The gatehouse was a fortress unto itself, an oblong pierced through with an entry tunnel, with matching black metal portcullises front and back. In its day, there would have been a floor through which trapdoors would open, and items could be dropped into the entry corridor: murder holes.

  The murder holes were gone. The floor was gone. The two first-story storage areas, barracks, perhaps, or armories; whatever they had been, once accessible from the second-story winch room, were gone. The armor and weapons that had once been here were long since looted. Even the roof was gone.

  Nevertheless, the stone blocks that protruded from the wall some eight inches or so, which had once anchored the beams holding up the floor, remained. So did the winch, set in stone, and the chains which fed from it to the portcullises, strung taut over the gap, links tinkling eerily in the wind.

  Sterling and Effluvia agreed that crossing from those anchor stones to get to the entryway right above the winches, where a child could step on the chain and climb on, should prevent a bear from accessing it at all.

  And so the ladder was set, quietly.

  They scrambled up the exterior wall, using their ladder, and into the gatehouse. With their backs against the rough stonework, they stepped gingerly across on the protruding anchor stones, the steady wind and its fume eyewatering as they maneuvered above the drop.

  Effluvia set up the entrance to the portable habitat against the wall above the entry portcullis, and one by one, they all snuck inside.

  The magical habitat was as plain as anything Dalliance had ever seen. They appeared to be on the inside of a large wooden crate. As soon as the scroll activated, a narrow doorway, narrow enough that Sterling had to turn his shoulders to enter, had manifested itself, connecting their spot high on the gatehouse wall to the interior of the crate.

  Viewed from the inside, he could tell the wall was also made of rough wooden planks, with a door made of wood and a door bar. Once that had been closed and secured, and they were as safe as they were going to be this close to a monster, they began to revise their plan.

  “It would make me feel better,” Sterling complained, “if we could pull up the portcullis. We could trap it in there, down there under us, and just shoot it full of arrows and lightning. Sleep, if we have to, and do it again in the morning until it’s dead.”

  This was a very optimistic plan. Everyone agreed, but nobody thought it would work.

  Woebegone had, in fact, attempted to raise the portcullis just to see. But despite being visibly unmarred by rust or corrosion, the black metal of the winch had resisted moving even the smallest fraction.

  “They’re either very heavy,” he concluded, “or there’s some sort of lock preventing them from going back up. I looked. I couldn’t find it.”

  “It’s probably better to keep this as a last resort, a hideaway sort of thing,” Dalliance suggested. “We’re not going to be able to get in and out quickly, but we’re safer here than on the wagon.”

  They'd left the wagon a mile up the road. Dalliance had regretted the necessity of trekking that far and even recognized the possible futility, given the massive range in which bears hunt. But that was as close a compromise as they could afford between keeping the horses safe from the bear and keeping the wagon where it might save their lives.

  “We’re all agreed then?” Effluvia asked. “We’re doing this the slow way.”

  What they were not going to do, the group had agreed, was run in, weapons akimbo, and get eaten. They had three days. If they had the supplies to perhaps survive for three days, should it come to it, they were going to make it count.

  When they saw it, they would herd it, harry it, and wear it down. In the end, it was just flesh and blood. If they could keep themselves safe in the meantime, they could attack it from the wall tops where it couldn’t get to them. Effluvia had come up with a good plan. And it wasn’t Effluvia who screwed it up.

  The air was stuffy inside the habitat. When they opened the door, the rain was pattering down in little, saucer-sized splashes with every drop—not a heavy deluge, nothing unpleasant, but enough to promise a future that was wet. The wind, at least, was pleasantly warm, even if it did smell. The whole castle seemed suffused with decay.

  Nobody relished exploring it, but it had to be done, so in the end, they drew lots.

  Dalliance was tempted to predict which one he should draw, but knew Effluvia and Earnest, not to mention Charity, would call him out. Could, anyway. Besides, he was probably the best choice.

  The job of scouting fell to Dalliance and Lackey, both of them with spears, Dalliance with a sling and a rock tucked in his belt for all the good it might do against a bear. Dalliance would go left, and Woebegone would go right. Behind them, Servility and Knot, cautiously, just in case something happened to them.

  The wall top was made of paving stones about two feet on a side, mortared in with a mixture which had turned to sand and dust, at least in the light rain. It was a thin, runny, gray muck that skidded grittily under his feet as he shuffled along, [Prediction] running as he scanned for future threats.

  The fortress had been built along the lines of a triangle, with two larger towers complementing the gatehouse tower. Each of them was now so much fallen stone, one canted as though the earth beneath it had shifted, and on the other, the roof lying completely adjacent to the tower, its shingles crumpled inward. The rubble had piled into ramps, which Dalliance glared at with mistrust. The back walls were not safe; it could get up there.

  But the front walls should be. They'd maintained that the doors for access from the tower to the wall top should be small, and a bear ought not fit: and they'd been right. The doors were every bit as narrow as they'd hoped they'd be, and scrambling up to the walltop from the courtyard looked impossible: the climb would be twelve to twenty feet, a massive undertaking for a creature that large.

  In the center of the triangular fortress sagged the remains of the keep, a large square structure. Its back wall had folded forward at some point, resting upon the still-standing other three much like a lean-to. This, they had identified as the likely lair from the hilltop a mile hence, where they had left the wagon. It looked the part.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Dalliance shuffled closer. The tower he had been assigned, the leftmost, had the most height remaining to it—perhaps a full forty feet—but looked jagged. Sections of the wall had clearly come loose like teeth, falling to scatter inside and out. It stank. The moss was rank with moisture. Down in the courtyard, he could see the source of the scent: a charnel house of bones and bits of armor from those who had come before.

  So many, he thought cheerlessly. It was not a comforting thought.

