Page 48 of Homeward for a Spell

Sage swears. “How do we bring down something that blades and arrowheads can’t touch?”

“Watch out, they’re coming in again!”

Araphi presses her back to Sage’s and the two of them raise their seemingly useless weapons as the terrible ravens swoop down, claws extended. This time, talons rake across Araphi’s temple. Hot blood trickles into her eye, half blinding her. The tornado of ice and snow whirls faster, lifting Araphi’s hair, and distantly she feels pain from her wound, but none of that matters because it’s nothing compared to that unearthly screeching…

Suddenly, Remy stands in front of them. He seems unbloodied but deeply shaken nonetheless. Arms outstretched, he shouts something in a quavering voice—a spell? The words aren’t spoken in a language Araphi recognizes, and the wind tears them from his lips before half can reach her ears. A giant bird dives toward him, only to scream as it incinerates in a burst of blinding light, not a bone or a feather left to float to the snow. Through the fog and debris, similar balls of light burst like dandelion heads in the wind.

Then the maelstrom dies, and deep silence fills the grove.

Can Remy cast?

“It wasn’t a spell,” he says, reading Araphi’s stunned expression correctly. “It was…more of a prayer than anything. Not magic. Just soldiers’ last rites, written in the old language of Harrow. I don’t speak it, but I know those words in my bones.”

She’s about to demand a further explanation when Sage wheels Araphi around to examine her, the ranger’s eyes wide and wild. “I’m so sorry,” she mutters. “Are you hurt badly? My weapons were useless, I couldn’t—I panicked.” She’s babbling, oblivious to the blood streaming down her own face from a cut on her cheek.

“Let’s go sit down over here,” Araphi says, taking the ranger’s arm. She leads her to a natural pine-bough seat made from a branch. “Bramble and the others will gather their gear, and we’ll get out of this horrible place.”

Sage’s hands shake as she holds them in her lap. She curls them into fists, more rattled than Araphi could have expected. The birds were terrifying to be sure…but she’s never seen Sage frightened.

“Why did I freeze like that?” the ranger demands. “What kind of party leader am I if I—”

“Sage.” Araphi takes the ranger’s face in her hands, cradling it. Not caring who else in the party sees. “I need you to breathe.”

The ranger hauls in a long, shuddering breath.

“Now do it again. And again.”

Sage complies, each breath a little steadier than the last.

“We’re all okay.” Araphi fights to keep her own voice steady. “We’re a party, and all of us have strengths. Yours include stabbing things that have an actual body, negotiations with recalcitrant villagers, that thing you did in Briarwall with your tongue…” A ghost of a smile from Sage, which makes Araphi’s heart thump in her chest.

There she is. There’s the confident, slightly cocky ranger Araphi met in the garden of a manor house.

“Let’s get moving, then. We have a mysterious, impossible-to-find river to locate before nightfall.”

“We do indeed,” Araphi says, offering the ranger a hand and helping her to her feet.

It’s so good to be needed. To be more than a pretty face. To be part of something larger than everything she’s ever known.

Even if it’s only until the end of this adventure.

17

Sage

Now that the clearing in the pine grove is miles behind them and the panic has ebbed slightly, Sage mostly feels embarrassed. For freezing in the moment, and for whimpering and fussing over Araphi afterward. Even now, she can hear the beating of those rotten wings. A sour taste still coats her tongue, and her heart is clenched like a fist behind her ribs while her pulse hammers in her throat. She can practically feel the warm and sticky slick of blood on her trembling hands. The blood of past foes trickling down the blade of her dagger, of party members’ seeping up between her fingers as she tried to stanch a wound, and her own. Sage presses a palm to her stomach where, beneath layers of fur and leather and linen, the old scar suddenly burns. She doesn’t like to think of it, has perfected the skill of never thinking about it. Yet a flock of birds—infernal though they may have been—sent her tumbling back into the very worst moments of her life, and it’s proving difficult to claw her way out again.

How soft has she become? Have a few admittedly exquisite tumbles with the bard turned her into this fearful creature, terrified of what lies on the path ahead as well as the path behind? What kind of ranger is she?

What kind of leader?

Riding at the front of the line as they wind one by one down a pass through the Kald Mountains no wider than their mounts’ shoulders, she keeps her eyes on the terrain (all the better not to have to look her party members in the eye, most especially Araphi). Ahead, a valley unfolds below the bone-white peaks, the ground hidden beneath spiny treetops. Whatever lies beyond that is veiled by the perpetual seeping layer of gray mist. But between the position of the late afternoon sun, the alignment of the peaks on the horizon, and the heading on whatever compass lies within Sage and seldom misleads her, she knows that they’re on course. Without the mist, they would likely be able to see the twinned paths of the Halhazy and Willowthorn churning downhill. Winding closer and closer together until the Swallow connects them both.

Almost there. Which means that all of this will soon be over, and Sage will be free to go her own way once more.

Free from what, she can’t yet say.

“It wasn’t about you.” The Agent’s voice over her right shoulder startles Sage; she never heard him approach as the path beneath Reaper’s hooves broadened, lost in her thoughts as she was.