The Borderkind

CHAPTER 16

L i knelt in the grass beside his tiger. The creature shuddered, her damp eyes locked upon his own, as her heat and blood ran out and soaked into the earth. The tiger’s eyes held no fear, only sadness.

The charred remains of two Perytons lay upon scorched earth not far from where Li knelt with his loyal beast. Perhaps a dozen feet further, the Black Devil lay upon the ground, eyes glassy and still. The tiger had killed it, but received terrible wounds in return. The Black Devil’s throat had been torn open and already flies buzzed around the wound. A single insect began to circle above Li’s tiger and the Guardian of Fire glared at it, flames spilling from his eyes and incinerating the fly instantly.

A horrid chuffing noise began to come from the tiger’s throat.

“No,” Li whispered, in the ancient language of his kin. “Do not go, my friend.”

The little man ran his hands over the tiger’s fur, felt the soft velvet and the heat of the animal’s body, felt her tremble in pain and confusion. Tears began to slide down Li’s cheeks, liquid fire that dripped upon the ground. The grass began to burn. The fire from his blazing tears spread, but he willed it away from his friend.

The tiger grimaced, black lips pulled back from her bloodstained teeth, and then went still, chest compressing as she exhaled her final breath. In a single moment, the light in her eyes vanished and they became glazed and dull.

Li felt her heart cease its beating. He bent over the tiger and embraced her, but made no more effort to keep the fire away from her remains. Fiery tears spilled upon her and her fur began to burn. Liquid fire spread quickly, engulfing both of them.

With a scream to ancient gods, Li stood and turned to seek out more of the Hunters, to destroy those responsible. His ears were full of the roar and crackle of the flames that raged around his fists and engulfed his upper arms. Fire spilled from his eyes and jetted from his nose, and when he screamed it erupted from his open mouth.

But he was diminished now, both in power and in spirit. The passing of the tiger had leeched so much from him that he felt old and weak. The fire that blazed within him still burned, but had lost some of its heat.

Still, he was a warrior. And the fire in his heart cried out for vengeance.

Off to his left he saw Cheval and Grin attacking a fallen Peryton. Above him, a blur of deeper blue spun across the sky, and green feathers floated down with a rain of Peryton blood. Li ignored them both. Ahead of him, Frost struggled with one of the Atlantean Hunters. He had managed to tear one of its wings off, but the winter man was out of his element here. The heat of Yucatazca weakened him. He ought to have been able to kill one Peryton with ease, but Frost had managed barely to root himself to the ground and now he grappled with the Hunter.

The Peryton slashed at Frost with its talons, gouging ice. Frost hissed in anger and pain and reached up, fingers wrapping around the Hunter’s antlers. The ice of his hands spread, quickly weighing down the Peryton. It bent under the weight of the ice and its own antlers. The creature shouted and thrashed its body, cracking the ice that had formed upon it, shattering Frost’s fingers.

The winter man did not so much as moan. Instead, he formed what remained of his left hand into a single dagger of ice and, with all his strength, impaled the Peryton upon it. The Hunter shrieked and bled, then died.

The last of the creatures shouted in fury as it dove from the sky toward Frost, intent upon his death.

Li screamed in return, a battle cry filled with all of his love for the tiger and all of his grief at her loss. The Guardian of Fire felt flame burst from him as though some volcanic explosion had come from his hands and his heart. Never again would he burn so brightly or with such heat as he had-he had lost a part of himself-and perhaps his command of the flames had lessened, but still he was the Guardian of Fire.

The last of the Perytons crashed to the ground in flames, twitching and dying.

The winter man felt weighted down with sorrow and frustration. He’d had enough of fighting, enough of death. Jack Frost had never been a warrior, but he had not been given a choice. That he had discovered himself quite capable of such horror provided little comfort.

The pyramid stood still and silent and Frost glanced toward it to see if any more enemies would emerge. But nothing stirred there save the bloodred birds that now took flight. He paused to see if they would attack, but they only circled, carrion birds above a field of battle, awaiting their meal.

Though the Minata-Karaia, those bizarre treelike creatures, still watched from the edge of the forest, they made no attempt to attack. The Perytons had been slain.

