2. Silvered Dreams
Blessing dreamt once again of silvered skies and regrets. They hadn’t taken the gray as a warning sign at first. That was their gravest mistake.
After all, it had been storming for days before they arrived at the little town of Meryd. Perseverance made a point of jumping in every puddle he came across. They’d left their horses at the nearest stable so that they wouldn’t be lamed if the larval hydra bit their legs; Blessing had her boot trims tugged as high as they would go, protecting her calves from infant monsters and idle splashes alike. Their veils kept the drizzle at bay.
“Tracking an adult hydra isn’t difficult if you know the signs,” Sister-Dame Guidance reviewed as they forged down the road. “Why so? Percy, can you answer?”
“Magic warps the world,” he replied blithely.
“So it does. And hydra are living embodiments of . . . ?”
Not liking to be outdone, Blessing allowed herself to butt in. “Mirror magic.”
“Reflection magic.”
Fuck. So close. Really, she ought to have gotten that right; it was why one needed weapons that could pierce. A severed hydra head did a huntress no favors.
“A butterscotch for your initiative,” their mentor said eagerly. “However, we’re hunting a larva, and those are incredibly vulnerable. They survive by . . .”
“Stealth,” said Percy.
“Deflecting attention, instead of catching it. It won’t leave nearly as much of a trace as an adult, meaning that our best bet to track it down is . . . ?”
Ah-ha! “By asking the townsfolk where they’ve spotted it or its signs, and then hunting for it in its own hunting grounds. We’ll probably find evidence of it in the river.”
“Its kills are an obvious tell,” Guidance agreed.
Blessing bit her lip briefly, and then asked the sort of question she only trusted her mentor with. “Do you ever get nervous, talking to outsiders?”
“You get used to it, dear.”
“It’s a little nice, meeting new people,” Perce said with a gentle elbow to her side. “Don’t get to do that every day.”
She nodded back, trying to loosen up. Armed women in the secular garnered attention. But whenever they wore their habits, it gathered eyes in a different way, which was sometimes good and sometimes not. “Look at those uppity sister-dames, prancing in their steel-toed boots like the fanciest shod warponies you ever did see . . .”
“Do you want me to take the lead when we get to town?” she whispered to Percy. “Nobody ever addresses you right when we’re in uniform.”
“I know. But it’s not like they always get it right when we’re not.”
“So, should I?”
“I’d like to not hide behind you all the time.”
“Fair enough. I just . . .”
He slung an arm around her shoulder with a long-loving sigh. “Worry too much.” Then he stole a quick peck on the cheek. “But you have a cute pout when you do it, so any complaints I make are for your own sake.”
It took him three giggly minutes to escape the headlock she trapped him in afterward.
After they’d finished tussling, Blessing realized that Guidance had pulled ahead in an almost protective fashion, scanning the town before them. When Blessing began to form another question, she was met with a hushing motion and a foreboding feeling that something had already gone wrong.
Their first body lay just inside an open doorway at the edge of town; an elderly woman, swathed in a shawl that might have been lavender beneath the gray weather. Everything above the shoulders was hidden just inside the house she had collapsed into.
Despite Guidance’s call for him to stay back, Percy rushed ahead to help. Blessing caught up to him soon enough. The woman’s head was . . . gone. What remained of her neck was jagged, as if she were a porcelain doll, and someone had simply snapped a piece off. Curled fragments of her skin and insides dusted the floor. As he beheld it with her, Percy’s curdled disgust and confusion burned into Blessing’s memory.
The two of them turned to Guidance.
Their mentor glanced over the carnage with an unspoken unease. “Our hydra could be older than the missive indicated,” was all that she had to say. “We need to see how bad this is. Follow me, stay silent, and stick close.”
Blessing slipped her hand into Percy’s as they continued on. He gripped back fiercely.
The storm let up as they entered town proper, clouds parting to reveal clear skies. Pebbles clinked underfoot like wet beads.
Somehow, the world only seemed grayer in the sun. It wasn’t the muted and mate gray of a dust mote or a cobweb. An unnatural gleaming sheen edged everything, as if reality itself had become spun of glass, of mirror-folds reflecting upon themselves in an endless echo of light and shadow. Blessing caught scatters of her reflection in every glance, flanked by her mentor and her love.
More shattered corpses lay ahead. Each one’s head had been removed indiscriminately, man or woman, child or parent. Sometimes there was evidence of a struggle – limbs broken off, torsos crushed into hollow heaps, bodies fallen over one another as if to be a shield.
Most of them were so placid, though. Blessing lingered on one stiff in his rocking chair with a cold mug in his hands, as if he hadn’t even bothered to get up when faced with his death.
Guidance searched the ground carefully as she walked — heel-toe, muffling her footsteps. She traced spots where a dozen hairline fractures clouded the glassy dirt. Following the strange tracks, the elder sister-dame hopped a broken fence and peered into the open side of a manger.
After she stood there for a moment, hand over her mouth, her squires peered along with her.
Blessing wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. It reminded her at once of a wispy white flower made transparent in the rain, and an abandoned nest, and the shed gauze of a butterfly chrysalis. Dozens of broken bodies had been dragged under the manger in piles. Teeth marks scraped the porcelain flesh and skin fragments dusted the ground.
“Much older. Much, much older,” Guidance realized, backing away slowly. “We need to leave. Now.” Her voice was so soft, Blessing just barely caught it.
Percy spun around. “What? We’ve finally arrived, and we’re just going to turn tail and—?”
“Perseverance, listen to me. We were prepared for FAR a more optimistic scenario. I’ve trained you well, but the three of us alone will not nearly be enough to take down an adult.” She pressed two fingers to her temple, grimacing. “It’s recently pupated, scales probably not hardened yet, but that guarantees no easy fight. It devoured a whole town without a single escapee to spread news of what happened here. This one is good at its hunt.”
“So are we.”
“You are barely adults yourselves,” she hissed back.
Blessing swallowed back her frustration. “I thought you had confidence in us.”
“Dear, I can’t even have confidence in myself for this.”
The two of them trembled with defiance (and perhaps a little fear) as their mentor reached for Percy’s habit, stubbornly pulling the crown down over his sky-gray eyes. He caught Blessing’s gaze with a nervous smile just before the cloth closed over him.
“Until we leave the influence of its lair, you cannot trust your senses,” Guidance whispered. “You’re going to walk away from here. Hand-in-hand. Do not under any circumstances remove your blindfolds, not until you’re out of the lair; you’ll know it when the grass stops sounding and feeling like glass underfoot. If you hear me calling for backup or telling you to remove your blinds, that is not me. But if I tell you to run, then you run. Understood?”
“But Guide—” Percy began, fiddling with his makeshift blindfold. “What if you really need us to—”
“You will run like the hells.”
Blessing could not remember a single time that Guidance had sworn at them before. They both nodded half-heartedly.
As their mentor adjusted Blessing’s habit next, she accepted it with a sigh. She’d been warned that larval hydra could mimic voices. The blindfold was a new precaution; one that didn’t make her feel one whit safer.
When it fell over her eyes again, Blessing blinked them open to a morning-bright inn room, realizing that she’d forgotten to take off her habit the night before.