Page 137 of Fortune's Blade

“How?”

He winced slightly, while the blue eyes reflected flames. “You aren’t going to like it.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Dorina

We hit the ground on a rocky slant and went rolling. Only we’d been moving so fast that it was more like flying, out of the portal’s mouth and down a steep hillside, before tumbling headlong into a huge snowbank. One littered with more stones, as if this was where avalanches often ended up, along with whatever debris they’d swept down the mountain along with them.

Marlowe cracked his chin on a rock, hard enough to leave even a master rattled, but then he was up again, looking around wildly. There was a lot to see. There was a damned lot to see, I thought, alarmed—

“Auggghhhhh!” he screamed, and moved with a speed that even most masters would have envied. Although they wouldn’t have envied the cause—a boulder the size of a house that obliterated the area where we’d been crouching, leaving a divot that looked like a major asteroid had hit the Earth.

Only this wasn’t Earth. I didn’t know where this was. But I doubted that it was Faerie, either, as they . . . weren’t fey, I thought, staring further down the slope after the bouncing boulder, to where it ended in a cliff. One towering above a valley filled with a battle such as I had never seen.

On this side were huge, hulking, crystalline giants, ones that made the fey variety look small by comparison. Some were so large that their heads almost reached the top of the cliff, allowing me to see the ice spikes they wore instead of hair flashing in the sun like diamonds. Others were smaller, or perhaps merely farther away, as the battlefield was as huge as its occupants, taking up the entire valley between mountain ranges.

The giants had spears, swords and shields made of the same brilliant matter as their bodies, while on the other side . . ..

I squinted, for the sun was blazing and the frozen landscape it ruled over acted as a reflector, increasing the glare. It made it difficult to see clearly even with Marlowe’s eyes, as the light was behind the advancing army. But the other side appeared to be composed of two distinct groups.

The one in front looked like the stories I had heard of yetis, massive, lumbering, shaggy, off-white creatures with primitive leather shields and stone tipped spears, as well as a few bows and arrows. Their clothing, in so far as they had any, was leather, too, only so worn that no self-respecting troll would have had it, and so minimal in the cold that it must have been mainly their fur keeping them warm. And behind them . . .

I squinted again, as the crystalline giants kept getting in the way. Their extremities were as clear as glass, showing me a distorted view of pale blue skies, black stone mountains, and a great deal of snow. But their trunks and heads looked like the cloudy center of an ice cube, white and opaque, obscuring the view.

“Not crystalline,” Marlowe rasped.

“What?” I pulled back slightly and refocused on him, because his voice had sounded . . . odd.

He looked it, too, with his face flushed, his eyes staring and his hair everywhere. “Not crystalline,” he rasped again. “Frost. Those are frost giants.”

I remembered something from mythology about such creatures, who inhabited a world very different from ours—or that of the fey. Theirs was Jotunheim, one of the nine realms that the gods had explored before they reached Faerie and then Earth, only I did not know much about it. And from what I could see of Marlowe’s expression, I did not think I wanted to.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“They are famous for resisting the gods,” was all he said. And all he needed to, because behind the ranks of the yeti-creatures was a second wave, which had been too distant for me to see clearly a moment before, but which was moving this way fast. And at the forefront—

“Who is that?” I asked, my own voice sounding hoarse in my head, despite the fact that I did not currently have vocal cords.

There were a number of strange creatures in that second wave, but the one that Marlowe’s telescoping vision had brought instantly closer was enough to cause anyone’s mind to stumble, or to shut down entirely. I would have said that it looked like a god, had I been talking merely about its height, which was staggering, being easily as tall as the bigger frost giants. Or its aura, which was shining as brightly as some of the previous specimens I had seen of its race.

But that description would have given a very wrong idea of the whole. For here was none of the health and vigor and, for lack of a better term, humanness of the other gods I had seen. Instead, a death’s mask met my eyes, not made out of bone but of skin so sallow, so yellowed, and stretched so tightly over the skeleton beneath that it may as well have been.

Thin, brittle hair, gray as steel, hung limply around it. Eyes that might have been brown once, but which were so faded that I could no longer say their true color, shone out of it. And then its teeth, cracked and blackened and in some cases missing altogether, bared themselves in a grimace of such hideous proportions that it felt like a hammer blow straight to my spine.

“Some don’t have the power to shed their physical forms anymore,” Marlowe said hoarsely, as if repeating something he’d heard. “Or else they wouldn’t be strong enough to take another. Yet they cannot die as we do. They are therefore forced to experience what decaying flesh feels like from the inside.”

But that was not the worst of it, for he was noticing things that, in my shock, I had overlooked: a helmet on the head, golden bright and of ancient Greek design; tattered robes that might once have been beautiful, and still showed glimmers of gold embroidery on the edges; a shield—

I held breath I didn’t have when his eyes landed on the big round shield on one skeletally thin arm, which was unadorned except for a single, small figure in the middle. Had anyone else bore it, I would have called it cute, being that of a tiny, large-eyed, gray owl with a few bits of the underlying bronze showing through its paint. As it was, I felt a chill creeping up my spine, as that symbol could only mean—

“Athena,” we whispered together, and I wasn’t certain which of us sounded more horrified.

Or which of us had initiated the order to start scrambling back up the cliffside, away from the chief strategist of the gods, one whose beauty had once been thought to rival Aphrodite’s. The daughter of Zeus was now something else entirely, something with a keen intelligence staring out of those narrowed, corpse-like eyes. Who didn’t even flinch when one of the huge boulders that had almost hit us tore past her head.

They were being thrown down the slope by frost giants on the mountain above us, I realized, to be used as projectiles by those below. Huge slings were being filled and their contents, in some cases the size of buses, sent screaming across the battlefield. But Athena did not waste energy ducking when she had already calculated the trajectory.

Like she never entered a battle without already knowing the outcome, or so the old legends said. Everything was planned out ahead of time with her, including her victory. Which did not bode well for anyone on this side of the divide, no matter how strong they appeared.

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