“I’m sure you’re right, Mister Gruff,” Edweth said. “But please go on.”
“Well, before I could say another word, the hogman’s face got all crafty-looking and he told me to come inside while he fetched Master Brax. I hope you won’t consider me a coward, ma’am, but I peeked through that doorway into what had once been the master’s toyshop and I didn’t see a front hall. I saw … well, I saw the throat of a beast. And I knew that if I set foot in there, I wouldn’t be coming back out—I couldn’t hope to stop the mage in his own lair, not by myself. I also knew that Rowen and Freya were safe, and that’s what I’d come to find out, so I called the hogman some fitting names and hurried back to Appleyard. And then I found out where they were holding you. I had to keep my promise to Rowen, you see.”
“You were right not to challenge Brax, Mister Gruff, and I consider you very brave indeed, but that wicked man must be removed from the toyshop, somehow. If he’s been stealing the master’s secrets, there’s no telling what terrible things he might do.”
“Or has already done. The way the Marshal took ill so suddenly …”
“Oh, do you think the mage poisoned him?”
“That or did something to his mind. The last orders he gave to Thorne, well, they were not like the Marshal at all. Anyhow, I’m not finished with Brax or those hogmen yet. And there are still plenty of us in the Errantry who haven’t signed on with the new management, let me tell you. We’re working on some plans of our own.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Mister Gruff. And when the time comes, you can count me among you.”
“I’ve no doubt of that, ma’am. But in the meantime I’ve thought of a place where we can keep you safely out of sight. Have you ever been to the Golden Goose?”
A short time later, Edweth and the wildman were at the bridge across the canal that ran through Fable. On the bridge itself was the Inn of the Golden Goose.
“You’re bringing me here?” Edweth said doubtfully. “I’m grateful for your pains, Mister Gruff, but this must be the busiest spot in all of Fable. There are travellers and foreigners and other riff-raff coming and going at all hours.”
“Yes, and that’s why this is the last place anyone would think to search for you, ma’am, if you see what I mean. Besides, I’ve got a good friend at the Goose. He may look after an inn where people talk each other’s heads off, but he knows how to keep quiet when need be.”
A troubled look crossed Edweth’s face.
“If you mean the innkeeper, Miles Plunkett, I can tell you right now he is not going to want me under his roof.”
Balor looked startled.
“Why not, ma’am?”
“We had a falling-out some years ago, and I don’t think he would care to see my face again. You see, one evening Rowen slipped out of the toyshop—she was only eight, the headstrong thing—and I finally found her here at the inn, perched on a chair by the fire with her legs dangling, telling stories to a roomful of strangers and vagabonds of the road. And Mister Plunkett hadn’t done a thing about it. He hadn’t sent word that she was at the inn, or had her escorted home. In fact, I found him sitting there with all the other idlers and ne’er-do-wells, just listening to the child spin some far-fetched tale. And, Mister Gruff, I told him in no uncertain terms what I thought of him, and we have never spoken since.”
“I’m sure Miles has forgotten all about it, ma’am,” Balor said. “I can tell you on my honour he’s never had anything but words of praise for you.”
Edweth gave the wildman a sharp glance, but she took a deep breath and followed him up into the inn.
The rickety stairs rose steeply to a small door set into an arch in the brickwork of the wall. Balor knocked softly and after a few moments they heard a bolt being drawn back and the door opened soundlessly, as if it had just been oiled before they arrived.
The innkeeper, Miles Plunkett, stood before them, a checked dishcloth over his shoulder and a lit candle lantern in his hand. He was a broad-shouldered, thickset man with a balding head and calloused red hands.
“Balor,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Good to see you. And you, too, ma’am,” he added, nodding stiffly in Edweth’s direction, though he wouldn’t look directly at her.
“Mister Plunkett,” Edweth said curtly, eyeing the many stains on the innkeeper’s apron.
Plunkett beckoned them inside and they found themselves in an unlit corridor cluttered with chairs, crates, casks, and other odds and ends stacked along its sides.
“Come this way—quickly,” Plunkett said, raising the lantern, “and watch your step, please.”
They followed him along the dark corridor and up another flight of stairs to a small door that he unlocked with one of the many keys on the ring on his belt. The door creaked open into a long, low-ceilinged storeroom filled with more crates and squat barrels. He led them down the one narrow passage that was left, Balor having to bend nearly double to avoid bumping his head on the roof beams. At the far end of the room Plunkett reached up and pulled on some sort of hidden catch, which brought a concealed flight of steps swivelling noiselessly down on metal brackets.
“If you would, ma’am,” the innkeeper said.
And Edweth, followed by Balor and Plunkett, climbed the steps. They led to a room that must have been right under the roof of the inn. It had a steeply sloping ceiling with a small round window set in the roof. In the room were a small, bare table and an armchair made of braided willow wands, a cot in one corner and even more crates stacked against the far wall. Old books stood leaning against each other in a row on a shelf. Cobwebs hung in every corner and there was the dusty, close smell of a room that had not been used or aired for a long time.
