The Accidental Highwayman

by Ben Tripp

  I saw this very clearly, for the white gryphon ceased to exist when I was halfway through my leap, so even if I had reached it, there was nothing there to reach. Of consequence I was following an identical course to the mantigorns, landward, face down, with a superb view of the entire tableau.

  A second after the lightning bolt, there was a detonation in my weskit pocket, and a puff of green smoke flew up behind me. As there was nothing else to do but fall to my death, I had the leisure to reach into the pocket to see what had exploded within. I withdrew none other than Magda’s tooth! It was black from end to end. Then it turned to dust in my fingers and blew away.

  There wasn’t anything further to do, so I watched the clouds grow closer. It was terribly cold and the wind battered mercilessly; my downward speed was increasing. By now the last of the mantigorns had dropped through the clouds. I was next, and beneath the clouds I’d see where my final resting place would be. A field would suffice, thought I. Perhaps a field of radishes, for remembrance.

  Then there was a great roar of air and a mighty black shape came up beneath me, stooping like a giant hawk. It was Midnight! His wings spread out and I fell heavily across his shoulders, nearly unhorsing Morgana, who reached out to secure me as I came down. For several long, sickening moments I hung by Midnight’s mane, dangling over the abyss, and the fear that had left me when I was falling in the open air now returned tenfold, because there was hope.

  Then I was astride him again, and clinging to horse and princess with legs and arms respectively and in equal measure.

  “You made a wish!” Morgana cried. There was joy in her face.

  “Are you unharmed?” I said, desperate for reassurances of any kind.

  “Very well,” said she. “Never better, as I have you alive. Are you hurt?”

  “A bit chilly,” I confessed. “But unmarked, except that Magda’s tooth exploded and singed my weskit.”

  “It’s a wishing tooth!” Morgana exclaimed. “Why did you not use it before?”

  “I didn’t know anything about it. I never make wishes.”

  “That’s what they’re for, you daft manling!”

  We were in a new world: Above us, thin, elegant clouds ribbed the great blue dome of the sky, and below us was an unbroken sea of mist, the clouds here and there undulating in hills and valleys. In the distance I saw great thunderhead clouds, iron-colored anvils that rose into the highest parts of the sky, and were there tinged with lambent pink and yellow. It was cold, but the air was deliciously fresh. I felt nothing of the chill, for I had one arm around Morgana, her hair flying in my face and her heart beating next to my own.

  We flew in silence for a time, at what must have been incredible speed; I could not tell, for there were no landmarks below us by which to gauge our progress. Suffice it to say that it must have been some aspect of Midnight’s enchantment that we were not frozen or deafened by the wind that swept all around us. We flew so fast that thunder pealed in our wake.

  Then Morgana turned around so that she could look into my eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” said I. “You rescued yourself.”

  “For that lovely piece of buttered toast when we were parted.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” I said, and then remembered.

  As the cruel mantigorns closed about her on that fateful night, I had thought, My love. Good-bye. Of course she had received the message, and my thought of toast beside.

  If I had felt a little cold before, now I was quite warm, for I was blushing again. A thousand protests rose to my lips, along with apologies and explanations. I let them all clamor for my attention, but did not speak until the confusion had settled down. A little hard-learned wisdom: Never miss an opportunity not to speak.

  “I’ve loved you since you came to my aid on that bridge, radishes and all,” she said. “That was rescue enough.”

  These words sent my heart flying on its own course; it must have circled the sun, for it returned to me glowing, and it seemed we must be soaring along in heaven itself. But there was an imperfection in my great happiness that I did not understand.

  “Why can’t I kiss you?” I asked.

  “Because,” said Morgana, “in the Middle Kingdom, all it takes for a Faerie to be married is a single kiss.”

  “And what’s the matter with that?”

  “There’s so much you don’t know about Faerie.” She sighed.

  Chapter 36

  THE IRISH SEA

  AS THE miles went by, I told Morgana what had transpired since last she saw me, and explained the mystery of the tortoise comb. Then she told me of her own travails. She had been taken to her father in shackles, at which time he condemned her and threatened vile curses. When that didn’t work, he threatened the common Faerie people with misery and pain instead, and, remembering the scene of the massacre we had encountered—the air thick with brails—she gave in. She was sent by the infernal silver coach to the palace. This time, a squad of King’s men accompanied her.

  It was only in the minute of the wedding, when young George was leaning over to place a kiss upon her lips, that Morgana had lost her temper entirely and performed the extraordinary caprizel I’d witnessed, all but blowing up both kings. It was the same one with which she’d knocked me off my feet some while back, but amplified a hundredfold. The rest, I had been present for.

  “The look on King Elgeron’s face will never leave my mind. I cannot decide if it was the most comical or the most terrible thing I ever saw. He was so twisted up with anger, you see, and puffed up like a bullfrog with his wig on fire. But still, my own father! The hatred on his features was unmistakable. I don’t know what I think.”

  Midnight flew without tiring for a long time, and eventually I thought we must see where we were. I bade him drop down below the overcast, and as the floor of clouds became a roof again, we saw there was nothing below us but steel-colored water. Morgana fainted and might have fallen, but I caught her firmly around the waist and held her against me. It was darker here below the cloud, and it was clear we were above the ocean, for the air smelled of salt and there was no shore in any direction.

