He shook his head, still breathing hard. “I can’t keep it up long enough, not this far from water. And there will be guards on the portal who’ll sense us if we try to slip past. Even with the spell, we’re visible when we move. And we can’t fight them using the staff. A hurricane in the midst of a wood would kill us as surely as it would them.” He looked around again, but it didn’t seem to help any more than it had last time. And then he grabbed me by the upper arms.
“Don’t even,” I told him, because I knew him, too.
“I can distract them, not for long, but for long enough—”
“Long enough for nothing!”
“You can go back to the village. You’re Fey Friend. They’ll hide you—”
“I’m not running off and leaving you here!”
“This is my fault! I got you into this—”
“We’ve had this discussion—”
“Then we’ll have it again!”
“You can have it whenever the hell you want,” I snapped. “But you’ll be talking to hear yourself, because I won’t—damn it!”
That last was because he’d just gone invisible again, or as close to it as the spell allowed. But I’d halfway expected that, because I knew him, too, and a lot better than the fey. I grabbed him as he rose, sending us both toppling back to the ground. And then latched on as he tried to get away, wrapping myself around something I couldn’t see but that couldn’t budge me, because he was already close to exhausted and I was hanging on like someone’s life depended on it, because it did.
And then he stopped. “Wait! What was that?”
“What was what?” I jerked my head up.
And then had it snapped backward by a certain someone’s fist or elbow or possibly heel. How could I tell? I just knew it broke my hold for a second, and a second was all he needed. He scrambled off, invisible in the night except for a few twitching tree limbs, and then not even that, and there was no way, no way in hell I was going to be able to find him, probably not at all and certainly not before he freaking martyred himself.
I sat there for a split second, debating options.
And then I started screaming.
A couple of seconds later I was tackled by a suddenly visible mage who grabbed me and shook me and, okay, this part was like old times. “Are you insane?”
“I thought . . . we’d already . . . established that,” I said breathlessly as several other cries echoed through the forest.
Pritkin heard them, too, and shook me again. “Don’t you understand? If we stay, they’ll find us; if we run, they’ll find us! And I won’t be able to protect you when they do, not in faerie, not from this many—”
“I told you, I don’t need protection.”
“Well, then I hope you can protect me!” he said wildly as footsteps nobody was bothering to conceal thundered our way.
I hope I can, too, I thought.
“Just hide us for as long as you can,” I told him. “And get us as close as you can to that portal. I’ll do the rest.”
And then we were running, full out, my heart pounding a little fast—okay, a lot fast—because this really might be the craziest damned thing I’d ever done. But it’s not a gamble when it’s the only chance you have, and we did have a chance. Not a great one, but right now, I’d take it.
And then we were slamming back against a tree again, as half a dozen Svarestri burst into the open, right in front of us.
And there was no hope they didn’t see us this time, no hope at all, because three of them were holding torches. One of which was thrust into our faces a second later. I held my breath, sure I’d just killed us both—
And then I knew I had, because the fey surrounded us. One of them said something, but not to me. And not to Pritkin, either. Or if he was, it was a little weird, because he was looking about six inches above his head.
I’d have thought he was looking at me, because I’d ended up standing on some tree roots when I backed up, trying to merge with the trunk. But no, he was definitely staring at the wood above Pritkin’s head. For a second there, I actually thought he was talking to the tree, which would have been nuts except faerie, but then Pritkin answered him back. And then another fey shoved something in my face.
I shrank back, but he wasn’t hitting me with it. Maybe because it wasn’t a weapon, I realized. It was . . . a torch.
I stared at it, but that’s unquestionably what it was. The blunt end of an unlit torch. Which he seemed to expect me to take.