
around her. He leaped backward, up to his feet, sword held before him. His
helmet he slapped down, and again when it would not settle right around his
eyes, and then, with an angry grunt, he wrenched it off and flung it to one side
so that, finally, his face was exposed—proud and handsome in the Quman way.
Ugly red welts bloomed on the woman's bronze-dark skin. Blood welled
from the cuts and snaked down in vermilion beads to lodge in the waistband of
her skirt.
They faced off, each wounded, each warrior now. In this way they
measured each the other: the Quman warrior made fearsome by the glint of the
griffin feathers bound into the wings at his back—only a man who had killed a
griffin could wear such wings; and the foreign woman, not of human breed or
birthing, with her bronze cast of skin and hair, her own blood seeping unheeded
down her belly. Her gaze on her opponent was as unyielding as the stone behind
Zacharias' back.
Bulkezu sprang forward, batting at the spear with his sword and closing the
distance between them. Zacharias gasped aloud. But her spear circled around
Bulkezu's blow, and as she stepped aside, she caught him with the haft, a strike
behind his knee. She was neither frail nor slender; the force of her blow dropped
him to his knees, but he sat down hard, locking the haft beneath him, and
lashed out with his sword. She leaped back, abandoning the spear. But as he
rose to pursue her, the spear
moved.
Like a serpent come to life, it twined
around his legs. He fell, catching himself on his hands, but where his sword
struck earth, it sank into the dirt as if hidden claws dragged it down into the
depths. No matter how hard he scrabbled, he could not grab it.
She raised her arms again, chest naked now except for a single strand of
gold that curved along the swell of a breast. The shaking resumed, more violent
than before. The great lintel stones rocked and teetered and began to slide.
Wind battered Zacharias to his knees. With his dagger Bulkezu hacked at the
magicked spear wound around his legs, but to no avail. With each cut it merely
grew spurs and flourishes, and these spurs sprouted roots that embedded
themselves into the ground until its many-limbed net pinned his calves to the dirt
and twined up his arms. In frustration he threw his dagger at her. With her arms
outstretched and blood trickling down her breasts to pool in the folds of her skirt,
she merely stared.
But the dagger slowed—or was that a trick of the haze and the trembling
earth? As the shaking subsided, the dagger froze, suspended in the air.
Impossible. Zacharias staggered up to his feet, leaning on the stone for
strength.
What was she?
"Damn you, witch, what do you want?" cried Bulkezu, but she did not
reply; she did not appear to understand him, and neither did she appear to care.
In the seething fog beyond the stone circle, riders still quested back and forth
and around the ring of stones for some way to get inside.
Bulkezu struggled on the ground but could not free himself from the
rootlike tangle that bound him hand and foot. His sword had vanished into the