The coach and horses were not touching the ground. I was pretty sure they could not.

I glanced back at the eru holding on at the back and ahead to the coachman sitting on the driver’s bench at the front. The eru regarded me with all three eyes. “This is as far as we can take you, Cousin,” she said.

I smiled. “Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the trust you’ve shown in me and the trust I’ve been able to give to you. Should things fall out in such a way that you discover leisure to do as you wish at some later date, my solicitor can be found at the law offices of Godwik and Clutch in the city of Havery, where you picked me up.”

The coachman raised his whip in salute.

I jumped awkwardly down into the pit, shifted the heavy bag on my shoulders, and with my sword in hand walked forward after my sire. The pit had become a resplendent plaza crowded with hungry courtiers. They slipped and slid about so much I could not count them, but I began to think they were far fewer than I had first believed. They just took up so much room and never stopped grasping and moving. Eager to get their drop of the rich feast, they parted to make a path for us that led straight to the dais of glittering salt.

On the dais stood four chairs beaten out of gold and four stools carved from obsidian. As my sire approached, human-like presences solidified in the eight chairs: they who ruled as the day court and the night court, for the spirit world was washed by both light and dark. What manner of people they were I could not tell: Were they spirit creatures who had begun to lose the ability to change and had thus become more and more solid? Ancestors who craved a rigid sort of immortality? Elders who stood in relation to humans much as dragons did to the feathered people? I did not know, and right now I was not going to find out.

The courts awaited the sacrifice. Chains like whips lashed my sire to his knees before them. He knelt, but he did not bend his head; his lips were drawn back as if he wished to growl. The Hunt stirred with myriad hisses and chortles and howls and snarls.

“Give us what is ours.” The voice of the courts thundered, many in one. “So you are required to do, because you are bound with the blood of the last feast, and because we bind you with the blood of this feast through the coming year.”

They ignored me, so I walked past him and planted myself in front of the dais, facing up to their chairs.

“Peace to you,” I said with my friendliest smile. “Does this night find you at peace?”