Karigan batted them away with her staff, but her efforts lagged in comparison to the sheer speed in which the birds maneuvered around her. She kept them off her, at least, and she was grateful her pack protected her back though it slowed her own movements.

Yates screamed. A hummingbird stabbed his thigh. She followed Graelalea’s example and grabbed it out, its body nothing in her hand. It flicked a long thread of forked tongue at her and she smashed it onto the paving stones of the road.

She ducked just in time as another hummingbird soared for her eye. One jammed its beak into the leather of her boot. She kicked it off. Another scored the back of her hand, leaving a trail of blood.

Private Porter called out as he wobbled precariously on a loose cobble, his arms flailing. The cloud of hummingbirds paused as one, hovering, wings beating, waiting. Porter crashed to the ground, and before he could even attempt to rise, the hummingbird cloud swarmed him, a moving mass of green and silver and crimson blanketing him. He flailed and thrashed but could not dislodge the birds.

“Quickly!” Graelalea cried.

Several of the company fell to their knees beside Porter grabbing handfuls of feathers and beaks from his convulsing body, while Karigan and the others tried to bat away airborne birds around them. Porter’s screams rang through the forest and curdled Karigan’s blood to her toes.

Soon the screams weakened, and then stopped entirely. The swarm of birds lifted away, slow and ungainly with engorged bellies, and flew back into the woods. Karigan turned away from Porter’s gruesome remains.

“The life is gone from him,” Graelalea announced. “He should be put to rest in whatever manner your customs dictate.”

“What of those birds?” Ard demanded. He bled from numerous wounds. “What if they come back?”

“They shall not return. Not for the time being, for they are sated.”

Porter’s cloak was laid over his body, and a cairn of loose cobblestones pulled from the roadbed was raised over him. Meanwhile, the Eletians, who escaped the ordeal largely unscathed, tended the wounds of the Sacoridians with their evaleoren salve. Karigan’s mind eased as the Eletian woman Hana spread the fragrant salve into the wound on her hand. Compared to her companions, Karigan had fared well.

Once the wounds were treated and the cairn finished, Grant stabbed Porter’s sword into the earth near where his right hand would be and mumbled a few halting words asking the gods to receive the good private into the heavens. When he finished, the Sacoridians made the sign of the crescent moon while the Eletians looked on as curious bystanders.

While Grant took time to sort through Porter’s belongings, discarding most things but keeping tools essential to the mission, Karigan gazed away from the grave and down the road. She had hardly known Porter, but did not doubt he was a good, brave man. Otherwise he would not have been chosen for the expedition. His fate could have just as easily been hers or Yates’—any of theirs. It still could be.

She picked dainty iridescent feathers from her clothes. Hummingbirds, she thought with a shake of her head. She’d expected confrontations with one of the other horrid creatures that dwelled in the forest, but hummingbirds? She would never regard them in the same light again, even on her own side of the wall.

When wings flashed in the branches above, she thought that despite Graelalea’s reassurance, the birds had come back for another attack.

OWL

The wings that brushed the air, however, were large and white, nothing at all like a tiny hummingbird. When the winter owl settled on a limb and tucked its wings to its sides, it looked like a clump of snow until it swiveled its head to gaze at its surroundings. Karigan realized she was squinting at the owl. The white of its plumage was so stark in the gloom of the forest that it hurt her eyes.

The others came beside her to look at it as well.

“Where are your arrows?” Grant demanded of the Eletians. “We should kill it.”

“No.” Graelalea replied. “It is not a forest denizen, and of no danger to us.”

“How do you know? Those other birds looked harmless enough until ...” His sharp gesture took in Porter’s cairn and the hummingbird corpses littering the road.

“I know this owl is not of this forest, and that is enough.”

“She’s right,” Lynx murmured. His eyes were closed in concentration. “It’s from the other side of the wall. Besides, it would not retain its snowy plumage in this forest.”

“I saw one yesterday,” Karigan said, “when I went out for a ride. What would it be doing here? Is it lost?”

“Lost? I do not think so,” Graelalea replied. “It is not here by accident. Such owls are revered in Eletia.” She stroked one of the white feathers braided into her hair. A light shone in her eyes. “We call the winter owl enmorial, memory.”

The owl preened, looking entirely at home in the dark woods. It paid them little heed, as if they were beneath its notice.

“Why memory?” Karigan asked.

“Memory is what it keeps.”

Karigan sighed. It was a typical Eletian response.

The owl spread its wings and launched from its limb, circling around their heads and winding down in a glide until it alighted on Graelalea’s outstretched wrist, its talons doing her no harm because of her armor. She and the owl gazed at one another for a long moment, before it lifted once more into the air. They watched it vanish above the trees and into the mist, a lone white feather twirling down back to Earth as the only proof it had been real.