All of their voices were cracking now, and they were fading from my view, only faint cobwebby shapes against the dark walls. I said desperately, aware we were running out of time, “Is there anything else we need to know?”
But all that lingered on the air was a name, faint as a ghost.
“Margaret….”
WHEN WE got to the lodge, I walked Michelle and Doug to the guesthouse. I had Michelle’s number in my phone now and could keep her informed of any plans we made, but I wasn’t sure where we could go next.
Actually, that was a lie. I knew exactly what I needed to do next, and it was so frightening a thought I kept flinching away from it. I’m no more of a physical coward than the next man, but it wasn’t the danger to life and limb that was eating away at me. There was something else, something I couldn’t quite pin down, not when I was also trying to keep watch over Michelle and Doug.
Who had done pretty well for themselves already, and who probably didn’t need me hovering over them. I had needed to get out of the house, though, to get out here to the road.
“You’re quiet,” Michelle said.
“Sorry.”
“No, I don’t blame you. If we do save my boy, if we bind this thing again, do you think it will free them too?”
To my shame, I hadn’t even considered it. “I don’t know. If not, at least they won’t be scared anymore. They seemed to be having fun without him.”
“Didn’t they? Good luck selling the place with that kind of behaviour going on. Unless you are planning to turn it into a school after all?”
“Not now.” We were across the border now, with Vainguard watching our backs, and I studied the distant heave and swell of the wind over the trees and said, as if it was a casual question, “Remind me of Tam Lin again.”
“What’s Tam Lin?” Doug asked.
“A song I used to sing. With great dramatic flourishes.” Her cheer was forced, but she added, grinning at me. “My bandmate used to sing Tam’s lines, and he had terrible delusions of Bowie, poor Cory.”
“Uncle Cory’s cool,” Doug said. “Weird, but cool.”
“And my costume was a green mantle and gold ribbons for my hair.”
She cleared her throat and began to recite the ballad, with the lilt of someone who has memorised something to music.
“Sing it!” Doug demanded.
With an abashed glance at me, she did, her voice sliding from recital to performance, floating out over the dull fields towards the looming, pathless hills, over a country little changed since the days the song was first performed. I shivered as I listened to the tale unfold—of a girl warned to avoid the dangerous stranger in the woods who ran to him instead, of the child she carried and her determination to bring the child’s father home. But her Tam Lin revealed he was a mortal captive of the fairy queen, and she would have to save him by force, lying in wait at sunset on Halloween to pull him from his horse and hold tight as fairy magic transformed him into monster after monster.
“But quick she met the milk white steed,” Michelle sang, “and pulled Tam to the ground—” And she stopped, staring at me.
“Mom!” Doug grumbled, but Michelle ignored him.
To me, she said, “Are you out of your mind?”
“We need a blacksmith.”
“You’ll be trampled.”
“I sincerely hope not. I think our chances of getting any other smith to believe us before you guys fly home are thin.”
She said, “It can’t be just for that. That’s not enough to win him back.”
I said, a little stiffly, “Well, obviously I have feelings too, but that’s not the point.”
“It kind of has to be,” she said. We were still walking, but her pace slowed now. “Christ, last time I had to think so hard about all this I was in my twenties. You get out of the habit, but you don’t lose what you already know. Fairyland, in all the medieval writing and in the later folk tradition—it’s closer to the underworld than anything else. There’s a medieval retelling of Orpheus that has the poor woman snatched by fairies instead. It’s a place where no one grows old, where time passes without notice, where everything is static. Janet doesn’t save her lover because she’s selfless. She’s carrying the future inside her, and she wants not just him, but their future together—a family for her and her child, time back in motion. She has to be selfish to restore Tam to the progression of his own life and restore the natural way of things.”
I was the one staring now. She gave me a faint shrug and added wryly, “Or so my much-belaboured senior thesis claimed, and from all you’ve said, your ghostly riders come from the same sort of place as those fairies in the ballads.”
“A place between life and death,” I said and turned to look back at Vainguard. “Maybe the children are there too.”
“No wonder they run free in that house,” she said. “Look at it—not left to crumble away naturally, but not truly lived in either, not for years.”
I left them before we reached the top of the drive, lest Mac and the thing inside him spot us and start to suspect we were plotting against him. Michelle walked down the drive towards her own part of this waking nightmare with her head held high, and I headed back to the lodge alone.
PETER AND Anita had launched into full research mode, trying to find out anything they could about the mysterious Margaret Elliot. I helped, though that help mostly consisted of being the one sent to rummage through the attic for the old books Anita was sure Niall had stored up there after his grandpa died. I couldn’t keep my mind on the research itself.
It was time to act, not think. Time to stop waiting for others to steer me or save me. I had gone from one extreme to another already in my life—from the boy who lashed out with a knife to the man who made no ripples. Now it was time to take risks again, this time knowingly and purposefully.
Sunset, my phone told me, would be around nine that night. I drove into the village for takeaway just after seven and was relieved when my timings worked neatly enough that I could offer to take the empty cartons out to the bin after eight thirty. I said, trusting neither of them would think to question it, “I’m going to walk down the road and see if anyone else has their recycling bin out, so I might be some time.”
