Huntress, Black Dawn, Witchlight

by L. J. Smith

  Laundress glared at her. Then she turned to Maggie and a change came over her gaunt features. It wasn’t much; they still remained as severe and grim as ever, but there was something like a bleak smile twisting her mouth.

  “If you are the Deliverer,” she said, “you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  “Just everybody hang on one second,” Maggie said.

  Her head was whirling. She understood what was going on—sort of. These people believed she was some legendary figure come to save them. Because of a prophecy—they seemed to have a lot of prophecies around here.

  But she couldn’t really be their Deliverer. She knew that. She was just an ordinary girl. And hadn’t anybody else ever worn a flowered top in this place?

  Well—maybe not. Not a slave anyway. Maggie looked at Laundress’s clothes again with new eyes. If they all wore this sort of thing, hand sewn and plain as a burlap sack, maybe a machine-made top with bright colors and a little wilted lace would look like something from a legend.

  And I bet nobody wears red and blue socks, she thought and almost smiled. Especially at once.

  She remembered how Sylvia had looked at them. Normally she would have been terribly embarrassed by that, perfect Sylvia looking at her imperfections. But the socks had been what started her on this whole journey by convincing her that Sylvia was lying. And just now they’d saved her life. If Laundress had attacked Jeanne or Cady, Maggie would have had to fight her.

  But I’m still not the Deliverer, she thought. I have to explain that to them….

  “And since she’s the Deliverer, you’re going to help us, right?” Jeanne was saying. “You’re going to heal Cady and feed us and hide us and everything? And help Maggie find out what happened to her brother?”

  Maggie blinked, then grimaced. She could see Jeanne looking at her meaningfully. She shut her mouth.

  “I’ll help you any way I can,” Laundress said. “But you’d better do your part. Do you have a plan, Deliverer?”

  Maggie rubbed her forehead. Things were happening very fast—but even if she wasn’t the Deliverer, she had come to help the slaves get free. Maybe it didn’t matter what they called her.

  She looked at Cady again, then at Jeanne, and at P.J., who was staring at her with shining confidence in her young eyes. Then she looked at the girl named Soaker, who was wearing the same expression.

  Finally she looked into the gaunt, hard-bitten face of Laundress. There was no easy confidence here, but there was that half-stifled look of hope deep in the burning gaze.

  “I don’t have a plan yet,” she said. “But I’ll come up with one. And I don’t know if I can really help you people. But I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Maggie woke up slowly and almost luxuriously. She wasn’t freezing. She wasn’t aching or weak with hunger. And she had an unreasonable feeling of safety.

  Then she sat up and the safe feeling disappeared.

  She was in Laundress’s hut of earth bricks. Jeanne and P.J. were there, but Cady had been taken to another hut to be treated. Laundress had stayed all night with her, and Maggie had no idea if she was getting better or not. The frightened girl called Soaker brought them breakfast, but could only say that Cady was still asleep.

  Breakfast was the same as dinner last night had been: a sort of thick oatmeal sweetened with huckleberries. Maggie ate it gratefully. It was good—at least to somebody as hungry as she was.

  “We’re lucky to have it,” Jeanne said, stretching. She and P.J. were sitting opposite Maggie on the bare earth of the floor, eating with their fingers. They all were wearing the coarse, scratchy tunics and loose leggings of slaves, and Maggie kept going into spasms of twitching when the material made her itch somewhere she couldn’t reach. Maggie’s clothes, including her precious socks, were hidden at the back of the hut.

  “They don’t grow much grain or vegetable stuff,” Jeanne was saying. “And of course slaves don’t get to eat any meat. Only the vampires and the shapeshifters get to eat blood or flesh.”

  P.J. shivered, hunching up her thin shoulders. “When you say it like that, it makes me not want to eat it.”

  Jeanne gave a sharp-toothed grin. “They’re afraid it would make the slaves too strong. Everything here’s designed for that. Maybe you noticed, there’s not much in the slave quarters made of wood.”

  Maggie blinked. She had noticed that vaguely, at the back of her mind. The huts were made of bricks, with hard-packed dirt floors. And there were no wooden tools like rakes or brooms lying around.

