She could not stand against them forever. They were too many. She reached for Freiherr Jörg, but as she did her concentration slipped. Some of her web flared and dissolved into a horde of midges that swarmed about her. They bit her mercilessly. They crawled down her throat as she gasped for air.
The grindylows wove a ward against her. She smashed through it and clutched desperately to the image of the oak. Her limbs felt like stone. She couldn’t tell whether hands clutched her, or whether she had tumbled down the embankment. Her ears had numbed to the popping rifle fire, the howls of the wulvers, and the chittering of trows and spriggans.
Soon! Rose’s cry of warning pulsed through her. Her heart raced to it. But she focused only on delaying the Unseily. Her friends would come, she trusted.
She had faith in them.
31
Effie drifted in a haze. She could not tell whether she dreamed. She knew only the pain—the burning in her lungs from gasping, the fire that throbbed along her shoulder where the wulver had rent her flesh, and trickling doubt that weighed heavier with each passing moment, as if she stood at the bottom of an hour glass with specks of sand cascading off her head.
Soon she would suffocate. Soon she would be buried. Her webs of Fey Craft were all but spent. She sensed Rose’s strength had dwindled, and every time the gnomes of the Order of Freiwald tried to reach her, they were blasted back until Effie could barely sense they lived at all.
A cry echoed across the hillfort. Effie shuddered in its wake. The cry meant hope. It meant her faith was just. The Scots had come—fey and man alike.
“Teribus ye teri odin! Teribus ye teri odin!”
Horns blared. Drums rumbled. The thunder of hooves rattled the ground. A soothing caress washed over Effie as Caledon’s blood strength joined with hers. His hand was deft yet made of steel. Rest. He sent her the impression of a doe drinking by a hidden pool, having defended its warren. His assault on the grindylows came in a flurry, faster and stronger than Freiherr Jörg’s lightning. It was a storm that drove them reeling into submission.
Effie released her grasp on the oak. Clutching at the grass to keep herself from tumbling over, she sank back onto her heels. She expected night to have fallen. She expected for days to have passed. But the sky still held light, and the snow drifted lazily in a thin dusting. She remained atop the first ring of the hillfort.
“They have come,” said Gaelyph. The warden stood next to her. Wonder painted his expression.
Effie followed his gaze and took in the duke’s army. Ranks of red coats marched in a line that stretched to the horizon. Riders flanked them. On one side rode the queen’s cavalry. On the other trotted the men of Hawick with their pendants flapping in the breeze.
Airships slid across the sky, bobbing as gusts knocked against their great balloons. She counted four of them and gasped in bewilderment at their colors. Not all were the queen’s. The French airship she had seen in Aberdeen floated among a trio of sleek British gunships. The former was painted blue, with a deck shaped like a long canoe. The gunships bristled with the muzzles of rifles. A pair of crank-guns were mounted on either side of their steel-banded hulls.
Trows and goblins squealed above Effie’s head. The clamor along the second ring and hilltop gave evidence to the scurrying of clawed feet and stomping hooves. Spears no longer fell. A roar came, something vicious and untamed.
The gunships made a pass overhead. Their crank-guns burst into action, spitting a hail of fiery lead. Where the bullets landed, Effie could not see, only that the flashing streaks ended atop the hillfort. The gunships banked. Gouts of white smoke billowed from the portholes where their guns were mounted.
Effie turned to Sergeant McGrady and flinched in shock. The man looked to her in question. She saw Brandon and a few of the others doing likewise. Even Gaelyph seemed to hesitate, taking a step neither forward nor back.
They waited on her to instruct them.
She nodded to each in turn. Blood marred their faces from cuts and gouges. Bruises welled. Their uniforms were torn and soiled. Sweat and spent powder hung about them in a cloud of perfume. She stood no different, and yet she would no sooner abandon the hillfort as host a tea for the lords of London. Besides, she had seen what she must do. She had felt it as she delved.
“We use the distraction,” she said. “The steward may have the strength to hold back the invasion of Elphame, but we will need to deal with the Barrow Witch herself.”
The sergeant nodded. He barked a command, and his men went about their rifles, checking their load and inspecting the weapons. Gaelyph squatted and reached out a hand as the grunting and huffing of Freiherr Jörg reached their small band.
The gnome had abandoned his glamour. He’d slung his blunderbuss over a shoulder and struggled his way to reach the height of the first ring. His cheeks puffed red from the effort, but once mounted, he tugged his coat straight and motioned that he was ready.
Effie eyed the pouch of powder strapped to his belt and grinned. It must’ve looked devilish, she thought, as a chuckle trickled across the sergeant’s men.
“For the fey of Elphame,” hollered Brandon.
“For queen and country,” Effie replied, to a chorus of cheers.
They followed Gaelyph up the slope of the hillfort’s second ring. The way was steeper, the grass slicker from the wet snow. Effie hauled herself with both hands, marveling as she did how the soldiers managed the feat with rifles clutched in their arms.
Above, the gunships had restarted their hammering barrage. But they no longer fired on the hilltop. They engaged a foe some distance from where the Unseily host swarmed, and Effie recalled Sergeant McGrady’s report of airships landed on the far side of the hillfort.
Taking a moment to catch her breath, Effie eyed the gunships’ line of fire. The enemy airships were no longer landed, she judged. But there was nothing she could do to aid or hinder their involvement. She returned to climbing, clawing her way up and digging in with her boots.
They had almost reached the lip of the ring when the head of a trow popped into view. Its ears flopped and eyes went wide as it screeched. A dozen of its cohorts joined the first. Their squat snouts twitched as they hopped back and forth flinging rocks down the slope.
Effie gasped. Her mouth ran dry. She ducked her head. The rocks thunked into the grass and sailed far below. A few struck the soldiers, and one man lost his purchase on the slope. He flailed as he slipped. Effie reached out, but his weight was too great. He smacked into her arm and tumbled past, landing hard against the flat surface of the first ring top.
Yelping, Effie snatched the arm in close and waited for the numbness to pass. A rock clapped off her back and sent a jolt down her spine. She gritted her teeth. A snarl escaped her lips, and she surged upward.
Rifles cracked next to her. The closeness of their fury brought a whine to her ears that drowned out all other noise. One of the trows bounced snout over heels past her. Another simply slumped to the grass and slid.
The assault of rocks lessened. Effie shook the ringing from her ears, clearing them just as a deep thump boomed from the direction of the approaching army. She whipped her head in time to see the rings of smoke billowing from the cannon. The device itself she could not see for the distance. Its shot screamed overhead. Chunks of the embankment exploded where it struck, raining down clumps of dirt. The cannon adjusted. Its second shot flew farther, blasting away at the hilltop.