“What?”
“Nothing. Come on, then. We should go as quietly as we can; Cezar and his hunting party might be out again. I’ll tell you my story when we’re safely home, with the door locked behind us.”
She was right about the portal—at least, right in her guess that we could walk back to Piscul Dracului without the need to pass between worlds once more. We had still more cuts and bruises by the time we came up the track past the barn toward the main entrance to the castle. Our boots were sodden from tramping through the snow and the hems of our skirts coated with forest debris. My ears ached; my nose streamed; I’d never felt so cold in my life. Within the castle, lights still burned. Despite the need to conserve fuel, Florica would not have the place in total darkness on a winter night. One lamp shone over the big iron-hinged doorway.
“It’s going to be locked,” Tati said. “Everything will be locked, except the door up on the terrace.”
If we’d been birds or bats, we could have reached that entry. As it was, I could think of only one solution. “We’ll have to take shelter in the barn,” I said. “We can slip indoors when Petru comes out in the morning. With luck, he won’t see us.”
“What if he does?”
“I know whom I’d rather answer to, out of Petru or Cezar,” I said grimly. “Come on! At least there’s warm straw in there, if you don’t mind sharing it with a cow.”
If we had reached home just a little earlier, if we’d walked just a little faster, this makeshift plan might have worked. If I hadn’t stopped—from some instinct I hardly understood—to leave the crown behind, Cezar wouldn’t have seen us. As it was, we were only halfway over to the barn when we heard voices. A moment later he and his two friends came around a corner of the house and stopped dead, staring at us. Rǎzvan was carrying a lighted torch. Daniel had a crossbow in his hands, with a bolt already in place. Cezar was in front, the ferocious expression on his dark features changing as he saw us to shocked incredulity. He was speechless.
My mind went completely blank.
“Cezar!” exclaimed Tati. “We—we were just … We thought we heard something out here.…”
My cousin’s eyes went from the two of us—shivering and pathetic in our muddy clothes—to the doorway of the house. At that moment, the bolts were slid aside and the door opened to reveal Petru in his nightshirt, with his sheepskin jacket over it. He had an iron poker clutched in one gnarled hand. The knot in my tongue undid itself. I ran across to him.
“Nothing to worry about, Petru. It turned out that it was only Cezar coming back,” I babbled, praying that the old man would understand we needed help. “I’m sorry we woke you up. We can all go back inside now. I really am sorry to have caused such a fuss.”
Petru didn’t say a thing, he just looked at me, then backed into the house. He muttered something about Florica and hot drinks and vanished in the direction of the kitchen. Cezar seized my arm and marched me indoors. I could feel the vibration of anger in his touch, and as soon as we were in the hallway, I wrenched my arm away.
“What have I told you, over and over?” he shouted. “You girls must never go out after dusk, especially on your own! I can’t believe you were so foolish as to venture outside at night. It could have been anything out there! And why in God’s name didn’t you wait for Petru? You must leave these things to me, Jena. I thought you’d grasped that basic fact.”
He grabbed me by the arm again and pulled me along after him in the direction of the kitchen. The others had gone ahead without a word.
Florica was boiling a kettle, bleary-eyed, a big coat of Petru’s partly covering her night attire. Her silent husband was setting cups on the table. Tati stood shivering convulsively by the stove, her face drained of color. Daniel and Rǎzvan were standing about, looking awkward.
Cezar was still holding on to me. I made a decision: before he began to pick holes in our account of ourselves, I must take preemptive action. “I need to sit down,” I said, finding it all too easy to buckle at the knees and put my other hand on my cousin’s arm for support. I had judged him correctly—he put his arm around me and guided me to a chair. I looked up at him. His eyes were full of suspicion. “I’m really sorry, Cezar,” I said, hating myself, but unable to think of any other way out of this. “We’ve been stupid, I can see that now. I promise never to do such a thing again.”
Maybe I had overdone it. He narrowed his eyes at me. Florica set a pot of fruit tea on the table, and beside it a flask of warm ţuicǎ, with a little dish of pepper and one of sugar. Neither she nor Petru had said a thing.
