Flight

by Neil Hetzner

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Escape and Capture

  The third time Joe asks Fair if he has a boat the feral boy slowly nods. Once Fair figures out that a boat might mean that Bird Bob’s ferend, who he doesn’t like, will leave and the girl will stay, Fair nods vigorously.

  The boat is an eighty-year old bass boat with solar seats to recharge its 40 amp motor. For decades it had been kept tied up on the shore of a tributary of the Carman’s River for decades to be used when Olewan made her infrequent trips to the outer villages of Long Island for supplies.; however when the centaurs started to become hostile, Olewan had Fair drag the boat all the way to the Bury to keep it safe.

  Since the boat hasn’t been used for months, the charge on the motor is low. Joe’s inclination is to start the next stage of his journey right away; but after his problems on the Hudson, the teener is more attuned to the things that can go wrong with boats. Rather than relying on the accuracy of the charge indicator and hoping that the solar seat panels work, Joe drags the boat out of its shed into the sun to begin its recharge.

  Prissi had been with Fair when Joe tracked the wild-haired boy down to find out about the boat. As soon as he started to talk about leaving, she had cut him off. Joe thought that she would follow him to find the boat, but she stayed behind. Although the teener is angry at Prissi’s behavior, he focuses on what some new and unfamiliar part of him is telling him is his first duty—to get the remains of Bob Tom Damall off the ground and onto the waters of the world.

  As the boat panels collect energy, Joe makes a shroud out of the large blue tarp. He folds edges and tucks in the ends in a way that has him thinking of assembling a huge burrito. The incongruous thought makes him laugh. That outlandish noise first horrifies him and, then, makes him wonder if he is going insane. Joe finds a coil of line in the boat which he uses to tie up the package. Once his friend’s remains are encapsulated in blue plastic, Joe finds it easier to use the force necessary to get his friend’s body into in the boat without worrying about doing further damage. Joe arranges the body so that Bob Tom’s head is held in place by the vee of the bow and his legs hang over the first of the boat’s three thwarts. By angling the old man’s body, more than half of the solar panel seat remains uncovered. Joe figures that if he has Prissi sit on the middle thwart with her weight opposite to Bob Tom’s, and if he himself sits in the middle of the stern, then the boat should be well-balanced.

  Having Bob Tom draped the way he has may work once they are on the water, but, when Joe tries to pull the boat across the clearing, he can’t do it. Changing tactics, he wrestles the riverman’s body to the stern, but concludes, even with the weight shift, that he wouldn’t be able to pull the boat as far as he must. The doubts about his sanity and, now, his physical weaknesses, paralyze Joe. He stands motionless in the dappled light of the late morning sun, which is wriggling its way through the canopy, like maggots in meat.

  After a motionless while, Joe notices the Schwinner and feels its tug. A voice tells him to get on the bike. Go home. A quest with a fifteen-year old hero is a farce, a tragic comedy, a pitiable delusion. Joe stares at the bike and can see himself pedaling across the Queensboro Bridge while miniature distorted images of the rising buildings of Manhattan reflect off the handlebars. A second later all Joe can see are the bike’s wheels. He runs to find Fair. Within an hour, the bike had been disassembled and its wheels attached to a long pole and the pole attached underneath the stern of the boat. Joe fashions a harness from the boat’s painter and finds that with the weight of Bob Tom in the stern above the wheels he can easily pull the boat along.

  Joe can understand why someone with the seemingly limited intelligence of Fair would be willing to let him have the boat, but he is less sure why the old woman hasn’t tried to stop his preparations. As Joe is putting the bicycle wheel carrier together, he gets the idea that the old woman might want to have the boat gone to remove a means of escape from Prissi. He pushes back against that thought since it leads him to another. In all the time since he and Bob Tom began their quest, one thought that never had been asked was whether Prissi would want their help. They had just assumed that Prissi would come with them. Now, he realizes that they never any real reason for thinking that. When Joe had demanded that Prissi leave with him, she had refused even to talk about it. In fact, within seconds, she had disappeared. Joe decides he must make a second plea, but immediately wonders whether she isn’t right to stay. She may be safer in the middle of nowhere with a crazy lady and slow-witted boy than she would be with him.

