Cold Steel

44

Drake’s trail led north in fire and ashes.

The first staging post lay in smoking ruins. Locals poking cautiously through the remains of a cottage, kitchen-house, and stable yard told us of fire and confusion none of them had been close enough to observe. The staging-post attendants were missing and the horses had all been stolen.

“A clever move on his part,” remarked the mansa as he paced the scorched grounds of a third staging post, later that afternoon. “All the local militias are in disarray from the campaign. Had we not this magical conveyance, his actions would have slowed down our pursuit so greatly there would have been no chance we could catch him.”

Seeing my distress, Bee ushered us back into the coach. As we headed into the gathering dusk, she talked to fill the silence. “Can the blacksmiths’ guild not be recruited to help us?”

“What can they do?” he retorted. “They have devised their own means to control and channel the destructive chain of fire magic, but they cannot combat this. I am come to appreciate General Camjiata’s devious mind. He raises a fire mage who can win his battles and discards him when he becomes too powerful, yet does so at no risk to himself. From what you’ve explained, Catherine, it seems to me the general pushed the man into embracing the worst of his anger without the man realizing he had been manipulated.”

“Yes, it does seem that way.”

I stared out the window at a rabbit racing across a meadow in fright for its life. A hawk stooped. With a gasp, I leaned to watch. In a flash of feathers the hawk thumped. Then we rocked around a corner and I never saw whether the hawk had caught its prey or the rabbit had escaped.

“Of course you would recognize such a stratagem, since you possess the same sort of devious mind,” said Bee. “For example, now we are thrown together as kinsfolk, allow me to commend you on your strikingly cunning ploy to elevate Andevai as your heir and thus bind him more tightly to the mage House. Considering everything I was told you said about him before, I would never have guessed you would do that.”

He brushed a finger along the unscarred side of his chin as if deciding whether to dignify her barbed teasing with a reply. “It was no ploy. The young man is the most rare and potent cold mage of his generation in Four Moons House and possibly in all of Europa, although I must request you never repeat to him that I said so.”

“Have no fear,” Bee reassured him. “I, too, would prefer to avoid any chance his already bloated conceit might yet expand, difficult as it is to imagine it could get any vaster.”

The mansa’s smile flashed so unexpectedly that for an instant I wondered if a different person had fallen into the coach with us. “The confluence of such powerful cold magic with the sort of unusually good looks that bring so much consequential attention to his person has certainly fed a temperament already prone to vanity and pride.”

Bee patted my hand, trying to get me to smile. “You see, Cat, this is where Andevai gets his pedantic way of speaking.”

I sighed.

The mansa glanced from her to me and back to her. “Yet for all his faults, he displays a profound sense of responsibility, as well as a willingness to labor tirelessly for the benefit of the House. He has also the intelligence and discipline to look beyond his own desires to what may be best for the House. I am not blind. The world is changing, even if I cannot approve. Sadly, there are many who no longer seek my approval.”

Bee offered him her most refulgent smile, an expression of considerable genius which she had worked for hours in front of a mirror to perfect. “As long as you respect and support my beloved cousin, and don’t make her husband too miserable, I shall approve of you, Your Excellency.”

He had the grace to laugh. “There is a great deal I thought I knew that I now discover I had not the least understanding of.” He reached for the shutter on the door that opened into the spirit world. “Why this is never opened, for instance.”

“Don’t touch that!” Bee and I said at the same time.

Startled, he withdrew his hand. “What secret lies behind this closed door? For some years Four Moons House employed this very coachman and footman as servants. Then they vanished with you, Catherine, only to reappear again at your call.”

A razor-toothed imp of mischief sank its fangs into my tongue. “The Master of the Wild Hunt has been spying on the mage Houses all along, seeking the most powerful among you to kill each year.”

“Do you mean to explain to me how you know all this, Catherine? That Beatrice walks the dreams of dragons I know. Andevai has explained how troll mazes protect against the Wild Hunt. But I am still puzzled by what exactly you are, a secret my heir has not seen fit to share with me.”

I no longer saw a reason to hide the truth. “What would you say if I told you my mother was a human woman and my sire the Master of the Wild Hunt?”

He sat back with a chuckle. “No wonder the boy can scarcely contain his vainglory when he speaks of you. I must say, Catherine, that gives me considerable relief, for it has been a goad on my pride that you escaped me three times.”

