Almost another month had passed, he realized. “I understand,” he said. “Shall I get Goliath?”
“I already told you I don’t need him,” she replied severely. “Make certain you perform all your duties: stay away from the closet under the stairs, and be certain to beat the white horse with all your might once a day, do you understand?”
He’d never considered staying away from the closet under the stairs a duty before. “Yes, ma’am,” he said obediently. He glanced again toward the stable, still not sure how she planned to take a week-long trip without Goliath.
“Good,” said Dame Groach. “I’ll see you in a week, then.”
She gathered her cloak around her, shrouding her sagging little body in the inky fabric. Then, knobbly cane held perfectly erect, she bobbed her head sharply.
A loud crack split the air, and the tiny old woman vanished.
Duncan gaped. Then, he blinked, shook his head, and peered again at the spot where she had stood. The only remnant of her presence was a dainty set of boot-prints in the dust.
His skin crawled at the unnatural phenomenon. He forced himself to move forward for a closer inspection, but he discovered nothing more than those boot-prints. The old witch had quite literally vanished into thin air.
Eventually his feet turned toward the stable, even as his eyes remained fixed on that curious spot. Not until he had crossed the threshold did he shift his attention to the two horses within. Goliath awaited him with wide, impatient eyes. Wildfire, too, hung his long head over his stall door.
Duncan vaguely pointed one thumb back over his shoulder. “She just disappeared,” he announced in wonder, “just gathered up her cloak and disappeared with a bang.”
“Her black cloak?” asked Wildfire.
Duncan nodded.
The white horse sighed in relief. “Then she’s really gone. How long did she say she’d be away?”
“For a week,” said Duncan. “But—”
“She’s a witch, Duncan,” Wildfire interrupted. “She doesn’t need a horse to travel places. She can do it by magic as well.”
“So she’s… really gone?”
“For the next week, so it seems,” said Wildfire. “You’d best go about your business as though she was here, though.”
Duncan didn’t need such a warning. If Dame Groach could disappear at will, it only stood to reason that she could reappear just as suddenly. Really, the only big change her absence brought was Wildfire’s willingness to converse again. That alone was enough to make Duncan happy. They resumed their morning and evening chats, and he faithfully went about his duties in the hours that intervened.
After a week, at the very same hour of the morning that she had left, Dame Groach reappeared in a crack of thunder. Duncan, once again on his way to the stables, jumped in surprise.
“Oh, you’re back!” he said politely. “Did you have a good trip?”
Beady black eyes glared at him malevolently. “What have you been doing while I’ve been gone?” she demanded.
He paused to think. “I trimmed back the row of hedges along the north alley, and I dusted in all the rooms upstairs. Let’s see… What else have I done?”
“Did you open the door beneath the stairs?” she asked abruptly.
“No. You told me not to.”
“Did you let the white horse out of his stall?”
“No. Was I supposed to?”
“Of course not!” she snapped. “Did you let the black horse out?”
“Was I supposed to?” Duncan asked with growing anxiety.
Dame Groach huffed. “Yes! He needs his exercise and sunshine!”
“I’m sorry,” said Duncan, contrition in his voice. “I just went about with my usual chores.”
“Fetch him for me,” she growled. “I’ll take him out for a run.”
“You’re not going inside first?”
She thumped her knobbly cane against his shoulder. “Do as you’re told, boy!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Duncan said, and he trotted off to get Goliath. He thought it only natural that someone would want to rest after a long journey, but he supposed that if a person could travel in a crack of thunder, it probably didn’t take them long to get where they were going. Perhaps the old crone wasn’t tired at all.
He watched her canter away atop the great black horse. When she had disappeared beyond the manor house, he turned his attention back to the stable. “Wildfire,” he called to the white horse, who peered out of the far stall curiously, “she’s back.”
“So I gathered,” Wildfire dryly replied. “That means we’re back to minimal talking.”
With that, he retreated back to his shadows. Duncan shrugged and went about his work, for there was plenty enough of that to do.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting your wages,” Dame Groach said that evening when Duncan appeared for his supper.
He’d forgotten about them again. “I guess so,” he said.
She scowled and produced another drawstring bag. Instead of handing this to him, though, she wedged open the top and extracted three silver coins. “Your cost of living has gone up,” she said as she held these out to him.
“All right,” Duncan replied, and he received the three coins quite readily. “Thank you.” He dropped them in his pocket, where they clinked against his other five. He liked to carry them around, to hear the sound of the silver jingling in his pocket.
“Are you daft?” the old crone suddenly demanded.
“What?”
“I thought when I collected you off the side of the road that you had a head for numbers.”
He didn’t know what this thread of conversation had to do with anything at all, but he went along with it. “I don’t know that I’d call it that. The numbers are just kind of stuck up there. Did you need something figured?”
“Your father was a farmer, and farmers are supposed to be miserly,” she said instead.
“I guess he was,” said Duncan. “He always complained about the price of everything.”
“And what about you?”
He frowned, even more confused now. “Yeah, he complained about me too.”
“No. That—” Her words suddenly broke off in an angry growl, and she stumped away in a huff.
