Rosa breathed, and squeezed.
The bang was so loud, even through the earmuffs Abuelita had made her wear! But the clay shingle jumped and shattered.
“I got it, Abuela! I got it, didn’t I?” Without thinking, Rosa rolled out of her careful belly-down position to grin up at her grandmother’s gentle face. But she kept the muzzle down out of habit, for that she had been taught long before she had ever been allowed to pull a trigger.
A proud smile wreathed Abuelita’s face. “Excellent, my child! Did it frighten you?”
“No,” Rosa boasted. “I want to go again!”
Her grandmother cast a quick, worried glance at the sun. “Next time. Your mother will be expecting you home.”
“Can’t I stay here tonight?”
“I wish, child.” Her grandmother’s hand touched Rosa’s cheek, a feather light brush. Rosa jerked back out of reflex, before she could remember that the bruise was almost healed, and besides which, Abuela was not Mama, never never never.
“Oh. My dear,” whispered her grandmother. “How I wish…”
But wishes never came true.
* * *
“You never speak of your mother,” Hou Yi said, when Rosa ran short of words.
“No,” Rosa agreed.
“I see.”
Rosa had tried to turn her back on her mother when she ran, to restart her life for only herself. How ironic that the poison she’d ended up wrapping her life around had been, in the end, her mother’s legacy.
No. Her prejudices were her own. She would not blame some long-ago influence that she had fled from in every other way.
“My mother was not a … kind woman,” Rosa said instead. “I sometimes feel like she must have loved me … but I think I made myself forget those parts. And the grundwirgen—she was spiteful. Small comments, all the time, about how unnatural and dangerous they were. I told myself I didn’t believe her, that I would be better.”
“Grundwirgen.” Hou Yi rolled the sounds around in her mouth, badly mispronouncing them. “What a complicated word. It’s your Western term for magic users, is it not?”
“Not quite,” Rosa said. “It is what we call any intelligent animal. Humans who are cursed to animal form, or witches who transform themselves, or nonhuman creatures born with speech and intellect.”
“What about gods who take the form of both beasts and humans?”
Rosa suspected, but was not certain, that the gods in this part of the world were a pantheon of extremely powerful sorcerers. But she had seen much here that she had never encountered before, so she reserved judgment. “I suppose so, yes.”
“What of demons?” Hou Yi said.
“If they become animals, yes.”
“What of the—” She said a word Rosa didn’t know.
“I don’t know. You have many more grundwirgen than we do. There is much more magic in use here.”
“A very strange term,” Hou Yi said. “Not very specific. The sunbirds are the children of a god, but they are a plague.”
Rosa frowned. She’d insisted, when she first joined Hou Yi—“You told me they are not grundwirgen.”
Hou Yi waved a careless hand. “These are dumb, yes. But others … I faced some in my youth who were perfectly capable of reason, but reveled in burning the countryside and countenanced nothing but their own amusement. Intelligent or not, beasts or not, such menaces must be removed.”
Rosa had no good answer. “Perhaps,” she said finally. She was too tired, and this was prodding old wounds from a direction she had not expected tonight. “But perhaps I am not the one to remove them.”
She settled back, staring up at the stars. The fire had burned down to a pocket of glowing ash beside them. The night was so clear, the stars so bright, and Rosa had no idea where they were. It might as well have been another world.
“You need rest,” Hou Yi said.
It was true. Rosa’s voice was scraping into uselessness anyway. But she’d begun, and perhaps Hou Yi would take the opening of her story as the promise it was. “What’s your plan? Where are we going?”
Hou Yi shifted, and sighed—a grant of permission. “We will move in the light. He is flaunting his trail at us.” She paused. “His name is Feng Meng. He was my apprentice, many years ago.”
Rosa didn’t speak, didn’t press.
“He surprised me in the woods. With a club, after he could not best me with a bow. He still would not have succeeded if the townsfolk hadn’t been on his side … they left me when they assumed their work was done.” She lowered her head slightly. “His motive was jealousy, but I am not sure he did wrong. Not then.”
Rosa could understand that feeling. Whatever Hou Yi had done to swallow her in such guilt, however … it was not for Rosa to say the scales had been rebalanced, but Feng Meng’s chosen revenge was burning a swath across the countryside. Rosa saw again the girl who had come running, gasping; saw the fleeing villagers, the burning farms; remembered the dead man’s face staring into her own.
“He does wrong now,” she said.
“Yes,” Hou Yi answered. “And I must—we must stop him.”
PART TWO
Rosa was not sure whether she felt better or worse when she woke the next day under the wan light of a white morning sun. Every muscle had stiffened and cramped from sleeping on the ground, and every bruise from the fight the night before moaned at her when she tried to move. At least she could breathe a little more easily, though her throat and lungs felt scoured out by a pumice stone.
Hou Yi must not have come away unscathed either, but she gave no sign. She’d restarted the fire by the time Rosa woke, and had a hare spitted over it.
“Where is Feng Meng leading us?” Rosa asked. “Do you know?”
“The sunbirds come from an island,” Hou Yi said. “Just off the coast, in the sea to the south and east. They mostly keep to that place. I was wondering why they had begun venturing so far into towns and villages—usually they do not, unless they are malicious.”
Maliciousness would mean grundwirgen. Rosa could only be glad she was not faced with that moral dilemma.
“The bird from last night seems to have returned in that direction. The trail of Feng Meng likewise points us on that path.”
Rosa nodded. She had assumed Hou Yi had been tracking. “You think he has the sunbirds under his control?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. He may be studying sorcery, but it’s also possible he only baited them out. The island is wild, steeped in magic, and home to many dangerous creatures. I’ve journeyed there once before, when I was seeking—well, it was many years ago. I think it is Feng Meng’s chosen arena for some final contest with me.”
“You’re better than he is,” Rosa said, again remembering a snippet of conversation from their standoff that she had not grasped at the time. “He never matched your skill with a bow.”
“No. But I am not under the illusion this contest will be even.”
Of course not. And who was to say Feng Meng would even choose archery to duel with, when he knew his former mentor could best him?