Jasnah, still holding the reins, let go with her right hand and pointed sharply at one of the snow wolves running level with the racing sled.
Crack!
Snow burst violently from the ground where the shot struck, scattering white in every direction.
But Jasnah's heart sank immediately at the result.
The wolf had been racing full-tilt alongside them, and the sled had already left it slightly behind and yet, it hadn't died.
The moment it felt her finger swing toward it, it lunged sideways and dodged the spell that would have otherwise killed it.
Damn it!
Jasnah cursed under her breath and struck again, and again in rapid sequence.
But the beasts had grown wary now, every single one of them—the instant her finger came up in their direction, they darted left and right unpredictably, and with the sled itself racing at considerable speed beneath her, jolting over the rough ice, her aim suffered badly for it.
After several failed attempts, her cutting hex had only managed to sever one wolf's leg.
Enno fired again over the chaos.
A wolf that had already climbed halfway onto the sled frame howled sharply as it was thrown clear by the impact, and the wooden boards shattered further beneath the violence of it—the sled was thoroughly riddled through by now, more hole than structure.
Smoke curled from the gun barrel, and the black metal had taken on a faint bluish sheen from the constant heat of repeated firing.
Enno's own gaze tightened at the sight. He didn't reload.
"What's wrong?"
Jasnah caught the sudden change in him at once and asked urgently.
"Barrel needs to cool."
Enno said.
It was grim news to receive in this moment. Enno's gun had been the one weapon that made the pack flinch and hesitate. Until it recovered, they'd have nothing left to lean on but Jasnah's own cutting hex and her aim, given the circumstances, simply wasn't good enough to trust with their lives.
"Take it!"
Jasnah bit down hard, pressed the reins firmly into Enno's waiting hands, and spun around as a flurry of cutting hexes knocked another wolf clean off the sled mid-leap.
The cargo bed kept getting sliced open in the chaos, and what little firewood and smoked meat he'd been saving spilled out and fell away behind them, an easy, welcome prize for the wolves still pursuing from behind.
Without proper supplies, they'd never make it through what remained of this journey.
But that particular problem was one for later consideration. Right now, the singular priority was breaking free of the pack.
The frame had lost more than half its wooden boards by now, and nearly all their gathered supplies were gone, but the sled hadn't gained any speed for the lightened load—if anything, it was slowing.
The change itself was faint but both Enno and Jasnah felt it settle in immediately; the shared dread was arriving without words.
She flung out a hand, driving back a wolf edging in aggressively from the side with a fresh blade of concentrated light, and drew a few ragged, exhausted breaths.
Casting this fast, and without a proper wand, was taking its toll on her body as well.
But Jasnah had no room left to spare for her exhaustion. She looked up ahead instead, at the sled dogs still running desperately for their lives.
They'd pushed themselves this hard, for this long, and every single one of them ran now with its tongue lolling out visibly, panting hard thoroughly spent.
Jasnah's face, already pale from the cold and exertion, went more pallid still at the sight.
'The moment those dogs had nothing left in them to pull with, I and Enno would be picked clean, not even bones will be left behind for anyone to find.
Damn it!'
The curse rose in her again.
'Would this pack let them go, given the chance?'
Never. She and Enno, and the dogs currently pulling them to these wolves, all of it together represented a feast rarely offered in a winter this harsh. With it secured, the pack's chances of surviving the season would leap dramatically.
'Unless I and Enno showed them that we were capable of killing every single last one.'
It wasn't only Enno and Jasnah who'd noticed the dogs beginning to fail. The wolves dogging their trail like some curse worked directly into the bone had noticed too.
AWOOOOOO—
The lead wolf, running along the frozen riverbed, flashed something cold in its own eyes and threw its head back sharply to howl.
The signal reached the whole pack at once. The wolves trailing the sled, still trying opportunistically to climb aboard, gave up the individual attempts and quit sparing their own strength—they surged forward faster as one.
"What are they doing, Enno!"
Jasnah shouted the question urgently, but before Enno could answer, the wolves answered for him instead.
One wolf, entirely reckless of its own death, threw itself straight and hard at the line of exhausted sled dogs.
Startled by the sheer commitment of the attack, Jasnah struck without hesitation at that close a range, this time, she didn't miss her mark.
But the sled dogs had already been badly spooked by the wolf's raw savagery, and the sled, running straight and true until that exact moment, lurched hard sideways.
"Is that—"
The sudden, violent lurch made Jasnah look up ahead without meaning to, her attention was pulled by instinct.
Far down the straight riverbed stretching before them, a faint gleam had appeared on the horizon and as the sled raced onward, it grew steadily closer fast.
'That had to be the lake the villagers had spoken of, somewhere past the pine woods.'
The bitterness sitting in Jasnah's chest thickened considerably at the realisation.
At this rate, they were going to die out here on this open snow plain, whatever they attempted.
When the sled finally burst out of the riverbed and onto the open expanse of the lake, the dense woods that had walled it in on both sides fell away, and Jasnah's view opened wide all at once, the horizon was suddenly, dizzyingly vast.
