The mystery of the coastal ponies was quickly solved: camels were terrified of the sidhe gate.
Their first day on white sands Everin and Drem passed without notice through the temporary city that was the desert army. Two sand snakes in a nest of thousands drew no undue attention. Their trickery held, although often Everin caught Drem scratching absently at the dried acacia gum concealing Desma’s tattoos. Each time he warned the sidhe off with a low whistle or an elbow in the ribs. Everin didn’t blame Drem; the dried solution itched worse than the dune fleas biting at their feet and ankles. At least the fleas let up during the hottest part of the day and the coldest hours of the night. The acacia prickled constantly.
In the beginning, they moved toward the gate, choosing those well-trod lanes between encampments that seemed most direct. The lanes were busy. Nomadic living meant whole families settled in one lodge and tribe members camped side by side. Dogs, livestock and children ran wild. Chickens roosted atop the tents or in the bundles of hay kept behind each lodge for the ponies. Tradespeople set up shop in the lanes, hawking everything from fresh cactus fruit and dried khaim jerky to warriors’ kilts and sandals to comfort of both the medicinal and sexual sort.
“Disgusting,” said Drem in its mother-tongue, low, muffled by the folds of its veil. It stepped over a pile of steaming manure. “Humans stink.”
Everin didn’t bother to point out they both smelled worse than any person they passed. “I told you not to speak,” he said instead.
“You promised we’d be out of the sun, in a tent, with water,” Drem retorted, turning silken sidhe vowels sharp. “We’ve been walking for more than a day, half of that time now beneath burning skies.” It stopped, forcing traffic around them both. A woman dressed in a linen chiton instead of snakeskin glanced their way as she trotted past, a large jug of fermented mesquite beer balanced on her shoulder. Six kilted warriors, faces wrapped against the wind, passed three to either side. They gave Desma’s strong thighs a cursory, appreciative glance before moving on. Drem didn’t notice. “I am fatigued.”
Everin adjusted his veil. Between the lodges the wind was lesser but a sandy grit still hung in the air, making his eyes water. He’d been so intent on weaving his way through the temporary city toward their goal he had forgotten that, in the heat and surrounded by steel, Drem did not have a mortal’s endurance. He saw now what he’d ignored and what the passing sand snakes had not noticed: behind Desma’s stern desert beauty, Drem was beginning to droop.
“Water,” the sidhe said, twisting Desma’s mouth into a sneer, “and a sit down is all I require. Don’t look so eager. The iron hasn’t got me yet.”
Everin squinted past lodge poles at the horizon. He’d lost track of time. The sun hung midsky. Awareness made his stomach wake and cramp on emptiness. Blisters stung between his toes where sandal leather rubbed. The skin on his shoulders felt stretched from too much time in the heat.
“This way,” he decided, choosing a promising tent from amidst a forest of similar. “Don’t speak.”
Drem scoffed but followed.
The encampment Everin approached flew two flags from its highest tent pole. The topmost was a crimson starburst on white background. Below that flapped a smaller pennant: two black scorpions on a field of red. Three lodges were pitched side by side, canvas doors fastened shut against wind. A large pot hung from a tripod over a banked cook fire. Sisal rugs covered the ground between the tents, the cook fire, and two hobbled camels. The rugs kept the sand from blowing into the lodges or the food or onto the camel. They were weighted down at each corner with elaborately woven capped baskets.
Two men sat in the shade cast by the lodges, talking softly. They looked up when Everin and Drem stepped off the road and onto their rugs. Their faces were wrapped and they wore feathers in their long hair and sewn into the pleats of their kilts. They did not seem alarmed by the intrusion.
“How much,” asked Everin, “for one of yon beasts?”
One of the men uncurled and rose to his feet. His chest and feet were naked in the heat. He pulled away his scarf, baring an amused smile. The camels stirred as Drem came near, squeaking uneasily. Their master hushed them with a sharp word.
“Not for sale,” he replied.
“Everything is for sale,” said Everin. “At the right price. We’ve come a long way. Our camel died east of the fissure. One is all we need to carry our tent and our baskets.”
“A long way indeed,” the man said, “and late to news. Those are not beasts of burden any longer. They are supper.”
