Page 110 of Woods of the Raven

His queen sneered at me. “Rulaine was a weak, conniving whore trying to claw her way out of the swamp she was born in, and Sola was nothing more than an enchantment gone wrong. If you dispatched them, they were weaker than I thought and did not use the vargrs I sent with them,” she proclaimed in a voice dripping with disdain before giving me a dismissive wave of her hand that sent all six wolves at me at once.

Dropping fast to the ground, I shoved my hands deep into the wet soil and called on the land for help.

I have to protect you, I said.

We have to protect you, the land answered.

As the vargrs rushed for me, roots erupted from the ground, and the first three were impaled, killed instantly as sharp barbs shot through their heads, while the fence the roots made shielded me from the others.

“Oh, the mage is skilled!” Threun laughed loudly. “He will make for good sport. You might even keep him for Marden, as he loves to torture beautiful boys like this one.”

Two of the knights came then, swords drawn, and the vargrs skulked around the sides of my small barricade to reach me.

The ground rose in blocks of compacted soil, lifting the knights off the ground, turning then to mud that engulfed them, drowning them, then went solid again, cracking every bone in their bodies at once, before sucking them back down into the ground, buried alive for seconds before their blood was squeezed from their bodies.

Looking at the vargrs, I used my power to freeze them where they were before my energy rose inside their bodies until, like Sola, they couldn’t breathe. It was scary, I knew it was, and when I couldn’t hold them a moment longer—they were far more powerful than the others—the second I released them I wasn’t surprised that they turned and ran, streaking by the queen and Threun, back through the rift they came from.

I was right about the handmaidens; they didn’t run, instead turning into enormous fast-moving snakes that came at me, smashing through the barrier, slapping me away from the ground, hurling me several feet into the clearing, closer to Threun and his queen. Before I could get my hands back into the ground, razor-sharp fangs were driven into my left shoulder and right thigh. I was caught in a vise of pain, being ripped apart as they pulled away from each other, trying to tear me in half as another slithered close.

I saw her head, and then it exploded in chunks of blood and bone. The other two snakes dropped me, and the head of the one on my right, who’d bitten through my thigh, shattered, the blood washing over my face and chest.

Lorne strode into the clearing, rifle in hand, reloading as he came, from the same kind of belt Threun wore across his chest. The difference was, Lorne’s was full of enormous bullets that I was guessing were iron, given that the snakes stayed dead, not turning back into women.

Two of the handmaidens went for him, the third coming for me. I crossed my arms over my face, guarding all that I could, and heard shots ring out before, again, I was splashed with hot blood.

Moving my arms, I found a dead snake beside me, looked for Lorne, and saw him charging by the others he’d killed to reach me.

The man was magnificent.

“The mage has a protector.” Gaeidhel laughed as a funnel of wind caught Lorne and flipped him around. He yelled, cursing up a storm as the rifle fell down into the dirt.

I wanted to move, but the maidens had delivered poison into my bloodstream with their bites, which had opened gaping wounds in my flesh. Blood was running out of me, and the poison was making everything blurry.

But I had to save Lorne. He was my love. He was supposed to be mine. I’d known it from the beginning, when he was in my house—my cottage—for the first time. The cottage loved him, and so did I. That needed to be confessed. And it was fast, but that didn’t make it any less true. I loved Lorne MacBain, and he needed to be told.

Lifting up, I shoved my hands into the ground, and a wall of soil shot straight up, blocking Gaeidhel’s vision of Lorne. As I suspected, her magic worked only if she could see her target. He dropped twenty feet out of the sky into the cradle of leaves that had blown together to cushion his fall. It was still a hard landing, and the wind was knocked out of him for a moment.

I couldn’t hold the barrier any longer, and it dropped back into the earth, like a retractable bridge, fitting seamlessly. Lorne leaped for his rifle, but a knight beat him to it, putting his foot on the barrel and drawing his sword, which would have sliced Lorne’s head off if he hadn’t come up off his knees fast and driven his shoulder into the knight’s chest, throwing him off his feet and down hard into the ground. With the rifle free, Lorne grabbed it, reloaded, and killed the man, his head blown into wet gore just as the snakes were.

Scrambling back, Lorne didn’t touch me, too busy reloading what I could now see was not a rifle but a shotgun with a really long barrel.

“It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay,” he promised me, lifting the gun to fire.

More vargrs had come through the rift and one hit him in the back, and the two of them went rolling away, only the barrel of the shotgun, wedged between the jaws of the wolf, keeping Lorne from having his face ripped off.

Barely able to lift myself up, I shoved my hands into the earth.

Save my love, I said.

And you, the land answered.

Like fingers lifting from the ground, both Lorne and the vargr were covered in soil and then sucked down into the earth. In seconds Lorne was pushed up, left heaving for breath, his shotgun beside him, with no sign of the vargr.

Sever the roots. They are poison, I said.

The roots will do you no harm, the land answered.

As predicted, the land saw no reason to fear that which the queen had sown so long ago. She was magic like me, had probably sung to the earth as she pressed the seeds deep inside. I couldn’t convince Corvus something was dangerous if it perceived it as benign.