Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(113)

But at the top of the stairway, he said over his shoulder, “Bring them.”





12


TWELFTH NIGHT. Twelfth Tithe.

Is this fear? Is this desperation? Is this . . . is this hope?

So many strange sensations, all of them an agony. Oh, to be free of these bodies! Oh, to be made whole once more, to be established, to be strong! To rule and be ruled.

The beating of these many hearts, large and small, all beat as one, joined in purpose.

Our purpose.

My purpose.

She bled out upon her kingdom. She took her own life, and she bled, and she died.

New blood must flow for life to renew. So eat them, devour them, take them deep inside and drink of their lives.

Twelfth Night. Twelfth Tithe.

Then, come Thirteenth Dawn . . . renew!



They traveled the fey Paths of the land as naturally as Foxbrush might have strolled the halls of his mother’s house, and they carried him un-protesting along with them. It was like being swept out with the tide, though his feet trod on uncertain soil beneath. All around him the surviving Faerie beasts of the land were silent with the focused intensity of the hunt. Their desire to drive Cren Cru from this land that had been their home was stronger than their desire for life. Even though, if they succeeded, they themselves would have to leave the land forever.

Foxbrush wondered how many of them, like Nidawi, had lost their former nations to the ravages of Cren Cru and his warriors?

Eanrin, once more a cat, paced sedately at Foxbrush’s side, his eyes half closed and his tail up, but his ears a little back with tension. He indicated by the very lie of his whiskers that he didn’t deem Foxbrush worth bothering with and refused to initiate any talk. Foxbrush, however, was unschooled in the language of cats.

“You know, you don’t have to come along with us,” he said to the cat. “I mean, this isn’t your fight, and . . . well, the poem is a bit vague on the details, so I can’t promise anything. I—”

“So are you saying you’d prefer I did not come along and therefore remained ignorant of the events as they unfold tonight?” said the cat icily. “Would make for a poor bit of poetry later, if you ask me.”


“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Foxbrush admitted. “You’re right. I suppose you should be there. It’s for the best.”

“The best? Hardly,” said Eanrin, his ears lowering still farther with ire. Had it been possible, he would have ignored the young man beside him entirely. The lad was a weakling, and a mortal weakling at that, and Eanrin wasn’t feeling too keen on mortals at the moment. But he could not deny the clarity of the Lumil Eliasul’s Path opening at Foxbrush’s feet. It was an enigma to be sure. One he would sleuth out if he possibly could.

He muttered in a low growl that Foxbrush could not understand, “Besides, I have unfinished business of my own to attend to this night.” The face of Sun Eagle was all too present in his mind; Sun Eagle, stained in the white lion’s blood.

Sun Eagle, looking into Imraldera’s eyes and calling her “Starflower.”

The cat began to growl.

“You know,” said Foxbrush, unaware how close he came in that moment to having his ankle scratched, “it would have made everything much easier if you’d just written it out in plain speaking.”

“What?” said Eanrin, twitching an ear Foxbrush’s way.

“Your message,” Foxbrush continued. “It’s daft to send something that important in poetry. I don’t even read poetry, not by preference. If, in the future, you’d just write it out plainly, everything that happens tonight, I mean, I’d be much obliged. That is, the future me will be obliged. Or the past me.” He frowned. “Actually, I’m not sure which of me it would matter to. Either way, do you think you could work it out?”

Both Eanrin’s ears flattened to his skull. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Foxbrush glanced down at the cat. Bard Eanrin of Rudiobus was proving far more foul tempered than generations of childhood rhymes would suggest. But then, whoever said those rhymes were reliable sources of information?

Foxbrush squeezed Leo’s scroll tightly in one fist and tried to focus on the strange, otherworldly shapes surrounding him. Like the cat-man, none of the beasts on this death march were bound to a single shape but constantly shifted into other shapes as well: some human, some reminiscent of human, some not human at all.

But they all trusted him. They all expected him to fulfill the promise given to Nidawi beside the Final Water.

They were all fools.

At Foxbrush’s feet, though he could not see it, a Path opened up, leading straight ahead. He pursued it unknowing, whispering as he went: “There you will win your Fiery One, or see her then devoured.”

Ahead, a light glowed brighter and brighter on the horizon. Not the glow of the rising sun.

This was a bronze light.



Had she governed her own body, she would have collapsed in weakness and despair. Her shoulder throbbed, her wound torn open with exertion, its soothing dressing long since vanished. But that which dwelled inside Daylily did not understand her pain, so it drove her, and she moved as she was driven. Through the darkness, through the Wood, through the Faerie Paths stretching across the land. She knew where she went with a knowing that was not her own.