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“I am sure it would be polite for us to wash before meeting the master,” I agreed.
He rinsed out the mugs as we brushed crumbs off our skirts. The coach awaited us. We settled inside, keeping open the shutter that looked onto the spirit world. The eru swung up on the back. As the coach rolled forward, the crow took wing.
In time, we came to a crossroads. We took the left-hand path, striking out along a ridgeline track from whose height we could see across vales and rises. I leaned out to let the wind blow into my face. I smelled a peppery spice so hot its aroma made my eyes water. I heard plucked strings in a waterfall of notes. I tasted the tears of the dead whose salt was the memory of voices I had not heard for years: My mother and father, conversing in low, loving voices as my child self drifted off to sleep, safe in their arms.
“Cat!” Bee was shaking me. “Wake up! We’ve come to the river.”
I had fallen asleep. My head was swollen with uneasy dreams, but when I patted my hair, everything seemed in order. I hadn’t sprouted cat’s ears or an eru’s wings. I looked out the window and saw a field of black rocks. Beyond the field flowed a wide river as pale as molten pewter. Light glinted over the water and thrust through my eyes to open a shaft of memory: I am six, and I am drowning alongside my parents. Water pours into my mouth.
“Look!” Bee’s shriek jolted me free.
She pressed open her sketchbook. At the bottom of the page, I saw myself wearing a very irritated expression no doubt because the clothes I wore in the sketch looked like a printed curtain wrapped around my waist topped by an immodestly low-cut blouse of a fabric so gauzy it was almost translucent. Blessed Tanit! As if I would ever dress so indecently! Above, Bee had drawn a field of black rocks. One rock, split in half as if by a bolt of lightning, was circled and had an arrow pointing at it. A river lay behind it and, on the far shore, five mighty ash trees.
I looked out the window. Five mighty ash trees rose on the other side of the river.
“Stop!” She hammered on the roof of the coach.
She shoved the sketchbook into the bag as the coach slowed. Before we came to a stop, she flung open the door and leaped out. Knit bag flapping behind her, she dashed into the rocks like a dog let loose in a trash pit.
The coach lurched to a stop. I jumped out and with sheathed sword in hand ran after her. The rocks were like the oozing remains of a porridge that has congealed into a crusty, jagged blanket. I slipped, caught myself on the nearest rock, and scraped my palm.
Glancing back, I saw the coachman holding the arm of the eru as if restraining her; her wings were half open. Crows cawed. I heard a buzzing noise, like the whirr of a factory floor. A loud splash disturbed the river. Could Bee really escape the spirit world through water?
Bee walked in widening circles, picking her way along the rocks with the knife in her hand. Her body stiffened as she saw something. She dropped to her knees and hacked at the ground.
“Cat, help me!” Dirt spat up.
I hurried over. “What are you doing? Go to the river!”
Ignoring me, she knelt in the cleft of a rock that was split in half. The hollow between the split halves was as wide as my out-stretched arms; rotted debris matted the ground like felted cloth.
“Help me!” She chopped and dug without cease.
The ground heaved. Fissures splintered the earth like veins swelling and bursting. I grabbed her arm to drag her away, but she shoved the knife at me and began digging with her hands.
“Something terrible is going happen if I don’t uncover them,” she cried.
Her fingers scraped dirt off a roundish thing that had a coppery shine. Fractured streaks of light chased patterns along its sheeny surface. Beneath the dirt she uncovered ten; no, twenty; no, fifty. Packed tight and deep, the fist-sized smooth objects filled the hollow.
They were eggs.
With a faint pop, one of the coppery eggs cracked. A sliver like a shard of broken glass thrust through the gap. Away in the distance rose the howl of an enraged beast. Gingerly, I poked at the egg with the knife and peeled back an inner shell wreathed with tendrils of translucent goo. A pasty mass pulsed vilely inside, a slimy grub the color of mottled vomit and metallic yolk.
I dropped the knife and raised my hand to smash it.
“We’ve got to help them get to the river!” Bee grabbed the knife and kept digging.
Horrified by my urge to kill something so small and helpless, I scrambled back to perch on the rock. The grub slithered out of the egg. No bigger than my hand, it had four limbs, a tail, a long beast-like torso, and a deformed back all crinkly like mashed-up paper. It had a snout for a face, with pasty-white strings striping its muzzle and head.
It was foul, and I hated it.
It opened its eyes to reveal molten fire, a blaze of blue-white heat. With a shudder, its outer skin hardened and sloughed off as I might shed a coat on going indoors. Beneath shimmered scaly skin as darkly red as the dregs of smoldering coals.
I could not look away from its eyes. That brilliant, fathomless gaze devoured me.
I had seen a gaze like this before: an old man sitting in a library with no fire and three dogs sprawled close, basking in the heat he radiated. He had kissed Bee on the forehead and on the lips.
I had seen jewel eyes like this in the headmaster’s emerald gaze before the spark was subsumed by ordinary brown.
