“C—Carole, do—do y-y—y—y—you k-know any ggg-ggggghost songs?” Bronwyn asked, and yelped as a hank of her hair was pulled hard.
“Shh,” Carole said. She’d grown quiet once she realized what was going on, and had become too frightened to speak, but while she was being quiet her excellent mer ears picked up the whispers swirling around, accompanying the unseen bodies.
Bronwyn hushed, all but the sound of her hair bristling, her teeth chattering, and the goosebumps swelling on her skin like the boils she’d described to the mermaids. She heard only those sounds, and the hammering of her heart. Then she too heard a sort of windy sighing.
Distinctly unpleasant wheezing laughter filled the room and something smacked each of them on their backs so hard they fell forward. Much to her shame, Bronwyn felt tears spring to her eyes. The humiliation of it made her angry.
“Very well, gentle spook!” she cried, and drew her sword from under the mattress, where she’d kept it handy during the night, “I’ve felt your tender caresses. Here are mine!” And whacked, and kept on whacking. The sword whistled above Carole’s head, and that was how Carole found her own whistle again.
* * *
“‘Never fear, Princess,’“ Anastasia mocked, “‘I am a big strong gypsy man. I will protect you.’ What nonsense!” She flew at Jack, fanning her wing derisively in his face. “What conceit! While you sneak around trying to steal things, you desert your companions. For SHAME, young man! For shame.”
“But Your Swanliness, I thought you needed protection more than they! That is why I came here first.”
“You thought! Your thought was to get what goods you could and leave. Do not forget, my boy, I have had dealings with your sort before.”
“Have you now, my beauty?” The old woman asked, cackling slightly. “And what are they like, all the same? Isn’t that a pretty thought?” Her bright eyes leapt from one to the other. “That’s what the Dungies said about my folk—that we were all alike. Oh, but we’re not. We’re not.”
The hag seemed to slip from sanity to senility and back again but her eyes gloated like those of Jack’s aunts when they conned ignorant peasants out of their silver by pretending to be even more ignorant peasants.
Anastasia looked somewhat abashed and finished lamely, “Nevertheless, you should not have left those poor ladies alone.”
“One of those poor ladies,” he pointed out, “is armed to the teeth and the other two, as you very well know, are witches, which is more than can be said of you or me.”
“Are they?” the little woman asked. “Witches, you say? Real witches?” She rubbed her hands together happily and the dog butted them with his nose for attention.
“Carole is a witch of a certainty. Mistress Raspberry is a witch I only suppose, but she is an ogress in fact.” He grinned and pointed to his own teeth.
“Tsk tsk. Such lovely illegal young ladies to get put in the inn. If my lord were here, ’twould never have happened so, but he ain’t and I fear their powers won’t help much with hidebehinds.”
“Are they in more danger in the inn than we are here?” Anastasia asked.
“Oh, aye. No iron on the inn. Old building, only original one left from before the wars. No, they won’t last long in there.”
“But this is simply dreadful!” Anastasia exclaimed, glaring at the old woman as if it were all her fault, glaring so fiercely, in fact, that the dog growled at her. “Do you mean to tell me that those young people are trapped in that building with all of those abominable creatures and we can do nothing to assist them?”
“Not by sitting weeping you can’t, no indeed,” the woman said.
“And by sitting here and not weeping?” Jack asked angrily, furious at the hag for mocking him. “Do you suggest, old one, that I would not do all in my power to aid the Princess?”
“Would you now?”
“Of a certainty.”
“Very well, then, come along,” she said, leading them to the stable door. “But I’d pick up that shovel there if I was you. There’s iron at the tip. And you might drape yon bridle across the swan. There’s iron in the rings and the bit. Won’t protect you full, but ’tis better than naught.”