  “But what do they burn?” she asked, looking at the small stone hearth built right on the floor of the hut. There was a hole in the roof above to let smoke out.

  “Charcoaled wood, cut in little pieces. They make it out in the forest in charcoal pits, and it’s strictly regulated. Everybody only gets so much. If they find a slave with extra wood, they execute ’em.”

  “Because wood kills vampires,” Maggie said.

  Jeanne nodded. “And silver kills shapeshifters. Slaves are forbidden to have silver, too—not that any of them are likely to get hold of any.”

  P.J. was looking out the small window of the hut. There was no glass in it, and last night it had been stuffed with sacking against the cold air. “If slaves can’t eat meat, what are those?” she asked.

  Maggie leaned to look. Outside two big calves were tethered to iron pickets. There were also a dozen trussed-up chickens and a pig in a pen made of rope.

  “Those are for Night People,” Jeanne said. “The shapeshifters and witches eat regular food—and so do the vampires, when they want to. It looks like they’re going to have a feast—they don’t bring the animals here until they’re ready to slaughter.”

  P.J.’s face was troubled. “I feel sorry for them,” she said softly.

  “Yeah, well, there are worse things than being hit over the head,” Jeanne said. “See those cages just beyond the pig? That’s where the exotics are—the tigers and things they bring in to hunt. That’s a bad way to die.”

  Maggie felt ice down her spine. “Let’s hope we never have to find out—” she was beginning, when a flash of movement outside caught her eye.

  “Get down!” she said sharply, and ducked out of the line of sight of the window. Then, very carefully, with her body tense, she edged up to the open square again and peered out.

  “What is it?” Jeanne hissed. P.J. just cowered on the floor, breathing quickly.

  Maggie whispered, “Sylvia.”

  Two figures had appeared, walking through the back courtyard and talking as they went. Sylvia and Gavin. Sylvia’s gown today was misty leaf green, and her hair rippled in shimmering waves over her shoulders. She looked beautiful and graceful and fragile.

  “Are they coming here?” Jeanne breathed.

  Maggie shook a hand—held low to the ground—toward her to be quiet. She was afraid of the same thing. If the Night People began a systematic search of the huts, they were lost.

  But instead, Sylvia turned toward the cages that held the exotics. She seemed to be looking at the animals, occasionally turning to make a remark to Gavin.

  “Now, what’s she up to?” a voice murmured by Maggie’s ear. Jeanne had crept up beside her.

  “I don’t know. Nothing good,” Maggie whispered.

  “They must be planning a hunt,” Jeanne said grimly. “That’s bad. I heard they were going to do a big one when Delos came to an agreement with Hunter Redfern.”

  Maggie drew in her breath. Had things gone that far already? It meant she didn’t have much time left.

  Outside, she could see Sylvia shaking her head, then moving on to the pens and tethers holding the domestic animals.

  “Get back,” Maggie whispered, ducking down. But Sylvia never looked at the hut. She made some remark while looking at the calves and smiling. Then she and Gavin turned and strolled back through the kitchen garden.

  Maggie watched until they were out of sight, chewing her lip. Then she looked at Jeanne. />
  “I think we’d better go see Laundress.”

  The hut Jeanne led her to was a little bigger than the others and had what Maggie knew by now was an amazing luxury: two rooms. Cady was in the tiny room—hardly bigger than an alcove—in back.

  And she was looking better. Maggie saw it immediately. The clammy, feverish look was gone and so were the blue-black shadows under her eyes. Her breathing was deep and regular and her lashes lay heavy and still on her smooth cheeks.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Maggie asked Laundress eagerly.

  The gaunt woman was sponging Cady’s cheeks with a cloth. Maggie was surprised at how tender the big red-knuckled hands could be.

  “She’ll live as long as any of us,” Laundress said grimly, and Jeanne gave a wry snort. Even Maggie felt her lip twitch. She was beginning to like this woman. In fact, if Jeanne and Laundress were examples, the slaves here had a courage and a black humor that she couldn’t help but admire.

