“What do we do?” Oliver whispered, his voice resounding eerily off the walls of the tunnel.
“Nothing,” Frost said. “Do nothing.”
He cocked his head, watching the serpent-people as they came nearer. His icicle hair made a familiar clinking noise and a white-blue mist rose from the corners of his diamond eyes.
Oliver nodded. If Frost had the strength, he could stop them. With a wave of his hand, he could turn the air so cold around their arrows that they would shatter. Perhaps, he might even momentarily freeze the river around them. But Frost looked just as drained as the rest of them, and Oliver did not share the certainty in the winter man’s voice.
He raised the Sword of Hunyadi.
“Oliver, no!” Kitsune shouted.
Blue Jay burst from the river, spraying water across the rocks and his companions. In a blur of motion he became a bird, crying out as he darted forward, then he spun in the air, ready to block the arrows of the Nagas.
Not a single arrow flew.
Oliver frowned, staring, sword still at the ready as the Nagas turned to one another, whispering. Their serpentine lower halves undulated beneath the water, keeping them from drifting.
Frost and Kitsune exchanged a look of confusion, and then the winter man gestured for Oliver to lower his sword. Reluctantly, he did so.
“We are travelers in search of brief sanctuary,” Frost announced. “We come openly and without pretense. I am Frost of the Borderkind. My companions and I need rest, and they need food as well. Legend says that Twillig’s Gorge is a place of safe haven for travelers of any allegiance, so long as their intentions are peaceful. Is the legend false?”
The Nagas rose up from the water, swaying cobralike for a moment. They opened their mouths and hissed, but their arrows still did not fly.
“Time changes even legends,” one of the females, perhaps the leader, said. “Perhaps legends most of all. You know that very well, Cailleach Bheur, just as I am certain you know that these are perilous times in the Two Kingdoms. Perilous for Borderkind most of all. There are others of your kind in the Gorge, but they have lived here for many years, and we protect our neighbors. We will fight for them. Risk all for them, just as they would for us.
“But you are not our neighbors,” the Naga said, nodding her head first toward Frost, then toward Kitsune and Blue Jay. “None of you. The company of myths is a danger to us all, when so many want you dead. Why should we risk it for strangers?”
Kitsune growled at the use of the word myth, a term the Borderkind despised. She might have attacked them then, but this time it was Oliver who held her back.
“You’ll turn us away out of cowardice, then?” Frost demanded.
Blue Jay landed atop the rock Oliver had crashed into, changing again into his human shape. He crouched there, glaring down at the Nagas.
“I never would have believed it,” the trickster said. “The world really has changed.”
“Better allies than strangers,” Frost said, voice low. Mist drifted up from his mouth. The light from along the tunnel made the sharp angles of his icy body and face even more severe. “Better friends than enemies. Now more than ever. If you have Borderkind amongst you, the Hunters will come for them. We mean to stop them before they ever get here. That serves us all.”
The Nagas watched them carefully for several long, tense moments, and then the leader raised her bow, let the pressure off of the string, and returned the arrow to its quiver. The others followed suit.
The leader bowed, then looked at Frost, her smile savage. “I ought to kill you just for calling us cowards. But this is not a time for those with no quarrel to slay one another. It may come to pass soon enough that we will all be short of friends. But you understand we must be wary. In these times, visitors to the Gorge are scarce and mostly unwelcome.”
Kitsune squeezed Oliver’s hand but stared at the Nagas. “But you will let us in?”
“To rest. To eat. You will be gone by dawn. And if others of your kin leave to join you on your quest, all the better.”
Oliver felt the tension go out of him. He slid his sword back into his belt and then stretched, feeling every one of the bruises he’d gotten when he slammed into that rock.
He waded downriver toward the Nagas, not liking the way they watched him. Though he was the least dangerous of the group, the sentries of Twillig’s Gorge seemed unduly focused on his movements. Blue Jay, Kitsune, and Frost joined him and the four of them strode to where the Nagas slithered in the water.
The leader, sleek and beautiful from the waist up, her hair cut short and ragged, gazed at him with wide, green eyes.
“That does not apply to you, brother. You are welcome to stay as long as you like. You have a home with Nagas, wherever you find us.”
Oliver stared dumbly at her. She turned and swam away down the river, the other Naga sentries following her. With the undulating of their serpentine bodies, they rode the current, and were out of the tunnel and into the sunlight of the gorge in moments.
“What the hell was that all about?” Oliver asked, glancing around at his friends.
Kitsune frowned. Beneath her hood, her expression was as puzzled as Oliver’s own. “I have no idea. ‘Brother’? Who do they think you are?”
Oliver opened his mouth to repeat the question, but Frost and Blue Jay had already set off after the Nagas, wading toward the end of the tunnel, where the river flowed into the gorge. They must have heard the Naga’s words, and his own reaction, but neither of them slowed or looked back.
“Could it be just that I’m not Borderkind? That I’m no danger to them?”
Kitsune smiled. “I suppose. If they only knew that having you here is even more dangerous than harboring us…The Hunters stalking the Borderkind are working in secret. You’ve got the whole of the Two Kingdoms after you.”
Oliver laughed softly and they set out together. But as they went, he watched Blue Jay and Frost, up ahead. They walked quickly and did not so much as glance at one another, as if neither one of them dared to speak.
It troubled him, though it seemed more strange than important. Idly, he slid his hand into his pocket and touched the seed given to him by the Harvest gods. Though it clung wetly to the damp fabric inside his pocket, he was strangely reassured that it was still there and seemed undamaged.
Then they emerged from the tunnel, and all other thoughts were banished instantly.
In his mind he had pictured Twillig’s Gorge as a river canyon lined with caves, in which its residents would dwell. That much was true. But it was also far more than that. The walls of the gorge were several hundred feet high and as sheer as the cliff face on the ocean bluff behind his father’s house. The village that had blossomed there in the gorge went on for a mile or more before the river disappeared into the face of another cliff. Twillig’s Gorge was closed in on four sides. From what Oliver could see, the only way in was down one of those sheer cliff faces or through a river tunnel.
There were caves, as he’d imagined. Most of them had balconies built on the outside, some with beautiful awnings. The caves were connected by ladders and walkways fixed to the gorge walls, somehow bolted into the stone, and the gorge itself was spanned by arched, stone bridges of elegant, ancient construction, and by nearly primitive hanging bridges of wood and thick rope, strung at odd angles.
From the look of it, that was how Twillig’s Gorge had started. But there had to be a limit to the number of cave dwellings, and so they had built out from the walls. Oliver gaped at the sight. He had seen homes on steep hillsides in his own world-some of them the product of sheer madness, in his opinion. Much of Southern California, or so it seemed, had been built with the front of a house on solid ground and the back on stilts. In comparison to the houses of Twillig’s Gorge, those homes were on bedrock. Some of them spanned the whole gorge, right over the river, and those seemed the safest. Others, though, were so precarious as to defy gravity. They clung to the stone cliffs with only struts beneath them, braced at angles against the rock face.