The inn was barely ten cart-lengths from the stable, but the journey to it was one of the longest runs Jack had ever taken in his life, and his had not been without a few frantic sprints. Far worse than angry farmers, indignant villagers, bloodthirsty mobs or infuriated wizards were the mewling things milling through the darkened streets or buzzing perilously close above his head. He ran with his blood beating through his limbs, as if he were escaping and yet realizing that at the end of his run he would still be far from safe inside the invaded inn. It looked naked and vulnerable, now that he knew the significance of its lack of iron banding. Beyond the building, seaward, a thousand glowing orbs glared at him from behind the sea net and the monsters waved their tentacles in the moonlight and their sad gills heaved and their misshapen bodies surged against the sea net.
Anastasia reached the inn first, but had to fend off monsters with her wings while she waited for the others to pull the door open for her. The old woman brought up the rear, mumbling and cursing under her breath and swatting at monsters with her braceleted arm.
Inside, the inn was convulsed with the noise of pounding blows and the very walls seemed to keen. Too late! Jack thought, running for the door to Bronwyn’s room, though he did pause, thinking that if he was indeed too late, surely his friends would not wish him to open the door and loose the creatures of their destruction upon himself.
But even as he paused the door boomed outward, thudding, splintering, and finally bursting asunder. He fell backwards before… Bronwyn.
“Bloody thing was wide open,” she called back inside, and flipped up the bar as if it were a mere latch hook. She tore it loose as an afterthought, and handed it to Carole, who stepped through the door behind her. Inside, the room looked empty, but seemed to Jack to sway rhythmically.
“But my Princess, you are safe!” he cried, launching himself at her, aiming poorly, and ending up clutching her knees.
“Rather!” she said. “I see they got you, did they?”
“I—er—escaped them with fast footwork and the use of my agile wit,” he said modestly.
Carole, still humming with a small mirthless smile on her face, took in Jack, the swan, the old woman and her dog with one glance and stepped behind Bronwyn to the adjoining room. Mistress Raspberry had had no protection, and Carole could only hope that her own magic songs had somehow attracted or distracted the lady’s would-be assailants. She lifted the bar and tugged, and Bronwyn and Jack stopped talking to peer over her shoulder.
Mistress Raspberry knelt in the middle of her bed, which she had pushed back from the rolled-up rug. Under the rug, a trap door was laid back against the floor to reveal a yawning square of blackness.
Unlike the room Carole and Bronwyn had shared, Mistress Raspberry’s chamber did not pulse with dancing waves. Instead, the darkness in the hole quivered slightly, and the lady strained forward, her pointed ear tips twitching, her tongue licking across her pointed teeth.
Bronwyn shook her head. “Poor thing, cowering in fear of her life.”
Mistress Raspberry looked up at them, the slight glaze leaving her eyes as she smiled a sliver of a smile and flopped the trap door back down over the hole.
“Insubstantial,” she said, smacking her lips, “I appreciated the song, my dear. It allowed me to isolate one. Next time I shall be able to obtain its essence.”
The dog yapped and bounced like a mop gone mad and Jack absently picked it up and stroked it quiet again. The old lady looked past him to the wavering energy in the room Bronwyn and Carole had vacated. “Out! Out! Back to the stable or they’ll have us yet.”
“But will they want us?” Jack asked cockily.
Mistress Raspberry grabbed her cloak and valise and pushed past him toward the door. “When in a strange place, my dear boy,” she said, “Neve
r argue with native customs.”
* * *
They curled up in the cleanest corner of the stable and waited for dawn.
Jack grumbled, “We could probably have slept in the beds. We beat the creatures, after all, and even a wolf pack will retreat when beaten.”
The old woman tittered. “Aye, but that’s no wolf pack, that’s not. The night things return and return and wear you down with returning till they swallow you up—or worse. Ask Murdo, if you don’t believe old Teeny.”
“What I’d like to ask old Teeny is what’s so funny,” Carole said. “Those horrible things nearly got us and you act like they’re court jesters.”
Jack, more used to the old woman’s rather black sense of humor by now, didn’t take it so personally. “What I would like to know is what those monsters are, and where they came from.”
“That’s just the sort of animals they have around here, Jack,” Bronwyn said. “Instead of bunnies or house cats or something. Didn’t you notice how well-matched the dear things were in temperament to the people? Am I right, Dame Teeny, or am I right?”
