Chapter Twenty-Three

We tramped wordlessly out of the wood. I tramped, he glided. There wasn't anything to say, or if there was, I didn't know how to say it. In any case, we were silent. I was absorbed in the dual labor of trying to ignore Li and trying to ignore the reptilian passenger in my head, both tasks meeting with an equal lack of success. Li was absorbed in…I don't know what… memories of a distant past or troubles of an invisible future? I wondered if he had ever been in love, and if there had been any queens involved, and what they had looked like if there were.

Oh, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Farther off in the vale, there was cooking and drying and picking. Sweet smells wafted on the air, betokening strange doings with fruits that wouldn’t grow anywhere else. One more evening and one more night we were allowed to spend in Numia. Would Li transform again and wander in the woods? I suspected that was how he slept, a unicorn in the moonlight, beneath enchanted boughs, maybe in the very clearing we had left short minutes ago.

The cut on his cheek was not deep, but it could have been made with a razor. One more thing I tried to ignore was the fleck of blood on my nail.

“So are we ready to go now,” I asked, “now that I know about you?”

He didn’t answer, but stopped as abruptly as if he had come to a wall. He was listening.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

On the far side of Numia a wolf howled, its lone voice rebounding off the mountains. Long seconds passed in frozen silence until a brother responded and then a black shape was moving around the lake, bursting out of the trees, followed by a grey.

The first form was not a wolf. It was a woman leaning so far forward she could have been falling, long black tangles streaming out behind. Clutched in her arms, tight against her chest, was a golden treasure. Pacing her, gaining stride by desperate stride, was Fletcher. My heart spasmed to a stop.

“She’s got Gregory!” I cried, but I could see from Li’s grim look that he already knew.

The Pard had come into the valley. Backtracking while two of Numia’s protectors were gone hunting in the mountains, she had chosen this as her hunting ground, maybe too weak to search any farther afield, perhaps grown reckless by her stay in the sorcerer’s cage. It would be my fault either way if she managed to spirit Gregory out of the vale. If she stole the child and… I was nearly sick imagining it.

“What do we do?” I panicked, spotting Casey now angling toward the Pard. She couldn’t outrun them in her human form. Casey would cut her off before she made the pass, but that didn’t ensure Gregory’s safety by any means. They were herding her back to the trees, into the cliffs. But when they had her cornered, any of the three could die before they overpowered her.

“You are going to stop this,” Li said firmly, “after I catch them.”

“What! How can I do anything? They’ll rip us apart.”

Li shook his head and had the gall to look amused. “She has a life debt to you. You can tell her to let the boy go and she will, as long as I get you there in time.”

“Me!” I cried incredulously. “She said she’d eat me!”

Li shrugged. “You will do fine. Try not to attack me this go round.”

“What?”

But Li was already gone. In his place was the snow white horse with its dark mane and darker horn, performing something like a bow so it would be easier for me to mount. I felt my Shadow convulse, reaching out to seize control, but I knew it this time and forced it down.

Hesitating only long enough to see the Pard and the wolves disappear into the ring of trees, I quashed my fears and leapt onto the Unicorn’s back, wrapping my arms around its long arched neck and pressing my face into its mane.

I smelled lilacs laced with lightning.

Then we were moving, flying so fast I had to close my eyes against the wind. The riding was easier than it should have been. I felt a smooth, steady rise and fall like a series of swells that never crested or broke. We may not have always been touching the ground and faster than I would have believed possible, we arrived on a scene at the edge of violence.

In a forest of poplar and Ponderosa pine, the Pard had been harried up the largest of several overgrown trees pressed close to the cliff face. She was in her natural state now, the paragon of feline wrath. A creature of rippling midnight blue, the skin on her shoulders was not as loose as when I last saw her, telling me that other prey had no defenders. Her eyes shone like twin green lanterns out of the cover of the needled boughs.

Behind her, Gregory clutched the sap sticky bark of the pine’s central trunk. He was unharmed, but he trembled like a reflection in uncalm waters, his face sealed tight with fear.

Two wolves paced the roots of the massive tree, foaming mad with the fever of the hunt, peridot eyes burning. The bulkier of the two was limping, his fore shoulder open from a single sure stroke. A flap of skin hung painfully there, the coil of muscle visible underneath. Twin lines of red matted the coal dark fur trailing to his paw, so that he left bloody footprints behind. An endless growl rumbled in his throat. This was Casey.