  When the boat is fully charged and both Bob Tom and the Schwinner’s frame secured, Joe studies Fair and the crone who stands protectively in front of the door that leads to Prissi. Joe says that he must see Prissi before he will leave. The old woman shakes her head gleefully and says that Prissi refuses to say goodbye. Joe wants to believe that the old woman is lying, but whether she is or not, the teener decides not to argue. He makes a decision. He will go. He will send Bob Tom on his journey and then come back for Prissi.

  Joe listens to the old woman’s directions of how to get to the stream as he slips the harness over his shoulders. As he begins making his way to the water, Joe shakes his head at how ludicrous everything he has done over the last two weeks has become.

  From her hiding place in the woods, Prissi watches Joe get on his way. It hurts to walk. She can only imagine how much worse the pain will be if she has to run… or fly. She has taken a vial of painkillers from the operatory, but she desperately hopes her plan succeeds in a way so that she doesn’t have to fly. She estimates that she has something between fifteen and thirty minutes before Olewan or Fair realizes that she isn’t behind the door she has locked. She knows without a doubt that when Fair finds out that she is gone that he will come after her. But, how fast he can make up for lost time and whether it will be rage or sadness at her betrayal that will motivate him, Prissi doesn’t know. She tells herself that the only thing she can do to end the harm she has been bringing to those who cross her path is follow the plan she has devised.

  After Joe disappears into the woods dragging the boat behind, Prissi waits two minutes before following him. As she walks, she looks to find some weapon she can use to get the boat away from Joe. It’s her intention to steal the boat, leave Joe the bicycle, take the boat down the Carman to the Atlantic, allow the old winger to find his grave and, then, to end the story.

  She passes on a rock shaped like the head of a croquet mallet because it seems too big. She grabs a dead branch from the low crotch of a hickory tree, but decides that it isn’t sturdy enough. She spies a second stick that looks stout enough, but finds it’s half rotten. Finally, Prissi picks up a baseball-sized rock even though she can’t conjure up a plan to use it that doesn’t frighten her. Throwing the rock and missing her target will leave her weaponless. Throwing and hitting Joe, but in the wrong place, could cause to happen what she is trying to prevent. The winger is so caught up in the inadequacies of her plans that she is around a curve and within Joe’s view before she knows it. He is stopped by the bank of a fast moving stream that is less than ten seven meters across. A half-skinned log acts as a bridge across the water. Prissi backs away, but it is too late. Joe has seen her.

  When Joe twists to free his shoulders from the rope harness, he catches a glimmer of silver and red and instantly knows its Prissi. The fatigue he has been feeling in his shoulders from pulling the boat begins to lift. If Prissi has run away from the old woman, then, he must be quick. He calls her name and tells her to hurry as he unbolts the bicycle wheels from the boat. The bicycle’s wheels are off and stowed in the boat and Joe is wrestling Bob Tom’s weight from the stern to the bow when he looks around for Prissi to get her help. It’s the twisting of his body that causes the blow to fall on his shoulder rather than its intended target. Before Prissi can even think what to do next, Joe, recovering with the speed of a hockey player with a put back shot, springs up, and knocks the rock from her hand.

  “What are you doin
g? Are you frutz? Help me get this thing in the water.”

  In a response that stuns both Joe and Prissi, the girl actually does as she is told.

  Three minutes pass before the boat is in the water and Joe and Prissi are in the boat. The boat strains to be free in the turbulent water. It takes both of Prissi’s hands and Joe’s right hand to steady the boat. While holding to a cluster of slippery roots jutting from the bank, Joe uses his left hand to start the motor. The ancient piece of equipment keeps starting, whining and stopping. Joe guesses it might have a short. He is considering what Bob Tom might do when Prissi screams. Joe looks up to see Fair pounding down the path with his ancient jack knife opened in his hand. A freeze frame image of a berserk skateboreder fills Joe’s mind.

  “Go! Go!”

  When Prissi lets go an instant before Joe, the bow immediately swings away from the bank. Despite having swamped on the Hudson from a boat turned sideways to the current, Joe only hesitates for a split second before he, too, lets go. The bass boat, caught crosswise in the stream, hurtles away. Joe is distracted as Fair runs up to the bank and, without any hesitation, starts crashing through the brush alongside the stream bank after them. Joe narrows his focus so that the threat of Fair and the threat of the boat capsizing are left behind. All of his attention is on getting the motor running. He flicks the starter switch a half-dozen times, bangs the cowling and then rattles the frame up and down. Finally, he feels, more than hears over the water’s roar, the motor engage. Joe throttles down figuring that it is safer to correct the boat’s course slowly. After a few seconds, the stern of the boat begins to come round. As the boat responds, Joe increases the power.

