Enshadowed

The fuse of fury he’d lit within her grew shorter and shorter with each of her rebounded attacks. He was making fun of her, she thought. He was doing this on purpose to mock her, trying to make her feel weak and stupid.

Well, she wasn’t. She had made it this far, hadn’t she?

Isobel continued her onslaught, but he repelled her blows one after the other, and their swords continued to clank and clack as they wound their way around the foyer.

He had yet to attack her in return, but she knew better than to think it wasn’t coming.

Already losing her breath, Isobel paused and scampered, out of weapon’s reach.

Over his shoulder, she caught sight of the painting with the ship just in time to watch the black-water jaws of the ocean open and overtake the battered and ragtag Grampus, upending the vessel.

When her eyes returned to Reynolds, though, it was too late to sidestep or use her sword to divert the swing of his own cutlass, the tip of which caught her left shoulder, splitting the skin there in a deep gash.

Isobel hissed, the searing pain of the wound too sharp to elicit a scream.

She raised her free hand to the gash, her fingers coming away scarlet with her blood.

“Your distractions cost you,” he said.

Isobel gritted her teeth and, charging forward, swiped at him again. He skittered back, arms spread wide as he narrowly avoided her strike, which slashed across his midsection, slicing a horizontal slit in his waistcoat.

They paused to look at each other, their eyes meeting in mirrored expressions of shock.

“Again,” he said, and moved on her, slashing this way and that, slinging blow after blow, forcing her back from him and toward the front door.

Isobel met each of his strokes with a block and a parry, her body moving before she could tell it when or where.

Sword fighting. She was actually sword fighting.

The unexplained ability, now seemingly inherent, reminded Isobel of how she had once shared a dance with Pinfeathers at the masquerade ball without knowing how. What had the Noc told her then?

Just let go.

Then she remembered something Reynolds had once told her after pulling her from the sunken grave where the Red Death had nearly buried her alive.

That grave, Reynolds had said, you could have flown out.

If that was possible in this world, then so was this.

Isobel raised her sword and rushed him, the heat of her own blood searing her free arm as it ran down to her wrist, where she could feel it soaking into the ribbon. He blocked her, but she whirled, slashing low and quick to nick his leg, tearing the fabric of his trousers just over the knee.

He didn’t bleed, but she hadn’t expected him to. What had been more rewarding was the look of surprise and momentary confusion that came over his stoic face. For once, she’d actually cracked the Rubik’s Cube code of his fortitude and had elicited a response. Flashing a dark smile, she went after him again. Once more, their swords traded back and forth, clanking loudly, and this time, she was the one forcing him back, driving him through the narrow hall she knew opened into the kitchen.

Once they were through the narrow bottleneck squeeze of the hallway, though, Isobel paused in her onslaught, startled and bewildered to find that they were not in a kitchen at all but outside, on a long and wide stone balcony.

Fierce winds gusted around them, coming first from one direction and then another, whipping Isobel’s hair into a frenzy, tugging the skirts of her black dress this way and that. The pink ribbon fluttered in her peripheral vision.

To her left, a line of stone faces carved into the side of the house watched the storm with indifferent eyes. Green men, Isobel thought, remembering them from the day she had seen the protector gargoyles on the facades of the houses in Varen’s neighborhood.

On her other side, a row of stone columns supported the floor above.

Through them, she saw a streak of lightning slice the sky in two, the ultraviolet spear of light illuminating the crooked line of black rock cliffs below that overlooked a white and rolling sea.

And there, standing on the brink of the farthest bluff . . .

“Varen!” Isobel shouted.

Forgetting her fight with Reynolds, Isobel lowered her sword and rushed to the balcony’s edge.

“Var—!”

Her cry was cut short by Reynolds, who had caught her from behind. Hooking her around the waist with one strong arm, he held the blade of his sword to her throat with the other.

“I told you that you cannot reach him this way,” he hissed in her ear. Isobel wrenched her elbow up and then jammed it into his stomach. He took the blow with a grunt but did not release her.