Peter was frowning down at a dusty book. “Be careful. I think I might have something when you get back.”
I waved lightly and headed out.
It was ten to nine by the time I made it to the bridge. The riders passed both the lodge and the guesthouse. This was their only route across the burn between the two and where they must cross the border besides. Logically, this was the best place to wait.
That was probably the last piece of logic I would use this evening.
The shadows were growing long, and the light had taken on the soft golden hue of evening. Soon it would sink below the hills and—if I was lucky—the riders would come.
The wind was restless in the trees, and the thing which had killed their children was still free to hunt. They would come. They had to come.
And then what? It was easy to say I would run into their midst and drag Niall down, but he was bigger than me and would be higher. There was no way we wouldn’t both go down under his weight, even if he didn’t fight back, and then we would be under the horses’ hooves. I’d seen the bruises one angry pony had left on him. What would a whole troop do? Would the reivers fight to keep him? Would I face the same lashing of hooves and spears the redcap had done?
Would Katie make him stay?
But no, thinking of that wouldn’t help. I looked up, taking a slow breath. Down here, close to the water, all I could see was the old stone bridge and Vainguard looming on the ridge behind me. Only the worn tarmac of the road was modern. Everything else could have been from any time in the last five centuries.
If I made this work, I’d have Niall back.
But no matter how much we needed him, I wasn’t sure I had the right. He had chosen to ride away, chosen Katie and the world between the living and the dead. He
’d been there a long time already, mourning too deeply to live again.
But his mum had said I was the first thing that made him smile. He had shown me the best of the moors, laughed with me freely on his birthday, made love to me with both passion and tenderness. He had been angry for me—at the police, at Felix, even at himself a few times. And when I’d tried to slip away myself, he’d pulled me back, told me never to doubt I was welcome in his house.
I had brought him this close to living again. Could I—should I—finish the job?
And what price would I have to pay for it? You couldn’t force a man to live if you weren’t planning to stay and live with him. Maybe I could take him home with me as I’d dreamed, tuck him safely in my warm attic rooms in the sanctuary of Eilbeck House, safe from any harm.
But would that be living? I thought again of the empty farm on the far side of Hawick, of the clean lift of the wind over the hills, of the friends I was starting to make here. If saving him meant staying, could I stay?
As soon as I thought it, the question seemed silly. Of course I could. I could stay with Niall for the rest of our lives.
Oh.
I couldn’t unthink it. I wanted Niall, not just to fight the redcap, not just out of a selfless desire to help him live and be happy again, but for myself.
Eilbeck House would still be waiting for me, even if I left—even if I outgrew it. Felix’s family—my family—would never give up on me. I had nothing to lose but Niall himself.
And I could not bear to lose him.
Suddenly I wished I hadn’t chosen to do this alone, that I had someone here I could tell all this, someone to confide in. I should have brought Peter, called Valerie, texted Kasia.
Taking control of my life didn’t mean I had to be alone.
But the sun was blazing over the stream along the valley, the shadows had closed over the hills, and in the distance, I could hear horses.
Chapter Forty
I STOOD up, my heart catching in my throat, and tried to keep my breathing steady. Margaret Elliot’s link hung around my wrists, and I hoped it would let me see these ghosts too.
They rode down the lane from Vainguard in single file, shadowy figures in the twilight. I could see their outlines, but they were indistinct and misty. A new fear gripped me—would I even be able to pick out Niall from the rest?
I had thought at first that they were coming at a slow pace, but then the first of them passed me and I realised that it had been a trick of the light. They were gathering speed as they approached the border—had they once, in another century, feared ambush here where there was little cover?
The first passed me and the next. Then they came two abreast, misty figures in round helmets, lances swaying with the beat of their horses’ hooves.
Then, amongst them, I glimpsed a single bare head, dark amongst the muddied steel bonnets of the rest of the party.
I didn’t hesitate in the moment, just ran for him, ducking between two oncoming horses and grabbing his leg as he passed. Behind me, horses reared and reivers shouted, but I could feel the roughness of denim under my hands and I clung on, even as I was forced into a run to keep pace with the horse.
Someone smacked the back of my head, laughing, but I dug my fingers in tighter and kept running. “Niall!”
He turned to look at me, but there was no recognition in his face, just the same scornful amusement I could hear from the rest of the riders around us, whooping and jeering, slapping at me with their hands and the ends of their reins, not even bothering with real weapons. I tried not to feel each blow, kept my eyes fixed on his face, remembered it not like this—cruel and careless—but bright with fond laughter. I kept gasping his name, my breath jerking out of me as the horses ran faster, trying to shake me off.
Katie, sitting in front of him, turned to face me, her hair whipping around her on the wind. She screamed, “Let go! Let go of my dad!”
“You let go!” I yelled back at her. “He’s not dead!”
It was the cruellest thing I could have said to her, and I saw her mouth go round with shock, but I couldn’t hold it back. I yelled at Niall too. “You’re not dead, you bastard! You’re not fucking dead! You can’t just stop living! Not when we need you! I need you!”
