I Only Summon Villainesses

The first dive came before I’d finished the thought.

There was no cry, no shadow, no rush of wings — just a line of wrong-feeling air, a pressure behind my left ear that shouldn’t have been there, and my body moving before my brain signed off on it.

I dropped.

Something went past the top of my skull close enough to part my hair, a black-crimson streak that cracked the frost where I’d been standing and was gone again, back up into the nothing overhead before the ice finished spitting chips into the dark. The cold of its passing stayed behind on my scalp, a thin wet band where the wind of it had touched me.

I stayed crouched there a second, breathing. My knees had found a seam in the black stone, and I could feel the frost through my trousers, already numbing the skin.

’That was my head. That was where my head lives.’

Above me the layer had no ceiling I could find, just a starless dark that swallowed the top of my vision and hid whatever was circling somewhere in it.

That bird is fast! Wren yelled into my head. Which was the single least useful thing she had ever told me.

”You think?”

Brunhilde hadn’t moved. She stood a few paces off with her greatsword grounded point-first in the rock, both hands folded on the pommel, watching the sky with the patience of a woman waiting for a kettle. Frost fanned out from her boots in slow fern-shapes, creeping across the black stone an inch at a time.

”That was merely it testing the waters. That atrocious bird proved more than capable of harvesting a head in a single dive. Be ready. It won’t come clean again. Now it’s counting.”

”Counting what?”

She turned her head to me and grinned.

”How much you’re worth.”

Her azure eyes tracked something I couldn’t see, some slow line drawn across the dark I had no name for.

”I surmise that it doesn’t strike to kill on the first pass. It strikes to learn where the fear lives. Then it goes there, over and over, faster each time, until you’re too rattled to move right. That is how it took a field from me.”

Her jaw tightened, just slightly.

”It made me hurry. I do not do well hurried.”

So that was the shape of it. A slow winter against a thing whose whole trade was denying you the time to become winter. Her strength arrived like a season. The bird’s job was to make sure the season never got to start.

’Two clocks,’ I thought. ’Hers and its. And whichever finishes first, wins.’

Which meant my job was stupidly simple and physically awful. Give her the clock. Be interesting enough that the bird spent itself on me instead of on her, and don’t die while she counted the other way.

”Okay.”

I straightened, rolling Wren once in my grip. The frost had already reached my heels, and the stone crackled faintly where I turned on it. Cold was climbing my boots now, a slow ache settling into the arches of my feet.

”So it wants me scared.”

”Terrified, ideally.”

”Yeah, that’s not really my thing.”

She glanced at me sidelong, and for a second the frost stopped spreading.

”I’m serious. Ask anyone. I have a documented medical inability to take a situation seriously. It’s ruined most of my relationships.”

I do not think you’re exaggerating either, Wren offered. I think it’s genuinely a problem.

’Yeah, Wren, no one asked for what you think, keep your voice out of my head.’

The second dive came mid-sentence.

This time I saw it, a fold of black peeling out of the dark above, wings tucking, the whole creature narrowing into a single falling blade of itself.

It came in at an angle no bird’s neck should survive, beak-first, and I read the line of it a half-breath early and threw myself the other way. The beak sheared past my ribs. One talon caught my shoulder and opened it, a bright vicious line of cold-then-hot, and then the weight was gone, hauling back up into the nothing while the pain arrived late and shouting.

I clamped a hand over it. My palm came away red, the blood already going tacky and cold in the frozen air before it reached my wrist. The whole arm had started to sing, one bright note that wouldn’t quit.

’...Ah, damn.’

But I didn’t flinch. That was the part that mattered, and it cost me more than the shoulder did, because every nerve in me wanted to, wanted to gasp and scramble and give the thing what it was fishing for. I breathed through it instead, slow and even, the way you’d talk down a spooked horse, except the horse was me. Then I said, out loud, to a predator that had never once in its existence been heckled:

”Bad angle. Sloppy. My grandmother dives better than you, and she’s dead.”

Above us, high in the black, something hesitated.

I felt it more than saw it. A hitch in the air. The bird had expected the panic to be waiting where it left the wound, a warm little pocket of fear to sink into and accelerate off of, and it had found a bleeding idiot making jokes about his dead grandmother instead. Its whole engine ran on the moment I broke.

I wasn’t going to break. I physically couldn’t. It was the first time being a disaster of a person had ever looked like a strategy.

”Cade,” Brunhilde called to me quietly. There was something new under the word. ”The cold is turning.”

I risked a look. She was right.

The frost had stopped crawling and started to pour, spilling off her in a widening ring, and the air had thickened until every breath came sharp and glassy in my chest. The cold went past cold and into something with weight to it, pressing on the cut in my shoulder until the blood there stiffened and stopped. The fern-shapes on the ground had become a sheet. Where it passed, the black stone went white and still, and the wrong bruised light of the layer seemed to dim under it, like the whole place was holding its breath along with me.

The small sounds of the place went out one after another, the drip and shift and far-off scrape of wind, until there was nothing left to hear but my own blood.

Her season had arrived.