The thought was a bitter one. Lionheart bowed his head.
“Then she was a greater fool than I’ve always believed,” said the baron. “She knew what Southlands needs. A strong Eldest. A ruthless Eldest, even. A man who can bring it back from the brink of collapse and see it thrive once more!”
Lionheart did not answer, and silence fell for a little while. Even beyond the door, all was quiet. Were guards still stationed there, they might have fallen asleep for all the sound they made.
“You know this is true, Lionheart. You know it as well as I.” The baron shifted, tugging uselessly against his bindings. “So why are you giving up your life for the sake of a cousin you know will never be fit to sit on your father’s throne?”
It was a fair question. As much as Lionheart would have liked to ignore it, he knew it was fair. He didn’t want to see Foxbrush in his father’s—in his—place. Could there be a greater disaster for Southlands? Could there be a worse fate?
And could there be a keener shame than watching his cousin and rival take everything that had ever been meant to be Lionheart’s? Foxbrush deserved none of it!
Lionheart leaned his head against the window frame. The window itself was open, but though the high winds blew cold around the tower, they offered no relief. “My Path led me here,” he whispered.
“What?” the baron demanded, tilting his head.
“My Path led me here.” Feeling as though he might collapse under the weight of words he did not wish to speak, Lionheart turned. As he turned, the moon emerged from behind a cloud and lit him from behind while simultaneously falling into the baron’s enormous eyes. “It led me here, and here I’ll stay until it leads me on.”
“Your path has led you to your death,” said the baron. But his voice was less confident now. For in that moment, he could see what Lionheart could not. He saw the moon shining, and it looked to him like a gentle eye, watchful and concerned. He saw how its light fell upon Lionheart’s hair and seemed to shine there as a crown. And he saw the thin wisp of cloud that drifted across the moon and took the shape of some enormous bird, wings spread in gathering protection, a creature of monstrous and mythic proportions, a creature of power and benevolence and wrath.
The baron quaked. Slowly he sank back down upon the floor.
The vision passed and clouds swallowed up the moon, leaving the high tower in darkness again. Lionheart, exhausted, returned to his post by the door. How tempting it was, for a moment so brief it might not have existed at all, to open it and give way. To let the course of history progress as it wished, with strong men in power and a hope for a brutal revival. To let himself be carried off, a traitor to be tried by the Council and hanged. To give up. To give in.
But he stood with his back to the door and crossed his arms. “My Path led me here,” he whispered. “And here I’ll stay.”
They were silent for so long, they might each have drifted off in the darkness to realms of far dreams.
Suddenly the baron said, “Who helped you?”
“What?” Lionheart frowned and peered through the gloom at the prisoner he could not see. “What did you say?”
“I know you could not have done this alone. You could not have secreted away these ropes of mine, or the kindling, for you would have been recognized. You had help from the inside. Who was it, Lionheart? Was it Blackrock? Or Evenwell? Disloyal dogs at heart, I know, for all their protestations of friendship.”
“No,” Lionheart said and hastily added, “There was no one, baron. I acted alone.”
“Liar.”
“Well, yes. But I’ll say no more.”
“You don’t need to. I’ll get it out of you. Before you hang.”
Lionheart made a face. His throat was parched for want of water, and his stomach was empty. The threat of death made none of this more bearable, and he growled, “Do what you like, baron. You’ll not get a word from me. Despite what you might think, I do still possess some shreds of honor.”
“Honor?” said the baron, musing over the word. He was quiet again for some time. Then he said, “So it was a woman.”
How anyone could come to that conclusion based off Lionheart’s words was testimony to a keen, near-animalistic cunning. Like a scent hound following the culprit across marshy ground, so the baron pursued a line of reason, however faint and untraceable it might be to another.
“Think as you will,” Lionheart said, perhaps too quickly.
“A woman,” said the baron again, musingly. “How intriguing this game becomes. Now, I wonder what—”
He broke off with a gasp. Lionheart, glad for the reprieve, took a seat on the floor and rested his tired head in his hands. He began to wonder if the night would never end.
