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“We’ll see about that!” I cried, fully drawing my sword.
The nasty little gremlin latch-face winced.
The coach slammed to a stop so abruptly I was thrown back against the seat and Bee thrown forward, narrowly missing my unsheathed blade and banging her knees. The coach rocked violently. The door to the spirit world was flung open to reveal the coachman.
“Out,” he said.
It wasn’t that he looked angry. He didn’t look angry. It was just that I was suddenly sure he could yank both my arms out of their sockets if I did not obey. Not that he would want to, or would enjoy the act, but that he could.
Bee’s face was a grimace of pain as she tried to uncurl her fingers. “My hand! My arm!”
“Out.”
We got out. I sheathed my sword as we huddled together at the side of the road. Bee had left the knife behind in the coach but made no attempt to dart back inside to grab it. She could not open or close her left hand. The knit bag sagged at her hip. He got in, and we heard him talking and a soft buzzing voice in reply, but no words I knew, nothing I could understand.
The eru strolled over. Her two ordinary eyes gazed at me; her third eye narrowed, as at a nastily ugly sight, on Bee.
“I’m not sorry we’re trying to save my cousin’s life,” I said.
“He is slow to anger,” she said in a reflective tone. “But one thing will do it: assaulting his coach or his horses.”
“I thought the coach and horses must belong to the master,” I said.
“No more than he does. No less than he does. No more than my wings belong to the master, and no less than they belong to me.”
He hopped out and regarded us for such a long time with such a steady stare whose emotions I could not possibly guess at—not anger, not sympathy, not rage, not pity—that Bee began to snivel, as if she had at last reached the end of her rope.
He said, “The door into the mortal world is locked.”
“What do you expect from us?” I burst out. “You can’t expect us to lie down and give up.”
He said, “Go sit on warded ground. I’ll make tea.”
He indicated a fire pit ringed by a low inner wall of bricks and an outer circle of marble benches. A fire burned. A lofty tree with red bark and white flowers shaded one side of the pit; there was also a granite pillar and a stone bowl from whose center burbled clear water. Bee and I sat side by side on a bench as the coachman brought over a kettle, filled it at the bowl, and set it across an iron grating over the flames. He carried two full buckets to water his horses. The eru flew ahead, scouting. Passed through the storm, we had reached the hills.
“It’s a triangle,” said Bee.
“What is?” I asked, watching the ease with which the eru flew, her smoky wings skimming the air. I had first seen her in the guise of a male human footman, booted and coated for winter, and it was not so easy to shake that image from my mind to see her as female.
“The tree, the spring, and the pillar form an equilateral triangle,” said Bee. “I wonder if the form creates the ward.”
“I think there has to be a tree, a stone, and water,” I said, remembering the djelimuso Lucia Kante’s fire. I had sheltered there, argued with Andevai, and met Rory. I had told her stories from my father’s journals, the price I had to pay so she would tell me how to leave the spirit world.
Bee massaged her left hand with her right. “Did you see that sneering face on the latch?”
“The one that bit me? Of course I did!”
Around us lay open forest, trees spaced apart and grass and bushes grown thickly in the gaps. Four big animals trotted into view and settled onto their haunches to leer at us. They looked something like what a dog and a cat and a pig would look like if smashed together, with coarse short hair and hind legs shorter than their forelegs. They had the teeth of carnivores and the gazes worn by the coldhearted who have nothing better to do than plot the ruin of all they see. When the coachman looked at them, they ambled out of sight, but I had a feeling they were hiding in a tangle of undergrowth, waiting hungrily.
Bee pulled her sketchbook out of her bag and paged through it.
I identified the faces of young men, studies from life, some shaded to fine detail and others a few deft lines that caught an essence. “Maester Lewis. That good-looking Keita lad whose family left for New Jenne. Here’s that laughing bootblack Uncle Jonatan scolded you for flirting with.”
She turned another page without replying.
I went on, unable to bear her silence. “Now we’re at summer solstice, when the Barry family arrived at the academy. My! Isn’t Legate Amadou Barry pretty? To think all those months we thought him a student at the academy, when instead he was a Roman spy. Do you suppose he was spying only on us? Or are there other pupils from disreputable families worth investigating?”
“I’m not the only one who has endured an unpleasant romantic interlude, Cat. I won’t hesitate to remind you of yours if you don’t stop teasing me about mine.”