  The smell was stronger, now, a sickly-sweet musk that made his gorge rise, forcing him to pause, fist to his mouth, lest he throw up. It just . . . left them there to rot. He made an effort not to think about it.

  Within the hollow tower, he found his first bit of really good news. The stairs had not been wood. Instead, wedge-shaped sections, like pie slices, were stacked in a spiral running up the inside of the tower.

  If he squinted at it long enough, he could picture a bear squeezing up the spiral along those steps, but it'd have to be a small bear.

  Dalliance scampered up the steps, fully expecting the top to be abandoned. And in this, he was proven correct. The steps ended abruptly. A yawning drop off to his left, forty feet to the unwholesome surface of the inner courtyard. He could now see a bit of deer antler, and elsewhere the familiar, blank gaze of a cow skull.

  Just how big is this thing? he wondered.

  The unfamiliar hug of ring mail around his chest reminded him that he wasn’t alone in this. Looking back, he could see Sterling, Effie, and the others taking the wall top with their own prescribed activities.

  He saw Effluvia’s nose wrinkle as she took in the death stench, and then her hair billowed like a banner as the winds changed.

  And he got his first vision of it.

  Fast as a horse, twice as broad, with a head the size of a half-barrel. They had been right, for all the good it was going to do. It wouldn’t fit up the stairs or through the wall-top doorways. But he had been wrong about whether it could get on the wall top at all.

  With a leap that seemed to completely defy the bulk of it, a dingy-brown, furred form landed midway up the wall's surface, its great claws scrabbling and scratching for a hold. Mortar, brick, and paving stone alike were sent flying as its iron-hard gouges tore chips from the granite, and the beast muscled itself up atop the wall.

  It was going to take Effluvia. It was going to bite her. She was going to die.

  He screamed out a warning as the rain began to fall in deafening sheets, hiding the world behind walls of uniform, flickering gray. The thunder roared overhead. Lightning beat in a pulsing flash, and he could see the girls duck completely into the gatehouse. From his angle, he could even see into it through the cutaway provided by the absent roof. They were making their way to the shelter, but could only go single file. Knot would be the last one left.

  Meanwhile, in the courtyard, Immaculate—how he had gotten there, Dalliance didn’t know—was running for the base of his own tower. And on the opposite wall top, Woebegone’s lean figure approached the gatehouse from the other direction, freezing upon sight of the bear.

  Effluvia was safe. She had been warned. Now it would be Knot who died first.

  Dalliance drew back an arrow and shot, the cloud of probabilities guiding a missile he could scarcely see through the driving rain. It stuck in shaggy fur and was ignored.

  Knot did not have time. The bear shoved its way through a doorway it couldn't fit through by main strength. When it was done, there was no doorway; the adjacent wall simply collapsed into the room. Knot jumped into empty space, grabbing the length of chain suspended there, running from the winch to the portcullis. He hung, a dozen feet off the ground, and began to arm-over-arm himself up the chain toward the winches, from which he could perhaps step and reach the door to safety.

  The bear charged across the gap onto the wall top, leaping to the entryway to the space between the portcullises. It sniffed, raising its nose. Dalliance bounced an arrow off its ear. It roared, so perhaps it had done more than bounce. But then it dropped to all fours, head lowered, and jumped down, out of sight.

  Dalliance couldn’t quite make out what happened to Knot. He heard the boy’s scream and saw the jaws—red and clamped and tugging—and then the boy was gone from his vision. But the screaming didn’t stop.

  There was the strobing of lightning, and then, finally, it flashed argent fire as Sterling’s sword did its work on the bear, now penned in exactly where Sterling had wanted it in the first place. The plan was working.

  The portcullis exploded with a ringing clatter of metal on metal, the flaming bulk of the bear charging through in its center, flames spreading across the rain-wet courtyard as it went, the spellfire burning on water.

  It vanished into the keep.

  It would be back.

  And they were not so safe as they had let themselves pretend.

  Dalliance sat down at the edge of the stairs as the rain fell on him. Without the benefit of the arc lighting provided by Effluvia’s spell, the final resting place of Sensibly Knot was just a hole in the darkness, one black spot among many, the flickering silver fire still lighting the night briefly in the aftermath of the Ursae's flight.

  The afterimages of the lightning played over the velvet night as he looked around. Anything could be happening in the future, and he wouldn’t know because he couldn’t see.

  Servility crested the top of the steps above him, chain mail jingling audibly as he came close enough to see. “Dalliance,” he said, putting a firm hand on his shoulder, “It’s good to see you. Glad you’re in one piece.” He sat himself down beside Dalliance, legs dangling. “Where is it?” he asked, his voice low.

  “Back inside. It . . . Knot's gone,” Dalliance said.

  “I'm sorry.” Servility was being reasonable. In the moment, this made Dalliance angry.

  “This isn’t fair,” Dalliance argued. “It’s not fair. How can they possibly expect us to kill that thing?”

  Immaculate nodded seriously, his hair curled by the humidity into ringlets that bobbed as he moved his head. “Mother tells me,” he said quietly, “the Magisters have forgotten what it was like to be human, or they wouldn’t do this to us.”

  Dalliance nodded. It was as good a guess as any.

  The rain was a thick sheet, a drumming on stone and skin, but at least the air smelled a bit better.

  “Sterling’s dad told me,” said Servility, “the trouble is, we killed the crow. So the auditor had to find something slightly harder. If we’d failed to kill the crow, it probably would’ve killed us. But if it hadn’t quite . . . then the next fight would’ve been easier. Not that it's supposed to be this dangerous to start with.”

  Dalliance had been wondering. "Really."

  “Definitely not. Mom told me about hers. They had to kill rats.”

  Dalliance absorbed this information.

  And the two boys sat there, staring into the darkness, in the rain.