No. What?! No.
Dalliance rammed his fists on the door, but nothing more was forthcoming.
The lock was disengaged, but the drop-bar on the other side wasn’t. Dalliance gave up rattling after a moment, turning sick eyes back to the fight by the walls.
They were losing.
A massive, furry paw tipped with five sharp claws as long as a short sword impacted Sterling in the hip. His mail appeared to hold, but it sent the knight’s son crashing sideways to rebound off the fortress wall with a clangor. He'd hit his head in that.
Immaculate darted forward, spear tip seeking, but didn't have the angle to go after its vulnerable head. The bear dipped its face to the side with a startlingly lithe gesture and took Sterling by the leg, biting down and shaking. Immaculate drove his spear into the humped, furry back instead, well past the start of the haft.
The beast roared, releasing Sterling and spinning to swipe at Immaculate.
The boy leapt to the side—unnaturally agile.
[Evade], Dalliance guessed. What a nice skill. There was probably a reason it was of Legendary rarity.
Motion on the wall caught his attention, as one of the few he was sure were safe and didn’t need safeguarding slipped down the side of the wall, landing in a billow of skirts.
Circe, no!
Zenith, overlooked by everyone—Dalliance included, she didn’t wake up in any future he’d seen so the bear hadn’t cared about her—received a quick flash of magic, delivered at a run. Dalliance didn’t know you could do that.
She darted to Sterling’s side, hands reaching out, already glowing, and there was nothing Dalliance could do to stop her.
The bear turned from the fleeing form of Immaculate at the first flash. Its head went down, and it galloped in eerie silence.
The first Circe would have known about it was the brutal paw that crumpled her against the fortress wall.
She struck hard, head and shoulder hitting first, rebounding and rolling to a stop, confused visage facing the sky, her hair a halo around her fallen form.
A great head bent down.
Teeth like daggers closed around gushing blood.
When it pulled away, with a little shake, and her head fell back with a splash on the dirty pavement, there was nothing recognizable left of the cheerful girl who had planted a tree with Dalliance all those months ago.
Dalliance was in full pelt, desperation giving his legs fuel for that last, slim chance.
He shouted the words of power and pointed his right hand, and the Winds answered his call.
Circe’s form tore itself free from the beast, arching up and over the wall, into the shelter of the tower threshold, to safety.
Dalliance’s churning legs slowed not an iota, curving toward the tower door. Zenith shortly behind him. They’d just made the fourth step when the beast’s head and neck jammed themselves through the same entrance, roaring in frustration.
These walls were six feet thick. The doorframe fell around it, but it couldn’t fit up the stairs.
Dalliance sat, trembling and already mourning, and let the ear-ringing roar soothe his spirit. Not this one. Not her.
It stopped, presently, and wandered away. Probably to look at Sterling, he realized numbly. Or look for Immaculate.
There was more he had to do.
When he reached the top of the steps, where she’d been taken, Circe’s face had already been bandaged, though he could still see the white flash of bone.
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He’d thought there was more bone in a nose than that.
He’d also never thought he’d hear Earnest crying.
“It took her face.”
It was Effluvia. Her features were drawn. Haunted. Her eyes weren’t on her friend. They were on the courtyard, where the Ursae had dropped the scrap of flesh in its charge for Dalliance.
Tears ran down her cheeks, but her voice was perfectly level. Her fingers, balled into fists, trembled.
Effluvia began to go down the steps.
Down below, the Ursae nudged Sterling with its paw, the armored boy clanking loudly at the impact.
“Did anyone bring any rope?” Dalliance asked. Earnest handed him a bundle without a word.
The two followed Effluvia down the stairs.
She took off across the courtyard at a fast walk, at first. That’s when she began screaming.
Servility Immaculate came around the corner of the magazine, at a light jog, clearly believing he was intervening.
He didn’t need to.
The bear lowered to four feet, head swinging to track the oncoming girl.
It charged.
Her hair, streaming behind her, stood on end, glowing with a blue corona. A spark kindled in her hands, two eye-searing points of violet pumping with her sprint.
The bear’s feet threw great paw-fulls of dirt and worse behind it, spattering to the ground as it leapt forward, a dozen feet with each bound.
Then hearing stopped, as a newborn voltaic mage dumped her entire mana pool in seconds, the reflection of a reflection of her wrath too bright to bear.
When his vision cleared, Effluvia was standing still over the scrap, and a reeling bear was turning its broad side to her as, steaming from face, chest, and back, it followed the thrown half-brick just falling away from it back to its originator, and, in hot pursuit of a stumbling Immaculate, broke into a run.
She took the face in careful hands, insensible to her surroundings, and carried it before her like a holy relic. She was bawling openly now, head held to the side as though her tears would pollute it.
Like anything could make it dirtier now.
“We have to get her out of here. Sterling too, I think,” said Charity in a low murmur near his ear. “They won’t last the three. Or even one. I don’t care if we have potions.”
Effluvia passed them without acknowledgement, sweeping up the steps in quick strides, leaving teardrops on the steps behind her. They followed.
Circe’s bag was open, a great cavernous thing full of bottles. Effie accepted Earnest’s mutely offered canteen and rinsed her offering, crimson and worse falling free as she performed the ablution with all the sanctity of a pontifex.
Dalliance looked away as, with shaking hands, she pressed it into place against Circe’s ruined skull, sobbing.
[Prediction] flared again.
If she used THAT one, she’d still be breathing in ten minutes.
He retrieved the potion quickly and offered it to the grieving, very dangerous mage. She took it unsteadily, visibly mastered herself for a long moment, and then poured it with much steadier hands, working along the seam where flesh met flesh.
Earnest’s canteen followed it, revealing white-meets-pink in a straight, bloodless line, but it was pale. Wrong.
“She’s not waking up,” Effie whispered. Quick rifling retrieved another potion, ‘Restoration’ by the carefully lettered label in Circe’s own writing.
Charity held Circe’s head back as the vibrant potion spilled down her throat.
Eyes fluttered vaguely. Widened in alarm.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
Effie leaned close. "What? What do you need?"
Circe's lips formed a word. Dalliance didn’t know what it was meant to be. Her hand gestured vaguely towards her bag, but her eyes were already closing.
“NO. YOU STAY HERE WITH ME!” Effie commanded, her throat raw from crying.
Circe didn’t wake, even when Charity nerved herself up to pinch her.
"It's not enough," Effie said, her voice breaking. "I don't—I don't know what else—"
"We have to get her out," Charity said. "Today. Now."
"We'll kill it," Fallowfield said. "We'll stay till you get back. Take the horses and go."
Effie was crying now, holding Circe in her lap, stroking her hair away from the seam where her face had been rent. "We'll get you back," she whispered. "We'll get you back."
Charity marched forward and took Dalliance by the arm, dragging him down the steps.
“What’s going to fix it?!” she demanded, asking the instant she had him away from Fallowfield.
“We can’t fix it,” he said. “She’s unconscious in every future I can see. . . .”
“Then we leave. Now,” Effluvia said, her voice cutting in, hard as diamond. “Make it happen. I don’t care anymore. Burn everything. Just do it.”
He nodded slowly.
There might be a way.
I hate...