Page 65 of Knight of Staria
Eli thrust the sword into Tristan’s chest.
Rey crouched in the grass, fur standing on end as Tristan looked down at the blade piercing his skin. Then he looked up again, and feathers bristled over his neck and pricked at his eyes, his face going round and wicked, eyes too wide, mouth narrowing to a beak. His body shifted around the sword, and he wriggled loose as an owl with the wingspan of a tree. Bloodran down his feathers and spattered over Eli’s face as Tristan descended on Eli with a piercing shriek.
“No you fucking don’t,” Sabre said, and pushed Eli aside. Eli went stumbling out of range as Sabre, his face ashen, drew his own sword. The blade slashed Tristan’s claws, and Tristan shrieked again, the sound reverberating through the woods.
“I had him!” Eli’s shout was hoarse.
“Touch my brother again,” Sabre said, as Tristan twisted back into the form of an enormous black wolf. “Go on. Try it.”
A spectral wolf emerged from the shadows, running for Sabre. Rey tried to chase after it, unsure what he could do with four paws and considerably smaller teeth, but Eli was there before he could make it. He sliced the sword through the wolf, which shivered and fell apart like smoke.
“De Valois,” Tristan growled. Blood dripped from his paws as he slashed at Sabre, ripping ragged tears through his shirt. Bright stripes of blood started to seep through the fabric, slantwise along his chest, and Eli darted in front of him as Sabre cringed back. “Why is it always a de Valois?”
“We’re stubborn assholes,” Eli said, and Sabre barked out a sharp laugh. “Isn’t that right, Sabre?”
“Might as well be the family motto,” Sabre said. He swiped at another spectral wolf, but it did nothing. Sabre grabbed Eli and dragged him around, and Eli pierced the ghost wolf through the throat. It died with an anguished howl, and Sabre grunted as he lurched out of the way of Tristan’s snapping jaws.
Tristan shifted form again, becoming a bird one second, a wolf the next, then a man, grasping for Eli’s eyes while blood ran thick down his chest. He was shifting too quickly for Eli and Sabre to keep up—as a wolf, he threw Eli heavily into a tree. As a bird, he clawed at Sabre’s hair, trying to drag him off his feet. He turned into a wolf again, rearing back to snap at Sabre’s side.
Sabre couldn’t move fast enough to avoid it. Eli couldn’t deflect it. The only one close enough was Rey, ignored where he crouched in frozen terror in the grass.
He couldn’t let another de Valois die. Not Sabre, who had offered Eli a place to stay, a family that would love him. Rey leapt for the wolf king and sank his jaws into his neck.
Tristan howled and ripped Rey off his neck with a paw bigger than Rey’s body. Rey fell to the earth, paws scrabbling, and couldn’t even gasp for breath before Tristan’s jaws closed over his stomach.
He felt the fangs sink into his middle before he felt the pain of it—a strange, detached sensation of something pushing up through his back on one side and into his belly on the other. He remembered, or the fox remembered, the sensation of being cut open in the forest, the pain of becoming something new. Reynard remembered the way the flesh of the fox had given way before the knife, how the skin seemed to expand to fit him as he stepped inside. Now, using his power over the dead, Tristan was tearing the fox and the man apart again. Rey screamed, and the fox screamed with him, his spirit struggling not to be ripped in two. He shifted forms as swiftly as Tristan had, and he felt his body starting to age as the immortality the fox gave him began to slough away, hundreds of years clawing into him as Tristan bore down.
Then there was pain, searing as a brand, as Rey dropped heavily to the earth. The fox and man selves sank back together, his wounds starting to knit closed, but he could barely roll over to his side. When he finally looked up, he lifted his head just in time to see Tristan trying to close his mouth over Eli’s torso. Eli had one hand on Tristan’s lower jaw, and the end of his sword stuck out through the other side of Tristan’s head, slick with blood.
Eli yanked the sword free, and Tristan closed his jaws.
Sabre cried out as though he’d been run through, his shout dying as soon as it came. The trees swallowed it, and Sabre fell to his knees as Tristan, the king of the Wild Hunt, let Eli’s body drop to the grass. Blood spilled from Tristan’s mouth in a torrent, and at first, Rey thought it was Eli’s—then Tristan stumbled, vomiting blood onto the trees as his legs gave way beneath him. He shifted at last into his mortal form, his head bloodied, mouth gaping, his chest a ruin of red. He reached for a tree to hold himself up, but missed, his fingers grasping at the air. As he fell, his body fell apart, and it disappeared into the same mist that rose from the spectral wolves, which gave out one last tremulous howl before they vanished with him.
Sabre half crawled to his brother, and Rey dragged himself to his hands and knees.
“Eli.” Sabre gathered Eli’s body in his arms. Eli’s limbs hung limp. His eyes stared over Sabre’s shoulder, unblinking, as Rey pulled himself past the discarded sword and reached for Eli. “Eli, please. You were going to—going to live with me. We were going to start over. I thought we were going to start over, Eli.” Sabre brushed at Eli’s forehead, trying to smooth his tangled hair.
Rey felt numb. It was as though a part of him were thrashing in pain somewhere deep below, in a place he couldn’t bear to go, and he didn’t even notice the tears in his eyes until they landed on Eli’s cheeks. He laid a hand on Eli’s throat, over his scars. Together, he and Sabre held Eli’s body, alone in the eternal dusk of the forest.
Rey bent over Eli until their foreheads were touching. He drew on all the power he had, on the memory of the fox that had come to him when he was just a man, on the long years of avoiding attachment and falling for humanity anyway, on the long, lazy mornings overlooking the Starian countryside.
“Once,” he whispered, “there was a boy named Eli de Valois, and he would grow up to become the last knight of Staria. Hewasn’t born perfectly good or perfectly kind, because no one is, but he cared for the things and people that slipped through the cracks, for the forgotten children who lay dying in wells or hidden in cellars. No one had ever been his champion when he needed one, so he became theirs. And one day, he killed the King of the Hunt with a sword that he claimed for himself.”
Rey laid a hand over Eli’s chest. No heartbeat drummed against his fingers.
“Even the spirits of Staria loved him,” Rey said. “I loved him. The fox. The king. I would have married him in the way of a king and their knights, with crowns of blueberry twigs and rabbit fur. I would have been bound to him, if he asked me to. And I—and as the knight gave his life to kill the king of the Wild Hunt, the fox gave him a choice.” Rey kissed Eli gently, hand still pressed to his heart. “He could come back as a spirit or as a man. He could choose to walk with his fox, or find a new journey as a mortal. The important thing was that he came back.”
Eli stoodin an empty field at dusk, looking over the horizon.
Fireflies drifted in the air around him. There was no pain—no fear. The air was cool and the wind was light, and Eli could see so far over the fields of Staria that he could spot distant villages overlooking the northern sea.
A firefly landed on his shoulder, and Eli brushed it off. His hand slid across metal, and he saw he was wearing armor—the old-fashioned kind, a mix between plate and leather, with pauldrons and a chest plate emblazoned with the insignia of the de Valois duchy. Eli ran a hand over the antlers of his family crest and turned to search for the man who always stood at the edge of the field in his visions.
He wasn’t there.
Instead, Eli’s body lay a few paces behind him. His clothes were muddy and soaked with blood, and his face was too pale, his eyes open but unseeing. When Eli took a step closer, the fireflies moved with him, weaving and bobbing around the high grass, and Eli looked back to where he’d been standing.
He’d been at the edge of the field, looking out.
