Then suddenly she found herself before the crumpled form of Foxbrush held in the arms of a mortal woman.
Nidawi stopped and looked at him, her champion. Did champions weep as this one wept? It was so strange!
She knelt beside him, ignoring Daylily and making quite certain that her own immortal beauty far eclipsed anything the mortal could offer. But when she reached to take Foxbrush in her arms, Daylily growled in her throat. Nidawi, startled, pulled her hands back and gave Daylily a quick once-over. Then the Faerie nodded with grudging respect and said:
“He is my hero.”
“As he is mine,” said Daylily, her arms tightening protectively. “The hero of all Southlands.”
“And Tadew-That-Was. And Etalpalli and Uleonore and Waclawa-so-Lid . . . all those who are avenged this Thirteenth Dawn.” Nidawi’s body trembled with the passion of her words, and her gorgeous eyes brimmed, then overflowed with tears. “They are free! They are free!”
“We are free,” Daylily whispered, gazing down at the one who lay inert in her arms. She could not say if he was conscious. He lay with his head in her lap, eyes open, tears streaming. He breathed very lightly and gazed up at the dawn-streaked sky. She thought he had a look about him as though he heard beautiful music that she herself could not quite catch.
His hands were burned into a mere abstract remnant of what they had once been. Hideous to look upon and unimaginably painful. One could no longer even see where the teeth of the shadow spirit in the Mound had torn and broken them; those wounds were nothing compared to the ruin inflicted by the melting Bronze.
But he lay as though the pain were far from him, as far away as that Song to which he listened.
Nidawi followed Daylily’s gaze and saw Foxbrush’s hands for herself. She sniffed, recoiling a little at the stench of burned flesh. Then she looked at Daylily again and tilted her head of black, leaf-strewn hair to one side. “Do I know you?”
“No,” said Daylily.
“You look familiar,” the Faerie protested. “All you mortals look so alike, but there’s something about you . . . Have I threatened your life at one time?”
“It was not my life you threatened,” Daylily replied.
Nidawi looked at the lion-claw wound in Daylily’s shoulder, still bright red with blood. She looked, and her eyes narrowed, and she almost spoke. At the last, however, she shook herself and turned once more to Foxbrush. His eyes were closed now, and perhaps he slept. “Did you see?” Nidawi asked. “Did you see how he did it? How he killed Cren Cru?”
“He did not kill Cren Cru,” Daylily replied. “I did.”
“What? You? ” This was enough to startle Nidawi right out of her beautiful form into that of an astounded child. Her mouth and her eyes opened wide, and she laughed wildly at the idea. “You killed Cren Cru? But you are not the King of Here and There!”
“Am I not?” said Daylily. Then she shook her head, gazing down into the still face of Foxbrush in her lap. “No, I am no king and no hero.”
But across the vast distances of time, of memory—of echoing dreams and hidden wishes—across the many voices singing songs in the faraway heavens from places neither mortal nor immortal have seen—came a voice. The voice of a girl child, fierce and brave and strong. And it said, so distantly it might perhaps have never spoken at all:
“I am King Shadow Hand of Here and There! And I will slay you, fiend of darkness!”
The voice passed over both Nidawi and Daylily, and they shivered and did not look at each other for a long, trembling moment.
Then Daylily said, “I could have done nothing had he not come for me. Had I not seen him there, in the darkness.”
She said it to herself, but Nidawi heard and nodded solemnly, her youthful face very old. Then she stood up and shook out her bounty of hair, raining leaves and flowers upon both Daylily and Foxbrush.
“I suppose I won’t marry him after all,” she said, crossing her skinny arms across her equally skinny chest. “I was going to, you know, after he killed my enemy. But if he didn’t . . .” She snorted and shrugged. “No matter! I’ll still see to it that the gates are built and this land of yours is protected.”
With that, she turned and cupped her hands around her mouth, prepared to give a great shout. Instead, however, her voice came out in a tiny gasp. She could not breathe for a spell, and her face turned blue. Then she let out all her air in a great, gusting shout.