  “Duck!” Prissi yells.

  Joe doesn’t even look up to see what the threat is. All of his attention is on bringing the bow of the boat into alignment with the current. The rock Fair has hurled smashes into his shoulder in exactly the same place where Prissi has hit him.

  Over the noise of the rampaging water, Prissi’s incensed screams, and the scrambled noise from the pain in his shoulder, Joe can hear Fair shouting, “Stay. Stay. You said stay.”

  Within two minutes the figure of Fair running along the bank is no more than a small pulse of mottled browns. Once they are free of Fair and the boat is running smoothly with the current, Joe throttles back to conserve energy and shifts his attention to interrogating Prissi.

  He asks question after question. Prissi only answers a few, and, of those, many are answered with just a word or two. Joe learns that Jack was involved in Prissi’s father’s death, and that the reason Prissi is in danger has to do with some science done by the old woman a long time ago. When Joe asks how the centaur’s figure into the story, Prissi only shrugs. It is more than an hour later and Joe is wondering why Bob Tom had to die when his attention shifts back to the water to understand what he is seeing.

  Because of the overhanging branches and the brush-edged banks, the water of the stream is mottled with the greens and browns of growth and blues, greens and blacks of growth’s shadows. What he has seen downstream and thought was just a darker band of shadow resolves itself into a natural dam made from a couple of fallen trees and a snarl of driftwood. Joe needs either to turn upstream or beach the boat. The likelihood of accomplishing the first option, given the speed of the current, the narrowness of the stream and the limited power of the motor is not good. Joe reverses speed and runs the motor as fast as it will go. The bass boat slows, but not by much. Joe scans the bank, picks his spot and tells Prissi to hold on tight. As the boy runs the boat up on the steep bank, the bow bucks upward and Bob Tom, wings tightly cocooned in plastic, takes a final flight. The riverman’s body hits the bank, rolls down into the water and heads down stream buoyed by air pockets in the tarp. Within seconds the body smashes into the dam, wriggles back and forth like a skunk getting under a fence, and disappears from view.

  A stunned Joe just sits in the boat after Bob Tom’s body disappears. It is Prissi who clambers out first and starts pushing aside the brush along the bank so that she can get to the dam. She is already using a long pole to prod for weak spots in the tangle of branches and broken trees by the time Joe joins her. Her exertions are causing her to pant and her sentences are broken as she tries to catch her breath.

  “Let’s push…the center. If we can…weaken it there…the whole thing might…wash away.”

  When Joe reaches for Prissi’s pole, she knocks his hand away and tells him to get his own. The teener digs around until he finds a stout, fairly straight branch. He crawls out onto the dam and works the end of the pole into the knot of branches before pushing down with all of his might. When he manages to lever up the center of the knot, Prissi uses her pole to push part of the top layer of the dam outward. After a dozen attempts, small parts of the dam untangle. Within ten minutes, they have made a boat-wide breach in the interwoven branches, but the interlocked fallen trees have not budged.

  “Freezing geezers, this isn’t working”

  Prissi would have thrown her pole away in frustration, but she is far too exhausted.

  “Let’s just stop, get in the boat and somehow work it over the trees.”

  Joe shakes his head in disagreement, “If we try that, we’re going to end up in the water. This current is moving too fast.”

  “Yeah, well, if we stay here much longer, my strange friend is going to show up and something bad is going to happen.”

  Despite his misgivings, Joe follows Prissi as she works her way off the dam.

  “He’s long gone.”

  “As a pubescent female, I have a sixth sense about when a male is going to appear or disappear. I can assure you that if we’re here much longer, I’m going to have a date to a woodsy spring fling with someone who probably doesn’t own a tux. Move.”

  Although Prissi’s manner angers him, Joe is both happy that she seems to have regained some of an attitude with which he is very familiar as well as happy that he is too tired to argue. He follows the girl as she scrambles her way back to the boat. She is about ten meters shy of her goal, fighting her way through the brush which grows to the edge of the bank, when her wing gets caught in a patch of bullbrier. Rather than take the time to work her wing free from the handful of thorns which claim it, Prissi’s frustration, her fear of Fair, and her anger at not getting free from Joe boil over. She gives her wing an impetuous yank which both lets loose a flurry of feathers and sets the thorns even deeper.

