Maeve had started to get to her feet, but as she did so a tremor ran through the ground, and she raised her head in time to see the crack convulse from one end to the other. Shaken by the violence in its midst, the flame was flickering out. "Coker!" she yelled, fearful he'd be trapped in the closing door.
He looked her way, his face all sorrow, and then retreated a step or two until he was safe from the threshold. The sliver of Quiddity visible through the crack was narrower by the moment, but her thoughts weren't of the voyages she'd never take there. they were of Coker, whom she'd known only half a night, but who'd been in that little time her savior and her tutor and her friend. He shied through the closing door like a beaten dog, so forlorn she couldn't bear to look at him.
Eyes stinging, she averted her gaze and Buddenbaum rose into her sight, his face spattered with Coker's blood.
"Never!" he was yelling, "Never! Never!" and raising his fists he stumbled back towards the narrowing crack as if to beat it open again.
In his passion he had forgotten the second assassin. He had clambered over his sprawled companion, and now, as Buddenbaum stepped onto the contested ground between slope and shore, the assassin lunged and drove his weapon into the enemy's back.
The wounding stopped Buddenbaum in his tracks. He let out a sob, more of frustration than of pain it seemed, and reached behind him, grabbing at the weapon and hauling it out of his flesh. As he did so he swung round, moving with such speed that his wounder had no time to avoid his own blade. It opened his belly from flank to flank in a single slice and without a sound the man fell forward, his guts precedin; him to the ground.
Maeve didn't watch his final moments. Her gaze went back to the crack, unable to keep from looking Coker's way one final time, and to her astonishment she saw him stepping forward and reaching through the gap, jamming his arms in the door before it could seal itself. Then he pressed forward and began to elbow the crack open a little way, pushing first his head, then his thickly muscled neck, then a shoulder, through the fissure.
It caused him no little pain, but the sensation seemed only to fuel his frenzy. Thrashing as he went, he dragged his body through the opening, inch by agonizing inch, until his wings met the crack. Though they were folded behind him as tight to his body as they'd go, they were too bulky to be pulled through. He let out a pitiful cry, and turned his eyes in Maeve's direction.
She started towards him, but he waved her away. "Just... be... ready-" he gasped.
Then, drawing a single, tremendous breath, he pressed every sinew into service and began to push again.
There was a terrible tearing sound, and blood began to flow from his back, running down over his shoulders. Maeve shuddered in horror, but she could not look away. His eyes were locked with hers, as though she was his only anchor in his suffering. He rocked back and forth, the muscle that joined wings to torso torn wide open, his body shuddering as he visited this terrible violence upon it.
The horror seemed to go on an age-the thrashing, rocking, and tearing-but his tenacity was repaid. With one final twisting motion he separated his body from its means of flight, pressed his mutilated form through the crack and fell, his honey blood flowing copiously, on the other side.
Maeve knew now what he'd meant by just be ready. He needed her help to stem the flow from his wounds before he bled to death. She went to the body of Buddenbaum's attacker and tore at his robes. they were thick and copious, precisely to her purpose. Returning to Coker, who was lying face-down where he'd fallen, she pressed the fabric gently, but firmly, against his wounds, which ran from his shoulder blades to waist, telling him softly as she did so that this was the bravest thing she'd ever seen. She would make him well, she said, and watch over him for as long as he wished her to do so.
He sobbed against the snow-the crack closed above him-and in the midst of his tears he answered her.
"Always," he said.
Buddenbaum had been wounded before, though only once as badly as this. The stabbing would not kill him-his patrons had rendered his constitution inhumanly strong in return for his services-but it would take a little time to heal, and this mountain was no place to do it. He lingered in the vicinity of the two rocks long enough to see the door close, then he stumbled away from the slope, leaving the O'Connell child and her miserable consort to bleed and weep together at the top. Discovefing how innocent little Maeve had come to cause such mayhem he would leave for another day. Not all the witnesses to the night's events were dead; he'd seen a handful fleeing the field when he'd arrived. In due course, he'd trace them and quiz them till he better understood how his fate and that of Maeve O'Connell were connected.
One thing he knew for certain: connected they were.
The instinct that had made him prick his ears that April day, hearing the name of a goddess called in a place of dust and dirt and unwashed flesh, had been good. The miraculous and the mundane lived side by side in this newfound land, and, in the person of Maeve O'Connell, were indivisible.
Coker and Maeve lay in the shelter of the two rocks for several hours, resting bones, flesh, and spirits traumatized by all that the previous night had brought. Sometimes she would make little compresses of fabric soaked in melted snow, and systematically clean his wounds, while he lay with his head upon her lap, moaning softly. Sometimes they would simply doze together, sobbing sometimes in their sleep.
There was no snow that morning. The wind was strong, and brought convoys of puffy white clouds up from the south west, shredding them against the peaks. Between them, sun, too frail to warm them much but reassuring nevertheless.
The supplies of carrion lying on the slope had not gone unnoticed. An hour or two after sunrise the first birds began to circle and descend, looking for morsels on the battlefield.
Their numbers steadily increased, and Maeve, fearful that she or Coker would have an eye pecked out while they slept, insisted they move a few yards into the cleft between the rocks, where the birds would be less likely to come.
Then, sometime towards noon, she woke with her heart hammering to the sound of growls. She got up and peered over the rock. A pack of wolves had nosed the dead on the wind, and were now either tearing at the bodies, or fighting over the tenderest scraps.
Their presence was not the only grim news. The clouds were getting heavier, threatening further snow. "We have to go," she told Coker.
He looked up at her through a haze of pain. "Go where?" he said.
"Back down the mountain," she told him, "before we freeze or starve. We don't have that much daylight left."
"What's the noise?"
"Wolves."
"Many of them?"
"Maybe fifteen. they won't come after us while they've got so much food just lying there." She went down on her haunches beside him. "I know you're hurting and I wish I could make it better. But if we can get back to the wagon I know there's clean bandages and-"
:'Yes-" he muttered, "and what then?" 'I told you: We go on down the mountain."
"And what happens after that?" he said, his voice pitifully weak. "Even if we could find the rest of your people, they'd kill us soon as look at us. they think you're a child of the Devil, and I'm-1 don't know what I am any more."
"We don't need them," she said. "We'll find our own place to live. Somewhere we can build."
"Build?"
"Not right now, but when you're well. Maybe we'll have to live in a hole for a while, steal food, do whatever we have to do, but we're not going to die."
"You're very certain."
"Yes," she said quietly. "We're going to build a shining city. You and me."