  “I had a daughter,” Laundress said. “She was about this one’s age, but she had that one’s coloring.” She nodded slightly at P.J., who clutched at the baseball cap stashed inside her tunic and smiled.

  Maggie hesitated, then asked. “What happened to her?”

  “One of the nobles saw her and liked her,” Laundress said. She wrung out the cloth and put it down, then stood briskly. When she saw Maggie still looking at her, she added, as if she were talking about the weather, “He was a shapeshifter, a wolf named Autolykos. He bit her and passed his curse on to her, but then he got tired of her. One night he made her run and hunted her down.”

  Maggie’s knees felt weak. She couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be colossally stupid, so she didn’t say anything.

  P.J. did. “I’m sorry,” she said in a husky little voice, and she put her small hand in Laundress’s rough one.

  Laundress touched the top of the shaggy blond head as if she were touching an angel.

  “Um, can I talk to her? Cady?” Maggie asked, blinking fast and clearing her throat.

  Laundress looked at her sharply. “No. You won’t be able to wake her up. I had to give her strong medicine to fight off what they’d given her. You know how the potion works.”

  Maggie shook her head. “What potion?”

  “They gave her calamus and bloodwort—and other things. It was a truth potion.”

  “You mean they wanted to get information out of her?”

  Laundress only dignified that with a bare nod for an answer.

  “But I wonder why?” Maggie looked at Jeanne, who shrugged.

  “She’s a witch from Outside. Maybe they thought she knew something.”

  Maggie considered another minute, then gave it up. She would just have to ask Cady when Cady was awake.

  “There was another reason I wanted to see you,” she said to Laundress, who was now briskly cleaning up the room. “Actually, a couple of reasons. I wanted to ask you about this.”

  She reached inside her slave tunic and pulled out the photo of Miles that she’d taken from her jacket last night.

  “Have you seen him?”

  Laundress took the picture between a callused thumb and forefinger and looked at it warily. “Wonderfully small painting,” she said.

  “It’s called a photograph. It’s not exactly painted.” Maggie was watching the woman’s face, afraid to hope.

  There was no sign of recognition. “He’s related to you,” Laundress said, holding the photo to Maggie.

  “He’s my brother. From Outside, you know? And his girlfriend was Sylvia Weald. He disappeared last week.”

  “Witch Sylvia!” a cracked, shaky voice said.

  Maggie looked up fast. There was an old woman in the doorway, a tiny, wizened creature with thin white hair and a face exactly like one of the dried-apple dolls Maggie had seen at fairs.

  “This is Old Mender,” Jeanne said. “She sews up torn clothes, you know? And she’s the other healing woman.”

  “So this is the Deliverer,” the cracked voice said, and the woman shuffled closer, peering at Maggie. “She looks like an ordinary girl, until you see the eyes.”

  Maggie blinked. “Oh—thanks,” she said. Secretly she thought that Old Mender herself looked more like a witch than anyone she’d ever seen in her life. But there was bright intelligence in the old woman’s birdlike gaze and her little smile was sweet.

  “Witch Sylvia came to the castle a week ago,” she told Maggie, her head on one side. “She didn’t have any boy with her, but she was talking about a boy. My grand-nephew Currier heard her. She was telling Prince Delos how she’d chosen a human for a plaything, and she’d tried to bring him to the castle for Samhain. But the boy did something—turned on her somehow. And so she had to punish him, and that had delayed her.”

  Maggie’s heart was beating in her ears. “Punish him,” she began, and then she said, “What’s Samhain?”

  “Halloween,” Jeanne said. “The witches here normally have a big celebration at midnight.”

  Halloween. All right. Maggie’s mind was whirring desperately, ticking over this new information. So now she knew for certain that Sylvia had gone hiking on Halloween with Miles, just as she’d told the sheriffs and rangers. Or maybe they’d been driving, if Jeanne’s story about a mysterious pass that only Night People could see was true. But anyway they’d been coming here, to the Dark Kingdom. And something had delayed them. Miles had done something that made Sylvia terribly angry and changed her mind about taking him to the castle.

