her eyes. Her face scrunched up in thought.
I tried to catch sight of Sam, hoping he’d recovered since Kit had brought me the bad news, and I’d find him tossing monsters around like so many matchsticks.
He was nowhere to be seen. But that didn’t mean anything, did it?
A thousand small skirmishes were being waged on every side of the castle, far more than I could take in at a glance.
He might be fighting in any one of them. He might be.
“Where is—”
Jack’s eyes popped open. “We’ll make them pause the assault first. Tell Kit and Max to meet me here. Everyone else needs to concentrate on picking off as many of the fliers as possible. Hurry!”
Harry had reattached her leg before Jack finished speaking, shifting back into a blur and zipping off along the walkway while the last word was still echoing in the air.
Jack turned and looked over the parapet.
The seething carpet of furry snakes had gathered close to the wrecked gatehouse.
The broken walls shielded them from arrows as they slithered into the water.
I pushed my other concerns aside, at least for the moment. “How are you going to stop them?”
“With a terrible plan that probably won’t work. Unless…By any chance, do you have anything spectacular to contribute?” She kept her voice casual, but I heard the urgent hope underneath. “As long as it doesn’t turn me into a bird again.”
“I don’t know.” I’d have said no, but after what I did when Sam was injured—whatever it was—I wasn’t sure anymore. “Maybe if I had some time to think about it?”
“Time isn’t something we really—”
She broke off as Kit sprinted up to us, panting with effort. Max, her telltale hat pulled slantwise over her ear, wasn’t far behind.
“What do you want?” Kit asked between wheezy breaths, clutching at her side as she skidded to a stop. “Every moment I waste here, a rock might sail through.”
Jack pointed at the bay. “Make a wave. As big as you can.”
“Why—”
“Now, Kit!”
Kit’s expression stayed sour as she held one nostril shut and blew through the other.
The great wind of her breath whistled down to the water.
The dark surface below rippled and undulated, gathering into humps and troughs.
Waves started rolling toward the mainland, chunks of ice slipping over them as they crossed the frigid bay.
They grew in size, each cresting higher than the one before.
The first rose tall enough to engulf a child, the next a horse, the next a house.
“Keep going,” Jack urged.
Kit’s face turned red as she blew harder. The waves began to break against the shore. The furred serpents paused. Every new crash sent the surf farther and farther across the beach.
“Higher!” Jack said.
With a final phlegmy snort, Kit expelled whatever breath remained in her lungs.
It created a sudden depression in the water, nearly deep enough to hold the castle itself.
As she dropped her hand from her nose and gasped desperately for air, a massive wave reared up, twice as large as the one that preceded it.
The great swell of water advanced like an avalanche, casting a long shadow over the creatures that stared at it from the opposite shore.
“Will that really help?” Kit sputtered. “The big ones might not even topple over!”
“Max,” Jack said, ignoring Kit, “when it breaks—”
“I know.” The hunter whipped off her hat. “I’m on it.”
The temperature dropped. Goosebumps rose on my skin, and the ichor staining my dress crystalized. Max set her mouth in fierce concentration.
“Everyone get back!” Jack shouted. We stumbled away from the hatless hunter as the vapor in the air around her froze into glitter.
Solid ice fanned out from the rocks at the base of the wall.
As it spread, every bump and ripple in the water became trapped in motionless sculpture.
The ice shot across a bay already on the point of freezing, the dark water transforming into an expanding semicircle of white, racing its way to the opposite shore.
Some of the monsters turned and ran, but it was already too late. The wave was moving too fast. As it neared the shore, the top of it curled, foamed, and came crashing over their heads.
And it froze there, the ice overtaking the wave just before it collapsed, sealing the enemy in a frozen prison.
Max jammed her hat back on her head, and I clenched my chattering teeth to a halt.
Jack nodded at the other hunters. “All right. Let’s go find out what they want with us at court.”
“Did you just win the battle?” I asked. The flying monstrosities had evaded the ice and were harrying the archers, but one by one, they were meeting their ends.
Jack shook her head. “Hardly. Listen.”
Deep booms issued forth from the mound of ice. The glistening surface was crazed with cracks. Small at the moment but widening as we watched.
“I hope I froze a few of them solid,” Max said. “But it won’t be all of them. And those rock things won’t care. They’ll break it, given enough time.”
“Enough time is what I was hoping for,” Jack told her. “The archers can hold out as long as no one’s throwing boulders at them.”
“And then what?”
“There must be a reason we’ve been summoned. Maybe Gervase has a brilliant plan. Or the lion. Or anyone.”
I didn’t see why any brilliant plans on offer wouldn’t have been sent as part of Harry’s message.
But military strategy hadn’t been an emphasis of my eclectic education, so I held my tongue.
Perhaps it could only be explained using charts or those toy soldiers you push around a map with a little rake.
Which still wouldn’t explain why I had been invited.
I supposed a summons to the Great Hall meant I had permission to be there this time, at least.
We made our way to the nearest ladder, dodging the extended claws and tentacles of winged horrors as we went. Clem met us at the top, firing arrows one after another. Her quiver had scarcely any left. Things I didn’t have time to look at thudded to the ground around us, pierced through.
“This ’ud better be important,” she snarled as she slung her bow across her back and grabbed the rungs. “If tis some courtier wha wants a report, he’s gittin’ an arrow thro’ th’ knee.”