DER TOD

German, "the death"

When everyone knows you're a monster, you needn't waste time doing every monstrous thing. -- Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

Diarnlan forgot one very important detail. The skrýszel was not the only problem she faced. In fact it was the easy part. She knew by heart when and where it would appear. All she had to do was wait for it.

The skrýszel that appeared was not the frog-like one she had killed before. It was the snake-like one with antlers, the one that had killed her in the last lifetime. The memory of its antlers stabbing through her chest distracted Diarnlan from attacking it when it first reached the beach. It had begun to slither towards the village by the time she recovered.

This time she knew to avoid its antlers. She sneaked up on it from behind and above, like she did the frog monster, and stabbed Saungrafn deep into the back of its neck.

She didn't tell anyone she had killed it. Instead she went to Teivain-ríkhon-hrair with a story about seeing its corpse there when she opened the window.

Her teacher examined the body curiously. "This is a stab-wound. Probably caused by a sword. This creature didn't just die; someone killed it."

Diarnlan very carefully did not think about Saungrafn, lying in a corner of her attic under a pile of old clothes. All mages were telepaths, after all. Her teacher probably wasn't going to snoop in her head without permission, but why take the chance?

"Did you hear a fight?" her teacher asked. She poked the skrýszel's antlers with her scythe and watched with interest as its scales flaked off. "I wonder if we can use this in potions."

Diarnlan had a sudden vision of cutting up the skrýszel's body for potion ingredients. On the one hand it was the perfect revenge for it killing her. On the other, she distinctly remembered that skrýszel blood turned acidic within a day of death. Several luckless would-be potion experts had discovered that the hard way in her first life. She considered warning the mage. But how would she explain how she knew that?

"I didn't hear anything," she said instead. "I just looked out the window and there the horrible thing was. It knocked my fence down and crushed my cabbages!"

"None of that would be quiet," Teivain-ríkhon-hrair said. Diarnlan paled. For the first time she realised her excuse had many holes in it. She waited for the pointed questions to start. "Whoever killed it must have cast a spell to reduce the noise. I suppose they thought it was the best way to avoid a panic."

Well, that wasn't what she expected. But if that was what her teacher wanted to believe, Diarnlan wasn't going to correct her.

"The question is, who killed it and how did they do it so easily? The only tracks here are the monster's. And our footprints. If there were any other prints, no one will ever be able to tell them from ours now."

Diarnlan breathed a silent sigh of relief. If even her teacher didn't suspect she was involved, then no one else would either. She could avoid fame and get on with her life.

The mage said, "This might complicate my idea."

A sinking feeling filled Diarnlan's chest. "Idea?" she asked sharply. "What idea?"

"I'm planning to have you -- all of you -- teach students from the academy."

At first Diarnlan didn't think she'd heard right. She stared blankly at her teacher as her mind replayed those words. Again and again she went over them until she finally understood their meaning. "What?"

In her hurry to deal with Karandren and the monster she'd completely forgotten everything else about her earlier lives. Somehow it had never occurred to her that getting rid of Karandren would not mean getting rid of the students.

Oh no, she realised with a shudder. I'll have to teach Erdreda again.

If Saungrafn had been to hand she would have stabbed herself. Dying yet again and starting her life over yet again was preferable to what lay ahead for her.

Frantically she searched for excuses. "That's a terrible idea! I can't teach anyone! I'm still a student myself!"

"You're twenty-four," Teivain-ríkhon-hrair said. "You're old enough and qualified enough to teach a group of children ten years younger than you."

Technically she was well over a hundred. By now she might even be getting close to a hundred and fifty. It was so hard to keep track of her age when she couldn't remember how many years she'd lived in all her lives. If that was a standard of how fit someone was to be a teacher, then yes, she was qualified. But Diarnlan still couldn't picture herself teaching anyone without losing her mind.

Her teacher saw her expression and rolled her eyes. "Don't look like that! It's not the end of the world, and it's not like you've been sentenced to a horrible death. They're teenagers, not monsters."

That was debatable. Alas, Diarnlan could see it was only too clear her teacher wouldn't be swayed. Perhaps she should consider running away to Byuryan again. ...On second thoughts, that hadn't gone so well the last time. She would just have to stay here and hope for the best.

Diarnlan's worst fears were confirmed. Within days of the monster's attack, she found herself saddled with two spoilt, arrogant brats who had less magic in their little fingers than Karandren had in his whole body.

Why am I thinking about Karandren? she wondered when she realised what she'd just thought. She did the mental equivalent of slapping herself in the face. He's dead. He'll never bother me again. Stop thinking about him.