The baron spoke with gentle venom: “I’ll have her hanged as well.”
Lionheart looked up sharply, and his heart began to pound. He must be mistaken. He must have fallen asleep, into some dreadful nightmare. He must have invented that sound from the shards of a tired mind pushed over the brink. He must have.
Because he couldn’t bear to believe he’d truly heard tears in the baron’s voice.
8
FROM THE BASE OF THE HILL, Foxbrush watched the enormous bonfire built near the Eldest’s House, a beacon into the night. Many men and women worked to gather fuel, driving the flames higher and hotter, a defense against the darkness and a light to those who had ventured into that darkness.
The warriors had gone. Led by Redman and Sight-of-Day, men and women alike, they had marched from the village and into the jungle, spreading out in all directions, searching. Surely the Bronze Warriors would have left some sign. Surely they could not have gone far.
“Please!” Foxbrush had begged, catching Redman by the arm. “Please let me come with you!”
“No,” Redman had replied, shaking him off. “You must follow your Path, and it does not lead with me.”
“I can help!” Foxbrush had tried to insist, catching up a weapon and holding it awkwardly. “I know I can!”
But Redman had been adamant. “You must remain here, Foxbrush. Follow your Path.”
Then he had gone, leading the village warriors in desperate hunt, calling Lark’s name as he went. And Foxbrush remained, watching the jungles into which everyone disappeared.
Useless. Shrugged off. Despised.
The story of his life.
The sun traveled swiftly across the sky and plummeted beyond the horizon. Those who’d stayed behind built up the fire, glad for some task at which to busy themselves. But they shook their heads and motioned Foxbrush away when he offered to help. So he stood now alone, his arms crossed against a cold that seeped from the inside out.
It was his fault. But how could he have helped it? He should never have shot the monkey. But how could he have known it was Crookjaw?
It didn’t matter. Lark would suffer for his mistake.
To Foxbrush’s horror, he found tears on his face, running through his beard. He cursed and dashed them away, turning from the bonfire back to the jungle. Hours ago he’d ceased to watch for any sign of return. The warriors would stay out searching for days. Then, like all those who had lost their firstborn over the last many months, they would return, heartbroken, spirit broken.
“Your red lady is stealing the blood of the South Land.”
He started walking. He hardly knew why or where he thought to go. He merely started walking, away from the light, into the darkness. Perhaps some path opened at his feet and compelled him to follow. He could not say and really didn’t care. That was Redman’s way of thinking, not his own. So he simply walked, and as he walked, he whispered:
“Just at the mirk and midnight hour
Of thirteen nights but one,
The warriors bear their bronzen stones
Where crooked stands the Mound alone.
There you must win your Fiery One
Or see her then devoured.”
Since coming to this place, his eyes had grown more used to seeing i
n the dark, and he was familiar enough with the trail he now sought to follow even in the night. He walked close to the jungle but did not enter, making for the orchard. Things shifted in the heavy foliage. He turned and thought he glimpsed eyes . . . many eyes, red and gold and silver and green, that gleamed in the blackness, then flickered out, only to gleam again briefly, like fireflies.
He knew them for what they were. But for some reason he did not fear them. “Have you come for tribute?” he asked.
One pair of eyes blinked. Then, for a moment, he thought he saw a face that was nearly human, save for the long, sharp beak. It vanished after only a brief glimpse, but then a voice came.
“We will fight.”
It was not a human voice, nor did it speak in any language Foxbrush knew. But he understood it deep in his mind.
“We will fight. We will help.”
“Who?” Foxbrush asked. “Whom will you fight? Who is our enemy?”
The response came in another voice, hoarse and rasping as a water bird’s. It said, “The Mound! The evil Mound.”
