“Who are you talking to?”

“Um, what?”

There was a moment of universal confusion, then Qanath gripped his elbow. She pointed past him at the monster with her free hand. It kept its eyes fixed on Havec and its mouth fell open to reveal the rows of ferocious teeth only a predator would sport. “That?”

“Her?”

“Havec, what do you see?”

“A lady.”

“Please draw your sword,” she said with every iota of calm she could muster.

To her eternal gratitude, he didn’t question, and went a step further, drawing both. “Why am I threatening this woman?”

“Can you describe her in more detail?”

“Somewhere in her thirties, maybe? Tabbi. Tall.”

“Long flowing hair? Pretty? Curvaceous? Not wearing clothes?”

“Um, yes.”

“And she’s singing to you?”

“Why do you say that like you’re guessing?” Uncertainty had crept into his voice.

Stooping swiftly, she seized up his bag, shrugging it awkwardly over her own. Then she took him by the back of the shirt. “We’re passing under the bridge to get back to the road, I think it’ll be easier than trying to climb back up the cliff on this side. I won’t let you trip or hit your head. You just please keep your eyes on the pretty lady.”

It took as much as fifteen minutes to move roughly fifteen feet. They would have made slow going along the bottom of the ravine amidst the raging waters in any circumstances, and she wasn’t letting Havec turn his back on that thing. She had to put a hand on his head as they went under the bridge, but he didn’t question it, allowing her to guide him. She lost sight of the thing more than once because she had to take her eyes off it in order to pick a path for their feet, and for the length of several minutes as she sought a way up the far bank, she couldn’t see it.

When they regained the road, panting and ragged with prolonged tension, the ravine downstream of the bridge came back into view. The vantage came with an unwelcome surprise: the thing had moved as much as ten feet up the stream, following them. Havec’s eyes had found it, too, and he must be completely confused; she was very glad he had reacted with wariness instead of stubbornness. There was one tiny pause while he put the swords away and took back his bag, then the two of them took off running north.

They jogged for several miserable miles, neither of them willing to stop while the rocky, forested ridges hemmed them in. The moment they came to a place where the trees began to fall back from the road and the steep slopes eased, the two of them collapsed into the undergrowth. Qanath lay on her side and laughed hysterically until she ran out of breath, then crawled a few feet away and vomited.

Havec sat in the grass with his arms braced on his knees, breathing heavily through an open mouth. His eyes were fixed on her. “Please say it’s time to explain.”

Writhing out of the pack, she rolled onto her back and stared at the fleecy clouds drifting serenely by overhead, thinking again how surreal it was that such horror could walk freely on this beautiful day. “We should be dead. I’m not exaggerating: at this moment you and I are incredibly lucky not to be dead.”

“So… that was a mean pretty lady?”

“That wasn’t a woman, it was a monster. A chegu, I’m almost sure of it. To me, it looked like a hideous ghoulish thing.”

There was a fleeting silence, then he said doubtfully, “It was bewitching me?”

“With its song. Don’t ask for more detail, I didn’t study bestiology in school. The song is a spell that shows you what you want to see.”

“What I want to see?” he repeated doubtfully.

She had meant to respond, but there came a rustling in the nearby grass. Havec was on his feet as she rolled onto her side. Crawling on all fours like a lizard, the chegu had tracked them down.

Qanath scrambled backward frantically until Havec was between them, although the thing still had eyes only for him and acted as though she didn’t exist. She had no idea whether she was just that unappetizing; she couldn’t recall that chegu only ate men. Havec did have a lot more meat on him, and it came straight for him.

He hesitated, though, and why would he not? To his eyes, a grown woman, stark naked, was crawling amidst the roadside weeds. Strange to see, but not worth killing a fellow person over. Now it was so close, Qanath could smell its fetid breath. “Havec, I swear to you, that thing means to eat you, I wouldn’t make something like that up.”

There was a note of desperation in his voice: “Is there nothing you can do to help?”

She knew he was alluding to her sorcery, but there was an easier way. Thrusting herself to her feet, she stepped up behind him and stuck the tips of both pinky fingers in his ears. She knew it had worked, because the instant she did it, he let out a shout of revulsion and lunged out of her grasp.

The chegu took a swipe at him and he kicked its claws away, slashing at its head. It scuttled back with the unnerving dexterity of a spider, then reared onto its hind legs. As Havec closed with it, it danced forward to meet him, bouncing on its toes like a boxer in the ring. It swiped at him, swiped again, and Qanath could have sworn there were moldy gobbets of rotting tissue dangling from its claws.