Grin and Cheval dragged Chorti’s broken corpse between them toward the blazing pyre Li had made of his tiger. Cheval, bent with grief, cast a pleading, hollow-eyed glance at Li, who nodded once, simply. As Grin helped her heft the wild man’s shaggy, blood-matted remains into the fire, Frost saw that half of his skull had been sheared away.

Had he been able to spare even a bit of water, the winter man might have wept.

He staggered toward Li, but did not dare go too near to the Guardian of Fire while the other Borderkind’s hands and eyes still burned. Li looked pale as ash, and his flesh was spotted with places where the skin glowed like fireplace embers. Something had happened when his tiger had died, changing Li and the fire inside him, weakening both flame and flesh.

Even so, the heat from within him rippled from his flesh in waves, shimmering in the air, and the winter man kept his distance. He’d had enough of heat.

When night fell, Frost would be better. The sun plagued him. The river water would be cool and could replenish him for a time, but not yet.

A small blue bird flew down from the sky and alighted by his feet. For a moment it hesitated as though wishing it might rest, but then the bird spun into a blue-streaked cyclone and, a moment later, Blue Jay stood beside Frost. The trickster gave him a mournful look and then slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

“You’ll be all right?” Blue Jay asked, glancing down at Frost’s shattered hands.

The winter man nodded.

One by one, the surviving Borderkind began to walk toward the pyramid, while the silent Minata-Karaia watched, the air filled with the quiet whistle of the wind through their hollow heads. The pyramid was not their destination, however.

At the base of the pyramid’s steps-steps high enough that they must have been built to be scaled by a god-a ball of black flame burned. The ebon fire flickered in the air, tendrils rising a dozen feet from the ground. Within the black flames, two figures stood rigid as flies trapped in amber.

Frost and Blue Jay reached the sphere of darkness only a moment before Grin and Cheval stepped up to it on the other side. Li joined them an instant later, the flames around his hands having subsided, though fire still danced in his furious eyes, and those ember patches still flared upon his pale skin.

Black as it was, enough light passed through the circle of flames that they could identify the figures within. The Mazikeen had his long, slender fingers wrapped around the throat of the witch, Jezi-Baba. Her neck was broken and her head lolled to one side, yet even in death she killed him, her blue-skinned hands buried to the wrist in his chest. A rictus grin split her features, showing pitted stone teeth and a lunatic’s amusement.

“He lives,” Blue Jay said, voice low.

They all moved nearer the flames. Though the black fire hissed and crackled like the blaze in a hearth, no heat came from it. Rather, it felt cold as the first snow of winter.

The Mazikeen’s eyes moved. The sorcerer glanced at each of them in turn, even as the black flame began to consume his flesh. His robes burned with it.

“Go,” the Mazikeen said. “My brothers will find you.”

Yet, even with his urging, they stood and watched him burn. Frost had begun to think that the black fire had been Jezi-Baba’s magic, but the moment the fire engulfed the Mazikeen’s face, the witch’s entire body disintegrated, crumbling to blue-black ash.

For a long moment he said nothing. At length he turned and surveyed the grim, mournful faces of his comrades, his kin.

“We must head for Palenque with all speed. Other Hunters will come soon.”

Cheval stared at him, shaking her head. “No. Can’t you see that you’re only leading us all to our deaths? This is madness. We cannot hope to succeed when so many stand against us.”

Her hands trembled and she cast her gaze downward, swiping at the tears that began to slip down her face. “You’re only killing us faster than the Hunters would have. There’s nothing left now. We should find somewhere to hide. Let someone else fight them-”

Frost did not take a step nearer or make a gesture. He only spoke one word.

“Who?”

Cheval flinched, raised her chin, and stared at him defiantly. Her features were taut with sorrow. “We cannot-”

“If not us, then who?” the winter man demanded. “I know you mourn, Cheval. Perhaps you do not have it within your heart to continue. You wish, now, to do nothing but crawl into a cave and hide, but I tell you this: the Hunters will not stop. You might live longer in hiding, but when the rest of us have fallen, they will come for you, too. And then Chorti will have died for nothing.”

Cheval glared at him.

Frost turned and strode toward the river, needing the cool water to sustain himself. It would not return him to his full strength, but it was the best he could hope for here.