That was much easier said -- or thought, in this case -- than done. In the first place, Karandren had been her enemy in every repetition of their lives. Sometimes the absence of an enemy affected a person more than the absence of a friend. Diarnlan had no friends to miss, so for want of anything better she fell back on missing Karandren. It didn't help that she occasionally felt what might be called pangs of conscience over killing him so treacherously when he had no chance to fight back. She ignored her conscience until it stopped bothering her. After all, it wasn't as if she'd killed an innocent child who wouldn't hurt a fly.

I put down a rabid dog before it could harm me, she tried to tell herself. That did not make her feel much better.

Her new students were also not calculated to

make her feel better. Erdreda was one of them, of course. Stupid, incompetent Erdreda who hadn't an original thought in her head. Lazy Erdreda who outright copied her essays from the textbooks. Whiny Erdreda who ran in tears to her aunt every time Diarnlan snapped at her.

Erdreda's aunt was the latest of Teivain-ríkhon-hrair's students. Diarnlan had never spared the woman a second thought until now. She'd never even bothered to learn her name. Now she found herself receiving very angry letters every day from someone who should have treated her with the respect due her ghuanihan[1]. After the first few Diarnlan stopped reading them. She threw them in the fire as soon as they arrived. Let those brats run to Teivain-ríkhon-hrair if they wanted. It wouldn't make any difference to her teaching methods.

The second student was a twelve-year-old boy named Dakael. Once upon a time Diarnlan had thought nothing could be as irritating as a fourteen-year-old boy. She was wrong. Whatever else she could say for Karandren, he had at least pretended to pay attention during lessons. Dakael openly scribbled on his slate and read novels behind his textbooks. Then he went a step further and started scribbling on his textbooks. That was bad enough on its own, but those textbooks belonged to Teivain-ríkhon-hrair. She'd bought them herself so her students wouldn't have to. Diarnlan would not hand them back to her teacher looking like someone had spilt ink all over them.

She dismissed the two of them early when she saw what he was doing. For the rest of the afternoon she painstakingly removed every spot of ink from the textbook. Sometimes she put too much magic behind her spells and erased lines of text by mistake. After the fifth time that happened Diarnlan flung the textbook clear across the room in a rage.

"When I get my hands on that little bastard I'll wring his scrawny neck!" she growled.

At the back of her mind she felt Saungrafn's presence sidle in. You wouldn't have to worry about this if Karandren was still alive.

"No," Diarnlan said aloud. "Instead I'd have to worry about being killed. Yet again."

She telekinetically summoned the textbook back to her and surveyed the damage. An entire paragraph was missing the first words of each line. The second and third words were very faint, and the fourth words blurred like someone had spilt water on them. The swirly lines of Dakael's scribbles covered the rest of the paragraph.

"What a mess. I should have run away."

Saungrafn said nothing. Diarnlan got the distinct feeling her sword was laughing at her. She firmly refused to think about that. Sometimes she really felt like she had gone mad and this whole thing was just a fever dream. If so, why confirm her insanity by acknowledging it more than necessary?

In spite of herself she thought, At least Karandren never did this sort of thing. She promptly gave herself another telepathic slap. Stop thinking about him!

This time Saungrafn definitely laughed at her.

Diarnlan tried not to think about Karandren when Dakael botched a spell so badly that he broke a window. She tried not to think about Karandren when Erdreda accidentally poisoned herself by eating reifþeríngberry. The trouble was, it was hard not to think of him as a skilled healer tried frantically to save the wretched little fool's life.

Karandren warned her what that was, Diarnlan remembered. He stopped her before she ate it.

She shook her head in disgust and pushed those thoughts away. So what if Karandren had prevented this fiasco? His other actions outweighed any good he'd ever done.

Amidst all these attempts not to think of her former pupil she managed to forget yet another very important detail. The jǫtunn attack. It was little more than a footnote after all the much more serious skrýszel attacks. Indeed, Diarnlan had practically forgotten it ever happened at all. Certainly it never occurred to her that it would happen again even though Karandren was gone.

When she arranged the trip to the farm her biggest concern was whether Erdreda would survive it. The last thing she wanted was a repeat of the poisonous berry debacle.

"Now remember, both of you," Diarnlan said several times during the trip to the farm, "don't eat anything. I don't care if you think it's safe to eat. Some mushrooms kill you within seconds. You'd be dead before anyone could help you."

Those two brats hadn't the courtesy to even pretend they were taking her seriously. Erdreda rolled her eyes. Dakael openly yawned. Diarnlan glared at both of them.

If they poison themselves I'm not going to rescue them, she thought as she shooed them into the farmyard.

All the same, she didn't read her book this time. There wasn't much point when she had to keep checking on the brats every other minute.

Naturally they got into a fight within seconds of being handed the mushrooms. It wasn't even over something important. Dakael simply decided -- for reasons beyond Diarnlan's comprehension -- that there was something more interesting in Erdreda's bowl than in his own. Diarnlan watched in exasperation as they got into a tug-of-war over the bowl.