  Not long after that, the ocean seemed to grow larger at a rapid pace. We were descending. Midnight was breathing hard, struggling to keep us aloft. The waves reached up greedily to snap at his hooves. I felt the spray on my cheeks. It revived Morgana, who clawed at my coat, wild with terror.

  “Kit,” said she, gasping, “soon we must part. Do not despair for me, but live your mad life well. Methinks I must undertake my next journey alone.”

  “I shan’t leave your side,” said I, as brave as I could manage.

  Ahead of us was a thin white band along the horizon. It grew in size and revealed a coastline fringed with cliffs and rocks. Midnight was laboring, his head tossing with every stroke of his wings. Great black feathers flew from those wings, and turned to ash as they struck the lashing surface of the sea. Soon it didn’t look as if their span could support us, so riven and ragged were they.

  I saw a strip of beach, and directed the horse toward it. If we could but get close, we could swim there; Morgana might cling to Midnight, for horses swim almost as well as they run.

  One hoof struck the water, and Midnight renewed his effort, but the largest of the waves now rose up higher than his back, and must soon overcome us. He twisted in and out between the foaming peaks. Before us the shore grew nearer, and seagulls wheeled overhead.

  “You’re the greatest horse that ever lived,” I said to him, and meant it. “You are the mightiest and finest horse in the world. Just another stroke of your wings. And now, one more. And again!”

  On brave Midnight labored. Half of a mile from the surf there was a great hissing sound, and his fine wings began to crumble into powder that whirled behind us, much as the substance of the Duchess had done. Morgana screamed in the most pitiable anguish, there was a stomach-twisting drop, and a moment later we plunged into the sea. Our three hours were up.

&nb
sp; I sank immediately, and lost my grip on Morgana, for we had been flung violently from Midnight’s back. I kicked to the surface, and spat seawater; Midnight emerged not far away, his great nostrils steaming. Morgana was nowhere about.

  I cried her name, and swallowed half the ocean. I plunged deep beneath the water, but it was too dim and turbulent to see much more than a hint of the bottom rising up in front of me. Again and again I dived, until I could not make another attempt without drowning. Not finding any trace of my Princess, I thrashed the surface of the sea and called her name with desperation until there was so much water in my lungs I must swim or drown. At last, I kicked for the bank, and after a long and weary struggle, waded upon a pebble strand. The tide was out. Midnight swam up after me. We could walk the rest of the distance to dry land.

  But Morgana was gone.

  I waited there in the shallows for a long time, watching the water for some sign of her. If only I still had the wishing tooth! No one has ever wished for something so fervently as I did then, but the waves cared not at all.

  Midnight stood beside me for a time, the water up to his belly. Then he nuzzled me, pushing me toward the beach with his nose. At length, with the sky beginning to show sunset through the clouds, I turned back to land, and sloshed my way ashore.

  At the tide line there was a fisherman mending a net. He obviously hadn’t seen us arrive, for he looked startled when Midnight and I emerged from the foam.

  [ The Cruel Waves ]

  “Fell you in?” he inquired, and I might have laughed aloud to hear his Irish voice, except laughter had died inside me.

  “Did you see a beautiful young lady emerge from the sea?” I begged him, clutching at his sleeve. The man’s merry face fell.

  “None have come from that water, son, but you and that great pony,” he replied, and solemnly plucked the cap from his head. “The last time a woman come ashore in this place it was a century past. Borne up by the water sprites, she was, as rule this part of the sea, and rose out o’ the waves with her feet in a blue flame and a crown of white feathers upon her head, dry as sunshine. My great-grandfodder seen it with his very own eyes.”

  A few months before I would have chuckled to hear this silly, superstitious tale. No longer! Instead, I took his words entirely to heart, and spent another long watch with my eyes bent upon the ocean.

  At one point, hugging myself for warmth, I found there was something in my breast pocket, waterlogged and lumpy; I drew out my master’s will, about which I had entirely forgotten. With numb, blue fingers I unfolded the sheet, and there found the map had changed again. In fact it was gone, and all the little sketches beside; the hanged man was no longer there.

  Instead there was only one drawing upon it, a fair portrait of Morgana. Even as I gazed upon the picture, the lines began to run, and the portrait was obliterated, and I held nothing but a very wet sheet of ink-blotted paper.

  I remained at the shore until the daylight was all gone and I was chilled to the marrows. The fisherman had long departed up a path on the cliff to wherever he lived; but presently he returned with a tallow lamp and a sealskin cape, wrapped up my shivering frame, and led me away. Midnight followed, his head held low. He, too, felt our loss.

  Chapter 37

  THE ENCHANTED LAND

  THE NEXT morning broke with a storm that churned up the sea and brought the stony clouds down low to meet it. Rain blackened the cliffs and pelted the fisherman’s cottage where I had spent the night. It was a low, dark place, the walls barely as high as my shoulder and the thatch above rustling with wood lice, humid with the stink of peat smoke. I recalled I had ridden Midnight clean through such a dwelling, a lifetime ago. But it was snug, and I was exhausted almost beyond reason.

