Free Chantress Fury by Amy Butler Greenfield Page A

perhaps that was just the confusion in my own head.
    How could I defeat this? We were done for.
    “Stay down!” Pulling me back, Nat snatched a dagger from his belt. Against the coiling length of the great serpent, the dagger looked laughably small—a matchstick next to a dragon. But when Nat lobbed it at the scaly head, the beast shrieked.
    Nat had aimed at the eyes, but at the last second the monster twisted away so that the dagger struck the scales on its back, well down from the head.
    I winced in sharp disappointment. It couldn’t possibly be a death blow.
    Yet even as I braced myself for the crunch of its massive teeth, the monster started backing away. It was wailing, almost keening, in a language that I could not understand. More miraculously still, the great green coils were turning the color of water and dissolving, first around the spot where the dagger had lodged, and then out and out until the entire monster was gone.
    Crouched in the boat, Nat turned to me, bewildered. “Did I do that?”
    “It wasn’t me,” I said. “There was strong magic there, but I don’t know what it was. I’ve never heard anything like it. If it weren’t for you, we’d have gone down.”
    “But it was just a dagger.” Nat looked out at the spot where the monster had vanished, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it was gone. “Made of the best Toledo steel, but even so . . .”
    “Maybe it was a lucky blow.”
    “But I only nicked its back. It wasn’t exactly a mortal injury.” And then, more slowly, Nat said, “Maybe that’s it.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “That creature wasn’t something from the mortal world, was it? It was magic.”
    “Yes.” The smell and the sound of magic had been all over it.
    “And steel is mostly iron, and iron breaks magic, doesn’t it?”
    “Not mine.” Iron had never stopped me.
    “No, but lots of kinds, or so the old stories say. It’s death to goblins, witches, faeries—why not sea monsters, too?”
    “I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “Could it really be that easy?”
    Humor glimmered in his eyes. “I’m not sure ‘easy’ is the right word for what we’ve just been through.”
    I had to laugh, but even as I did, something wrenched inside me. For a moment, he no longer seemed like a stranger. That glimmer in his eyes, that quiet humor—they were part of what I had loved about him.
    As he looked back at me, I felt the old spark leap between us. For one shining moment, I could believe that time had run backward and we were in a world where we had never parted. Anything seemed possible.
    But then he looked away, and I became conscious once more of the cold rain and my river-drenched clothes and the lingering smell of putrid serpent breath in my hair. Romance on the river? Not here. It would take more than a spark to fix what had gone wrong between us.
    “Ahoy there!”
    I turned, startled. One of the royal pinnaces was bearing down on our small boat, and the captain was calling out to us through cupped hands. “Marvelous, the way you two finished off that beast! We’ve come to pick you up and tow your boat to shore.”
    Before either Nat or I could reply, an enormous cheer shook the waters. A crowd had gathered on the riverbank and was saluting the victory. “Hurrah!”
    Moments later, the pinnace drew up beside us. In the commotion and fuss that followed, Nat and I were separated. We were back in the real world, the world of the Court—the world where we were strangers once again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    MELUSINE
    After we landed, Norrie, shaken and white, took charge of me as soon as she could. Exclaiming and making much of me, she bustled me off to our rooms and prepared a hot bath. “To warm you up,” she said, “and to ward off colds.”
    Perhaps that was all it was meant to do, but I noticed that she sprinkled lavender and rosemary into the bath, and even slipped in a bay leaf—herbs of protection against harm. I could remember her making use of them