  And made her…punish him. In some way that Maggie wasn’t supposed to be able to guess.

  Maybe she just killed him after all, Maggie thought, with an awful sinking in her stomach. She could have shoved him off a cliff easily. Whatever she did, he never made it here—right?

  “So there isn’t any human boy in the dungeon or anything?” she asked, looking at Laundress and then Mender. But she knew the answer before they shook their heads.

  Nobody recognizes him. He can’t be here.

  Maggie felt her shoulders slump. But although she was discouraged and heartsick, she wasn’t defeated. What she felt instead was a hard little burning like a coal in her chest. She wanted more than ever to grab Sylvia and shake the truth out of her.

  At the very least, if nothing else, I’m going to find out how he died. Because that’s important.

  Funny how it didn’t seem impossible anymore that Miles was dead. Maggie had learned a lot since coming to this valley. People got hurt and died and had other awful things happen to them, and that was that. The ones left alive had to find some way of going on.

  But not of forgetting.

  “You said you had two reasons for coming to see me,” Laundress prompted. She was standing with her big hands on her hips, her gaunt body erect and looking just slightly impatient. “Have you come up with a plan, Deliverer?”

  “Well—sort of. Not exactly a plan so much as—well, I guess it’s a plan.” Maggie floundered, trying to explain herself. The truth was that she’d come up with the most basic plan of all.

  To go see Delos.

  That was it. The simplest, most direct solution. She was going to get him alone and talk to him. Use the weird connection between them if she had to. Pound some sort of understanding into his thick head.

  And put her life on the line to back up her words.

  Jeanne thought the slaves were going to be killed when Hunter Redfern and Delos made their deal. Maggie was a slave now. If the other slaves were killed, Maggie would be with them.

  And you’re betting that he’ll care, a nasty little voice in her brain whispered. But you don’t really know that. He keeps threatening to kill you himself. He specifically warned you not to come to the castle.

  Well, anyway, we’re going to find out, Maggie told the little voice. And if I can’t convince him, I’ll have to do something more violent.

  “I need to get into the castle,” she said to Laundress. “Not just into the kitchen, you know, b
ut the other rooms—wherever I might be able to find Prince Delos alone.”

  “Alone? You won’t find him alone anywhere but his bedchamber.”

  “Well, then, I have to go there.”

  Laundress was watching her narrowly. “Is it assassination you’ve got in mind? Because I know someone who has a piece of wood.”

  “It…” Maggie stopped and took a breath. “I really hope it isn’t going to come to that. But maybe I’d better take the wood, just in case.”

  And you’d better hope for a miracle, the nasty voice in her mind said. Because how else are you going to overpower him?

  Jeanne was rubbing her forehead. When she spoke, Maggie knew she’d been thinking along the same lines. “Look, dummy, are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, he’s—”

  “A Night Person,” Maggie supplied.

  “And you’re—”

  “Just an ordinary human.”

  “She’s the Deliverer,” P.J. said stoutly, and Maggie paused to smile at her.

  Then she turned back to Jeanne. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but it’s my only idea. And I know it’s dangerous, but I have to do it.” She looked awkwardly at Laundress and Old Mender. “The truth is that it’s not just about you people here. If what Jeanne told you about Hunter Redfern is right, then the whole human world is in trouble.”

  “Oh, the prophecies,” Old Mender said, and cackled.

  “You know them, too?”

  “We slaves hear everything.” Old Mender smiled and nodded. “Especially when it concerns our own prince. I remember when he was little—I was the Queen’s seamstress then, before she died. His mother knew the prophecies, and she said,

  ‘In blue fire, the final darkness is banished.

  In blood, the final price is paid.’”

  Blood, Maggie thought. She knew that blood had to run before Delos could use the blue fire, but this sounded as if it were talking about something darker. Whose blood? she wondered.

  “And the final darkness is the end of the world, right?” she said. “So you can see how important it is for me to change Delos’s mind. Not just for the slaves, but for all humans.” She looked at Jeanne as she spoke. Laundress and Old Mender didn’t know anything about the world Outside, but Jeanne did.