One by one, the surviving Borderkind followed, their fallen comrades still burning on the battlefield behind them. Cheval Bayard came last, but then hurried to catch up to the others.

The bloodred birds descended.

The Borderkind did not look back.

Oliver could not breathe. The ambassador’s daughter slept on in her floral canopy bed. The two-year-old’s gentle breathing was the only sound in the room save for the eerie scratch of sand eddying across the floor in an unnatural breeze. Kitsune’s body stretched languorously against his, warm and pulsing with the beat of her heart, but he sensed that even she now held her breath.

In the center of the room stood a tall figure in a black bowler hat and a dark woven greatcoat with a high collar. Its hem nearly reached the floor. The figure had tombstone-gray flesh and a thick, drooping mustache. There was about him the sense that this was a man from another age, a time past. His hands were overlarge, the fingers long and slender and somehow wrong. When he moved them, as he did now, raising one to point a stern finger at them, grains of dust sifted off his hands, falling to the ground.

“You are trespassing,” the Dustman said, his voice deep and sonorous, with an edge of gravel.

Oliver swallowed, his throat dry and tight. “Yes, we know. But with good reason.”

He would have gone on, but Kitsune held up a hand to silence him. She turned, slowly pulling her legs beneath her, and bowed low in a manner more customary in the land of her own legend than in that of the Dustman. His English accent was clear.

“We beg your pardon, sir,” Kitsune said. “We do not wish to incur your wrath, only to have a few moments’ discourse.”

Beneath the rim of his bowler, the Dustman’s eyes glittered like stars; pinpoint white amidst deepest black. He raised both hands and dust sprinkled to the floor, where it began to swirl upward, raising a cloud that reached toward them as though he were a puppeteer holding its strings.

“Wait. Stop!” Oliver said, voice rasping in panic even as he tried not to wake the little girl. “Just talk to us. What harm will it do? The Borderkind are being slaughtered. She’s here as your kin, not your enemy. Do you really want to help the Hunters finish the job?”

The Dustman cocked his head to one side and regarded them both. Cold radiated from him, and Oliver shivered.

On her bed, the ambassador’s daughter began to stir. She reached a tiny hand up to rub the sleep grit from her yet unopened eyes. Oliver and Kitsune fell completely still, but the Dustman gestured toward her and a tendril of the dust that swirled around his feet reached out toward her, breezed past her face, and the girl’s arm slid down. She did not stir again, and her breathing grew deeper.

“Continue,” the Dustman said. He slid his hands into the pockets of his jacket, an oddly human gesture. But the more Oliver looked at him, the less human he seemed. The Dustman did not breathe. The air that he expelled with his words was a breeze through a hollow cavern, and when he turned his head, the substance of him, flesh and mustache and hat and coat, shifted like sand.

“May we rise?” Kitsune asked.

Oliver studied her. The subservient tone was quite unlike her, but he saw the spark of something in her gleaming jade eyes, a dark, calculating intelligence. It ought not have surprised him. She was a trickster and had a great deal at stake here-not only on Oliver’s behalf, but her own as well. When Collette had been rescued, the Dustman might make a powerful ally in the war against the Hunters.

The Dustman nodded, glittering eyes eclipsed for a moment by his hat brim. Oliver let out a tiny breath of relief to be spared his attention even for that moment.

“Tell me your tale,” he said in that gravel voice. “Whispers have reached me about the Hunters, but I would know more.”

So Kitsune and Oliver began, taking the story in turns. They told the Dustman of the conspiracy to murder the Borderkind, of Oliver’s first meeting with Frost and their flight from the Myth Hunters, of the losses and betrayals they had suffered on the road to Perinthia and later to Canna Island, of the death of Professor Koenig and the massacre there. Oliver touched the hilt of the Sword of Hunyadi to illustrate the tale, but he made no attempt to draw the blade for fear the Dustman would misinterpret the gesture.

They spoke of Twillig’s Gorge and the allies and enemies found there.

Most important, they spoke of the Sandman, the gruesome killing spree the creature had embarked upon, the murder of Oliver’s father, and the abduction of Collette. When the Dustman inquired as to why Oliver and his sister had been targeted, silence reigned. They had no answers, only overheard conversations and suspicions.

