“Picking you up so we can run!”
“Don’t be daft, my hand is broken, not my feet!”
“Right, that was stupid. Stupid.” He helps me up by my elbow. “This way!”
We run across the lane and down the street. We’re surrounded by solid row homes, finer than any I’ve ever been in, with attached walls and no alleys or side streets to offer us escape. The cloud of birds circles overhead, a swirling mass of terror.
There are a few people out, but judging from their dress they are all servants. They glue their eyes on the ground and hurry in the opposite direction of us. Is this so normal an occasion for them that it does not merit so much as a shout of fear?
I do not realize I am cursing in Melenese until Finn—one hand on my elbow and the other waving his cane in mad circles overhead—gasps, “What are you saying?”
“I am saying that my hand hurts so much I want to die and will you kindly shut up and let me focus on running?”
“If you will kindly shut up and let me focus on a spell to save our lives!”
He glares at me but then stops dead, nearly jerking me from my feet. “One of the familiars is with you!” He raises his cane, eyes blazing with murder toward Sir Bird.
“Don’t you dare!” I hunch my shoulders around Sir Bird, angling him away from Finn.
“We haven’t time for this!”
“So keep running!” I shrug away from him and continue my mad flight.
He catches up to me quickly, falling into pace though I do not doubt he could outrun me in my current state. “That bird belongs to him.”
“This bird saved my life.”
“I am saving your life!”
“You were ready to give in! I saved my own life. You are simply keeping me company on this leg of my escape.” Sir Bird caws brokenly in support of my statements.
One of the birds dives at us and smashes against an unseen barrier, exploding in a poof of feathers that turns into ash. “And how,” Finn says, huffing with anger or exertion, his cane still tracing patterns into the air, “do you intend to evade the flock of familiars even now conveying our every move?”
“I can’t do all the work! Surely if you are so important as to merit the smashing of my every finger, you can figure this out.”
“Stop!” he says. I fear he is going to leave me, but he nods. “Here, this should work.” He traces a rectangle onto the blank space of a head-high wall, then knocks the tip of his cane on it three times in rapid succession. The wall melts away and, instead of a view into the small front lot of the house, it opens into blackness.
He ducks to go through, then looks back and sees my hesitation. “Trust me?”
“Of course I don’t.” I grit my teeth and swish sideways past him, but I miscalculate the width of the door and brush my ruined hand against the brick. I cry out, the pain intensified to a blinding wave.
This time when his arms come around me, lifting and cradling, I do not object. He hurries down a flight of stairs in the pitch black. The wall seals behind us, cutting off the harsh screams of the birds. At the bottom, Finn taps his cane against the wall and a line of sconces burst into flame, illuminating a stone tunnel with periodic holes in the ceiling. It drips with the slick collection of water from the cobbled stones of the street above us. Finn’s fine shoes splosh through the accumulated slush and stone-strained filth.
“Not far now,” he says.
“I can walk.” I do not want to, of course, but most of the dizziness has passed and the pain has dulled to merely overwhelming.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I need you close for this next part anyhow. And will you please get rid of the bird.”
I cradle Sir Bird closer to my chest. “You will have to get rid of me first.” Sir Bird squawks loudly.
“Accursed stubborn creature.”
“He is not accursed!”
“I was speaking of you.”
He stops and I brace myself to be dropped, but he shifts me with the gentlest of movements to free his cane for wider access. I turn to see a circle, inscribed with patterns, burned into the wall. Beneath us, a wider circle glows faintly under the streaming water Finn stands in.