Edweth looked around and sniffed.
“I realize it’s not the most pleasant accommodation, ma’am,” Plunkett said, passing his dishcloth quickly over the layer of dust on the table, “but no one will be likely to look for you here. In fact, I’m the only person at the inn who knows about this place.”
“Why do you keep a room like this, Mister Plunkett?” Edweth asked, unable to keep a note of suspicion out of her voice.
“It was for my Nell,” the innkeeper said, resting a hand on the back of the armchair. “She was a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, Nell was, you see, and she used to talk about how lovely it would be to have a place where she could climb up out of the noise and bustle and have a wider view of the world. So I built this for her. She could be alone here, knit, read her books, and no one would bother her. She was a great one for the books, my Nell. Smart as a whip, not like me at all. Can’t have been easy for her, being an innkeeper’s wife when she could have been, I don’t know, a scholar or a doctor …”
He trailed off with a worried glance at Edweth as if he might have said too much.
“Forgive me, Mister Plunkett, my question was rude,” Edweth said, her face flushed. “I did not know your wife well, but I was sorry to hear of her passing.”
The innkeeper at last summoned the courage to look Edweth in the eye.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said huskily, and cleared his throat. “Balor’s told me what’s been happening, Master Pendrake going missing and the mage taking over the toyshop and all of that. It got my blood up, I can tell you. And now the girl off on her own somewhere.” He shook his head slowly. “Those were always the best evenings around here, when the toymaker dropped by with Rowen and they’d tell their stories. The best evenings. I hope they’ll both get back to you safe and sound, ma’am.”
For once, Edweth seemed unable to speak. Her eyes welled with tears.
“There isn’t much that someone like me can do to help make things right,” the innkeeper went on quickly, “but as I told Balor, you’re welcome to stay as long as need be, ma’am, and not a soul will hear of it from Miles Plunkett. I know the room’s in poor shape and I haven’t kept it as I should have, what with things always so busy.”
“The room will be just fine, Mister Plunkett,” Edweth said firmly. She
stepped under the sloped ceiling, glanced out the little window, then faced the innkeeper again. “Thank you for your kindness. And I wanted to tell you … about that time I found Rowen here in your common room and … well, I said some things to you.”
The innkeeper flushed to the very crown of his balding head. He wrung the dishcloth in his hands.
“I don’t remember a word of it, ma’am,” he replied. “That is to say, I’m sure I deserved every word of it, even though I’ve forgotten what you … what I mean is …” He frowned, clearly desperate for a way out of the tangle he’d gotten himself into. Then he cleared his throat again and squared his shoulders. “What I mean to say is that Nicholas Pendrake is a good friend, and no harm would ever come to Rowen here, not while the name of Plunkett is on that sign above the door.”
“I know that, Mister Plunkett,” Edweth said warmly. “Let us both put all of it behind us for good, shall we? And please, call me Edweth.”
“I will, if you’ll call me Miles.”
They smiled at each other and shook hands. Balor stared slack-jawed from one to the other as if witness to the most unlikely thing he’d ever seen in his life. And now both Edweth and the innkeeper seemed unable to find words, so the wildman came to their rescue.
“You’re a good man, Miles, to do this,” Balor said.
“It’s what anyone would do,” the innkeeper mumbled. “Just watch out for yourself, my friend, and stay alive.” He turned to Edweth. “I have to be leaving now, ma’am, before everything goes to rack and ruin downstairs. But I’ll come see you, I promise, when I have any news.”
“Thank you, Miles.”
With that he made an awkward bow and ducked out the low doorway.
“He’s so kind,” Edweth said to Balor when the innkeeper had gone, and her face glowed with more than its usual colour. “I’m sorry to say I had Miles Plunkett all wrong.”
“He’s one of the best, ma’am,” the wildman said. “But I must leave now, too, before I’m missed. Will you be all right here?”
“Of course, Balor,” she said, and to the wildman’s surprise she rose up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “But what are you going to do? What if they find out you were the one who got me out of Appleyard?”
Balor grinned.
“You let me worry about that, ma’am. I’ve got some other friends to see. Brax may think he’s running things now, but he doesn’t have everyone in his pocket, not yet.”
16
THEY HAD LEFT THE last of the working streetlights long behind.
Rowen, Will, Morrigan and Shade walked in an unending grey half-light through the silent city. Heaps of broken wood and masonry, bent and twisted scraps of metal and shards of glass were scattered everywhere. It was impossible to take more than a few steps without having to climb over or go around some obstacle. Fallen electrical wires lay across their path like dead snakes. They passed mounds of refuse and many abandoned vehicles, including a car that stood in the middle of a pool of oily water, on fire. Black smoke billowed from its burning interior. Apart from that, nothing moved. The air was cold down at the bottom of the city’s canyons, and still and dry as dead bone.
This place had been well named, Rowen thought. It really was like being inside a shadow.
