The Wizard of London (34 page)

“Not
so fast, my unfriend, my shadow wraith!” cried a fierce young voice that
brought with it sun and a rush of flower-scented summer wind—and
blessedly, the release of whatever it was that had hold of Nan’s throat.

She
dropped to her knees, gasping for breath at the same time that she looked to
her right. There, standing between her and Sarah, was Robin Goodfellow. He wore
the same outlandish costume he’d worn for the play, only on him, it
didn’t look so outlandish. He had one hand on Sarah’s shoulder, and
Nan could actually see the strength flowing from him to her as she fed the
ghost girl with that light, which now was bright as strong sunlight.

The
ghost girl thrashed wildly, and broke free of the shadow woman’s hold,
and that was when Robin made a casting motion of his own and threw something at
the shadow form. It looked like a spiderweb, mostly insubstantial and sparkling
with dew drops, but it expanded as it flew toward the shadow woman, and when it
struck her, it enveloped her altogether. She crumpled as it hit, as if it had
been spun out of lead, not spider silk, and collapsed into a pool of shadow
beneath its sparkling strands.

The
ghost girl stood where she was, trembling, staring at them.

“She’s
stuck,” Sarah said, her voice shaky, but sounding otherwise normal.

Grey
waddled over to the ghost girl, looked up at her, and shook herself all over.
Neville returned to Nan’s shoulder, feathers bristling, as he stared at
the shadow woman trapped in Puck’s net.

“She
doesn’t know where to go, or how to get there, or even why she should
go,” Sarah continued, pity now creeping into her voice.

“Oh
so?” Puck took a step or two toward the ghost girl, peering at her as if
he could read something on her terrified young face. “Welladay, and this
is one who can see further into a millstone than most… no wonder she
don’t know where to go. Hell can’t take her and heaven won’t
have her, but there’s a place for you, my mortal child.”

His
voice had turned pitying and welcoming all at the same time, and so kindly that
even Nan felt herself melting a little inside just to hear it. He held out his
hand to the ghost girl. “Come away, human child, or what’s left of
you. Come! Take a step to me, just one, to show you trust your dreams and want
to find them—”

Shaking
so much her vague outlines blurred, the ghost girl drifted the equivalent of a
step toward Robin.

He
laughed. Nan had never heard a sound quite like it before. Most people
she’d ever heard, when they laughed, had something else in their
laughter. Pity, scorn, irony, self-deprecation, ruefulness—most adults
anyway, always had something besides amusement in their voices when they
laughed.

This
was just a laugh with nothing in it but pure joy. Even the ghost girl
brightened at the sound of it, and drifted forward again—and Robin made a
little circle gesture with his free hand.

Something
glowing opened up between him and the ghost girl. Nan couldn’t see what
it was, other than a kind of glowing doorway, but the ghost girl’s face
was transformed, all in an instant. She lost that pinched, despairing look. Her
eyes shone with joyful surprise, and her mouth turned up in a silent smile of
bliss.

“There
you be, my little lady,” Robin said softly. “What you’ve
dreamed all your life and death about, what you saw only dimly before.
Summerland, my wee little dear. Summerland, waiting for you. Go on through,
honey sweetling, go on through.”

The
ghost girl darted forward like a kingfisher diving for a minnow. A flash, and
she was into the glow—and gone. And the glow went with her.

Now
Robin turned his attention to the shadow woman, lying motionless under his
spiderweb net. “Heaven won’t have
you
neither, and
you’re not fit for Summerland,” he said sternly. “Nor am I
the one to call hell to come and take you. But you’re too much mischief
in the world, my lady, and I can’t leave you free.”

Neville
suddenly made a sound Nan had never heard him make before. Something like a
quork, and something like a caw, it made Puck glance at him and nod.

“Right
you are, Morrigan’s bird,” he replied. “That’s all
she’s fit for. It’s the Hunt for her, and well rid of her this
middle earth will be.”

He
turned to Nan and Sarah. “Close your eyes, young mortals,” he said,
with such an inflection that Nan could not have disobeyed him if she’d
wanted to. “These things are not for the gaze of so young as you.”

She
kept her eyes open just long enough to see him take a cow horn bound in silver
with a silver mouthpiece from his belt, the sort of thing she saw in books
about Robin Hood, and put it to his lips. Her eyes closed and glued themselves
shut as three mellow notes sounded in the sultry air.