I did not know what to say to that. I had not even shocked him!

We rocked along, wheels rumbling a steady rhythm. Bee made me eat cooked chicken and rolls and cheese. For half the night we rolled through forest, and eventually I slept, head resting on Bee’s shoulder. I woke at dawn to the sight of Bee paging through her sketchbook under the thin light of a cloudy day. Both Rory and the mansa dozed, Rory with his hands curled up by his face and the mansa bolt upright, his big frame filling half the opposite bench and pressing Rory’s slighter figure into the corner.

“Have you found anything new?” I asked, as if I could pull hope from her dreams.

“No.” She handed the book to me. “For the last month, all I have dreamed of is fire, and I couldn’t bear to draw all those flames for I swear to you I heard screams in them.” She pinched a length of skirt between her finger and thumb. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you.”

Yet for all that I stared at every sketch, I could discern nothing to tell me how to save Vai. What if he and I weren’t meant to meet ever again?

Mid-morning on the following day we stopped at a burned-out staging post to allow the coachman to tend his coach and horses. The mansa studied the coachman as the man watered the horses from a bucket whose lip never touched stream or well.

“No living horse can travel at such a steady pace without cease and not die,” said the mansa. “What manner of creature are they?”

The coachman acknowledged the mansa’s attention by flicking a forefinger against the rim of his cap, but did not deign to respond.

“The man mocks me,” said the mansa, as if it were my fault.

I glanced up at him from under half-lowered eyelids, although I did not mean to be coy. “I would be cautious in assuming that he is man.”

With a shake of his head he walked away.

Bee was still in the nearby woods doing her business. I approached the eru, who stood beside a stream watching the flash and subsidence of ripples.

“I want to thank you for coming at my call,” I said.

Away from the others she wore her female aspect. “The law of kinship binds us. But there are other reasons to answer.”

“Perhaps you can tell me what those might be,” I said, careful not to ask a question.

“Perhaps my lips are chained.”

“Perhaps the Master of the Wild Hunt chains you to his purpose.”

Her gaze held a whisper of the wild fury of lofty winds where an eru might climb, when she is free to fly as she wishes. I could not see her third eye, but I knew it was there. “Perhaps I am not the only one who is chained. Chains reach deep and rise high, little cat. They may be anchored in the depths of the Great Smoke, or pull against us from the heights of the tallest peak. Do not mistake the servant for the master.”

I thought of the courts atop the ziggurat feeding on the blood my sire brought them. Picking up a stone, I tossed it into the water. “I have been thinking about chains.”

“Cat! Over here!” Rory knelt at the wall of a byre. “It’s all dried now, but Vai pissed here.”

I saw nothing except scuffed ground and what looked like half-formed letters scraped into the dirt and then obscured by footprints. “You can distinguish different people’s urine?”

“Can’t you? I shall never understand you Deadlands people. How do you distinguish who has been poking around where if you can’t smell?”

“There’s a thought I am grateful had never occurred to me before now.”

A scrap of leather cord had been half shoved into a hole scraped under the byre’s wall. I got hold of it and fished out the empty ring of an ice lens. The sight so congealed my legs that I sat down with a thump.

Rory pried my hand open to see what I was clutching. “He left this here on purpose, so we would know he is with Drake.”

All along the road to Arras and then on to Audui, every isolated staging post had been burned. Worst, at one hostel the corpse of a magister had been stuffed headfirst down a well. When we pulled him out by the rope tied around his feet, the seeping blisters over every bit of his reddened skin told the story of how he had died.

“Over here.” Rory beckoned from beyond the hostel’s vegetable garden to an old and falling-down outhouse. He indicated a row of three stones and a pearl jacket button.

The mansa came up behind us. “Four stones for Four Moons House. The estate of Four Moons House lies on the Cantiacorum Pike. If they stay on this road, they will pass it. If Andevai attempts an escape there, he can hope for assistance.”

“I don’t think Vai will risk drawing Drake’s anger down on the House, or on his village. And I’m certain he won’t abandon the other mages.” But I rubbed the dirt off the button and tucked it into my bodice.

The mansa insisted we break our headlong pace and spend one night at Audui’s resplendent mage inn. In truth the amenities of a bath, a change of underclothes, the promise of a comfortable bed, and a decent supper improved my mood considerably. The steward in charge told us there had been a plague of fires tormenting the countryside, a freakish set of frightful blazes no one could explain although they had passed as quickly as they had come.