The second warrior laughed at Everin’s surprise. He stayed seated but also pulled down his scarf. He was older, his yellow eyes clouded. Gray salted his brows and beard, and age lines pulled down the corners of his mouth.
“Join us,” he offered formally, “before you fall down. We have beer, and some meat to share. Then we will talk camels.”
Everin accepted the invitation, squatting on his heels in the shade. There the wind was nonexistent. He freed his nose and mouth from folds of cloth. The shade was only marginally cooler than direct sun but it was a relief to sit.
“You, also,” their host told Drem, who hadn’t yet moved. “I am Myron, and this is my son Pelagius. The others are resting after a night in the saddle.” He nodded at the tents. While Drem settled on the rug, spear laid carefully beside Desma’s knee, Pelagius fetched a pitcher and four cups from within a basket. He poured out a round of beer before sitting again in the shade.
“Erastos.” The old name fell easily off Everin’s tongue. “And my sister, Demetria.” For courtesy’s sake he toasted Myron before taking a healthy swallow of beer. Unlike flatland ale, the liquor was sweet and syrupy, and warm. One cup refreshed the body. Four could send a man into a drunken stupor. To Everin, the beer tasted like home. “May your enemies fall before you.”
Myron chuckled. “It’s been a good year,” he conceded, “and not just for the scorpion tribe.” He sipped his drink before raising gray brows in polite enquiry. “From east of the fissure, you said? I had family east. They were not so late as you to war. They arrived a full season past, with the rains.”
Drem had not touched the beer. Pelagius watched the sidhe minutely. Everin could not tell whether the young man was admiring Desma’s beauty or affronted by Drem’s abysmal manners.
“Sister,” Everin chided. “If you fall asleep over your drink you will offend our hosts.”
Drem glared, through the folds of its veil. Then it plucked aside silk, raised its cup in a succinct toast in Myron’s direction, and downed the drink in one gulp. Myron’s smile deepened. Pelagius’s mouth twitched.
“Good,” Drem said, smothering a cough. “Thank you.”
“My family serve in isolation,” Everin continued, hoping Drem was not about to vomit all over Myron’s rugs. “As brick makers, in the mudflats. News always comes to us several seasons too late.”
Myron puckered his lips in sympathy. “And which lord is it that you serve, Erastos?”
Everin took another swallow of drink to hide vacillation. It was possible, although not probable, that in his absence titles had shifted or been lost. Like the white sands, desert hierarchy was oft changing, prey to familial schism or tribal feuds. There was no guarantee the man he had served ruled still.
“Nicanor,” he ventured.
For a heartbeat Everin thought they were lost. Myron closed his eyes in thought, brow wrinkled. Drem shifted, one hand alighting on the rug very near its spear. Everin rested his own casually on the pommel of the Aug’s sword. Then Pelagius nodded.
“Nicanor is here,” he said. “They are much closer to the gateway, near Black Crom’s lodges. Remember, father. We saw his flag when he came in.”
“Ah, yes.” Myron’s eyes snapped open. “But that was moons ago, before even the rains. You are quite tardy, Erastos. Nicanor will not be pleased.”
Everin finished the dregs of his beer to hide his face.
“Tell us,” Drem said after a moment of silence. “About eating the humped beasts.”
Everin coughed. Drem arranged Desma’s mouth into a bland expression, deliberately not looking Everin’s way.
“New orders from the top,” replied Pelagius. He licked his lips. “Camels, they will not go near the demon gateway. They spit and moan and fall in the sand. The ponies are not so smart, and do much better, as promised.” He propped his chin on one fist, regarding the two dozing camels with fond resignation. “I will be sorry to put old friends to the slaughter, but who knows what we will find on the other side of the mountains? I would rather eat gamy camels than starve.”
“I have heard,” Myron added, “that the flatlanders are forced to catch their suppers in river waters, or in the sea.”
“Fish,” said Drem with relish.
“Demetria has spent time on the other side of the divide,” explained Everin hastily. “Scouting the west face of the mountains.”
“Ah!” Pelagius leaned close. “Demetria! Tell us! Is it as they say? A land bursting with true gold and opion and plenty of fields for a man to make his own? Greener than scrubland after a hard rain?”
