Wren the Fox Witch (Europa #3: A Dark Fantasy) Read online

  Wren came forward as she set another stone in her sling. For a moment she locked eyes with Thora, but the taller girl looked away first and yanked her dark hood up to cover her furry ears. As she drew closer, Wren saw something move near the edge of the bodies, near the old woman that Thora had filled with arrows and that Leif had cut down.

  The aether mist around the dead woman was shifting, gliding, and flowing. And then a dim figure rose up from the body, the figure of an old woman identical to the one lying dismembered in the road. The ghost looked around herself, blinked, then turned to leave and simply faded away into the darkness. On the other side of the ring of bodies, Wren saw the shades of two men rise up and vanish.

  “Omar? What’s going on?” she asked.

  Her mentor waved his sword at the others. “Get back.”

  Leif and Thora withdrew to the far side of the bodies.

  Omar knelt down and picked up a severed hand. “Look at this.”

  Wren winced and stayed where she was. “Thanks. I’ve seen dead bodies before.”

  “Yes, and now you’re going to look at this one.” He tossed the hand to her.

  Frowning, she held the hand up daintily by one finger to inspect it. The skin was pale blue and veined in violet and black. The nails were black and chipped. The knuckles were black and scraped raw. She was about to drop it when it caught the light from Omar’s sword and the dead skin glistened with a strange blue glow. “What am I looking at?”

  “Aether,” Omar said, standing up. “Frozen aether in the skin, and in the blood.”

  “Aether can’t freeze in a person’s body,” she said, dropping the severed hand.

  “No, but it can freeze in the ice, or the icy ground. Permafrost.” Omar walked around the dead bodies, sweeping his bright sword over them. “It’s everywhere. Aether crystals. Frozen inside them.”

  “But how? People can’t get that cold.” Wren wiped her hand on her black skirt.

  “They can if they’re dead and buried.” Omar looked up at the scowling pair on the far side of the road. “Where did they come from?”

  “Everywhere, nowhere. I don’t know,” Leif said.

  Almost as one, Wren and Thora and Leif all turned to look down the lane where they saw two more bluish people walking toward them. The strangers moved quickly, thumping forward at a jog, but they were unsteady on their feet, weaving drunkenly, colliding with each other every few steps.

  The three fox-eared Yslanders turned at the sound of other bare feet on the snowy roads. Left, then right. North, then east.

  “More?” Omar asked.

  Wren nodded. “A lot more.”

  Chapter 2. Doors

  Wren clutched her laden sling as she ran. When a drooping blue face loomed out of the shadows, she hurled a stone at it, and ran on without looking to see what she had struck. She heard Leif and Thora panting along behind her, and every now and then she heard Leif hack one of the walking corpses to pieces along the way, but she never turned to look back.

  Woden, whatever you’re playing at, it isn’t funny!

  Omar led the way, veering around corners and down narrow alleys and across wide open market squares painted white and blue by the soft moonlight. The old Vlachian city moaned quietly with the wind pressing on the frozen walls and shaking the loose shutters, and breaking off chunks of snow from the eaves. But the homes and the streets were all empty.

  Except for the dead.

  Glistening blue bodies stumbled out of every doorway, their feet moving quickly but unevenly, their hands grasping clumsily, their frozen black eyes staring blindly at nothing and everything, their shriveled black tongues choking and gasping.

  Omar’s blazing seireiken lit the way, transforming the four running souls into a pocket of daylight racing through the streets of Targoviste. Wren tried not to look straight at the sun-steel sword, but every few moments it would swing up into her line of sight and leave a blinding after-image seared into her vision. As they ran, Wren noticed that the houses were taller. Two stories, then three stories. Glass-paned windows reflected the starlight, and wrought iron balconies hung overhead, dripping with long icicles.

  “We’re nearly there,” Omar yelled.

  “Where?” Leif yelled back.

  “The castle!”

