Page 51 of The Serpent’s Shadow

“Fuck,” I growled.

We spun around to look for another route.

A throng of Huscarls emerged from the trees at the bottom of the incline, from every direction like an alluvial fan of creeping spiders scuttling out of their webs.

Twelve of them. Gods only knew where the other half were.

“We don’t have to jump,” Corym said out the side of his mouth as we watched the Huscarls gain the hill toward us, trapping us. “We can slide.”

I backpedaled a step, sending a strip of soil and loose rock crumbling behind me in dramatic fashion, rolling down the cliffside.

A slide was just as dangerous, I noted, with countless jagged rocks and branches down the side of the hundred-twenty-degree drop.

“No good,” I said simply.

We were caught. Trapped by our own making—our own foolish path.

I’d expected our luck to run out sooner or later. Mother Nature gave life and took it away. If you spilled blood too often in her home, she would make you pay.

And now she was.

“Then we fight, as planned,” Corym said with a sigh, throwing aside his bravado and gamesmanship.

“S’pose we die together, too,” I said with a shrug.

Academy student or not, no one was going to let me live after seeing the man I fought beside behead a Huscarl right in front of them, and do nothing to stop it.

We were just as culpable and tyrannical as the academy’s soldiers, if you wanted to look at it that way.

Corym and I took a step forward, together, so we wouldn’t be forced backward over the cliff face; so we could choose the fight on our terms, since we had the high ground.

I counted the Huscarls off in my mind, planning out my strategy to take as many of them with me as I could.

My left hand shimmered with energy, magic drawn from my core to my fingertips as I Shaped the sky. My right hand held my hatchet. Corym worked in reverse: Shaping with his right, sword-wielding with his left.

An idea came to me, and I carved a rune, changing my source from my inner magic to the narrow creek the Huscarls passed over. I brought the creek to me, lifting tendrils of muddy riverwater in a double helix up the hill toward my outstretched palm.

From the base of the hill, Huscarls cast their runes and threw fiery magic at me to break my concentration.

Corym countered the spells with his own, smacking the fireballs aside with his magical sword, which seemed to absorb the fire. For the rest of them, I sponged up the flames in the vortex of water I cast in front of me.

My body sweated as I ordered the directive of the spell, drawing Shapes rapidly in the air, glistening the marks with burnished-gold outlines.

Three men were ten feet away, knees bent as they charged up the hill with roars of battle-fury.

I abruptly dropped my hatchet, kneeled, and put both hands to the soil. The vortex dropped with my hands and flooded down the hill, in a wave toward the enemies.

The Huscarls slipped on the sudden sleet of water, losing their footing. One rolled back downhill, his roar turned into a yelp. Another got his footing by going on all fours to catch himself, and the third stopped moving to let the water rush by her in a wave.

Corym let out a grunt and cast his magic by imitating my stance—knees down, hands to the ground.

The earth shook and rumbled. Cracks and crevices formed in jagged lines down the hillside, shaking us where we made our stand.

Then the earthopened, drawing in my wave of water with a yawn, bringing slipping Huscarls with it.

Two more fell into the gaping groove Corym created—dropping them four or five feet into the earth, enough to slow their approach and let us arm ourselves for the next cycle of enemies to come at us.

When Corym finished, he glanced at me and winked.

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