“It is,” replied Drem, “a green and gold land, also black as dusk and red as dawn. Plenty of rain on root and leaf, and sweet meat to fill an empty belly. If,” the sidhe added, “one is willing to kill for a piece of it.”
Myron busied himself with refilling their cups. “I look forward to sweet meat,” he said. “I grow tired of famine. Every year is harder than the last. The rainy season is shorter each turn: the crops turn to dust, the animals die. We all suffer for it.” He swirled the beer in his cup. “For a little while longer we will make do with khaim and camel meat. So then. You were not wrong. Everything under Two Scorpions is for sale—at a price. I am willing to sell to you a piece of my beasts. Say, a quarter of a haunch. If you are interested.”
“I am more interested,” replied Everin, “in talk of ponies. We would rather ride proud through the gateway than run behind.”
“That is your Nicanor’s business,” retorted Myron. “Whom of his tribe shall ride and whom shall walk? Take it up with him.”
Everin flicked two fingers in acceptance. Desma’s head was lolling; Drem was not pretending weariness. Pelagius looked dangerously close to laying his head in her lap.
“A place in one of your lodges,” Everin decided. “Until sun down. So my sister may sleep.”
“For the telescope,” answered Myron. “You may each share a sleeping fur in one of my tents. Also—” he wrinkled his nose “—water to wash. For the sake of my family.”
“Telescope?” Baffled, Everin followed the other man’s gaze to the lens hanging on his belt. “Of course. But we are hungry. And this telescope is very fine, indeed.”
“Water to wash. A place to sleep until sundown. Khaim and a jug of beer. For the rest, you’ll have to find your lord. If you are lucky, he will not whip you for being tardy.”
Everin spit in his left hand and then offered it, palm up, in the manner of a desert bargain sealed. “Done,” he said. “And thank you.”
Myron’s cloudy eyes danced. “Pelagius will show you to the water cask. Mind he keeps his hands to himself. He is of an age for a second wife, and your Demetria is a rare jewel.”
They left Two Scorpions after sunset. Pelagius was visibly disappointed to see them go. Myron, busy taking apart his new telescope near the cook fire, was less so. His family, forsaking bed for the evening’s activities, gathered to see them off, inquisitive and solemn.
“May your enemies fall before you,” Pelagius said. “But if they do not, may you find the god’s cradle in good time.”
“I will look for you there,” Everin responded, bowing from the waist. Drem, gnawing a strip of khaim, said nothing. Everin ushered the sidhe away from the lodge and back onto the road. Light was coming up all throughout the encampment; torches burned near each lodge and at every intersection, smelling heavily of animal fat. Cook fires were fed fresh tinder until the flames leapt high and hot. Laughter rang out as day-sleepers stirred. The wind had abated at last. The army was waking, singing praises to the gloaming.
“Is it the same god?” Drem wondered around a mouthful of jerky. “Pelagius’s god and the one on the other side of the mountains?”
“There are no gods but the sidhe,” Everin recited. He meant it as mockery. Drem shrugged.
“The gate is directly that way,” the lesser sidhe said, jabbing khaim at the twilight. “‘Twould be simpler to cut across.”
“Simpler but hardly expedient. Every lodge we crossed would play host. We’d soon be too drunk to find our own feet. These are a congenial people, Drem. They value allegiance.”
“When they’re not fighting amongst themselves.”
“Which they are not, for the moment.” Everin stopped at a crossroads to find his bearings. Drem was right. The tent city was a maze. He could not be sure the correct turning was the most obvious and they did not have time to waste. Already they’d been off the mountain two days too long. Drem might claim no ill effects, but there was no certainty Faolan’s magic would hold up indefinitely under the weight of so much surrounding iron.
“Nicanor?” he asked, stopping a lass before she could hurry by. “Nicanor’s lodge?”
“Lord Nicanor?” She pointed opposite the path he would have chosen. “That way. Next to Black Crom’s lodge, you can’t miss it. The demon gate shines upon his tent flap.”
“Shines?” Everin asked Drem when the lass had trotted away.
“Black Crom?” Drem frowned.
They walked on, stopping frequently so Everin might ask further directions. From Skerrit’s Pass he’d assumed the army was exactly as it had looked: lodge squares laid out in a tidy grid. In fact there were as many sideways and byways as main roads, trails carved into the sand by necessity of use. Some squares had become rectangles as lodges were added to a family grouping, turning roads into dead ends as space ran out.
