I Only Summon Villainesses

The contempt on his face was the thing that did it.

Not Wren, or the mountain shaking above my head or the blood on the snow or any of it. It was the specific quality of the smile Harter Hammerfeld wore when he looked at me. It made me wanna go mad with rage.

So much that I broke into a swift movement, lunged towards him.

And at half the distance cut between us, Feather Step swallowed the rest in a blink and I came out of it behind him, with Frostfang already swinging, the white flame packed into the broken edge burning cold and sharp against the grey air of the pass.

Harter pivoted into the strike without flinching, and Wren was there before his hands needed to be — a silver line sweeping between us, catching Frostfang edge-on and redirecting it wide.

The impact shuddered up my arm.

I understood immediately. Wren seemed to have managed to hold back against White Feather, something inside the sword refused to finish it. I was a nobody. I was a stranger with a broken blade who had stepped into a fight she’d already mapped out, and she was not going to spare me anything.

’Noted.’

Harter’s fist came through the gap she’d made, compressed wind coiling around his knuckles, and I dropped under it and drove my elbow into his ribs on the way past. He grunted — actually grunted, actually felt it — and I felt the grim satisfaction of landing something real on a man I already hated more than I’d hated anyone in a long time.

Wren curved back around and came for the side of my head.

I ducked. She clipped my ear. The sting was clean and bright and woke me up completely.

White Feather was pushing off the snow behind me, hand pressed to the cut across her back, her sword slowly shuddering as it came up. She was trying to rejoin and the movement was costing her visibly.

”Stay back...” I shouted at her.

”Lord Cade—”

”You’re slowing down. You get in my space right now and she’ll use you to get to me.”

I didn’t look back at her.

”Give me a moment.”

I didn’t actually know what I was going to do with the moment. But I needed her out of his reach.

Harter rolled his neck and the wind around him picked up, not wild now but organised, channelled through the narrow pass in a current that pushed the snow sideways in long flat sheets. Wren rode it. She climbed the current and spun at the top of it and dove, and I tracked her line and stepped left with Feather Step a half-second before she arrived, and she carved a furrow in the stone where I’d been standing.

She adjusted mid-arc. And came back.

I let the white flames go.

Not the full release, that would fill the pass and Wren was somewhere in it and I had already decided I was not doing that, whatever happened to me. A controlled burst, palmed outward, the fire blooming in a wall between me and her current. Not to burn her. To disrupt the wind she was riding, collapse the channel, force her to find her own momentum.

She hit the wall of white flame and punched straight through it.

’Of course she did.’

The impact threw me backward a full step and my shoulder screamed and Harter was already crossing the ground between us, his fist swinging down in a overhead strike that would have split my forehead. Instead I sidestepped and drove one kick towards his belly.

He caught it though, and kicked the balance of my other leg, driving me to my knee.

His face was two feet from mine. He was smiling again.

He asked with an almost friendly tone.

”How old are you, boy?”

”I should you be asking you that, you were this small the last time I saw you. Are you even an adult?”

I bared my teeth and pushed.

Emperor’s Presence came out of me like heat off iron and rolled forth with the weight of dominion, something that has looked at everything enough to never flinch again. It rolled outward from where I knelt and hit Harter in the chest and I watched his next breath stutter.

But it was only for a moment.

His boots slid back an inch.

I came up off my knee.

Wren swept in from the left to cover him and I dropped my shoulder and let her pass over me, the edge of her kissing the top of my hair, and I threw the chains with my other hand, hard and low. They caught Harter’s ankle and bit in and I pulled.

He went down sideways.

Not gracefully but he still managed to land on one knee in the snow, the Fairywind of the North on his knees in front of me, and for one bright instant I had the angle I needed. Frostfang came up for his shoulder — not his throat, not his chest, nothing that Wren might lose her mind over — just his shoulder, just enough to finish this cleanly.

Wren hit me like a falling wall.

She had not gone to cover him. She had looped back above me while I was pulling the chains and come down in a full-weight dive, and when she connected she connected with everything, and I went skidding across the frozen floor of the pass on my back and came to rest against the stone wall with my ribs screaming and Frostfang still somehow in my hand.

