by M. E. Breen
Chopper stood slightly apart from the others. Pip moved restlessly between an iron pot in which something was cooking and a tent-covered wagon at the edge of camp. A flap of red flesh hung over one eye. He stopped to stir the pot, frowned, peered inside, and stirred it again.
Another wolf moved into the light, just the tip of its tail, just for a second, but there came the shout and warning shot. In the brief hubbub that followed, Pip caught Chopper’s arm and drew him aside. Annie crept into the shadowed space between the covered wagon and the tent closest to it.
“What do you mean not ready?” Chopper asked. He sounded impatient.
“No, no, they’re ready, all right, it’s just …”
“What?”
“It’s nothing, except, well, they’ve rotted through the bags.”
“And?”
“The apothecary said they’ll eat them, but it doesn’t … it looks just awful, Chop, and it smells worse. I don’t see how they will. And whatever that is in the pot, it won’t begin to cover it.”
“When did they feed last, Pip?”
“Two days ago now.”
“And how long yet before they feed again?”
“Until they return from the fight. Unless … unless they eat the—”
“They’ve been ordered not to.”
“Right.”
“So, Pip?”
“Yes, Chopper?”
“They’ll eat them. And, Pip?”
“Chop?”
“I’d listen to the apothecary.”
Pip nodded, abashed, but he didn’t look convinced. He covered his nose and mouth with his shirttail and stepped inside the tent. A moment later he reappeared, stumbling backward. He held his hands in front of him as if to ward off danger.
“Beg pardon! Beg pardon! I didn’t know you were inside!”
A small bent figure followed him out, leaning on a heavy wooden staff. The figure shuffled forward, stabbing with its staff at Pip’s legs and anyone else who stood too close. When it reached the cooking pot the figure straightened up a little and the hood fell back. Annie gasped.
She couldn’t tell if she was looking at a man or woman, an aged person or a child. A few wisps of hair clung to a pointed head, and huge, beautiful eyes protruded slightly from a sallow face. The features were delicate, the mouth a red bow. The figure muttered something Annie couldn’t hear, then shook a handful of glittering grains into the pot. She—for Annie had decided it must be a she, to have such a face—dipped her staff into the pot. As she stirred, a foul-looking blue smoke rose from the brew. But the smell that reached Annie was delicious: warm, spicy, sweet, savory, all at once. The apothecary breathed deeply, closed her eyes and nodded. Then she smiled. The bow-shaped lips, a child’s mouth, parted to reveal row after row of pointed black teeth. The smile seemed to split her whole head in two, as though she would turn herself inside out. More than Chopper or Gibbet, more than Uncle Jock, this woman, this creature, terrified Annie. A trickle of dark fluid slipped from the corner of her mouth and ran over her chin before it dropped, glistening, into the pot. Pip’s eyes widened with horror. The apothecary hooted with laughter, then drew up her hood and hobbled back into the tent.
Rinka nudged Annie’s shoulder. “I’ve found the break in the hedge they’re using for an entrance. But Brisa—”
He stopped speaking midsentence, transfixed by the blue smoke rising over the fire. The other wolves, too, had gone strangely still. Their heads were all turned toward the smell, their noses testing the air. Even the men, the men who must have known better, began to saunter over to peer into the pot. Annie’s mouth filled with saliva.
Rinka was inching forward, leaving the safety of darkness. Annie made a gesture to stop him, but instead she found herself following him toward the camp, towing a reluctant Baggy behind her. It seemed to her years since she had last eaten. A fantasy banquet spread before her mind’s eye: braised veal, steak and kidney pie, smoked sausages, roast chicken, leg of lamb.
But Baggy stopped and would not budge. She turned on him savagely, famished, furious. And then, what is the matter with me?
“Rinka!”
He was poised just on the verge of the shadows, one foot raised to step into the light.
“Rinka, it’s poison! To kill the survivors.”
Still he hesitated, trembling with longing. As hard as it had been for her to resist, how much harder for him, who had been so hungry for so long?
“We must find Brisa,” she said softly.