“Jena,” said Cezar, “I must ask you some questions. I don’t wish to seem distrustful, but in light of these wild tales that have been raised about the house, I’m duty bound to investigate anything in the least suspicious. How was it that you were able to hear something out in the yard when your bedchamber looks over the other side of the castle? Whatever it was you heard, it was not our hunting party. Only the three of us went out tonight, and it was no farther than the innermost fence, to check that the stock were undisturbed. We went as quietly as we always do, the better to apprehend an evildoer should we chance on one. If you roused Petru, how was it that the two of you were already in the yard in your outdoor clothing while he was only just opening the door? This doesn’t add up. I don’t like it. Petru, what have you to say for yourself?”
Petru was seized by a sudden fit of coughing. It was so severe, he had to excuse himself and leave the room.
“I’d best go and help him, Mistress Jenica,” muttered Florica. “He’s bad when it takes him like this.” And she, too, was gone. Tati began to pour the tea, as if this were one of Aunt Bogdana’s polite gatherings. Through a haze of weariness I thought that at times, the human world could be every bit as strange as the Other Kingdom.
“Anyway,” Cezar said, “it’s the middle of the night—you must have been fast asleep. Surely only a commotion would wake you. If there’d been any disturbance I would have heard it myself.”
“Jena’s been sleeping very poorly,” said Tati, sliding a cup across to Cezar. “We’re all upset by what’s been happening. She didn’t want to worry you.” It was a bold-faced lie and utterly surprising in view of my sister’s wanly dispirited demeanor of late. Her eyes were still bright, and not just with tears. Perhaps that kiss had given her strength.
“Mmm,” grunted Cezar, sitting down beside me, so close his thigh was against mine. I edged away, trying not to be too obvious about it. “I’m sorry, Jena. All the same—”
I yawned; it owed nothing to artifice. “Could we talk about this in the morning?” I asked him in as sweet a tone as I could muster.
“Drink your tea,” Cezar said. “Get warm. You’re shivering—here.” He took off his thick cloak and put it around my shoulders. It was, in fact, wonderfully warm.
“Thank you,” I said in a small voice. “I’m truly sorry.” And in a way I was; sorry that Tati had taken it into her head to cross a forbidden margin, and sorry that we had not been able to reach home undetected; sorry that such sad things existed as those I had witnessed at Dark of the Moon.
“All right, Jena; don’t distress yourself.” Cezar patted my hand. “I can wait for an accounting. But when it comes, I want the truth.”
Gogu was on my pillow, sitting so still he might have been dead. When I got into bed, he edged away from me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I should have taken you with me.”
Crouched between my pillow and Tati’s, the frog turned reproachful eyes on me. The shutters were closed over his thoughts, but I needed no words to know what he was feeling.
“We are back safely, Tati and I. We didn’t meet some terrible fate,” I told him.
He blinked. There was a whole world of meaning in it.
“Gogu? Will you forgive me? I can’t go to sleep if you’re angry. I truly am sorry.”
A torrent of furious distress came from him. You lied to me. I’ll just slip out and bring her back, you said. And you’d promise
d never to go away from me again. How can I look after you if you leave me behind?
I struggled for an answer that would not insult him.
Beside me, Tati had slipped under the quilt, pulling it up almost over her head. “Go to sleep, Jena,” she mumbled. “It’s almost morning.”
“Gogu,” I whispered, “I did slip out and bring her back. It was just a bit farther than I expected. And I’m upset by what I saw—things I wouldn’t want anyone to see, not even you. Things so bad I can’t even talk about them. But you’re right. I needed you. I knew that as soon as I got there.”
You think me worthless. You think because I am a frog, I cannot stand by you.
His anger hurt me terribly. I had never seen him like this, not in all the years we had been together. Tears sprang to my eyes. “That’s rubbish, Gogu, and you know it,” I sniffed. “You’re my dearest friend, my inseparable companion, and my wise advisor. You’ve got as much heart as any knight on horseback.”
