To hell with Oliver, then. She’d find a way to forgive herself. She’d make her own purpose.
“What the hell are you thinking?” Coyote demanded. Small and lithe, he paced the ground between tents, pausing from time to time to gesture with a red glass bottle of honey mead. The wound where his eye had been had begun to heal, white scar tissue replacing ragged, raw flesh. “You’ve done enough, Kit.”
“Have I?” she asked, smiling slyly. “I’m not going to go down to that battlefield, cousin. A little slip of a fox would last mere seconds. But I mean to fight, to make the Atlanteans pay for all of our kin they murdered. I’ll do what tricksters do. I’m going to get weapons-daggers and a sword, even if I have to pluck them from the fingers of the dead-and then I’m going to cross through the Veil. I’ll do it just as we’ve done before, slip over to the ordinary world, get behind our enemies, then push back through to this world. In secret, I’ll find the commanders of the invasion-the High Council of Atlantis, if they’re here-and I’ll kill them.”
Coyote stared at her a moment, then took a long pull from the bottle of mead. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand like a common drunkard.
“So you’re nothing but an assassin, now?”
Kitsune curled back her upper lip in a kind of sneer. “I’m whatever I need to be in order to make them suffer for what they’ve done.”
After another swig of mead, he contemplated her a moment.
“Fair enough,” Coyote said.
“I’m pleased you approve,” Kitsune replied, making sure her sarcasm was evident.
“I don’t.”
She pulled her cloak more tightly around her, as though within that copper fur she could hide from him. “Why would you say that?”
Something flickered in his single eye then, but it wasn’t the mischief of a trickster.
“I wish we could abandon both worlds,” Coyote said, his voice low. Always snide, always mocking, always playing, that had been her experience of him for so long. Seeing the sincerity in him frightened her.
“I wish we could abandon these bodies,” he went on. “Just be fox and coyote and run in the woods, like we did.”
Kitsune held her breath a moment, then let it out slowly. “Maybe one day.”
Coyote moved toward her. His skin glistened bronze in the sun. He held out the bottle of mead for her, and Kitsune took it.
“Where did you get this, anyway?”
He smiled. “Stole it from the king’s tent.”
With a laugh, she shook her head. “Trickster,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Always.”
Kitsune tipped the bottle back and took a sip. As she did, she saw the top of an enormous head on the other side of the king’s tent. Cronus ducked down, trying to keep from being seen, but the lumbering Titan was not the most inconspicuous legend.
“We have a spy,” she said.
Coyote frowned and, almost imperceptibly, moved into a defensive stance. Kitsune shook her head.
“No danger. Just an ancient god-a father of gods-simple and sweet.”
She started around the tent, handing the bottle back to Coyote as he joined her. They emerged near the entrance to the tent and the giant Titan sat crouched there like a child caught at something naughty. A sad twinge touched her heart. Once, this creature had been one of the lords of the world, wise and clever and strong. Cronus still had his strength, but his other faculties had failed him.
“I thought you’d gone down to war with Salacia, Hesperos, and the others,” she said.
Cronus rolled his massive shoulders in a shrug. His clothes and arms were spattered with the blood of enemies he had already killed this morning.
“I did,” the Titan replied. “But I worried about you. When you fight, I’ll fight. Must watch over you.”
Kitsune smiled and glanced at Coyote.
But Coyote had no smile. He wasn’t even looking at Cronus. Instead, he stared beyond the Titan. When Kitsune looked to discover what had drawn his attention, she saw Oliver striding toward them, one hand on the hilt of the sword that hung from his hip. With his longer hair and thickening beard, he did not look like someone who had only entered this world the first time months ago. At first glance, she would have assumed he had been here for years. Perhaps even since birth.
He was a warrior, now.
Cronus grunted angrily and turned to block Oliver’s path.
“No,” Kitsune said. The Titan turned to glance back at her. “It’s all right.”
Dubious, Cronus nevertheless stood back and let Oliver stride up to the spot where Kitsune and Coyote stood. He gave Coyote a brief glance, nodded once, and then focused on Kitsune. Her face flushed under the intensity of his gaze and when he saw that, he glanced away for a moment.
“I’m sorry if I was rough on you before,” Oliver said.
She stared in amazement. “You’re apologizing to me?”
“Maybe I’m just trying to understand.”
Kitsune glanced at Coyote, feeling awkward now that he and Cronus were the audience for this exchange. Still, things had to be said.
“That was all I ever wanted,” she told him. “I never meant to-”
Oliver held up a hand. “I know. And I’m sorry to interrupt, and to rush you now, but we’re out of time.”
The warm breeze had been blowing the scents of distant flowers around them, but now the wind shifted and that smell was replaced by the stink of blood. Shouts of hatred and screams of pain filled the air, carried up from the field of battle.
“What do you need?” she asked.
“If Hunyadi doesn’t win this war quickly, the army may not be able to hold out over time. There’s no way to tell what kind of reinforcements might come from Atlantis.”
“So you need to end it quickly,” Coyote said.
Kitsune stared at Oliver. “You’re still thinking about Prince Tzajin?”
Oliver nodded. “We’re going to bring him back here, alive. Take Yucatazca out of the war or, even better, get them to switch sides.”
Tentatively, she reached up and lowered her hood. The breeze felt good on her face. A lock of hair blew in front of her eyes.
“We?”
“Frost. Blue Jay and the others. Some Nagas. Me. And you, if you’ll come.”
Kitsune resisted the urge to smile. “Oh, I’ll come.”
Cronus tapped his chest with one gigantic finger. “And Cronus.”
Oliver visibly winced. “I’m sorry, but we need to try to do this quickly and quietly. We’d like to slip in and slip out without attracting much attention.”
Kitsune went to Cronus and reached up to put her tiny hand over his enormous one.
“I’m sorry, my friend. Go back to the gods-to your family. They need your help. As soon as we return from Atlantis, I will come and find you.”
Cronus looked at her, sulking. “I have your promise?”
She smiled. “I promise.”
With a dangerous glance at Oliver, the Titan ambled down the hill. When he had gone, only the three of them remained, and Kitsune looked at Coyote.
“And you? Say you’ll come,” she said.
Coyote took a long swig of honey mead, draining the last of the bottle, then tossed it toward the entrance to the king’s tent. Calmly, he produced a cigarette from the palm of his hand, as though it had always been there, and lit it with a silver lighter that likewise seemed to appear from nowhere.
Little nothing sleights of hand, easy for a trickster.
“I wish you’d come,” Kitsune said.
Coyote smiled, his single eye twinkling with mischief, but she thought it hid something else entirely. She studied him, trying to understand.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Coyote said, stepping toward her. “It isn’t that I’m afraid. I’m going to smoke this cigarette and then I’m going down to war. I’ll fight, Kit. With claw or sword, I’ll fight. But I want to be with my kin, to fight side by side with the Borderkind. And it seems to me Bascombe’s already got more than enough to take on his secret mission.”
When the rangy little legend reached out a hand to touch the side of her face, then leaned in to kiss her, Kitsune could do nothing but kiss him back. And she found that she wanted to. He had comforted her when all she could do was howl her sorrow to the night sky. His presence would have soothed her. But she could not force him to go.