“So are you saying you’d prefer I did not come along and therefore remained ignorant of the events as they unfold tonight?” said the cat icily. “Would make for a poor bit of poetry later, if you ask me.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Foxbrush admitted. “You’re right. I suppose you should be there. It’s for the best.”
“The best? Hardly,” said Eanrin, his ears lowering still farther with ire. Had it been possible, he would have ignored the young man beside him entirely. The lad was a weakling, and a mortal weakling at that, and Eanrin wasn’t feeling too keen on mortals at the moment. But he could not deny the clarity of the Lumil Eliasul’s Path opening at Foxbrush’s feet. It was an enigma to be sure. One he would sleuth out if he possibly could.
He muttered in a low growl that Foxbrush could not understand, “Besides, I have unfinished business of my own to attend to this night.” The face of Sun Eagle was all too present in his mind; Sun Eagle, stained in the white lion’s blood.
Sun Eagle, looking into Imraldera’s eyes and calling her “Starflower.”
The cat began to growl.
“You know,” said Foxbrush, unaware how close he came in that moment to having his ankle scratched, “it would have made everything much easier if you’d just written it out in plain speaking.”
“What?” said Eanrin, twitching an ear Foxbrush’s way.
“Your message,” Foxbrush continued. “It’s daft to send something that important in poetry. I don’t even read poetry, not by preference. If, in the future, you’d just write it out plainly, everything that happens tonight, I mean, I’d be much obliged. That is, the future me will be obliged. Or the past me.” He frowned. “Actually, I’m not sure which of me it would matter to. Either way, do you think you could work it out?”
Both Eanrin’s ears flattened to his skull. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Foxbrush glanced down at the cat. Bard Eanrin of Rudiobus was proving far more foul tempered than generations of childhood rhymes would suggest. But then, whoever said those rhymes were reliable sources of information?
Foxbrush squeezed Leo’s scroll tightly in one fist and tried to focus on the strange, otherworldly shapes surrounding him. Like the cat-man, none of the beasts on this death march were bound to a single shape but constantly shifted into other shapes as well: some human, some reminiscent of human, some not human at all.
But they all trusted him. They all expected him to fulfill the promise given to Nidawi beside the Final Water.
They were all fools.
At Foxbrush’s feet, though he could not see it, a Path opened up, leading straight ahead. He pursued it unknowing, whispering as he went: “There you will win your Fiery One, or see her then devoured.”
Ahead, a light glowed brighter and brighter on the horizon. Not the glow of the rising sun.
This was a bronze light.
Had she governed her own body, she would have collapsed in weakness and despair. Her shoulder throbbed, her wound torn open with exertion, its soothing dressing long since vanished. But that which dwelled inside Daylily did not understand her pain, so it drove her, and she moved as she was driven. Through the darkness, through the Wood, through the Faerie Paths stretching across the land. She knew where she went with a knowing that was not her own.
The center of the land. The heart where the tumor festered.
Twelfth Night. Twelfth Tithe.
The wolf inside her, weakened to the point of death but struggling still, growled. You say I made you cruel. But at least I never made you false!
“You made me betray Rose Red,” Daylily whispered as she stumbled on, her head heavy with the presence of both Cren Cru and the wolf.
I never made you anything. I am you. I am the true you! The one you hide from the world; the one you can’t bear to admit exists. But I am true.
As true as knives to the heart. As true as poison in the blood. As true as love or hatred living buried in a wounded heart.
How long had she known it, this secret truth? Since that summer, long ago, when she had traveled to the mountains to spend her holidays in countrified isolation with Lionheart and Foxbrush. That summer when she had first heard the cry of a wolf, lonely and forlorn in the forests of night. How her heart had responded to that sound!
And in that response, the truth that was the she-wolf inside Daylily had sprung to vicious life. A life that must always be suppressed, always be secreted away to those dark corners of her mind that no one could find. Bound down with chains, deprived of freedom . . . yet it dominated her existence still more in captivity.
“I don’t want any part of you,” Daylily said. “Not anymore.”
Then let me go!
A trill of notes. “Then let it go.”
Daylily closed her eyes, recognizing the voice of the songbird. She should have known he would follow her even here, on this dark Path to her master’s door.
“Let it go, Daylily,” the bird sang in gentle, compelling melody.