  So I lay on a pallet of straw while the fisherman went out—his trade ignored all but the most violent weather—and stayed abed until his stout wife awoke me with a smoking porringer of oat gruel.

  The remainder of the day I spent with Midnight, for the shed in which the fisherman had installed him had its back to the cliffs, and a shutter that could be opened to command a view of the coast for miles in either direction. I looked down upon the foaming surf that beat the rocks, and out upon the hammered iron skin of the water, and all the while hoped to see a maiden rise from the waves with her feet in a blue flame and her head wreathed in feathers.

  All the day long, nothing rose from the water except the rotten hull of a years-old shipwreck, which rolled drunkenly ashore and came to pieces in the surf. The boom and rush of the storm was the only conversation I heard that day, Midnight my only companion.

  My mind was fixed on Morgana’s last words to me. She had begged me to live my life well. That had a ring of finality to it. But I also knew that the Faerie people didn’t speak of “next journeys” as manlings did, referring to the afterlife—if Morgana said her next journey must be undertaken alone, there was a very good chance she meant it quite literally. So she might somehow have survived the plunge into the ocean. Perhaps she went back to the Realm Between, and there must remain.

  Whatever the truth of it was, I was alone, and as the hours passed and the sea gave up nothing but wrack, I came to understand Morgana was not going to return.

  That was why she had told me to live my mad life. Otherwise I might have waited there atop the cliff forever.

  * * *

  My troubles weren’t over, of course. I was a wanted man across the sea, and I’d set down in British territory. I hadn’t more than a few small coins that had happened to be in the coat I’d been given by Captain Sterne; even Midnight’s saddle was borrowed from a nearby farmer. I needed to earn a living, but hadn’t yet determined what that living should be. There wasn’t much need of trick-riders or manservants without letters of recommendation in those parts.

  I wasn’t worried, though. After what I’d been through, it seemed to me I could do anything. The trouble was, without Morgana beside me, nothing seemed worth doing.

  I didn’t much fear discovery. Ireland was a wild place, and the people were isolated and kept to their own folk, so no word of me reached the ears of anyone who might have caused difficulty—although it seemed that everyone for miles around knew me to be that same fellow they had heard was washed ashore.

  “Tales,” as the fisherman’s wife said, “travel swift and far, for they’re light as a feather. It’s truth goes slowly, heavy as ’tis.” She didn’t know that the tale, in this case, was the truth. So it was that I became the “fellow swum ashore with his horse,” and wherever I rode, there was a different version of how it transpired. The Irish love a sad tale better than a happy one, so they dwelt mostly upon the loss of my fair lover to the waves.

  So did I. Morgana had told me to get on with my life, but that was a thing easier said than done.

  The Irish enjoy only one thing better than a sad story, and that’s a sad song, so it wasn’t long before I was sitting in a tavern in the company of a short brown ale and heard a lilting melody sung with the following words:

  Farewell to thee, cried the maiden of springtime

  Farewell to thee, then no more she spake

  For the waves they rose up

  And the sea overtook her

  And over her head did the cold waters break.

  Long did he seek with an eye to the ocean

  Long did he seek on the stone of the shore

  But the sea ne’er gave up

  The maiden of springtime

  And laughed for to tell him he’d see her no more.

  I don’t think the singer recognized me, but others must have done, for I hurried out and sorry eyes followed me.

  But that very night, something occurred to remind me I hadn’t died myself, and might have reason to hope after all. As I was returning to the cottage after a long aimless day, Midnight walking slowly in the gloaming, following his own path, I saw a single light dancing within the hedge beside me, like a spark that wouldn’t burn up. There was a greenish cast to it, and a familiar look
to the way it flitted about, and excitement was new-kindled in my bosom. I sprang from Midnight’s back and bade him wait for me at the stile, then went through a gate. The wee light danced away, teasing me. I followed it, and crossed a dark field to the woods.

  I’d hardly entered the deep darkness beneath the boughs when the glowing point of light winked out. It had been a Faerie. I was certain of it.

  My heart leapt against my ribs—this was the first I’d seen of the magical people since coming ashore, and I hadn’t dared to hope I might encounter them again in my lifetime. This was rather a change from when first I had met Willum and Gruntle and felt nothing but trepidation, for I had come to know the feyín for a fine, brave people, willing to risk everything if they thought it might help a just cause.

  I stumbled through the darkness to the heart of the stand of trees, and heard a familiar snuffling sound, as of a hog seeking truffles in the loam. I stopped in my tracks, and ahead saw a shape I took at first to be a stone jutting out of the mossy ground.

  “Don’t stand there gaping nor a fool,” came a rusty old voice. “Come to me yarms, boyo!”

  It was Magda, the old witch, with Demon the bulldog grunting at her side. I embraced her as I would have embraced my own mother, had I ever the opportunity. It was like hugging a handful of sticks, but I was grateful. Demon leapt up and down and yowled with delight, then capered in circles.

  “Magda,” I gasped. I was overcome with emotion. “Everything you said—I was a fool not to trust you.”