An Enchantment of Ravens(27)
Oh, god.
The Barrow Lord only had eyes for me now. It lumbered forward until I lay in the fetid darkness of its shadow. Ravens launched themselves shrieking from the trees to claw and peck at its back, flap wings in its face, but their calls soon turned to shrill squawks of desperation as their feathers stuck to the Barrow Lord’s hide. Skeletal hands surfaced, clutching at them greedily, pulling them inside. The birds struggled and thrashed, but soon all that remained was a beak here, a wing there, protruding at random from the monster’s rancid flesh. Some of them kept twitching.
The Barrow Lord lowered its head to my level.
Its head alone was the size of a log, the round mouth-hollow broad enough for a person to crawl into. The mushrooms twisted and turned. A hot gust blew out, and then another.
Surely I was too small, too weak to pose this creature any danger. The voices whispered among themselves. The little girl giggled.
A ragged wail tore from my chest, and I sank my fingers into its spongy face. This gave me enough purchase to haul myself up and seize one of its eye clusters with my other hand, the one wearing the iron ring. Instantly the mushrooms wilted. They turned gray and brittle, shriveling in my grasp.
All the voices groaned in unison, from that faraway room I’d begun to think of as hell, and the Barrow Lord took a step back, dragging my legs across the ground. I gave the eye stalks one last squeeze, feeling them crumble away. I only needed to buy myself another second. Because out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rook getting up.
He had one hand inside his coat, holding his chest, and the look on his face was terrifying to behold, contorted with pain and fury. His steps weaved; I wondered if he’d make it.
He did.
I let go and tumbled to the ground as he staggered up to the Barrow Lord’s face, pulled the bloody hand from his coat, and thrust it straight into the monster’s mouth. First there came a cracking sound, wood splintering and snapping. The Barrow Lord’s body convulsed and canted stiffly to one side. Then thorny branches as thick around as my torso burst from every inch of its flesh, skewering it a hundred times over, pinning it in place like a grisly statue. I wasn’t sure if it was dead. I’m not sure that it even mattered.
One last branch pushed slowly out of its remaining eye, and yellow leaves unfolded inches from my nose.
“Rook,” I breathed. “You did it. You—”
But a thump interrupted me. I pushed the leaves aside to find Rook collapsed, unconscious, with his glamour bleeding away.
Eight
THE FIRST thing I noticed upon dropping to my knees next to him was that his clothes were torn and dirty from the battle, and wrinkled by travel. I hadn’t gotten a good look at them when he’d lost his glamour earlier that afternoon, and the change was shocking: in an instant he’d gone from prince to vagabond. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that he might use his glamour to alter his clothing’s appearance, too. Most astonishingly of all, until now the enormous tear across his coat front where the Barrow Lord had struck him had been completely invisible to my eyes.
“How much magic do you waste on vanity? For heaven’s sake, you could barely stand.” My hands shook as I slipped off my ring, put it away, and undid the buttons down his front. “It wasn’t as though the Barrow Lord and I cared how you looked, you know.”
I spread his coat open, and his head lolled to the side. His mouth was slightly parted. I had decided not to look too closely at the sharp teeth showing behind his lips, but as it turned out I needn’t have even bothered thinking about it, because the wound on his chest demanded all my attention and then some.
I didn’t have a basis for comparison, but I could make an educated guess that with his glamour on, his chest wouldn’t look so gaunt, each of his ribs showing clearly through his skin. I just wished I couldn’t see that much of his ribs. Not all of the white showing amid the blood belonged to his torn-up shirt.
The wound was long and gruesome, running from his collarbone on the left side all the way down over his ribs to the right. A human with that injury would have been dying of blood loss. Thankfully he didn’t seem to be bleeding out, but I’d have felt a great deal more optimistic about the situation if he had been conscious, smugly informing me that the bone-deep gash in his chest was only a flesh wound.
“Rook,” I said, patting his cheek and trying not to cringe. His jutting bones and hollow face conjured an echo of the skeleton crawling up my legs. “You’re a prince, remember? Wake up and infuriate me, please.”
He turned his face toward my hand and moaned.
“You’ll have to try a little harder than that.” I balled up some of his coat and pressed it against his chest. Then, remembering the night before, I took his right wrist and turned his hand palm up. So he’d used his glamour to hide the cut after all. Yet his hand was healing quickly—if I hadn’t known otherwise I would have believed the wound a week old or more.
I started when I realized his eyes were slitted open. He was watching me. “You’re still here,” he murmured, half-delirious.
Quickly, I set his hand back down. “Where else would I be?”
“Running.”
“If you hadn’t noticed, this forest is full of things that want to kill me. Even their dismembered limbs want to kill me. As loath as I am to admit it, I’m better off taking my chances with you.”