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Chapter Twenty-Eight

Guinevere

“One day I’ll be famous and you’ll all be sorry,” Guinevere sang as she and Oskar walked to a nearby stream the next morning. “So put that turnip down, my horrid sister, Zugri.”

“Sing something else,” Oskar begged her. “Anything. I couldn’t sleep last night because that accursed jingle kept running through my head.”

“It’s stuck in mine, too.” Guinevere offered him an apologetic smile. “Rodregg has an ear for melody, you have to admit.”

“But his lyricism leaves much to be desired.”

Oskar was carrying a chest full of the used bowls and spoons from last night’s supper. He had volunteered to do the washing, and Guinevere was accompanying him because she wanted to be useful, for once. Not that she knew how to wash dishes, but how hard could it be?

“Where is the soap?” she asked brightly, sorting the utensils as she and Oskar crouched by the stream.

“And so her diabolical plan is revealed,” Oskar muttered, opening a round wooden container filled with…something. “She wishes to bathe while I toil away.”

Guinevere chuckled. “The soap for the dishes, Oskar.”

He blinked. “Why would you waste soap on cleaning the dishes?”

“What are we supposed to use, then?”

He showed her what was inside the container. The ashes from the campfire.

A few minutes later, Guinevere was trying very hard not to cry as she dragged her bare fingers through the black muck, sprinkling it into the bowls and scrubbing, scrubbing.

She could feel the grit seeping into the crevices under her nails, along with bits of grain and mutton.

This was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

She put on a brave face and muddled through, all the while praying that Oskar wouldn’t notice her distress.

When he hadn’t made any remarks by the time the last bowl was rinsed off in the stream and placed back in the chest, Guinevere started to hope that she’d gotten away with it. They stood up, and she turned to head back to the campsite, but he stopped her with a hand around her waist.

“If it makes you feel any better…” His grin was gentle in the early morning light, but there was a trace of ruefulness to it. “That’s probably the last time you’ll have to do it.”

She turned her nose up at him. He kissed it, then darted another quick peck to her lips. Which was a pity, as she would have quite liked for it to last longer.

“You know, Oskar,” Guinevere mused as they retraced their steps to the clearing, “you haven’t been as grumpy lately.”

“I threw a turnip peel at someone last night,” he reminded her.

“The old you would have thrown a rock,” she countered. “You have also been smiling more. And sometimes you laugh. ”

This time, the bend in his grin was devilish. His golden eyes swept her from head to toe, poured over her like honey. “Maybe it’s because you’re just so good at— it. ”

She almost walked into a low-hanging branch, so flustered was she. But she was pleased, too. “Thank you,” she said primly. “I—”

“At washing the dishes, I mean.”

Guinevere half burst into giggles, half choked on outrage. She took a threatening step toward Oskar, and he held the chest of bowls and spoons higher in front of him, like a shield.

“If any of these fall, you’re doing the rewashing,” he warned.

“Just you wait until we get back to camp and you can’t hide behind them anymore.” A thought struck her, and she looked around. “Speaking of, we should have been back by now, don’t you think? Did we take a wrong turn?”

A wrong turn wasn’t possible, though. Not when the stream was only a stone’s throw away from the campsite, not with a veteran woodsman like Oskar. They both went still as they attempted to get their bearings.

With its moss-covered rocks and floor of bracken and canopy of red and gold, this part of the forest looked like any other. But something was slightly… off, like what should have been a closed door only three-quarters settled into the wall.

Oskar slowly placed the chest on the ground. When he straightened up, his right hand dropped to the hilt of one sword.

“Stay alert,” he told Guinevere in a soft voice that somehow rang unnaturally loud in her ears, and at last she realized what was bothering her about their surroundings.

In the course of her travels, she had come to realize that the forests were never truly silent. There were always birds singing and insects whirring away, always the snap of twigs and the rustling in the undergrowth.

None of those ambient noises was present now. The world was as still as glass.

Guinevere listened the way Elaras had taught her. And the eerie quiet was replaced by the roar of magic everywhere, woven into each blade of burnished grass. Teinidh stirred uneasily within the caverns of her soul.

