by Eli Brown
But Clover was already jumping off the wagon.
“Wait,” Nessa said. “He’s dangerous.”
“So am I,” Clover answered, running straight for the pontoon.
“Is that Clover under all that mud?” Willit said, his eyes bugging. “Glory, I thought we’d lost her! Nessa, you have outdone yourself, girl! Shouldn’t we tie her up, though?”
When she reached the wine’s edge, Clover sent Sweetwater across the shallows straight onto the pontoon.
Willit danced in fear as Sweetwater coiled around his ankle, fangs exposed. “What the blazes?” he shouted, reaching for his Pistol.
“Can you pull a trigger faster than a viper can strike?” Clover called out.
Willit froze where he stood, and Clover tossed Susanna onto the pontoon behind him. Before he could see what was happening, Susanna yanked his feet out from under him. Then, with one swift snap, the Doll smacked him onto the planks like a dirty rug. The Pistol clattered out of his hand. Clover leaped onto the planks and snatched it up.
“That’s enough, Susanna; don’t kill him.”
“A swell idea,” Willit groaned. “Don’t kill me.” His nose was bloody.
Susanna grumbled but let him go.
Nessa stood gawking on the bank.
Clover yelled out, “If you want to help, come steer this pontoon.”
After watering and setting her horses loose so they wouldn’t drink marsh wine, Nessa guided the pontoon out onto the purple lake. Willit sat with his back against the wall of the shack, guarded by Sweetwater. Clover peered inside the shack. It was a lonesome kind of filthy, with piles of newspapers and empty liquor bottles. Beside a stained straw mattress was a collection of Society journals. She could imagine Willit reading the lists of oddities, sleepless with greed, and wondering, as she had, which were real.
“Didn’t know I was receiving such dignified guests,” Willit mumbled, cupping his tender nose. “Or I would have cleaned up.”
“So when you aren’t murdering innocent men, you live here alone?” Clover asked.
“No place safer! No lawman has so much as tried to find me here. Sometimes Bolete stays with me. He’s a better cook than I am. I believe my nose is broken,” he groused.
“You deserve worse. Where is Bolete now?” Clover asked.
“Gone to town for bacon and coffee, but he’ll come looking for me.”
Clover examined the Pistol.
“You don’t want to mess with that, kid,” Willit said.
“I don’t want to do any of the things I’ve been forced to do since I met you,” Clover said, putting the Pistol in her father’s bag. “I don’t want to be in this stinking marsh and I don’t want to travel with a devil like you, but I have to.”
“Travel with me? You mean you ain’t going to kill me?” Willit asked.
“You’re going to guide us across the marsh to the abandoned silver mine.”
“Is that right?” Willit sat up straighter. “Well, that’s what you’d call a partnership.”
“It’s not.”
“It sounds like one to me. Do you mind if I light my pipe?” Willit produced a box of Matches and started to remove one, but Sweetwater hissed and exposed her fangs near his ear. A droplet of venom fell onto his shoulder. The wool there sizzled like frying oil.
“Sweetwater will bite before you can get that Match lit.”
“Well, of course,” Willit said. “You’ve seen that trick . . .”
Clover took the box and examined it. Only seven Matchsticks remained.
“What other oddities do you have?” she asked.
Willit shrugged. “I guess you’ve got them all. The tables have turned. You’re a regular poacher now, ain’t you?”
“Pull legs off?” Susanna asked.
“Not yet,” Clover said. “I have questions. What kind of curse did the witch put on you, Willit?”
“Want to see it?” Willit asked.
“See the curse?”
“You got to lean close.” Willit pulled his collar wide, as if the curse were on his neck.
Clover hesitated, then leaned in and peered at his grimy neck, welted and scabbed from his endless scratching.
“Do you see it?” Willit asked.
At first it looked like a grain of crushed pepper. But it jumped from his neck to his earlobe, then onto his arm.
“That’s a flea,” Clover said.
Willit scratched and smacked at it, but it was faster than he was, and everywhere it landed, it bit him.
