Astryx crouched so they were face-to-face, a distant candle-flame of empathy in her icy blue eyes.
“I understand what’s happening here,” she said. “It’s easy for me to forget, but I think I know what you’re feeling. Seven or eight hundred years ago, I might have felt the same. A sense of responsibility for events you can’t control. A conviction that things could have been different,if only.”
“Why don’t you feel that now?” demanded Fern, but quieter with the elf’s face so close.
“In all the years I’ve been doing this, can you imagine how many jobs have turned sour? It’s more than you’d believe. And after a while, it becomes clear that those feelings you’re having aren’t practical. Sometimes, the ill turn is your own mistake; sometimes, it’s not. But that depth of feeling? It can’t survive thenumbers.”
“I think that’s supposed to sound reasonable, but it only sounds awful,” said Fern.
Astryx stood again. “I don’t wish her ill, and I’ve done what I can to protect her. It’s possible she escaped. Unlikely, but you never know.”
“So . . . what now?”
“We go back to camp. We journey to the next village. We go our separate ways. And onward and again.”
An hour later they trudged out of the woods and into view of the campsite—only one of them lacerated and aching. The first thing Fern noticed was Bucket calmly cropping grass by the roadside. Apparently the threat of hazferou had never materialized. Or he’d kicked them to death, she supposed.
The second thing she noticed was Zyll, just as calmly sitting beside the expired campfire. She perched atop a neat coil of the rope that had once bound her, her coat of many pockets puddling on the hemp. The goblin’s sharp-toothed grin was barely visible over the creature clutched in her lap—a black-and-white hen the size of a turkey, with long feathered frills capping its feet.
“Chuptik,”declared Zyll, lifting the bird and gesturing with it, much to the chicken’s consternation.
No,nota chicken, Fern realized.
Chickens did not have cruelly hooked beaks and fangs and poisonous green eyes, nor did they hiss like a kettle on the boil.
The goblin hugged the indignant hazferou to her chest and snuggled her face into the spines and extravagant feathers of its back.
“Is shereallya prisoner?” asked Fern.
Astryx scratched her ear. “Hm.”
“Honestly, she’s not very good at it.”
7
Astryx made a game attempt to separate Zyll from the hazferou. This would have been easier had either of them cooperated, but the creature nipped at any approaching fingers that were not green, and Zyll’s lips writhed closed over her teeth as she growled deep in her throat and clutched the hen closer to her coat.
Fern discovered that the goblin only seemedtrulymenacing when her incredibly sharp teeth were hidden.
The elf regarded the demon bird and the goblin with a frown and fists on hips, then squatted before them both, a choice that put her face far closer to that fanged beak than Fern would ever have dared.
Snagging the loose end of the coil of rope, Astryx held it up in front of Zyll’s eyes. “I have a feeling you understand me perfectly. So, I’m going to offer you a bargain.”
Zyll’s eyes narrowed to calculating slits, but the growling ceased.
“I won’t pretend to understand whatthisis,” she said, gesturing between bird and goblin. “And I have no idea how you slipped your bonds, but I can assure you that I knowmuchmore complicated knot-work, and have dispatched plenty of hazferou in my time. It wouldn’t even be an inconvenience to do it again.However.If you’ll let me rebind you without a fuss—just the wrists this time—then I’ll let this creature live.” She tilted her head toward the hazferou, which clucked aggressively.
Zyll blinked very slowly, and with equal slowness her pointed pink tongue emerged from between her lips in an inscrutable expression. Lazy. Somehow catlike.
Then she stood, placed the hazferou carefully on the ground, and thrust both wrists in Astryx’s direction.
“Holy shit!” cried Fern, shrinking away from the hazferou as it hopped onto the buckboard between her and Zyll.
This despite Astryx depositing the creature in the underbrush at least two leagues back.
Its evil green eyes regarded her with a species of malicious disdain before it shuffled closer to the goblin, who burbled happily and buried her face in its side.
The furry hind limb of some unfortunate woodland creature dangled from its beak for an unsettling moment until, with a gulping cluck, the leg vanished down its gullet.