“How long ago?” I asked over a delicious meal of soup, roasted beef, yam pudding, fish in dill sauce, and apple dumplings.

“Just yesterday did all the reports come in, Maestra,” said the steward in charge. “One of our own young grooms escaped a terrible fire yesterday at West Mile Post just four miles west of town.”

“Can we talk to him?”

The lad was brought, white and trembling. He had a tendency to jump every time a door closed elsewhere in the inn, but Bee hastened forward to take hold of his hand as if he were a long-lost kinsman. No lad his age could resist her radiant glamour.

“You are the only one who can help us!” she exclaimed. “What was your name again?”

“They call me Rufus, Maestra, for my red hair.”

“Tell us everything you saw, Rufus!”

“It was all fire, Maestra,” the lad whispered in a hoarse voice. “But the man gave me a message.” His gaze flashed toward me. “He said there would be a woman with black hair and golden eyes come after him. I was to speak to her when I saw her.”

Had Vai managed to get a message to me? Hope surged.

“Go on,” said Bee in her most encouraging tone.

The lad handled the words as cautiously as a knife. “He said, ‘Nothing you can do will save him.’ ”

I recoiled as if struck.

Bee smiled. “Very good! Thank you for remembering. What did he look like, the man who spoke those words? Had he red hair and white skin, like yours?”

He nodded, gulping down a sob. “He did burn the whole compound, Maestra.”

“Had they prisoners?” asked the mansa. “Any they treat differently from the rest?”

Concentration furrowed his brow. “Hard to count, I was that scared. But there was one they did hold away from all the others. Maybe he was sick, for he could barely walk. He was whistling a song, that one, and they did kick him to shut him up.”

“What song?” I asked.

Like any Celt, he could remember a tune after hearing it once. He hummed the melody the djeli had sung when he had led Andevai to the meeting with the Romans, the one I had first heard in the spirit world on the fiddle of Lucia Kante.

The mansa handed the boy a coin. “You have done well.”

We rose at dawn. At breakfast the mansa asked for coffee with a bowl of whipped and sweetened cream but I could not bear to touch it for it made me think of Vai so weak he could barely walk. Was he wounded? Beaten? Assaulted? Or was he simply exhausted to the edge of collapse? It would be just like Vai to believe he had to carry all the burden himself.

A headache throbbed behind my eyes as we set out. I was so sick of being in the coach.

As if catching my mood, the gremlin latch winked to life with a flickering sneer. “I have been very patient,” the latch said in a thin whine that put the lie to the statement, “but all your cousin and that unpleasantly large and frowning cold mage do to pass the time is argue about this thing called politics and law which means nothing to me! Could you not tell me stories instead? Or at the least, let the cold mage draw some of those pictures in the air like the other one used to do. I’ll tell you a secret if you do.”

“Everyone claims to have a secret!” I said.

“Cat?” Bee bent to look at me. “You’re very worn down, dearest, and now you’re babbling. Perhaps you should try to sleep some more.”

“I can’t rest,” I said, “but perhaps the mansa could explain to us how young magisters are taught the basic skill of illusion. It would make the time pass, would it not?”

To my surprise the gaze I fixed on the mansa, meant to be venturesome and coaxing and more likely appearing fractious and sour, softened his bearing. He had begun to treat Bee and me with the grave amusement shown by an exalted and wealthy uncle toward his impoverished but marginally respectable nieces, the ones who with better clothes and improved elocution might hope to make modest marriages to humble clerks. He drew the basic illusions every young magister was expected to master: a candle flame, a glinting gold ring, and a veil of mist that could be shaped into the shadows of living creatures. The slow play of shadow and light eased my mind and let me doze.

The next day we moved into a dense lowland scrub forest as the great valley of the lower Rhenus River opened before us. Now and again we caught glimpses of the wide river glittering to the west. We passed a toll station, which had been burned. Threads of smoke ghosting up from its embers told us that Drake’s troop was not many hours ahead.

As night fell the mansa lit globes of cold fire to light our way. Scraps of cloud lightened the moon-scarred sky. Very late we halted in a lonely meadow amid the creak of insects and a night breeze winnowing the grass. The coachman preferred to water and care for the horses at night, and I was grateful for the chance to lie down on a blanket on the ground. An owl’s white wings fluttered through the trees, and for an instant the weight of ice pressed down on me as if malevolent claws had reached across the worlds to throttle me. Then Bee put an arm around me and, comforted by her presence, I slept.

