“Down!” I snapped.
Bee dropped, and I straddled her back, feet braced on either side of her. My sword blazed with an icy light so bright it burned. I slashed and stabbed as they attacked. Where my blade nicked flesh, they shrieked, scattering in all directions.
“Cat, what are they?”
“Don’t move.” I shifted so my skirts belled over her. “They don’t like my sword.”
The mob resumed its circling above us. One landed out of reach of my blade.
Tall, broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, she looked much like a human. Her short black hair stuck up in spikes. Her narrow face was as translucently pale as watered-down milk, and she had the stark blue eyes we in the north called “the mark of the ice.” A line of purple-blue tattoos like falling feathers spun down the right side of her face and neck. She wore a sleeveless calf-length tunic covered with amulets sewn onto the fabric much as hunters fixed such talismans onto their clothing to protect them in the bush. Her wings certainly amazed me. But it was the third eye in the center of her forehead that riveted my attention.
“You are an eru,” I said, choosing offense over defense. “My greetings to you and your people. May we be at peace rather than at odds. I ask for guest rights, if such can be offered to peaceful strangers who have stumbled here by accident.”
She spoke in a voice like a bell. “You are well come here, Cousin. Our hearth is open to you. All we have is yours. All we are is at your service. But we have to kill the servant of the enemy. That is the law.”
“Cat,” Bee whispered from under my skirts, “I think they mean me .”
The eru cried out the same way the great bells of Adurnam cried out the alarm when the city was threatened. “It speaks! Beware!”
I shifted my sword’s angle; the eru took a step back. “She is not my enemy, and therefore she is not yours.”
More eru landed out of my reach, ranging in a circle around us. The tall ones had third eyes as bright as gems. The shorter bore marks on their foreheads like a mass of cloudy veins, and I had the oddest feeling they could see with those blinded, blinkered third eyes onto sights invisible to me. It was very disturbing. Worse, it seemed likely these eru could rip us to pieces in short order with their claws. And how could I predict what damage they could do with their magic, for weren’t eru fabled as the masters of storm and wind?
“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll just go on our way.”
“She must be sacrificed,” said the eru who had spoken before. “As a courtesy to you, if it is your wish, we will kill her and eat her at the welcoming feast, all except her head. Her head we will cast in the well to give strength to our water. Out of respect for you, our guest, we will show her this honor.”
Bee’s choked exclamation hit me in a wave of fear. I swept my blade in a slow circle, to mark each eru, ten in all. “I will take as many of you with me as I can, before I let you touch her.”
A melody like words flowed around the circle, then ceased when the first eru raised an arm. “Do you serve her, who is a servant of the enemy?”
“Why do you believe her to be your enemy?”
“Did she not come to seek a serpent’s nest? Do you not feel the enemy turning and turning again? Doesn’t this rising tide aid their servant because it forces us, who would drive her away, to hide within our wards rather than pursue her?”
“I think you are a servant of the night court,” I said, remembering the eru who had pretended to be a footman in the service of Four Moons House and what she had told me when we had stopped at Brigands’ Beacon so Andevai could make an offering. “Because servants of the night court have to answer questions with questions.”
She nodded in the manner of an opponent acknowledging a hit. “I am she who speaks for this hearth when the night court commands.”
Black wings fluttered. Out of the sky dropped a crow. No ordinary crow could cause such a reaction among fearsome eru. They took flight in a cacophony of wings until only the speaker remained. With a self-satisfied air, the crow folded its wings and cocked its head to consider me. A smear of dried blood mottled the tip of its scabrous bill. I was sure the blood was mine.
I could not resist a jabbing feint at the crow, just to make it hop back. I had feelings, too, even if Bee sometimes called me heartless.
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten you,” I said as I touched the clotted wound above my right eye.
With its third eye, the speaker looked at the crow, and then at me with all three eyes. For an instant, I thought I saw a reflection in her third eye: turning wheels flashing along a road.
“The master comes,” she said. “The enemy’s servant will not escape.”
Bee had shoved her head out from under my skirts. “Look!”
She scrambled up, pointing toward the hills. At first all I noticed was eru fanning out like herders. They were shepherding antelopes toward the town walls, or corralling them within sturdy copses of shimmering trees. Beyond, a blur of fog avalanched down the distant slopes. Claws sharpened in my chest as though a foul beast had burrowed inside me and latched on to my heart.
“I don’t know what else to do, Bee,” I said as the fog grew. “You have to run for it. Take my sword. If I offer it to you freely, you can take it.” I held it out.
Sparks leaped from the blade, and where they struck her hands and arms, a shower of spitting flames poured like a sheath over her limbs. She yelped and snatched back her hand.
“Cold steel burns the servants of the enemy, so she cannot wield it,” remarked the speaker with a cruel smile. But her smile vanished as she looked past me. She knelt.
How the vehicle had bridged the distance so quickly I did not know. An elegant black coach pulled by four white horses rolled to a stop beside us. The horses had a polished sheen, like pearl. The first pair stamped, hooves striking sparks from the obsidian pavement, while the second pair waited patiently in their traces.
The coachman was a burly man wearing a perfectly ordinary wool greatcoat. He wore his short blond hair in the lime-whitened spikes traditional to Celtic warriors in the ancient days when the Romans with their land empire and the Phoenicians with their sea trade fought to a standstill, and the barbaric Celts shifted allegiance depending on what benefited them the most. Seeing me, he did not smile, but the corners of his eyes crinkled as with an inward chuckle. He tapped two fingers to his forehead in greeting.
A figure swung down from the back. I recognized the tall, broad-shouldered eru with skin the color of tar, her third eye ablaze with a sapphire brilliance, her wings a swirl of smoke. Power roiled in her like a storm about to burst free. I stepped between her and Bee as if I could fend off the brunt of the blow. My blade shone like a torch, its hilt turned to ice against my palm.
“Let it be,” said the coachman to the eru. “We are here for Tara Bell’s child, not for the other one.”
She settled back, wingtips fluttering as if a wind spun off them. I swallowed; my ears popped; the wind died.
“Greetings, Cousin,” the eru said. “The master has sent us to fetch you.”
Such a wave of despair washed through me that my strength failed. I stared at the two creatures I had first met in the guise of a humble coachman and a humble footman. Bee grasped my hand. Hers was cold.
I spoke in pleading whine I did not like but could not help. “We just want to go home.”
The splendor of her third eye sparked rays of light along the surface of the black road. “The master has summoned you.”
“Help her return to the other side, and I’ll give you no trouble,” I said desperately.
The coachman’s lips curved in a wry, weary smile.
“You will give us no trouble regardless, Cousin,” said the eru, not in anger but in sorrow. “You are bound, as we are bound. Get in the coach. Both you and the serpent. We have a long way to travel. The master is not patient.”