The tiger dissolved again.
The vapor rushed straight across Owen’s path and reformed at an angle he hadn’t expected, jaws open. Owen had to abandon his attack completely and twist away to defend himself.
Rrrraaagh!
Garrick used the opening the tiger had made for him. The axe came around at Owen, and it would have taken him in half if Hugh hadn’t recovered just in time to throw his shoulder into Owen and knock them both out of its path.
Thud!
Owen hit the ground and rolled to his feet. His ribs howled.
He had thought Garrick was exposed. He had been wrong. The tiger wasn’t only Agnes’s opponent. Garrick had trained it to protect him, and it came the moment he called.
Then Agnes was there.
She came across the clearing after the tiger before it could settle beside its master, her wounded shoulder dark with blood, and attacked it hard enough to drag its attention back to her. The tiger turned on her, and the two of them went back toward the open ground between the tents.
After that, every time Owen glanced her way, the fight looked worse.
The tiger mixed everything together: charges, heavy swipes of its claws, and those sudden dissolves into vapor, slipping out from under her attacks and reforming somewhere dangerous. Owen saw it catch her across the side.
"Ngh—!"
Agnes stayed on her feet, but her breathing had gone heavy enough for him to hear it from across the fire.
Watching it, Owen began to understand what made the tiger so dangerous. It wasn’t only fast. It could escape an attack that was already committed, move while it was still vapor, and come back to its body whenever it needed to strike or defend. Some part of him was fascinated by it.
He didn’t have time to think about that. Garrick was coming at him again.
Garrick tried to bury them both. Ice thickened over the axe until every swing came in heavy and jagged with it, and between swings he slammed the blade into the ground and sent frost racing across the earth after their feet.
Crrrk!
Hugh found another opening and went for it. Garrick brought the axe up, and dense ice gathered around it in an instant, thick enough to take Hugh’s blow like a wall.
CLANG!
It protected him, but it tied up his axe. Owen was already moving around to the other side.
"Wraith!" Garrick bellowed again.
This time, Agnes didn’t let the tiger go uncontested. When it broke away from her and streamed toward its master as vapor, she went after it. The tiger reformed beside Garrick to swat at Hugh, solid for a moment, and Agnes closed in and drove her sword deep into its flank.
RRRAAAGH!
The tiger whipped around on her, and Owen and Hugh had Garrick to themselves again.
The wounded tiger went at Agnes with a new kind of fury. She was badly hurt already, and Owen could see it getting harder for her to stay on her feet. A heavy swipe drove her back several steps. The tiger dissolved at once and reappeared at her flank, jaws wide.
Agnes didn’t try to cut the vapor. Owen saw her stop trying altogether. She kept her sword where it needed to be for the moment the tiger had to become solid to bite.
It caught her across the arm, a glancing wound. Then it reformed fully to sink its teeth in, and she drove her blade into it as deep as it would go.
The tiger recoiled, but it didn’t fall. It came at her one last time, desperately, and Agnes stood her ground through it. Then she struck again.
Shhk!
The tiger collapsed onto the ground with a heavy thud, its white fur soaked with blood. It didn’t get up.
Agnes pulled her sword free. She swayed. Her wounded arm was trembling, and blood was still spreading through her uniform.
Garrick had seen it.
"Wraith?" His voice cracked across the clearing. "Wraith!"
The tiger didn’t move.
Garrick’s good eye went to Agnes, and whatever confidence he had left turned into something ugly.
"I’m going to kill these two," he said, low and shaking. "And then I’m going to take my time with you. You’ll beg me to let you die."
He came at Owen and Hugh harder than ever. The ice on his axe thickened until it was almost twice its size, and he swung with everything he had, trying to smash through their defenses instead of working them apart the way he had with the tiger at his side. The blows were still terrifying. But he was overcommitting now. The control that had made him so hard to fight was slipping.
Then Agnes came limping across the clearing toward them.
She was badly hurt, but she wasn’t going to stand back while Garrick threatened her and went after Owen. She took her place on Garrick’s other side, and suddenly it was three against one.
Owen and Hugh both saw it at the same time. Garrick had lost the thing that had been protecting him.
Hugh pressed him from one side, and Agnes threatened him from the other. Garrick had to split his attention between them. He threw up his wall of ice against Hugh, and Owen changed his sword and came in from a new angle, forcing him to adjust again. Every time he committed the axe against one of them, the other two were there.
Hugh hooked his footing and knocked him off balance. Agnes forced him to cover his open side, wounded as she was. Owen slipped inside the axe’s reach.
Garrick tried one last heavy swing.
Owen stepped out of its path. Steel spread across his longsword, and fire roared along it.
Whoosh!
He drove it into Garrick.
Shhk!
The big man stood there for a moment, his one good eye wide. Then the axe fell from his hands, and he went down.
For the first time since the fight began, Owen could actually look at the clearing.
The campfire was still burning among overturned crates, broken weapons and bodies. The ice Garrick had spread across the ground was already starting to melt, running into the dirt and the blood. Around the edges of the camp, the last of the bandits had either been subdued or were being run down and secured by the Ferrers soldiers, who were regrouping now as Hugh called out to them.
Owen dismissed his sword. His ribs hurt every time he breathed, and the cut along his side burned.
He turned to the other two. Hugh’s forearm was bleeding where the axe had driven his own sword into it. Agnes was far worse. Her uniform was soaked with blood around her shoulder and her side, and she was having trouble keeping her balance.
