Danny thought of the farm, and the woods and fields and birds and badgers, all together with Tom.
“He’d like that,” he said.
“You’d like that,” said Death. “Why did you give yourself up to Sammael? Do you understand what he’s getting from you?”
“Yeah.” Danny nodded. “But I didn’t have a choice, in the end.”
“Of course you did,” said Death.
Danny shrugged. “I could have left Tom behind. I could have left bits of the world gray and pretended not to see them. But I’d never have stopped thinking about it.”
“Poor boy,” said Death. “There’s a lot on your shoulders.”
Danny didn’t feel sorry for himself. It wasn’t that hard to face things when they were inevitable.
“Why do people do it?” he asked, looking up into Death’s red eyes. “Why do they give themselves to him freely, when they don’t have to? I still don’t understand that.”
“Ach, I don’t know,” said Death. “To me, it is only right and proper that things come from the earth and return to the earth. But there is a power in imagination that lifts creatures out of the earth, higher and higher, until their toes are dangling in the stars. They live in the colored sky, and they throw handfuls of it down to remind the rest of earth’s creatures to raise their eyes once in a while. They give up their own lives in the belief that they can improve the world—not by violence or death or hurt, but by dreaming wonderful dreams, and thinking up glorious ideas, and passing them down to others. Sammael would tell you that life begins not on earth but in dreams. I would not agree with him. But I honor him for saying it.”
“What about Abel Korsakof?” asked Danny, remembering the old man’s strange words in Chromos. “Who got him, in the end? It was Sammael, wasn’t it?”
Death looked confused for a moment, as if struggling to remember, and then her soft old face went curiously beautiful.
“Ah, no,” she said. “Abel Korsakof has long since returned to his Polish soil, and if he could know anything, he would know what peace was now.”
Danny frowned as the last fragment of sun slipped below the horizon. “But he sold his soul to Sammael, didn’t he? How did he get out of it?”
“That I don’t know,” said Death. “I know only that I was summoned to him, and when I found him, he was mine. The reasons were unfathomable.”
Danny’s heart, which had given a little leap, sank again. “Well,” he said. “Here is Tom. I guess you’d better take him.”
Death stooped and gathered up Tom in her arms. He did not look weightless anymore; he hung in her embrace as if he were a young man again, asleep, his limbs dangling with their full, muscled heaviness.
Danny tried to say good-bye, but his voice didn’t work.
And Death turned away to walk off down the valley side. His eyes wouldn’t follow her for long: soon she became impossible to see through the darkness, and he knew that he had had his last sight of both of them. He would never see Tom again. Nor would he ever rest his eyes on the friendly old face of Death. Fate had something altogether different in store for him.
He touched the solid earth beneath his feet and wanted to throw himself onto it. It seemed so unfair that Barshin the hare claimed the earth as his own element. It was Danny who wanted to cling to it, Danny who felt every grain inside him calling out to the soil, longing to be a part of it again.
But I am water, he told himself. Water evaporates. It has to let go and fly free.
Angrily, he pulled the useless Book of Shadows from his pocket and went to tear it up, to finish his connection with the whole hated business, so that he could lie on the earth and close his eyes and wait for what was coming to him.
A drop of rain fell onto his face, out of the darkness.
“Come on,” he said to it. “Soak me. Bring your friend the wind to knock me from side to side. Bring white forks of lightning to strike me from the skies. Make me feel alive one last time.”
“Are you sure?” asked the splattered raindrop as it trickled down his cheek.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he said, clutching the Book of Shadows. He could write no new worlds in it now, but it was still a taro, and he could still use it to speak to the rain. Even if it was only minutes till he saw Sammael again, he had his voice for a little while longer.
He raised his mind to the darkened sky. And then he heard it, in the distance.
Thunder.
His heart leapt. His whole body threw all the hope and laughter it still held out toward the storm and yelled to it—“Come on! Come and find me! I’m here, at Hangman’s Wood!”
And the storm came.