  Up ahead, Wren saw the imposing walls of the castle rising above the street. It was nothing like the black stone castle of Rekavik back in Ysland. This was a building of pale bricks carefully shaped and mortared together into a proud and beautiful palace with arching windows and perfectly matched turrets capped in tiled roofs.

  On one side she saw a tower, and she noted how different it was from the filthy hovel she had lived in for seventeen years in Denveller. This tower was a perfect cylinder crowned in sharp crenellations, with arched glass windows on every floor. Hers had been a leaning pile of stones under a rotting thatch roof, a single doorway she had filled with stones from the inside, and a single window she had covered with iron bars at night.

  “Won’t we just be trapped in there?” Wren asked.

  “Better than being trapped out here,” Omar answered.

  They ran through the open gates into a paved courtyard, and then up the wide steps and through the gaping doorway of the first building they saw.

  “There aren’t any doors!” Thora pointed at the entrance, where the rusty hinges stood empty.

  “Here they come.” Leif strode back out to the steps. A dozen of the blue-skinned corpses rushed into the courtyard, moaning and gurgling and crashing into each other, with dozens more hurrying up the road behind them.

  Omar touched Wren’s shoulder and gestured politely at the oncoming dead people. “Wren, if you please.”

  “It won’t work on the dead, will it?”

  “If they still have souls, it will.”

  Wren nodded and pushed Leif aside. The aether lay across the ground in shifting, sliding waves of silent white vapor, and when the young girl raised her hands, the aether rose with them as high as she could reach. A moment later the running dead crashed into the wall and fell back, stumbling and falling over each other, clawing at each others’ black and blue and white skin, and groaning as they tumbled to the ground.

  With a frown and a wince, Wren tried to shove the aether forward, to push the bodies back across the courtyard. But the writhing corpses lay too thick and heavy on the ground, and the aether merely rippled through them, tossing back several limp arms and legs, and making a few bodies near the rear stagger and topple over backward.

  “Come on, keep moving,” Omar barked.

  They ran back through the foyer and up a tall, curving stair that circled an ancient, rusting chandelier. On the second floor, Omar turned left and Wren followed him, but immediately heard feet pounding on stairs, and she turned to see Leif and Thora continuing up to the third floor.

  “Wait, what are you doing?” she asked. “We need to stay together.”

  Omar grasped her arm. “No, we don’t. Let them go.”

  Frowning, Wren dashed after Omar down the hall.

  I know, I know. Leif’s a killer, and Thora, well, she’d probably be a killer too if the situation ever came up. But there are only four of us and a hundred of those… things.

  Omar shoved open a door, and another, and then a third. “Here!” They ran inside and closed the door behind them. It was a large bedroom and in the center of it was the largest bed Wren had ever seen. A huge rotting mattress lay on the wooden platform with four massive wooden columns in each corner to support the steepled wooden roof, from which hung tattered, moth-eaten curtains.

  Omar ran to one side, grabbed hold of a large chest of drawers next to the wall, and shoved. The tiny wooden legs screeched across the bare floor, until two of them snapped off. Together, they wrestled the bureau in front of the door, and then stood panting in the shadows.

  In the quiet, they heard thumping and grunting and distorted echoes from the hall outside and from the rooms below.

  Omar crosse
d to the windows and looked down. “Good. There’s a balcony here. We can get to the roof, move to another part of the estate, and find our way out of here, quietly.”

  “Wait a minute, what’s going on?” Wren asked in an anxious whisper. “We’ve got an army of dead bodies out there walking around, and they’re still got souls inside them. That’s crazy. That’s not how it works.”

  “Oh, you noticed that too, did you?” Omar grinned. “Yes, that is a bit unusual.”

  Wren frowned. “Doesn’t anything surprise you anymore?”

  “Not really, no. The world is huge and strange. If you would just stop expecting it to always play by the rules, it would surprise you a lot less, too.” He unlatched one of the tall glazed windows and gently swung it out. It squeaked softly.

  “But don’t you think we should stay here and figure this out? What if it’s another plague, like the one in Ysland? Some sort of ancient soul-breaking creature, maybe? One that turns people into frozen corpses instead of giant foxes?”