“The king of Euphrasia has given me a year to prove my worth,” Oliver whispered, glancing from time to time at the door, at the sleeping girl, at Kitsune, anything to avoid the narrow eyes of the Dustman. “I hope to convince the king of Yucatazca to do the same. But I can’t worry about saving my own life when I don’t know what’s become of my sister.”

Oliver paused. The Dustman stared at him with those eyes, that gray, shifting skin. Perhaps it was the bowler and the coat, or perhaps the mustache gave the disguise its success, but he realized now he had been speaking to the creature as though it were a man, a human being.

The embassy creaked. Radiator pipes ticked. Outside the windows, the Austrian night remained lit with the diffuse color of Christmas lights, but the darkness seemed to gather closer. In the small hours of the night, nothing moved.

He glanced at Kitsune, thinking she would continue, but the fox-woman only watched the Dustman, pulling her fur cloak more tightly around her as though she might at any moment disappear into the copper-red fur and run for the door.

The Dustman shifted again, took two steps toward them. He moved his shoulders and the high collar of his greatcoat seemed to hide much of his face.

“And somehow you believe I will help you?” he rasped, dust swirling around him, scratching the floor. “A human and a trickster, and you would ask me to ally myself with you against the Sandman, a facet of my own legend? My brother? You wish me to destroy my own brother?”

Kitsune sneered, lips curling back to reveal those small, sharp teeth. “He murders children, tears out their eyes. Were he a facet of my legend, it would shame me.”

The Dustman shuddered, the grains of sand and grit that made up his form shifting, and he slid his hands from his pockets, pointing at her.

“You dare much, fox.”

Oliver’s heart thundered in his chest, but on the outside he felt a strange calm settle over him. He stepped between Kitsune and the Dustman.

“The Hunters will come for you soon enough,” Oliver said, even as the dust eddied around his shoes, cold and rough as sandpaper. This creature could scour the flesh from his bones, but there was no turning back now. “You’re Borderkind. Do you really think they won’t come for you? They’ll kill you. And your brother is working with them. He’s already chosen, and he’s sided against you.”

The embassy continued to creak, but this time it seemed like more than the ordinary settling of time and weight and temperature and wind. Oliver glanced at Kitsune and saw that she had begun to sniff the air. After a moment, she turned to him, alarm lighting her eyes.

“We should go.”

Oliver silently refused. He stared at the Dustman, waiting. The figure regarded him in return, pinpoint-star eyes glittering. Then, with a sound like the hiss of sand through an hourglass, the Dustman smiled and reached up to touch the brim of his bowler, a gesture of courtesy and acceptance.

He strode to the little girl’s bed and ducked beneath the floral awning. Dust sifting around his feet, he slid long fingers inside the girl’s pillowcase and his hand moved around, searching for something there. In a moment he withdrew a single small white feather, goose down from the pillow.

The Dustman handed the pillow feather to Oliver.

“Hold this and call for me, and I shall come.”

Oliver took the feather, staring up at the imposing figure, entranced by the grain of his face, at the apparent reality of the fabric of his hat and coat. He wanted to ask for clarification, to be certain that the creature had truly agreed to help him.

But a strong breeze eddied across the floor again and the Dustman disintegrated before his eyes, slipping away, blowing beneath the bed and through the crack under the door. In seconds, he was gone.

For a moment, Oliver stared at the feather, then he put it into the right-hand pocket of his jeans with the single large seed he still had from his encounter with the gods of the Harvest.

“Oliver,” Kitsune whispered.

On the bed, the girl began to stir again.

“We must go.”

Gently, Kitsune opened the door and peered out into the hall. She glanced back at him and nodded, then the two of them moved quietly out of the girl’s bedroom, leaving the door open.

They had reached the top of the stairs when the girl called out in a sleepy voice for her mother. Oliver froze and looked at Kit, who nodded curtly, urging him to hurry. He started down the stairs, wishing his own tread was as silent as the fox-woman’s.

“Martina?” came a voice from the hall above. The ambassador’s wife, come to check on their little girl.

Oliver cursed to himself and slid his hand along the banister, stealth now far more important than speed. Kitsune reached the bottom of the stairs ahead of him and vanished.