  Prissi’s reason vacates her. She screams and thrashes until Joe pinions her tightly in his arms. His first thought is to talk to her to try to calm her down, but a wiser part of him guesses that he himself is a big part of what is setting Prissi off. The walker shuts his mouth as tightly as his grip. Once Prissi becomes still, Joe loosens his arms and begins to prize the thorns from her wing. By the time the wing is free, there are dozens of feathers, both pinions and remiges, strewn around the brush. As Joe leads his now docile friend to the boat, he remembers how he felt as Adrona and Seka led him through the mountain after he had had his tantrum.

  The boy ends up completely wet but he manages to get Prissi in the stern of the boat before he uses his pole to push the boat back into the water. He tells her how to start the motor and where to steer. When they get close to the dam, Joe tells Prissi to flip the propeller out of the water before he uses his pole to push the boat over the obstruction. The boat rocks precariously and water slops over the gunwales, but finally slides across to the other side. Prissi aims the boat back toward the bank. As soon as she and Joe switch seats, Joe takes the helm and pushes the motor to its maximum speed. As the newly minted captain careers downstream, slopping in and out of the shifting currents, he keeps his eyes peeled for a blotch of blue. He hasn’t gone far before a series of bends and switchbacks force him to slow down. When the stream finally straightens, Joe looks as far downstream as he can but he sees nothing blue. When the stream joins up with a much larger body of water, which Joe assumes is the Carman’s River, the boy is convinced that he ha
s somehow missed his friend. He slows the boat as he tries to decide whether to turn back. Joe is chilled by the idea that Bob Tom‘s body might be hung up on a snag or trapped underwater between a pair of rocks. It is too easy for him to imagine a blue bundle caught in a similar puzzle of limbs and logs as what he and Prissi have just gotten past. He can see how the bundle will become undone and what will happen to the old man’s remains when the carnivorous animals of the woods find it. If he doesn’t go back, he understands how the question of “what if” could bother him long years into his future. Joe begins to swing the boat upstream when he remembers to ask himself the same question that has guided him since his friend left.

  What would Bob Tom do?

  Although the answer is not without shades of gray, Joe is pretty sure that if it were his body upstream and Bob Tom in the boat with Prissi that the boat would be traveling downstream.

  Joe completes a circle so that he is heading back toward the ocean.

  Prissi twirls her hand as she asks, “What was that about?”

  “I wanted to go back to find my friend, but then I decided that he wouldn’t want that.”

  “Why not?”

  “A live Prissi is more important than a dead Bob Tom Damall.”

  Rather than deal with the implications of that, Prissi snorts, “Bob Tom Damall? A woodsy kind of guy with a name like that? Is that for real? He sounds like the long lost cousin of the woodsman in Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil.”

  Joe is silent for a moment before he says, “I just assumed that was his name. I never thought about it.”

  “Did you ever read Tolkien?’

  “Of course, everybody has to.”

  “And you never made that connection?”

  Prissi’s question is asked with so much disdain that Joe decides to keep his mouth shut.

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  As Joe tells the story of running away, staying with the Greenlanders and Blesonus, capsizing on the Hudson, being rescued by Bob Tom and the days since, Prissi doesn’t say a single word. It may be the way that Joe tells his tale, in how he dismisses the danger and disguises his fears, or it may be that her experience has scarred her, but the longer she listens, the more it seems to Prissi that, even though Joe’s life has been in real danger, some part of him also seems to think that the past days have been a lark, some kind of merit badge quest. She twists her head around so that she can look at Joe. She is looking for her NQB, a special friend, someone who has made both her lips and her brain tingle, but she has a hard time seeing anything other than a deluded rich boy on a Spring Break safari. Prissi’s hands and feet begin jiggling and tapping in frustration that getting to where she has to go is taking so long.

  Both adolescents are shocked when a rubberized launch of camo green sweeps around a curve and comes hurtling up the river. Joe doesn’t slow his speed, but he does move the bass boat close to the western bank. His action gives the other boat plenty of room to pass by, but when the launch’s path veers to intersect with theirs, Joe guesses that the two orange-feathered wingers standing up in the speeding craft are coming for Prissi. Her swearing, so filled with rage and despair that the words themselves are slurred, confirms Joe’s guess.

  “What do we do?”

  “Get out of the boat. There’s no way this will outrun them.”

  As a frantic Joe looks for a place to land on the high banked brush-covered shore, he yells, “Can you fly?”