At dawn I woke to see a big furry flank draped alongside me. The big cat snored softly, until I punched him in the shoulder to wake him up.

“Rory! Where are your clothes? What are you doing?”

After he dressed and as we ate our provisions, he told his story. “I decided to scout. Drake’s party is not even half a day ahead of us.”

“I should have gone with you! I could have rescued Vai.”

“No, you should not have gone. They have little mirrors hung up all about the camp, so they would have caught you.”

“Like a troll maze! I wonder how Drake knew.”

“Mirrors are no danger to me!” Rory smiled with the preening confidence of a male who accepts that he is lovely. “I scared their horses, so they lost more time because they had to round them up. Wasn’t that clever?”

“Indeed.” The mansa’s puzzled frown would have amused me another time. Rory’s shape change had taken him aback in a way the confession of my parentage had not.

“What about Vai?” I demanded.

“He was tied up and staked to a post. The other cold mages were tied up, but they looked like sheep to me, so fearful of the wolf they hadn’t a bleat among them. I wasn’t sure if Vai had seen me but then he began to talk. I must say, I wouldn’t have used that tone of voice if I had been the one in captivity.”

“What did he say?” asked Bee.

“He said, ‘I’m surprised you can stand all these mirrors, Drake. They keep showing you how poorly you look in my clothes.’ And Drake replied, ‘I’ll see how poorly you look as you beg me not to destroy your mage House.’ ”

“Gracious Melqart!” murmured Bee.

“Then I had to run, for their riflemen started shooting. I fear I gave us away.”

The mansa said, “He already guesses we’re following. Best we move quickly.”

In another hour we reached a major curve in the road that opened onto a vista. The wide, flat valley at the confluence of the Rhenus River and the Temes shone in the sunlight. Horribly, all four ferry landings and the ferries were burning.

I shrieked out loud, out of sheer frustration. “How far is it to the next ferry? We’ll have to go days out of our way!”

The mansa tapped my arm. “Enough, Catherine! Drake’s people can’t have had time to hunt down and burn every farmstead along the river. We can cross by rowboat. Four Moons land begins on the other side of the river, so we do not need the coach anymore. Many a path runs through backcountry to the main house. We may still reach the estate in time to assemble enough magisters on the main road to crush James Drake’s flames.”

Shaking with rage, I settled back into the seat as the mansa told the coachman his plan. Then the eru latched the shutters and closed the door, leaving us in darkness.

The mansa shaped a globe of cold fire. “Are we to be shut up like prisoners?”

A mouth glimmered on the latch. “I like it when he does that. Can he make more pictures?”

“Obviously we are promised secrets and then denied them!” I snapped, giving the latch a dark stare, although both Bee and the mansa did stare at me, for they could not hear the latch. Rory yawned, looking amused.

Two eyes like silvery stitches winked. “The other cold mage drew illusions of your face while you were sleeping, when he thought you weren’t looking.”

Oblivious to the latch’s voice, the mansa went on. “Certainly these creatures have held their secrets close against themselves all this time. Servants ought not to act as if they are the masters. Such disrespect sows discord and disorder in the world.”

“It’s starting to get very stuffy in here,” remarked Bee to the air.

“Is that what you call a secret?” I said, to the latch. “I already knew that!”

The mansa frowned. “I have indulged the two of you for many days now. But this is truly more than I can be expected to endure.” He reached for the latch.

The gremlin’s mouth stretched until its line ran the length of the latch, ready to bite.

For an instant I was tempted to let events play out on the unsuspecting mansa, but instead I set my hand on the latch so he could not. “Do not forget, Your Excellency, that the coach and eru serve another master.”

“And you trust them?”

The latch licked my palm with its scratchy tongue, then said, muffled by my hand, “Can I help it if all I ever know about is what I see in here? I thought you were asleep and didn’t know he had done that.”

“I do trust them,” I said, removing my hand and giving the latch a stern side-eye glance.

The mansa studied me with a thoughtful frown. “Very well. In this, you have the advantage of me.”