Rinka shook his head as if to dispel the cloud of scent. He began to sniff the ground, running a few feet in one direction, then turning back the way he had come.
“I can’t find her scent. The smell from the pot overpowers everything. But the wolves I spoke to are worried. She has been missing for three days now. Oh, what has he done to her!”
Annie did not know what to say. She hadn’t expected this of Rinka, that he should love another in this way. She pitied him and also felt strangely apart from him, a little uneasy, a little left out. It was the same way she felt when she thought about Page and the king.
A light appeared inside the tent next to the apothecary’s wagon. Annie could see a figure moving around, his shadow sharp on the thin burlap walls. The man set his gun on the ground and lay down beside it.
“Wait here,” she whispered. From the sound of his breathing, the man was already asleep, or nearly so. She reached into her boot for the knife. With her other hand, she worked a tent stake free from the ground, glad that Gibbet’s men were the kind who didn’t bother to pound their stakes in well. She lay flat, cheek pressed into the ground, and lifted the loose edge of the tent. The man’s face was startlingly close to her own. On his chin, whiskers poked through the skin like blades of blond grass. A hairy mole clung to his scalp.
Smirch, my old friend.
Annie took a deep breath and rolled sideways under the edge of the tent. Lightly she placed her hand on the man’s chest, seeking the opening to his heavy wool jacket, and brought the knifepoint to rest where she felt his heart beating. He awoke with a start, but Annie clapped her hand over his mouth, pinching his nostrils shut with her thumb and forefinger.
“Listen.”
The smell of whisky was strong in the tent, and Annie realized he had gone to sleep because he was drunk. They’re too afraid of the wolves, she thought. Gibbet didn’t plan for that.
“Where is the wolf Brisa?” Smirch shook his head. Annie pressed the knife closer to his side. He jerked away, but her knife followed him. Now he nodded. Annie uncovered his mouth, just a bit.
“Don’t know name.”
“The leader’s mate. The leader who has been missing.”
“Don’t know!” he gasped.
“Think, Smirch. A wounded kinderstalk. Where are they keeping her?”
Smirch’s body relaxed. “Chopper’s farm.”
Annie relaxed too. She knew what to do.
“Keep quiet now, Smirch, or I’ll be back for you.” Then she growled her very best Hippa growl in his ear.
He nodded. Sweat stood out all over his bald head.
She had the knife in his ribs. She might have given him a little stick, for Gregor. She almost did.
From her hiding place Annie watched Pip ferry buckets back and forth between the cooking pot and whatever was hidden beneath the covered wagon. A light shone dimly inside the tent, but the front of the wagon, the seat and shafts, remained in darkness.
Baggy wore a bridle but no harness or saddle. Working fast, Annie cut her petticoat into strips and tied them together into a rough sort of harness: a strip across his chest connected to another strip around his middle, behind his front legs. There was only enough petticoat left for one of the reins, so she had to cut the other one out of her cloak. The fabric was thick and full of lumps and knots. She and Rinka had fought over this part of her plan; he had insisted it would take too long. Now she felt his eyes on her, impatient.
Finally, she backed Baggy between t
he shafts. He stood patiently while she threaded her bootlaces through the holes in the shafts and tied them to the harness, as though he too was relieved to know what was expected of him. Impulsively, Annie dropped the frizzled waistband of her petticoat over the horse’s head, decorating him for battle.
“Girl! Knife! Kinderstalk!”
Chopper burst from one of the tents. “What is it, man? What are you saying?”
“Girl, knife!” Smirch babbled.
“What girl? What knife? Pull yourself together!”
Annie was already up in the wagon seat, the reins in her hands.
“Rinka!” she cried. “Through the middle! Of one wolf, twenty!”
Rinka burst into the light, snapping and snarling. Men screamed. The closest wolves, frenzied by hunger and the men’s fear, leapt into the fray.
“Hup, Baggy! Hup, hup!”
