With a sigh, I kept going, the ghouls getting closer and closer. I pulled my blindfold down to get a good look at them – at least I could see their spirit forms with the blindfold – and spun, coming face to face with one of the horrific death-heads. It opened its mouth as if it really thought I would get close enough to let it kiss me and take my soul.
I wrenched the axe handle from my belt and swung it at the ghoul and almost dropped it in surprise when the end of the handle flared to life with a crimson burst of flame.
The ghoul shrieked, dashing away and knocking over the other ghoul in its haste. It leapt to its feet joining the first ghoul. Their screeches faded into the night as I lifted the torch, surprised by how bright it was. The flames that danced on the end of the shaft looked very real, and they lit my path like a real torch would, and yet they didn’t consume the wood or burn any kind of fuel.
Curious, I pulled my blindfold up with one hand. I was plunged back into darkness.
A spirit torch.
I liked it. At least it could get me home with my spirit vision. It revealed more than my simple blindfold did, lighting the spirit world like the Faewald had been to my second sight.
“I don’t know what trick you have played, Mortal, but hiding from me does you no good,” the Lieutenant said sharply. Was she nervous?
I looked down at her but her eyes were unfocused, seeming to almost look through me.
“Get some sleep,” I told her.
Was it possible that she couldn’t see me? That would be an interesting gift to have in a world of Fae.
I could use this torch to light the way home and tomorrow, after I explained away my ripped dress and my absence from the house, I could go chase down another path and another and another until I found all my ancestors’ little stashes of odd items. Maybe, eventually, there would be a way to make the key work again and open the Faewald.
The memory of a voice rang in my mind with every step.
“Haunt me, Little Nightmare. Haunt me until I beg you to stop.”
I was feeling incomplete without someone to haunt.
Chapter Seven
I woke the next morning with a gasp, scrambling to the kitchen and grabbing a huge frying pan before reaching into the cage carefully and plucking a hair from the sleeping Fae’s head.
She screamed, leaping to her feet and throwing her axes through the bars. I’d been ready for that. I threw my hand up, letting them clatter off the back of the cast iron pan.
“What have you done to me?” she shrieked.
It hadn’t taken long to collect her axes and replace the pan. It had taken a bit longer to run up to the stone circle in the pre-dawn light.
I stood there, gasping for breath and tingling all over. The first thing I was going to do was find Scouvrel and tell him that now that we were friends forever, he had to help me trap Hulanna.
I took the chunk of hair I’d torn from her head and wound it around the golden key, gathered my pack and all my things, drew in a huge breath and stepped into the circle.
Nothing happened.
I cursed quietly.
“Now do you want to explain why you assaulted a Lieutenant of the Court of Twilight in her sleep, Rat Killer?” she breathed. “I will roast you slowly over a bed of coals. I will season you with ginger and onions. I will watch my court strip your bones.”
“Not today you won’t,” I said, despair heavy on my heart.
There will be a way, Allie. Don’t give up.
Chapter Eight
Chasing down spirit trails without people thinking you were crazy or getting angry that you were walking through their sheep pen or cattle grazing fields was harder than I’d anticipated. I’d had more clods of earth thrown at me and curses shouted than I cared to count.
I’d also witnessed a cluster of those magenta glowing things with wings pick up a chicken out of its yard and go flying off with it, the owner none the wiser. Two sheep had also been snatched by packs of owl-griffins while I watched from the woods, calm and patient as any hunter would be. I’d considered putting them all in the cage with the Lieutenant, but it had never been my way to torture anything – the Fae woman or the creatures.
The people of Skundton thought they didn’t need a Hunter here, did they? And yet, with every passing day I saw how much that wasn’t true.
Two weeks of treasure hunting was enough to make me more than a few enemies in the town and produce a grand total of one moldy bow that seemed to have no spirit abilities at all, and a rusty sword likewise bereft of value.
I kept them both in the branches of the eagle nest tree outside the Chanters’ house, carefully oiling and re-stringing the bow with a waxed string just in case I could use it someday to the Lieutenant’s amusement.
“With such glorious weapons, your victory must seem very near to you,” she’d laughed. But that was the most I could get out of her. Mockery. Needling. She would not offer anything else up and she could not be convinced or bargained with. Like me, she was relying on patience to win the day.
Who knew if maybe I’d find out something that made the weapons valuable, despite her mockery? If anyone had learned that magic wasn’t always easy to see, it was me.
What I feared most was that they would send more scouts. Or worse, that the army would plunge through the circle before I was ready. I knew what Hullana wanted. I had the trap. But what would I use for bait? And where would I set it?
I kept the axe handle in my belt at all times on a loop I’d sewn for it, alongside the hanging cage. I was becoming a walking magic-tool chest. The light of day hadn’t revealed anything new about it – no magical writing or buttons or secret compartments. Nothing that made it look like anything other than a handle with no blade. But all I had to do was lift it with my blindfold off, and it illuminated the spirit world in a way so intense that my heart almost skipped a beat. Better yet, the Lieutenant seemed to lose sight of me when I was using it. Invisibility was a strong skill to have. What would it be like to take it into the Faewald? What would it reveal that even my second sight hadn’t seen on its own? I was dying to try it out.
