Chapter 109: Done

Charolette stepped forward, both hands closing around the hilt of her sword.

She did not hurry. She raised the blade slowly, until the flat of it caught the dull red light, and then the light changed.

Starlight crept along the steel from guard to tip, silver and cold, until the whole sword shone like a sliver of night sky that had been cut free and forged into a weapon. The air around her grew very quiet.

’She is aiming for the head,’ I realized. ’Not the body. The head is where the thing lives.’

The healthy Rorozi crouched. Its calf muscles knotted again, bunching beneath the golden fur, and the grass around its feet flattened under the pressure. I saw the exact moment it decided. It meant to launch itself at her in a single streak, faster than any eye could follow.

It never got the chance.

"Fall," Charolette said, very softly.

The world pressed down.

I felt it even from where I stood, a heavy, invisible hand laid across my shoulders. Dust lifted from the ground in a perfect ring, then sank. Beneath the Rorozi, a faint circle appeared, thin as a thread of silver, drawn in the air an inch above the earth. Inside it, gravity had changed its course.

The beast’s launch collapsed into a stumble. Its legs shook. Its tail dragged. Every motion came as though it were wading through thick mud, each limb lifting slowly and falling slowly, the whole body was pinned to the earth by a weight it could not understand.

"It is slowing," Hazel breathed.

"It will not last," Charolette said.

She was right.

A heartbeat later, the circle flickered. Charolette’s shoulders gave a small, almost invisible tremor, and the silver thread thinned and vanished. The pressure lifted from the air. Her spiritual power had dipped, and the field had gone with it.

The Rorozi felt it at once.

Its eyes flared. The slow, clumsy motion left its body, and its legs coiled with all the stored fury it had gathered during its imprisonment.

It saw the gap. It saw a woman with her power spent, standing within reach, and it lunged.

’No.’

I did not think. My eyes were already locked on its skull, and the thing I wanted was close enough to touch.

’Its last three seconds.’

I reached into them, the way a hand reaches into a stream and plucks out a single stone.

The thought left it.

Mid-motion, the Rorozi’s body stopped being a weapon. The fury drained from its face, and its jaw loosened, and its eyes went round and empty and puzzled. It stood there in the grass, one leg lifted, one clawed hand half raised, wearing the expression of a creature who had walked into a room and forgotten why.

It had forgotten the lunge. It had forgotten the woman. It had forgotten everything it had planned for the last three seconds.

Charolette did not smile. She did not even blink.

She simply stepped inside its reach and drove her sword into its belly.

Shhk!

The blade slid through the thick fur, through the pouch, and out the far side with barely a whisper.

Starlight flared along the steel, and the creature’s body arched, its mouth opening in a soundless gasp. The small head in the pouch jerked, twisting sharply, and a ripple ran down its stalk as it began to rise.

’There. It is trying to hatch again.’

That was the whole trick of the thing. Kill the body, and the head would birth a new one. A cycle with no end, so long as the head lived.

I had been waiting for exactly this.

I focused. My whole attention narrowed to the swollen, rippling stalk, to the bright, terrible power knotted inside it, the secret that made the creature what it was. I felt it pulse against my chest like a living heart.

’Mine.’

I took it.

The ripple on its neck stopped halfway.

The head froze, caught mid-rise, its wide eyes shuddering as it tried to push itself out of the pouch and found that the power it had always relied on was no longer there.

The stalk went limp. The grin fell away.

For the first time, I think the creature understood that it was truly going to die.

A sound escaped it, small and thin and strangely human, and then the starlight in Charolette’s blade reached the heart of it.

The fur went pale.

The glow in its eyes guttered and went out, and the heavy body collapsed against her sword, then slid slowly off it and settled into the grass.

Rorozi was dead.

Silence rolled over the grove.

Nobody moved.

The only sound was the thin whisper of the wind through the bare trees and the tick of cooling flesh. Camila stood frozen with one hand over her mouth.

Hazel lowered her crossbow, her chest rising and falling. Theodore had not blinked once, though I knew exactly what he was thinking.

Charolette pulled her sword free, shook the blood from the blade, and slid it into its scabbard in a single smooth motion. She turned her head and looked at the corpse for a long moment.

Then, without any change in her face, she looked at me.

Only for a second. Only long enough to let me know she had seen something.

She had watched the first Rorozi stand frozen, and she had watched the second die without hatching. She was far too clever to take either as luck.

’She knows something happened. She does not know what.’

And she said nothing.

"Ahh," I said at once, letting my knees wobble, pressing a hand to my chest. "Is it... is it dead? Did we win?"

"We won," Camila said, and burst into delighted laughter, bouncing on her toes. "Charolette, you were amazing!"

"I was adequate," Charolette said.

"You jumped thirty-five feet!"

"Thirty-six," she corrected, with a smile.

Hazel laughed, softly, wonderingly. Theodore let out a long, shuddering breath and leaned on me, the very picture of a frightened boy, though I felt the faint tremor of his shoulders and knew he was fighting a grin.

"I thought I was going to die," he whispered.

"You did not do anything," I whispered back.

"That is how I thought it."

I turned my eyes downward, to the fallen beast, and felt a small, pleasant warmth spread through my chest.

It had also left behind a gift.. I could see that much from Charolette’s face.

I did not let myself look at it too eagerly. A trembling boy named Peter would never stare at a reward like that.

’Now, I have to meet the others.’