  Prissi’s arms fly up like they have exploded from a Jack-in-the-Box.

  “Probably not. And not against them. Freeieekin mimi, just land.”

  Joe is so slow to make a decision about where to run the boat up on shore that Prissi gets the same eerie feeling she had with Jack after her father was killed. With the same kind of data density that those near death supposedly get, Prissi’s mind flashes on myriad images of all the people she’s met since the whole disaster began. Except for Allan Burgey, the only people who have been helpful and trustworthy have been Africans.

  Making the same kind of ululating wail she’d heard so many times in Africa, Prissi snaps her body back, dislodges Joe, grabs the handle of the motor, yanks it as hard as she can, and pushes herself up into a half-crouch. Just as the bow crashes into the bank and begins to climb its root thick muddy side, Prissi flaps her wings twice, stretches her arms up and grabs hold of a thick branch overhanging the water. The pain that brings to her cracked and broken ribs triggers a jet of slurry from her stomach.

  Prissi’s actions take Joe by surprise. As a result, he isn’t prepared for the crash. As the bass boat’s momentum carries it up the bank, instead of jumping free, Joe reflexively holds on. When the boat flips over Joe is caught beneath it. Looking down, Prissi sees Joe’s situation, but commands herself not to care. The wingers are after her, not Joe. She slides hand over hand until she is close enough to the trunk of tree that the underbrush thins out. She drops down safely. As soon as her feet touch ground, she starts looking for a way through the woods. She knows she needs to hurry. The wingers are no more than fifty meters from shore, but Prissi also knows that she must be careful. She’s already been caught in the brush once. She keeps her wings furled as tightly as she can before she begins to twist and turn through the dense thorny maze.

  When she had escaped by flying between the ships on the Hudson and had climbed down the rabbit hole to the subway and, even when she was fighting the zies, Prissi had been confident that her wing size and shape gave her an advantage over her foes. Now, the forest is so thick and intertwined, and she feels so weak, that she can’t think of any advantage that she might have. In fact, she is feeling the same helplessness as on the night when she crashed, but, despite her despair, she has no notion of quitting. In so much of what she has done, especially in her sports, the fact that she knew she was going to lose had never ever given her an excuse not to compete as hard as she could.

  Semi-crouched, with her wingtips just short of touching the ground, Prissi swings herself around the trunk of a tree so that she can take a glance backward. The wingers have beached further upriver from Olewan’s boat and already are climbing the bank. Prissi wriggles forward another ten meters before she turns around again. As she has guessed, the wingers are paying no attention to Joe. She is their sole prey. For the first time in her life, Prissi wishes that her wings were not the silver and red that she had had to beg her father to approve. If only she had been smart enough to get brown wings, then she might have a chance. Instead of hoping that she can make her way far enough into the woods to find a trail and escape, she could have been looking for a place to hide her brown among all the other browns in the woods. The girl twists and turns, snags a wing, slows and carefully frees herself.

  Suddenly, for some reason which she cannot explain, Prissi feels incredibly calm. It seems to her that everything is moving in slow motion. The thorn she has between her fingers has a brilliant clarity. Its tip is a rosy ivory which darkens to a chocolate brown at its base. The shape reminds her of a sliver of moon. She watches her fingertips turn pink when she squeezes the thorn’s base. She works the barb free from a feather whose vane is speckled with small glistening cabochons of river spray. She studies the twig that gives birth to the thorn and sees where buds are struggling to break free into bloom. Her eyes follow the twig back to where it joins a branch. She is fascinated by its latticed architecture…until it suddenly comes to her that she is being chased by two men who want to kill her. The shell-shocked girl wonders how much time she’s wasted studying the thorn, but she has no sense of whether it’s been a milli-second or a minute. When Prissi turns her head, she sees the two wingers are only a half-dozen trees away. She lunges forward and begins to wrestle her way through the woods. Within seconds the feeling of preternatural calm returns. Prissi sees the world around her as a giant maze. But, instead of feeling trapped or confused, she feels like she has a perfect lucidity as to where to put her foot, what branch to hold with which hand, and how to twist her body so that she c
an slip under or around the next impediment.

  Joe is flabbergasted when the two wingers pass him by. Because he sees himself as Prissi’s rescuer, the teener can’t understand why her attackers are not confronting him. The idea that they consider him either non-threatening or ineffectual enrages the boy; however, at the same time, he feels much relief that he has been ignored.