He thought he ought to call out an apology to her, but he wasn’t sure what offense he had caused. So, instead, he simply selected his supper from the array of dishes laid out before him. Dame Groach, whether by magic or natural means, was a magnificent cook. Duncan only knew how to make simple fare and welcomed the return of an evening meal he did not have to prepare for himself. He hoped that everything would settle back into the same routine that had existed when he first came, two months ago.
He was thus surprised when, two days later at noon, Dame Groach descended the back staircase of the manor hall, wrapped in her black cloak and clutching her knobbly cane again.
Duncan was just on his way in from the garden. “Are you leaving again?” he asked in confusion.
“I’m going for another week,” she said irritably. “This time, make certain you take the black horse out for his exercise every day.”
“Can I use him to haul rocks away from the garden?” Duncan asked as he followed her toward the stable yard.
She grunted. He wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no, but before he could ask, she wrapped herself in her cloak and glared up at him. “I’ll see you in exactly one week,” she told him, and then she nodded and once again vanished in an ear-splitting bang.
Two more days passed. Each morning he carefully bridled Goliath and took him for a token walk around the stable yard, the leads in one hand and the magic cane in the other. Every time the cantankerous horse tried to nip at him, Duncan thwacked him with the cane, which made the horse forget being hit for bad behavior. If it had been a normal cane, Goliath would have learned his lesson by now, Duncan thought sourly.
After only two days, he was tired of the added morning ritual. Dame Groach had given him very speci
fic instructions, but he’d figured out a way to get around them.
“Can you turn yourself black again?” he asked Wildfire on the third morning.
“Of course,” said the horse suspiciously. “Why?”
“There are some rocks out in the garden that I need help moving, but I don’t want to take Goliath. Dame Groach told me I’m not allowed to take the white horse out of his stall, but if you’re black…”
Wildfire stared.
Duncan shifted from one foot to the other, feeling suddenly foolish. “It was a silly idea,” he said the next moment. “You probably don’t want to bother with moving rocks in a garden.”
“Fayet-mec-blaec,” the white horse suddenly uttered, and darkness swept over his coat. He stared at Duncan almost apprehensively, as though he feared that the offer of an outing would be revoked.
“How long’s it been since you left that stall?” Duncan asked as he reached forward to work the latch. Before Wildfire could answer, he paused and added suspiciously, “You’re not going to trample me and run away if I let you out, are you?”
“This is our chance to escape,” the horse replied.
Duncan stepped away from the stall. “I don’t have anywhere to escape to,” he argued. “Besides that, how can you possibly escape from an old witch who can travel in a clap of thunder?”
Wildfire scowled, if scowl it could be called on a horse. “There must be a way,” he said vaguely. “If I could only remember…”
“Well, for now, maybe you could settle for pulling up rocks in the garden. I can’t let you out unless you promise not to run away. I’ll get in horrible trouble if you’re not here when she gets back.”
“I would take you with me,” Wildfire replied pettishly. “But,” he added before Duncan could protest, “you’re right. There’s no point in running away if we can’t bind her from following us with magic. I swear there’s a way—”
Despite the passage of nearly two months without a single beating, Wildfire’s memories were still spotty at best. It made Duncan wonder just how long he had been cooped up in the stable, and just how potent the magic in the beating cane was. That thought reminded him to give Goliath a good thump on the nose.
“Come on,” he said to Wildfire as he replaced the cane on its hook. “Let’s go dig up rocks.”
He knew there was a chance the horse would make a break for it as soon as the stall door opened, but Wildfire seemed logical enough to know such an escape would be futile.
“Hold on,” said Duncan as a sudden thought occurred to him. “Let me grab a bridle for you.”
“I beg your pardon?” Wildfire replied, and he sounded offended.
Duncan hesitated. “What am I supposed to lead you by, if not by a bridle?” he asked. “And you’ll need a harness, too, to be hitched to a wagon to cart the rocks away.”
“Do you have any idea how demeaning that is? You really think I’m a common labor horse?”
Duncan eyed him dubiously. Wildfire was rather small for a horse and wouldn’t be much for labor. He had offered him the job more out of pity than anything else. “I carted away all your magical oats,” he said after a moment. “But then, I suppose I’m a common labor boy, aren’t I?”
The horse snorted irritably. “Get your bridle, then. But you’d better take out the bit. I can’t very well talk around something like that.”
“It’s probably not very comfortable, either,” said Duncan as he removed the offending object.
Wildfire stood patiently outside his stall as Duncan fit him with all the needed tack. Goliath, meanwhile, glowered and snorted indignantly, and earned himself another couple whacks with the cane for his trouble.
When the pair finally stepped from the shadowy stable into the sunlight beyond, Wildfire winced as though shying away from the light.
“Are you all right?” Duncan asked in concern.
“It’s just been a very long time,” the horse whispered. His voice strengthened as he impulsively moved forward. “Come along, now. There’s work to do.”
They spent the morning hauling up rocks from a stony patch of ground next to Dame Groach’s overgrown vegetable garden. Eventually, only one particularly large boulder remained. It was dirt-encrusted and covered with thorny, poisonous-looking vines. Duncan was loath to touch it, but it half-blocked the small, disused path he was trying to restore.