“This Flea is the nastiest vermin the Seamstress ever stitched. It’s her masterpiece of cruelty.”
Suddenly the Flea leaped onto Clover’s arm, and she gasped. Its body was made from an onion seed, its delicate legs from the smallest watch springs. Its mandibles were steel filings, and it was all held together with a single stitch of blue Thread. It was a miracle of rage and craftsmanship, a testament to the witch’s hatred. The Flea leaped back onto Willit and crawled under his shirt as he scratched after it.
For a moment, Clover almost felt sorry for Willit. Then she said, “You deserve a hundred more.”
They were far from shore now, rolling on a lake of wine, and the vapors hung thick around them. Occasionally, Willit grumbled directions to Nessa — “Go left when you see the bubbles foaming up, and keep left!” — and Nessa pushed the pole deep into the muck to steer the pontoon.
Clover glanced at the distant slopes, hoping Hannibal had not reached the mine. She turned to Willit, who looked as beaten and harmless as a churchyard tramp. “Why did you sew rabbit ears to your hat?”
“Oh, he’ll never tell you that,” Nessa said.
“I was once in love with a woman who kept a pet rabbit,” Willit announced.
Nessa stared at the poacher, shocked. “Well, don’t believe what he says, anyhow.”
“Don’t tell me you’re a romantic,” Clover said.
“Why not? A man has a heart, doesn’t he?” Willit said wistfully. “But when I confessed my feelings to my beloved, she threw me out a window. I keep these ears to remind myself that behind every tender smile there are teeth waiting to bite.”
Clover shook her head, the vapors making her dizzy. She didn’t want to hear any more, but there were answers here, if only she could find them. She kicked Willit in the knee. “Were you there the night of the fire? Why did the Seamstress set the curse on you?”
“That much is my personal history, and a secret besides,” Willit said.
Clover nodded at Susanna, and the Doll grabbed him by the shin, preparing to break his leg.
Willit yelped and looked at Clover pleadingly. “I don’t think you’re the violent kind, kid!”
She wanted to throw Willit into the drowning mud, but he was right. She wasn’t going to let Susanna rip him apart.
Still, she was tired of his games. She pulled out Smalt’s terrible Hat and held it between them, her hands shaking with rage. “Are you really going to make me use this, Mr. Willit?”
“Isn’t that what you come here to do? Why, you already look like a witch, covered with mud and carrying your little goblins.” He tried to shake Susanna off his leg, but she held fast to his ankle.
“This is your last chance,” Clover warned. “I don’t want to use the Hat, but I will . . .”
Willit said, “I could tell you the truth as pure as the angels saw it, but you wouldn’t believe a word that came out of my mouth. Because I am a liar. But no one can lie to the Hat.” Willit laughed, tickled to see her squirm. “You’ve got all the power now. I’m just a cursed man, caught up in your story.”
Clover knew Willit was trying to rattle her, to keep her off balance so he could get the upper hand. But the poacher also knew things she didn’t, and Clover needed to find the threads of truth in his words. “My story?”
Willit smiled. “Of course it’s your story. The Pistol, the Matches — well, I was just holding them for you, wasn’t I? And now you’ve come to claim them.”
“Don�
�t listen to him,” Nessa warned. “He can talk a bird into a cat’s mouth.”
“Oh, but Clover understands me, don’t you, girl? Nessa was happy to take orders, but you are no one’s fool. You know now how the game is played. You know that sometimes you have to take control —”
“Enough,” Clover said.
“— so you can get things done.”
“I said enough!”
Sweetwater rattled, and Willit raised his hands in surrender. Then he removed his hat and scratched furiously. “Whatever you say, little witch.”
She gripped the Hat, trembling with indecision. I can use the Hat just this once, then never again, she thought. But Clover remembered the tortured man in the Golden Cannon Inn, trying to eat his shirt. The Hat would tempt her again and again. She remembered her father’s words: “A person may think she is collecting oddities, but in fact the oddities are collecting her.”
She stuffed the Hat back into the bag. “I am not Smalt.”
Willit seemed disappointed. He blew a bloody wad into his handkerchief and continued scratching after the Flea.
