Duncan snapped shut his mouth and trotted out to obey this order. Goliath whinnied indignantly as he passed.
“Shut it, bootlicker,” he heard Wildfire command the other horse. “One day with nothing to eat won’t kill you—I should know, thanks to you.”
In hindsight, it shouldn’t have surprised him that the two horses had a history together that extended beyond the simple stable they shared. If Goliath had betrayed Wildfire to curry favor with Dame Groach, it was no wonder that Wildfire despised him so very much.
Chapter 8
A tense afternoon passed. Duncan did his best to keep his nerves in check. His head was heavy and hot, though, and the wig made it itch. This discomfort served as constant reminder of his impending doom, and of how ill-prepared he was for that doom. In contrast, Wildfire seemed to feel that the saddle and its contents were preparation enough. He ate his oats with a leisurely calm as Goliath reared and bucked indignantly in the other stall.
“Hit him again, would you?” he would say to Duncan every so often, and the boy readily obeyed.
“So,” the white horse remarked after he had finished his meal, “you said you heard a voice calling for help?”
“Yes,” replied Duncan, and he was relieved that he would get the chance to explain the reason behind his wrongdoing. “It came from behind the closet door. And there was this scratching noise against the wood—I’d heard that earlier in the week, but I ignored it—but when I finally opened the door, there was nothing there.”
“Of course not,” Wildfire replied, as though this was the most logical outcome. “She set you up.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s been trying to entrap you for… how long has it been now since you arrived? A couple of months?”
“Two and a half,” Duncan supplied. “But what do you mean, she’s been trying to entrap me?”
“That’s what she does. I told you, she’s a witch. She invites people here with an offer to fulfill some need they have, and then she entraps them and curses them, either with the goldwater if she has no more use for them, or with an animal skin if she does. It’s how she amuses herself. Only it seems she completely misread you. You’ve lasted far longer than anyone else I can remember.”
“You remember others?” Duncan asked with growing horror.
“My memories are still coming back piece by piece,” said Wildfire with what looked like a studious frown. “There were at least a dozen before you, maybe more. She lured them here to be magic students, housemaids, cooks, or whatever other job she wanted done in the moment. Most of them didn’t even last a week, that I recall. I imagine that the moment she told them not to open the door under the stairs, they were immediately eaten with curiosity and took the soonest opportunity to disobey.
“You’re not like that though,” he added, and he scrutinized Duncan from head to toe. “She loaded you down with so much work that anyone else would have abandoned it in futility. Instead, you kept yourself busy and thereby out of trouble. I imagine she grew quite impatient with you. She started following you around and spying on you all those weeks ago to see whether you were secretly breaking rules behind her back, but it seems the only place you did that was in here, with me and Goliath.”
Duncan colored slightly. “I couldn’t very well beat a talking horse,” he said uncomfortably. It was hard enough to hit Goliath with the cane, and he was a nasty old brute.
“Yes, well, unbeknownst to you, this stable was probably the last place she would spy on you. She tries to avoid me as much as possible.”
“Why?”
“Because malicious magic tends to rebound on the person who casts it if the victim doesn’t really deserve it, and she’s cast a lot of malicious magic on me. I think one of the reasons she kept bringing others back here was so she would have someone else to beat me in her stead. And since I never deserved it, all those people had something terrible happen to them in return. Goliath deserved every hit you gave him,” he added upon seeing Duncan’s eyes grow wide with dawning horror. “You needn’t worry about accumulating curses. The only thing you’ve really done wrong was open that closet door.”
“There was a voice calling for help,” Duncan insisted. “It sounded like a child! What was I supposed to do, ignore it?”
Wildfire snorted. “She entrapped you. I suspect that once she discovered boredom to be your weakness, she sweetened the trap with a charm so that you would be compelled to open the door. You’d have to be completely heartless to ignore the pleas of a child. She would’ve ignored it if she’d been in your shoes, of course, but then she’s so clever she probably would have opened the door on her very first day, thinking that no one would ever be the wiser.”