She remembered a trip she had taken with her grandfather a few summers before to visit the old cottage at Blue Hill. They’d reached the farm just as the sun was setting. One moment they had been walking through a warm, buzzing, honey-coloured world, and then the sun had dropped below the brow of the hill and they were inside its shadow. The air was suddenly chilled and damp, as if they had plunged under water, and it was then she’d understood that a shadow wasn’t just a flat patch of darkness stretched over the ground. A shadow was a place itself. It had height and depth. When you passed into the shadow of something, you really were inside it. Except that here, in the Night King’s realm, there was no hill casting the shadow. It was simply everywhere, a part of this dead world that never changed. And it was not a cool, welcome twilight like the one they’d entered that evening at Blue Hill, but an unrelenting ashen greyness, neither day nor night, which seemed to have seeped inside things themselves.
It was seeping into her, as well. She could feel it in the heaviness of her steps and the bleak thoughts she couldn’t help thinking. When they had stopped to rest in the concealment of an underpass, Will had handed her one of the bottles of water he’d brought from the hotel. He’d given her a smile, too, to cheer her, but a voice in her head said, How much longer will he stay with you before he gives up and runs away? He’s just a weak, scared boy. He can’t help you anyway.
She’d looked away, ashamed of herself. Where had these hateful thoughts come from? It was the shadow. What was happening to Shade was happening to all of them, she was sure, if more slowly.
Since leaving the hotel they had seen no one, and now even the distant roar of traffic had faded away, leaving only the sound of their own footsteps as they slowly picked their way through the rubble-choked streets. From time to time they did hear faint rustlings and skitterings that might have been rats or other small creatures scuttling through the debris. And yet Rowen was sure that these were not the only inhabitants of this city. The farther they walked, the more certain she was they were being watched by hidden eyes.
“Do you feel it?” she whispered to Will when her eyes caught his.
He nodded without speaking and she knew he understood what she meant.
If Morrigan sensed the watchers, she, too, gave no sign. Rowen and Will were walking ahead of her, as they had been since leaving the hotel, and it often happened that they were forced to stop when they came to a crossroads and were uncertain which way to proceed. Then Morrigan would quickly indicate with a nod which path to take and they would go on. She kept her face hidden under her hood at all times, so that Rowen could not help but wonder if their friend really was still concealed within the silent white shrowde that covered her.
For his part Shade stayed close to Morrigan, but sometimes, at a word from her, he would trot on ahead to scout beyond some obstacle or around a corner and then report back to her whether the way was clear. He kept his distance from Rowen and Will, not even glancing at them when he passed them on the way back to Morrigan from his scouting forays. Since he was playing the part of the Angel’s servant, it made sense for him to ignore them like this, but Rowen had the troubling feeling that Shade’s avoidance was more than an act. Ever since they set foot in the Shadow Realm, the wolf had grown increasingly agitated and withdrawn. His hackles were up all the time now. Rowen’s heart went out to the wolf as he struggled. She wanted to speak to Shade, find some comforting words if she could, but she dared not drop her own role as a prisoner even for a moment.
Both Rowen and Will had lost any sense for how long they had been walking. The dead sky showed no familiar signs, no lengthening shadows or changing light to mark the passing hours. The fact that they did not speak to each other only added to the feeling that they were wandering in a timeless dream. If anything changed at all, it was the buildings themselves, which looked more shattered and desolate the farther they walked, until they could hardly be distinguished from the heaps of rubble that filled the streets. The pavement under their feet also grew increasingly broken and heaved up, so that eventually they were doing as much scrambling up and down as walking. This slowed them considerably when they had to take a meandering path around some crevasse in the roadway or carefully pick their way over ridges of loose, fallen stone or brick. Morrigan and the shrowde moved easily over the rougher terrain, but Rowen and Will were soon breathing hard and stumbling from weariness. Even Shade seemed to be having difficulty.
At last, when Rowen felt she could barely take another step, Morrigan called a halt. She told them that back in the world they knew it was now night. They had been walking for many hours and it was time to rest.
Shade nosed around and found a shelter that would offer some concealment. It was a small dome-roofed st
ructure that jutted out from the front of a blackened, burned-out building.
“What sort of place was this before?” Rowen wondered.
“It looks like a ticket booth for a theatre,” Will said.
She wasn’t sure what that meant, but there was enough room inside the booth for both Will and her to lie down on the paper-strewn floor with their heads on their packs. Rowen and Will shared some of the food and water they had brought from the hotel, while Shade hunkered down outside the door and Morrigan stood at the building’s entrance. Neither she nor the wolf appeared to need sleep, but Rowen was exhausted and she soon found herself nodding off.
She was jolted awake several times out of frightening dreams to find Will asleep beside her, breathing softly, and Shade in the doorway, his eyes open and observant. Each time, she wondered whether she was really awake or still dreaming. Maybe in this place, she thought, they were the same thing.
She awoke once to find Shade watching her.
“You cannot sleep, Rowen of Blue Hill?”
The Tree of Story Page 22
