The Watchtower (21 page)

She shook her head again. Maybe I could make her stay hidden ... but then I heard the hoofbeats approaching and felt Sarah tense. She was getting ready to spring. I knew because every muscle in my body longed to do the same thing. The hoofbeats were in my veins, nudging my muscles to action. Every fiber of my being longed to spring from cover and race down the long, straight paths.

"Listen," I said. "Remember what your art teacher said about taking your line for a walk?"

A little furrow appeared between Sarah's carefully plucked and waxed eyebrows. I had a vision of who she was: a pampered daughter and good student despite her raucous laughter and bad language. She wanted hard to please. I just had to get her to please me and not the hunt.

"That's what you're here to do, remember? You're going to take your line for a walk. When I tell you to, you're going to walk
very slowly
back up this path like it's a line n>
Wa#x2019;re drawing with your pencil. A long straight line. You're going to make it perfect."

"Perfect?"

"Yes, and you're going to follow it."

"Like
Harold and the Purple Crayon
? I love that book!"

"Me, too." I gave Sarah a hug. "Just think about Harold and his purple crayon and walk the line. Slowly. Okay?"

She nodded. I had no idea if I'd gotten through to her. I didn't even know if I was going to be able to keep myself from running, but we were out of time. The hoofbeats were growing louder. The hunt was on the road, almost upon us, and my feet were itching to hit the ground running.

I stepped out into the middle of the path, holding Sarah behind me. Then I turned to her, looked hard into her eyes, and told her, "Walk," uttering the command as I would to a recalcitrant dachshund. I was ordering myself as well as her.

She turned around but I didn't have time to see if she walked or ran. The hunt was upon me. I turned to face it, drawing Sylvianne's branch from my pocket and brandishing it in front of me. Blooming out of the dust cloud I saw it. A team of horses lathered wet, flakes of froth like sea foam cresting the air. The lead horse reared, his hooves inches from my nose. A swarm of hounds surrounded me, their breath rising hot and sour around me, choking me, their noses nudging me, teeth clicking against my skin, urging me,
Run! Why didn't I run?
They whimpered and scratched at my legs. I smelled my own blood and felt how wild the smell made the hounds. A satyr crept up on all fours into the throng of hounds and sniffed at my crotch. I pretended I was a statue--like Diana in the garden--and stared straight into the malevolent yellow eyes of the head steed, and then, when his rider mastered his horse's head level to mine, I looked up at the rider.

He rose off the back of his mount like a wave cresting a rocky shore, poised to crash over my head. He wore a tight-fitting, black suit stitched with red diamonds and a mask that divided his face into red and black. The eye staring out of the red half was black; the one staring out of the black half was bloodred. A multicolored, tattered cloak billowed around him, moving in a wind that stirred nothing else. The whole forest had gone still as glass.

He licked his red lips with a blackened tongue.
"Run!"
he hissed. "Why don't you run?"

I held the branch up in front of me. It quaked like an aspen. "I'm not here to play your hunting game," I said, my voice trembling like the leaves on the branch. "I'm here for passage to the Summer Country."

A great booming rocked the forest. For a moment I thought it was thunder, then I realized the rider was laughing.

"Passage to the Summer Country? And who told you I could give you that?" Then, crouching lower over his horse's neck; "Do you know who I am?"

"I think you must be Hellequin, going by your outfit." I paused, staring harder at that outfit. It wasn't a harlequin's suit he was wearing; it was his own skin, blackened by fire and tattooed in red ink ... or blood, by the smell of it. And his mask was no mask. It was his face, half-blackened flesh and half ...

I reared back. There was no flesh over the right side of his face, only bloody sinew.

He chuckled. "My outfit, you say? This is what a thousand years of riding to the hounds does to a man ... oh, yes, I was a man once. A fine man, a ruler, with palaces and chateaus and hunting grounds of my own. I liked nothing more than to ride to the hounds whenever I could. I liked it so well I tired of chasing fox and pheasant and boar and instead began to chase more interesting ... game."