There were tinkers living alongside the sand snakes, carts and wagons tied up near tents. From the depths of sand around the wagon wheels they were long ensconced. They whistled cheerfully as they set out their wares for the night, joking easily with the desert merchants who were their competition.
“They’ve been here some time,” Drem said.
“The tinkers?”
“The army. Also the tinkers. The sun has faded the paint on their wagons. The tents, also, are more worn to the north, from whence the wind comes. Patched in places, do you see?”
“I see,” Everin replied. “But I never thought it possible. To stop moving in the desert is to die.”
“If you are a camel or a wolf or even a sand serpent,” agreed Drem, “but these people have something neither the camel nor the wolf nor the serpent claims to know.”
“And what’s that?”
“Hope.” For an instant sharp sidhe teeth flashed in Desma’s smile.
Everin grunted. “Renault will never let go the flatlands.”
“So we said, when the woods and waters and prairies belonged to the sidhe.” Before Everin could respond, Drem lifted its spear, indicating with the tip. “Look there. It shines upon his tent flap.”
In their circuitous ramblings, dusk had turned the sky to deep purple, and then to near black. The moon was not yet bright. A new brilliance bloomed on the horizon to the southeast, turning lodge roofs from white to rose. It shifted like a candle flame through wavy glass: expanding, retreating, and then burgeoning once more. Alarm made Everin’s heart catch.
“Skald’s balls.” His feet stopped moving of their own accord. Drem dragged him off the busy road under the scant shelter of a merchant’s canvas. The merchant, busy plucking spines from cactus fruit, looked up in welcome. Everin ignored him. “By the Aug—”
“Hsst,” Drem interrupted. “Hush.” The sidhe directed a scowl at the fruit merchant. “What is that? That light?”
The man walked around his counter to get a better look. When he glimpsed the rosy incandescence, he smiled. “Black Crom’s grace,” he said. “Isn’t it lovely? Lately it shines often, as victory approaches and he graces us more often with his presence.”
“Black Crom?” Everin paused in unhooking Myron’s gift of beer from his belt. Drem snatched it away and stole a swallow. The merchant looked between them, puzzled.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Called Crom Dubh by his equals. May all his enemies—”
“Fall before him. Thank you.” Drem placed a hand hard between Everin’s shoulders blades and pushed him on ahead. Once out of the merchant’s earshot, the sidhe began to laugh. Drem’s laughter was as piercing as its voice, silver bells in a winter sky. It drew attention from nearby tents. Drem stifled the sound with one hand.
“Crom Dubh.” Everin bit back more curses. “Not a tribesman, nor even a sand lord. I should have guessed. It needed something bigger to unite the desert.” He looked bitterly at Drem. “Does Faolan know?”
“That a sidhe elder marshals mortal against mortal?” Drem’s laughter subsided to musical giggles. “Would he have sent you, his best game piece, into the heart of it if he did? I think not.” Desma’s mouth curled, and that should have been warning enough, but Everin did not expect Drem’s betrayal and so when the sidhe sprang, Everin barely missed being knocked to the ground. As it was, Drem’s spear haft connected solidly with his ribs. Everin staggered, drawing his sword as he backpedaled.
“Hope,” said Drem. Desma’s spear whirled in its hand. “Until just now, you see, I’d mislaid it.” Drem reversed the spear haft and struck at Everin’s unguarded right side with the butt end. Everin blocked the blow, if not handily, then competently. The last time he’d had need to use a blade in earnest he’d been in Nicanor’s employ. The irony did not escape him.
Drem slashed low. Everin hopped the spear haft, dancing forward. Drem scuttled sideways, evading Everin’s thrust. Around them men, women, and children gathered, seeking entertainment. A few whistled approvingly and stomped their feet when Everin managed to dodge a third swat. The spear made Drem’s reach much longer than Everin’s own. Drem was faster, more agile. But Everin was unbloodied.
“You don’t want to end me.”
“Not yet,” agreed Drem, closing their distance. “Not until I visit Crom Dubh and see how things stand.” The sidhe leapt into the air, making spectators gasp. The spear butt came down with a crack on Everin’s left wrist. The gathered crowd groaned sympathy. Everin grabbed at his falling sword with his right hand just as his left went numb, bobbled the pommel, and went down on his knees in the road to grab it again.