Close by, guarding the remainder of the perimeter was the brindled grey, Fletcher. His padding was slower, more measured and fluid. His yellow-green glare never left the patch of night that was the Pard’s crouching form. He kept careful watch on the bone white talons that scarred the wood beneath her. The wolves did not note our arrival, but the Pard’s eyes came to rest on me.

I had the oddest sensation of falling as the unicorn disappeared from under me. I was in Li’s arms as if I had been there all along. Then he was setting me on my feet.

A low and deadly hiss emanated from the cat’s jaws. Casey’s snarl built, his hind legs tensed to leap, but Fletcher called him down as we came closer to the tree. I would not have gone forward at all except for Li’s gentle pressure on my back.

“Wait,” the old wolf growled, and then to us, “Why bring her? You feed the demon twice?”

“I bring hope,” said Li, his own eyes on the frightened boy.

From the trees there came a rasping laugh. “I did not expect you here. I thought you would have gone.” Her voice was the velvet contralto I remembered, the lady in her drawing room. “It is not safe for you so close to where the dragon fed.”

She seemed to be talking to me.

“We’re leaving soon,” I said, but it felt inadequate. “We had to figure out where we would go.”

Emerald fires banked low. “You’ll want me to give up my prize then, won’t you?” She leapt right to the crux. At least it saved me from bringing it up, but I quailed beneath those eyes.

“Please, don’t hurt Gregory.” My voice was barely above a whisper.

“You want me to starve!” Her tone brought up the hackles on both the wolves. If they had been tense before, now they were a hairsbreadth from snapping.

“No! I don’t want that. I wouldn’t have freed you if I did.”

Casey’s head whipped toward me, looking as comically shocked as his fearsome, giant wolf exterior would allow. Li seemed chagrined. Oops. They hadn’t known that part.

The Pard only gave that whispery chuckle, as if she had never been agitated. She almost relaxed in her perch. “You are a strange little serpent, aren’t you? This is the predator’s way, you know, to live a life of death. If I had been a little faster… but I underestimated my weakness. Those sorcerers left their marks. I wish I had been the one to kill them,” she purred. “You will learn, though, you will learn.” Green flames flashed, then dimmed and dagger fangs glimmered like ivory. “You’ll learn.”

“You can feed on animals. You don’t have to attack people.”

Gregory was utterly still against the trunk. No longer shivering, he didn’t so much as whimper. No doubt he was listening with his whole body as we argued his fate. I couldn’t fail him, not when I was the one to put him in danger in the first place.

The Pard made a disgusted sound. “Animals—just as well eat dirt. There is no spark in them.” She paused, eyes narrowing in distaste as the wolves rumbled louder, fury building. “I can survive, though,” she said. “I can make exceptions.”

Her head cocked to one side, squinting at me through two burning emerald slits. She purred again. “You are not like these dogs, I think. You will learn.”

Faster than I could follow, she moved, and Gregory came flying out of the tree into Li’s arms at the same instant the Pard sprang, a black blur, from pine to pine then onto the cliff itself. She went scrabbling up the escarpment as if it had been level ground, and I had to suppress the smile of an incongruous thought. She was like a cat scaling the kitchen cabinets.

The wolves watched her go. After that, it wasn’t long before Esme found us, surveyed us stoically, and then broke into a wide grin. Li patted Gregory’s golden curls and released him to run to Esme, with a strangled sound that was almost a laugh. The small, plump woman embraced him fiercely, but all the while, her eyes scanned the trees and weighed us, even as they smiled.

Fletcher went scouting to test whether the Pard was truly gone. Casey remained to be healed by Esme, eyeing me warily as he regained his human form, clutching his wounded shoulder. A wound in one body corresponded to a wound in the other. Being a shape shifter obviously had its limitations, another set of rules to be learned.

When Esme was able to extract herself from Gregory, she padded over to Casey and gently pushed him down into a seated position. “I hate looking up to work,” she said. “Now wipe that grimace off your face.”

The wolf man had been glowering at me, but at her command he became stonily expressionless. Not that this was much better. As Esme examined his torn shoulder, her skin became faintly luminous, dustily sparkling. She was mumbling under her breath, words rustling leaves and grass in a quiet breeze.

