She crossed her arms. “If you don’t want to marry me, why were you thinking of me?”
“I wasn’t thinking of you.”
“Yes, you were. I heard you. Ever since I sent you back, I’ve been listening for you very carefully. You thought of my laugh, and you remembered it as alluring.” She grinned slyly up at him. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the memory of me. Not once you got home to your own world.”
“H-Home? My own world?” All temptation to yield (which may or may not have been slowly building in Foxbrush’s heart) vanished as he gasped out those words. He opened his mouth and roared like a young lion himself, “You sent me back into the wrong time!”
She drew up her legs and sat more primly, her face an entire world of affront. “No, I didn’t. I don’t deal in Time.”
“You pushed me! You pushed me out of the Wood, and I landed here!”
“No, actually you landed There,” said Nidawi. “Here is . . . elsewhere. If you ended up anywhere, it’s because of the Path you’re on. Nothing to do with me.”
Foxbrush opened his mouth, but nothing happened, so he shook himself and managed a weak, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
He felt the breath of Lioness again. The great animal pushed her massive head under his hand and rolled it around so that he now stood with his arm up and across her neck. She blinked sweetly at him, her mouth still open as she exhaled a puffing lion’s purr.
“Um,” said Foxbrush. Then he sneezed again.
Lioness nosed him affectionately in the chest.
“Really, Lioness,” said Nidawi crossly as she scrambled to her feet. “You are too forward sometimes.” And she hurried over to take Foxbrush’s other arm, clutching it tightly. She smiled at him again, and he was nearly blinded by the glitter both of her teeth and of the rain in her eyelashes and hair.
“Please,” said Foxbrush, stepping back and trying to free his arms. “Please, I think I’m allergic to your lion.”
“My what?”
“Your lion.”
“My . . . oh! You mean Lioness?” Nidawi laughed like chiming crystals and refused to release Foxbrush’s arm no matter how he tugged. “She’s not mine! I mean, I suppose she sort of is. Are you mine, Lioness?” she asked the white lion, who shook her head briskly and padded away to lie down in a dry patch under a tree. She continued blinking Foxbrush’s way, but the tip of her tail swished quietly through the grass and over the roots.
“There now, you’ve offended her,” Nidawi said, shaking a finger under Foxbrush’s nose. “She’s not mine like a slave. I never kept slaves, not even when I had a world of subjects!”
A change came across her unbelievably delicate features. They sagged suddenly with heaviness, bags appearing under the eyes, lines deepening into framing crevices around the mouth, which, in turn, thinned to a narrow line. The black hair tumbling over Foxbrush’s shoulder and arm faded to gray, then to white. Nidawi the Everblooming let go her hold on Foxbrush and stepped away, bent and tottering so that she had to put out a hand and support herself against the tree.
It was unnatural and so sudden that Foxbrush took a moment to catch his breath. Then he licked rain from his lips and said, “I say, I’m sorry.” He put a hand on Nidawi’s bowed shoulder. “Was it something I said? Is it . . .” He grimaced. “Is it about the betrothal?”
But she shook her head. When she spoke, her voice was as heavy as her face but paper-thin and frail. “No, it’s just painful to remember.” She drew a shuddering breath that Foxbrush feared might shatter her body. When she turned to him, the lights had gone from the rain in her lashes, and instead her eyes brimmed with shining tears. “A mother should never outlive her children.”
Then she was sobbing an old woman’s sobs, dry and broken. Foxbrush put his arms around her and held her close to his chest, and her tears mingled with the rain. But unlike the rain, which was warm on that summer’s evening, Nidawi’s tears were cold, and they chilled him. Still he held her and smoothed her thin hair, from which dead leaves fell and littered the ground at their feet.
The moment ended with Foxbrush’s sudden yelp of pain. For Nidawi’s hands, which had been wrapped around him, dug into his skin with a surprising sharpness. Foxbrush looked down to see the white head sinking into a black mop of tangles, and Nidawi was a child again. A child turning away from him with a vicious snarl, her fingers curled into claws.
“Cren Cru!” she shrieked.