His blackened tongue swished over his bloodied lips. "Only one day I made the mistake of pursuing a creature who wasn't human. A woodland nymph who in the moment of capture cried out to her sisters to punish me. It was Sylvianne and her kind who cursed me to this ... life, if you want to call it that. An eternity of riding to the hounds. If I ever dismount, they'll devour me. See, even now they lap at my blood."

I looked down and saw that indeed the creatures swarming on the ground were licking the blood-flecked dust with their long black tongues. Even the satyrs. I felt bile rise in my throat.

"So, you can't give me passage to the Summer Country?" I asked, anxious to terminate this interview.

"Sure," he said, extending a blackened hand out to me. "Ride with me for a bit and we'll look for it together."

"Um, no thank you. I think I'll go by foot. I'm sorry to have troubled you. I guess this was Sylvianne's idea of a joke." I saw that now. She probably liked taunting Hellequin by sending hapless women such as myself to ask him for favors he couldn't grant.

"Yes, she's probably laughing about it now with her latest pet ... unless..." His bloody lips pulled back over blackened gums and I realized he was smiling.

"Unless what?" I asked, adding a hopeful (hopeful that I didn't look as nauseated as I felt) smile.

"I do have an idea of who to send you to. A fey who once took pity on me and gave me a cool drink of water from her spring as I rode through the Forest of Coulombiers--Melusine. She'd know the way to the Summer Country. You'll find her at the Chateau of Lusignan."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that the Chateau of Lusignan was rubble and that Melusine wasn't anywhere near there. The last time I'd seen her
in the flesh
had been at Governors Island in New York, and she'd been dissolving into a puddle of goo.

"Thank you," I said, feeling oddly reluctant to disappoint him. Why? I wondered. He'd been a rapist in life and he was still abducting innocent young women. What happened to them anyway...?

A gust of wind gave me the answer. Hidden in the folds of his cloak was the woman in the capris and fisherman's shirt. She was clinging to Hellequin's back, her eyes squeezed shut. She looked thinner than she had earlier ... and as I watched, she grew even thinner. She was evaporating, leaving only a husk of skin behind her that clung to the shreds of cloth that made up Hellequin's cloak ... which weren't shreds of cloth at all, but the husks of Hellequin's previous victims. Okay. I didn't feel bad for him anymore, just anxious to get away. Besides, I'd just recalled where to find Melusine.

"I'll be going now," I said, taking a tentative step backward. The hounds and satyrs parted to let me go.

Hellequin gave me another grotesque smile. "Good luck on your travels, Garet James, and remember, if you ever get tired of walking, just call my name and I'd be happy to give you a ride. I'll keep an eye out for you." He flicked his cloak over his shoulder and I saw the faces of his victims distend with pain. Then he was gone in a whoosh of hoofbeats that made me want to take to my heels. It took every nerve in my body to make myself walk out of that forest without breaking into a run.

16

The Black Bird

"On the way back, I've got to stop for a wee time to pick up a passenger," the driver said to Will as his horses and carriage trotted out of Dee's front yard. "Hope you don't mind, Sir Hughes."

Will was startled. This was the same driver who had brought him up from London; he hadn't observed any change in his appearance or attire when awakening him just now. But he was almost certain that his voice had changed to a deeper, gruffer one, with more of a brogue.

"Sir?"

"I don't mind," Will said. "I'm quite tired, but I assume your passenger will be punctual?"

"That he will be, sir! Yes!" the driver responded, with what seemed like excessive enthusiasm.

Will pressed himself into the corner of his plush seat, virtually into the carriage frame, as if to be as close to exiting as possible. Then he gazed out the window at the woods lining the road while they drove on. Uncertain as
it
was, the natural world seemed for the moment all he had to hold on to. Moonlight silvered the crowns of close-grown oaks and maples, casting dappled shadows on the road. Here and there Will thought he could see a larger, more furtive shadow moving amid the tanglement of the woods, with no idea what it could be from. A boar? A large dog or an apprentice escaped from an oppressive domicile? He didn't know. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. He clasped his hands together in his lap for comfort. They were still a ways from the city. But, for the first time since his flight from Swan Hall, Will had the sense that London was home, the place where returning meant comfort. A ways away.