  Omar chuckled as he swung one leg out the window and carefully slipped through the narrow opening onto the wrought iron balcony, which groaned as it took his weight. “It’s possible,” he said. “But what happened in Ysland was awfully rare and unlikely. I doubt the exact same thing is happening here. And besides, even if it was the same, this time it isn’t my fault, so I don’t feel particularly inclined to linger. Come along, little one. It’s time to go.”

  Wren crossed the room. “But—”

  The door handle behind her rattled in its housing, and a voice whispered, “Wren? Let us in! Hurry!”

  Wren dashed back to the bedroom door. “Thora? Is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me. The door at the top of the stairs was locked, so we came back down. And those things are coming up the stairs. Let us in!”

  Wren looked down at the bureau and then back at Omar standing out on the balcony. “Help me move this!”

  “Absolutely not. Now get out here, young lady. I imagine we have a long night of running and hiding before us. And I may be immortal, but I still get tired and sore-footed, and I’ve no desire to watch those corpses tear you apart, either. Now come along!”

  “No, we can’t just leave her out there.”

  “We can, and we will. Need I remind you that those two tried to kill us not a quarter of an hour ago?” He held out his hand through the open window. “Now come on!”

  You don’t need to remind me, but there’s a difference between a blood feud and Ragnarok, and when it looks like the world is ending, it’s not a crime to set old wounds aside, even if it’s only for a little while.

  Wren lunged against the side of the chest of drawers, heaving it slowly back across the room, its two broken feet screaming across the scratched floorboards. Between shoves, she heard the thumping on the stairs outside, and she heard Leif grunting and cursing, his sword sighing through the air as he hacked the frozen bodies to pieces, the limbs banging and rolling on the landing just outside the door.

  “Hurry!” Thora yelled. “They’re getting closer!”

  The bureau shifted a little more, enough for Thora to slam the door inward a bit, just enough for Wren to see her face in the gap. The taller girl looked pale, her golden eyes wide, her lips twisted into a terrified grimace. Wren shoved again and the bureau screeched again, but her hand slipped and she stumbled off to one side, right against the corner of the bed. Her shoulder struck one of the wooden columns, and the sudden pain jarred her from her chest to her hips.

  She turned to look at the widened gap in the door. Thora had shoved her head and one shoulder into the room and was straining to push the door open, straining to push the bureau just a bit farther away, but the huge chest of drawers had caught on a warped floorboard and refused to move any farther.

  Wren staggered up and saw Omar out on the balcony, his arms crossed over his chest, a stern and disapproving look on his face. But she dashed back to the door just as a heavy body was flung against it from the other side. There were two booms in quick succession, and each time Thora winced and grunted. Leif was shouting, and judging from the sounds Wren guessed that his sword was banging and hacking into the walls and floor as much as the corpses.

  Thora’s hands clutched the door frame, her eyes screwed shut as she shoved with all her strength against the blocked door. Wren grabbed the bureau and pulled, but with a sinking, exhausted feeling in her belly that there was no hope of it moving any more. She ran to the door and grabbed Thora’s arm and tried to pull the other girl inside, through the gap was still far too small.

  Then Thora’s face went slack and she stared into Wren’s eyes, and for a cold instant they stood together, face to face, in silence. Then a blue hand with black nails wrapped around Thora’s face, two of its fingers poking into her mouth, and wrenched her back out into the hall. Wren leapt forward to slam the door shut with shaking hands, and she sat with her back to the door, gasping and shaking as she listened to Thora and Leif scream together just two paces away, just behind her on the other side of the door. Leif roared and Thora shrieked, and then both went suddenly silent, and all Wren could hear were wet thumping sounds on the floor and wall behind her.

  Staring across the room, over the bed, through its tattered curtains, and past the window, she saw Omar still standing on the balcony. He was gazing up at the roof, one finger tapping lightly on his chin as though he was trying to decide what sort of flowers might look best around the window frame.

