The Borderkind by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page B

at her sodden clothes, nose wrinkled.
    Then she started along the base of the cliff, westward, and Halliwell followed.

CHAPTER 3
    O liver expected to die. Beyond the end of the tunnel he could see the sunlight streaming into the gorge, but he did not think they would ever get there. He had been battered and bruised by his collision with the rocks, his throat was raw from nearly drowning, and his companions seemed exhausted as well. There had been all too much of battle in these past hours, then the trek along the river had drained them further. Blue Jay and Kitsune were ragged and weakened. Frost was their only chance.
    The Nagas swam at them, serpentine lower bodies gliding under the water, moving upriver slowly, watching them carefully as though searching for the precise moment to strike. From the waist up they were ordinary enough, men and women carrying bows, arrows at the ready. But below the waist they were enormous snakes, with all the deadly speed that would entail.
    “What do we do?” Oliver whispered, his voice resounding eerily off the walls of the tunnel.
    “Nothing,” Frost said. “Do nothing.”
    He cocked his head, watching the serpent-people as they came nearer. His icicle hair made a familiar clinking noise and a white-blue mist rose from the corners of his diamond eyes.
    Oliver nodded. If Frost had the strength, he could stop them. With a wave of his hand, he could turn the air so cold around their arrows that they would shatter. Perhaps, he might even momentarily freeze the river around them. But Frost looked just as drained as the rest of them, and Oliver did not share the certainty in the winter man’s voice.
    He raised the Sword of Hunyadi.
    “Oliver, no!” Kitsune shouted.
    Blue Jay burst from the river, spraying water across the rocks and his companions. In a blur of motion he became a bird, crying out as he darted forward, then he spun in the air, ready to block the arrows of the Nagas.
    Not a single arrow flew.
    Oliver frowned, staring, sword still at the ready as the Nagas turned to one another, whispering. Their serpentine lower halves undulated beneath the water, keeping them from drifting.
    Frost and Kitsune exchanged a look of confusion, and then the winter man gestured for Oliver to lower his sword. Reluctantly, he did so.
    “We are travelers in search of brief sanctuary,” Frost announced. “We come openly and without pretense. I am Frost of the Borderkind. My companions and I need rest, and they need food as well. Legend says that Twillig’s Gorge is a place of safe haven for travelers of any allegiance, so long as their intentions are peaceful. Is the legend false?”
    The Nagas rose up from the water, swaying cobralike for a moment. They opened their mouths and hissed, but their arrows still did not fly.
    “Time changes even legends,” one of the females, perhaps the leader, said. “Perhaps legends most of all. You know that very well, Cailleach Bheur, just as I am certain you know that these are perilous times in the Two Kingdoms. Perilous for Borderkind most of all. There are others of your kind in the Gorge, but they have lived here for many years, and we protect our neighbors. We will fight for them. Risk all for them, just as they would for us.
    “But you are not our neighbors,” the Naga said, nodding her head first toward Frost, then toward Kitsune and Blue Jay. “None of you. The company of myths is a danger to us all, when so many want you dead. Why should we risk it for strangers?”
    Kitsune growled at the use of the word
myth,
a term the Borderkind despised. She might have attacked them then, but this time it was Oliver who held her back.
    “You’ll turn us away out of cowardice, then?” Frost demanded.
    Blue Jay landed atop the rock Oliver had crashed into, changing again into his human shape. He crouched there, glaring down at the Nagas.
    “I never would have believed it,” the trickster said. “The world really has changed.”
    “Better allies than