“You wait here and I’ll go get some pruning shears.”
“Make certain there are no holes in your gloves too,” Wildfire called after him.
“I’m wearing two pairs,” said Duncan. Still, he did make certain that his long sleeves were tucked into the innermost set of gloves, and he took care to tie a scarf over his nose and mouth to guard against breathing in anything toxic. He had thought several times that he should probably root the nasty vine out of the garden all together, but it only grew in this one quarter. Since there were so many other poisonous and nefarious plants, he suspected its presence was intentional.
He returned with a pair of shears, and began to cut away the overgrowth. Wildfire stood calmly by and watched the process. As Duncan removed the first layer of leaves, he made a startling discovery.
“This isn’t a boulder,” he said with a frown. “It’s metal.” He brushed away some of the dirt, and the surface beneath gleamed dully.
“It’s probably one of the old witch’s statues,” Wildfire replied, and he glanced around nervously.
Duncan thought this was a very likely guess. The estate was peppered with statues, life-sized and tarnished with age. He hadn’t gotten around to cleaning them yet, though the task was getting higher and higher on his mental list of chores.
“It must’ve toppled over in a storm or something,” he said. What he had thought was a boulder was in actuality an irregularly shaped base. As he circled around and pulled back more vines, sure enough, he found the statue’s head. “It’s a goat—what an odd expression he’s making!”
The creature’s head was bent and its tongue out as though it was trying to lick something. It was a rather comical pose. Duncan supposed that the artist had a sense of humor.
Wildfire didn’t seem so amused. “Can I go back to the stable now?”
“What’s wrong?” asked Duncan.
“The statues—I’ve never liked them.”
To be sure, most of them were strange. This was the first animal Duncan had seen, but the human figures were portrayed in all sorts of odd poses. Some were grinning foolishly, some were praying, some looked completely terrified. In the south corner of the garden, there was one of a woman crouching toward the ground, her hands cupped and her lips puckered as though she meant to kiss some unseen object. He had seen a live bullfrog sitting on those hands one day and thought perhaps the statue was meant to depict an old fairy tale he’d once heard, of a princess who kissed a frog.
Strange though the statues were, he’d never been afraid of them as Wildfire seemed to be.
“I’ll take you back in just a minute,” he told the horse. “Do you think you can help me pull this one upright, or would you rather not?”
“I’d rather not,” said Wildfire, “but I’ll help you anyway. Poor fellow doesn’t deserve to be left on his side like that.”
Duncan thought this was an odd thing to say about a statue, but he didn’t question it. Instead, he looped some rope around the object and, with Wildfire’s assistance, somehow managed to lever the heavy hunk of metal off the ground and back to its intended position.
A thousand bugs, beetles, and centipedes skittered away from the muddy soil beneath, terrified of the sudden daylight. In its upright state, the metal goat atop its base didn’t even come to Duncan’s shoulder. It was as heavy as a ton of bricks, though.
“I hope that’s where she wants it, because I don’t want to have to move it very much farther than that,” he said.
“Can I go back to the stable now?” Wildfire asked again.
“Yes! Sorry!” He scrambled forward to lead the faux-black
horse from the garden. “Thanks for your help,” he said as they walked. “I couldn’t have done half of that by myself today.”
Wildfire did not respond, and Duncan surmised that he was lost in his own thoughts. In the stable, the horse quietly retreated into his stall as Duncan put away his tack. A muttered spell echoed from within the shadows there, and when Duncan looked over the stall door he discovered a white horse staring back at him again.
“Are you all right?” he asked with worry. Wildfire had lost his jovial attitude. “You really don’t like those statues, do you?”
“I don’t,” Wildfire said solemnly. “She has a name for each one of them. Mind she doesn’t take it into her head to name one after you, Duncan.”
He might have puzzled over this warning, but Goliath chose that very moment to whinny and snort angrily. Duncan caught up the cane between the stalls and thumped him with it out of habit.
“Do you need your water replaced?” he asked Wildfire during Goliath’s ensuing daze. “Here, let me get it for you.”
He went to fill the bucket. It was but a small gesture of goodwill, but one that the white horse had certainly earned.
Chapter 6
The remainder of the week passed in a blur. Duncan did not invite Wildfire from his stall again, and the horse never asked to be let out. There were plenty enough jobs to perform that did not require a horse, and Wildfire seemed more prone to brooding anyway. Rather than entangle him in the work, Duncan merely reported his activities every evening when he came to feed the two horses.
“I found a great, tall tower in the farthermost corner of the garden, all overgrown and falling apart,” he said on the evening after Wildfire’s excursion. “I wonder if it was supposed to be a watchtower or something. It looks like it’s a hundred years old.”
“Probably older,” said Wildfire morosely.
“What do you think it was used for?”
“Entrapment,” said the horse, and that effectively killed the conversation.
The next evening, “I polished a statue today, the one of the fat man. I thought it was made of brass, but now that I’ve gotten the grime off, it doesn’t quite look right.”
Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale Page 6