More creatures, Faerie beasts all, gathered in the shadows beyond his vision; small and unthreatening, large and intimidating, and everything in between. They gathered, and their eyes blinked and stared at Foxbrush. He knew he should be frightened. Somehow, he couldn’t work up the energy for it.
“Well, good,” he said, shrugging at the jungle and moving on his way toward the orchard. “I’m glad to hear it. Fight away, and let us know how it goes, won’t you?”
“You must lead us.”
Foxbrush snorted and did not deign to answer. The skittering, flapping, shuffling, stomping, slithering of many unseen creatures followed him, and the jungle on his right writhed with the movements. But they did not step beyond its fringes, and he did not go near enough to see or touch.
“You must lead us!” they all called in their bizarre tongues. “Lead us into battle!”
But he stopped up his ears to their pleas. In the orchard, their voices died away into whispers and then to nothing. Real fireflies glinted now, like small pixies themselves. Night birds and nimble-fingered lemurs had their way with the fig trees’ bounty, for no one had been posted to chase them away.
And somewhere among the trees, someone was crying.
Foxbrush made his way through the orchard, slipping between twisted trunks and stepping over gnarled, grasping roots. He parted the curtains of heavy leaves until at last he found the one who wept.
“Nidawi?”
He had not seen her in months, not since that dreadful night when Daylily had come upon them in this very orchard, before the elder figs ripened. But here sat the Everblooming, surrounded by fireflies whose gentle glow illuminated her tear-stained face and the white body of Lioness cradled in her arms. She wore the form of an old woman, a woman who is the last of all her friends, alone in a strange world where people no longer recall the life she knew, the family she loved, the places she held dear. Her tears were the awful tears of memories slowly slipping, and they gleamed as they fell like little fireflies themselves and caught and sparkled in Lioness’s fur.
She did not look up as Foxbrush approached, but cried on. All wild sobbing had faded, withering her into the form she now wore. Her wrinkled hands clung to the mighty carcass, however, as though they would never let go.
Foxbrush knelt, gazing upon the dead Lioness, the red wound in her breast. Once more he felt tears on his face. He put out a hand and smoothed the noble muzzle of the great cat. Then he let his hand trail down and rest upon Nidawi’s.
She looked up then, transforming in an instant to the form of a tiny child, bewildered with loss, looking for comfort, for understanding.
“She’s dead!” she said.
“Yes,” said Foxbrush. He took hold of her hand and she, reluctantly, let go of Lioness enough to let him wrap his fingers about hers. “What happened, Nidawi?”
“Cren Cru,” she said, gnashing the name through her teeth. “Cren Cru killed her. The Parasite! As he kills all of mine. He wore a body armed with stone, and he drove it into her heart!”
She let Lioness slip from her arms then and flung herself suddenly at Foxbrush, wrapping her scrawny limbs about his neck and weeping into his shoulder. He held her, frightened but making soothing noises and murmuring things he could not later recall. When at last her quivering body began to still, he said, “Who is Cren Cru, Nidawi?”
She straightened into the form of a woman again. A mature, hardened woman with the face of a bereft mother. “Come,” she said, taking Foxbrush’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Come and I will show you.”
She stepped onto a Faerie Path as lightly as though stepping through an open door, and led Foxbrush onto it as well. The night was already so strange, what with the beasts in the jungle, the warriors with their bronze stones, and the hollow-eyed faces he’d witnessed around the bonfire, that Foxbrush had not the strength to be surprised at this. Indeed, he felt he would never be surprised again! So he followed Nidawi, and his peripheral vision caught brief glimpses of wood and tree and rock and hill sliding past him, all within a few strides. And he realized, without knowing what it was he realized, that Southlands was riddled with Faerie Paths lingering just beyond the range of his senses and understanding, but as real as the air he breathed.
They passed gorges and villages and great stretches of jungle. Within a minute, or possibly two (though even so brief a time meant nothing), they came to the center of the Land Behind the Mountains.
Nidawi stepped off the Path, pulling Foxbrush behind her. “Look,” she said, pointing.