“But why would she want to entrap me?” Duncan pressed. “I’m nobody! She found me sleeping in a ditch on the side of the road!”
“She probably liked your face,” said Wildfire plainly. “Why shouldn’t she preserve someone in gold, especially if they’re nothing special in life?”
Duncan’s skin crawled as he remembered that Dame Groach had indeed made some cryptic remark about his face when she had first met him. He could hardly believe she had been plotting against him from that very moment, but everything Wildfire told him seemed to fit into that scenario.
“And no one would have missed me,” he mumbled dejectedly. “I should never have left my father’s farm.”
“Cheer up,” said Wildfire. “We’re going to get out of here, and then everything will be all right.”
The horse’s insouciance did little to calm the erratic flutter of Duncan’s heart, or to dissipate the ball of anxiety in his stomach. Time slipped by, and he tried to think of ways to keep himself busy, to keep his mind occupied. He managed to pry off one of Goliath’s shoes and to wedge a rock between another and the hoof. The black horse spent most of the afternoon in a daze induced by the magic cane and seemed almost entirely unaware of what was happening around him. Duncan even went so far as to hide the beast’s saddle away in the back garden, though he suspected Dame Groach would not need it when the time for pursuit came.
As the sun dipped toward the horizon, Wildfire, out of his stall and freshly saddled, gave Duncan his final instructions.
“Take the magic cane and hit Goliath with everything you’ve got,” he said. “Swallow any qualms you’ve got and hit him. I’ll warn you right now that he’s a big nasty brute who can run far faster than I can. You need to hobble him now as best you can before it comes to that.”
Duncan had watched his father beat the old gray mule so many times before, and that treatment had never sat well with him. Even though he was acting out of self-preservation instead of anger, he still had to steel himself to obey Wildfire’s commands.
“I’m sorry,” he told Goliath.
The black horse bared his teeth, and Duncan struck him on the flank once, twice, three, four, five times. Goliath looked lethargic at that point, and Duncan’s will was quickly fading.
“That’s enough,” said Wildfire mercifully. “Come out of the stall and lock it up tight. Take the cane now and chop it in half. Yes, in half, Duncan—you needn’t look at me as though I’m crazy every time I tell you to do something.”
Duncan obeyed. The wooden cane was seasoned. He expected some sort of magical resistance when he went to chop it, but it split in two quite easily.
Wildfire had followed him into the yard. “Now here’s the charm,” he said. “You have to stand directly in front of Dame Groach. Take those two pieces of the cane, one in each hand, and cross them in front of you. Then, say ‘Fram-wege-anan’ and lay the cross on the ground between you.”
“Fram-wege-anan?” Duncan echoed.
“It means ‘only by the road.’”
“Fram-wege-anan,” he mumbled again as he looked down at the two pieces of broken cane. “And you’re sure that’ll stop her from chasing after us in a clap of thunder?”
“Yes,” said Wildfire. “That cane holds a powerful magic in i
t—she’ll be bound to follow us only on horseback or on foot instead of chasing us with any of her spells.”
Duncan sincerely hoped he was telling the truth, because dusk was quickly falling and bringing with it his fate.
“I’ll get back inside the stable and come once you’ve laid the charm,” Wildfire said. “Remember, ‘Fram-wege-anan.’”
Duncan nodded. He tucked the two ends of the cane into his back pocket and leaned up against the stable wall to wait. His nerves were drawn taut as he counted his breaths and wondered whether they would be his last. Time passed with excruciating slowness.
At long last, just as the final sliver of sun slipped beneath the horizon, a loud crack reverberated across the stable yard, and his doom stood before him in a long black cloak.
“Hello,” Duncan said nervously, and he straightened his stance.
Dame Groach’s beady eyes honed in on him immediately. A wicked glee spread across her face. “Ha!” she crowed. “What have you done to your head, boy?”
“It was cold, so I thought I’d try wearing a wig,” Duncan lied, and he reached his hands behind him to grab the two pieces of the magic cane.
