Young Writers Society

Evening is coming, drawing sweetness from the damp earth and the humid air, pooling gold along the lines of a lone, looming oak tree. The breeze brushes its hand over the grass, draws a lazy finger through Hester’s knotted hair.

“Ready?” she asks.

Häl squints against the dying light, at the burnt edges of Hester’s topknot, glowing red with the sun. His feet find surer footing. His arms hover at his sides.

“Ready,” he says.

“We’ll count together,” she says. “On three.”

“One.” Their voices layer together.

“Two.” Hester shifts her weight back, barely.

“Three-”

Häl’s hand closes around the wand, but she moves like a mayfly, skittering to one side in a flash of plum and swinging hair. A barrier ribbons from her wand: swathes of liquid amber swirl, pour, and cocoon around her. When Häl swings – one shockwave, two, hot and crackling – they shatter into sparks against the shield. The second is enough to burn through, but she conjures another swathe, and another, and another.

The grass scrapes against his legs as he moves, but she barely seems to stir the air. He’s onto fireballs now, bullet-sized volleys which fill the space between them with smoke trails. They glance against her rippling shields, mostly, but some dash her robes – one draws a blackened streak across her cheek, and her gasp is part-shock, part-laughter.

She’s not attacking, Häl realises, just dancing – a sequence of ducks and dodges and shutter-flash barriers, which smoulder under one or two blows. Twice Häl’s footing catches on the grass, making him stagger, and she whips her wand as if to attack, but nothing comes.

Then a mirror shield, like liquid glass pooling in the air – Hal’s shockwave is already rolling, already there, already rebounding, and it’s all he can do to dive to the ground. The heat tumbles through the space above him like warm breath, and through the shimmering air he sees Hester’s wand flicking uprightdownleftright, but there’s nothing else there, nothing to see.

He’s up again, but fatigue is settling in. He lurches for her, lashing whips of light, but his arms have lost their fluidity and his feet aren’t lifting as they should. At every slip and falter, she flicks her wand in that illegible way, like she’s conducting an orchestra he can’t hear.

The realisation comes when he looses a light arc, and his arm sticks halfway through the movement. The arc dashes her leg, kicking the foundations out from under her, but he’s still stuck, still can’t move. He wrenches his arm, but the movement jerks his leg up and sends him sprawling.

He’s bound. Something’s bound him.

Hester’s unsteady feet fill his vision. With one foot, she rolls him over, pressing her sole to his chest. The tip of her wand blurs between his eyes.

“Do you yield, my dear?” she says. He can hear the smile rather than see it.

He stares up at her. “Don’t have much choice, do I?”

She cups her ear with one hand. He rolls his eyes.

“I yield, alright?”

A satisfied sigh. “The three words a woman truly wants to hear.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Häl grumbles. “What’s the secret, then?”

She lifts her foot, and the toe of her boots catches on something invisible, pulling his arms up with it. From this angle, in the glare of the sun, he finally sees it – glimmering threads, thinner than hair, lashed around his wrists and arms and legs and ankles. A web of hundreds, sticky and tangled, but so light that he can barely feel them.

He clicks his tongue. “So that’s why they call you the Widow.”

She grins, then untangles her foot and takes a step back.

“I just figure,” she says, flicking soot off her sleeves, “That there’s no need to knock a man down when you can tie a few threads to him and let him do it himself.”

“Yeah, well,” Häl mutters. “Get the damn things off me, will you?”

A wave of her wand and the threads melt away. In the absence of them, his body unravels like a broken puppet, and he can hardly believe he didn’t notice them sooner.

“Did I impress you?” she asks, when he’s back on his feet. The duel has shuddered her hair partway free of her topknot, and the light makes shadows in the hollows of her face.

“You might’ve done.”

Her lips quirk. She walks on ahead, back towards the estate, the pleats of her coat trailing through the grass.