Sun Eagle said nothing as he led the quiet girl out of the Between and back into the vibrant, hot air of the Near World. Indeed, he could not speak at first, so keen was the quickening of his pulse, the thickening in his throat. How many far and fantastical countries had he seen since that morning long ago when he, a mere boy on the threshold of manhood, had passed into the Gray Wood to make his rite of passage and bring honor to his father’s name? He had passed into the Gray Wood, and the cord that secured him to his own world and time had broken. So he had become lost, never to return to his father’s waiting arms, never to return to his lovely chosen bride.
He felt again for the blue bead painted with the white starflower that he wore in the hollow of his throat, above the dangling Bronze. Her name mark. Her final gift. She must have believed that he died long ago.
She must have died herself.
But he had no time to think of this. Not now, with the whole of his native country opening before him, and the drive to protect, to save, to . . . to possess. To possess for the good of all!
So Sun Eagle led, his head full of too many thoughts to put into words, and Daylily followed. She was tired, and she knew it with a distant vagueness, but she would not dream of resting. Who could rest now? There was so much to do!
They came out of the Wood Between, and she saw that they had come to a different gorge than that she had climbed down in her flight from her wedding. This one was narrower and deeper, but as with the other, a path led up to the table country above. Sun Eagle climbed and Daylily hurried after. And when they reached the summit, they found the land clearer here, not thick with jungle but well tilled and wide with rolling green hills.
“Crescent Land!” Sun Eagle exclaimed, his eyes shining.
“Middlecrescent,” Daylily whispered. She felt a jolt in the pit of her stomach. Then they reached for each other, hand clutching hand, as linked now by the spirit of their homeland as they were by that which lived inside them.
Then a cloud passed over Sun Eagle’s face, and his grip on Daylily’s hand tightened. “Do you smell that?”
“What?” asked Daylily.
“Faerie beast.” Sun Eagle snarled the words. “A fey power living in our country. An intruder.”
And Daylily said in a voice as soft and gentle as that she once used to order tea or a certain gown laid out for dinner, “We must kill it.”
Sun Eagle nodded. “We must.”
They moved swiftly across this landscape, unhindered by the growth of jungle. And the air was hot, but the wind was fresh, and they both laughed as they ran, though Daylily’s limbs trembled with the thrill of fear and delight that was becoming so mixed up in her being that she could scarcely tell the one from the other.
Tocho sensed their approach.
Tocho sat on Skymount Watch, a rocky outcropping that rose above the fields and greens of this pleasant country. He was still relatively new to the Near World, but he liked it well. In the Far World there were too many others of his kind, brutal and greedy, and many much larger than he. Here, he could be master if he liked, for there was little enough the mortals could do.
Amarok the Wolf had had the right idea, all those ages ago, when he came to the Near World and made himself a god over these little people.
But, Tocho thought, I am not a fool like Amarok. He lost his godhood because he was too fond of the pretty women of this land. A woman with a pretty face will always bring a fellow low in the end. I don’t fall for a pretty face, however, for was there ever a face as pretty as mine?
So he sat contented upon his rocky seat, and his whiskers twitched with sensitive interest at every breeze that passed. Silky black fur clothed his lithe body, even his cheeks and around his eyes, though otherwise he was much like a man, if far bigger. His toes and fingers were extraordinarily long and tipped with lovely, lethal claws. His ears were large and tufted, and his mouth split into a cleft cat’s grin. When the sun shone upon him, as it did now, faint jaguar blotches showed in an elegant but subdued pattern across his torso and haunches.
He was Tocho the Panther, Big Cat of Skymount. And the rock on which he sat was carved in his own likeness. Ugly, perhaps, to mortal eyes. But what did mortals know?
When the mortals came up from their village, climbing to this place of his totem stone to pay him tribute, they brought him fresh meats, still alive and bleating, and they bowed down and sang songs: songs to the length of his tail, to the whiteness of his whiskers, to the saucer moons of his copper eyes, and to the gleam of his smile.
What a happy life was his. A fat, happy, sun-bathing life. Let Lumé shine down upon him with disapproval; what did Tocho care, so long as the rays were warm! Thus he sat atop Skymount Watch, and the tip of his tail twitched as he idly sharpened the claws of his right hand upon a stone, making sparks.
His whiskers sensed them first. Then his nose picked up their smell. Last of all, his ears twitched to the beat of their hearts.
Tocho dropped his filing stone and stood upright, staring out across the land that was his own little demesne.