Two more joined the first, but their thumping booms disappeared under a cacophony. Crank-guns rattled high above as the airships swooped and banked. The enemy craft had risen aloft. Their designs reminded Effie of giant bugs with their jaggedly ridged keels, outrigger sails like wings, and pointed battering rams.
Below her position, rifles popped like a crackling fire. The soldiers of the main army had reached the field and begun their advance on the hillfort. Their charge was more orderly than hers had been. They scurried in ragged ranks. Bayonets gleamed at the tips of their rifles.
Effie ducked her head and clambered over the lip of the second ring. She flinched as a wulver barreled down the slope from the hilltop. Brandon shot it before swiveling his rifle down the flat area atop the ring. There, the Unseily scurried in chaos. Some of the trows fled, rocks still in hand. Spriggans waved their spears, crying out some unfathomable taunt. Their porcine mounts squealed and pressed against the shelter of the embankment.
Slipping past the smaller creatures, a group of bogills bounded toward Effie. They didn’t make a dozen paces before bullets zipped from below and peppered them to a halt. One shied, raising its buckler, only to be knocked aside by a larger brute. The impact sent it reeling down the slope Effie had just climbed.
Freiherr Jörg’s blunderbuss blasted fire from its bell-shaped muzzle. Effie spun in time to see the ogress she’d spied earlier rumbling down from the hilltop. She carried a wicked blade, like a butcher’s knife grown ten times too large. Her head was shaped like a melon, with a squat nose and close, beady eyes. Barely a wisp of hair remained to cover her scalp. The greenish tint she bore reminded Effie more of a fungus than moss or leaf. Her stench echoed the impression.
The ogress roared a challenge. A cloud of tumbling rocks and clods of dirt flew in her wake. The swipe of her blade cleaved into a trow and sliced through one of Sergeant McGrady’s men. Brandon yanked the poor man back. He raised his rifle barely in time to catch the ogress’ next stroke. It clacked off the wood and rattled the weapon from his arms.
“Verdammt!” Freiherr Jörg cursed next to Effie. The gnome labored to reload his blunderbuss. Cold dread washed over Effie. She reached a trembling hand toward her friend, ready to shove them both over the embankment and out of the ogress’s path.
Gaelyph’s sword whirled. But the warden struggled to reach the ogress on the narrow ring top. He could only approach straight on, and the ogress drove him onto his heels.
Fear for the warden constricted Effie’s muscles. Her thoughts sprang to Rose, lost in the fighting below, and to Conall—what had befallen him? She clamped her hands into fists. Such fear would serve none of them.
Flashes of green and gold and pink swirled past Effie, blinding against the cold grey of the clouded sky. The wee forms of pixies swarmed the ogress, darting in and stabbing with tiny blades like needles. Their squeals sounded like the clamor of tiny bells chiming in fury.
The ogress bellowed, swatting at the wee assailants.
Effie jolted in shock. Her tight muscles melted. She had never seen so many pixies together, not even during the moots at Skye. Watching in awe, she couldn’t fathom from whence they came. But come, they had. She allowed her senses to roam and found that Caledon had brought with him a host of fey she did not recognize.
“The Erbgraf,” said Freiherr Jörg. “He has sent allies from the continent to throw back the Unseily.” The gnome brought his blunderbuss to bear on the ogress.
“Ana, as well,” said Effie. She understood some of the pixies’ squeals. The words were French.
The cannons boomed once more. They were closer. Their shot whooshed overhead, thumping into the hilltop. Effie’s teeth rattled, and she snapped alert. She could worry over giving thanks later, if she managed to survive.
Gaelyph lunged with his sword. His boot skidded, scraping over ice-encrusted dirt. He caught his balance, but the ogress saw the hesitation. Her meaty fist drew back, blade raised high. As it did, Sergeant McGrady let out a hoarse cry. He stomped into a lumbering charge. His pistol clicked empty in his hand, but he didn’t slow.
The pixies renewed their flurry. A pair poked at the ogress’ nose and ears. The creature’s raised hand came crashing down at them, smashing into the side of her own head. It staggered woozily.
Sergeant McGrady barreled into ogress. The impact flung him aside. He grunted and landed hard.
The ogress toppled. Her arms reached out for purchase but found only empty air and the soft kiss of snowflakes. She made an awful noise, like that of a starved sow, before her weight sent her plummeting down the slope of the hillfort.
Cries rang out from the soldiers below. Rifle fire erupted, but Effie barely registered it. Her attention had been drawn across the fields.
“There!” The soldier next to her pointed. At first Effie saw only the flurry of red coats beneath the light drift of snow. In the distance, along the edge of the horizon, it was difficult to distinguish one man from another. Their shapes blurred and blended, five men becoming one, and then ten. But she saw the struggling, the way their arms flailed at one another, the stomping and thrashing. Her heart sank as she peered. Her dread returned.
The banshee’s touch consumed the duke’s army.
The madness crawled toward the hillfort in a steady wave. The surge from behind caught those before them unaware. The soldiers pummeled with fists and fired randomly with their rifles. Shouts began to reach her and her companions, some in anger and others in panic.
“More come,” said Gaelyph. The warden nodded to Sergeant McGrady before turning his attention to the rise of a hill behind the crofter’s cottage. The slight gesture spoke a volume of gratitude and respect.
Brandon helped the sergeant to his feet. “All of Melrose has come.” He whistled. “And Selkirk too, by the look of it.”
Men and women, young and old, finely dressed and bedraggled, roamed over the hill in an endless mass. They moved like a horde of locusts, having neither direction nor aim. Their minds held no faculty. The banshee’s touch had consumed them as fully as those at Hermitage Castle.
Effie’s heart had sunk before, but now it seized. She eyed the soldiers of the duke’s army. Already, a pitched skirmish consumed half its strength. Its officers had dissipated, enthralled by the same Fey Craft as their riflemen. Those who remained untouched shouted impotently, their cries drowned out by the angry murmur of the Barrow Witch’s growing mob.
Feeling for her link with Rose, Effie scoured the mass. The elder fey woman flared a response of desperation. Relief flooded Effie, knowing her friend was unharmed. But panic blossomed with it at the danger Rose now faced. Exhaustion pulled at Effie from the mix of emotions. She ignored it. There was no time. Nor was there time for delicacy. She ripped randomly at the invisible bonds of the banshee’s touch, and hoped that none of its victims had been so fully corrupted that they would never recover.
Others joined her. She felt Freiherr Jörg’s deft Fey Craft, and the pixies. Some fey she did not know, but a few from Skye she did. Together, they strained and ripped, but those they freed did not run for safety. They merely milled about in a daze until the Barrow Witch’s touch found them again.
Panic rose within Effie. It took no military mind to see what the Sidhe Bhreige intended. “They will trap those who escape her touch against the embankment,” she said. “They will be caught between the Unseily above and the mob before them.”