The Athraith moved to pass her; Aoife reached for it, unsure what she hoped to accomplish. Her feet slipped in the mud, and she landed on her hands and knees. At the same moment the air split with a crack sharper than thunder, a crack that tore through the sky.
The Athraith reared, screaming.
Aoife curled inwards, hands over her ears. She looked up. Halverton was in a heap on the ground, hands shaking as he tried to reload.
The Athraith’s left shoulder was wrong. The dark hair there was slick and shining. For a heartbeat she stared unseeing, uncomprehending.
Blood.
Blood spreading, rich and wet against its coat.
“No,” she whispered.
The creature wheeled and bolted into the trees. A streak of blood marked where the Athraith had fled.
Aoife stared after it. This was her fault; this was all her fault. Halverton was regaining his feet behind her.
“Are you hurt?” he demanded. She turned, and he grabbed her by the arms, looking her over. His face aglow with triumph.
“No,” she said, still stunned.
“You were lucky. I have never seen a bear on the estate before.”
Aoife stared at him. “A… bear?”
He nodded, frowning at the treeline as though replaying it. “Have you never seen one before? I thought they were quite common in this area.”
Her chest tightened. Of course.
In a world where he refused to believe anything of Inis Morra’s old stories, his mind had grabbed the closest “logical” shape and forced it over what he’d seen. Something he could believe in. Something with a category, a place in the Empire’s tidy lists of fauna.
Not an Athraith.
Not one of the old things.
Never that.
The sting of tears pricked her eyes. She wouldn’t let them fall.
Even faced with the truth in full daylight, he would reshape it to fit his worldview. Nothing she said, nothing anyone said, would change that.
Not even what he had seen with his own eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, each syllable sharp with effort. “I’m all right. Just shaken.”
He smiled faintly. “You were fortunate. Who knows what might have happened if I had not returned?”
“You’re right, of course.”
“Here,” he said, removing his jacket and placing it over her shoulders. “You are shivering.”
It wasn’t the cold making her limbs shake, but she clung to the jacket all the same.
A man on a horse was approaching them across the lawn. He pulled the horse to a stop next to them.
“Are you all right, my lord?”
“Yes, Miller, quite all right.”