  A body crashed against the door behind her, rattling the hinges. With a hot surge of adrenaline in her legs, Wren scrambled up, ran across the room, and jumped through the open window. She stumbled into Omar’s arms and looked up at the Aegyptian, only to see a weary and slightly condescending smile.

  “Oh good, you’re here. Now we can run for our lives.” He jogged across the balcony, pointed out a series of handholds in the brickwork and roof, and together they climbed up onto the icy tiles beside a narrow chimney.

  “I can’t believe you just left them like that,” she said.

  “And I can’t believe you tried to save them.”

  Wren’s foot shot out from under her, and she fell to her knees. Omar helped her back up and they trudged slowly and carefully up the slope of the roof through the snow and over the ice, squinting into the whistling wind.

  “How can it possibly be colder here than in Ysland?” Wren muttered.

  Omar snorted. “Ysland’s covered in volcanoes. It barely counts as cold at all. This is genuine cold, here. This is winter as it should be.”

  “You like this?”

  “I hate this. But at least it’s the genuine article.”

  The ice underfoot crackled and the snow slid down a bit here and there, but otherwise the roof held together and they walked along the apex arm in arm, each of them looking down at a steep fall across the tiles and into a frozen garden or a snowy courtyard or a wrought iron fence with tiny spikes along the top.

  On their right side, they could see the walking dead milling about near the front gates of the castle grounds, but they were merely shuffling in circles or leaning against walls. They moaned softly to one another, making sounds that were almost words. Here and there, a pair of them would collide and paw at each other, sometimes even hitting each other, but never with much force or passion, and they would drift apart again.

  At the end of the roof, Omar pointed out a brick chimney at the lower edge and they slid down on their backsides to it. There, between the angle of the roof and the wall of the chimney, the wind was gentler and quieter.

  “Now what?” Wren asked. “Those things are everywhere.”

  “Not everywhere.” Omar nodded at the north wall where a small gate house stood between a frosted garden and the town outside.

  “Won’t they see us?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure if they can see or hear. What if they can only feel vibrations in their feet, or only smell? They’re certainly not the most athletic enemies we’ve ever face
d. After all, their bodies are dead and frozen.” Omar ran his thumb along his jaw. “It would seem the only things keeping them moving at all are their souls. And that means you can simply push them away with your little trick.”

  Wren nodded. “I can, but I don’t know how many I can manage. And what if the aether thins out? Besides, I don’t think I’m good enough to hold off an entire city yet. Why can’t you just use your seireiken on them?”

  Omar shuffled in place and winced. “I could, but frankly I’m not too keen on having these souls absorbed into the blade. What if they’re damaged somehow? Broken, insane, diseased souls, maybe? Forever is a very long time to have a diseased soul trapped in your sword.”

  “Couldn’t you just ignore them?”

  “Maybe. But what if they infect the other souls in the seireiken? I have some very nice dead people in there, you know. You’ve met them.”

  “Then don’t absorb the corpse souls. Just do that fancy cutting thing that doesn’t kill people. Except, you know, use it to kill them this time,” Wren said.

  “Iaido? Maybe. It’s still a risk. I’m cold and tired, my hand could slip, I could make a mistake, and forever is a very long—”

  “—long time to live with a mistake, I know.” Wren rolled her eyes. “Only you could make immortality sound like such a burden. I think I’m becoming thankful that I’ll die one day.”

  “You’re learning!” Omar grinned. “Now let’s go. Quietly.”

  They climbed down from their perch on the roof to a stone balcony, and from there they slipped over the stone walls to the garden below. Snowy evergreens stood in silent rows around them, blocking their view of the north gate as well as everything else. Wren shuffled through the snow, feeling carefully with her thin boots, and soon felt the hard edges of a paved path underfoot.

  Waving at Omar to follow, she led the way through the trees into an open space full of snow-capped bushes that stood waist high, and then past flower beds where only a handful of short brown stalks indicated where the flowers had once been. She could see the north gate now, its wooden doors standing slightly ajar.