Her eyes were burning. I never knew what that meant before. She was growing more and more clear and solid—I couldn’t see through her anymore. She said, “I spoke evil words against Edric. I cursed him for deserting me, and I vowed that he should wait as I had waited, wait on forever and forever for someone who never came. Jenny, do you understand me now?”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, no wonder you forgot.” My teeth were actually chattering, dumb as that sounds.
Tamsin said, “The last breath of a passing soul has such power— the power of a transient angel, of a momentary demon… And I loosed it against him. It was I sent him to his eternal torment—I, not Judge Jeffreys. My doing, my doing—three hundred years.” She was rocking herself slowly, like a grieving old woman.
The big, warm drops of rain were starting to fall, one at a time, but Tamsin couldn’t feel them, and I didn’t care about them. Of all the damn, damn things, I wanted to see Evan. Evan would think of something. I said, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what we can do to save him.”
Tamsin smiled at me. I know I’ve written all over the place about the way I felt when she smiled, but this one didn’t turn my heart and my insides gooey: This was a smile like Marta’s, like Jake’s, on my last night on West Eighty-third Street. An old friend saying good-bye.
“Do, Mistress Jenny?” she said. “Why, there is nothing for you to do, having aided me so far beyond my deserving. What I do now is for me.”
And with that the storm broke, and the Wild Hunt came.
There wasn’t a lot of rain, not like when Julian and I were caught at Mrs. Fallowfield’s farmhouse. This was mostly wet wind, but it was the strongest wind I’ve ever been out in. It knocked me back down when I tried to stand, punching at me from every side; it slashed my hair across my face and into my eyes so it stung like mad, and it shook me the way I’ve seen Albert shake a poor little mole to bits before he tossed it up and swallowed it. I saw Tamsin’s face, bright as the moon, if there had been a moon. She touched her right-hand fingers to her remembered lips, blowing me a kiss—and then she was gone, swept away by the wind like a rag snatched off a clothesline.
I screamed after her—couldn’t hear myself, of course—and then did something a lot more useful, which was pushing myself to my feet. The Wild Hunt was tight overhead, shrieking and banging and yammering like the D train barreling uptown, but for once I hardly paid any mind to them. I had one glimpse of Tamsin, not being driven by the wind but riding it to meet the Huntsmen, flashing like a meteor, up and out, on an angle that would intercept them somewhere over the downland. Then I lost sight of her for good, and I sank back down in total despair, because there wasn’t any way for me to catch up, to be with her when she turned to deal with the Wild Hunt and fight them all for Edric Davies, if she had to. I’d always figured I would be there at the end, without thinking much about it, but I wasn’t going to be, and I couldn’t even cry about it, because of the damn wind. I think that’s the lowest I’ve ever been—though I’m sure there’s worse waiting, as Mrs. Fallowfield would say.
The black pony materialized slowly out of the storm, as though it were drifting up from the bottom of the sea. It looked at me out of its yellow eyes and remarked, “I had thought better of you. Slightly better.”
That got me on my feet fast enough. I yelled, “Pooka!” and stumbled to him against the wind, but he backed away, shaking his shaggy head. I kept yelling, “You have to, you have to! I have to get to her!”
“Do you remember her words on the day we met?” The Pooka’s voice was as calm and low as though the Wild Hunt weren’t still raging over us, and his mane weren’t trying to whip itself loose by the roots. “She warned you never to trust me, never to mount my back, for I would surely hurl you into a bog or a briarpatch and abandon you there. I am still what I am, jenny Gluckstein.”
I put my hands on him. I said, “I know, but I can’t worry about it now. just try to dump me someplace near where she’s gone.” And I grabbed his mane and scrambled aboard, not giving myself time to reconsider anything. I was braced for matted, soaking horsehair, but the Pooka’s back was completely dry, even warm. I actually yelped in surprise, and the Pooka slanted one eye back at me in the usual wicked amusement. Then he took off.
I’m not a big horse person, and I never have been. I know young girls are all supposed to go through a stage of thinking about nothing but horses, but there wasn’t a lot of that on West Eighty-third Street. The boys both like horses better than I do, and Meena’s nuts about them—it’s the only time she’s ever boring, when she starts in on horses. Not me. I used to have a thing about snakes, though, when I was really young. I still like them.
But the Pooka isn’t a horse. The Pooka is the Pooka, and he didn’t run like a horse at all. He didn’t gallop, he bounded, like Mister Cat, like a lion or a cheetah, the way I’ve seen them on nature shows. He was in top gear around the second stride, driving off both hind legs together, with his back bowing under me, moving in great flowing leaps that melted together into a hunter’s glide that felt as though it could outrun the Wild Hunt itself. I flattened myself along his neck, because the storm and his speed together would have had me on the ground in a minute if I’d tried to sit up like a real rider. It was hard to breathe: All I could do was grab onto his mane, and bury my face in it, while we tore through orchards whose branches almost raked me off his back, fields that I could only pray he wouldn’t trample, pastures where sheep gaped sleepily up at us and the wind froze my fingers and pounded at my face. I knew where we were, more or less, but I was as groggy and stupid as those sheep. All I could do was hang on.
The Wild Hunt was downwind of us, their nerve-numbing howl making me want to throw myself off the Pooka’s back and crawl away into the dark and wet, where they’d never find me. But each time I opened my eyes, we’d drawn closer to that terrible rainbow, because the Pooka was traveling. The half-moon was a crayon scrawl on the horizon, and the trees on both sides of us had blurred into a sort of grayish tunnel, but I could see the Hunt clearly—and I could see Edric Davies now, running and running in the black sky. The Huntsmen were so close behind him that it seemed to me as though they were playing with him, that they could have caught him any time they wanted to, but maybe not.
What did he look like, Tamsin’s lost lover? What do you think you’d look like after three hundred years like his? Horrible, right. I’ll tell you what’s horrible. What’s really horrible is that I’d seen worse. I see worse than Edric Davies damn near every day, and so do you—on TV, in newspaper pictures, in photographs we get so totally used to that they don’t make us puke our guts out every time we look at them, the way we should. There’s only so much you can do to a person, to a human body, even if you’re the Wild Hunt or Judge Jeffreys. I grew up knowing that, and you probably did, too.
The Pooka said quietly, under the storm and the Huntsmen’s baying, “It ends here.” And I saw Tamsin directly up ahead of us, standing in a field of young corn. Her head was thrown back, her hair fallen loose—though she hadn’t wasted any time remembering how it would have blown around—and she was stretching her arms up toward the Wild Hunt, and Edric Davies. She was calling, crying out words, but I couldn’t hear them, because of the wind.
But the Wild Hunt heard. The riders out in front, so close on Edric Davies’s heels, swung away from him, banking straight down toward Tamsin. The others followed as they caught sight of her, filling the sky with their spears and their skulls and their screaming laughter, lunging forward over their mounts’ necks as if they couldn’t wait to get at that small white figure in the cornfield. But she never took one step backward—she kept on beckoning, challenging them down, away from Edric to her. I was too dazed and too scared to be proud of her then, my Tamsin. But I dream that moment sometimes, these years later, and in the dream I always tell her.