Lioness sprang to her feet, her ears pinned back, her growl outmatching even the thunder that rolled across the darkened sky. Foxbrush turned to look where they looked.
His heart stopped beating.
It must be a dream or an illusion brought on by the magic intoxication of Nidawi’s presence. It must be, for how else could he see, even through dark and rain, that form in white rags, her hair falling free in red-gold tatters below her shoulders, her icy eyes fixed upon him in unbelief. His bride: his beautiful, broken, terrible bride.
“Daylily!” he cried, taking three strides. But he had not taken a fourth when, with a roar that shook the orchard, Lioness sprang over his head and charged in streaking, snarling fury right at that vision that was no vision, but which breathed and moved and looked right at him.
“No!” Foxbrush shouted, though he did not know he shouted. Like one in a dream, he could not run, could not make his limbs move, straining against the pull of resisting time. Seconds, half seconds, were hours too long, for the white lion bounded with the speed of lightning.
Daylily shook herself free of her shock at seeing Foxbrush in this of all places and focused her gaze fiercely on that which approached. It was not a wolf. It was a Faerie beast, an invader, and her enemy.
Our enemy!
She snatched the Bronze from around her neck and crouched, prepared for battle.
Save our land!
The Lioness leapt, and Daylily, though her arm was none too strong, would have driven her sharp stone up and into her flesh as she descended, had the great cat not turned in the air at the last and landed to one side. Lioness lashed out, claws flashing, but caught Daylily’s gown and not Daylily herself. The lion’s second swing struck Daylily in the side, sending her crashing to the ground and her Bronze stone spinning through the air.
Daylily bared her teeth and reached for the stone, but Lioness pressed her to the dirt with an enormous, crushing paw. Claws tore into Daylily’s shoulder and she screamed. Her voice pierced the rain and the thunder and Foxbrush’s heart, and he screamed as well and threw himself at the lion.
But just as he did so, a savage yell rang out, and a wild man in skins, his hair pulled back in a long braid, fell from the branches of the fig tree above and landed square upon Lioness’s broad back. With strength greater than his size indicated, he unbalanced her, pulling her off Daylily so that both of them rolled across the ground. Foxbrush narrowly avoided losing his face to Lioness’s flailing claws, and found himself standing clear, staring down at Daylily’s flattened form.
Nidawi caught Foxbrush’s arm and pointed at Daylily, screaming, “Kill it! Kill it, my king!”
Then, without another word, she turned to Lioness and the wild man, who were grappling together. Sun Eagle was on the lion’s back, his arm around her shaggy neck, holding on with desperate force even as he struggled to grasp his own Bronze stone. Lioness reared up on her hind legs, twisting her long body and catching Sun Eagle by the leg. He yelled a brutal, angry yell but held on a few moments more before Lioness pulled him free and flung him from her.
Nidawi, still a child but with the face of a demon, flung herself at him, her claw-like hands tearing the skin of his chest into ribbons of blood. He struck with the Bronze, and where it touched the skin of her arm, it burned. The smell of burnt flesh filled the orchard, and steam sizzled in the rain.
Nidawi fell back, clutching her arm. “Kill it!” she cried out to Lioness.
Lioness crouched, her eyes intent. Then she leapt, her powerful body unfolding
to its full lethal extent. But she landed on empty ground, for Sun Eagle gathered his limbs beneath him and fled. He hurtled into the deeper dark of the orchard, plunging on into the jungle, Lioness close at his heels. Nidawi, still holding her arm, ran after, screaming wild, incoherent threats. And the three of them disappeared, followed by the echoes of their voices.
Foxbrush stood in the dripping orchard, staring after the vanished figures and telling himself that none of this could be true.
Daylily moaned.
This at least, be it dream or real, he could not ignore. Foxbrush spun about, his skin-clad feet slipping in the wet grass, and all but fell to her side. Her eyes were closed, her face a rictus of pain as she rolled onto her side. Her fingers, muddied and scraped, clutched the Bronze.
She neither saw nor heard Foxbrush as he awkwardly lifted her, apologizing and cursing in turn. Her mind was full of pain. Pain and the driving voice still urging, Our enemy! Our enemy . . . our enemy . . .
