Gen­er­a­tor: The story’s pro­ta­gan­ist is female and not human. ‘In a tree’ plays a sig­nif­i­cant part in the story. The story is set in a place between worlds in the medieval age. The story is about fear.

She licked her wounds, blood-salty, and let the sun warm her fur. In the mid­dle dis­tance she could hear a brook whis­per­ing over smooth, worn rocks. The fat branches of the tree would hold her up. Even if she drifted into heal­ing sleep she would be safe here.

Below her, troops marched by, and she pushed the pain into the old, cold part of her mind so that she could con­cen­trate on the types of per­ils she might yet face.

Sun­light winked off of a mot­ley assort­ment of armor and weaponry; the knights and rich war­riors wore and car­ried items pol­ished to a high sheen, suf­fi­cient to throw fun­house reflec­tions of the sky and the trees of the grove they were pass­ing through; the poorer men wore dull metal plates held together by leather or cloth, where they wore armor at all, and their weapons had a worka­day look to them, swords of truly awful bal­ance and made of infe­rior metal as likely to shat­ter in a fight as to defend their own­ers. The cat woman won­dered how many of them under­stood what they’d been pressed into, or even under­stood the Latin that the gen­try spoke. There was a con­fused gab­ble of speech that rose from their ranks, quelled now and then when one of the knights rid­ing out­rider shouted some­thing or struck a man with the flat of his sword.

They marched on, headed south, headed to slaugh­ter and be slaugh­tered by Saracens.

The cat woman looked with long­ing at the hillock where she’d buried her chord-driven time machine. The men were still flow­ing over it, a line reach­ing nearly to the hori­zon in either direc­tion. This war would be the war to end all wars, she thought sar­don­ically. Till the next one.

#

At night­fall they encamped, some of them directly beneath her. Fires appeared, and she had a brief quiver of fear, watch­ing the sparks dance upwards past her, won­der­ing if they would burn the grove in their fool­hardy ignorance.

Some sang songs, oth­ers went to the brook to wash faces and hands, oth­ers still cooked skew­ered meats and breads over the flames. The cat woman drifted in and out of sleep, her wounds clos­ing, tiny beings in her blood­stream foam­ing out to form dams against sep­sis and air­borne par­ti­cles. She dreamed of home, of caper­ing up car­peted walls in pur­suit of her hus­band and her brood of children.

In the morn­ing fog had erased the world, and she knew for sure that this was a thin place, a spirit grove where the walls between worlds was thin. The men below sensed it too, if she was any judge. Their voices were pitched low, their echoes eaten by the soft white mist. She could smell their fear from here, the stink of sour sweat and the tang of pheromones that rode it.

They were march­ing to com­bat in an enemy land, and mere mist fright­ened them?

But she knew that thought was crazy bravado. She was, in her way, as afraid as them.

Things were astir in the mist. Things she couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite smell, couldn’t quite get a fix on. Were they benev­o­lent? Were they hun­gry? There was no way to know for sure.

Until one of them snared a cru­sader, flayed him and ate him. His screams raised her hack­les. She tried to will her­self into a fugue state, a sound­less igno­rance of the world around her, but the heal­ing yes­ter­day after the dog attack had left her reserves depleted. She needed food, and soon.

But she wasn’t about to descend while those hun­gry things were abroad in the world.

#

Hours later, the sun had risen high enough to close the gap between worlds. Its energy vibrated the por­tal shut and burned away the fog. There were at least twenty dead sol­diers, and a pair of the—things—were stuck on this side. They were immense, and shaggy, and angry. But their fur was already smol­der­ing under the light of the sun, and in less than another hour, hav­ing killed nine more war­riors, they had burned away into soul­less ghosts, ris­ing and flat­ten­ing into the blue sky. Some­day they would fall as rain, per­haps, or maybe they would rise for­ever into the black beyond, past the moon, past the worlds, pushed out ever­more by the wind from the sun. The cat woman didn’t really care right now.

There was food in the chord-ship. She had to risk sneak­ing past the war­riors, as they gath­ered their wits and their weapons, as they buried their dead and pre­pared to move on from this cursed thin place. There might be enough cover, espe­cially if they were distracted.

If they caught her, these Cru­saders would kill her, think­ing her a demon. But if she waited in the tree even another day with­out her food, she would deplete too far, and the lit­tle helpers in her blood would start to eat her body tis­sues, killing her from within.

She waited till some­one screamed, one of the poor sol­diers in his tar­nished armor find­ing the sev­ered head of his brother, and then she made a break for it.