A warrior in snakeskin and wolf pelt clapped her hands, enjoying the show. “Your woman is good,” she shouted cheerfully at Everin, “best apologize before she makes an eunuch of you.” The people around her began to hoot.
“If Faolan didn’t know, then things stand badly,” gasped Everin, back on his feet. His left arm from his fingers to his elbow felt dead. In sword’s play he was weaker with his right side than his left, but not incompetent. He clenched his jaw and set his guard. If Drem did not intend to kill him, all was far from lost. “Think. A new-waked sidhe elder? You’d be but a nuisance, an annoyance.”
Drem’s anticipation gleamed behind Desma’s yellow eyes. “With you over my shoulder, I’d surely be welcomed.”
Some things, Everin knew, were worse than death. He did not think twice. Sword in hand he wheeled and ran, plunging into the crowd, knocking unwary bystanders aside. Shouts and catcalls followed him off the road and into the nearest camp. He hopped a sleeping warrior, trod upon the cook fire, scattering sparks, and dashed on. From the sounds behind him, Drem was in fierce pursuit. In normal circumstances the sidhe would be far swifter. Everin could only hope the encompassing forest of steel and iron would deplete Drem’s vigor.
The tent city was a maze, and Everin meant to use that muddle to his advantage. The night was a riot of sounds and smells. He pushed through one group of lodges to the next, and then the next. A sleeping camel rose upright out of the dancing shadows near a back road, startling him badly. He glanced over his shoulder as he ran. The camel hissed and spat, and struggled to break free of its tether: Drem was still too close.
Stars blinked in the desert sky. The rose-red glow on the horizon pulsed. His left arm was turning to pins and needles. The sound of his boots pounding on sand seemed too loud in his ears. He’d run from sidhe pursuit more times than he cared to remember in trying to escape the barrows. He’d never been fast enough. In the end, his strength always ran out.
A thrush called in the night, from mere steps behind. Everin recognized the whistle for what it was: Drem’s sense of dark humor. Just as no thrush lived high on Skerrit’s Pass, so also were the birds nonexistent in the desert. Everin leapt behind a tinker’s cart, shoving it over into the road before he ran on. The tinker screamed outrage as her wares crashed onto the sand. Everin took advantage of the distraction to duck between a pyramid of stacked hay and a lodge tent. Puffing, he set his back to the stack, flexed his left hand as he listened for pursuit. A pony, hobbled near the hay, regarded him with suspicion.
Everin crouched, making himself as inconspicuous as possible. There was no purpose in moving on toward the sidhe gate any longer. He needed to get back up and over the mountains with word of the elder’s interference. To do that, he needed to lose Drem. Alone in the dark, weary to the point of hysteria, and surrounded by enemies, escape seemed an impossible and frightening task. Drem, like all its kin, was bred for the hunt.
Everin reached for Myron’s flask to ease his nerves, found it gone, and remembered that Drem sipped from it last. He choked back a snort of hysteria. The pony rolled an eye in his direction, clearly unimpressed. Everin sighed and sheathed his sword. A naked blade would draw notice, and he intended to blend in. He wrapped his veil around his face, rubbed the tension from his neck, glanced at the stars in the sky for orientation, and then stepped briskly out from behind the haystack and back onto the busy road, heading west.
None of the sand snakes paid him any attention at all. They were busy with talk of war and famine. He was one kilted warrior amidst many. The moon’s silver face ripened, outshining every torch. In the night the desert was a place of beauty and promise, every man and woman united in survival. Almost, he was Erastos again, Nicanor’s finest champion, a wolf running wild on the dunes. Almost, addled and sleep deprived, he believed he’d never left.
Almost, he made it to the western edge of the encampment. The mountains were again within sight; he could smell sage broom. He thought to hide himself in the wash, hole up in a gulley, and sleep. Relief made him lengthen his stride.
A thrush called from the road behind. Everin stumbled. He broke into a trot, pushing past a throng of opion befuddled, bare-chested men busy howling at the stars. The thrush called again, this time from the road ahead. Another answered. And a fourth, east and west and just behind. He stopped and drew his sword, surrounded and baffled by the trap.
