Cold Fire

Bee sat down opposite, her knees shoved against mine. “Don’t give up hope, Cat.”



The door closed. With a crack of the whip and a shout of “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” the coachman got the horses moving. We turned in a sweep, and the coach lurched as the eru jumped on behind. We picked up speed. No coach in the mortal world ever ran so smoothly and so fast.



A blast of wind shook the coach. The shaking and shuddering pitched us off our seats. The coach bounced up, thudded down, pitched halfway over, righted itself. Like a ship caught in a typhoon, it rolled and yawed. We clung to each other as the gale roared around us with a howl so loud I saw Bee’s lips moving but could not hear a single word, nothing except the frightful mocking caws of a murder of crows flocking around us as if their flight were the wind.



Unseen claws squeezed my heart. If I did not obey, the master would crush me.



Terror, like grief, can make you numb. But when the first edge passes, as the storm gusts on and the coach settles, it can also make you angry. For who wishes to be subject to terror?



We struggled up to sit. After the battering we had taken, I was grateful the cushions were so soft. We caught our breaths.



“That puts Papa’s temper tantrums into perspective, does it not?” said Bee with a gaunt smile.



I looked at the two doors, the one to my right which we sat up against, and the other door, closed and shuttered, by which Andevai had sat on the first journey we had made together. He had warned me never to open the other door, but when he had said that, he had meant the door to my right, the one we had just used to enter the coach.



I grinned. “This coach is a passageway between the worlds. One door leads into the spirit world. But that one leads back to our world. We’ll jump out and run for it.”



I scooted over to the other door. Sliding my sword half out of its sheath, I sliced a stinging, shallow cut in my right hand. I grasped the latch, smeared blood on it, and pushed down.



The latch bit me.



I yelped, jerking back my arm. Three tiny puncture wounds in the back of my hand prickled red with my blood. The latch glowered, having acquired a dour, brassy gremlin face as wide as my hand and as thin as a finger. Incisors sparked as if tipped with diamond. A thread of a tongue licked along the brass, and my blood vanished.



Bee slid her knife from the knit bag and, with all her considerable strength, chopped where the latch was attached to the door. The blade thunked, and bounced off. The force of the blow redounded back up her arm. She cried out, dropping the knife as she doubled over.



“We’ll see about that!” I cried, fully drawing my sword.



The nasty little gremlin latch-face winced.



The coach slammed to a stop so abruptly I was thrown back against the seat and Bee thrown forward, narrowly missing my unsheathed blade and banging her knees. The coach rocked violently. The door to the spirit world was flung open to reveal the coachman.



“Out,” he said.



It wasn’t that he looked angry. He didn’t look angry. It was just that I was suddenly sure he could yank both my arms out of their sockets if I did not obey. Not that he would want to, or would enjoy the act, but that he could.



Bee’s face was a grimace of pain as she tried to uncurl her fingers. “My hand! My arm!”



“Out.”



We got out. I sheathed my sword as we huddled together at the side of the road. Bee had left the knife behind in the coach but made no attempt to dart back inside to grab it. She could not open or close her left hand. The knit bag sagged at her hip. He got in, and we heard him talking and a soft buzzing voice in reply, but no words I knew, nothing I could understand.



The eru strolled over. Her two ordinary eyes gazed at me; her third eye narrowed, as at a nastily ugly sight, on Bee.



“I’m not sorry we’re trying to save my cousin’s life,” I said.



“He is slow to anger,” she said in a reflective tone. “But one thing will do it: assaulting his coach or his horses.”



“I thought the coach and horses must belong to the master,” I said.



“No more than he does. No less than he does. No more than my wings belong to the master, and no less than they belong to me.”



He hopped out and regarded us for such a long time with such a steady stare whose emotions I could not possibly guess at—not anger, not sympathy, not rage, not pity—that Bee began to snivel, as if she had at last reached the end of her rope.



He said, “The door into the mortal world is locked.”



“What do you expect from us?” I burst out. “You can’t expect us to lie down and give up.”