Quicker than lightning, Dame Groach leapt forward and tore away the sheepskin to reveal the brilliant golden hair beneath.
“Cold head, eh?” she sneered malevolently. She cast the wig aside and rolled up her sleeves with a menacing laugh. “I’ll show you a cold head, you disobedient little—”
“Wait!” Duncan cried, and he crossed the two pieces of cane in front of him with a clack. “Fram-wege-anan!”
Dame Groach’s eyes grew round as saucers. Duncan quickly laid the cross on the ground and, in her momentary stupor, snatched up his sheepskin wig again. Wildfire hurried from the open stable door. His appearance on the scene jarred the old witch back into action.
“No!” she screamed in fury, and she reached forward to catch hold of Duncan, but he had already clutched the horse’s saddle and swung himself up. Wildfire took off running, down the alley next to the house and out into the lane that led away from it. Behind him, Dame Groach shouted oaths and curses with a vocabulary to rival that of Duncan’s father in one of his drunken rages.
Wildfire never looked back, but Duncan peered over his shoulder every couple of seconds, even after they made it past the trees and out onto the open road. Nighttime was falling around them, and Goliath with his black-clad rider would blend into the darkness. If Duncan wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t see them until they were nearly upon him.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked Wildfire.
The horse replied succinctly, “Meridiana.”
He had heard of the neighboring country before and knew that it lay somewhere to the south of Borealia, where they were now. He had no idea how far to the south it was, though, and certainly no clue which roads they would have to take to get there.
“You know the way?” he asked.
“Roughly,” Wildfire replied. He sounded annoyed. Duncan decided not to question him further, but instead hunched closer to the horse. He glanced back over his shoulder and thought he saw some movement on the road behind them. Through the darkness his eyes discerned a hulking black horse and the knobbly cane raised high by its rider.
“Wildfire, she’s coming!” he cried in rising panic.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, it’s definitely her! They’re gaining on us.”
“Take Goliath’s bridle out of the saddle,” Wildfire instructed.
Duncan scrambled to obey. “Now what?” he asked when he had the bundle of leather straps and buckles in his hand.
“How close is she?”
“She’ll be on top of us in a moment!” said Duncan.
“Throw the bridle at her!”
He didn’t know what good that would do, but he obeyed nonetheless.
“Iec-thu!” Wildfire yelled, and the bridle, aloft in the air, suddenly multiplied. The growing projectile clobbered Dame Groach and Goliath and continued to increase. The old witch screamed a litany of curses into the night as she and her horse were buried beneath the mass.
Wildfire was barely able to outrun the pile of straps. Duncan watched over his shoulder as it grew into a mountain of bridles.
“That ought to keep her busy for a while,” said the white horse, and he continued to run as fast as his legs would carry them.
Duncan could well imagine—Dame Groach and Goliath would be so entangled in that pile that it might take them hours to get free. Hope blossomed in his chest that maybe—just maybe—he and Wildfire might have a chance to escape for real.
“I told you that spell might come in handy someday,” Wildfire gloated.
“That was amazing,” said Duncan in honest thanks.
“We’re not free and clear yet. Keep watch for her.”
Night was thick around them now, but a gibbous moon was rising into the sky, providing better visibility. Duncan kept his attention on the road behind them, wary that Dame Groach and Goliath would appear again.
Wildfire’s run had long since slowed from its original sprint when the dreaded black pursuers at last rounded a bend behind them.
“She’s coming again,” Duncan cried. He heard Goliath’s furious whinny and knew that the black horse had caught sight of him and Wildfire.
“Get the comb,” Wildfire commanded.
Duncan pulled that object from the saddle bag. It was meant for a horse’s mane, with long, close, sharp teeth to smooth the coarse hair. “You want me to throw it at them?” he asked expectantly.
“Yes,” said Wildfire, and the moment the comb was aloft, he repeated the same multiplying spell. Duncan watched with grim satisfaction as Goliath plowed into the growing mountain of sharp combs. The horse’s sudden stop actually threw Dame Groach from his back, into a bed of biting teeth.