Then, for the first time, I caught a glimmer of recognition in his face. I went a little mad, hauling myself up his leg, no longer trying to run but simply to put all my weight on him, to pull him down or to go with him—I’m still not sure which.
To my horror, his horse reared, hooves lashing the air as it tried to heave us all off. Niall bit off a very modern, “Fuck,” and moved, dropping the reins to lift Katie up and heave them both out of the saddle towards me.
It wasn’t the most elegant dismount in the world, especially as they both landed on me, but he was on his feet fast, shoving Katie at me and grabbing for the trailing reins. I swore at him, tucked Katie in the curve of one arm as she fought against me, and got my other hand around his belt, hauling him back as the riders swirled and whooped around us, great shadowy shapes filling the air with threat and thunder. Katie was shrieking like a banshee, kicking me hard in the side, but I was damned if I was going to let him get back on that horse. I hung on, taking slow steps backwards, hoping against hope that I wasn’t backing into further danger.
Niall’s horse bolted. He lunged after it, but it had vanished into the shadowy mass. He turned to snarl at me but froze.
“Leon?” he said slowly.
The reivers and their horses were fading back into the twilight. I was shaking, hurting from head to foot from the reivers’ blows and the hard ground we had landed on, but I took a staggering step closer. I wasn’t going to let go, not now. I couldn’t lose him now.
Katie bit me.
It shocked me enough that I let her go. Immediately she burst into a run, dashing up the road after the riders. She only paused once, to swing back and scream, “Dad! Hurry!”
“Don’t go,” I gasped, bringing my other hand up to grab his T-shirt. “Please. Please don’t go!”
Katie only hesitated a moment more. There was a rider at her side, offering her a hand and she seized it, her face convulsing with grief.
Then she too was gone, and Niall and I were alone on the road, high above the river. I sunk to my knees, shaking, but he stood entirely still.
I was expecting his anger, expecting to have done all that and be met only with his fury. I couldn’t bear to look at him and see him hate me. It had stung when he was a stranger. Now it would burn. I put my hands against the road to hold myself up and stared instead at the worn grey edges of it, tracing the ragged edge of the pothole beside my fingers.
At last Niall said, sounding bewildered, “Is it dawn already?”
I shook my head.
His hand landed on my exposed nape, warm and comforting, and suddenly my eyes went hot with tears. I choked on them, and he said, his voice soft with worry, “Leon?”
I couldn’t talk, could only swallow back all the tears I hadn’t shed since he rode away.
“Stand up now,” he said, then added, voice sharper, “You’re bleeding. Leon, how badly are you hurt?”
I had no idea, but I shoved myself to my feet, determined not to seem weak as well. I had been ready for his anger, but I wasn’t prepared to feel his arms close around me, warm and steady. “Hey. Talk to me, lover. What the hell just happened?”
I swallowed hard enough to say, “You rode away.”
“I wanted to ride with Katie—” He stopped and said, “Fuck. Was that really her?”
I braced myself for his anger and nodded against his shoulder.
His arms tightened around me, and he said, voice shaking, “She’s still here. She isn’t… she hasn’t….”
“The others are still in Vainguard,” I told him. “I spoke to them this afternoon.”
“This afternoon?” His shoulders moved as he looked around, staring west for a long moment. Then he said slowly, “This is dusk, not dawn.”
He said, sounding completely bewildered, “But it didn’t even feel like an hour. How can it have been a whole day?”
“Three,” I said, my throat closing on the word. “You’ve been gone three fucking days, Niall, and I didn’t think you had any reason to come back, and the bloody police seem to think I’ve bumped you off, and the fucking redcap has possessed Mac, and it turns out Peter does actually think I’m his brother, and everything has been fucking shit.”
I turned my face against his shoulder again, shaking, and he said, “You didn’t think I’d come back?”
That was the only thing he picked up on from that little outburst?
“Leon,” he said urgently. “Look at me.”
I raised my head, trying to blink away my tears before he saw them. The light was fading fast now, and his eyes seemed darker than usual, meeting my gaze quietly. Then he bent his head and kissed me.
We’d had wild kisses and teasing kisses, sleepy kisses at night and promising ones in the morning. This felt different, a kiss for the sake of a kiss, light, tender, and lingering. I closed my eyes before tears could well up again and returned it with a sigh. Niall gathered me closer, his hands spreading across my back, and I winced as he hit a fresh bruise.
He pulled back, brows drawing together. “You are hurt.”
“They weren’t even real horses.”
“It was a real road you landed on.” He looked around. “We’re closer to the guesthouse than the lodge. Let’s go—”
“Mac’s there.”
“Mac, who we rescued?”
I winced. “We cocked that up, actually. He’s possessed.”
“Bloody hell. Right, back to the lodge, then.” He slung his arm around my shoulders and turned us back down the road. “Let’s get you patched up, and then I can yell at you for that stupid stunt.”
“Got you back, didn’t I?”
“Not worth killing yourself over.”
I snorted my opinion of that and leaned on him the rest of the way back. It wasn’t until we saw the lights of the lodge and he muttered something about the electric bill that I thought to say, “Your mum’s here.”
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