Havec waved his swords before him in a dizzying pattern as if to fend it off. Is head vibrated side to side, eyes flickering, as it watched the flashing metal whip whip whip. Qanath and the chegu were both incredibly surprised when he broke the pattern just as they were getting the rhythm, taking a long step forward and driving one of his swords through its gut. As its paws reached instinctively to grasp the sword impaling it, he swung the other and cut off its head.

When it fell dead in the grass at his feet, Havec cursed and spat at it as if it had offended him. He took the time to wipe the swords off very carefully in the grass. The body of the chegu lay where it had fallen, head vanished amidst the foliage growing along the roadside verge. It put off a reek of carrion as if it had been dead for a week.

Once he had put his swords away, he came to join her. “Come on, let’s get out of sight of the road and sit down. You just fell down a cliff, what say we call it a day?”

***

They settled in a clear space at the top of a hill to the west maybe a quarter mile further on. They had passed up several likely places along the way, both of them on the east side of the road. They had no proof there were other chegu in the area, and if there were, why would the monsters be stymied by crossing a few feet of dirt? Neither of them was willing to rest there anyway, however little logic was at work.

Havec felt absolutely terrible about the girl and readily cleared a space of sticks and rocks for them to rest while she stared at a tree. Bad enough she’d ripped half her face off on the cliff; he had done a decent job of crushing her. It was a miracle she didn’t have any broken bones, and he still wasn’t positive about her ribs. The way she was hunched over, favoring her middle, might just be a reaction to the scrapes, but it might be more.

It was true he had refused to strike a bargain with her or ask for her help, and in his mind, this placed a solid upward limit on what she had the right to ask of him. But bargain or not, at the end of the day she was helping him, and he knew it. Whether he said it aloud or not, it put him in her debt. At the very least this must mean he owed her not breaking her neck accidentally by being a reckless twit.

He glanced at her while he dug through his bag, wondering whether he wanted to ask. Six years now he had spent in this country, aware that it was infinitely larger and older and richer in history than his own, yet all that time he had passed indoors, looking out a window, wondering what the world outside was like. It had left him painfully curious about the place. Xar had been willing to tell him stories, but only if he asked; the value of every piece of information must be weighed against his pride. The servants had loved him and doted on him, but they’d spent their entire lives within ten miles of where they were born.

This close scrape with the supernatural had him intrigued. The generic beauty of the woman it revealed to him was pedestrian, especially compared to its secret face. Based on what Qanath told him, it sounded like a siren, at least in its hunting habits, a creature they had legends of back home. But although it might resemble one of Moritia’s home-grown legends, that made it no less surreal to have seen it up close. He hadn’t gone exploring as a boy, seeking out the myths of his people and confirming or refuting them. Roaming about in the wilds having adventures was something princes did only in tales.

Once they both had a long drink of water, he handed out food. He wasn’t hungry, but Etheg had always fed him when she knew he was upset. Qanath held the food he had given her without eating, eyes turning repeatedly onto the nearby trees.

When a deeper shadow passed above, he glanced idly up. A formation of three birds went by, fleeting south, but there was something wrong with the scale. His mouth fell open. “No.”

Qanath glanced at him, then followed his eyes. When she saw what he was staring at, she grunted. “Sons of Kur.”

He kept his eyes on the winged shapes until they dwindled into specs and vanished. He hadn’t needed the girl to tell him what he was looking at; for birds to appear that size, they would have been close enough to touch. What had just soared by above them was as big as a horse. To the best of his knowledge, there were only two types of winged creatures that grew that big, and the Great Birds stuck to the wild places, venturing down out of their lofty eyries only to confer with shamans who earned their respect. They didn’t fly in numbers over the Empire’s heartland, mostly abandoned or not.

He heaved a sigh and yanked off his boots. “Are you really not impressed or can you just not admit it because you don’t want to sound like the ‘barbarian’?”

“That would be pretty embarrassing,” she agreed.

He had been trying to start a fight, but that made him laugh. Then he shook his head and put the food away. “Why ‘sons’? Can dragonriders not be girls?”

She huffed a laugh. “You have hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

“I feel like the obvious joke is just too on-the-nose.”

She rolled her eyes. “I meant the aviators can be any gender, it’s dragons themselves that are always boys.”