Duncan heard her shriek in fury as the combs continued to multiply around her.
“Are we going to get cursed for using so much malicious magic?” he asked Wildfire.
The horse had picked up his speed again, but he managed to answer through panting breaths. “You don’t think she deserves this and more?”
Duncan considered this. If Dame Groach had already accumulated curses from using her magic unjustly, perhaps this was how those curses would come about. If magic was like a scale, then from what Wildfire had said, it was already so far skewed against her that anything she suffered was probably a means of restoring balance.
“You’re keeping watch, right?” said Wildfire suddenly.
“Yes,” Duncan replied, called back to the situation at hand. He turned vigilant eyes behind him. “Is it very much further to Meridiana?”
“A few leagues yet.”
Anxiety tore through him. It probably wouldn’t take Dame Groach too long to extract herself from the pile of sharp combs and to dig Goliath out. Duncan didn’t know if they would have to go around the obstruction, or if they could ride right over it without getting bogged down. It didn’t matter. He was fairly certain they would catch up again soon. Only the small glass bottle remained in the one saddle bag, though. Duncan didn’t see what a mountain of glass could accomplish where the bridles and combs had failed.
After more than an hour’s watching, he saw at last the great black horse appear, its malevolent rider angrier than ever. Together they charged forward, kicking up a cloud of dust behind them.
“Here they come!” Duncan cried in warning to Wildfire.
“Get the bottle.”
He slipped it from the saddle bag. “Do I throw it?” he asked breathlessly.
“Not yet. You have to wait for exactly the right moment this time. The road is going to narrow up ahead, and we want to throw it in the gap there.”
Duncan peered through the moonlight and caught a glimpse of what Wildfire was talking about: their way did indeed narrow to a path cut between two high cliffs. A mountain of bottles there would block the road entirely, and Dame Groach was bound to follow them “only by
the road.”
The cliffs were too far away, though. Goliath was bearing down on them with increasing speed.
“They’re coming too fast,” Duncan warned.
“Wait for my cue,” Wildfire insisted, but he was already running as fast as he could. The black horse would be upon them in no time.
Duncan could see the flecks of foam around Goliath’s bared teeth, could see the crazed expression on Dame Groach’s face.
“Steady, Duncan,” Wildfire reminded him. “Wait for my cue!”
“They’re almost on top of us,” he replied. The cliffs loomed closer, but the shadowed pass seemed too far away. “Wildfire, we’re not going to make it!”
“Almost there!” the horse cried.
Duncan could have sworn he felt Goliath’s hot breath breathing down upon him as the black horse and rider inched closer, closer, closer.
“Now!” shouted Wildfire. “Iec-thu, iec-thu, iec-thu!”
The bottle was aloft in the air between them as it multiplied. Goliath had suffered this trick twice already, and upon seeing a third object cast at him, he skidded and tried to stop, much to the rage of Dame Groach. They collided with the burgeoning supply of bottles. Duncan had little time to observe their fate, for just after he had tossed the object, he and Wildfire entered the narrow pass. They were chased now by a wall of glass that grew upward and threatened to engulf them like a tidal wave. Wildfire never slowed for an instant, but continued to weave his way down the jagged road between the two high cliffs. He burst from the other side, followed by a flood of bottles that spilled out onto the road and its shoulders.
Dame Groach would be stuck on the other side, with no course to follow unless she planned to dig out the mass of bottles. She couldn’t very well run over them, for they would slip and tumble beneath Goliath’s hooves.
“We made it,” Duncan said in disbelief.
Wildfire had slowed to a canter, but he kept moving forward. “Not yet,” he said grimly, “but we might actually have a shot now.”
“What?” Duncan cried.
“There’s another road, the long way round that pass,” the horse replied. “She’ll take that once she realizes that she can’t run over a mountain of glass bottles. We have to get across the river and into Meridiana before then.”
Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale Page 9
