“No more are you, I imagine,” Eanrin replied with a careless flick of his ears, though his heart raced madly. “Unless you want to try and tell me that these mortals asked you to come and steal their land.”
“What business is it of yours?” Wolf Tongue cried. He would have liked to snap up the cat in a single bite and be rid of him. But he dared not. Not if there was a breach in his land allowing Faerie folk through. He must learn the source of that breach, and soon, if he was to close it and secure his territory once more. “Why should you care what I do with these maggots?”
“I find myself caught up in all sorts of business not my own these days,” said the cat, smiling. “But curiosity always was my downfall, you know.”
“It will be in the end, I have no doubt,” said Wolf Tongue. He took a menacing step out of the house. Eanrin crawled back a few paces. “How did you break those protections and infiltrate my realm?”
The cat said nothing.
“The rivers keep all Faerie kind out,” said the Beast, “save those brought in by a man of this land. Thus was I given admittance. A young man making his rite of passage came upon me in the Wood. I convinced him that if he took me back into his world, I would make him a king among his people. He agreed and led me back, and so I crossed the river gates that would otherwise have held me at bay. And I did indeed make him master of his people . . . and I became his god! So have I worked to make this realm my own, to make myself a power as great as any Faerie king or queen.
“But I will not permit others of our kind to enter here and contest my rule! So I ask you again, and I will not ask a third time: How did you pass the rivers?”
“I come,” said Eanrin quietly, “on behalf of Maid Imraldera.”
Wolf Tongue stared at him. “Imraldera,” he breathed, the name rolling slowly off his tongue. “Imral . . . the star . . .” A slow, terrible smile spread across his face, and he was more wolfish now than when he ran upon four feet. “You come on behalf of the Starflower.” His look was ravenous and he gnashed his teeth. “How I loved her!”
“Loved her?” Eanrin stood upright as a man. He cut a small figure beside the towering Wolf Tongue, and his bright shock of hair contrasted against the darkness of that other. “You say you loved her?” He shook his head, grimacing. “You have never loved anyone but yourself all your life!”
Wolf Tongue’s smile grew. “And you have?”
Eanrin stared into that terrible face, and he saw his own reflected there. A beast. An immortal beast. His voice shook, but he spoke his next words loudly, flinging them in Wolf Tongue’s face as a challenge.
“The Starflower has returned to her land!” he cried. “She has returned to finish her business with the god of her people. She waits for you even now at the Place of the Teeth!”
With those words, Eanrin spun about and ran. Taking his cat’s form, he hurled himself down the hill, streaking like lightning. And only just fast enough! No sooner had those words crossed his tongue than the Beast lunged for him. He felt the brush of teeth against his skin. He felt the heat of breath upon his fur. Had he hesitated even an instant, those jaws would have closed upon his spine and snapped him in two.
He hurtled through the village, a bright orange streak, darting for the nearest Faerie Path he could find and praying it did not belong to the Beast. Howls filled the air behind him, and he knew that Wolf Tongue had taken his true form.
The race was on.
5
IMRALDERA STOOD ON THE EDGE of the Place of the Teeth, watching the landscape far below. She understood many things that she could not have begun to imagine the last time she came to this place. She knew what lay beyond the Circle of Faces. She knew that the Void was no Void but in fact held worlds far greater than the world she had always known and found sufficient.
She gazed upon the Land of her people, the Land that belonged to the Beast. The naming of things had always come easy to her. The night her mother died and Fairbird drew her first crying breath, Imraldera had studied her sister until she discovered her true name, and wondered then if perhaps she had known it all along. Later, she had gazed into Frostbite’s snarling face and known what the dog had been intended to be, not what it was. Even the Black Dogs, waiting now just beyond the ring of mountains . . . even they had names, though their souls were suppressed to the point of extinction.
The name of this land was Sorrow. But what, she wondered, was the true name of its master?
“When you hold the name of a Faerie Lord, you hold power indeed.”