C. Brittain - Voima

“I cannot be all for you,” he said, stroking her arm and trying desperately to remember why he could not. “The path of honor is higher than the path of love,” he added after a moment.

Her eyes flashed at him, and the corner of her mouth twitched. “I do have to remember that you too are, after all, a man.”

Before he could answer, he heard a clanging, of swords against shields, not a quarter mile away.

“We know you’re in there, Valmar Hadros’s son!” came a booming voice. For a horrible second he thought it was the Wanderers, then knew it was not. “We’ve surrounded this woods and we’re coming for you. Surrender yourself! Since you would not be our friend as Roric was, you shall take you to our manor as our enemy!”

The woman sprang up and went for her armor and sword. “We’ll compromise,” she said with a grin, “we’ll both fight these beings for your lords of voima, and also be together.” She had her clothes on in seconds, and was sliding on her mail and stamping her feet into her boots. “I’ve already seen how you do against me. Now we’ll see how much a mortal can do against hollow creatures who want him dead.”

PART III: Realms of Voima

Karin and Roric began to run, back the way they had come, slipping and almost falling in the piles of coins. Their feet could find no purchase. It was like trying to wade through surf-swirled sand-like a nightmare in which one struggled to move until wakened by one’s own kicks, but there was no waking here. The scraping and slithering behind them became louder, and the dragon’s hot breath blew on their hair.

Karin clung to Roric’s hand, struggling to keep her feet, staring through blurred eyes at the fire burning at the side of the cave.

Why should the dragon have a fire in its den?

She caught her foot on a jeweled sword, half-buried in the coins, and fell, nearly pulling Roric down with her. “Go!” she gasped. “Go! One of us may still escape!” Wildly she thought that it would be better to be eaten in one gulp than pursued up the narrow passage down which they had slid into the dragon’s den.

Not hearing or not listening, Roric stood over her, facing the dragon with his sword out. The long snout came toward them, slowly, very slowly. For a second Karin hoped that the mind behind the burning eyes was only curious, that the dragon was at the moment more interested in their presence than hungry.

And then the enormous mouth opened, showing hundreds of needle teeth, and the forked tongue licked toward them.

Roric’s armed darted out, and his sword clanged on the dragon’s scales with a ring like steel against steel. The scarlet nostrils flared and the jaw opened even wider. Roric stabbed toward the closest nostril, his full weight behind the sword.

The blade bit home, and the dragon’s head jerked upwards, almost yanking the sword from Roric’s hand.

In the seconds while the dragon bellowed in pain, Roric dragged Karin to her feet and almost carried her, not toward the passage down which they had come but toward the fire. Through tangled hair she thought she saw in the uncertain firelight a dark crevice in the rock wall next to the blaze.

The dragon’s mouth behind them opened wider and the head darted forward, no longer moving slowly. Roric reached the wall a dozen feet ahead of the dragon’s teeth, threw her into the crevice, and dove in behind her.

“Back! Further back!” he cried hoarsely, but she was already scrambling deeper into the crevice, for the rock here was burning hot and the dragon’s teeth snicked together just behind Roric’s feet.

It tried to work its head into the crevice, hissing horribly. Roric kept pushing her onward. She crawled blindly as the dragon’s head blocked all the light from the firelit room.

Suddenly she cried out, for the stone was gone beneath her hands. She reached back desperately, grabbing Roric’s arm, but could not regain her balance. For a second she teetered, the edge of the dropoff biting into her flesh. Then, pulling him with her, she tumbled down into a pit where no light penetrated.

They landed hard on a sandy floor, and Roric’s sword clattered against the stone wall. They lay still for a moment, gasping for breath, waiting for whatever creature lived in this pit to attack them next. When nothing happened at once, they slowly sat up.

“Are you all right?”

“Are you all right?”

They collapsed into each other’s arms, clinging to each other until the worst of the trembling passed.

“I couldn’t have left you, certainly not to save myself,” Roric said quietly.

She couldn’t answer, her face pressed against his chest.

Above them they could still hear deep, angry rumblings from the dragon, but it did not seem able to follow. “If nothing’s broken,” said Roric after a moment, “let’s follow this passage a little further and see if we can find a way out. Maybe if we go slower we won’t have any more surprises like that one!”

“Roric, please! I can’t crawl through any more dark tunnels. I just can’t!”

“Then I’ll go ahead, and you can wait for me.”

“No, please don’t leave me!” She was sobbing now. This was entirely her fault, from the decision to try to find Valmar to the decision to descend into the firelit room under the rocks in search of the Witch of the Western Cliffs, and if they starved to death here it would only be an appropriate end to their story.

He held her again, rocking her like a child. “I won’t leave you behind if you don’t want,” he murmured into her hair. “But feel how smooth the floor is here. And someone built that fire in the dragon’s den, and I doubt it was the dragon. Don’t you think some of your faeys might have found a way to live close to it?”

At the thought of the faeys she sat up straight, peering about in the blackness in search of the faint green light cast by their lamps. She still saw nothing, and she realized that no faeys she had ever known, either the ones in Hadros’s kingdom or the ones here, had used open fires. But imagining this was a faeys’ burrow gave her courage. She took a deep breath. “Let’s go then,” she said.

Roric went first, crawling with his sword in one hand, feeling his way in the dark. The surface under their knees and hands remained level. “ Someone certainly must live here,” he said over his shoulder.

“Of course someone does,” said a deep voice in front of them.

Karin reached forward to grasp Roric by the shoulder. The voice was good-natured and deeper than the voice of any faey, but with a detached, almost weary note that reminded her oddly of Queen Arane. “Are you-” she began tentatively, addressing the darkness and already knowing the answer, “are you a faey?”

There was a chuckle then before the voice continued. With the echoes, it was impossible to judge distance, but it sounded very close. “I have been called many things, but never that.”

Karin squeezed Roric’s shoulder tighter. It was very strange speaking to someone she could not see, someone who, she told herself, had to be human. “Then who are you?”

“Some call me,” said the voice, “the Witch of the Western Cliffs.”

“We’d like to see you if we could,” said Roric when Karin fell silent.

“Then keep coming,” the voice replied. “You will be able to see me-and I you-by the light of my fire. Though I must say I had thought mortals had more sense than to blunder into a dragon’s den after I set the fire beacon there to warn everyone away!”

Roric crawled on, Karin right behind him. The tunnel curved around a corner, and the dark lightened to the level of dimness. The tunnel opened into a room with a high ceiling. Here again a fire was burning, and something enormous and squat reclined before it.