The Killing Shape

The lynx came low.

The younger huntress moved with it, leaving Maeril breathless in the spring channel and coming around from Rishi’s right with her fighting staff. The interruption he had put into her body should have kept one knee unreliable and one shoulder slow. Neither showed. She kept her eyes below the dark shapes at his shoulders and watched his hands.

The lynx’s pale eyes flicked toward her, timing their convergence with the same trained agreement the sisters had shown before the leader took animal shape.

Rishi kept the Staff of Warding across his body. Behind him, thorned stems enclosed Aestra and the dryad, every dark pulse of sap tightening the living cage. He held the only open line between the lynx and that bloom.

One breath, Rishi told himself. I only need to break their timing.

The younger huntress’s first step found the raised root that had taken Maeril’s footing. Her second drove her over it. She shortened her grip for a strike across Rishi’s hands.

The lynx launched from the front.

Two lines.

The staff descending from Rishi’s right. Tawny weight crossing low toward his left hip. Thorns behind his heel. A root ridge beneath the outer edge of his forward foot. Maeril beyond both attackers, still dragging air into a body that would not give her enough.

Rishi moved before either strike completed, giving ground at the angle they needed him to hold.

The younger huntress’s staff met his. He turned his wrists and let the blow slide down the length of his guard, carrying her hands farther across her body. His left heel found the root behind him.

His right hand left the staff for one instant. Two fingers touched the inside of her forward arm, where the hard line of muscle narrowed toward the elbow. His palm followed beneath her lowest rib. He knew that place as a healer; he used it now to make the body lie to itself.

Her next breath arrived as pain. The hand above it lost its certainty. Her forward leg tried to turn while the hip refused, and the ground tilted under a woman whose balance had not moved.

Rishi caught her upper arm with his shoulder and continued her uncontrolled motion across him. She stumbled into the space his body had left, directly into the lynx’s path.

Its forequarters struck her across the thighs. Her staff drove into the root and bowed. She used it to keep from falling, but the planted end fixed her while the collision turned the rest of her body sideways.

One of the lynx’s forepaws hit the ground beyond her. The other struck her staff instead of Rishi’s ribs. Claws tore splinters from the wood.

The younger woman went to one knee. The lynx twisted in the air to keep its full weight from landing on her, breaking the line of its attack.

Rishi stepped past both of them. A thorn caught the back of his calf, opening pain along the muscle. He planted the staff, tore free, and turned before the lynx could recover.

The whole reversal had taken less than one breath. It cost him most of the next.

The younger huntress rose with one hand on the damaged staff. Her free hand touched the root, then left it. She shook her head once as if water had entered her ears. Her gaze passed to one side of Rishi, then the other, before settling on him.

She lifted the staff anyway.

Inside the thorns, Aestra straightened with the dryad. One body pulled away from the duskwood. The other could not. Their joined hands rose between them, flesh against bark, and the protective stems opened just far enough for Aestra’s face.

“Stop.”

The word came in her voice, then again beneath it as leaf-rustle, root-creak, and the low sound of strained wood moving inside the central tree.

“Be gentle.”

At the call, the younger huntress’s staff lowered a hand’s breadth.

Her fingers whitened around the wood as she fought the motion. Confusion passed across her face, followed by anger at the intrusion and something more dangerous than either: recognition.

For one breath, she did not complete the harm her body had prepared.

The lynx turned its head toward the thorned bloom.

Pale animal eyes moved from Aestra and the dryad to the younger sister’s lowered staff, then to the cloaked woman behind her guards.

Fury entered the lynx’s face without erasing intelligence.

The ears flattened. The shoulders lowered. A growl moved through the broad chest without leaving it.

She means to kill me, Rishi thought.

Beyond the lynx, Maeril had gained one knee but still could not stand. Behind Rishi, Aestra’s thorns stayed closed. The clearing narrowed to him and the lynx.

He placed his right foot behind the root ridge and set the Staff of Warding diagonally across his center.

He kept the lynx before him and the line to the thorns closed, waiting for the younger huntress to choose for herself again.

Breathe, Maeril, he pleaded silently. Please.

Rishi read the lynx’s weight.

More over the hind legs than the fore. Left shoulder lowered first. Head angled toward his throat, though the eyes held lower. It would use the raised root between them or clear it.

He could answer either.

The lynx moved. Rishi’s back foot pressed down, and the moss beneath it gave too far.

A soft pocket hidden beside the root compressed under his heel, taking the firm resistance his turn required. At the same instant, the wounded root lifted beneath his outer foot. Only the width of two fingers. Enough to change the line from ankle to hip.

Rishi adjusted. His balance held, but his timing narrowed.

The lynx came high, one forepaw opening toward his face, the other following at his shoulder. Its full tawny body rose behind the threat, large enough that if he yielded backward, it would drive through him into the thorns.

Rishi raised the staff. His guard met the first foreleg above him. Wood took the weight and turned the claws away from his eyes. The defense was true; staff and arms held.

The lynx was no longer there.

Its body folded beneath the contact with terrifying control. The high attack vanished into a turn. Shoulders dropped below Rishi’s hands. Hind paws struck the root and drove the animal low inside his guard.

Rishi pulled the staff down. A thorned runner caught its lower end, delaying it for less than a heartbeat.

The lynx opened its mouth beneath his arms.

Thunder struck him from inside the guard.

The sound did not cross the clearing. It began against his chest.

His teeth met. His ears ceased to know direction. Pressure drove through his ribs and emptied his lungs before the body understood that breath had been taken. Both hands remained on the staff, but their distance from him changed. His left foot found the root and could not tell whether it was level.

He saw the claws rise and forced the staff down between them. The upper end struck one foreleg and turned it. One set of claws cut across his robes and passed wide.