The middle of the marsh was too deep for the pole, but the sun-warmed wine carried the pontoon on a dark current. They floated in silence for several minutes, and Clover tried not to panic; she was far from solid ground on a flimsy pontoon with a murderer.
Nessa guided the craft through a cluster of dead trees, pushing against the bleached trunks with strong arms. Her upper arm was scarred where Willit’s bullet had branded her, a pale coil on the freckled skin. Clover wondered if she could really trust her.
Nessa pointed to a tassel of dust rising from the distant mountains. “There’s riders on Abbot’s Highway,” she said. “A bunch of them.”
“That’s Hannibal’s platoon,” Clover said.
“Coming from Louisiana?”
Clover looked again, and it was true: the party was coming from the west. Louisiana. Smalt’s secrets had flown quickly, and Hannibal wasn’t the only one racing for the Seamstress.
“Can’t you go faster?”
Nessa stuck the pole deep into the mud and managed to give the pontoon a little more speed.
At last, they saw the far side of the marsh, a steep cliff of ashy boulders that plunged right into the wine.
“So you work for Clover now?” Willit asked Nessa.
“I don’t work for you no more,” Nessa answered.
“You’re quitting a solid business arrangement?”
“Wasn’t ever solid for me,” Nessa said. “You got all the money!”
“Don’t be so quick to change teams, kid. We’re headed into the lair of the beast, where we’ll likely get skinned by the Seamstress, but not Clover here. She’s got a special connection to the witch, don’t you?”
“Stop it,” Clover said.
“Something drawing you toward the vermin-makin’ she-demon —”
“Shut your mouth!”
“What is he talking about?” Nessa’s cheeks were flushed.
“Oh, hasn’t she told you?” Willit spat blood. “I guess Clover and I share a secret, don’t we? And that’s a special bond, ain’t it? We’re practically family! It’s the ones we’re closest to, hurt us the most.”
“Clover?” Nessa’s eyes were wide.
Clover looked up at the cliffs. “After we cross the marsh, you can go back to your wagon. I’m headed for danger.”
“Don’t I know that? I’ve lost a tooth to this witch, remember? It’s her pet that killed my uncle.”
“When we get to shore you can take the pontoon back.”
Nessa shook her head. “Every time I let you out of my sight, you get walloped.”
“I don’t know how this will end. I have to face it, but this isn’t your problem.”
“It is now,” Nessa said, and amazingly, she was smiling. “Whatever business you’ve got, fate keeps crossing our paths. We’re meant to stick together.”
“The lovebirds twitter and prattle,” Willit said.
The pontoon stopped abruptly on shallow shoals, and a silence came over them as they peered up at the walls of the unforgiving mountain. The mines were hidden in the cloud-covered peaks above them, and peering up the slopes made Clover dizzy.
Willit laughed. “This is your shortcut? I don’t think even a goat could make its way up those slopes. You can’t get to the mines from here.”
Then Susanna piped up. “Follow me.”
She led them up a winding path between piles of rubble and sheer rock faces. Clover considered leaving Willit on his pontoon but was afraid to turn her back on the man, figuring he’d sneak up and try to reclaim his Pistol. So she slung Sweetwater around his neck to keep him in line.
They followed Susanna on a trail that was so narrow they had to turn sideways to squeeze through shoulders of cold granite. The only things that survived here were crusts of lichen and blue-bearded lizards. Clover tried not to think about avalanches, but it was clear from the heaps of rockfall that the terrain was unstable, as if the mining had broken something deep inside the mountain.
Suddenly, the mountain was trembling. About a hundred yards away, a slope shifted, then came crashing down. It sounded as if the earth itself were growling as tons of rock dropped into the Wine Marsh, sending a wave of dark fluid rushing across the surface.
Through the dust and mist, they saw what had touched off the avalanche: the jittery movement of creatures scrambling over the rock, wounded but agile.
Willit shook his head. “Vermin. This mountain is infested with them. They’re watching.”
“Do you think they will come for us?” Nessa asked.