The horse surged forward. Snow flew from beneath his hooves, and the cart, with a great groan, rolled into motion. The apothecary’s tent, still tied to the wagon bed, stretched taut, then the stakes pulled free from the ground and the cloth went slack. Following Rinka’s path, Baggy turned sharply and charged through camp, heading south. Annie had a brief impression of astonished faces and flailing limbs as men and wolves jumped clear of the wheels. Then they plunged back into the shadows on the other side of camp. Baggy dodged trees and rocks, jerked the wagon through ditches. Wherever Rinka led, he followed. The din of camp, the howls and cries, Chopper’s staccato voice shouting orders, all began to recede except for one noise, a terrific, high-pitched shrieking that seemed instead to come closer. Annie turned in her seat. A scream caught in her throat.
The apothecary, inside the tent when it had torn free, was still clinging to the burlap, riding behind them as though on a sled. She was shrieking with rage, her child’s face contorted into a fierce grimace, the black teeth bared. Her small fingers proved remarkably strong: Annie realized with horror that she was not merely hanging on, but dragging herself hand over fist across the burlap, getting closer and closer to the wagon. Her shrieks were not just random sounds, but some kind of incantation.
“Salma, mach, minera, Scion! Salma, mach, minera, Scion! Scion, Scion, Scion!” she shrieked, hiccupping when the tent hit a bump. She was so tiny that her body barely touched the ground as they sped along, her cloak whipping out behind her. Snow stuck to her clothes. Already she had crawled to the middle of the tent—a few more feet and she would reach the wagon bed. Her eyes were so huge and dark that Annie couldn’t see any iris or pupil; it was as if she were staring through holes straight into the darkness inside the apothecary’s head.
Annie snapped into action. She hadn’t wanted to look at what was under the cloth, but now she took her knife from her boot and began to saw at the ties that attached the tent to the back of the wagon. Annie hewed away frantically, but her fingers felt too thick and stiff to work properly. The knife slipped and nicked one forefinger. Blood welled to the surface and Annie realized with deepening horror that she didn’t feel any pain, not in her finger and not in the calf where Rinka had bitten her.
The apothecary reached the back of the wagon and began crawling across the wagon bed, still chanting her spell. Where her weight pressed into the burlap dark stains appeared. The burlap began to smoke, but the apothecary seemed immune to the poison. Her hands were not so much hands as talons, Annie saw, the skin shiny and tough.
The first tie gave way suddenly under Annie’s knife. One side of the tent flapped free, flinging the apothecary nearly perpendicular to the wagon bed. She only gripped the fabric tighter and kept crawling toward the wagon seat, chanting incessantly.
Annie could see what Gibbet had prepared for the wolves. Rabbits, or what had once been rabbits, now badly decayed. Some were little more than skeletons. Drifting through the stench of death was the tantalizing odor of the poison Pip had poured over the bodies. Annie felt her mouth water and spat violently.
Her fingers had become so stiff that she could only hold the knife by pressing the handle between her palms. Panting, she gave a little cry of victory as the second tie snapped apart. But the tent did not drop off the cart. Now that the apothecary was in the wagon bed, her weight held the fabric in place. One hooked hand gripped the back of the wagon seat. The woman was close enough now that Annie could see the blue veins running beneath the pale skin of her face, the delicate mesh of capillaries covering her scalp. The terror she had felt watching the apothecary in camp overwhelmed her. Like dark falling. Like the dark, before I could see.
Annie pressed herself as close to the front of the wagon as she could, but still the woman reached for her. Her long nails snagged the fabric of Annie’s cloak. Her smile was unmistakable now. The stiffness in Annie’s hands and arms had traveled up to her shoulders. She could feel it in her calves now and her thighs, stiff as planks. In panic, Annie realized that she was the target of the apothecary’s spell. Somehow the witch was making her immobile. If she could just get away … but there was nowhere to go. Her hips and torso grew rigid, as though all the blood in her body had simply stopped circulating. Annie lay nearly flat on her back now, the apothecary looming over her, a knee on her chest, the other foot still planted in the wagon bed. Annie’s arms lay heavy and useless at her sides. She could still feel her feet—did her boots protect her somehow?—so Annie pushed hard with her heels, scooting across the seat. The apothecary lost her grip for a moment, startled by Annie’s sudden movement. If this wagon was like Serena’s, and if she was facing the right way … she pushed again, until her head and shoulders hung clear of the seat. From the corner of her eye she could see the ground racing away beneath them. But there it was, the wooden lever.