Drem fell on him from above, as though from the moon itself, knocking Everin to the ground, pressing his face into the sand. Everin bucked, but when he inhaled, he breathed grit, and Drem, for all its child-sized frame, was heavier than it looked. He was pinned.
It had traded spear for dirk. It pressed the blade to Everin’s pulse point and leaned close. “You’ll be glad of me,” it said into his ear, just as it had promised on Skerrit’s Pass. Then it sat up and whistled. Everin lifted his head off the ground to better see his downfall.
The bare-chested men were not so opion addled as they appeared. Nor Pelagius a love-sick fool in truth. They surrounded Everin where he lay, spears and scimitars shining, Pelagius at their head. He squatted near Everin.
“I have a message for you, little king,” he said in the language of deep barrows and dark places. “The dullahan says your debt has come due.”
They hoisted Everin onto his feet and took his sword and bound his hands behind his back with braided leather rope. When he struggled, Pelagius backhanded him twice across his face. Everin tasted blood. Dizzy, defeated, he stumbled ahead of their brutal encouragement. His captors surrounded him in a tight circle, using sword point and muscle mass to disperse curious spectators. Hardened warriors scattered before Pelagius’s terse threats.
Everin looked for Drem but did see not his erstwhile companion anywhere.
Pelagius and his men marched him toward the rose-gold glow in the east. As they grew close to the gate, lodges became sparse. The encampments they did pass were lavish, tightly guarded by watchful warriors with ready swords. There was less noise; the energy of the common camp did not extend to this more private sanctum.
They rounded a corner and night turned to day. Here the torches were unlit, campfires banked low. Moonlight was nonexistent, subsumed by ruddy light. The world blushed. Everin lifted his chin and looked.
The gray stone arch was not a thing that belonged in the desert, between blazing skies and white sands, at the mercy of scraping winds. Impossibly green moss dripped in verdant swathes from its filigreed curvature, and down along two proud columns. Lush grass grew in an emerald sweep around its base. Blooming flowers scented the air; pink-budded saplings sprouted in the gate’s shadow.
The saplings, the red-flushed flowers, and the emerald grass were not native to arid places. They were not, as far as Everin could tell, a flatland species, nor even coastal. He was certain he had never seen their like before.
“This way,” ordered Pelagius, shoving Everin in the direction of a solitary lodge erected within striking distance of the gate. More armed warriors patrolled the camp perimeter. They carried scimitars and spears, bow and arrow. They took care not to step too close to the unnatural, flowering oasis. The rose-gold star within the gate turned their yellow eyes orange.
Pelagius propelled Everin into the lodge. Everin tripped on an edge of sisal carpet and went down. His bound hands were useless to break his fall. He landed on his shoulder and rolled onto his stomach, again facedown. There he lay still, a mouse hoping to elude the notice of a hungry hawk. It did him no good.
“Well done, Pelagius. Free his hands. He’s beyond any chance for escape, and I wish to see what time outside the mounds has done to his face.”
Everin knew that voice, he knew the lilting music of it. He smelled musty scales and dusty feathers and the odor of wet, fertile soil. Because he was not a better man, he cowered, curling in upon himself, hunching his shoulders.
It did him no good.
Pelagius was not gentle. He scraped Everin’s flesh as he severed the leather rope. Then he grabbed him by the hair and hauled him up to kneeling. He grasped Everin’s chin in unkind fingers, forced his gaze upward. “Crom Dubh wishes to see your face, mortal.”
He seemed an ordinary man, to have the entire desert at his beck and call. Of average size, and average comeliness, his expression unreadable. He wore a snakeskin vest and wolf’s pelt around his shoulders. There were many black feathers sewn onto his sleeves and kilt. His feet were bare of sandals, his dark hair pulled off a high brow into a loose tail.
He’d been standing near a brazier, warming his hands over opion smoke and sage broom incense. He crossed sisal carpets without a sound, his movements sinuous and wrong, contrary as flourishing pink flowers in dry desert.
Everin heard invisible pinions dragging on sisal. Crom Dubh bent to better see Everin’s face. A mediocre man with a mediocre smile, he huffed bland amusement.
“Little king,” the dullahan said sweetly, his breath hot on Everin’s brow. “Faolan is dead. Your debt to him is discharged. But you and I still have a score to settle. Stand.”