Suddenly,
that sultry air grew cold and dank; she shivered, and Neville pressed himself
into her neck, reassuringly, his warm body radiating the confidence that the
air was sapping away from her. All the birds stopped singing, and even the
sound of the river nearby faded away, as if she had been taken a mile away from
it.

She
heard hoofbeats in the distance, and hounds baying.

She’d
never heard nor seen a foxhunt, though she’d read about them since coming
to the school, and it was one of those things even a street urchin knew about
vaguely.

This,
however, did not sound like a foxhunt. The hounds had deep, deep voices that
made her shiver, and made her feel even less inclined to open her eyes, if that
was possible. There were a lot of hounds—and a lot of horses,
too—and they were coming nearer by the moment.

She
reached out blindly and caught Sarah’s hand, and they clung to each other
as the hounds and horses thundered down practically on top of them—as the
riders neared, she heard them laughing, and if Puck’s laugh was all joy,
this laughter was more sorrowful than weeping. It made her want to huddle on
the ground and hope that no one noticed her.

The
shadow woman shrieked.

Then
dogs and riders were all around them except that, other than the sounds, there
was nothing physically there.

Feelings,
though—Nan was so struck through with fear that she couldn’t have
moved if her life depended on it. Only Sarah’s hand in hers, and
Neville’s warm presence on her shoulder, kept her from screaming in
terror. And it was cold, it was colder than the coldest night on the streets of
London, so cold that Nan couldn’t even shiver.

Hoofbeats
milling around them, the dogs baying hollowly, the riders laughing—then
the shadow woman stopped shrieking, and somehow her silence was worst of all.

One
of the riders shouted something in a language that Nan didn’t recognize.
Robin answered him, and the rider laughed, this time not a laugh full of pain,
but full of eager gloating. She felt Neville spread his wings over her, and
there was a terrible cry of despair—

And
then, it all was gone. The birds sang again, warmth returned to the day, the
scent of new-mown grass and flowers and the river filled her nostrils, and
Neville shook himself and quorked.

“You
can open your eyes now, children,” said Robin.

Nan
did; Neville hopped down off her shoulder and stood on the ground, looking up
at Robin. There was nothing out of the ordinary now in the scene before them,
no matter how hard Nan looked. No shadow woman, no ghost girl, no dark emotions
haunting the bridge. Just a normal stone bridge over a pretty little English
river in the countryside. Even Robin was ordinary again; his fantastical garb
was gone, and he could have been any other country boy except for the single
strand of tiny vine leaves wound through his curly brown hair.

“What—”
Sarah began, looking at Puck with a peculiarly stern expression.

“That
was the Wild Hunt, and you’d do well to stay clear of it and what it
Hunts, little Seeker,” Robin said, without a smile. “It answers to
me because I am Oldest, but there isn’t much it will answer to, not much
it will stop for, not too many ways to escape it when it has your scent, and
there’s no pity in the Huntsman. He decides what they’ll Hunt, and
no other.”

“What
does
it hunt?” Nan asked, at the same time that Sarah asked,
“What
is
it?”

Robin
shrugged. “Run and find out for yourself what it is, young Sarah. And go
and look to see what it hunts on your own, young Nan. There’s mortal
libraries full of books that can tell you—in part. The rest you can only
feel, and if your head doesn’t know, your heart can tell you.”

“Well,”
Nan replied, stubbornly determined to get
some
sort of answer out of
him, “What was that thing at the bridge, then?”

“And
I need to tell you what you already know?” Robin shook his head.
“You work it out between you. She’s not been here long, I will tell
you, and I should have dealt with her when she first appeared,
but—” he scratched his head, and grinned one of those
day-brightening grins, “—but there was birds to gossip with, and
calves to tease, and goats to ride, and I just forgot.”

Nan
snorted at the evasive answer, but Sarah smiled. “You never will answer
anyone straight up, will you?” she asked with a sidelong glance.

“It’s
not my way, Missy Sahib,” Puck replied, and tickled her under the chin
with a buttercup that suddenly appeared in his hand. “Now go you back and
not a word of this to your schooling dame. Just your bad luck that two things
came together and you as the third made some things happen that might not have,
otherwise. That was bad for you, but good for the little mite. Then came your
good luck, that it all made a mighty big stir-up of the world, and that got my
attention. And me knowing you, that called me. An hour one way or the other and
this would never have happened. The shadow would have claimed the mite, and no
doubt of it.”

