Page 78 of Beyond the Shadowed Earth
Gasping for breath, Eda scrambled back up to where Morin was fighting another of the spirits. There was a jagged scratch down one side of his face, and he was guarding his ayrrah as he fought, the bird too injured to protect himself.
The winged spirits laughed, a sound like steel scraping stone, and gathered themselves to dive again.
Eda stood shoulder to shoulder with Morin, her hand tight around her knife hilt, blood gushing down her hand. She glanced at Morin and he nodded, grim. They couldn’t survive another attack.
The spirits rushed toward them, all shadow and malice and clacking bone swords; Eda and Morin raised their puny blades high.
And then something leapt past them and collided with the spirits head on, and the spirits were fighting that something instead of Eda and Morin. Eda stared, dumbfounded.
It took her a moment to make sense of what she saw in the whirl of shadow: the creature who’d come to their defense was a cat of some kind, a leopard perhaps, light colored and spotted, with massive paws and huge sharp teeth.
Morin sagged with relief beside her, and Eda realized that he wasn’t surprised by the leopard’s presence. He adjusted his grip on the dagger and ran forward to help.
The spirits drew back, screeching and seething and dripping shadow blood, and then they beat their black wings and flew away, leaving Morin and Eda alone with the spotted cat on the mountain. The leopard stared after the spirits, crouched and ready to spring again if they were to return.
“It’s all right,” said Morin, stepping up to the cat and laying his hand on its shoulders. “They’re gone.”
“He must have called them back,” said Eda. “Rudion must have called them back.”
And then the leopard let out a long strange sigh and glinted suddenly with sparks of gold light. Its body stretched and strained andchanged,and a moment later Tainir laid there, trembling, claw marks raking all down her bare shoulders.
The wind was searing cold on the mountainside, and Morin took off his poncho and pulled it over his sister’s head. She shook and shook, unable to get warm.
It was Eda who stumbled about in a daze, gathering wood for a fire, finding flint in her pack, laying the sparks and coaxing them to burn.
It grew swiftly dark, and Morin and Tainir and Eda huddled round the flames, Tainir still trembling uncontrollably. Morin’s ayrrah perched with his huge head on Morin’s knee, his wide dark wing broken, unusable. Eda’s and Tainir’s ayrrah were nowhere to be found, and Eda knew, without wanting to know, that they wouldn’t be coming back again.
“Tainir’s not usually like this when she changes,” said Morin, his voice low and tight. “Fighting those spirits has weakened her, like their shadow stuff has poisoned her blood.”
And Eda realized that Tainir must have shifted into her leopard form—a snow leopard, Morin told her—almost daily on their journey, every time she disappeared to go hunting. “Our father could change, too,” said Morin, as he wrapped his arm around his sister and held her tight. “He did it only rarely, but I saw him once—he transformed himself into a mountain goat. But he didn’t like it. He said it made his head feel odd, his thoughts go dim. He was afraid if he changed too often he wouldn’t be able to become human again. I was always jealous of Tainir—her changes are usually so effortless.”
“But you can talk to birds,” said Eda, part of her thinking absently that it turned out Tainirwaspart mountain goat after all.
Morin laughed a little, though his face was creased with worry and pain. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I can.”
Eda’s eyes went to his torn and bloody shirtsleeve. “You’d better let me have a look at your shoulder.”
He let her peel the sleeve away, pull the shirt up over his head. His bare skin pricked with gooseflesh in the frigid night. The cut was jagged, and deep enough Eda glimpsed Morin’s bone. Nausea rose acrid in her throat.
Morin peered at his wound in the firelight, and Eda thought he turned a little green.
“Tell me how to fix it,” she begged him.
He took a breath, and told her to dig the medical pouch from his pack. “Can you sew?”
A fair question. Empresses definitely did not, but her mother had taught her embroidery as a child. It was different, stitching Morin’s flesh back together. Bloody and wet and awful, and she knew with each prick of her needle she was causing him more pain. But finally she pulled the wound closed, and tied off the thread. She bandaged it clumsily, and then helped him pull his shirt on again.
She felt more awkward around him than she had in days.
“Now let me look at you,” he said.
She acquiesced, flushing furiously as she shrugged out of her poncho and let him examine the cuts on her own shoulders. She drew off one sleeve, hugging her poncho fiercely to her chest and turning her back to the firelight. She’d never felt more exposed in her life.
“The scratches aren’t deep,” he assured her after a moment. “The one on your neck is the worst.” He smoothed salve on all her cuts with his quick fingers. The salve tingled. Her skin sparked where he touched her. She was relieved to draw her shirt on again, to tie her poncho tight around her throat.
His eyes caught hers across the fire. Something pulsed between them. Something she didn’t want to name. She thought of a wicked smile in the ballroom. Hungry kisses on a rooftop. She closed herself off, turned her face away. She was Tuer, shut in the mountain. She wouldn’t let Morin be Raiva, calling her name for an eternity in the dark.
“Even with Tainir’s help, the spirits should have destroyed us,” she said. “Why did Rudion call them off? What are we going to do when they come back again?”
