DAWN IS BREAKING; there’s movement about the house. The Hero heads stealthily back to his room. But when he gets to his door, he finds it open. Inside is a whirl of screeching Illyrians. The bear-skinned ‘King’ rushes towards him, gesticulating and shouting. He’s swept up in the whirl, and borne down the hallway.
Did they discover his discovery of the Princess? Everyone is shouting. Some are waving short swords; others brandish bows. The Hero looks around frantically for the Envoy; he hopes they are not shouting hang him or chop him or something equally unpleasant, but without the Envoy he has no idea. No one has disarmed him yet, which is reassuring. They are making enough noise, surely, that Reynard will be warned.
The horde bursts out into the courtyard; the sun is barely over the roof ridge and already its rays feel like hammer-blows on his back. The gate is open; they hustle across the cactus moat, and through the ocotillo stockade to a stand of nervous-looking horses. There’s the Envoy, holding the bridle of a beautiful paint horse.
“What is going on?” the Hero demands.
“The Monster! Come, mount, we have no time to lose! He catches the dawn!”
As they ride away, pell-mell, the Hero looks over his shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of a small red shape, rushing to catch up with them. But the dust cloud is too thick and obscuring.
EVEN IN EARLY morning, it is hot out on the Illyrian hillside. The smells of sage and juniper mingle with the dust and old, old yellow rock. He wonders where the rubies are. Maybe right underneath him....
They’d ridden to an outcropping of boulders. There, they dismounted and picketed the horses, and there the monsters—who looked like men and who hadn’t acted the least bit monstrous—had given him a club made of some sort of polished hardwood, its tip embedded with shards of black glass as sharp as his sword’s blade; and then they insisted that he take a swig from the leather bota. A grassy-tasting liquid that burnt the roof of his mouth and made him feel momentarily light-headed. He accepted the club politely, planning to drop it behind a bush when he could.
What is the Monster that the monsters are afraid of? A bigger Shifter? A renegade, a rogue?
From his stance on the hillside, he looks around hopefully for Reynard; but still no sign of the small red fox. This, more than the approaching Monster, makes him nervous. Perhaps he hadn’t heard the commotion from the storeroom? No, Reynard can hear a mouse a mile away. It’s unlike Reynard to stay so far behind out of choice. He must be working strategy. That’s it.
There’s sudden silence. The Hero looks up, momentarily blinded by the sunlight. And so he feels it before he hears it, hears it before he sees it. The tremble of rock, the rhythm of hooves. Look up, look right, and across that little hill... and there it is, magnificent and undaunted, against the sun.
A four-legged bird, wings more than the usual two, hard to tell when they’re folded back, but jet black, obsidian black, gleaming with a million colors in the sun. Its legs are shiny, but end in spiked hooves. Its eyes are rubies. Its beak is enormous.
The man next to him is trembling. He’s breathing a word, over and over again... it’s so clearly “HIM! THAT! HIM!” that the Hero needs no translation. The terror is palpable.
The Monster wheels and cavorts upon the hill, as if announcing itself, as if daring anyone to approach it. It pauses, then, its wheeling more focused, purposeful. The great beak turns from side to side, ruby eyes scanning the terrain. It is looking for them.
This is his moment. Time for thinking, time for planning is over. The Hero charges, sword upraised.
And the Monster draws a weapon of its own.
Oh, six-fingered gods, it’s a man! A man robed in feathers and jewels, but a man nonetheless, up on a horse so he has the advantage, but that’s easy enough, the Hero has killed plenty of valiant steeds in his time (pity, though, about this one).
Unhorsed, the feathered man leaps to the high ground, defends himself with massive strokes of his strangely serrated blade, formed of a shining black so dark that when the sun catches it, it turns white, or all colors at once. Bastard. The Hero is whistling through his teeth, an old habit from his training days that he’s not even aware of doing.
The creature puts up a good fight. He has a hard time thinking of him as a man. The feathers and jewels are beautiful, distracting... they should slow the fellow down, but they seem to give him assurance. Maybe he’s using magic. Probably he is. The elaborate mask should be denying him peripheral vision, but instead he seems to see out of the side of his head, like a bird. The cape should be weighing him down, but he’s stronger than the Hero; he feels that when their blades collide, and the force of the obsidian blade nearly pushes him off the hillside. Damn.
The others are shouting something at him, but it’s from the direction of his deaf ear. And do they really think they can advise him how to fight?
The Hero begins to work at disrobing his opponent, to separate him from his magic accoutrements. Tricky, but fun. Very tricky. Trying to stay alive while aiming for a shoulder seam... Trying to breathe in the hot sun while figuring out how the headpiece attaches to the neck... The Hero is slowing down. This is not going well.
He seems to have shrunk to the size of a small animal; he is looking up at a huge black blade coming down at him from a cerulean sky. No, he is on his knees, that’s what it is. They’re going to hurt like seven devils later, but for now he must use them to get up. Up is where he belongs, not rolling and dodging, eating dust like a desert snake. He can’t get a purchase. It’s like the land is pulling him down, demanding he yield his bones to it before it can even belong to him for the few years remaining to him. He was planning to retire here, not to expire. Not yet.
Dimly he realizes someone new is shouting over the din, and that shouting is not words of encouragement either. He raises his head, sees through the grit a pair of dirty, perfectly formed feet.
“STOP!!!” screams the Princess. The rest of her words, foreign, are lost to him.
The feathered creature stops. The Hero struggles to his feet, wipes sweat from his eyes, finds his fighting stance, watches the other for his next move—and is utterly astonished by the fact that the creature has begun to dance. It’s a lively pace, a sprightly jig that seems to be designed to keep his feet from touching the earth—or, no, to get a bright red fox to let go of his legs.
The Hero is touched beyond measure; Reynard has never fought for him before—and he is horrified to realize that means he must need him to.
The creature stamps and shouts, still trying to shake Reynard off his lower legs. The Hero realizes he must try to attack the top half, the feathered cape, flaring into wings, the beaked head. Because of the fox dance, it’s hard to say where the feathered man will be from moment to moment.
The creature is ignoring the Hero, now, concentrating on getting rid of Reynard. Which is good, because he’s afraid to come in too close, lest he hurt the fox by mistake. And besides, his sword has gotten awfully heavy. Must be the heat. The fox is a flurry of motion. The Hero is mesmerized by the dancing colors: foxfur rust, tailtip black, rainbow obsidian blade, ruby eye, feather black, rainbow blade, foxblood red—
“No!” the Princess is shouting. Is she defending the Monster, or Reynard? He should give her his impossibly heavy sword after all, see how much luck she has with it. She’s lifting something dark and bright: the club they’d given him. She holds it high above her head, and flings it over both their heads, right at the feathered creature.
It hits with a huge thud. The creature’s arms fly upward. Is it going to take off from the hillside? No; the obsidian blade goes sailing out instead. Empty-handed, the creature seems to shrink. It—he—falls forward, face-plants in the dust, head askew as the beak turns to one side, reaching for but never nailing the fox lying utterly still beside it.