Grandma Harken followed the turn in the wall and there it was.
It was adobe and it was old. The roof had fallen in on one side and the tops of the walls had the slumped-pottery look of weathered clay.
It was not a large building. The entire structure was not much larger than Grandma’s house, though it had been at least three stories tall before the roof fell. If she tilted her head back, she could see the remains of shattered floors sticking out from the high, broken wall.
The world was folded so tightly around it that the desert sun had turned the hazy gray-green color of the sky before a storm.
There was trash around the outside. Bird bones and rotting scraps of fruit made a scattered midden, although she could not smell anything. A few flat weeds crawled across the ground and despite everything, Grandma Harken felt a gardener’s urge to pull them.
Not the time. Although if I don’t die in the next few hours, I’ll get them before I leave.
The opening to the ruins was a narrow rectangle of darkness. She watched it for a long time before she approached it.
She had taken only a step or two forward when someone came out.
He was young, perhaps in his late teens, and clad in the same strange, feathered skin that Marguerite had been. By that, she thought he was likely a victim. He had a dark crest and his cheeks were stained brilliant scarlet.
Roadrunner, thought Grandma Harken.
He saw her.
His mouth fell open in surprise—she saw a glint of silver in his tongue—and he said something frantic in O’odham.
Grandma could understand about twenty words of O’odham if the other person spoke very slowly and clearly, which he hadn’t.
Probably warning me off. He’s not the enchanter, anyhow. Poor kid must have gotten caught like Marguerite.
He does like turning people into birds, doesn’t he?
From inside the ruin came another voice, thick and rumbling. She could not tell what it said, either, but the roadrunner-boy put his hands to his mouth and grimaced.
“It’s all right,” she said. She’d never had much of a plan anyway, and apparently stealth wasn’t part of it.
Whether he understood her words or her tone, she didn’t know. He took her arm, his eyes apologetic. She followed him inside.
It took a long moment for her eyes to adjust. The gray-green light through the broken ceiling did little to illuminate the shadows.
It was colder inside the ruin than it should have been.
“Ah, hell,” said Marguerite, somewhere off to her left. “I told you to stay away.”
“I’m bad at that,” said Grandma cheerfully, as she tried to pierce the darkness.
There were broken pots in the corners, and a few intact ones, draped with old flower sacks and coarse-cured hides. It smelled rank. Whoever lived here was a poor housekeeper.
At the far end, something moved.
She heard the thick, rumbling voice again. This time, it spoke English.
“Where do you come from, old woman?” asked the voice. “And why are you sniffing around what is mine?”
Her first thought was that it was a bear.
Her second was that bears generally had better manners, and certainly kept themselves cleaner.
It was a man, more or less. He was huge and hairy and his head was sunk down between his shoulders. He sat on a throne, like a king, but the throne was made of broken stones and rabbit skins and there were flies crawling in and out of it.
He did not belong in the desert. He stank of cold and forests and distance, of magic from another place and another time. More than that, he stank of power—his own power, wrapped up in that bear-like hide, not a power that could give itself to a place and be given back in return.
There were things that could come to the desert and learn to live with it, like the trains, but this was not one of them.
“You’re not from around here,” said Grandma Harken to the cold-king.
He made a noise like bubbles breaking in glue, and maybe that was laughter.
“I have been driven out,” he said. “Someone found the soul I had hidden in a duck egg. It takes time to grow it back.”
“Seems a fragile sort of place for a soul,” said Grandma Harken. “Better than a chicken egg, but not by much.”
“I shall wrap it in a snake next time,” said the cold-king. “I have learned.”
Marguerite and the roadrunner boy shifted in the corner. Grandma spared them a look and saw that Marguerite had put her arms around the boy for comfort.
Well, and now I know why she wasn’t entirely keen on curse-breaking. Had nothing much to do with flying after all.
She had no idea what she was going to do, butit seemed like she should probably start doing it.
“I’ll ask politely,” said Grandma Harken. “Let these people go and stop twisting up the world hereabouts. The land doesn’t like it.” She considered this, and then added, “Please.”
“I do not care what the land likes,” said the cold-king. “This is a dreadful land.”
“Then why’d you come here at all?”
The cold-king stretched. “I did not choose. I hid myself in the seeds of a thistle and when I woke again, I had crossed an ocean and was rolling and rolling across the hills of this terrible, dry place. But soon I shall be done growing back, and until then, my old enemies will not find me.”
Grandma Harken sighed. She had never thought it was going to be easy. “Well,” she said, planting her feet, “I’m afraid you’ve made a new one.”
The cold-king flung out his arm and power raged through the ruined building. Marguerite cried out and the roadrunner-boy spoke a short, sharp curse.
The cold-king’s power struck Grandma Harken and would have knocked her down, but she let it spin her around instead. She’d been a dancer in her youth, the wild kind, so she spun like a top and landed, breathless, on her feet.
Well, this is going to end badly, she thought.
Her right hip let it be known that it was not up for any more of that.
She reached down and pulled out her kitchen knife. It had seemed very large when cutting tomatoes in her kitchen. Now it was a small bright wedge against the bulk of the cold-king.
He laughed his bubbling laugh again. “Pretty,” he said.
The next blow came sideways and there was no spinning with it. It slammed her into the ruined adobe wall. Her head struck it and spawned a universe of stars across her vision. The knife went skittering across the floor.
She slid down the wall and into a jumble of shattered pots. One dug into her back, in the same place that the ladle had, and for a moment Grandma wondered if she was still in her chair on the porch, watching a glowing bird fly across the garden.
Was that a dream? The dragon and the train and …
She remembered the cholla-bone girl’s face. No, she had not been a dream. Her mouth was full of blood.
“No!” cried Marguerite. The mockingbird-woman lunged across the floor, her orange eyes shining in the dark. She caught the cold-king’s arm and tugged at it, fierce and ineffectual. “Stop! She’s old! She can’t hurt you!”
Shows what you know, thought Grandma, vague and indignant. She didn’t think she could stand up, but she wasn’t done yet. She’d hurt that bastard plenty.
She would … she would …
She had no idea what she was going to do.
She had lost her knife. She put her hand in her pocket, looking for something else—a weapon, a seed, she didn’t know what—and found something smooth and leathery under her fingers.