Casey flinched only slightly as she went to work, and I recalled the spasms of heat I had felt when Timothy healed my neck. Esme’s work was swift and sure, her hand pressing the flap of meat and skin into place, sealing it as she went. Casey gave no other sign of being affected, and thanked her gruffly when she was done. He left without another glance at any of us muttering something about helping Fletcher on patrol.

“What is done can yet be undone, if magic wills it so.”

I gave a start, not so much at Li being beside me as at the familiar litany, calmly repeated.

“Timothy said that,” I said. It was unsettling to hear it from another’s mouth.

“It is an old saying,” Esme said joining us, Gregory hanging on her arm, “part of an older tradition. ‘Magic, do as you will’ is an ancient prayer among wizards of every culture.” She frowned at us. “I am not sure what happened here,” she said, “but I will need to be before we call meet tonight. My children will want answers.”

Li nodded and went about explaining to her the flurry of excitement that had transpired over the last minutes. Esme was openly grateful for our intervention, though she took it as a matter of course that Lialanni would always see that what needed saving would be saved. She was plainly worried about what her people’s reaction would be when Casey inevitably spread word of why the Pard had listened to me at all.

“Freeing her was a noble thing,” Esme told me. “We cannot often afford nobility in this world.”

So it was that the last night we spent in Numia was less welcoming than the first. Ajax and Esme and Gregory were as kind as they had always been, and thankful for our help. But even they could not conceal their relief at the prospect of our departure. They were eager to see our troubles, mine really, gone from the valley.

Only Gregory didn’t know any better. If we ever returned, I would probably be as mythic a figure in his eyes as Li. His mother, also, did not care why the Pard had gone, only that her son was safe. Her gratitude was enough to have me stammering from embarrassment.

The rest, though, listened to Casey. By the time he was done, I had become a queen to the Pard, or a sister. Faces turned away from me as quickly as hardened eyes. I was suddenly the pariah he had intended me to be from the beginning. The fact that I had persuaded her to let Gregory free instead of fighting it out with the Totem brothers was lost amid unspoken accusations.

Evil follows where you walk.

It wasn’t entirely untrue, but I couldn’t be too hurt by their rejection, silent or not. I had Li, or at least, he had me. When morning came, cold and dim, we prepared to set off with only Esme for our fanfare.

She came bearing gifts and worried smiles that made her look very young and yet mature at once. I was back in my jeans, thankfully, since we were going back into civilization. My old clothes had been washed in Numia. Those waters really did have some interesting properties.

Esme saw to it that I wouldn’t leave entirely unmarked. She brought a new sash made of the same ubiquitous plant fiber that composed the rest of their garments. Somehow it had been woven and treated to have the feel of fine silk, though it was sturdier and dyed to my favorite shade of blue. I couldn’t have refused if I had wanted to. The outline of a dragon, in the Chinese style, stretched across its length in expert silver threads. When I exclaimed over this, she said “We have a lot of leisure in Numia.” Then she tied it so that my hair was swept out of my eyes and its ends trailed most of the way down my back.

“No need to hide,” she said and gave me a lengthy hug.

The second gift was odder. A plastic bottle, Dasani maybe, that looked to have been discarded by some hiker a month or so ago. It had been refilled with water from the lake. “So that the Naiad’s blessing will always be with you,” she said. And that was the end of it.

Li and I proceeded alone into the thin pass shadowed by morning. It ended in a bar of impenetrable brightness, but on the way, the path was cool and dark and midnight still.

“You know,” I said as mildly as I could, “this would be the perfect time for a clever ambush.”

Li gave me that wondering, quizzical look. “You really are well prepared for this.”

“Books again,” I shrugged.

He laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s no one waiting for us out there.”

He was too confident. “How are you so sure?”

“I have a sense for these things.”

It was not long before we were out under the full force of dawn, and my suspicion proved unfounded. Li took us Sideways, so we wouldn’t be spotted by any who shouldn’t see us.

Seeing the unicorn again, my Shadow stirred uneasily in its corner. I forced it down into a little dark box and locked it there before it could cause any chaos. I didn’t think about how I did it, but acted instinctively to maintain control.

In another moment, we were riding north.

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