I Only Summon Villainesses

I ONLY SUMMON VILLAINESS

Chapter 430:

The snow did not fall so much as drift, slow and patient, settling over the black firs and the broken ridge like ash over a pyre that had already gone cold.

Light stood in the middle of all that white. His breath came out in thin, disciplined plumes. Frost had crept along the filigree of his vambraces and rimed the trailing edge of his cape where it dragged the powder behind him.

The cold did not trouble him though. The north stripped a place down to bone and silence, and silence was the closest thing this filthy world had ever offered to prayer.

He flexed his fingers around the grip of his blade. Then the wind shifted, and he was no longer alone.

Three of them stepped out of the treeline, fanning wide across the slope with the unhurried ease of people who already knew the shape of the trap. He counted them the way the Doctrine taught — threat first, names never — and what he counted made his lip curl.

All three of them were women.

’Of course,’ he thought. ’It is always women, in the end, sent to do the work men are too proud to fail at.’

The one in the center planted a lance butt-first in the snow and let it stand on its own. Short brown hair, cut for a helmet she wasn’t wearing, whipping where the wind caught it. Her armor was Paladin-white, but it sat wrong on her, too new and too clean in a way that had nothing to do with devotion, like a coat borrowed from a corpse. Above her the air had begun to turn.

Cloud spiraled down into a low, bruised funnel, and a figure of woman-shape and thunderhead-grey took form inside it, crown crackling, robes unspooling into rain that froze before it could reach the ground. The thing looked down at him with no expression at all. The girl beneath it looked at him with far too much.

”Put the sword down,” she said. Her voice carried flat across the snow, steady in a way that cost her something. ”You don’t have to do this. None of us want to be the one who—”

”Spare me your mercy,” Light said. ”It smells the same as your fear.”

Grief moved across her face, and he knew it the way one knows mold.

’She wants something out of this that isn’t my death.’ That made her the weakest of the three. It also made her the most dangerous, because grief made people patient.

To her right, the small one. Red hair, loose and bright as a wound against all that white, on a body that barely filled the harness it wore — a child’s frame playing dress-up in a war. He almost dismissed her. Then the thing behind her unfolded.

It rose, and rose, and kept rising, a Heroic Spirit far past anything that thin little soul had any right to hold, sheathed in a metal that drank the daylight instead of giving it back. The girl tilted her head up at her own summon as though even she wasn’t certain it would listen.

”Don’t talk to him,” she said, quick and quiet, not to him — to the brown-haired one. ”Please. We agreed. We don’t talk to him, we just—”

”I know what we agreed.”

Light watched the giant settle its weight in a wrong and unnatural manner. The kind of mismatch a properly governed world would have corrected with fire.

And on the left, the blonde cocked her hips and let her weight loose, with a smile hat had no business appearing on a battlefield. Pale gold hair spilling out from under her helmet. Vines came up out of the snow around her boots in slow green coils, thorned and glistening, reaching toward something huge and crowned and patient behind her.

”Aw, he’s pretty,” she said, and blew the frozen air a kiss. ”Shame about the personality. They always send the pretty ones to the chopping block first, you ever notice that?”

”Vulgar.”

The word arrived on its own, familiar, almost a comfort.

”You will learn the price of that mouth.”

”Promises, promises.”

Three Heroic Spirits. Three women who ought to be kneeling in some chapel learning their place, and instead they’d been handed power they could not have earned and did not deserve, then pointed north to corner one man.

’I knew that place was wrong...’

Light could almost not think about the reason why the new Order of the Church from the Aetheris Diocese suddenly are coming after him. Except it had to do with the incident from almost a year ago.

As he thought of it and rage slowly consumed him, he let the scripture rise behind his teeth, the old reflex, the one that had never once failed to steady his hand.

’Be not afraid of the multitude, for the Light is a host unto itself.’

He called it up.

The radiance broke out of him without a sound, a sheet of white-gold heat that turned the falling snow to steam in a perfect ring and threw his shadow long and black down the slope. The frost on his armor flashed to nothing. For one breath the whole grey world had a sun in it, and the sun was him.

”Now,” the brown-haired one said.

Then they moved, all three at once, and the breath ended.

The storm came first, because storms are honest. The grey queen swept an arm and the funnel overhead stooped, and a column of frozen lightning came down the slope like a dropped sword. He met it edge-on with a wall of his own light, and the impact shoved him back a full stride, heels carving furrows in the snow, teeth locked. Cold and heat warred across the barrier, and the barrier screamed.

’Hold.’

He held. He always held.

He never saw the small one’s summon move. That was the obscenity of it — a thing that size had no right to be quick, and it was quick, a mountain that arrived like an arrow. The blow caught him through the barrier from the flank and the world tipped sideways; he was in the air, then he was not, the impact folding him into a drift hard enough to drive the breath out of him in a single white gasp. Snow went down the collar of his armor, melting, trickling cold along his spine.

He came up spitting it. The radiance guttered, and he fed it more of himself than he wanted to, and it flared back. His blade found his hand. ’Filthy. Crude. Graceless.’ The litany steadied him. ’No form. No discipline. No—’

The vines took his ankle.

He hadn’t felt them cross the ground. The blonde’s thorned green had been running under the snow the entire time, while the storm kept his eyes up and the giant kept his eyes down, and now they had his leg and they were strong, grotesquely strong, hauling.

”Gotcha,” the blonde sang.

He brought the blade down and split the coil in a hiss of sap and light — and that half-second, the moment his guard dropped to the ground, was when the lance arrived.

She had crossed the whole distance while he burned. The brown-haired one drove the point in under his ribs, where the gold plate met, and the storm rode the steel into him. Not heat. Cold. A cold so total it felt like fire, lancing up through his chest and locking every muscle it touched. His light stuttered. And for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt the specific, undignified sensation of a body that had been hurt.

He looked down at the lance. He looked up at the face behind it.

She was crying. Of course she was.

’Even now she wants to be forgiven for it.’

The contempt was real, but it was thinner than it had been a minute ago, and he hated that he could feel the difference.

”I’m sorry,” she whispered. ”I really am.”

”Then you are weak,” he said through his teeth, ”and you will die weak.”

She didn’t answer. The three of them had barely traded a word that meant anything, and they didn’t need to — they moved like one animal wearing three faces. The storm to press, the giant to break, the thorns to bind, the lance to finish. And he understood, with the clean clarity the north was so generous with, that he had walked into something built. Deliberately drilled and choreographed.

’They were trained for this... But by who?’

The answer came on its own, and the answer hurt worse than the lance, because the answer had a name, and the name belonged to a heretic he had once looked away from.

He tore himself off the point. Light ruptured out of him in every direction at once, a desperate corona, and the three of them gave ground — gave ground, not fled — resetting, fanning wide again, patient as the snow.

His blood steamed where it struck the white. His breath had stopped being disciplined. The grey queen’s clouds were already coiling for the next descent; the small one’s giant was already turning, ground groaning beneath it; the blonde was already smiling, the thorns already sliding back under the surface where he couldn’t watch them.

”Last chance,” the brown-haired one called, and her voice cracked clean down the middle on the word. ”Please.”

’The Light is a host unto itself,’ he told himself, and lifted the blade, and tasted iron, and could not make the words feel true.

The slope was very quiet, and very white, and there were three of them, and one of him, and for the first time the prayer was not enough.