You say that.
“I mean it. I didn’t take you tonight because I was worried I might lose you. That’s the truth. If that happened, I couldn’t bear it.”
“Couldn’t this wait until the morning?” Tati’s voice was an exhausted whisper.
I laid my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t stop crying. Long after Tati had fallen asleep, I felt Gogu’s small damp form jump onto the linen beside my face, and his tongue came out to lick my tears away.
After our Dark of the Moon journey, the idea of our party—which I had hoped might be the solution to several problems—became faintly ridiculous. We were bound to it, nonetheless. The invitations had gone out and acceptances had begun to come in—more than Aunt Bogdana had expected, for she had wondered whether the rumors that were sweeping the valley about us and our home would keep folk away. It seemed that curiosity outweighed fear.
The castle was being given a top-to-toe cleanup by women from the local area. I heard whispered stories about Night People, and about Drǎguţa the witch, as our helpers scrubbed and dusted and polished—and I tried to ignore them. I had a story of my own, and I had not yet told it to Tati.
If I was right about what that vision meant—the two children lost in the forest—I owed it to her to tell her the truth about Sorrow. His parting words had seemed to confirm what I believed: that he was in some kind of servitude to the Night People, with his sister’s safety the price of obedience. I wondered why he had not told Tati himself.
I held back from giving my sister the news. Once she heard that Sorrow was, in fact, a human boy who had strayed into the Other Kingdom and been kept there for years, growing into a man far away from his own people, how would she ever be persuaded to give him up? The cruel thing about it was that even if he was a mortal man, he was still beyond her reach as sweetheart, lover, or husband. It seemed that he and his sister had been living in the Other Kingdom since they were children. One could not stay so long in Drǎguţa’s realm without partaking of food and drink. Tadeusz had lured them and kept them; kept them too long. They would never be able to live in our world again. They might both be halfway toward becoming Night People by now, or worse. And if Sorrow could not stay here, the solution Tati might seize on would be for her to go there. I knew her kind heart. As soon as I told her his story, that was what she would want. Even if it meant a future in that shadowy, cruel realm we had glimpsed at Dark of the Moon, I thought she would do it for him.
I could hold back from divulging the story, of course. I did not plan to tell her of my other vision in Drǎguţa’s mirror: that of a young man with green eyes whom I had thought for a wonderful moment I could love, until the image revealed the monster beneath. I had no idea what that meant. Perhaps it was a warning not to trust too easily. I had not passed on Anastasia’s crushing words to me, nor the news that it had been my sister whom Tadeusz had wanted all along. Indeed, Tati and I had hardly spoken of our experience since we came home, despite our younger sisters’ volleys of questions.
Paula was our most reliable source of information on just about anything to do with the Other Kingdom. I seized my opportunity to quiz her while we were doing the final hemming on our party gowns. The two of us had taken our work up to a little tower room where the light was good. Our only companion was Gogu, crouched down in a roll of green silk thread, sulking. He still hadn’t entirely forgiven me and, in a way, I could see his point.
“Paula, I want to ask you something.”
“Mmm?”
“When people go to the Other Kingdom and stay there, they can’t ever come back, can they? Not if they’ve been eating the food.”
She nodded. “Everybody knows that.”
“But folk do come back sometimes. I’ve heard stories of people vanishing and being gone for hundreds of years, and then suddenly appearing in the woods again. They’re out of their wits, usually. So it must be possible.”
“Time works differently there,” said Paula, pushing her spectacles higher on her nose and peering closely at her sewing. “It can be quicker or slower than our time, whatever they want it to be. You might be gone for years and years in our time, but you’d only have been in the Other Kingdom a day or less. You might not have touched the food. That’s why people go mad. Imagine coming back and finding everyone you knew had been dead for a hundred years. Why do you want to know that, Jena? I wish you’d tell us what happened that night.”
I shuddered. “It was horrible. Dark and cruel. I don’t want any of you even thinking about such things. Be glad you didn’t see it.”
Paula gave me a funny look. “How did you get there?” she asked me.
