Horrified by my urge to kill something so small and helpless, I scrambled back to perch on the rock. The grub slithered out of the egg. No bigger than my hand, it had four limbs, a tail, a long beast-like torso, and a deformed back all crinkly like mashed-up paper. It had a snout for a face, with pasty-white strings striping its muzzle and head.
It was foul, and I hated it.
It opened its eyes to reveal molten fire, a blaze of blue-white heat. With a shudder, its outer skin hardened and sloughed off as I might shed a coat on going indoors. Beneath shimmered scaly skin as darkly red as the dregs of smoldering coals.
I could not look away from its eyes. That brilliant, fathomless gaze devoured me.
I had seen a gaze like this before: an old man sitting in a library with no fire and three dogs sprawled close, basking in the heat he radiated. He had kissed Bee on the forehead and on the lips.
I had seen jewel eyes like this in the headmaster’s emerald gaze before the spark was subsumed by ordinary brown.
A shadow fell over us in a flutter of black wings. A crow snatched up the tiny creature and gulped it down in one bite.
Bee screamed with pure rage, but she did not stop digging. Around her, more eggs cracked. A crow landed beside me, intent on the nearest egg. On the rock opposite, a bold creature with the look of a plump rodent poised; it had a meek, chubby face, but a frightening mad gleam in its little black eyes as it fixed on a hatchling squirming up out of the hollow. It lunged and caught the thing, which spat and hissed in vain as the rodent ripped off its head.
I jabbed at the crow, which hopped back. Bee dug. The grubs emerged, shed, and crawled. Their sluggish swarm crept toward the river. Predators descended: more crows; a cruel-billed eagle; stinging flies like a cloud of misery that covered the hatchlings with vibrating wings.
The hatchlings had no voices. They just died.
But the wind had a voice, a rising chatter and roar. Shadows boiled on the horizon. My heart froze in my chest. The creatures of the spirit world were racing or shambling or flying toward us in their tens and hundreds: proud eru, gracile antelopes, sleek wolves, clumsy six-legged oxen.
“Bee.” I crunched over broken copper shells. “You’ve got to get to the river.”
“I have to save them.” Her hands were smeared with the grease and mucus of their rising, and still they writhed upward, on her, across her, for she was oblivious to their blood and slime. “I can’t leave until they’re all dug out.”
“We have to go. Pick up what you can carry in your skirts. I’ll cover your back.”
She gathered up her outer skirt and scooped up what hatchlings she could into the cloth. Then she ran, light on her feet despite the rugged terrain. I cut at crows diving at her head. I swiped my blade through a cloud of glittering-winged creatures that had tiny fox faces and grotesque, elongated limbs like grasshoppers. I stabbed a rat, and shook it free just in time to spear a ghastly huge moth trying to fly away with a hatchling.
A chuckling rolling laugh surprised me. To my right, the four hyenas loped closer. I thrust at the closest, my blade catching in the loose skin of its neck. It swung its head back and forth, almost jerking me off my feet, but I wrenched my blade free and raced after Bee. I stepped on a hatchling, crushing it, but there were a dozen crawling beside it. Birds dropped, snagging up the morsels. Some ate them; others flew higher and dropped the grubs to smash on the rocks.
I grabbed up one of the little pathetic creatures, but it bit me with nasty stinging teeth, and I yelped and let go.
“Cat!” Bee splashed into the shallows and opened her skirt.
Hatchlings spilled, flashing and undulating as they began to swim.
Fish with bulbous eyes and teeth like thorns rose out of the water to feed. Pikes and golden-red salmon breached the surface. The water churned with their thrashing. Blood ran in threads. Hatchlings she had not helped reached the shore, nosing into the water.
I stood with one foot on the bank and one in the water, my blade unsheathed. But with so many hatchlings to feast on, even the hyenas had forgotten us, all except the one I had cut. It looked straight at me with black, intelligent eyes, and gave that unsettling laugh.
“Bee, you have to swim.”
She did not answer.
“Bee!”
I spun around. She was gone.
A hatchling crawled over my boot and into the water. A fish rose up with mouth gaping. I stabbed the cursed fish and flung it high. Its body spun off my blade and hit the water. Following its arc with my gaze, I saw Bee.
She was under the river, walking through a coruscating whirlpool that had created a tunnel of water leading to a bright net flung deep within the current. Hatchlings swam on all sides of her; many had latched on to her clothes. She should have been drowning yet she walked as if through air. So fixated was she on herding the hatchlings forward that she didn’t even look back for me.
The last little hatchling launched after her, diving fearlessly into the water.
I slashed my blade through the water to keep biting fish away from the last one. I waded in past my hips, past my chest, my skirts sodden and dragging, calling Bee’s name, but she could not hear me. Water slopped into my mouth. The current dragged at me, pulling me down. The river wanted to drown me. Panicking, I struggled back toward shore, gasping with fear and swallowing more water.
White light splintered the horizon. The frenzy of feasting ceased abruptly. A distant vibration, as of a village bell heard across miles of empty countryside, sounded like the toll of death. The feeding eru in the field rose in a battering of wings and headed for the road. Earthbound animals scrambled after.
“Little cat! Hurry! The tide comes!” The coachman called from the road.
I leaped from rock to rock past the smashed remains of hatchlings and one little grub still working its way toward the river. The coachman stretched out a hand and hauled me up onto the road just as the knife edge of the dream cut over us. I covered my face with my hands, coughing and choking on the memory of the river’s water filling my mouth. I hadn’t been able to follow her.
As the bell’s long reverberation faded, a rush of sound filled its silence. I looked up to see hundreds of eru rising off the road and flying away. Closer, my eru waited beside the coach-and-four. Blood smeared her mouth. I winced away, and my gaze swept the landscape.
Only there was no land. We stood on a causeway, surrounded by a wild gray sea. Waves broke over shallows in foaming white caps. Spray stung my face. I saw not one sign of life, nothing except a single black crow fighting the wind, the eru watching me as she wiped blood from her lips, and the coachman checking the traces on the horses.
My voice trembled. “When the tide came, Bee wasn’t on warded ground. She’ll be changed.”
“Little cat, she who walks the dreams of dragons cannot be altered by their tides,” said the eru.
I thought of how I had clung to Bee when the tide had swept over us at the first river. Other creatures had changed, but she and I had remained as we were.
“You see why we who live in this world hate such as she,” added the eru.
A wave spilled over the causeway. I pressed against the coach, clinging to the open door. “So she’s crossed back to the mortal world?” I said desperately. “I couldn’t follow.”
“You are not as she,” said the eru. “What binds her does not bind you.”
“What binds me?” I whispered.
The eru laughed in a way that made me cringe.
The coachman nodded toward the door. “The master is waiting.”
Bee had escaped. Surely that was all that mattered, the best outcome I could have hoped for. Weary to my bones, my face moist with sea spume and my body battered by a tearing wind rising off the wide, dark sea, I climbed into the coach and sank onto the cushions.
“What were those grubs she dug up?” I asked, looking out at him.
Without answering, he shut the door, although he left the shutter open. Outside, four gray birds with long beaks swept into view, battling the wind. One dove and snatched a fish out of the water. They flapped to rest on the rocky revetment that shored up the causeway and began pecking life and entrails out of the fish. I looked away,
