“How do you know?”
The girl grinned. “I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day.”
“Oh,” said Easter. “Well. There you go.” She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock.
“And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one,” said the girl. “And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses.” The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them.
Easter cocked her head on one side. “Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge?” she asked. “The whole who’s-going-to-win thing? Who gets whose head?”
“No,” said the girl, “I can smell the battle, but that’s all. But we’ll win. Won’t we? We have to. I saw what they did to the All-Father. It’s them or us.”
“Yeah,” said Easter. “I suppose it is.”
The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot that stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open.
Easter looked up at the hawk. “Can I help you?” she said.
The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easter’s head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes.
“Hello, cutie,” she said. “Now, what do you really look like, eh?”
The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. “You?” he said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her.
“Me,” she said. “What about me?”
“You.” He stopped. He seemed to be tryfrig”to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too long a bird, she thought He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, “Will you come with me?”
“Maybe. Where do you want me to go?”
“The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead.”
“There’s a war on. I can’t just go running away.”
The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air or on a swaying branch, not on the solid earth. Then he said, “If he is gone forever, it is all over.”
“But the battle—”
“If he is lost, it will not matter who wins.” He looked like he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him somewhere he could just shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held his arms stiffly against his sides..
“Where is this? Nearby?”
He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. “Way away.”
“Well,” she said, “I’m needed here. And I can’t just leave. How do you expect me to get there? I can’t fly, like you, you know.”
“No,” said Horus, “You can’t.” Then he looked up, gravely, and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the darkening clouds, growing in size. “He can.”
Another several hours’ pointless driving, and by now Town hated the global positioning system almost as much as he hated Shadow. There was no passion in the hate, though. He had thought finding his way to the farm, to the great silver ash tree, had been hard; finding his way away from the farm was much harder. It did not seem to matter which road he took, which direction he drove down the narrow country lanes—the twisting Virginia back roads that must have begun, he was sure, as deer trails and cowpaths—eventually he would find himself passing the farm once more, and the hand-painted sign, ASH.
This was crazy, wasn’t it? He simply had to retrace his way, take a left turn for every right he had taken on his way here, a right turn for every left.
Only that was what he had done last time, and now here he was, back at the farm once more. There were heavy storm clouds coming in, it was getting dark fast, it felt like night, not morning, and he had a long drive ahead of him: he would never get to Chattanooga before afternoon at this rate.
His cell phone gave him only a No Service message. The fold-out map in the car’s glove compartment showed the main roads, all the interstates and the real highways, but as far as it was concerned nothing else existed.