At last even that faded into the fire in her shoulder.
1
FEW FOLKS LIVE in the Wood Between. The Wood is not a place to call one’s home, for it is never safe, even at the best of times, and is predictably unpredictable. Nevertheless, Dame Imraldera had come to consider her little corner of the Wood as more of a home than anything else she had known.
The Haven in which she dwelt had been constructed by Faerie hands long ages ago, though it had since fallen into such disrepair that when Dame Imraldera first came to it with her comrade-in-arms, they had spent many days and nights (difficult to count in the timeless Between) repairing it. Thus she took more than a little pride in its stately halls and elegant, nature-rimmed chambers, and justly so. The library was particularly splendid, boasting shelves upon shelves of books, scrolls, parchments, and brass-bound tomes, most of which she had taken down in her own hand after learning to read and write in Faerie, a difficult but rewarding language. Here she kept histories and lineages, prophecies and prose, instructions for heroes on their quests, and obscure rules of etiquette, useful should one find oneself visiting faraway fey courts.
She also recorded poetry, the task at which she worked now. Most of the poetry in need of transcribing and cataloguing had been written by the same poet—the most renowned poet in the history of the worlds, to be sure, but a cheap rhymer, when all was said and done. Worse yet, he knew it!
But awareness of deficiency never stopped him from bringing more and more benighted verses to her, scrawled ingloriously on whatever scraps had been under his hand at the time. This latest had been written in what appeared to be beetle blood on a strip of birch bark that kept rolling back up on itself every time Imraldera opened it.
The poet little cared to make her job easier. And the rhyme itself made her cringe. It went something like this:
I wish I were in Rudiobus,
Where the mountain touches the sky,
Where Gorm-Uisce mirrors the stars,
And we’re together, Gleamdren and I!
“Well, you’ve got your wish now, fool cat,” the good dame growled softly even as her pen scratched away. “In Rudiobus with your lady Gleamdren, and far away from any work to be done. I hope you’re happy!”
This irritable grumbling was perhaps unworthy of her, but the poem went on in this, she thought, inane vein for ten full verses—enough to try anyone’s patience. Besides, she was a little tired and feeling ill used.
Imraldera was not herself a Faerie, though after more than one hundred years of life in the Wood Between and no sign of aging she began to suspect that she might be immortal. Her face was that of a young maiden, her skin smooth and brown, her hair glossy black and pulled rather severely back from her face and tied with a scarf so as not to interrupt her work. Her tunic was long and lavender, its billowy sleeves rolled up past her elbows, and underneath she wore green trousers of a light, loose fabric.
She made a sweet, if earnest, picture, Sir Eanrin thought when he stepped into the library. Her brow set in a stern line of concentration, her lips parted slightly back from her teeth (which were a little crooked—proof that she had been, at one time at least, mortal—no woman of Faerie would suffer such imperfection). It was a shame to disturb her, hard at work as she was, so Eanrin stood a moment, his hand on the doorframe, and watched her, glad at the sight of her and thinking many things that his golden eyes might have revealed had anyone been looking.
Then suddenly he sank down into the form of a bright orange cat, tail high and soft as the plume of Imraldera’s pen. “Prrrrrrlt?” he said, honey-sweet, and Imraldera dropped her work and spun on her stool to face him.
“You!” she said. “How dare you show your face after all this time?”
“Time, old girl?” the cat replied with another cheerful trill and a flick of his tail. “What do we care for time?”
“You may not, but I certainly do!” the good dame said. For a moment she looked as though she might throw her pen at him. “You said you’d be gone for a month, Eanrin. A month. Not three years.”
The cat shrugged a cattish sort of shrug and began grooming a paw. “I don’t see what you have to complain about,” he said between licks. “You were gone for, what was it, fifteen years at least? Gallivanting about your old world, bothering mortals with this, that, and the other. I’m not much on time and its nuances, but as I remember, three years and twenty years are hardly—”
Imraldera threw up her hands in exasperation. “It’s not the same thing at all! I was about our Lord’s work, tending to the needs of my people. They were—and are, last we knew—under invasion! It’s not as though I could simply leave them, with the Dragonwitch newly dead, no leader to turn to, and Faerie beasts crawling in at the borders.”
