Tamsin never left my side. She could have flown on to be with Edric, even if it meant running from the Hunt with him forever, as she must have known it would. But she stayed close to me, leading me through the storm, that glimmer of hers almost bright enough to see by. Every time I stumbled, she reached out to catch me, and couldn’t, but the terror in her eyes always got me back on my feet right away, yelling at her to go on, the way Edric was calling, “Tamsin, beloved, hurry!” He’d have abandoned me in a hot second, if he’d had the choice—I know that, and I can’t blame him. He’d had the Wild Hunt after him for a lot longer time than I had—or Tamsin either—he knew what we were dealing with, and all he cared about was getting Tamsin the hell away from them. But she wouldn’t leave me.
I don’t honestly know what kind of danger I was in. They’d been ordered to get Edric back on the rails, and to bring Tamsin to Judge Jeffreys, but I’m not sure even the Huntsmen knew what he had in mind for me. But Tamsin did—I’m sure of that—and she kept driving me on when I could have lain down right there and gone straight to sleep in the rain and mud. Absolutely crazy, when you think about it: scrambling and stumbling through what people here call a real toadstrangler of a storm, with a ghost who couldn’t even touch me trying to protect me from another ghost—who maybe could—and also save her ghost-boyfriend from the pack of immortal hellhounds hunting us all. But I think if not for her I could have wound up where Edric had been, and with no Tamsin to come and find me. I think so. I don’t know.
I remember the maddest things about that flight; in fact, the mad stuff is about all I do remember. I’d swear I remember Tamsin singing to me, for one thing—just snatches of her sister Maria’s nursery song——.
I know Tamsin had us running through a deep place called Digby’s Coombe—that’s where I lost my shoes—and I remember Miss Sophia Brown running with us, bounding along like the Pooka, and keeping up, too. The rain was flashing through her as she ran, turning her blue-gray coat to silver.
And I couldn’t tell you for certain how we reached the Alpine Meadow without crossing the wheatfield, because you can’t, but we did. The name’s just a joke of Evan’s: It isn’t alpine, and it isn’t a real meadow at all—maybe it was long ago, but now it’s useless to anyone short of Wilf’s billygoat. It’s just a huge stretch of brush and sinkholes and twisted, nameless shrubs, with a few dead cherry trees left from some Willoughby’s vision of an orchard. It’s a blasted heath, like in Macbeth, and nobody goes up there much. Evan says you could still do something with the land, but Evan always says that.
I’ve never gone back to the Alpine Meadow since that night. I do dream about it once in a while: me scrabbling along out there in the storm, with the rain bouncing off me like hail and the Wild Hunt on my track—sometimes they’re right on top of me, sometimes not—and it’s so dark that all I can see is those two lights fluttering just ahead. Tamsin and Edric, twinkling away like Tinker Bell, for God’s sake. My legs are unbelievably painful, and I can’t get my breath at all—it’s like my lungs are full of broken glass— but Tamsin won’t let me give up, so Edric won’t either, even though there’s no point, no hope, no damn reason. I’d rather breathe, I’d rather breathe than anything in the world, and those damn ghosts won’t let me. In the dream I’m always angrier at them than I am at the Wild Hunt and Judge Jeffreys.
The Huntsmen’s horses were still having trouble with the mud and gaining only slowly, if they were gaining at all. But Judge Jeffreys was on us all the way, swooping and howling, popping out of the dark so close to my face that I’d jump back and fall, and then slashing in at Tamsin or Edric when they came to me. And he was hurting them, though I couldn’t see how. I don’t know what ghosts can actually do to other ghosts, but when the light that pulsed around him even came near them, their own light would go dim for a few seconds, or whip around and flicker as though the storm wind was almost blowing them out. I was really scared to see that, really frightened that they would go out and leave me alone; but they always came back, bright as before. It just seemed to take a little longer each time.
The next-to-last time I fell, I tripped over one rock and turned my ankle, and my chin hit another one, or something that hard, and I didn’t know where I was, or who, until I heard Tamsin saying my name. “Jenny, you must get up, Jenny, please,” over and over, like Sally trying to rouse me for the school bus.
“Can’t,” I mumbled. “You go. Catch me anyway.”
The Horsemen were coming on, still not making a sound themselves, but I could feel their beasts’ hoofbeats, lying there. Beside me, Tamsin said, “No. No, they will not catch us, Jenny—not if you can only make one more effort. Only one more, Jenny.” I didn’t move. Tamsin said, “Jenny, please—I promise thee. One more.”
It was the “thee” that did it, of course. She’d never called me that before. I got up with my ankle hurting and my head swimming worse than the one time Marta and Jake and I got stupid drunk on Jake’s mother’s Courvoisier. Tamsin was on one side of me, saying, “Oh, brave, my Jenny—only a little now,” and Edric on the other. He still wasn’t a bit happy about my entire existence, but he was practically polite when he growled into my ear, “Girl, for her sake.” And I put my weight on that bad ankle, and I started on.
The one thing the storm hadn’t had much of up to now was lightning and thunder. That all hit about the time the ground leveled off and the Wild Hunt really began gaining on us. Tamsin told me not to turn, but I twisted my head around once, and saw them in the flash, as though someone in heaven was taking pictures. The lightning made them look motionless, frozen in the moment, like the dead cherry trees, or the shrubby thicket coming up just ahead. Not Judge Jeffreys, though. He was divebombing us worse than ever, and he was screeching continually now. I couldn’t make out all the words, but most of it was Jesus and God and the King, and Welsh traitors a stink in the nostrils of the Almighty. And Tamsin belonging to him through eternity—that one I got, I heard him right through the thunder. And all the while he kept smothering Tamsin and Edric’s ghost-lights with his own, and every time they’d be slower coming back. Dimmer, too, now.
“Jenny, my Jenny—canst run only a little faster?” I didn’t even have the breath to answer Tamsin, but I think I maybe got an extra RPM or two out of my legs. I like to think so, but probably not.
But it wasn’t any good. The wind had switched around so it was blowing straight in my face, and between that and my ankle buckling with each step, we weren’t even going to make that thicket before the Wild Hunt caught up with us—as though we could have hidden there for one minute. The Huntsmen had started baying at us again the moment the wind changed, which makes me think maybe they actually hunted by smell, not that it matters. They sounded different than they did in the sky: not as loud, not whooping maniacally, but precise now, united, calling to each other. Like the West Dorset Hounds blowing their dumb horns when the poor fox is in full sight and they’re closing in.