Nan
could well believe that. And she also had no intention of telling Mem’sab
about it.

But
she was going to find out what that shadow lady had been, and why she was at
the bridge.

No
one had missed them by the time they got back, and evidently there was no sign
of their misadventure clinging to them either. Nan and Sarah stood in the
garden doorway for a moment, assessing the mood in the manor, and exchanged a
look.

“Think
I’m gonna talk to th‘ kitchen maids,” Nan said thoughtfully.
“If there’s gossip about, they’ll know it.”

“I’m
going to see if Robin was right about the Hunt being in books,” was
Sarah’s answer. “There are a lot of oddish things in the library
here.”

With
a nod, they separated, and Nan ensconced herself, first in the kitchen on the
excuse of begging toast and jam and milk, then in the laundry, then in the
dairy as the two dairymaids finished churning the butter out of the second
milking, and turned the cheeses as they ripened.

By
that time, the bell had rung for dinner, and it was too late to talk to Sarah
about what she’d found out. She could tell that Sarah was bursting with
news, though, and so was she—

The
news had to wait. After dinner came the nightly chore Mem’sab had set Nan
to doing, helping put the littlest ones to bed. And Sarah went to help Tommy
catch fireflies—he had a scheme to put enough in a little wire cage
he’d made to read under the covers by, but he couldn’t get the wire
bars close enough and they kept escaping, much to the delight of the bats that
flew in and out of their open windows at night—

That
had been something that had shocked Nan the first time it had happened.

The
children from India were all used to it; the same sort of thing happened in
their Indian bungalows all the time. But Nan hadn’t ever even seen a bat
before, and the first time one had flitted in the open window and fluttered
around, she hadn’t known what it was. A lot of the maids hated them, and
shrieked when they were flying around a room, pulling their caps down tight to
their heads (because bats allegedly would get tangled in your hair). The
bravest of them whacked at the poor little things with brooms, and all of them
kept their bedroom windows shut tight all night long. But Mem’sab told
the children that sort of behavior was silly, so they kept their own windows
open to the night air. The children all rather enjoyed the tiny creatures, and
eventually even Nan got to liking the way they swooped around the room, clearing
it of insects, then flitting out the window again.

Tonight
the little ones were full of mischief, and each had to be put to bed half a
dozen times before they actually
stayed
in bed. Weary, but relieved,
Nan trudged up the stairs to the room she and Sarah shared, to find Sarah,
Neville, and Grey already waiting for her. Nan changed into her nightgown and
hopped up to sit cross-legged on her own little bed and looked at her friend
expectantly.

Sarah
laughed. “You first,” she said.

Nan
coughed, because a great deal of what she had heard was not the sort of thing
that you told a “nice” girl like Sarah. Country folk were earthy
sorts, and they had no compunction about calling a spade a spade, and not an
“earth-turning implement.” The maids had certainly filled
Nan’s ears, particularly when the cook was out of earshot.

“There
was a gal down to the village that put on a lot of airs,” she said,
heavily editing out a great deal. The whole truth was that this particular
young lady was a lot like Becky Sharpe in
Vanity Fair;
she wanted a
husband with money who would let her buy whatever pleased her; if she could get
one, she wanted a husband with a title too, and she was perfectly willing to
use any and every means at her disposal to get it.

“She
set her cap at this feller, this captain, what showed up here at one of them
hunting parties,” Nan continued. “Friend of a friend, the maids
said, not some’un the master invited himself. Man didn’t make
himself real popular; I guess he broke a lot of shooting rules right from the start.”
The maids had been vague on that score; they didn’t understand the
shooting rules either. What they hadn’t been vague about was that the
shooting parties started forming up and leaving without the captain, as the
guests tacitly organized themselves to be off when he was busy doing something
else. Part of that “something else” had been to flirt with the
ladies, and the maids had no doubt that if he’d had his way, there would
have been more than just flirting going on. “There weren’t no
single ladies at this party, an’ when he made himself unwelcome,
he’d take himself down to the pub in the village sometimes, an’
that’s where this gal saw him and decided she was gonna get him.”