There it stood. Somehow, Foxbrush felt he’d already known, though he never could have said as much if asked. It was like the knowledge of a sickness deep inside, as yet showing no symptoms but already working terrible carnage upon the body and the spirit.
The Mound of Cren Cru grew up from the soil of Southlands like a tumor grown on a heart. It was a mound of black earth, three times the height of a man but no taller; and sprouting from that earth, so thick as to be a sort of coat, were twisted branches, sharp, thorn-covered, bristling, and dead. They looked like antlers or horns, a thousand horns jutting up from the dirt, which was like a bulbous head.
Foxbrush, from where he stood holding Nidawi’s hand, saw with a clarity he could not have known had he looked through his unaided mortal eyes. By Nidawi’s power he saw all the Faerie Paths of Southlands crisscrossing the land, rising up from the gorges, and flowing down from the mountains. All of them streamed to this one central point like the veins of a body, pulsing.
There fell upon Foxbrush’s heart a shadow of horror such as he had never known, not even when the Dragon dropped in fire from the sky and covered his world in smoke and poison. That, at least, was a dread he understood, a dread of teeth and scales and flames and fumes.
This was something he could not understand, and in his ignorance he trembled and despaired even at that one swift glance.
He turned away, looking at Nidawi instead, who stood facing the Mound with an expression of intense hatred, hatred that could not be bound into one age, so she was all ages in that moment: old, young, beautiful, childish, frail, strong, awful.
“What is it, Nidawi? What is that thing?” Foxbrush asked.
“Once upon a time,” she said, and her voice was that of a little girl speaking from the thin, lined mouth of a crone, “there was a Faerie queen, Meadhbh by name, who ruled the land of Cren Cru. She wore a bronze crown set with twelve bright prongs, and she drank a wine as red as blood, which some said was blood indeed. She fed it to her consorts, and when they died, one by one, it was said she killed them. For she did not desire consorts. She was queen, and she was beautiful, and she was a great power. She needed only her demesne, the Faerie realm Cren Cru.
“But rumor of her murderous games did fly across the Between and fall upon the ears of that queen my people called Bebo Moonsong. Bebo left her own demesne and traveled to Cren Cru, to find Meadhbh and question her as t
o her doings. But Meadhbh took offense and thought to prove her innocence in a battle. She fought to kill Queen Bebo Moonsong, and when she could not, she took her own life.
“She was a Faerie queen, however, so she had two more lives to live. But she had taken one of her lives of her own free will, and this was a sin, a curse, a blight upon existence such as none but a Faerie lord or lady may understand! The remaining two lives were too evil to her, too unbearable. Thus she took them as well, denying the gift of Faerie queenship and severing the ties with her demesne. She left no heir, for she had loved no man, be he Faerie or mortal.
“And so the demesne of Cren Cru fell silent as death. But a demesne cannot die, not with the blood of its Faerie queen spilled upon its ground. It drank up the blood, and it felt something like life, the lives Queen Meadhbh had forgone.
“So Cren Cru rose up, alive and not alive, disembodied and wandering. It had no queen and it had no bindings, for the land itself was devastated by Meadhbh’s evil. And it traveled, a being without spirit, without heart, without blood, without knowing of itself or understanding. Only a shadow of awareness. Neither alive nor unalive, but a force of instinct driven to find . . . to find a . . .”
Here Nidawi stopped and wrapped her arms about herself, unable to continue for a long while. Her teeth tore at her lips as she struggled to get the words out. Then she said:
“A home.”
Foxbrush tried once more to look at the Mound. But he could not bear it and hid his face in his hands.
“It took bodies,” Nidawi said. “Lost folk wandering the Between, immortals and mortals. It found them and it took them, and so it became aware of being, of life, of the need to belong. Twelve in all it took, and it melted down Meadhbh’s twelve-pronged crown to give each of them a piece, a binding. Twelve made one by the strength that was Cren Cru. Then it set about to lay claim to a world.”