The rain fell harder, driving into his face with icy spears. The wind slammed against him, dragging at his clothes, whipping his frozen skin. Hail blinded him, thunder crashed against the trees of Hangman’s Wood, roaring out in anger as the trees wailed in grief.
Danny watched the hail and the rain and the black branches of the trees swinging wildly in the black night; every flash of white lightning stung the world into a thousand swirling particles of ice and water and steam, and the fingers of the trees were the fingers of all that he was leaving behind: the life of the world, the rage of it, the frenzied, fantastic dance of it. And he knew the final thing about being alive: it was a storm—a terrifying, glorious storm—and you could never stay still because the winds would push you and the rain would soak you and there would always be hail to hide from and lightning to marvel at. And you could never be sure when you’d have to take shelter as it all became too fierce, or when you’d manage to stand fast against it, holding out against the powers that raged around you, trying to throw you in every direction.
Humans could never hold the lightning. They could only hold the trees and the earth and each other.
“Ori!” he shouted. “Go! Into the woods! Go away!”
The dog cringed against his leg. “I won’t leave you,” she whimpered.
He shook her off. She had to leave him. He had to be alone.
“Go!” he shouted. “I want you to go!”
“I’ll wait for you,” she said. “On the other side of the wood. I’ll wait for you till you come.”
“I won’t come!” shouted Danny. “Don’t wait for me. Go back to your old owner! Live a long and happy life! Go, and good-bye!”
Ori slunk away into the trees; he didn’t see where she’d gone and knew only that she had left him, that he had said his last good-bye. Perhaps Sammael was coming for him in this storm? Perhaps the end wasn’t far off.
But Danny couldn’t feel Sammael’s presence in the air. He was alone in the storm: himself and his book and some words he had to remember, some words he’d heard only recently—
I knew at the end that I belonged … to the storm. And I chose the storm.…
Abel Korsakof. He took hold of the lightning, and he let it kill him. And he belonged not to Sammael but to the storm.…
Danny turned his face to the sky and held the book up to it and opened his heart to everything in it: the rain, the hail, the wind, the lightning.…
And he knew.
“Strike me,” he said. “Strike me down. I understand about Sammael. I understand about the earth. I choose that which I don’t understand. I choose the storm.”
The lightning struck around him, hissing and shrieking at the flailing trees. And he remembered that the taro protected him.
So he dropped the Book of Shadows.
The lightning struck him.
Danny O’Neill’s body flew backward against an ancient beech tree.
And his soul walked into the storm.
CHAPTER 24
THE GUARDIANS OF CHROMOS
“Will he come?” Cath squatted in the lee of the dunes, looking out across the ink-dark sea.
“He’ll come.”
Barshin kept close beside her, and she felt his windblown fur warm against the palm of her hand. His body was steady.
The gold of Shimny’s coat cast some
light around the beach, but not enough to see the house inland. Cath didn’t want to see it anyway. She didn’t belong here anymore. But it had seemed like the best place to find Sammael again, so they had come back.
This beach was the closest she had ever had to a home. You need to look at something that feels like a broader part of yourself, Barshin had said. Open up your heart, and he’ll hear you calling him.
And so they waited as the light left the sky and the darkness rolled overhead, and it felt to Cath, too, like the end of a long journey. What lay beyond giving the boots to Sammael? She had no idea. Color would come back to the gray parts of the earth, but a mere dusting of Chromos had never been enough for her. She wanted to feel herself soaked in it.
“There he is,” said Barshin.
He came with his own light around him, day still clinging to his shoulders, fending off the darkness and the shadows. He looked thin and old and tired, and his bare feet sank into the sand. His head was down, and his face was hard to see until he stood before Cath and turned his full gaze upon her. Then she saw that, however dusty and moth-eaten the rest of him might look, his black eyes were still bright. It was a soft, sparking brightness, and it refused utterly the suggestion that Sammael’s hope would ever die.
“What now?” he asked.
