The footing was better, as Gan had claimed; Rule was not. They proceeded slowly, but his breathing grew rough.
The ravine they traveled angled away from the ocean. This was good, for the village they sought was set well back from the shoreline. Li Lei had given that some thought. She had seen odd paw prints on the sand of the beach. Large ones. She had not seen any fishing boats. Perhaps the ocean was especially dangerous here and people did not settle too near it. Certainly it both held and released much more magic than it did on Earth. Too much, perhaps, for the purely human? It was hard to tell. It had been a long time since she had been purely human.
Li Lei did not sense magic the way her granddaughter did. For her, magic was a call, a song in her blood and bones. She knew Lily thought dragons possessed the Sight, like human sorcerers. This was wrong. Sun had allowed Lily to continue in her error, so Li Lei had not corrected her, either. Sun had reasons for what he did and for what he did not do. But dragons—and Li Lei—perceived magic more directly than that, a sensing that had no analogue among the other senses.
Although song came close. She wondered sometimes if the visceral song of magic was anything like the moonsong the lupi heard.
Rule stumbled. She paused, frowning at him. He continued walking. After a moment, so did she. She did not wish to worry so much about him. She did not possess the discipline to stop. It was very annoying.
But Rule needed to live for so many reasons, some of them having nothing to do with the war or saving the Earth. He carried her future grandchildren in his loins. She knew this, even if he and Lily did not. And she did not want . . . well, there were many things she did not want to happen, most of them beyond her control. Here and now, she could do little but keep walking and hope she absorbed enough power along the way to use her cantrip again when Rule collapsed.
Here and now. Her mouth tightened grimly. She had hoped never to be here, nor in this particular moment. Not that she’d ever imagined being in this place, in this lost realm, under these circumstances. But she’d known for long and long that a day like this might come.
It had not been inevitable. The Great Enemy might have been stopped any number of times, in any number of places, along the way, or at least delayed for another millennia. She had tried. She had fought against the Enemy for more years than humans normally received. Sometimes she’d won, sometimes she’d lost . . . so many battles over so many years, most of them fought in the smallest of ways. Most of them—maybe all?—about choice.
People feared choice. With it marched change, and people feared change more than either death or taxes. Easier to do things the way they had always been done. Easier, even, to surrender choice, let others make the decisions, and complain when things went wrong. Easier, for many, to assert that God was in charge, so everything must turn out all right in the end, no matter how bad things looked.
Eh! Did people not understand that the vastness they called God reached into this world only through them? That choosing to do nothing when evil walked among them gave God no way to act?
But then, most people did not understand evil. Often it arrived cloaked as habit. In the privacy of her thoughts, Li Lei admitted that she was not immune to the comforting allure of habit. It could still capture her in spite of the lessons of over three centuries of living. Habits of thought, in particular . . . right now what she longed for most was her own familiar bed. That and Li Qin’s dear familiar voice. Her son’s wry smile. The garden her namesake granddaughter had helped her make . . .
But she was not going to think about Lily. Lily was alive. That much was certain. She knew nothing else about Lily’s situation or condition. She would live with that unknowing because she had to. She would not speculate.
Rule stumbled again. This time, he wobbled as he regained his footing. His head hung low. His sides heaved as if he’d been running. She stopped, studying him with more than one sense. “Gan,” she said crisply. “Stop.”
She dropped to her own knees. Rule was usually reasonable, but he was a lupus. A dominant, badly wounded, and very hungry lupus. Best if her head did not loom over his while she told him what to do. “Rule. You are stubborn enough to kill yourself, but this does not help Lily. You may lie down now and rest. Gan will stay with you. I will go ahead. We must be near a farm by now.”
Rule growled at her. He did not raise his head.
“Do not be impertinent. I am quite capable of obtaining a cart or some other transport.” But logic, she could see, was not penetrating his thick, addled head. Too much stubbornness. Too much pain.
The former demon had gotten well ahead of the two of them, but she was trotting back now. “Is he okay?”
“No.” If logic did not work, try something else. “Rule. You made us leave, pointed us in the direction you want us to go. Very well. We will go to the village and seek a boat to carry us to Lily—if you live. If you die, who will lead us?”
The big wolf swayed . . . then slowly sank to the ground.
She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Good. That is good. I will be back with a cart as soon as I can.”
“Will you bring some food, too?” Gan asked hopefully. “Something sweet?”
Li Lei did not snap at Gan. It was something any child might say, was it not? The former demon might have had about as many years as she had, but her soul was very new. “We will see.” She creaked to her feet. “You will stay with him. You have the water. Dig a little bowl in the dirt and fill it so he can drink.”
Gan eyed the wolf warily. “He’ll try to bite me again, like he did yesterday.”
“His thinking is clouded. Tell him what you are doing. Remind him of who you are. Move slowly. I must go now.”
With that, she left her charges and climbed the eastern embankment to look around. It was a fair, sunny day, neither hot nor cold, with clouds piling up to the south over the unseen ocean. It would rain later, she decided. By tonight, certainly. Well, they had been lucky so far. Perhaps their luck would extend to finding a boat or some other shelter by then.
Far off to the northeast, she glimpsed a twist of the river they sought, shining in the sun; the rest was hidden by the rolling land. Much nearer, the orderly green of cultivated land beckoned. And yes, there was a house or barn—a low, small building almost hidden inside a small grove of trees. Sensible. Trees might shelter one from attack from above. That was likely important in a place where wild dragons flew.