The other went low.

Rishi’s body tried to leave the line.

The soft ground kept his heel. The lifted root stopped his turn. Thunder held the missing fraction between seeing and moving.

The lynx’s claws entered below his navel.

They tore across his lower abdomen and came away red.

For one instant, Rishi remained standing with both hands on the Staff of Warding, holding the last guard he had managed to make.

Then his legs stopped carrying him.

He fell onto the root behind his heels and rolled from it to the Grove floor. His right hip struck first. His shoulder followed. The staff remained caught in his hands until the impact opened his left fingers.

It landed lengthwise along his left side, the upper end beside his shoulder and the lower beyond his knee. No part of it crossed the wound.

Rishi’s forearms folded over his abdomen. Blood pressed hot between them.

The darkness drew inward. For a moment it clung along his shoulders; then the last ragged edges vanished, leaving a man on the ground with his hands over a wound he could not close.

Every moving thing in the clearing stopped.

Maeril got one breath.

It hurt beneath her left ribs. It caught halfway down and left black flecks moving across her sight.

It was enough to see Rishi fall.

The younger huntress stood between Maeril and the center of the clearing with her fighting staff lowered. The lynx landed beyond Rishi and did not strike again. Its red claws entered the soil.

The thorns around Aestra held motionless. The dryad’s head turned toward Rishi. The two guards by the gate-like roots kept their positions, but both looked at the body on the ground instead of the threats they had been watching. The wiry man’s fingers pressed into the bark.

The cloaked woman did not move.

No, Maeril thought. This cannot be happening.

She pushed up from the spring channel. Her first foot slipped on the wet stone. Her next breath failed, and she went down on both hands.

Rishi moved beyond the root.

His knees drew once toward his body. His right forearm pressed harder across his lower abdomen. His left slipped from the wound and reached toward the staff. His mouth opened around an attempt at air that never reached his chest.

Maeril crawled.

The younger huntress stepped out of her way.

Maeril did not look at her. She dragged one knee across the root ridge, caught herself when the ground tipped, and reached Rishi from his right side.

The Staff of Warding lay along his left side. His reaching hand found its upper end, and one finger rested against the worked wood.

Maeril dropped beside his right shoulder.

“No.”

Rishi looked at her.

His eyes knew her. That made everything worse.

His right forearm was trying to hold him closed. It shook with the force of it. Blood escaped beneath it and moved into the leaf-mould under his robes.

Maeril put one hand over his right forearm without lifting it from the wound.

“Stay.”

He tried to breathe.

Nothing entered.

“Stay.”

She pressed her other palm to his chest and reached for the living word she had learned outside books and straight lines. It began in breath, green growth, and the body’s remembered insistence on mending. Maeril forced air beneath her injured ribs.

Warmth gathered under her palm. A fine green light showed between her fingers. She felt the healing take shape against his chest, each part joining the next. It held.

Across from her, the lynx went still. The younger huntress stared at Maeril’s hand. Through the unmoving thorns, Aestra watched with the dryad’s hand clasped in hers.

Maeril spoke the word into Rishi.

Pressure bent the little working sideways beneath her palm. One edge lifted between her fingers while the rest dragged flat against his chest. Maeril held the center.

The green light twisted. She felt its joins stretching, each one drawing thin under the opposing strain. Gaps opened between them. Her hand stayed flat against Rishi’s chest as the edges tore away.

The last connection parted beneath her palm. Green light lifted between her fingers in separate, trembling pieces. The warmth went with it.

Moisture gleamed along a line beside her wrist and drew upward. Maeril raised her face without lifting either hand. The line vanished from sight, then showed again between the branches. Another crossed it above the clearing and pulled taut.

The green pieces caught across those lines. Each crossing pulled them longer and thinner, peeling their edges into threads. The threads slipped apart overhead.

The younger huntress followed them with her eyes, her face tilted toward the canopy. The lynx raised its head. By the gate, both guards were looking up.

One green strand snapped. The others drew tight and shattered above them.

A broken syllable came back from deep inside the duskwood in Maeril’s own voice, dragged low enough to shake the root beneath her knees. Another cut across it from the spring, thin and piercing. Water struck the basin’s rim. At the gate, the wiry guard snatched his fingers from the bark as the last piece of her word cracked through the clearing.

The green sparks went grey and vanished in the air.

Maeril looked down. Her hand was still pressed to Rishi’s chest, where the warmth had been.

Blood seeped from beneath Rishi’s forearm and crept between Maeril’s other fingers.

She shook her head.

Rishi was looking at her, his mouth open around the breath he could not draw.

Tears spilled before she could blink them back. His face blurred. She bent closer, trying to keep him clear, and a sob caught beneath her bruised ribs so hard that she folded over their joined hands.

“Rish. Please stay with me.”

Her voice broke on his name. She tried to draw another breath and could not get past the sob. One hand stayed over his forearm. The other pressed against his chest. Tears fell onto his robe.

Rishi’s next breath entered as a wet thread.

Maeril lowered herself until her face filled what remained of his sight. Tears fell onto his cheek. She tried to steady her voice for him.

“I am here.”

His right forearm shifted beneath her hand, pressing once against her palm. She kept it against the wound. His left fingers remained against the staff.

The small pressure undid her. She sobbed against the breath she was trying to take, keeping her face close to his. He was still there. She could feel him answering her, and she could not keep him.

His body tried again for air. His chest rose a fraction and stopped.

Maeril lifted her other hand from his chest to the pulse at his throat. Her fingers shifted, searching, and would not stop shaking. Her wrist rested beside his mouth.

“I am here,” she said again, crying through the words.

Rishi looked at her as long as he could.

His last breath left against her wrist.

The next one did not come.