She wondered how the Evil One would counter this shape; there wasn’t much that could take on three mustangs and win, not on the plains—

Then the palomino whinnied sharply, and she and Watches-Over-The-Land pivoted in his direction.

Fire!

Fire sprang up in a long line stretching from horizon to horizon, racing toward them, eating its way across the landscape. Kestrel fought her horse-instinct to run in a blind panic, as more fires cut across the horizon, until they were ringed with flame.

“Follow!” whinnied Mooncrow, and reared, and leapt—

She followed, and found herself—

Fluttering through air that tasted thick and grainy. In bird shape. But not the familiar bird-shape of Kestrel, but black, speckled, stub-tailed.

A starling? She faltered for a moment, then picked up her wingbeats again, moving easily among the—

High-rise apartment buildings?

Fumes drifted up from the traffic below, but they didn’t seem to bother her in this shape. Car horns blared, sirens screamed, construction equipment rattled and pounded, and the noise of uncounted engines battered her ears.

Beside her flapped an English sparrow and a pigeon.

The air behind them popped. And the Evil One, in his form of Black Bird, hovered there for a moment, confused by the terrific noise.

That moment was all that Kestrel needed. It was time to stop running and give him a taste of being the prey! Calling a starling alarm, she dove on the Black Bird, certain of what would follow.

Her alarm call swiftly summoned a cloud of starlings from all directions, which followed her lead and proceeded to mob the Black Bird mercilessly. Individually, the Evil One was more than a match for them—and in fact, he lashed out with beak and claws, and sent several of his tormentors tumbling dead out of the sky. But that only made the rest of the starlings angrier, and they pecked at his head and pulled at his feathers until he began to falter and lose height. And he could not tell which of the starlings was really Kestrel; he could only strike blindly and hope that luck would put her into his reach.

He could not win this one, and so he changed the setting, shattering the air with a terrible cry that wrenched the fabric of time and space, sending them all hurtling—

Into the white of a landscape of nothing but snow and ice. Wind ate at her; snow whipped around her, driving itself into her eyes and nose. The sky was white, the ground was an undulating white; everything was white.