Cath got to her feet and held out the boots.
“We made them,” she said. “Both of us. One each.”
Sammael didn’t take them. “Cath and Barshin the shoemakers,” he said. “Well done. You should set up a shop. Call it ‘A Load of Old Cobblers.’ But they’re no good to me. Only those who destroyed the real boots could bring them back, and I believe that was Cath and someone else.”
“Yes,” said Cath. “It was Danny and me. I made the left one. He made the right.”
Sammael snorted. “If you expect me to believe that—”
Cath thrust the boots toward him. “We went into Chromos and killed Zadoc.”
“You might have. But I’d bet anything that Danny O’Neill didn’t.”
Cath shrugged. “It’s true, though. We went into Chromos, and we wanted the boots back. Both of us—him and me. So we got them. They won’t disappear. They’re yours.”
Still Sammael refused to take them. “Danny O’Neill wouldn’t have wanted them,” he said. “I sent him a dog in a million to make him brave, and he was still afraid of me. Where is he now? Cowering in the shadows somewhere?”
“He’s gone to take Tom back to Death. And then I think he’s going to wait for you to come and kill him,” said Cath. “Once you’ve gone into Chromos and given us back our color again, of course. That’s what he wants now, and he’s made it happen.”
Sammael stared at her. His face changed color, from white to pale orange. His eyes flashed a dark red. His hair shone with streaks of emerald and purple, and his shirt was tinged with blue.
He reached out and took the boots in both hands. As he touched them, his whole body trembled, and his mouth opened.
Instead of words, a stream of stars poured from between his lips. Tiny as candle flames, they danced into the night, drifting up the sky and growing in size and brightness as they went.
The stars floated away, as brilliant as bubbles catching at the sun. But these stars caught no light other than their own: they shone with gold as they raced up into the black sky and found places for themselves at the very top of it, blazing across the darkness in a trail of light.
Cath watched them for a moment, and Barshin watched them and Shimny watched them, and each knew that the earth would never be enough for them now. They had seen the stars set the sky alight, and it was the beginning of countless new worlds made from bravery and despair and sheer astonishment. And hope.
By the time Sammael closed his mouth, he had already put the boots on. They had missed the moment of seeing him do it.
He held out his hand to Cath and opened his mouth again, but this time it was only to speak normal words.
“Thank you,” he said. “They fit well. When I sent Ori, it was my dream to make Danny O’Neill brave enough to return to Chromos and bring out my boots again. I had lost all hope that he would ever do it. But you, it seems, can move mountains.”
Cath took his hand, and the colors of Chromos flooded through her. The gorse over her skin blazed as yellow as a summer’s day.
She looked at it in wonder. “How did you get the sand so fast?” she asked. “Did you have some left?”
Sammael shook his head. “I didn’t need sand to bring color back to you. You brought it back to yourself.”
Cath didn’t understand. “What do you mean? I was gray before you shook my hand. Barshin still is. We were dying.”
Sammael reached down and touched the hare. Barshin was brown again, black tips to his ears, a pale smudge under his tail.
“You are the guardians of Chromos,” said Sammael. “All three of you. It isn’t my doing; don’t ask me to change it. It isn’t even Chromos who chose you. You chose yourselves. You watched the stars of my hope fly into the sky, and you wanted nothing but to follow them. You are the wildest of all the creatures—yet you have great hearts. You’ll ride over the wide plain of Chromos and guide others toward the dreams that they deserve until something stops you, as you stopped Zadoc. But what that thing will be, none of us can predict.”
He turned his fierce eyes on Barshin. “I still owe you something.”
“But you can’t have my sand anymore,” said the hare. “Not if it belongs to Chromos.”
“Even so,” said Sammael. “I offer you Marija’s sand. Where do you want it? Shall I give it to Death and let her put it back in the earth?”
Barshin was silent for a moment, and then his fur blazed silver in the golden starlight.
