we’re not?” Giselle asked, her hands trembling and fear running down her spine. She had never seen Rosa at a loss before, and never, ever seen her show more than a moment of fear. To see Rosa so terrified made her insides clench with fear herself.
“And if we’re not . . . they’ll manage to build that Frost Giant they spoke of. It won’t care about dwarven protections. It won’t care about stone walls. It will just walk up to the walls and bash them down, and we’ll be exposed like chickens when a bear cracks open their coop.” Suddenly she put her face in her hands and began to cry. “I can’t do anything about either! I don’t have that kind of power! And no one I knows does!”
Giselle found herself plunged into dark despair. If Rosa didn’t know how to handle this situation . . . what hope did they have? They didn’t have a chance! And . . . not only were all her friends going to die, but the people she was closest to were going to die horribly, and so was she!
And in that moment, as her mind froze with terror . . . she remembered something. Something that Rosa herself had said.
When you are fighting against something or someone that is powerful in magic, and they know that you, too, are a magician, more often than not they completely forget to guard themselves against a purely physical attack. That has saved my life, and more than once.
And she heard herself speaking, calmly, before she had even consciously formed the words, before she had even thought past that fear. It was as if something was speaking through her, and as if Mother was once again putting a comforting arm around her shoulders.
“Well,” she said, putting her hand on Rosa’s shoulder, as Mother used to do for her. “Then we’ll just have to kill them all before they get a chance to put their plan into motion. As you told me, they will be expecting magic to oppose them, not physical force. Simple, really.”
Later she was a little appalled that she had said that out loud . . . but no one else seemed in the least shocked. Cody and Fox had even nodded in approval.
And really, what other choice did they have? It was quite clear that this was a situation of kill or be killed.
The raven evidently did not feel it was safe to come back, so after nightfall, Fox sent out an owl. It had been a long wait, but one in which they had discussed . . . a lot of plans.
“Look. ’Member when we reckoned that the strongest thing we had was us?” Cody finally said. “That we gotta make sure they couldn’t put somethin’ to drive us apart? Well, don’t y’all think the other way ’round goes fer them?”
Giselle’s eyes widened. “They’re practically at each other’s throats, all the time. And if we can get them separated . . .”
“They’ll be so busy thinking of themselves, they won’t come to the aid of one of the others,” Rosa agreed. “What we have to do—”
“Is pick our ground. An’ choose our opponents,” Cody finished, and grinned at her.
“The most dangerous of them seems to be this Johann,” Fox observed. “He may be a cripple and unable to move, but that has made him all the stronger in magic. No one will be able to approach him.”
“Yes . . .” Giselle said, slowly. “But I don’t have to.”
It was already colder by the time Fox sent his owl out. And through the owl’s eyes they saw there was a mound of snow in the meadow near the abbey that had not been there before. “That’s the frost giant,” Rosa said. “Or it will be. It will take them days to grow the thing, but they have already started the Breath of the Ice Wurm, you can tell by how much colder it is.” She thought for a moment. “Actually, that can work in our favor. There will be a crust of ice on top of the snow by morning that will be thick enough to hold us.”
“Yes, but how’ll we move an’ fight on ice?” Cody asked “I could make snowshoes iffen the snow was still soft—”
“I have just the thing,” Giselle said, instantly, and ran for the rooms that had once been Mother’s, where her things were still stored. She came back with two sets of ice spikes that you could