At the end of the two weeks, my mother and Goodie Chanter were both frustrated with me for the mud and rips in my clothing and the late hours I kept.
“At least she isn’t taking up space like you feared, Goodie Chanter,” I’d overheard my mother saying as she poured tea for the both of them.
“I’d forgotten that raising children who were almost grown was so much work, Genda. You don’t think ... you don’t think she’s carrying on with one of the village boys, do you?”
“Nonsense. They were all children when she left here,” my mother said, and I felt a sense of satisfaction at her words. At least someone had confidence in me still.
“Well, then, one of the village men? She’s filthy and rumpled when she comes home. Could she be stealing kisses behind the barns and in the lofts?” Goodie Chanter had asked. “My Olen, for instance ...”
“No, Danna,” my mother said repressively. “Allie is a good girl. She wouldn’t bother your boy.”
“His marriage to Heldra is happy,” Goodie Chanter said, but it sounded more like a warning than a statement.
“Of course, it is, Danna,” my mother said, and I shivered.
There was a time when I would have been jealous of Heldra. A time when I would have wanted her life. Now, the thought of stolen kisses reminded me only of Scouvrel and the way his kisses had seared onto my lips leaving them ruined for anyone else.
Fae ruined everything. Those few kisses had left me immune to human men. None of them caught my eye or made my heart beat any faster.
I’d taken my mother and Goodie Chanter’s words as license to try just one more time. It couldn’t hurt to try just one more time, could it?
Wrong. It could hurt. But I was willing to hurt if that was the only way.
I hiked through the woods and up to the mountain plain, arriving as night descended over the lonely stone circle. No one pla
yed music here anymore. There was no hunter set to shoot at strange creatures. There was no defense set at all.
Calmly, I stripped down to my underthings and danced across the frosty ground around the circle.
“Next time you decide to disrobe, be sure and warn me,” the Fae in my cage said. “You’re even uglier than usual with less to cover you.”
I ignored her and danced.
Faster, faster, faster.
The sparkling silver grass crunching under my feet as the moon swelled full and bright and I thought of what I loved about the Faewald – of the huge statue with its eye full of books, of the greenish orc skin of Ghadrot and his toothy grin, of the nest of feathers beside the river and the scent of cedars wafting through the Court of Cups, and of smoke waterfalls and flying through the mountains and of the bright hope in Scouvrel’s haunted eyes and the way his lips felt when they brushed mine.
My toe hit a rock and with an angry curse, I tumbled to the ground, skinning both knees. I’d cracked the toenail on the biggest toe of my left foot, and it hurt. Making a tiny mewing sound, I wrapped it back up and reluctantly put my clothing back on as the first snowflakes of winter began to drift down into the magic circle. The dead, useless, lifeless magic circle.
Take me, circle. Take me back to the Faewald!
But just like every time before, nothing happened.
Chapter Nine
There was something different about the feel of the town when I trudged through the melting snow bringing our goat cheese to town to trade for flour with strict instructions from Goodie Chanter that I was only to trade with the Baker family and not those new Spencers who had come up to Skundton from the valleys.
“They are not our people,” she warned me strictly.
Which seemed silly, because they were mortal which made them more ‘our people’ than the ones waiting for us beyond the circle I couldn’t open.
They were certainly more ‘our people’ than the person sitting in my cage right now. I’d tried to bargain with her again last night. I’d pled with her. I’d threatened her. I’d tried to tease out some interest from her. She was completely immune to me.
“I can wait, Mortal. My Court will soon rush across your land like termites. Then, they will free me from this cage and present your innards as a prize to me.”
I’d given up after that. Which was why I agreed to go to town for Goodie Chanter this morning. I needed the right place to trap Hulanna when she arrived and to pick it, I wanted to spy out the town.
Where would she go first when she arrived? Our old cottage? It was gone now, but that didn’t make it a poor choice for setting my trap.
But Hulanna liked an audience. I had a feeling she’d want to come right into the town square.
I huffed my way toward the Bakery, lost in thoughts of how to set a trap for an enemy who might come at any time, who far out-numbered me and had all the advantages. It wasn’t until I was almost there that I noticed how quiet the town was.
I froze.
No guards had stopped me at the gates.
There were no children underfoot.
Someone was building a platform in the center of town beside the well. The kind of platform you might stand on to give a speech. They’d left a saw halfway through a length of timber as if they had been interrupted in cutting it.
A chill came over me and I set the wrapped cheese down on the steps of the bakery and ran through the town to the faint sounds in the distance. Something was happening south of Skundton.
I felt for my bow, pulling it free from the quiver and pausing only long enough to string it. My heart was in my throat, my hands shaking already.
They couldn’t have come through the circle, could they?
Not with me watching every day and night.
But I was only one person. And I’d been out last night looking for the end of a green trail that looped and spiraled around and around until I lost all hope and stumbled home. I hadn’t been to the circle in a full day.