“I’ve seen the world without Chromos,” the hare said. “And now I am Chromos. And I see what she wanted to be a part of. When I think of her spinning through the world in a blaze of color, with Chromos attached to every particle of her—I think that’s what she would have wanted. She loved the light and the color. She loved to leap and jump. And she loved to fight. I never understood exactly what it was that she loved so much. But now I see it. Keep her. I’ll never find her again, but she’ll be everywhere.”
The hare dipped his silver head and looked away into the shining darkness. Cath’s hand ached to reach out and touch his fur, but she let him be. They would have plenty of time to spend together on the plains of Chromos.
“And you”—Sammael turned to Shimny—“you have your home already, although I can’t take credit for it. That was one good use of that wretched Book of Shadows—at least Danny O’Neill wrote you a fine ending.”
“What is it?” asked Shimny. “I don’t know what he wrote.”
“That you would find the best place you ever could have wished for. And you did. Your coat changed to red and gold, the colors of your shining heart. You’ll find a good home in Chromos.”
“Why did the Earth burn?” asked Cath. “Did Danny write that, too?”
Sammael shook his head. “That was my work. I needed the dreams to fight for me, so I took them away. On Earth, dreams often hide inside the shadows, waiting for the right wistful creature to come along and need them. Without them, the shadows grew thin, and the earth began to burn. But that’s enough explanations from me. You are all quite healthy-looking now, it seems. I had better go and collect my prize, hadn’t I?”
“Can’t you let him go?” asked Cath. “He did the bravest thing he could ever do: he made himself understand that you weren’t all bad, though you scared him so much. He deserves to get what he wants now, I reckon.”
“Does he?” asked Sammael, raising an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”
“Just … the chance to live and die like the rest of them,” said Cath. “Like a normal human being.”
Sammael curled his lip. “Don’t make me lose hope again,” he said. “Don’t tell me he hasn’t changed.”
Cath shrugged. “Of course he’s changed,”
she said. “But not into what you’d want. He doesn’t want to be wild, and he never will. He’s human, and he’s kind, and I reckon he’s the sort of person the Earth needs to be made of. That’d be good for every creature that lives on it. But I guess you’ll decide for yourself about that.”
“Do you want to come and say good-bye?” asked Sammael, with a mocking edge to his voice.
Cath shook her head. “We’ve already said it,” she said. And she closed her heart.
“Off you go, then,” said Sammael. “Go and take your places.”
Cath leapt up onto Shimny’s back, and Barshin jumped into her arms. None of them weighed anything anymore. Cath spread the cloak around her shoulders and narrowed her eyes against the blinding stream of color that opened up before them. It rose into the sky, a wide and gleaming path, and Shimny’s gold hooves began to race along it, sending spray after spray of red and turquoise and yellow and bright jade into the black sky as they lifted and fell. The path was smooth and bright, and the horse put her head down and charged, up into a new world.
On the horse’s back, the hare sat balanced, looking forward between the red and gold ears. And the girl sat easily astride, head held high, black hair tangled in the wind. The cloak billowed out behind her, and she felt not a single tinge of regret at leaving the soft old Earth. Onward, upward, into Chromos—
The hooves beat out a pattern up the wide path of colors, and the girl smiled.
CHAPTER 25
AFTER THE STORM
High on the hilltop, icy dawn crept into Hangman’s Wood. Only the wood itself remembered the day it had been christened, and its name hadn’t come from a violent act. No murders had taken place in it; no gallows had been crafted from its trees. Many centuries before, a tree had been felled by lightning. Thor’s hammer, someone had said. And Hammer Wood had gradually become Hangman’s.
The gentle wood had never thought that it would wake one day to find the body of a boy lying burned and broken at the foot of an ancient tree.
Over him stood a manlike creature, as old as the hills and fields, as old as the sky itself. The creature was holding a small book made from sailcloth and a few ripped scraps of paper. They were singed around the edges, but generally intact; a half-formed scrawl could be seen running across the pages.
The Book of Shadows Page 18