Slowly, Everin found his feet. Pelagius’s steel bit between his shoulder blades, a reminder. He stared blankly around the lodge, waiting for relief or sorrow and feeling neither. Faolan had been captor first, friend much later. He couldn’t remember a time before the aes si’s interference in his life. It seemed impossible Faolan was gone, but the dullahan did not tell lies.
He glimpsed Drem standing alone against the tent wall. The sidhe’s shock made Desma’s mouth tremble. When Drem saw Everin looking, it glanced away.
“You did not know? You did not feel the geis lift when he died? Ah, I see from your expression you did not. He was kind to you,” the dullahan guessed. “You are an interesting plaything. Faolan enjoyed a tragedy. An infant princeling, traded by his mother to the Tuath Dé in return for her royal husband’s life. The rightful heir to the mortal throne exiled forever beneath the earth because his progenitor loved him less. I imagine you suffered, knowing that. Faolan was attracted to human suffering, a moth to flame.”
The dullahan stretched. It should have filled the tent to bursting. Its shadow did, darkening sisal carpet with an impression of wings spread and a coiled, lashing tail. Everin saw the shadow and Crom Dubh with his unremarkable smile, and his mind boggled. It was as if, he thought, the shadow cast the man.
“Human suffering is of no interest to me,” the dullahan confessed. “Nor kindness. But I will be fair, so long as you fulfill your obligation.”
Everin ground out, “What is it you want of me, monster?”
Pelagius hit him again for his disdain. “He is Crom Dubh. Show respect.”
“That one,” the dullahan said, regarding Pelagius fondly, “I caught the very night I left you on the mountain top. Tending his family’s camels in the foothills. He was just a child, then. I recognized his ambition. No royal princeling, Pelagius, but he and his family have grown to be very useful. They appreciate malice and I reward each handsomely for his efforts. Almost, Pelagius’s tribe is as useful to me as my lesser sidhe. Of a certain, they are more resourceful.”
Everin did not respond. It crossed his mind then that he might be wise in provoking his own death. Pelagius, he suspected, would be easily incensed. And it would not be a terrible end, so long as the sand snake knew how to use his blade.
Don’t, said the dullahan, silver bells in his skull. I will only bring you back, as many times as it takes. A painful process, a waste of time, and we both know you would not be unchanged. Die on the battlefield, if you like, but not until I’m done with you.
“On the battlefield,” repeated Everin. His head swam. He wondered what Pelagius would do if he fainted.
“You did well for yourself after I left.” The dullahan padded across the lodge to the brazier. He spread blunt-fingered hands, warming them over the coals. “Erastos, desert wolf, hero of the dunes. Your enemies, I’m told, did indeed fall beneath your blade, easily as sidhe before iron.”
The point of Pelagius’s sword twitched against Everin’s spine.
“When you vanished from the dunes, Nicanor mourned you as a lost brother,” the dullahan mused. “And wept again when I told him just this evening that you were returned to us, alive and hardy, in the hour of our victory. He rejoices that you will lead the charge beside him with the rest of my heroes. These desert people are a courageous sort, but not unlike my lesser sidhe, they need incentive to take on a difficult task. The gate has been a task more difficult than most. Almost, it would be easier to convince them to move an army over the mountains than to convince one warrior to cross that threshold.”
“It’s the camels, Crom Dubh,” Pelagius said with the air of a man who had explained this shame one too many times. “The camels will not go near it. In the desert, a man relies on his camel more so even than his sword.”
The dullahan stretched again. Invisible pinions scraped. “No matter,” he said. “We will make a show of it, and they will be convinced, from behind and ahead. It will not take much. They desperately want to believe. They’ve been so long without—” The dullahan blinked over the brazier at Drem.
“Hope,” Drem offered quietly.
“So long without hope they’re willing to follow anyone to greener fields.”
“You want me to lead an army against my own people.”
“The flatlanders were never your people. It was the desert you ran to when I flew you from the barrows. One last thing,” the dullahan said, as if in afterthought. “Drem tells me Faolan taught you the ways of the tunnels beneath flatland fields and villages. I expect you can recall those youthful lessons. I trust you will make use of them for my benefit.”