“It’s an illusion,” said Guinevere. “This whole area.” She remembered sparks flaring from purple fingers beneath the onslaught of a stallion’s hooves. “The mercenaries had a magic user with them, didn’t they? That gnome.”

Oskar drew his sword. “Get behind me. No matter where I turn, you have to make sure you’re always behind me. Understand?”

She nodded, stepping into place as he’d instructed. She tried to peek over his shoulder, but his next command quickly put a stop to that.

“Face the other way. If you spot even the tiniest movement, anything at all—scream.”

Guinevere nodded again, then realized Oskar couldn’t see her. “Yes.”

When she faced away from him, her view consisted mostly of bushes and tree trunks. She was more or less calm, thanks to Oskar’s own steady, no-nonsense attitude, but it was a fluttery sort of calm, like a veil had been thrown over the apprehension that was struggling to break free.

Suddenly there was a glint of silver leaping out of the autumn foliage, and Guinevere was too startled and afraid to scream.

She gasped instead, but it was all the warning that Oskar needed.

Swiftly, he spun on his heel and one arm shoved her behind him while the other raised his sword at a slant. A dagger bounced off the curved blade.

And a second one flew into Oskar’s shoulder.

Guinevere screamed then.

There was a subtle twist in the air as the net of illusion magic shifted, and three figures came charging out from bushes that had not visibly contained a single living soul scant seconds prior.

There was the leonine katari, the reptilian dragonblood whom the purple gnome had called Bharash, and the uniya, whose name, Oskar had said, was Selene.

“You should have taken the deal,” Selene called out to Oskar, right before she and her cohorts descended on him and Guinevere.

Guinevere couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment Oskar wrenched the dagger from his shoulder, or when his sword blocked the enemy’s first strike.

Everything was a blur. He had switched his weapon to his left hand while the injured right arm reached back, guiding her with every movement he made so that she was always shielded by his body even as he slipped them through every break in the mercenary ranks.

But Guinevere was surprised to find that she didn’t need to be guided.

Years of dance lessons came rushing to the forefront.

No one could escape more than a decade of waltzes and tangos and quadrilles without developing impeccable timing and a sense of rhythm.

What had been the blur of battle soon began to take on a certain logic, and her footwork synchronized perfectly with his, stepping parallel to where he stepped, turning when he turned.

He’d told her to ensure that she stayed behind him, and so she did.

The back-and-forth of attacks and countermeasures was her rhythm.

The slam of steel against steel was her beat.

Whirling around her were the katari’s claws and the dragonblood’s morning-star flail and the uniya’s multitude of daggers, but as long as she kept time with Oskar, she would be all right.

He was her dance partner, and he would keep her safe.

She would follow his lead until the ends of the earth.

They couldn’t keep it up forever, though. It was still three against one. Oskar began to falter in the face of the relentless assaults from all sides, his blocks clumsier, his swings far too wide.

Where was Teinidh?

For the first time in her life, Guinevere wished that the wildfire spirit would manifest. She wished it with every inch of her body.

She could feel it, the flames within her, fanned by terror.

But they could never seem to hit critical mass, the point of breaking free.

There was something holding her back, and she couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out what it was.

Teinidh wailed and gnashed against the walls of her prison, and the seconds hurtled agonizingly by…

And the katari’s great paw swiped across Oskar’s ribs, sharp claws cutting through fabric and through skin. In doing so, however, the feline humanoid had left a flank wide open, and Oskar wasted no time in lunging forward, driving the dwarven-made sword into his opponent’s furred stomach.

Blood went everywhere. Some of it spattered on Guinevere’s face.

It was worse than the ashes. The katari staggered back and fell and then moved no more, his sightless eyes clouding over.

Enraged, the two surviving mercenaries fell upon Oskar with a vengeance.

He resorted to dodging and darting out of reach rather than fighting back.

Guinevere kept pace with him, and they led the enemy in a frantic circle through the woods.

She wondered why Selene was no longer throwing her daggers and why Bharash had yet to use his breath attack, then realization hit her like a flare of lightning—the mercenaries wanted her in addition to the trunk.

That first dagger had been flung at Guinevere because the uniya knew that Oskar would block it and fail to guard against the second.

But, when it came right down to it, the mercenaries needed her alive.