Chapter Thirty-One Hairbreadth Escapes #2
“Would you pull that out?” came a familiar voice from behind me. “I want to kill the evil bird.”
I whipped my head around to see my sister-in-law, Gnoflwhogir, large as life and twice as green. She was balancing awkwardly on one leg and looking very grumpy about it.
“I’d do it myself,” she continued, “but these annoying boots would carry me away. What have you done with your hair?”
My brain was beginning to catch up with the situation. I finally recognized the distinctive magic boots she was struggling not to use by accident. A single step would send her far into the distance. I couldn’t remember the last time my stepmother had let someone borrow the seven-league boots.
“How did you get here?” I asked. “How did you find me?”
“A cranky magic mirror told me. But the sword? Now? Because the evil bird is—”
She broke off, her gaze flicking upward as Angelique shot toward her like a stooping hawk. Gnoflwhogir cursed, shifted her weight, and hammered her fist forward. It connected with an audible crack against Angelique’s head. The bird tumbled into the underbrush.
“Sword!” Gnoflwhogir shouted, turning her eyes back to me.
I rose to my feet and tugged on the hilt. The blade was stuck fast in the tree.
“That’s not a bird, by the way.” I braced my foot against the trunk and pulled harder.
“It looks like a bird.”
“She’s a sorceress. She can probably look like whatever she wants.”
“Oh.” A pensive look crossed her face. She fingered her necklace of left ears fretfully. “I should have brought my witch-slaying axe.”
A familiar hissing growl came from the woods around us.
A few of the young furred snakes poked their heads out of the underbrush.
They flared their hoods at us, and feathery spines rose from their bodies like the fluffed-out fur of an angry cat.
They must have been small enough to escape their cage and weave their way through my hair. A disquieting thought.
Gnoflwhogir turned sharply to see what was making the noise. She nearly lost her balance, windmilling her arms in a desperate attempt to keep from toppling over. I wrenched her claymore free at last and tossed it to her as soon as she stopped wobbling.
“These snake things,” she said, snatching her weapon out of the air, “do they die if you stab them?”
“Probably.” More of them slithered into view.
I retreated as rapidly as I could without tripping on my own hair.
“But there are an awful lot of them, and a single bite might be deadly.” Were the juveniles as dangerous as the adults?
I wasn’t eager to find out. Out of the combined venoms of a cobra, a devil firefish, and a platypus, one would probably kill us even if the others didn’t.
Gnoflwhogir bared her teeth in a grimace.
She swung her huge claymore as easily as someone else might brandish a knife.
With a quick shift of her weight, she settled into as good a fighting stance as she could manage on one leg.
I scurried behind her since it seemed like the safest place to be.
Somewhere deeper in the woods, I was sure, Angelique was watching.
“I will fight you, enemy snakes!” Gnoflwhogir shouted. “You are many and I cannot move, so horrible death shall be our fate! But I will do battle with you nonetheless!”
Dozens of them darted closer, surprisingly fast. She chopped at one and then another.
Her claymore blurred into a streak of bright metal.
In moments, half of the monsters had been bisected, strange blue-green blood leaking onto the ground.
But there were simply too many. Only one had to find an opening.
And as she slashed at a serpent to her right, one on her left struck to kill, lunging at her exposed ankle.
Its fangs snapped closed on air when a dragon caught Gnoflwhogir in its claws and yanked her up and out of the way.
“Light them up!” Jonquil shouted from her seat on the dragon’s back. It bent its sinuous neck into the shape of a question mark and disgorged a burst of flame. The fire scorched bark and leaves and fur, and it left the snakes dead or fleeing in its wake.
Behind Jonquil sat Calla, and behind Calla sat Liam, clinging to his wife and looking rather airsick.
My family had come.
“The snakes aren’t the worst threat!” I yelled. “There’s an evil killer bird!”
I gestured toward where I had last seen Angelique. Jonquil obligingly turned her dragon’s head in that direction and sent another stream of fire into the trees. There was a startled squawk, and something dark fluttered up and out of sight.
“Here!” Jonquil flew the dragon low to the ground and reached out a hand. “Hop on!”
I grabbed hold and swung myself up as they passed. Calla shifted to let me on and took a firm hold around my waist. “Get us out of here!” I said.
“I’m having a definite sense of déjà vu.” Jonquil grinned at me before turning her attention back to her dragon, encouraging it to greater heights and faster speeds. My hair streamed behind us like a banner.
“Fine, leave me down here like a handbag!” Gnoflwhogir called up from her uncomfortable position clenched in the dragon’s grasp. “It is not at all demeaning for a proud warrior!”
“Little busy escaping from the evil right now, darling,” Jonquil said through gritted teeth. The dragon banked hard to the left. Jonquil peered over her shoulder for any sign of the dark bird following us, maintaining her sidesaddle perch without apparent difficulty.
The air was bitter cold, but the dragon was a furnace, the fire in its belly keeping me warm.
Calla’s grip turned into the quick squeeze of a hug, before she reached up to bat my fluttering locks out of her face.
I tried to gather it all up again. The pair of goldfinches nesting on her head chirped in my ear. “I missed you,” she said.
“Missed you, too.” I half expected to feel some lingering resentment over having to be saved by my sisters again, but none came. Other than the night I’d spent with Sam in Angelique’s tower, it was the first time since I’d been attacked by the spider wolves that I felt safe. “How did you—LOOK OUT!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen movement.
One of the furred snakes was creeping up to Liam, pulling itself along the dragon’s back with its little claws, nearly in striking distance.
It must have hooked on when they picked me up.
Jonquil began chanting the syllables of some spell.
I couldn’t imagine she would complete it in time.
The furred snake stopped as Liam thrust a small hissing animal at its face. He was clutching Calla with one white-knuckled hand, but with the other he had pulled a furious mongoose from her skirt pocket.
The furred snake scrabbled backward in fright and lost its grip on the slick dragon scales. With a whistling shriek, it slid over the side and dropped until it vanished far below. The words of the spell died on Jonquil’s lips.
The danger gone, I looked around, but the dark bird was nowhere to be seen.
“Natural enemy of cobras,” Liam explained, glancing down at the forest, then away again, shutting his eyes.
“Good job, Lord Thrombwobbley,” Calla told the mongoose. It leapt to her shoulder and made proud chittering noises. Liam took the opportunity to wrap both his arms tightly around her.
“Lucky thing he came along,” I said.
“Not lucky at all,” Liam replied, his face buried in his wife’s back. “I told Calla to bring him.”
“Really? Why?”
His lifted his head, his eyes opening the barest fraction. His expression changed from one of nausea to one of puzzlement. “In case we met any dangerous snakes, of course.”
From experience, I knew there was little point in continuing that line of questioning. In any case, the magic mirror tied to his belt chose that moment to make its presence known. “I was rooting for the devilserpent fireplatyfishes,” it said in a bitter tone. “But no one asked my opinion.”
“Where did you get that?” It occurred to me there were a number of other questions I should really be asking. “When did you get to Tailliz? How did you know I was being attacked?” I glanced around at all of them, trying to put the puzzle together but lacking far too many pieces. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” the mirror said. “I was brought here under protest.”
Calla rapped her knuckles against its frame. “Shut up, mirror,” she said. “It’s a bit of a long story. Why don’t you go first?”
“All right.” My own story was hardly a short one. It felt like ages had passed since my tooth guards were attacked on the forest road. “Things started going wrong,” I began, “when I was about a day’s journey away from Castle Tailliz….”