"Stop that or I'll make you clean cauldrons with your toothbrushes," she snapped after the fight had dragged on for five minutes.

The brats meekly settled down and went back to examining the mushrooms. For ten minutes all was peaceful. Diarnlan watched them like a hawk to make sure neither put any of the mushrooms in their mouths. She was just beginning to accept nothing would go wrong when something did.

An icy chill filled the air. Diarnlan shivered and wrapped her coat tighter around her. For some incomprehensible reason the motion prompted her to remember Karandren's ridiculous coat. She promptly spent several minutes silently yelling at herself -- yet again -- for thinking about him -- yet again. Meanwhile the temperate continued to drop. It dropped steadily yet so slowly that Diarnlan didn't notice the change until she saw the steam of her breath in the air.

She blinked. Late spring in Avallot was hardly what anyone would call overly warm, but it also wasn't icy cold. Why the sudden--

Wait. Once more her mind flew to Karandren. This time it went to the farce of a trial and his exile immediately afterwards. Then it went back to the jǫtunn.

Diarnlan leapt to her feet. "Children! Go into the farmhouse, now!"

The two brats stared at her. Naturally they were too stupid to obey her without question.

"We're not children!" Erdreda protested, pouting like a spoilt toddler.

"We can't just barge into someone else's house without permission," Dakael said -- a display of disgusting hypocrisy considering how often he barged into Diarnlan's house without bothering to knock.

All right, so technically he was allowed in because he was (unfortunately for all concerned, she thought with a shudder) her pupil. The point still held because the farmer had allowed them onto the farm and into the garden. And all of this was pointlessly wasting time -- time they didn't have.

"Shut up and go inside."

The brats saw the look on her face and realised this was one time when they should not argue. Diarnlan watched to make sure they did indeed go into the house. As soon as the door closed behind them she walked out of the garden. The jǫtunn had appeared in the middle of the yard. It would be here at any minute. Karandren had killed it with just one knife. Diarnlan conjured up a knife of her own and held it ready to throw. In the background the farm's chickens began to squawk and flutter. A dog barked wildly. The temperature continued to fall.

The hole in the veil opened right in front of her. For one nightmarish minute she looked through it into the Óhreinnjǫrð. Colours swirled behind the veil, colours that human eyes should not be able to see. In seconds the landscape changed from mountains to valleys to cities that defied all logic. She saw palaces built on top of enormous spindly towers. A thousand shapes rolled back and forth in the gorge-like streets.

A pair of eyes stared back at her. They looked far too human to be a skrýszel's eyes. They were there and gone so quickly she wasn't even sure she'd seen them properly. For all she knew they might have been her brain misinterpreting something else she saw.

Then an enormous figure stepped through the veil and blocked her view of the other side.

Diarnlan looked up at the jǫtunn. After facing so many other sorts of skrýszel she no longer felt particularly afraid of them. Instead she just felt angry. How dare this latest pest come along and make her life even harder than it already was?

The brute hadn't spotted her yet. She supposed that when you were taller than most buildings, it was very easy to miss someone whose head was on a level with your knee. No matter. Its obliviousness was just what she needed right now.

Diarnlan raised the knife and took aim. She had never practiced throwing knives. But if Karandren had killed the jǫtunn with one blow when he was only fourteen, then she should have no problems. All the same, she cast a spell to make sure the knife flew straight at the jǫtunn's eye.

She miscalculated. Badly. So badly, in fact, that the knife didn't even reach the brute's face, let alone its eye. It scraped over its shoulder then fell harmlessly to the ground. Diarnlan watched it fall with a mixture of shock and resignation.

Of course it wouldn't be that easy, was her last thought before a block of ice crashed down on her head.

There were few things worse than being crushed to death. Waking up in the snow again was one of them. Waking up just in time for a sword to plunge into her eye-socket was another.

"Took you long enough," Karandren said. He sounded far too cheerful for someone who had just stabbed right through Diarnlan's skull. "I was beginning to worry you wouldn't come back at all, and then where would I be?"

Diarnlan grabbed the blade, oblivious to how it sliced open her palm, and shoved the sword away. Through her one intact eye she saw Karandren overbalance and fall into the snow beside her. The cuts on her hand and her ruined eye healed themselves in the time it took him to stand up.

"So," he said, "how did you die this time?"

"None of your business."

"Did someone sneak up on you while you were unarmed? Because that's what happened to me, you know. I wonder who could possibly be low enough for such a dirty trick." He gave her a pointed glare. "They'd have to be the lowest of the low. A complete scumbag. Someone lacking all honour. An absolute--"

Diarnlan gathered a handful of snow and hurled it at his face.