The apothecary stopped chanting and in the sudden quiet Annie could hear the air wheezing in and out of her own lungs. The witch pressed her knee into Annie’s chest, just above her heart, so the flesh there began to stiffen. She looked into Annie’s face with an expression of almost ecstatic tenderness.
“Salma mach minera, Scion,” she whispered. Then the apothecary shook her head and, as if Annie had spoken aloud, placed a cold finger against her lips to quiet her. Annie felt her throat tighten. Her tongue dropped into the back of her mouth.
In this last moment, using all that was left of her muscles, she managed to rock herself partway onto her side and hook her chin over the handle of the lever. Then she let herself fall back again. Her body, stiff and heavy as a corpse, bore the lever down with it. The lever slid smoothly along its track, the back of the wagon opened, and the wagon bed tipped down.
For a moment, nothing happened. The apothecary gazed at Annie with the same terrible expression of tenderness. Then, suddenly, her face changed. Baggy veered sharply to avoid a fallen tree, and part of the loose tent fabric snagged on one of its branches. Horse and wagon kept moving, but the tough burlap stretched taut, tightening like a noose around the apothecary’s foot. The apothecary’s body was lifted, suspended, and still she would not let go of Annie’s cloak. Then came the sound of ripping fabric and the apothecary’s scream as her body jerked clear of the wagon.
Sensation flooded back into Annie’s limbs. Her hands flew to her breast and touched the cloth of her dress where the cloak had been torn away. Beneath her dress she could feel warm skin and the strong beating of her heart. Quickly then, she pushed the lever back into position, righting the wagon bed, but not before several of the rabbits had fallen off. The last thing Annie saw before she turned her face south was the apothecary lying facedown in a drift of burlap. Dead rabbits dotted the ground around her, each carcass surrounded by a circle of bare steaming earth where the poison burned through the snow.
Chapter 16
Rinka kept up his swift, three-legged gait, but Baggy, so full of fire at the beginning, had started to flag. They couldn’t be far from the farm now. The trees had thinned out, and the tracks of men and horses showed plainly in the snow.
“Come on, Bags!” Annie urged. She heard, or imagined she heard, the
clamor of Gibbet’s men in the distance. Gray light filled the eastern sky. Had the night passed so quickly? Was Gibbet even now sending the first wave of wolves into battle? She turned, sickened, from the sight of the rabbits. At least they accomplished one good thing: Baggy, long since having lost interest in running toward anything, was running as hard as he could away from the smell of death.
Then, blessedly, the dark outlines of the farm buildings appeared ahead of them.
“We’re here, Bags! We made it!”
Nothing about Chopper’s farm had changed. The rose bushes still bloomed on either side of the farmhouse door. The fruit trees still drooped with fruit. The lawn spread green and awful over everything.
Rinka circled the yard, nose low to the ground. His tail swung from side to side. He stopped at a circular patch of snow and started to dig.
“Brisa! Brisa! Are you there? Can you hear me? Are you badly hurt? Brisa! Brisa!”
Annie dropped to her knees beside him, scraping away handfuls of snow. There was the broad wooden disk with the iron ring at its center. Even as she tried, Annie knew she couldn’t move it. Rinka barked frantically, clawing at the cover until he had raked deep furrows in the wood.
“I know she’s in there. I can smell her—she’s alive. Why won’t she answer me?”
Annie couldn’t answer him either. Was it all to end here, back at the pit, because she was still too weak to open the door? Baggy whinnied. Wolves, perhaps fifty of them, had broken through the line of trees. They flowed over the fence in a long wave.
Annie stood to meet them. She felt tall and awkward and bare, somehow. She pulled her hair forward over her shoulders.