“They’ll be on us like dogs on a sausage,” Willit said.
Clover gripped her father’s bag closer to her body, watching the shadows shifting on the hillside. Through clenched teeth she said, “Keep moving.”
Susanna, who had been riding on Clover’s shoulder, crawled into her pocket and pulled her head in. “Ain’t afraid,” she whispered.
“That’s all right,” Clover said. “You’re being very brave.”
Willit coughed. At last they emerged onto a plateau, where leaning pines shed their needles in the wind.
“We’ll take a short rest,” Clover announced, her legs wobbling from the climb.
They sat in a sullen circle, and Willit coughed again. Clover knew the sounds of illness, and this was malingering. Willit was up to something. The next time he did it, she watched closely and saw that he was whispering into his walnut shell necklace.
Sweetwater’s rattle cut the air as Clover snatched the walnut off his chest.
“Is it an oddity?” Clover demanded. “Who are you talking to?”
Willit shrugged.
“Do you want Susanna to break your nose again?”
“No need for all that,” Willit said. “I just remembered that I do have another little something in my pocket. I’ll show it to you.”
“Do it slowly,” Clover ordered.
With dramatic care, Willit reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a single Match. “I always keep one handy for myself, just in case.”
Before Clover could reach it, he struck the Match with his thumbnail and disappeared in a blink. Sweetwater fell to the ground with a thump that knocked the wind out of Clover.
Willit reappeared yards away, beside a gnarled pine.
Bolete, who had been hiding in the branches, tossed Willit a shotgun and leaped down to stand beside him. Clover remembered that Bolete had the other half of the Walnut. They’d been using it to arrange an ambush. In the brush behind them, Clover spotted the foam-flecked horse Bolete had spurred all the way up the mountain, lying panting on the ground.
The poachers started shooting immediately. Their bullets ricocheted off the cliff side, and Clover dove for cover in a spray of shattered rock.
“You should see your faces!” Willit laughed between shots.
Clover found herself crammed next to Nessa in a hollow no bigger than a closet. Sweetwater, b
ruised from her fall, came slithering in as the poachers reloaded.
Susanna leaped from Clover’s pocket, climbed over a boulder, and charged madly toward Willit.
The Doll was only a few feet from him, her fists balled for wrecking, when he fired. The blast sent Susanna flying. She hit the wall behind Clover, smoldering and in tatters. The Doll lay still.
Clover screamed, “Susanna!”
“Use the Pistol!” Nessa yelled.
Clover pulled it out and cocked the hammer. She was thinking of a course for the bullet when she heard Bolete’s voice coming through the Walnut shell in her pocket. “Just give up, girly,” he said. “You forgot to take the bullets. Pistol isn’t much good without ’em.”
Then Willit’s voice came through. “Now is a better time to choose teams, young Nessa.”
Panicked, Clover looked and saw that it was true — the Pistol’s chamber was empty. The bullets she had stolen earlier had sunk to the bottom of the Wine Marsh in her haversack. The oddity was useless.
Willit hollered, “Nessa, you like that mountain girl enough to die for her?”
Nessa put on a brave face and hollered back, “I have seen the error of my ways!”
There was a confused silence, and through the Walnut, they heard the poachers muttering, “Does that mean she’s with us or against?”
“I’m with her!” Nessa shouted.
“Unwise,” Willit hollered back. “I need the Elkin girl alive, but it don’t bother me to shoot you dead.”
Nessa moaned and knocked her forehead into the rock in terror.
“Come on now, little witch,” Willit said. “Do more people have to die? Don’t you have enough on your conscience?”
Clover trembled, clutching Nessa’s hand and shouting, “I didn’t kill anyone! You did!”
“I wasn’t looking for your father,” Willit said. “You know that now, don’t you? He’d be alive today if only you’d played nice.”
Clover shook her head, trying to keep his words from her ears. She searched desperately for something useful, but all she saw was rocky ruin.
“We’ll give you the count of three to surrender before we come blastin’,” Bolete said. “I’ll wager that snake ain’t immune to bullets.”