Page 36 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

Arrows flew from three different places: from a man and woman perched on rooftops, using the chimneys as shields, and from Ryder, who’d brought his crossbow and quiver of arrows. Earlier that morning, I’d thought it strange for him to arrive at Rosewarren with an arsenal strapped to his back, but now I understood. He’d suspected something like this might happen, even if he’d hoped it wouldn’t.

The arrows flew true, each one slamming into the creature’s side with a grotesque thunk, but that only made it angrier. It dropped the poor child into the splintered wood and glass, and then it rounded on us and dragged its claws through the dirt. A flick of its yellow eyes, and I spun around to see another chimaera in the trees, this one slender and wily, feline save for its sharp-toothed goat’s head and rattling serpent’s tail. It crouched on a branch that sagged under its weight; it would pounce, and so would the other one, the lizard-bear, from the other side. We were trapped. The old woman gave an anguished moan; she expected to die.

Desperation awoke something in me. I found Gemma, and then Ryder, and a strange awareness passed between us, some shared instinct from that night in the Old Country reawakening. We’d fought necromancers and revenants and specters, we’d fought Kilraith in Talan’s body, in that evil house by the sea, and we’d won. Even if that victory wouldn’t last forever, it had indeed been a victory. We’d fought, and we’d triumphed.

Gemma nodded at me, her sweet blue eyes now grim and hard. Ryder grinned a little and glanced up at the sky full of bewildered birds. And I…

I began to sing.

“Willa’s Lullaby” was fresh in my mind. I spat out every word with crystalline precision as Gemma and Ryder flanked me, their backs to me and their magic spilling out of them in ferocious waves.

Gemma flung her arms at the ground, and when she yanked her hands back toward her, a thick web of tree roots sprang up out of the earth, hissing and writhing. The chimaera pounced, both at once, from the cottage and the tree. With an angry cry, Gemma hurled the roots at the shrieking chimaera with the lizard’s face, its jaws red from the child’s blood. The roots slammed into the beast, knocking it back into the dirt. Gemma stalked toward it, her fingers moving quickly, as if weaving unseen threads through the air. The roots answered her, whipping around and around the monster into a tight net, but even as the roots engulfed it, the chimaera still fought, thrashing. As Gemma’s net crushed its body and cracked its bones, its tireless ursine claws slashed through root after root.

With a furious yowl, the other chimaera leaped toward us. The thing was ghastly, unthinkable. A rasping feline roar burst from its mouth; its eyes were mad and white, slitted like those of a goat. The horror of it nearly made me lose my voice. But Ryder didn’t hesitate even for a moment. He murmured words in what I thought was Ekkari—the arcane bestial language he and Alastrina had used, weeks ago, to wild the chimaera in the Citadel—and as he spoke, the confused birds wheeling about in the sky fell into formation, suddenly deadly and focused, hundreds moving as one—starlings, crows, sparrows, jays. They flew at the chimaera and swarmed around it, pecking and tearing at it with beaks and claws. The creature roared in fury and swiped at them, batting them away, but more kept coming, a whole sea of birds rising from the distant trees to join their brethren. I glanced at Ryder, wondering if wilding so many animals at once was exhausting him, but though his face was slick with sweat, hisexpression was ferocious, utterly unafraid. He held his crossbow at the ready, loaded with a thick black arrow.

The chaos gave the villagers time to run away from the fire, the beasts, the Mist, and into the forest to the north. I heard Gentar Barthel shouting at them to hurry, saw Gareth helping children flee a burning cottage right before it collapsed. Father fought a smaller chimaera all on his own, a hissing serpentine beast with a shell of bone protecting its head and chest. He ran at the thing with a roar to match its own and slammed into it with a horrible crack. The blow dazed both of them; the creature writhed on the ground, stuck on its back. Father spat blood and surged to his feet, unsteady. Then a ball of white light zipped past him and hit the stunned chimaera right on its exposed belly. Lord Alaster had thrown it, half hidden behind a collapsed roof, his hand crackling with residual alchemical magic and a triumphant grin on his face.

Father would be furious. Aided in a fight by none other than Alaster Bask? The memory would be a perpetual provocation, and Alaster would never let him forget it. But I refused to succumb to that particular worry. The important thing was that all three chimaera were either dead or nearing it. Gemma was tireless, drawing root after root from the ground and weaving a tight ball of wood around her chimaera attacker. Villagers who had stayed to help kept throwing her branches, even began hacking down trees and tearing up roots themselves to offer to her. The chimaera Father and Alaster had bombarded wasn’t moving; brave villagers with cloths tied over their mouths to ward off the smoke were dragging the beast toward the fire. Once Father regained his balance, he waved them off and did it himself, lifting the beast onto his shoulders and single-handedly hurling it into the flames. As its body burned, a horrible stench wafted across Devenmere, rotten and green-smelling, like food left out to spoil.

And Ryder’s birds gave him the chance to shoot. He advanced onthe confused, mutilated chimaera, which still fought with claws and teeth, dragging down every bird it could. He loosed arrow after arrow into its sleek feline hide until at last the beast lay unmoving in the feather-strewn dirt, seven arrows sticking out of it.

I stopped singing then, feeling a bit foolish for having continued this long. Clearly, none of them had needed my help to fell the chimaera; the villagers had been more of a help than I.

But then from behind me came a skittering sound and a hard, quick clacking as of rattling teeth. I turned and looked up, and up, and my knees wobbled, my legs giving out. I knelt in the dirt before this chimaera, a fourth one that must have somehow gotten through the flames, or gone around them, and now crouched over me, ready to strike. It was a clever thing, its green reptilian eyes focused right on me; it had eight legs like a spider, all of them covered in hard bone and tufts of dark hair, each one ending in a pointed hoof sharp enough to gut me. And its face was indescribable, neither wolf nor snake but something hideously in between. It opened its mouth in utter silence, yellow fangs dripping.

I shook on the ground before it. I couldn’t move, couldn’t call for the others to help me. All I could do was sing—softly, brokenly, my voice a mere rasp.

“Oh, little star, so bright in the sky,

oh, big moon, shining up so high…”

The creature raised one of its front legs to strike; something viscous and black dripped from its hoof. Desperate, hot and cold all over, I dug deep inside myself and found my voice.

“Can you see the bird’s wing?

Can you hear the bells ring?

Can you feel my heart sing?

Oh yes, come down,

come down, come down…”

The familiar lyrics poured out of me on sweet rivers of sound. With the beast’s enormous shadow stretching over me, it suddenly felt wrong, even futile, to sing with violence in my voice. “Willa’s Lullaby” was a tender song, so I would sing it tenderly. I would sing it with love, as I would have done for one of my sisters, as Ihaddone for Gemma in those dark days after Mother left.

“There’s a world to be seen, oh,

precious little grimlings.

There’s a life to be lived, oh,

precious little grimlings.

Don’t you cry for the stars in the sky.

Don’t you cry for the moon so high…”

Tears of terror ran unchecked down my cheeks. The creature had frozen and now blinked at me in bewilderment, and I kept going, kept singing even though everything inside me screamed at me to run, to shout for Ryder, for my father. I sang until the chimaera began to sink toward the ground; I sang until its mean glowing eyes started drifting closed.

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