“I will tell you a tale of power that strikes like a snake out of the air.” Sgathaich hissed her words and wove them in the air with her fingers. While the Sethian Skin danced away from the power and mocked it, Sgathaich finished in whispers, “Not to bite to coil, how the power grows when you struggle.” She lifted her hands, fingertips humming with whispering song, and watched as a haze of serpentine coils encircled the arms of the Sethian Skin. She pulled on the coils, used them to pull herself behind him like she’d leashed herself to the fleeing creature.
“I will tell you a story of an eagle’s speedy dive and outstretched claws.” At this, the air around her howled, wind eddying up beneath her. She had no wings, but the tale bore her into the air. She wrote the words of the story in the air with her hands, and the magic ran down to her feet. Where moments ago her limbs had ached with the sleeplessness of war and the weakness of her age, suddenly the felt powerful, her claws sharper and longer. “How it dives!”
The Sethian Skin dove into a wooden doorway just as she fell, and her empowered talons cut through snow and ice and left gouges in the paving stones where he’d been standing. She heard him laughing as he vanished into a warm, red hallway, and huffed in aggravation. Sgathaich took a moment to glance behind her, watching the light of northland weaponry tear through the city. She said, “In Pharaul the children get home safely; clever and stubborn, the children stay close to one another and evade both the bite and terror of war.” She wrote these words in the light and song of magic, words of ancient script shivering in the air, and then she sent it away into the city.
The summoned serpent returned to her; no longer able to hold onto the Sethian Skin, it coiled about her arm. The summoned eagle lit upon her shoulder. These were ephemeral shapes, as invisible as eddies of wind in the snow.
Sgathaich leaned down and followed the Sethian Skin into the tiny open door, out of the chill snow of Pharaul and into the warm air of whatever cursed place he’d fled to. As she stepped in, the serpent and the eagle vanished, and the weary pains of her body returned suddenly. Crouching in the narrow hallway, she still had to bend her head to crouch in the low place, shoulders brushing red cloth hanging on the ceiling.
“Please don’t touch the fabric if you aren’t going to purchase it.” The Sethian Skin stood, narrow and small but for the broad hat he hid beneath. Beneath the hat, he smiled with onyx-black teeth.
She leaned forward onto her knees, prepared to chase him beastlike through this tunnel if she had to. “I’ll tell a tale…” She began, but couldn’t feel the magic in her voice or in her hand. She watched the walls covered in purple and red cloth, how they shivered in the wind. “What is this place?”
“My warren,” answered the Sethian Skin. “If you’ve told my tale, you know what that means.”
“A wandering house.” Sgathaich tore her coat off and cast it out the door she’d stepped through, its metal buckles in the snow. She was narrow beneath it, wrapped tight in white rags that imperfectly concealed tufts of feathers. From pouches about her waist, she tossed metal and wooden tools, pens and blades, coins of silver and bronze, all back into Pharaul. She divested herself of all her wood, metal, and earth.
“That’s the idea. You might just survive.” The Sethian Skin lifted his hands, skin on his fingers splitting to show the bone beneath. “Or you would, but I’ve an understanding with the Maniaque, and my magic works just fine.” A slam came from down the hallway, the echoing bang of breaking wood, and it came with the shout of many men. It was enough to make the Sethian Skin look over his shoulder in surprise. “Who would dare-?”
Sgathaich pounced, shouldering into the dark man hard. More than double his size, she sent him rolling, then pivoted around to grab at his face with her taloned foot. Fast as a rodent, he squirmed from side to side away from her claws. For just a moment, the two looked like an eagle and its black-furred prey, talons snapping at a writhing body, and then the Sethian Skin bolted away.