"Agnes," Owen said. "Sit down."
"I’m all right, Young Master."
"You’re not. You’re bleeding through your uniform."
She looked down at herself, as though noticing for the first time how bad it looked. "It looks worse than it is."
"Then it won’t take long to treat." Owen turned. "Get someone over here to see to her. Now."
One of the soldiers hurried over with bandages. Agnes didn’t argue any further, which told Owen more than anything she had said.
"I shouldn’t have let you take that thing on your own," he said quietly.
"You didn’t send me, Young Master. I asked."
"And I agreed."
Agnes looked at him for a moment, then let the soldier start on her shoulder.
Hugh had already started organizing the soldiers. They secured the prisoners, gathered up the stolen goods and accounted for everyone, wounded and dead. Then two of them brought the Ashcombe sister and her maid out from the shelter area.
Both women were frightened and exhausted, but they were alive. The sister clung to the maid’s arm, flinching at every loud voice.
"Are either of you hurt?" Owen asked.
The sister shook her head, then nodded, then seemed unsure. "I don’t— no. Not badly."
"He’s dead," Owen told them. "Garrick. It’s over. We’re leaving this place."
The sister looked past him toward the big man lying by the fire and the tiger beyond him. She didn’t say anything, but some of the tension went out of her shoulders. The maid closed her eyes for a moment.
Owen turned to Hugh. "The tiger’s core. I want it recovered."
Hugh glanced at Agnes.
"You may have it, Young Master," Agnes said from where she sat. "I don’t have any use for it."
"I’ll see it’s recovered," Hugh said. "And I’ll include it in the account of the operation."
Owen thought of the way the tiger had come apart into vapor and reformed somewhere else entirely. He wanted to know whether the Arsenal could use something like that.
But when the core was brought to him, he only secured it. Right now, the important thing was getting everyone out of this forest.
Once the injured had been treated as well as they could be, and the two women were ready to travel, Owen gave the order to head back to the road.
The soldiers escorted the Ashcombe sister and her maid through the trees, while Hugh kept an eye on the prisoners and the recovered valuables. Agnes walked with a soldier supporting her on her good side. Owen kept pace with them, every uneven step jarring his ribs.
It was a slow walk. The soldiers’ uniforms were stained, bandages were already darkening, and nobody had much to say. Every time something moved in the undergrowth, the two rescued women started, and the maid’s grip on the sister’s arm tightened.
When they came out onto the road, the convoy was still waiting exactly where they had left it.
The sister who had escaped was standing beside the carriage, and the moment the soldiers came out of the trees, her head snapped toward them. Owen watched her search every face in the group.
Then she found her twin.
She ran. Her sister broke away from the maid and ran to meet her, and the two of them collided in the middle of the road and held on to each other as hard as they could.
Both of them were crying. They pulled apart just far enough to look at each other, touching each other’s faces, checking each other’s scratches and torn sleeves, and then clung together again.
"I thought—" one of them started.
"I know. I know. I’m here—"
"When you didn’t come back, I thought they’d—"
"They didn’t. I’m all right. I’m all right."
They kept talking over one another, trying to explain what had happened after they were separated and getting no further than a few words before one of them started crying again.
Their maid came up beside them. She didn’t say anything at first. She just put a hand on each of their shoulders, and Owen saw her shoulders shake once with relief.
Owen stayed where he was and let them have it.
It was a while before the sisters finally calmed down. When they did, they came over to him together, still holding hands.
"My lord," the first one said. "We haven’t introduced ourselves properly. I’m Clara Ashcombe." She glanced at her twin. "This is my sister, Elise."
Clara was the one he had met in the forest. Elise was the one he had brought out of the camp.
"Thank you," Clara said. "You could have just kept going. It wasn’t your business, and you went after my sister anyway."
Elise looked up at him. Her eyes were still red, but her voice was steady.
"You saved my life," she said. "I owe you a debt for that, my lord, and I’ll repay it. I promise you that."
She said it simply and plainly, and Owen could see that she meant every word.
Both sisters turned to look at Agnes, bandaged and pale beside the carriage, and at Hugh and the soldiers.
"Thank you," Clara said to all of them. "Every one of you."
"I’m glad you’re both safe," Owen said. He looked toward the broken carriage at the edge of the road. "Can you keep travelling?"
The sisters looked at each other.
"Our carriage is ruined," Elise said quietly. "Our soldiers are dead. We don’t have anyone left to get us to the capital."
"We’re going to the capital as well," Owen said. "Travel with us. When we get there, you can send word to your father, tell him what happened, and arrange somewhere to stay or a way home through your family."
The relief on both their faces was immediate.
"Thank you, my lord," Clara said. "Truly."
Hugh was already moving. He found space in the convoy for the sisters and their maid and made sure they had food, water and somewhere to sit and rest. Agnes was helped back into the carriage, where one of the soldiers set about properly treating her wounds before they moved on.
Owen stood by the road for a moment, watching the sisters settle in with their maid under the protection of his escort.
His first journey to the Imperial Capital had already turned out to be far more eventful than he had expected. Somewhere in his belongings, he was carrying a monster core holding a power unlike anything he had seen before.
That could wait. For now, all that mattered was getting the people he had rescued, and the people who had been hurt rescuing them, safely back on the road.