I ignored the question. “Paula, what if someone from the Other Kingdom wanted to stay in our world? Is the rule the same?”
“I don’t know, Jena. Anyway, I suspect the rules can be broken if Drǎguţa decides that’s the right thing. I’ve wondered whether the only reason anyone can cross over is her deciding to let it happen.”
I looked at her. “Really? Tati said that, too: that the way we open the portal doesn’t mean anything special; that it’s only because Drǎguţa approves that we can go to the Other Kingdom at all. At Dark of the Moon, once we’d gotten back across the Deadwash, we just walked home.”
“Is this about Sorrow?” Paula was astute as ever.
“I can’t say. I have to talk to Tati first. There’s something I need to tell her.”
Cezar had been asking questions of his own. It was clear to me that he did not believe our explanation for being out at night. But since we maintained our story about strange noises, and Petru managed to back us up without quite telling lies, my cousin made no progress in his search for answers. Cezar was edgy; his ill temper manifested itself without warning, and nobody was safe from his sharp tongue. I gathered from Ivan that more and more of the valley men were trying to get out of the hunting party. It had been many days since Ivona’s death. With nothing useful discovered, and not so much as a sniff of a Night Person detected, folk were starting to say they’d rather be safe in bed behind a locked door at night and spend their energies by day looking after their stock and keeping their families fed and warm. Someone had suggested, behind my cousin’s back, that continuing the hunt could only offend the folk of the wildwood further—that Cezar risked bringing down another act of violence on the community. A group of the local men made a formal request that the master of Vǎrful cu Negurǎ erect a new crucifix on the slopes above the mill, and Cezar agreed to pay for it. But he was angry, and we crept around the house as if on eggshells, trying to keep out of his way.
With seven days to go until Full Moon and the party, Aunt Bogdana paid us a visit to check on the supper arrangements. While she was closeted with Florica and her helpers, deep in discussion of pies and puddings, I took Tati up to the tower room. I bolted the door and told her my theory about what I had seen of Sorrow in Drǎguţa’s mirror.
“So I owe you an apology, if I’m right about what it means,” I said at the end of my account.
“It seems as if Sorrow isn’t one of the Night People—he isn’t even from the Other Kingdom. Or wasn’t. But he’s trapped there now, he and his little sister. I didn’t like seeing her there, Tati. It looked as if they were making her watch: as if she’d been shown so many bad things that she hardly understood what they were anymore.”
“But why didn’t he say?” It was clear she believed my theory. Her eyes were wide with horror. “Why didn’t he tell me? This is terrible, Jena! We have to help them. I must go there at Full Moon. I must talk to Ileana—”
“No,” I said, before she could work herself up any further. “You’re not going—not this time. We have our own party, remember? We all have to appear at that. Cezar’s suspicious enough already without any of us going missing. Besides, I don’t know how we could help. From what Sorrow said when we were leaving, he’s obliged to do the Night People’s bidding in order to stop worse harm from coming to his sister. And the Night People are powerful. Ileana didn’t even put in an appearance at their revels. You must have felt it, Tati—the way they twist and turn things, and meddle with your thoughts. Against that kind of strength, we’re like little feathers drifting on a stream, carried along wherever it decides to take us.”
“You said yourself”—Tati was fixing me with her eyes—“that Sorrow should ask Drǎguţa for help. She’s supposed to be the real power of the wildwood. Couldn’t she change things, if we explained how important it is?”
“You make it sound easy. I don’t even know where she is. I don’t think anyone does. Anyway, if she really is so powerful, why has she let the Night People keep Sorrow and his sister prisoner so long? Even if they can never come back to their old lives, at least in Ileana’s world they wouldn’t be … well, slaves, or whatever they are.”
Tati’s voice was a whisper. “Are you saying you don’t believe in Drǎguţa? Are you saying you don’t believe there’s a power in the wildwood that’s strong enough to defeat evil, Jena?”
I felt as if I were suddenly teetering on a precipice.
Wildwood Dancing Page 19