Maybe I’d missed the invasion.
Maybe I’d missed my chance to set my trap.
There were shouts up ahead – not happy squeals of children but angry-sounding shouts. I quickened my pace, trotting down the street past empty houses and shops. A few heads peered curiously from windows and doors, but everyone was still, watching silently as if trying to hear the distant noise.
If this was war, we were woefully unprepared.
I let my fingers run over my arrows as I ran. Twelve. I should have brought more. I should have known better.
The Lieutenant was silent in her cage, not deigning to talk even now. I didn’t have time to pull down my blindfold and look at her. If she was using this moment to escape, there was nothing I could do about that now.
The sounds of jeering and shouting were growing louder. I heard something clang and something else like metal hitting wood. I forced my legs to run faster.
There were people up ahead, jammed into a pack. No sight of guards or soldiers. No sign of Olen on his horse. Fat lot of good knights did.
But no, this wasn’t an attack. Someone from the back of the crowd threw a cabbage forward. Hardly a winning move in a pitched battle.
And I was beginning to hear words.
“We don’t want your kind here! Boo!”
“Go back where you came from!”
“Get out of here!”
Someone spun in the crowd, looking toward me. The wild eyes and anger in his expression gripped my heart. The last time I’d seen a look like that had been on Cavariel’s face. It was a look of pure malevolence. A twisted look.
“Let me through!” I demanded, pushing past the angry man and grunting when he elbowed me in the ribs. That had been no accident.
And neither was this mob – because that was what it was. Angry faces, twisted in ways that made them look less than human, pressed in on every side. Men, women, boys, girls, every age and type but all joined in one animal-like emotion.
I clenched my jaw and pushed through them, fearing the worst. Maybe Scouvrel had made it through the stone circle. Maybe he had come looking for me. Something inside ached at the thought. Not my heart, obviously, just my injured toe. Obviously.
And yet my breath was coming too quickly when I finally burst through the crowd to the middle of all the chaos.
Well, here’s where the horse was.
Olen sat his brown mare, shouting down at the people while he held the reins of a pair of draft horses. Steam rose from the draft horses as they snorted, their bodies quivering with pent up tension and their eyes rolling so far back that all I could see were the whites. They’d stampede at any minute if someone didn’t calm them. Their stomping hooves already cut divots out of the packed earth of the road.
Behind them, a colorful covered wagon draped and wrapped in lilac purple and canary yellow silk cloth, shook with every stomp and tug and a pair of brown eyes – wide with terror – peered at me from a gap between the cloth and the wagon. Someone had painted bright shining suns on the side of the wagon with the abandon of children.
Beside me, someone shook a fist. When I looked back, the eyes darted out of sight. There was a child in there and the crowd was screaming for her blood.
Furious, I pushed through the last of the people, using my own elbows this time.
“Calm down!” Olen roared from the back of the horse.
I ignored him. He was doing this wrong. I strode up to the nose of the first horse, put my hand up to his muzzle and let him sniff it while I whipped off my big cloak and threw it over his head. He needed quiet and to ignore the raging crowd.
The other animal tried to break forward, but I leapt into his path before he could tug the blinded one more than a pace. He towered over me, his massive snout so big that my hand looked like a drifting leaf beside it, but I stretched the cloak to cover his eyes, too, and then leapt up onto his back.
In the driver’s seat, a harrowed looking woman clutched the reins, her face lined with worry an
d beside her, a mustachioed man held a prod as if he could keep the raging crowd away. Their garish dress told me they were Travelers.
Just like the peaceful Loremistress. Just like my grandmother.
I swallowed. If Skundton had turned on the Travelers, then it was in worse shape than I thought.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I bellowed from the horse’s back.
Olen’s expression was stunned. Hadn’t he seen me get up here? But he’d never been the most observant person.
“Get down, Allie Hunter!” someone called from the crowd. “This is no concern of a Fae-lover like you!”
“Fae lover?” I asked, leaning forward with a snarl. “That’s what you call me? I, who kept the Fae from destroying this town by sending them back into the circle and closing it behind me? I, who lost my sight to keep you safe?”
Couldn’t they see the blindfold covering my eyes? The Travelers could. They were eyeing me with knowing looks. And then their eyes traveled to the cage I always kept tied to my belt, and those eyes widened.
I hoped they couldn’t see who was in it.
“I don’t believe you are blind!” Goodie Rootdigger called, spitting to emphasize her words. “You saw well enough to jump onto those horses!”
“And did you see well enough to see these are Travelers?” I demanded. “Did you fail to see the colorful wagon or the bright silk scarves? We’ve never threatened Travelers in Skundton! We’ve always welcomed their stories by our fires and the marvelous things they bring to trade!”
“Times have changed,” Olen said quietly and around him the crowd murmured agreement. “Sir Eckelmeyer has decreed all Travelers are to be stopped and detained.”
My mouth fell open. “You’re arresting these people?”
He looked away, his face flooding an ugly red. He was wearing his shining breastplate like he was a shining knight from a tale come to save us all and not a terrible disappointment.
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