But suddenly they were in her place of power, and he was seated on a kneeling bench in his crimson velvet. “No, quite easy, Miriam,” he said. “Really, you must accept that I mean no harm because if I meant harm, I could effect it.”

Miriam nodded. “May I ask you politely to leave?” she asked. “And then perhaps we might build trust towards a meeting.”

Harmodius smiled. “I’d like to say we saved your girl,” he said. “But whatever happened out there was none of our doing. She’s on the edge of Becoming.”

Miriam put a hand to her metaphysical throat. “What?”

Harmodius shrugged. “You’ll see,” he said.

Back in the real, Harmodius was sitting with a pipe, forgotten, across his lap. The Faery Knight sat on a stool made of antlers—not dispensing justice or even holding court, but instead sewing on his deerskin hose.

“He’ll come for her,” the Faery Knight said. “Ssshe will be too great a temptassshion for him, and too great a potential threat.” He nodded in approval. “Ssshe isss very dangerousss.”

Harmodius rubbed his thumb along the sticky black tar that had formed on his pipe. “She will change his plans. Whatever they are.” Harmodius smiled—and just for a moment, it was the chilling smile of Aeskepiles. “And whatever else it means, it will hold him focused on her.”

The Faery Knight winced as he put his needle into his nearly immortal thumb. But he met the magister’s eye. “You intend to take him on?”

Harmodius frowned. “We’ll see.”

“He’ll kill you,” the Faery Knight said. “I have fought thisss foe before. Never direct confrontation. Alwaysss the indirect approach.”

Harmodius rose to his feet. “I hear you.”

“You would be a great losss, mortal.” The Faery Knight put out a hand, a very human gesture.

Harmodius nodded. “We’re going to take losses.”

An hour later, the Abbess sent them a copy of an imperial message warning of a horse plague delivered from the sky. The warning was timely—and the intent friendly. When the barghasts struck, they found a roof of ops bound white-hot air that burned their feathers and frightened them—and the choir within Lissen Carak turned them as they rose away.

“Now he’sss ssseen usss,” Tapio said bitterly.

“Not if my new friend Miriam stripped off his spies fast enough,” Harmodius allowed. “But we can’t chance it. Best assume we’ve been discovered.”

That night, Abenaki scouts to the north of Lissen Carak—out beyond Hawkshead—found the Black Mountain Pond clan and a great rout of bearish refugees moving slowly. They were pressed—at their backs was a tide of other creatures, old and new.

“We’ll have to fight,” Tapio said. He looked at the human magister. “Jussst to cover them.”

Harmodius nodded. “It is too soon, and in the wrong place,” he said. “Perfect.”