  From his limited vantage point beneath the overturned boat, Joe watches the two sets of black ankle-high frylon boots scramble up the bank and disappear. As soon as the coast is clear, Joe looks around for some kind of weapon. He thinks that if the wingers are engrossed with catching Prissi that he might be able to sneak up behind them and…. The end of the thought won’t come. He’ll sneak up on them and …. Joe finally tells himself that the reason that he can’t think what to do is because he hasn’t found a weapon. Obviously, a rock would call for a different strategy than a club. Joe scours the riverbank, sees a number of fist-sized rocks, and decides that throwing them from a distance makes more sense than trying to get close enough to hit someone with a club. As he gathers his arsenal, his thoughts go back to the rocks and pebbles that he threw at Adrona and Seka—rocks thrown in anger…and futility.

  It is not until the boy climbs to the top of the riverbank that his plan falls apart. The woods are far too dense to accurately throw a rock more than a few meters. If he is going to be of any use to Prissi, Joe realizes that he is going to have to attack from close quarters. As the young Fflowers looks around for something he can use as a cudgel or spear, the beached boat of the wingers catches his eye. With a relief he refuses to acknowledge, Joe considers whether he might be more help from farther away. Joe drops back down the bank to gauge how much the trees overhang the river. Reassured by the protection the trees’ canopy provides from an overhead attack and how little room to maneuver there would be for a large winger trying to fly under the drooping boughs, Joe grabs the bow of the bass boat and begins to lift it. Once it is high enough, he gets himself underneath and pushes up until the boat flips right side up. A minute later he has the bass boat tied to the wingers’ launch. He jumps into the launch and makes sure that he knows how to operate it. Leaving the motor running in neutral, Joe climbs back up the bank. He can make out flashes of orange and knows that the wingers are too deep into the woods to be able to easily fly out. The boy cups his hands and yells to Prissi, “Three keds.” Hoping that she will understand and her attackers won’t, Joe yells his instructions a second time, drops down the bank, jumps into the launch and heads downstream with the bass boat towed behind. Joe keeps close to the shore and under the protection of the overhanging canopy as he speeds away.

  It takes Prissi only a second to translate keds as “kilometers downstream.” She snorts in derision that her escape could be as simple as making her way three kilos downstream. Her legs are quivering in exhaustion and her ribs feel like someone has buried a stone spearhead between them. Her pursuers, who she is sure, are the same ones who attacked her on the West Side Highway and the Hudson, are using the same tactics that they used before. They have split apart so that they can flank her.

  As her enemies have gotten closer, Prissi has had premonitions when she is sure that a bullet is speeding toward her. She has imagined how, in the split second before she dies, as her body is slammed forward by the projectile’s force, she will hear the flat whine announcing her death. After her last moment comes and goes four times, Prissi begins to wonder whether her assailants are armed.

  Guns in Africa were ubiquitous. A ten-year old boy or girl who had not pulled the trigger on a weapon was the exception. Even though guns in Noramica are illegal and extremely rare, Prissi has just assumed that the wingers who were chasing her would have them. Now, as she threads her way through the kudzu and bullbrier snarled woods, she tries to decide whether she hasn’t been fired on because the wingers don’t have guns or because they want to capture, not kill, her.

  In the middle of slinking around a tree trunk covered in poison ivy, Prissi stops dead. If it was Schecty’s men who wanted to kill her and Schecty worked for Joshua Fflowers as Olewan thought, then these two must work for Dicky Baudgew. But what is puzzling is why, if both groups want the same thing, the crystals around her neck, why does one group want to capture her and the other to kill her?

  Prissi is navigating her way through a narrow thorny crease between two ancient uprooted swamp maples when her foot slips on a patch of mud. As her leg slides out from under her, her arms snap out to recover her balance. The girl lists, balances precariously for a split second, then, falls. Like Br’er Rabbit in the brier patch, Prissi is trapped in the clasp of the brush. She immediately knows that she won’t be able to free herself in time to escape. She can feel hundreds of small sharp talons holding her in place. As was true just minutes before when Joe had to help to free her, she knows that struggling will only make things worse. Knows it, but doesn’t care. She cannot lie still and do nothing while the two wingers close in. Prissi arches her back, kicks her feet and finds a black satisfaction as she makes her situation worse. She is still thrashing when a winger grabs her hair and commands her to stop struggling. In response, Prissi’s body goes deathly still, but her mouth opens and a low wail, like the last long note of a dirge, comes out, hangs for a second, and, then, like fog, drifts across the forest.