Pressing my hands to my forehead, I breathed a soundless prayer to the blessed Tanit. “Blessed lady, let the righteous triumph and the wicked despair. Most of all, holy one, let me save his life and the lives of all those who do not deserve to suffer death at the hands of a man like James Drake. Not that any person deserves to suffer death in that wise, but you know what I mean.”

I sat with face buried in hands for a long time, in a daze of such weary anxiety that I felt rocked as in a boat crossing a rushing river. When my sire had stolen Andevai on Hallows’ Night, I had been more angry than fearful. My sire was not a creature of emotion. He was cruel in the way storms were cruel: They cared nothing for your vulnerability as they crashed through your life. If he wanted something, he had a reason for it that could be addressed.

But Drake’s reasons had melted in the fire of his resentment, the sense that what he had lost could be regained only through the pain and humiliation of others. He had turned in on himself until he had become a mirror that did nothing but reflect his grievances back into his own face. That made him dangerous, but it also made him vulnerable.

The coach slowed to a halt. The door was opened from the outside, and the eru set down the steps so we could get out. Gritty ash burned in my eyes. Sobs and screams billowed with the smoke. We had come to a stop in a hamlet of inns, stables, shelters, and outbuildings. Every building in the village as well as two flat-bottomed ferries were on fire, a roaring blaze whose heat blasted our faces.

“Get down,” said the mansa.

Bee had her head out of the coach, staring at local men who were beating at a fire as they tried to reach someone inside a house. They were so frantic they did not notice us.

“Sit down, Bee!” I dropped to my knees on the road.

The hammer of cold magic snuffed out every fire within sight, the flames sucked right out. The furnace heat turned in an eyeblink to the crackling of timbers buckling and the groan and smash of a wall toppling over. Every person in sight now lay on the ground. All except the eru. The mansa stared disbelievingly at the tall footman in his impeccable dress who appeared untouched by the impressive display. The eru offered a mocking servant’s bow that made the mansa frown.

“Dearest,” said Bee, clambering down, “are my eyes deceiving me, or have we crossed both rivers?”

Amazingly, we had reached the western bank.

Bee glanced up at the coachman, who sat upright and unruffled on the driver’s bench. “And yet why not? For it seems your goblin makers have their own secret magic.”

He removed his cap and slapped it against a hand to shake off ash. “Shall we go on? I am built for a steady, enduring pace rather than for speed. But we are not far behind them now.”

The eru turned to me. “Cousin, is it your plan to come upon them on the road? For if we continue in this direction, I think it likely we shall do so.”

“The fire mage has become quite powerful,” I said. “Can you aid us with your magic, Cousin? For I must believe that you and the mansa, together, ought to be able to kill his fire.”

“If Drake sees us coming up from behind, what is to stop him from simply killing Andevai?” Bee asked.

“Drake needs Vai. And Vai knows Drake needs him.”

The mansa surveyed the village. The locals scrambled into the cold ruins, seeking survivors. “I do not like to think of what a company of fire mages led by a man with no conscience can do to Four Moons House if he chooses to practice his revenge there before he reaches his homeland.”

A woman with a baby in her arms and a raw burn mark on her pale cheek shuffled forward to kneel before the mansa. “My lord mansa. What know you of this wicked spirit whose anger lashed out at us? You are come just in time. Otherwise we would have lost everything.”

He pressed several sesterces into her hand. “No. I am come too late. I should have understood matters differently, and much sooner. Someone from the House will come to see what can be done with cleaning up and rebuilding. For now, you must do what you can.”

Other supplicants began to approach, for it was obvious they knew who he was and did not fear to approach him in a respectful way. In their eyes he was a just master. He passed out coins to the survivors, emptying his purse in a rash manner that made Bee and me look at each other in disbelief. What if we needed that money later? To him it was trivial, something he expected to easily replace. He considered this generosity to be his duty. It was in this way, I supposed, that mages had built the edifice of their power over the generations.

On we traveled. Because we were traveling west, the door in the coach that opened into the spirit world faced the direction I most needed to look. So instead of looking ahead toward the graveled drive and the gatehouse to the estate, I could only stare through the other window as a drizzle clouded the north. Stands of birches flashed silver. Spruce darkened the slopes. In the distance a ring of round houses marked a village several miles off the road. The afternoon light turned to a hazy orange glow.

My nose twitched, and I sneezed.

“More smoke and more fire.” Rory rubbed at eyes reddened by days of breathing ash.

