She did not look up as Foxbrush approached, but cried on. All wild sobbing had faded, withering her into the form she now wore. Her wrinkled hands clung to the mighty carcass, however, as though they would never let go.
Foxbrush knelt, gazing upon the dead Lioness, the red wound in her breast. Once more he felt tears on his face. He put out a hand and smoothed the noble muzzle of the great cat. Then he let his hand trail down and rest upon Nidawi’s.
She looked up then, transforming in an instant to the form of a tiny child, bewildered with loss, looking for comfort, for understanding.
“She’s dead!” she said.
“Yes,” said Foxbrush. He took hold of her hand and she, reluctantly, let go of Lioness enough to let him wrap his fingers about hers. “What happened, Nidawi?”
“Cren Cru,” she said, gnashing the name through her teeth. “Cren Cru killed her. The Parasite! As he kills all of mine. He wore a body armed with stone, and he drove it into her heart!”
She let Lioness slip from her arms then and flung herself suddenly at Foxbrush, wrapping her scrawny limbs about his neck and weeping into his shoulder. He held her, frightened but making soothing noises and murmuring things he could not later recall. When at last her quivering body began to still, he said, “Who is Cren Cru, Nidawi?”
She straightened into the form of a woman again. A mature, hardened woman with the face of a bereft mother. “Come,” she said, taking Foxbrush’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Come and I will show you.”
She stepped onto a Faerie Path as lightly as though stepping through an open door, and led Foxbrush onto it as well. The night was already so strange, what with the beasts in the jungle, the warriors with their bronze stones, and the hollow-eyed faces he’d witnessed around the bonfire, that Foxbrush had not the strength to be surprised at this. Indeed, he felt he would never be surprised again! So he followed Nidawi, and his peripheral vision caught brief glimpses of wood and tree and rock and hill sliding past him, all within a few strides. And he realized, without knowing what it was he realized, that Southlands was riddled with Faerie Paths lingering just beyond the range of his senses and understanding, but as real as the air he breathed.
They passed gorges and villages and great stretches of jungle. Within a minute, or possibly two (though even so brief a time meant nothing), they came to the center of the Land Behind the Mountains.
Nidawi stepped off the Path, pulling Foxbrush behind her. “Look,” she said, pointing.
There it stood. Somehow, Foxbrush felt he’d already known, though he never could have said as much if asked. It was like the knowledge of a sickness deep inside, as yet showing no symptoms but already working terrible carnage upon the body and the spirit.
The Mound of Cren Cru grew up from the soil of Southlands like a tumor grown on a heart. It was a mound of black earth, three times the height of a man but no taller; and sprouting from that earth, so thick as to be a sort of coat, were twisted branches, sharp, thorn-covered, bristling, and dead. They looked like antlers or horns, a thousand horns jutting up from the dirt, which was like a bulbous head.
Foxbrush, from where he stood holding Nidawi’s hand, saw with a clarity he could not have known had he looked through his unaided mortal eyes. By Nidawi’s power he saw all the Faerie Paths of Southlands crisscrossing the land, rising up from the gorges, and flowing down from the mountains. All of them streamed to this one central point like the veins of a body, pulsing.
There fell upon Foxbrush’s heart a shadow of horror such as he had never known, not even when the Dragon dropped in fire from the sky and covered his world in smoke and poison. That, at least, was a dread he understood, a dread of teeth and scales and flames and fumes.
This was something he could not understand, and in his ignorance he trembled and despaired even at that one swift glance.
He turned away, looking at Nidawi instead, who stood facing the Mound with an expression of intense hatred, hatred that could not be bound into one age, so she was all ages in that moment: old, young, beautiful, childish, frail, strong, awful.
“What is it, Nidawi? What is that thing?” Foxbrush asked.