At the bottom step, Oliver paused. The hair on the back of his neck prickled and he turned to look back up the way they’d come.

A woman in a long cotton nightdress stood at the top of the stairs, staring down at him with her mouth open in shock and fear. She said something in German, a question, then repeated it.

Then she began to shout.

Oliver bolted, no longer taking care to tread lightly. He barreled through the embassy, glancing ahead and over his shoulder with every step, waiting for a guard to appear and put a bullet in his head. The sword banged against his hip as he ran.

In the small office where they had entered the building, Kitsune waited. Voices shouted after him now-male voices-and as he swung himself into the office, holding on to the door frame, a gunshot punctured the air, echoing through the whole building. The sound alone made Oliver feel as though he were a target and he tried to shrink in on himself. Another shot came, and a bullet struck the open door behind him as he ran into the room.

Kitsune dove through the window, heedless of any injury that might await outside. Oliver had only a moment to debate attempting the same, and he knew that the fall was far less likely to kill him than a bullet.

He ran to the window, bent low, and slid his torso over the frame. At the last moment, even as his body careened out the window, he gripped the window frame and flipped forward, so that he did not fall into the alley headfirst. Oliver had gone over chain-link fences the same way as a boy, but boyhood was far behind him now, and the move was far from smooth. He sprawled onto the pavement, skinning his palms and scraping his right knee, the denim tearing. The metal scabbard clattered when it struck the ground, but the sword remained in place.

Adrenaline and terror propelled him forward, staggering to his feet even as he kept up his momentum. His hands were bright with pain, but it felt far away and unimportant.

Kitsune stepped from the shadows and grabbed his wrist. For a moment he’d thought she had left him behind. Now they raced down the alley together, behind the embassy and then between two other buildings. Oliver felt like an idiot. If he’d been running on his own he would have gone back the way they’d come, right past the front doors, and probably been shot dead in the street.

There were shouts and the staccato footfalls of their pursuers, but there were no more gunshots, and soon they had left even that behind in the narrow back alleys of Vienna. The police would be out in force soon, searching for them, but the guards at the British embassy had no jurisdiction to shoot people in the streets of the Austrian capital.

Oliver had long since lost track of their location when Kitsune led him around a corner and he saw the Danube churning by only a hundred yards away.

Slowly, catching her breath, she took his hand again and together they walked to the riverbank. The darkness still clung to the sky, but night would soon be over and Christmas day would dawn. The river raced by, the current powerful, but even so, it was cold enough that ice had formed along its edges, drifting and breaking and spinning on the water.

Kitsune smiled at him, tugging him toward the river.

Then Oliver understood. He stopped, trying to pull her back. “Kit, no. It’s freezing.”

“Public space, remember?” she said. “Do you know Vienna well enough to find us a place to cross through the Veil before dawn, before the police catch up with us?”

Oliver sighed. “You know I don’t.”

Kitsune raised her hood, jade eyes gleaming in the dark. “I’ll keep you warm,” she said.

Together, they leaped into the Danube, and through the Veil.

Oliver lay in a shallow creek, barely more than a trickle, his clothes soaked through from splashing into the Danube. Back on the mundane side of the Veil-the place he thought of less and less as his own world-it had still been dark, the sky that pure indigo of the hour before dawn. But in the realm of the legendary, it was midday and the sun shone, drawing rich colors out of the landscape. Trees seemed remarkably green, the sky extraordinarily blue, and the coppery fur of Kitsune’s cloak a brighter red than ever before.

It occurred to Oliver that perhaps this sharpness of color, the vividness of the world around him, might well be an aftereffect of the exultant feeling of escaping with his life. If so, he appreciated that there was at least one benefit to their circumstances.

The air felt cool, the water outright cold, yet he lay there and shivered, feeling the stones beneath him, even through his clothes, and the little rivulets that streamed around him.

Oliver let his head loll to one side and glanced at Kitsune. She shook herself, water spraying from her fur cloak. The absurdity of it and the exultation of their escape must have touched her as well. Giddy, they began to laugh.

“That…was a close one,” Oliver managed.

Kitsune sighed, corners of her lips still turned up in a broad smile. The sun lit her features so that it seemed she had her own internal luminescence.

“Far too close. When you finally get all of your troubles sorted out and go home, you’re going to have quite a time explaining yourself.”