  Prissi’s assailants are well-prepared. The amount of gear they keep removing from their paks and pants as they work to free her remind her of magicians. Folding saws, short-handled loppers, rope and water tubes appear. Despite the loathing she feels for these strangers who can touch her, command her, and, even, rescue her without her permission, Prissi is grateful when they share their supply of water. Her throat is extraordinarily dry, which she hopes is more from the medications she has been taking than from fear. It takes twenty minutes before the wingers have cut her free from the brush. Looking down, Prissi guesses that it would take twice that long to pick out all of the thorn-covered stems stuck in her wings and clothes, but that is a moot issue. Her captors get Prissi to her feet and tie a rope around her waist before they begin backtracking toward the river.

  As the wingers slowly make their way through the puzzle of limb and vine with Prissi sandwiched between them, the exhausted girl strains her ears for any sound of a boat. She has been thinking that Joe’s instructions must have been meant to deceive the wingers. Joe has not fallen so far in her esteem that she can believe that he has done no more than run away downstream. If that really is what he has done, then Joe Fflowers has not made an escape plan, but only an excuse. Even though Prissi hears nothing, she holds onto her waning belief, by panning her eyes across the woods in hopes of spying some small patch of Joe preparing an ambush. But, despite her efforts, she hears and sees nothing that can sustain hope.

  As she stumbles and is tugged along, the captive considers and rejects a dozen ideas, each more improbable than the one before, of how, without help, she might escape. At last, she gives up on any idea beyond that of slowing her captors’ progress. She trips, stumbles and struggles, moans and swears, while being careful not to use up too much of her energy, nor irritate her captors to the point of violence.

  While Prissi has been frantically devising a means of escape, Dicky Baudgew’s minions have been discussing their own escape. They had heard the diminishing whine of their boat’s motor as Joe raced it downstream. As they wend their way back to the water, the two wingers decide that the smaller one, Whir, will stay behind with Prissi while the larger, Edgee, will fly downstream, deal with the boy, retrieve the boat, and come back to get Prissi and his partner. Whir reminds Edgee to be sure to say please when he asks for their boat back.

  When they arrive back at the river’e edge, the brush along the bank is so heavy that there is almost no room to move. Whir holds Prissi back as Edgee removes some of the gear he has been carrying and slurps down more water before launching himself into the air. Once his partner is gone, Whir pushes Prissi out to the edge of the bank to give himself
enough room to lean against a low-hanging branch as a kind of perch. He looks Prissi up and down before asking, “What makes you so valuable?”

  Prissi considers her response for just a second, “I make fabulous eleven layer bars. Your evil boss wants the secret recipe.”

  The small squirrel-faced winger smiles at Prissi. The smile grows to a sharp-toothed chuckle and then a full-blown laugh. The man’s foot lashes out so quickly that Prissi has no chance to do anything but scream as she shoots backward off the bank into the river. Prissi is wet past her waist and her floundering wings are soaked before Whir uses the rope attached to his captive to violently pull her back on shore.

  Pride, rather than any real strength, gets Prissi back on her feet. She chances a glance before she turns away from her assailant and stares at the river. Again, like while she was attempting her escape in the woods, Prissi waits for the blow that doesn’t come. Finally, the anticipation becomes too much, but when she turns her head, she sees the winger looking downstream and not at her at all. Prissi begins to clean her wings.

  It’s less than fifteen minutes later that a slight movement tight against the bank upstream catches her eye. The girl wonders if Joe has abandoned the boats and somehow circled around. If it is Joe, he is moving faster than she would guess he could. The form hugs the shore and shadows as it makes its way down-stream. It’s not until the object is less than fifty meters away that Prissi figures out that what she is seeing is a swimming centaur.

  Prissi holds her breath as the man-horse draws closer. He swims to within twenty meters before he stops in a splotch of dense shadow. Prissi can make out movement, but doesn‘t understand what she is seeing. Suddenly, there is a streak of brown flashing toward her. It’s accompanied by a slight hissing sound. Simultaneously with Prissi whipping her head around to make sense of what she has seen, Whir yowls before staggering forward with a brown-fletched arrow buried deep in his left wing below the shoulder blade. A second sound, anguished, precedes the winger tumbling off the bank into the river.