“Right, dearie, and wrong as well. For it’s true enough that there ain’t many of the other kind of beast left, except for the few horses that were protected and a dog or two who escaped.” She held the dog against her cheek for a moment and stroked his fur with her knotted fingers, and when she looked up again, her eyes blinked in the feeble candlelight. “They—them things out there—ate up most of the natural animals, along with a great many people—ours, for we weren’t banded then, and the Dungies.” Her titter made a momentary feeble comeback. “There were no monsters at all before the invasions, save the natural beasts: bears, dragons, deer, serpents, seals, otters, whales, unicorns and the like. Gone now, all gone. Stung to death by the fliers gone mad when their masters died on the Day of Disenchantment, changed to them wretched things that has to crawl out of the sea to feed since when Loefwin threw all potions into the river.”
“Did Loefwin make the monsters then?” Carole asked impatiently. “Why would he do that if the monsters killed all the animals and some of his own people?”
“Charming family your sister married into, eh?” Bronwyn remarked out of the side of her mouth to Mistress Raspberry.
“Anyway,” Carole continued, “how could Loefwin make monsters? That would take magic and he doesn’t allow that.”
The old lady snorted. “He don’t allow magic on account of he can’t do it himself. But my folk could, once. Greatest magicians in all the seven lands was Suleskerians. Selkie blood among us, from the seal-people, you know, and elvin on the other side. Not like the Dungies—they be half man, half goblin, with a touch of ogre.” To Mistress Raspberry she said, “No offense, dearie, but that’s why it is we’re so much comelier.” She fluffed her snarled tufts of gray hair.
“Then it was your own people who made the monsters?” Carole asked. “I wouldn’t be so proud of that, if I were you. Comely is as comely does.”
Teeny glared at her. “It was the war done it. I told you.”
“Oh, yes,” Bronwyn said. “The war. She did say so, Carole, and I think that explains it.”
Carole shushed her impatiently, but Bronwyn continued placatingly to the old woman. “My cousin is a very kind and peaceful person, Dame Teeny. She doesn’t understand about war like us veterans.”
“I just don’t understand why anyone would make such horrid things that would turn back on themselves, for war or any other purpose,” Carole said slowly and distinctly, from between gritted teeth.
“They wasn’t so bad to begin with,” Teeny replied. “The fliers started out as weapons. They was made up in Bintnar, what’s West Frostingdung now. While the wizards that made them was alive, they obeyed and hurt naught but what they were aimed at. They went wild, you might say, when all their masters was killed on the Day of Disenchantment. And I suppose you could actually say Loefwin was responsible for making them things as crawls out of the sea. When the selkies sought to aid my folk during the invasion, Loefwin seeded the waves with that which he used to destroy the Six Kings and the Great Mages on the Day. And when his men raided the studies and the laboratories of our great ones, he had them throw the potions and sacred books into the rivers and the sea. And all of the sea beasts and the selkies that didn’t escape got changed into them things that come ashore of a night to feed on us. What they used to eat died, I suppose, from the magic in the water. That’s why we don’t eat fish here no more.”
“And those—those ghosts,” Bronwyn’s spine crawled again at the memory. “They are the ghosts of your dead? Or are they perhaps enemy dead, made by your magic to haunt the premises in perpetuity?”
Teeny tittered again. “Not ghosts exactly, dearie. You might say more of a last will and testament. When the Dungies invaded us, we were already beat before we got started, you understand. Any mage strong enough to withstand them they’d killed by treachery on the Day of Disenchantment. The wizardry we had left was feeble indeed, but we thought if we hid some of the few half-decent magicians we had left in caves and cellars they could fight the Dungies from underground. Didn’t work. Dungies found ’em and guarded the holes with iron till they died of starvation. But when the moans stopped and the bones was took away, the Dungies stopped guarding. That’s when the hidebehinds come out.” She made crawling motions with her fingers along the fur of the dog’s back. “And got everybody. Leastways everybody not wearing iron already. That wasn’t so many as you’d think. Dungies are mad for iron, and come well supplied with it to fight us.” She looked ruefully down at the band glowing in the feeble light against the wrinkled skin of her arm.