Oliver’s laughter died. Thoughts of home led to thoughts of Julianna, and he stared at Kitsune-her beauty painful to regard-and any trace of humor died.

“What is it?” she asked, still lying there beside him in the small brook.

“I’m not sure what ‘home’ even is anymore,” he said, surprising himself with the honesty of his answer. “After all of this, I don’t know what’ll be left to go back to. If Julianna’s gone…”

His time with the Borderkind had irrevocably altered him. There was no denying that. And with all that had happened, there were a great many people who had questions for him that he would find impossible to answer. Trouble waited for him back in his world. But his house, his childhood home, that waited as well. And his job. His friends.

But without Julianna, none of that mattered.

Kitsune reached out until her fingertips grazed his, the water rushing over their hands. “Then don’t go back.”

Oliver stared at her, letting her fingers play against his.

“I love her, you know,” he said softly.

Her eyes narrowed and she pulled away. Tendrils of her hair streamed in the brook, and as she lifted her head, water dripped and ran down her cloak, which glistened with droplets.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“And I’ll find her.”

Kitsune moved away from the brook a few paces and thrust out her tongue as though using it to test the wind-or taste the wind. Oliver watched the stiffness in her manner, the formality that seemed to have returned to her every gesture, and he rose from the brook in a cascade of water and regret.

He had survived this long partly due to Kitsune’s help. Had she not accompanied him, he surely would have been long since dead. But for the first time he began to think that it would be best if he and Kit parted ways. Traveling with her clouded his mind, when he desperately needed focus.

To think he didn’t have a home to go back to-that was pure foolishness. When Collette had been in the midst of her divorce and things had gotten ugly, both financially and personally, she’d called the process triage. In catastrophic circumstances, doctors had to make hard decisions, focusing first on the patients who were horribly injured, but not so far gone that they were likely to die even with treatment.

You saved what you could, one problem at a time.

Oliver knew that his homecoming would be problematic when the time came, but between then and now he had to do triage. Save Collette. Save himself. Help the Borderkind if he could. Then get himself home to Julianna and whatever else awaited him.

So, much as he hated the chill that had just descended between himself and Kitsune, Oliver only followed as she walked away.

For nearly an hour they wandered across fields and along cart paths lined with delicate-looking trees and low shrubs with tiny leaves. Kitsune seemed unsure of their direction, but Oliver dared not question. At length they came to a small settlement not large enough even to warrant the word village. Most of the dwellings appeared to be temporary, some no more than tents. Herds of sheep and cows grazed freely on the surrounding hills, not penned but guarded by shepherds with a distinctly eastern aspect. They wore wool vests against the chill, and some had headgear fashioned from fur that reminded Oliver of nothing so much as warriors who would have bowed to the commands of a sultan.

As they made their way into the settlement, men and women alike watched them warily. Oliver saw no weapons, but the Sword of Hunyadi hanging at his hip gave him great comfort.

Kitsune walked ten steps ahead, as though she were his mistress and he some lowly servant. This might have been some affectation for the benefit of their observers, the haughty Borderkind keeping the ordinary man in his place, but Oliver did not think so. The hood of her cloak framed her face, casting her features in shadow so that for once he could not even see the jade gleam of her eyes. He was quite sure this was precisely the effect she desired.

Oliver rested his palm upon the handle of his sword. If she wished for him to appear as though he was some servant or bodyguard, he would. The mid-afternoon shadow stretched before him, making a pantomime of his actions, transforming him into a fierce warrior giant. Yet Oliver knew that shadows were only strange contortions of the truth.

After they had passed through the entire encampment, Kitsune waited on the far side. Oliver thought for a moment she was waiting for him, but then an old woman emerged from one of the large tents and began to shamble toward them, accompanied by a pair of men in horned fur caps. These two carried spears, the first weapons he’d seen.

Kitsune and the old woman greeted one another in a sharp-edged language Oliver did not understand. The nomadic matriarch studied Kit warily as they spoke, and after a few moments, the fox-woman nodded her head in apparent gratitude and then started off again, this time at an angle that would take them past a herd of sheep and into the sunless shade of those delicate, unfamiliar trees.

