They would have slammed into me, too, but he was keeping me in front of him, something that would have been marginally less terrifying if we hadn’t been sliding down an absurdly tilted roof of slick clay tiles, straight toward—

“Auuggghhhh!” I yelled, finally getting my breath back, as we plunged over the edge and into darkness.

Well, almost. I found myself on my hands and knees, my body jolting and sending pain signals everywhere, and my eyes staring down at a blinding circle of light. I appeared to be straddling it, I didn’t know why. Until my vision adjusted, and my confused brain finally figured out that I was looking through a round opening in the castle floor, below which was a huge drop that ended in the rushing river and a lot of rocks.

And a lot of bones.

The river curved about the castle here, creating a fairly sharp turn, and allowing anything dumped below to pile up. And the bones had done exactly that, washing up onto the riverbank in heaps of rotting ribcages, dirty clavicles, shattered femurs, and a few skulls, one of them alarmingly outsized. Its features looked more human than animal, with green, trailing slime for hair and eye sockets that must have been as big as my head. The river was pouring through them, making the giant skull look like it was weeping—

For us, probably, I thought, snapping out of it, as a fey hit the floor in front of me.

Mircea pulled me up, and I received a brief glimpse of a small, roofless room; of a long-decayed sheep’s head, its tongue lolling from a perch by a door; of a bunch of empty meat hooks, originally plain wood like the tables scattered about, but stained dark from years’ worth of dried blood; and of more bones, most of them near the opening in the floor, because we were in the castle abattoir, weren’t we? It was on the edge of the structure, probably so the animals could be butchered and their unwanted bits chucked down the hole for the river to sort out.

Fitting, I thought, as Mircea grabbed a cleaver.

The fey in front of me went staggering back with his head bisected down to the neck and flopping to the sides, spilling his brains out. My gorge rose, but I swallowed it back where it belonged because more fey were sliding down the steeply sloped roof, some shooting as they came. Thankfully, the little room had once had a thatched covering, some decayed bits of which still clung to the stones and acted as an arrow trap.

But not enough of one.

A shaft took me through the hand, I screamed, Mircea swore, and then the bastards were on us.

And really wished they weren’t.