“Well,” said the cat, primly placing one forepaw beside the other and twitching an ear at her, “I was about my work as well.”
“Work? You were playing the fool for Lady Gleamdren!”
“That shows what you know.” The cat stood and stretched, forming a fluffy arch with his back, and when he had finished, he unbent into the form of a man. Sir Eanrin, clad in scarlet with a gold-edged cape and a feathered cap, removed said cap and ran a hand through his tawny hair, as much a cat in this form as he was when more blatantly feline. “I am first and foremost a Knight of Farthestshore, even as you are yourself, my girl,” he said with an easy grace and confidence that never failed to make Imraldera want to smack him. “Servant of the Lumil Eliasul and all that.”
“Eanrin, I—”
“But I am also,” he continued, holding up a silencing hand, “the Chief Poet of Rudiobus, and I have a duty to my king Iubdan and his fair queen, a duty I neglected all the while you were away in your old country so that I could—all by myself, I hardly need add—guard the gates of our watch. Faerie beasts might crawl thick and fast into your homeland, but by Lumé and Hymlumé’s eternal song, they did not get through any of the gates under this guard.” He crossed his arms and gave her such a stare as only cats can give. “Fifteen years, Imraldera. By myself. I think I earned a bit of a holiday.”
She opened her mouth to speak, venom waiting to spit from her tongue. Then she stopped herself and shook her head, momentarily defeated. “All right, you win,” she said, turning back to her desk and taking up her quill. “I can’t grudge you the reprieve. And I’m certain King Iubdan and Queen Bebo both were grateful to have their bard back for a little while.”
The cat-man slid up behind Imraldera and said with a satisfied smirk, “They and—ahem—others too.”
She glared round at him. “I can see that you’re brimming. Tell me, then: Did Lady Gleamdrené Gormlaith speak to you this time?”
Eanrin smiled a brilliant smile and began to nod his head. But he stopped and shook it at the last. “Well, no,” he admitted. The big smile sank into a smaller, more rueful one. “A tad awkward, that.”
“I would imagine it is awkward, yes, wooing a woman who has vowed never to speak to you again.”
Eanrin shr
ugged. “I haven’t lost heart! Indeed, I do hope very soon now to win her over with my perfumed words and glorious lyrics.”
Imraldera gave him a look. “No, you don’t.”
Again he smiled. “No, I don’t. You’re right. But what can I say? It adds to the drama, to the romance! There’s nothing quite like unrequited passion, is there, old girl?”
She shook her head, rolling her eyes and turning back to her work. Eanrin, meanwhile, suddenly flushed and backed away. Finding a chair partially buried under a pile of unused parchment, he shoved aside the clutter and made himself comfortable, lounging with one leg over its arm, the picture of feline grace, clad though he was momentarily in manhood. “I’ve begun composing a new ballad, you’ll be interested to know,” he said. “An epic.”
“Lights Above save us,” Imraldera muttered without looking around.
“You’ll like this one!” said Eanrin. “It’s the tale of how the Dragonwitch snatched my lady Gleamdren from the very bosom of Rudiobus and locked her away in her high tower. It’s taken me long enough to get around to it, but I figured I should begin the composing while it’s still fresh in my mind. Would you like to hear?”
“Spare me, please,” said she.
“Just my favorite bits! Like this one, when the Dragonwitch first carries her off.”
“Eanrin, I’m trying to—”
But the poet, still seated, threw out his hands and began to declaim as though he’d not heard her.
“The witch of fire bound her tight
Before Eanrin’s very eye!
She bore his lady far and fast
And locked her in a tower high!
“Isn’t that grand, then?” He looked eagerly her way.
She sighed, put down her pen, and asked rather gloomily, “Is there more?”
“Scads! This part is the Dragonwitch’s speech:
“‘Where flows the gold, sweet Gleamdrené,
The gold for which I thirst?
Where flows the gold, the shining gold?