Like the river before it, the bitter cold and heavy accumulated snow had frozen the vast lake completely solid, turning it into an open field stretching on and endlessly on in every direction.
Distant mountains drifted at the edge of visibility, half-lost in the streaming, blowing snow and that, she thought with a ache, might be a shore they'd never manage to reach in time.
Grief welled up in her at the thought. But her hands, working independently of that grief, showed no mercy at all in their motion.
One wolf after another, closing steadily in on the sled dogs, was torn apart by her spellwork.
The lead wolf still kept its careful distance throughout, wary, its head cocked at an assessing angle, watching the human whose swinging arm kept cutting down its own kin one by one—reading with predatory intelligence, precisely how she struck, piece by careful piece, working toward some conclusion.
Enno wasn't giving his own full attention to driving anymore, but he hadn't raised the rifle again either, biding his time.
With the pack already pressing in for what promised to be a dense, close attack, a gun that fired only once and had to be reloaded by hand wasn't going to do much good against numbers like these.
Fewer than thirty snow wolves remained now, spread along both sides of the desperate sled, throwing themselves at the exhausted dogs one after another without apparent regard for their own losses.
AWOOOOO!
A shrill, unified wolf-cry tore through the blinding, driving snow, and the pack, as if gone entirely mad all at once, surged forward together in a single, coordinated wave.
Jasnah's face went completely white at the sight. In a single second she'd flung out several cutting hexes in rapid succession—they killed a few of the attacking wolves, but more had already landed successfully on the sled dogs themselves.
The wolves she managed to tear apart were dragged straight under the racing runners, and in one violent, sudden jolt, Jasnah realised, in horror, that her line of sight was climbing steadily.
'The sled was going to tip!'
Enno dropped the reins, tucked the rifle securely under one arm, and hauled the panicked, dazed Jasnah hard against his chest in a single, decisive motion.
Jasnah, who had weathered countless dangerous flash-step spells across her career without ever flinching, shut her eyes now against the sight of the sky spinning wildly around her, genuinely afraid for the first time in longer than she could remember.
CRASHHH
The whole frame tumbled violently and slammed hard into the ground, bursting entirely into pieces at once—a few wolves and sled dogs caught helplessly beneath it coughed blood and died on the spot from the impact.
The instant she hit the ground herself, Jasnah didn't feel the crushing impact she'd braced desperately for, and only then did it properly register that Enno had thrown his own body down beneath her, to cushion the fall with his body.
They rolled across the frozen ground a dozen times or more together, then slid on a long way further still, and only then, still wrapped tightly around each other, did Enno and Jasnah finally come to a stop.
"Enno, are you all right?!"
The instant she stopped moving, Jasnah ignoring the sharp pain radiating through every joint in her own body, scrambled up and looked to Enno, frantic with worry.
The relief lasted barely one full second in her mind before it vanished, replaced by fresh horror.
Enno wasn't dead but the thin trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth said quite enough on its own: the injury sitting somewhere inside him ran deep.
To a wild beast, injury and death in the course of any hunt were things to be avoided at all reasonable costs and also, simultaneously, just the ordinary, accepted price of doing it at all.
No wolf, in the end mourned a life lost somewhere along the way.
The instant the two of them rose from the snow, the wolves, ignoring their wounds, threw themselves at the nearest available prey like men with nothing left to lose.
The sled dogs, still tangled hopelessly in their own harnesses, had no way to fight back—one after another, their throats were torn open, and they died crying out into the storm.
At least ten wolves were coming now, straight and fast, for Jasnah and Enno directly. The one running in the lead sprang forward, aimed with precision for the exposed back of Jasnah's own neck.
Jasnah never saw the wolf fixed on her own throat approaching from behind—all her attention remained entirely fixed on Enno, who was still struggling to catch his breath.
Bang!
A single second before it would have struck home, Enno raised the rifle—he hadn't lost it even through the entire violent fall and fired, and the leaping wolf dropped abruptly out of the air, lifeless.
Jasnah spun at once and cut down the wolf's already-dead corpse as it tumbled uselessly into her arms.
But the danger wasn't really over.
It had come to this: the pack no longer cared what the assault cost them. One wolf after another leapt into the freezing air, jaws bared wide and snarling, each one determined to deliver some killing blow.
'No time left,' Jasnah thought, her whole face falling into total despair.
Enno's rifle had already fired its single available shot, and there was, by any honest measure, no way Jasnah herself could put down every wolf closing in from every direction at once, in a single instant.
Death would come in that one final breath.
In the stretched-out, suspended second inside that mist of raw, overwhelming murderous aura, Enno looked once, silently, at Jasnah who stared back at him in turn, stricken through with guilt at what her choices had brought them both to.
Then, in the very next instant, something churned deep in the clouded depths of his eyes, and a silver light broke through like sunlight tearing violently through storm clouds.
"Enough—"
A single voice cut cleanly through the noise—it was young, but steady and reached Jasnah's ears just as she waited, resigned, to die.
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