They traveled on in silence, the pounding of hooves the only constant. Every once in a while the screech of an owl slit the air like a razorstroe lathered by moonlight, but otherwise Will had his conflicting thoughts to himself. Maybe the farther he got away physically from Dee, the better, he considered. But maybe he was being too hard on his somewhat peculiar host. Likely Will couldn't have made things worse by seeing him. And maybe he'd made them better. Will scented that black flower of hope again. It wasn't a sweet scent, yet it wasn't half unpleasant either.

But another jolt came when the driver pulled over in the middle of nowhere. Will, skittish about an additional passenger in light of his tense mood, and the alteration in the driver's voice, had at least hoped for a signpost, or a house with a lit window. Where the driver had stopped had no marker at all, just the shadow-dappled woods on one side and an open field on the other, tall grasses stirring there in the caress of a soft breeze.

"How will he find us?" Will asked. "With nothing to guide him?"

"Who?"

"The new passenger--your friend."

"Calm down, Hughes," the driver said, chuckling. "He knows the road well."

Will glanced around at the blankness. "I'm going to stretch my legs," he told the driver, stepping down from the carriage onto the hard dirt road before the man could reply. Will began to pace up and down at the edge of the woods, observing brilliant pinpoint stars above him, listening to the wind rustle through leaves so brightly green they shimmered in moonlight, and to louder and not easily explained rustles coming from only a few yards into the woods.

Oh, to be back in my meager bed,
Will thought. But better to shudder out here than return to the carriage and its creepy driver.

He heard an enormous rustling from farther into the woods, one that made him pause in his strolling to listen keenly, and even as he paused, he observed, from the corner of his right eye, a gigantic black bird rising over the open field opposite, flapping huge wings slowly. The woods immediately fell silent, or at least back to their murmur of crown sway, branch creak, and twig crack. Those moving shadows still seemed to move.

Will's gaze was fixed on the black bird, in growing astonishment. He began to realize that the bird was of truly spectacular size. Indeed he was afraid to estimate the wingspan, but when it hovered in line with the moon, it blotted out that white curve entirely. And when it soared higher, the wind seemed to pick up, as if its flight contributed materially to the wind's force.

Will was startled again by a man's voice coming at him from the open window of the carriage, the same window that he had moments earlier been staring out of.

"
Pardon moi, monsieur.
It is a beautiful night, yes, admittedly, but I am on an urgent errand toward the city. If you'd be so kind...?"

Will squinted into the darkness to make out the man's face, but he was wearing a cloak with a hood pulled low over his forehead, making it impossible to see his features. The man must have come from the other side of the road and clambered aboard wout Will's hearing him. So many sounds were abroad at the moment that they thwarted any logic to hearing. Perhaps the grass had been high enough to conceal the man's presence when they first pulled over. Will didn't want to consider any other explanations until he was safely home in bed.

Rather than ask the newcomer to give him his seat back, Will got in the carriage on the road side, shooting the black bird another glance as he did so. Fifty feet across, he guessed, though if so, that made it likelier apparition than bird. He felt the unnerving sense, as he ascended the steps, that the bird's moon shadow was concentrated on him. As if a living being could concentrate its shadow by will, the way a magnifying glass could concentrate the sun's rays to set a twig aflame. To what purpose, he couldn't fathom. But he hurried the final few steps into the carriage's shelter, bothered by the image of fire. He could only imagine what sort of fire the bird's shadow might set: maybe dark silver in color, and with flames that felt like ice!

Upon reentering the carriage, Will was struck by an odor that hadn't been in it before. At first it was not unpleasant, a smell of singed roses as if a garden had caught on fire, a domesticated scent with a flavor of the savage. But a hint of ash threaded through the scent soon became sulfurous, and this mix of the fragrant with the foul was oppressive. Will began to breathe through his mouth, then became aware of a proferred hand above his lap. He turned to the newcomer, who was smiling affably enough, and took the man's hand, but in that instant, strange things started to happen to the hand he took. The flesh seemed to peel away to a shimmer of delicate bones, the spaces between them glowing, and in the moments before Will fearfully withdrew his hand, he thought he was grasping whirls of tiny motion, not even bones left, spinning orbits colliding with his own with little zings of electric shock. That gave his own hand a buzzing, painful sensation, even as it then recoiled away from the newcomer's.