For a moment, Oliver stared at the nomad woman and her two guards, with their grim eyes and pointed beards.

“Good-bye, Mischief,” the old woman said quietly, staring at Kitsune’s back as the Borderkind strode away from the encampment.

She’d spoken English. Oliver wanted to know what she’d meant and started to ask, even as the woman turned and made her way back to her tent, the guards at her sides. One of them raised his spear in both hands, hardly paying attention to Oliver and yet menacing him with its point at the same time.

Feeling the fool, he glanced back and forth from one retreating woman to the other, and at last hurried to catch up with Kitsune. As she passed the sheep, the creatures bleated and milled away from her. The sight disconcerted Oliver for a moment, until he realized that of course sheep would shy away from a fox wearing the skin of a woman.

His throat felt dry.

Two wizened old shepherds muttered to themselves as they caught up with their charges. Oliver felt he ought to apologize, but what could he say that they would understand? Instead he hurried on and at last caught up with Kitsune at the top of the slope, just as she stepped into the shade of those strange trees, which looked to him like giant bonsais.

“What did she say?” Oliver asked.

His eyes were still adjusting and in that moment Kitsune existed merely as a hooded outline in the shade. Then Oliver blinked, and the rich color of her fur came into focus. From beneath the hood she gazed at him without malice. A sadness lingered in her features, but otherwise she was only Kitsune, his friend and companion, the only one who had stuck with him.

“The Orient Road is near now. My instincts were correct. We’re less than an hour’s walk from it. By nightfall, we should reach the stone circle where there is an entrance to the Winding Way.”

“But you still don’t think I’ll be able to walk the Winding Way.”

Kitsune cocked her head. “We shall see. Though, yes, to my knowledge, only the legendary can travel that way.”

She waited for him to say more, but Oliver feared opening his mouth just then. If he did, he could only say something that would hurt her more. Or, conversely, betray Julianna further than he already had. Neither option appealed to him, so he kept silent.

Kitsune turned and started off through the trees, and soon they found themselves on a narrow trail that led up the hill, across sun-splashed clearings and through copses of trees. On the other side of the hill the land stretched out in a long plain that descended so gradually it could barely be considered a slope.

They walked in silence, so that it seemed to Oliver much more than an hour before they reached the Orient Road. When at last it came into sight, a broad avenue of hard-packed dirt, he saw beyond it a long, rough-hewn post-and-beam fence, and within those confines a handful of tall, proud horses-the largest horses he had ever laid eyes upon.

In the distance, to the east, the road wound toward a mountain range whose snow-capped peaks scraped the heavens. The mountains were far away, but even from here Oliver could make out some kind of long, rambling structure that ran along the edge of a steep cliff. Its isolation and formidable construction made him think it a fortress, but then he thought again, studying its location.

“A monastery?” he asked.

Kitsune glanced at him. “Yes. There are many to the east. It is a quieter life.”

She said nothing more, but Oliver felt a great weight lifted from him as they continued on together. Along the way they passed several dwellings and an aged, rickety wagon, with peeling paint and a broken wheel, abandoned on the roadside.

When they came upon a small shrine on the side of the road-really no more than a rabbit hutch full of candles, painted tiles, and small jade figures-Kitsune paused and bowed her head in a silent moment. Respectfully, Oliver did the same. Though he had no idea to what or whom he appealed, he prayed for his sister’s life, for the Borderkind’s fate, and for his safe return home.

After a moment, Oliver just stood and watched Kitsune.

“The old nomad woman spoke English,” he said when she looked up. “Just after you walked off, she said good-bye, but she called you a different name. I can’t help thinking if she spoke English, it was for my benefit.”

Kitsune gazed at him. “What did she call me?”

“Mischief.”

The fox-woman laughed softly, shaking her head. Oliver swallowed, his chest strangely tight.

“Why did she call you that?” he asked.

Kitsune gave him a sidelong glance. “You know my kin and I are called tricksters, Oliver. Mischief is what we are.”

“See, that’s what I thought, too. But if I think about all of the people I’ve met since crossing through the Veil, the tricksters are the only ones who really seem to be what they appear to be. No bullshit.”

“At the moment, true enough,” Kitsune replied. “With all that the Borderkind are suffering of late, there is little call for mischief.”