I pushed myself up onto one elbow and looked at her.

She hung in the air between me and Harter, thin and bright in the grey light, perfectly still for just a moment.

’Why? How the heck is he controlling her?!’

The question sat there in my chest, blunt and wrong-feeling.

Harter found his feet. He pulled the chains off his ankle without hurrying, snapped them like thread, and dropped them in the snow. Then he looked at Wren, and the contempt was gone from his face entirely.

Replaced by a crooked smile.

”Amusing isn’t it, it’s loyal.”

He started walking towards me but at that moment, something cold consumed my heart and I commanded him.

”Kneel.”

He paused. And froze for a moment, the smile on his face had dissipated.

He struggled from going to his knee, unable to take another step forward.

Of course, Warlord’s Command was not enough to make him knee. I just had to rely on something to cover the distance.

I appeared behind him and with a twirl, launched a fist-full of flames.

Immediately, Wren put herself between me and him, coming through with a torrent of wind that scattered the trajectory of my flames into all directions.

The torrent of wind threw me off of my feet and sent me into the air, landing and rolling across the snow.

”Enough!”

With a crude shout, Harter broke out of Warlord’s Command.

He raised his eyes, and what lived in them now was not contempt. It was something far more dangerous — the focused, cold attention of a man who has been watching you find every weak point and has found yours first.

”I’ve had enough of all your nonsense. From Lady Sulin and now to this. Whoever, the fuck you are, you’re beginning to get on my nerves.”

I gave him a dashing smile.

”Oh, nice, at least we’re getting on something. And talking about Sulin, would you happen to know where she put my money?”

The wind responded instead of him.

He drove in fast — faster than before, faster than he’d moved against White Feather, all that measured patience gone and something reckless and precise in its place — and Wren was everywhere at once, every angle, every gap, and the thing I had not let myself do was the only thing that would have stopped them. He had my measure in four words and he spent it well.

I used Feather Step until I couldn’t feel my legs. I threw white flame in bursts, controlled and careful, never full release, never wide enough to catch her.

I put the chains out twice more and he read both of them. Emperor’s Presence bought me half-steps and stuttered breaths and nothing more, because he had decided that the weight of me was an acceptable tax and he was paying it without complaint.

He was winning.

Not quickly, but the snow under my boots was slick with what I was spending to keep upright, and the broken edge of Frostfang was dimming, the white flame packed into the crack thinning out as I burned through it, and Harter Hammerfeld looked like a man who had correctly calculated the length of a rope.

Wren found a gap I didn’t have time to close.

She came in under Frostfang’s guard and hit the flat of the blade from beneath, cracking it upward, and Harter’s axe came through the space that opened in a diagonal cut that caught me across the ribs before I could pull back.

I hit the ground.

The cold came up through my palms and my knees, and for a moment the whole pass went very quiet and very far away.

’...Get up.’ I commanded myself and pushed.

Harter walked toward me without hurrying, Wren drifting at his shoulder.

”You’re brave. Being able to come at me without your summons and even last this long, that’s commendable. I have no malice towards you. You’re just a reptile that got in the way, a lowlife, nothing more.”

I grinned at him, shining my bloodied teeth.

”What a lie? You hate that I got the girl, you hate me.”

He glared at me with disgust and opened his hand. Wren flowed into his palms and he raised her.

As he brought her down.

Something hit him in the side like a thunderclap. And he was sent careening across the white.

A figure had come through the narrow end of the pass at a dead sprint, without slowing, they had hit Harter shoulder-first with the kind of impact that had nothing elegant in it and didn’t need to be.

He went sideways into the wall.

The new arrival skidded to a stop between me and where Harter had been.

She turned and looked at me, and the moment, I saw her my chest burned with rage.

”You idiot.” Sulin said.

I didn’t care though. All I cared about was retrieving my money, so I looked into her eyes and spoke calmly.

”First of all, give me back what you owe.”