  Prissi experiences a split second of overwhelming relief at her rescue before the rope around her waist tightens. The wounded winger thrashes against the current and his pain as the two conspire to pull him to a place he does not want to go. A second later Prissi is torn from the bank and joins Whir in his fight for a longer life.

  Despite her frantic efforts, Prissi can’t get her feet braced in the soft muck of the river bed. The force of the winger in his death throes drags her forward. She loses her balance and her face gets pulled under. She lunges forward to keep from drowning. She coughs and spits out bloody river water. She pedals her feet like she is on an invisible bicycle until one foot gets planted on something solid enough that she can spring forward. That movement is enough to put some slack into the rope. She uses that opportunity to lunge forward and spread her sodden wings. When she comes back down into the river, her half-submerged wings act like an anchor. She digs in her feet and, after a few tries, manages to maintain a precarious counter-balance against the river’s pull on the dying winger.

  Afraid of losing her footing, Prissi doesn’t turn around when she hears the centaur approach from behind. The man-horse sweeps past her and cuts the tether that binds her to her captor. As the twitching winger is carried away by the current, Prissi is transfixed by the rosy contrail he leaves behind.

  It takes a touch from the centaur to get Prissi to turn away. When she looks up into her rescuer’s face, it is not, as she had supposed, the one who had killed Joe’s friend. This centaur has a round face with mottled skin from too much sun, perfectly round pale blue eyes and a small nearly lipless mouth. When the centaur reaches out a hand, Prissi grabs it. The centaur cups his other hand and Prissi uses it as a stirrup to climb onto his back. Even though the centaur’s shirt is little more than a filthy rag, his long gray hair smells of grease and smoke, and a quiver of arrows hangs in the way, Prissi can’t help tightly pressing herself against the man-horse’s back.

  When she murmurs, “Thank you,” in a voice that might be meant more for her than him, the centaur, whose name is Hortos, rasps, “You helped Mortos.”

  Those three words, words which tell Prissi that something she has done, finally, has helped rather than harmed someone, snaps her jaw open and eyes tightly shut as she shudders out her sobs.

  Prissi cries as Hortos swims downstream at a fast, but, seemingly, effortless, pace. Just shy of a bend in the river, the centaur lunges his way out of the water. Although the bosky woods look impenetrable to the girl, they are not. Behind a thin barricade of dense brush begins a trail that is just high and wide enough for the centaur.

  As soon as they are on the trail, Prissi’s emotions calm as if the solid footing beneath the centaur’s hooves is providing the same kind of foundation for her feelings.

  “Where are we going?”

  Although the centaur’s words spill from his mouth as rough as gravel, Prissi understands him to say, “To find your ferend.”

  “Will we be in time?”

  “To do what?”

  “To save him.”

  “He need saving?”

  “The other winger is going to hurt him.”

  “Course. He’s angry. But…your ferend…he need saving?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My herd dying, but don’t need saving.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would you say that?”

  Hortos cranes his neck to the newly leafed trees overhead as he shakes his head, “I don’t. She did.”

  “Olewan?”

  “Old one. Yes.”

  “But why does her opinion count?’

  “Only one can save us. But, won’t. Didn’t.”

  It’s Prissi’s turn to shake her head, “Why not?”

  It sounds like the rumble of thunder, but Prissi interprets it as a laugh…a very bitter laugh.

  “Don’t need saving.”

  Prissi is so engrossed in the futility of that statement that she gets slapped in the face by a fan of twigs.

  “How is your friend?” Prissi hesitates because she isn’t sure that she has listened hard enough to remember his name. “Mortos.”

  The centaur’s response is almost a whisper, “Gone.”

  Since she is sure she knows the answer, Prissi doesn’t ask, “Gone where?” Instead, she says, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  The centaur makes a keening sound and trots a half-dozen paces before he says, “Old one, too.”

  This time Prissi doesn’t know the answer to the question she has on her lips, but an intuitive part of her brain keeps her mouth from asking it.

  Hortos has trotted another twenty meters down the green corridor before he says, “Gone.”

  A vision, a violent African flash of the imperious old woman, her few day mother, shrieking as she scuttles away from enraged hooves flares in Prissi’s mind, but using all of her will, she extinguishes it. She sees nothing but the maze of woods around her and hears nothing but unseen birds and the husky breathing of the centaur. She says nothing. The only sign that she understands what she has been told is that her grasp on Hortos’ torso loosens.