“I beg to differ!” Gleamdren’s voice twittered and chirped as she blustered about her little cage. “If she’s keeping company with that fool Eanrin, she can be nothing but a fool herself!”
The Dragonwitch ignored her noisy captive. She saw the Black Dogs loping through the streets, dragging their darkness behind them. She saw how the maid picked up their trail and led the others through twisted Etalpalli as straight and true as a flying arrow. “She caught the Path of the Black Dogs.” Hri Sora hissed, impressed and frightened all at once. “The Faerie folk could not think to catch onto my children’s trail, but she caught and pursues it. A real woman of the Land!”
Yet this knowledge contradicted her earlier observations. The gentleness with which the girl had managed one of Hri Sora’s own dark brood conflicted with the story. “None who have met Amarok could bear to show kindness to one of my beasts,” she whispered.
She must test the girl. She must know for certain.
So she stretched out her hands and cast a glamour over Etalpalli. Not a glamour of beauty. No, this was a vision breathed into being by Death’s own daughter, as much a truth as her hate, as much a lie as her love.
17
THE SKY BOILED RED ABOVE ETALPALLI, its heat oppressing Imraldera as she led the poet and the captain straight through the writhing streets. She heard a rumble like thunder, but how could there be thunder in this cloudless atmosphere? Perhaps the sky itself growled with a voice greater than those of the Black Dogs, threatening these intruders, warning them away.
A flash of blue drew her eye. Before her mind caught up with her leaping heart to shout its silent warning, she turned. She looked.
Oh, gods and devils! Not here!
Before her spread, not the towering red structures of Etalpalli, but a sweeping vista of a thousand colors, of light and shadow and depth. Green valleys and dark forests; great rivers cutting the land in gorges; scattered villages, and smoke from a thousand hearths curling to a deep sky. Not a tortured sky scalded as though by brands. A healthy, thriving, blue sky with a warm sun. A sun that shone down upon the Land she had known and loved all her life, never realizing she loved it until it was taken from her.
Only one place in all the worlds afforded this view.
Not the dead mountain!
If she gazed south, would she see the home fires of her village? Would she see the light of her own hearth shining from the top of the hill? Would Fairbird sit in the doorway, waiting?
No!
She grabbed her head in her hands, forcing her eyes away from that view. The prints. Look at the footprints!
She saw them. They swam before her dizzy vision, but they were there, solid in the red dirt of the street. For she did not stand on the mountain, and the Land did not spread below her, awaiting her return. She had left that life behind when her people abandoned her on the mountaintop. This world, this dead, twisted world, was all the reality left, and she would not lose her mind to visions and dreams! That would be the final defeat in a life born defeated.
Her feet were heavy weights, but she lifted one, then the other, following the rubble-strewn street of red. Dead, just like the mountain, yet not the mountain. She must not look right or left. She must follow the trail.
The footprints, she saw, were no longer those of a Dog. They had become the prints of a small child.
Glomar and Eanrin, a few paces behind, exchanged looks. The girl was staggering drunkenly, bent over as though climbing a steep incline while the street remained level.
“What ails her, do you think?” Glomar whispered.
“Mortality?” Eanrin suggested.
“Hadn’t we ought to . . . I don’t know . . . help her? Give her an arm, or something? She looks about to topple.” The captain, favoring his twisted ankle, made a face. “I’d volunteer but, you know, with my game leg and all—”
“Of course, leave it to Eanrin,” sighed the poet. “Seems to be the popular theme these days. Let Eanrin take care of mortal maids. He’s bound to like the task! Let Eanrin mind the weak and infirm. He’s got the stomach for it!”
“You said she was yours, didn’t you?” Glomar snarled.
“Oh, well, she is. I’m merely pointing out—”
Imraldera screamed.
It was a sound she should not have been able to make. Even hearing it was pain, the pain of fire and ice. In that tormented moment, the curse holding her trembled, then renewed its grasp with agonizing strength that Eanrin and Glomar, both attuned to the workings of Faerie, felt almost as keenly as the girl did. Both gasped and recoiled from her, even as silence once more slapped upon her so heavily that she fell facedown in the street, her arms around her head, her body crumpled.