“But if it was your people who made the hidebehinds, why do they hurt everyone? Why don’t they just take vengeance on your enemies?” Carole asked.
Teeny shrugged. “Once a spear’s been thrown, does it turn away if a friend gets in front of it instead of a foe? Their makers are dead and they’re invisible and outlawed to boot. What do they know of loyalty?” She chuckled again. “But the way things stand for my folk, these bracelets they use to control us also protect us, not that life’s a great joy any more. The Dungies have more to lose.”
“Stupid of Loefwin not to polish off his enemies cleanly or make peace with them,” Mistress Raspberry said, rising to her feet and stretching. “Seems to me that the way he did it, your people are a great deal more trouble to him dead than they were alive.”
“Aye.” The old lady grinned, and chuckled again. “He must feel it so, too. He’s tried to pretend it never happened, since he’s come back from Argonia with Herself. He’s cleaned up the streets, cleaned up the houses, cleaned up the history. But he has not cleaned up the hidebehinds yet, nor the other horrors, for all of trying to pretend he’s all of a sudden not a goblin. And he still refuses to permit the most innocent magic, or any talk of it. But he don’t know everything.”
“You mean you still practice?” Carole asked.
“Oh, not I. Not I. Not with this bauble on me. But Dragon and me, we talk. And we notice things the Emperor doesn’t see. There’s magic at work in Frostingdung makes our old kind look tame.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Mistress Raspberry said. “But what we need now is a mundane means of leaving this dreary place.”
“You must leave with us, Dame Teeny,” Bronwyn said. “I will pull the bond from your arm and slay any who would seek to enslave you again.”
“Are you daft?” Teeny said, beating Bronwyn’s companions to it. “I told you, this bauble of mine protects me.” Bronwyn looked properly rebuffed and the old woman put a soothing hand on her arm. “Not that you don’t mean well, lass, but I’m too old to go traveling, and there’s Dragon to think of. My master’s not so bad, as masters go. He’s young, is Gilles. I’ve known him from babyhood, when he was born to my lady after she give up her honor to keep company with the Dungie general who took our castle.” She chuckled. “Babe looked like a Dungie when he was born, and my lady was alive with he
r magic unrestrained by iron. Nowadays, though, them as remember, and some of the Dungies do, might mistake him for our late lord. Not a popular lord, my Gilles. But the best master in Suleskeria and,” she grinned a gap-toothed grin, “quite mad. The others can’t stand him. So I’ll bide here, thank you, I’ll just bide here.”
“Well, I rather think we shouldn’t,” Mistress Raspberry said. By now the candle flame was little more than a glimmer in a puddle of wax, but light strong enough to see each other in a gray sort of way was filtering into the stable. “Can you direct us to the capital?”
“Anyone could,” Teeny said, sounding surprised. “Go straight upriver for two days and veer right where the channel splits. You can’t miss it.”
Chapter 7
“When you stop for the night,” Teeny told them, “you’ll come upon two dwellings. The first is large and comfortable-looking. Pass it by. The second is small and humble, of iron-banded logs. Stay there.”
“Are the people who run the first one evil and likely to slay us?” Carole asked.
“No, but they overcharge and the food is bad. The second is a wayside for—I suppose you could still call them fishermen. It’s kept provisioned and people are known to leave it alive in the morning.”
* * *
Before they dealt with the problem of where to stay, they had to get there, and for a time it looked as if that would prove impossible. They had little trouble vacating the stable before the villagers arose after the growing light dispersed the monsters. The chariot was where they’d left it, intact and apparently unmolested, and they towed it to the river. They pushed it half into the water, but when they were ready to hitch Anastasia to it, the swan flatly refused. “There are far too many of you and besides, I saw what crawled out of the sea last night. Do you think I would sink so low as to swim among them? I prefer to fly.”
“What if we row? Would that help?” Carole asked.
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