“See here, my good woman, I . . . I . . . I thank you for your kindly, um, thoughts of me, but I—” His hair flattened down across his forehead, and he pushed it back nervously. “I haven’t changed my mind. I still can’t marry you. Or kill anyone,” he added quickly.
Nidawi blinked. Despite the darkness, everything around her shone brightly. Her lashes caught the rain into tiny diamonds rimming her violet eyes, glittering like prisms, casting and creating gleams of light. How magical and beautiful and thoroughly petulant she was in that moment.
She crossed her arms. “If you don’t want to marry me, why were you thinking of me?”
“I wasn’t thinking of you.”
“Yes, you were. I heard you. Ever since I sent you back, I’ve been listening for you very carefully. You thought of my laugh, and you remembered it as alluring.” She grinned slyly up at him. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the memory of me. Not once you got home to your own world.”
“H-Home? My own world?” All temptation to yield (which may or may not have been slowly building in Foxbrush’s heart) vanished as he gasped out those words. He opened his mouth and roared like a young lion himself, “You sent me back into the wrong time!”
She drew up her legs and sat more primly, her face an entire world of affront. “No, I didn’t. I don’t deal in Time.”
“You pushed me! You pushed me out of the Wood, and I landed here!”
“No, actually you landed There,” said Nidawi. “Here is . . . elsewhere. If you ended up anywhere, it’s because of the Path you’re on. Nothing to do with me.”
Foxbrush opened his mouth, but nothing happened, so he shook himself and managed a weak, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
He felt the breath of Lioness again. The great animal pushed her massive head under his hand and rolled it around so that he now stood with his arm up and across her neck. She blinked sweetly at him, her mouth still open as she exhaled a puffing lion’s purr.
“Um,” said Foxbrush. Then he sneezed again.
Lioness nosed him affectionately in the chest.
“Really, Lioness,” said Nidawi crossly as she scrambled to her feet. “You are too forward sometimes.” And she hurried over to take Foxbrush’s other arm, clutching it tightly. She smiled at him again, and he was nearly blinded by the glitter both of her teeth and of the rain in her eyelashes and hair.
“Please,” said Foxbrush, stepping back and trying to free his arms. “Please, I think I’m allergic to your lion.”
“My what?”
“Your lion.”
“My . . . oh! You mean Lioness?” Nidawi laughed like chiming crystals and refused to release Foxbrush’s arm no matter how he tugged. “She’s not mine! I mean, I suppose she sort of is. Are you mine, Lioness?” she asked the white lion, who shook her head briskly and padded away to lie down in a dry patch under a tree. She continued blinking Foxbrush’s way, but the tip of her tail swished quietly through the grass and over the roots.
“There now, you’ve offended her,” Nidawi said, shaking a finger under Foxbrush’s nose. “She’s not mine like a slave. I never kept slaves, not even when I had a world of subjects!”
A change came across her unbelievably delicate features. They sagged suddenly with heaviness, bags appearing under the eyes, lines deepening into framing crevices around the mouth, which, in turn, thinned to a narrow line. The black hair tumbling over Foxbrush’s shoulder and arm faded to gray, then to white. Nidawi the Everblooming let go her hold on Foxbrush and stepped away, bent and tottering so that she had to put out a hand and support herself against the tree.
It was unnatural and so sudden that Foxbrush took a moment to catch his breath. Then he licked rain from his lips and said, “I say, I’m sorry.” He put a hand on Nidawi’s bowed shoulder. “Was it something I said? Is it . . .” He grimaced. “Is it about the betrothal?”
But she shook her head. When she spoke, her voice was as heavy as her face but paper-thin and frail. “No, it’s just painful to remember.” She drew a shuddering breath that Foxbrush feared might shatter her body. When she turned to him, the lights had gone from the rain in her lashes, and instead her eyes brimmed with shining tears. “A mother should never outlive her children.”
Then she was sobbing an old woman’s sobs, dry and broken. Foxbrush put his arms around her and held her close to his chest, and her tears mingled with the rain. But unlike the rain, which was warm on that summer’s evening, Nidawi’s tears were cold, and they chilled him. Still he held her and smoothed her thin hair, from which dead leaves fell and littered the ground at their feet.
The moment ended with Foxbrush’s sudden yelp of pain. For Nidawi’s hands, which had been wrapped around him, dug into his skin with a surprising sharpness. Foxbrush looked down to see the white head sinking into a black mop of tangles, and Nidawi was a child again. A child turning away from him with a vicious snarl, her fingers curled into claws.
“Cren Cru!” she shrieked.