The coach jolted to a halt.

The mansa flung open the door, then sucked in a harsh breath. “We are too late.”

I scrambled out after him.

The turnpike from Audui to Cantiacorum was built atop the old Roman road in layers of crushed stone. South of the road a high stone wall demarcated the perimeter of the main estate of Four Moons House. A wide fan driveway fronted four arches, each ornamented with a phase of the moon. Between turnpike and wall lay a garden and the gatehouse supervised by the women magisters who tended the purification baths and gave or revoked permission for visitors to enter.

Ruin engulfed the gatehouse and the stables behind it. The carefully pruned hedges poured a greasy smoke into the air. Every tree was on fire. A dead woman sprawled on the steps, her face turned away from us and her bare back a grotesque fabric of savage burns.

When a magister powerful enough to rule as the head of a mage House is struck rigid with fury and he is standing not ten paces from you, you will be glad he is fighting on your side.

A powerfully cold wind rocked the coach. As the mansa started walking to the gatehouse, icy sleet began to fall. I drew my sword.

“How did they get past the gate?” I asked. “Is it not protected by a cold magic binding?”

“She who holds the keys to the gates must be alive to close or open them.” His right hand clenched as he looked toward the body on the steps. He let out the hard exhalation of a man determined to get on with the painful task that has to be done.

“Was she your kinswoman?” I asked, for she had hair the same color as his.

“My sister,” he said curtly. “Let Rory scout in his cat form. Go around to the back. I think they will not think to use a cat as a catch-fire. Go on.”

Rory shed his clothes and turned from man to cat. He nudged my hands, licked Bee, yawned assertively at the mansa, and loped off. We got in the carriage.

The shadow of the arch passed over us as we entered the estate.

“Here is a riddle,” the mansa said as we rolled down the wide avenue past black pine and a reed-choked pond. “Fire will burn as long as it has fuel and is not doused by water. If this man Drake uses Andevai as a catch-fire yet cannot fathom the well of Andevai’s power, what then?”

“I told Vai once that the potency of his cold magic is the inverse of his modesty,” I said.

“Cat, are you saying that by using Andevai as his catch-fire, Drake becomes as powerful as Andevai is vain?” Bee smiled at me with brows lifted in the way she had that provoked me to mischief. Her smile broke through the wall of relentless concentration I had raised around my fears. We broke into hysterical giggles.

The mansa stared as if to scold us but instead sat back with a stiff but honest smile. “I suppose a little levity cannot harm our cause. Anyway, it may well be an apt analogy that should give us pause, given what we know of Andevai’s monstrously bloated conceit.”

Bee snickered. I wiped tears from my eyes.

He set a fist on the window’s rim and studied the orchard as we passed. The first time I had been driven this way, I had seen Kayleigh walking in the orchard among the field hands. Vai had halted our carriage to greet her. I had begun then to comprehend that the man I thought I saw was merely the clothes he showed to the world. What made him who he truly was ran far deeper. Just as it did in all of us.

The main house lay almost two miles from the road. Smoke boiled up above the trees, shimmering with heat.

“What better way to humiliate Vai than by destroying the House he has pledged to uphold and maintain?” I cried. “And likewise practice for the greater destruction he means to visit on his own home?”

“I fear you are right,” said the mansa. He did not take his gaze from the smoke. “My surviving troops and magisters will be days behind us on the road. Beatrice, you must remain in the coach so you do not yourself need rescuing. Catherine, are you ready?”

Shared laughter had polished away the weight of my dread. I knew what I had to do.

“Mansa, the only way to kill James Drake is with cold steel.”

“Andevai taught us how to pull the backlash off another and into ourselves, so I will keep the fire mages from using you as a catch-fire for long enough that you can reach him,” he said without the least sign that he appreciated the irony of protecting me after he was the one who had once demanded I be killed. “I will not let you burn. Best you scout first, however.”

“Be safe, dearest.” Bee grasped my hand, kissed my cheek, and let me go.

I pushed down the latch as we rumbled along the drive. As the door swung open I leaned out, feet in the coach and body braced on the door. The coach came to a halt just out of sight around the last curve of the drive from the House.

I hopped out. The coachman touched the brim of his cap in salute. The eru leaped onto the roof of the coach in a tremor of unseen wings. I wrapped the shadows around me and ran alone up to the House.