"Mol!" Silfy's voice is like a kitten's wail. Her frail hands flutter over Mol, lighting in terror on her shoulders, her arm: patting her awake, not shaking her. Hard to picture Silfy shaking anything. "Mol! Something's happening!"
What's happening: oilskins billowing from the casements, dust shaking down from the joists, boots pounding across the taproom's pitching floor. Mol sits up so fast she and Silfy knock horns. Silfy squeaks. Beneath them the whole rotting inn shifts on its haunches with a groan.
"Fists!" cries Florrick's fierce, hoarse voice outside. The snap of a floorboard almost drowns it out. "To me!"
"Harpers!" comes the prompt echo.
Which leaves Mol. She scrambles round Silfy and the counter, giving Rolan's sorry, snoring bulk a rousing kick. Drunk wizard's better than none, in a pinch. Alaundo said that. "Mattis!"
A shelf of cloudy jars crashes to the floor. There's Doni wringing his hands, there's Mirkon blinking through his curls, there's Mattis with a broken bottle. They crunch through the mess, mobbing her. "Is it a quake, Mol?"
"It's them, isn't it?" Meli's face looks more pinched than a tough's ought. "The shadows? Back for us?"
Has to be, Mol thinks. Back for more fun. Back for her brats' eyes.
"Shut up and hide," she says, shouldering through them. She has to shake Silfy off. "Like we practiced. Now!"
"What about you—"
You freeze up, you end up like Zevlor, dragged off sobbing by the horns. Mol darts for the door—
"Mol!" shouts Mattis.
—and stumbles to a halt on the crumbling portico, catching herself on a pillar, because the cobbles of the forecourt are boiling up. Roots squirm like eels across the cracking stones, feeling blindly for the drawbridge, where the High Harper's standing with her arm outflung—
"Mol!"
She almost doesn't hear. The wind churns with crackling leaves. The trees by the water creak and bow like gnarled henchmen, ripping themselves out of the dirt, swarming on a thousand twisted legs over the figures huddled at the drawbridge's mouth: some bloody, battered ghosts, gaunt with the curse, armed with torches and the broken ends of spears. Can't be more than ten of them. The High Harper, her hair a tangle on the wind, shouts a word over the wild crash of wood.
It slams them to the ground with a lumbering crack. The wardlight strikes their faces. Mol, with one foot off the steps, freezes up.
“Hells,” says Mattis in horrified awe, peering over her shoulder. Behind him Mirkon cries out. Shouldn't have expected them to listen. “She’ll mulch them—Mol, wait, wait!”
She's already running. Some Fist makes a grab for her and trips; Baldy Ron's clankers couldn't catch a cold. She smacks away a Harper's startled hand. On her tail she hears a scuffle, a yelp, a curse: Mattis, shoving after her. Good. Of all her kids, he throws the meanest elbows.
“Stop!” she shouts, stumbling over a vine that slithers underfoot. It snags her ankle. With a furious cry she rips it up, stamps on another, yanks the High Harper’s upraised arm. “What are you doing? They’re the ones who saved us!”
Jaheira staggers, surprised. The strangling roots shudder and lurch. One of Wyll’s friends makes a crushed noise. If Mol’s got to, she’ll bite—
“These, imp?” Jaheira's voice is even. Her arm's hard as oak. When she lifts a finger to stall her Harpers, even the spikes of the stakewells sprout shoots. “These protected the Grove?”
“Didn’t leave a goblin standing!” Probably. Mol hangs on Jaheira's forearm, breathing hard. A snake of stinging ivy twines up her leg. “The Blade, there, I’d pretty much trust him with my life”—she’s talking too fast, she’s pinched Silfy a hundred times for this—“and he’s not so bad to hang around with, either—”
“Ha,” says Wyll, dangling upside-down by one leg.
“—and those ones might not look like much, but they fought off a whole flock of harpies—”
The ranger Vally Dell, twisting on the ground, toes after her boot with a furious stockinged foot. She kicks it at the Harpers with a yell. Silk the minstrel, turning a doomed color, coughs something that the root round his neck chokes short. Maybe Mirkon was only telling tales.
“Rather a thorny situation, this.” The wizard, dragged down by nettles not far off, tries for a strained smile. The marks on his cheek pulse purple. “Well met by moonlight, High Harper?”
"Release us!" Rage eclipses Shadowheart's pretty face. "Or this darkness will swallow you all!"
Her pasty friend casts a despairing look skyward. "Oh, do let's threaten the fabled Jaheira—"
“Let them go!” cries a high, scared voice: Mirkon, wide-eyed, thrashing through the Harpers’ front line. So much for the rank-and-file. It’s Mattis who snatches the brat by the shirt. “Please! Get off, Mattis!”
“Ow!” Mattis, still wrestling Mirkon, kicks away a crawling root. “Hey! What’s the shrubbery got against us, lady?”
Jaheira, her face taut, closes her spell in a fist. With a seething hiss of leaves, the rotten undergrowth of Reithwin ripples to heel.
“The shrubbery,” she says, unsmiling, “is angry with us all. For good reason.” She eases her arm from Mol's grasp. To anyone else, her face would give nothing away. “True Souls with minds of their own. How is that possible?"
She wants to believe it. She only needs a nudge. Mol signals, curt, to Mattis. "Let him go."
Mattis looks startled. "He'll get hurt—"
Mirkon tears free with a shrill sob of a curse. Must have learned it from the harpies. He flounders barefoot through the churning thorns and, as Jaheira stares, crashes into Silk.
"You came!" Poor, stupid Mirkon. Thinks he's going to eat pie every day, play stickball, be a minstrel's foundling son. He'll get hurt, all right. With tears sliming his stubborn face, he tugs the snarl of wood round the man's neck. "Mol said you wouldn't—wait, hold still—"
“Oh, you’re alive,” Silk gasps, his voice all crumpled up. His face crumples, too. As he drops it into Mirkon’s filthy curls, the roots shrivel back into the dirt. “Oh, good." Mol's got to look away. "Oh, good.”
* * *
"Looking for something?" asks Harper Bor.
"No," says the True Soul ranger with bleak cheer, hopping on one foot across the innyard. Her braid's unraveling. When she wobbles, her sodden stocking squidges in the mud. "Not me. Just having a skeg about."
"You're not"—Bor can keep a straight face, he's been trained to—"looking for your boot?"
"Why?" She can keep a straight face, too. And her aim's not bad. He can fight alongside this one, he decides, once it comes to that. "Seen it?"
"Just in time to duck," says Bor, grinning at last. He raises his voice. "Quartermaster? Seen a boot?"
The young spiderling's mind was elsewhere, absentmindedly watching the thrum of bodies on the dancefloor as the club's lights drowned their movements, the music's beat thumping throughout the joint. It was a busy night, packed with patrons all looking to throw their cash at the first release they could find - booze, sex, drugs... whichever came first.
Molly's palm rest on a familiar lap, her body leaning into the warmth she found there though her attention had been drawn away. Her fingers idly drew rhythmic circles where they lay against the fabric clad thigh of the Overlord, not quite registering her own actions.
"Stop, before I kiss you" she heard his thick tone in her ear, turning her head back to follow his gaze down. Forcing a smile to curl on her lips, she went to remove her hand, tilting her head up to him so her response could be heard through the noise. "I've neva' known you t'show restraint before..." she noted. He seemed in a good mood... it was best to keep it that way.
