And I couldn’t run anymore. The last time I went down, it wasn’t a question of getting me back on my feet, and Tamsin didn’t ask me again. All she said was “Here,” to Edric; and to give him credit, he didn’t ever suggest that they drop me and head for the border. At least I didn’t hear him say anything like that, because things were starting to slide away from me now, leaving me peaceful and sleepy, with my ankle hardly hurting at all. I did hear Tamsin say, “Twas this place, this, exactly this. I am sure to my soul of it, Edric.”
And Edric, with a sudden laugh that sounded very young, considering he can’t have done that for three hundred years: “Well, dear one, you are my soul, so there’s naught for me to do but bide with you.” Miss Sophia Brown sat calmly down beside me, looked in my face and said “Prrp?” just like Mister Cat, only small and faraway. Edric was saying, “—there’s no knowing or compounding her, nor there never was. She might as easily—”
Thunder and the wail of the Wild Hunt drowned the rest of it, just as Judge Jeffreys’s last gobbling squall of triumph seemed to drown Edric and Tamsin’s lights together. Far away as I was, numb as I was, I could feel them going out this time, as though a phone line between us had been cut. It hurt terribly—it hurt a lot more than my ankle—and I think I called for them. I know I tried to get up—or anyway I wanted to, but that line was down, too, and the Wild Hunt was on us. On me, their beasts rearing right over me on their spider legs, monkey legs, goats’ hooves, hawks’ claws… and the weird thing was that I didn’t care one damn bit. Tamsin was gone, Tamsin and her Edric, and I didn’t care what the hell happened to me now.
That was when I heard Mrs. Fallowfield.
Heard, not saw, because I was lying the wrong way, and I couldn’t even raise my head, but I knew it was her. She was speaking in a slow, buzzing language that sounded like Old Dorset, but I couldn’t separate any of the words from each other; and I hardly recognized her voice, the way it rang on the syllables like a hammer on a horseshoe. All around me the Huntsmen’s beasts dropped down to all fours—or all eights, or whatever—and the Huntsmen got really quiet, a different quiet from the way they’d first been with Tamsin. Then they’d been puzzled, uncertain, practically embarrassed—now they were scared. Even in the state I was in, I could tell the difference.
There was another sound under Mrs. Fallowfield’s voice, and it wasn’t any of the Huntsmen. Or Judge Jeffreys, either—he was watching silently from one of the dead trees, wedged in the branches, a snagged kite now. The growl was so low it seemed to be coming out of the ground, and it was so cold and evil that the thunder just stopped, and the lightning shrank away, and the whole storm sort of sidled off, scuffing its feet, pretending it hadn’t been doing anything. I got my elbows under me, and I dragged myself around to look at Mrs. Fallowfield.
She was something to see. No Russian hat; the long yellow-white hair she’d had bunched up under it was rippling down her back like something alive. No wool shirt, no Army boots—instead, a dark-green toga sort of thing, only with full sleeves, fitting close round her tough, skinny body. Her face was Mrs. Fallowfield’s, feature for feature, but the woman wearing it wasn’t Mrs. Fallowfield—not the one I knew. This face was the pale-golden color of the half-moon, and it was just as old: It looked as though it had been pounded and battered for billions of years by meteors, asteroids, I don’t know what; the eyes weren’t blue anymore, but black as Mister Cat, black to the bone. And even so, she was dreadfully beautiful, and she was taller than Mrs. Fallowfield, and she walked out of that thicket and toward the Wild Hunt the way queens are supposed to walk.
At her side was the thing that had growled. It was the size of the Black Dog, and it had staring red eyes like the Black Dog, but that was it for the resemblance. Nothing about it fit with a damn thing else about it: I saw long, pointed, leathery ears and a head like a huge bat, only with an alligator muzzle stuck onto it. The body was more like a big cat’s body than a dog’s, with the rear quarters higher than the front; but it had a sheep’s woolly coat, coming away in dirty patches as though the thing were molting—and the skin underneath was pink! And I guess the moral of that story is, be nice to people’s disgusting, yippy little dogs. You never know.
Mrs. Fallowfield—or whoever—didn’t look at me. She pointed a long arm at the Wild Hunt, at each Huntsman in turn, moving on to the next only when that one lowered his eyes, until finally she was pointing straight at Judge Jeffreys. He looked right back at her—he didn’t flinch for a minute. He had the courage of his awfulness, Judge Jeffreys had.
Mrs. Fallowfield said, “You. I know you.” The Dorset sound was still there, but her whole voice was different—deep enough to be a man’s voice, and with that metallic clang to it that I could feel all along my backbone. She said, “I remember.”
Judge Jeffreys didn’t give an inch. He answered her, gentle, almost apologetic, “I will have what is mine.”
“The woman,” Mrs. Fallowfield said. No expression—just those two flat words. Judge Jeffreys nodded. “The woman,” Mrs. Fallowfield repeated, and this time there was something in the voice which would have made me a little nervous. She held her other arm away from her side, and Tamsin was standing beside her, and the first thing she did was to smile at me. And I couldn’t breathe, no more than I could when we were running from the Wild Hunt.
“And the man,” that voice said. Mrs. Fallowfield did something with her arm almost like something I’ve seen Tony do, dancing— and there was Edric Davies standing with Tamsin. As though she had somehow taken them into herself, and given them birth again—not that she could do that, I mean they were still ghosts… never mind. Maybe Meena can help me with that sentence, if I ever figure out what I was trying to say. All that mattered to me then was that Tamsin was smiling at me.
“The man belongs to them,” Judge Jeffreys said, gesturing around at the Wild Hunt in his turn. “The woman to me.” He might have been sharing out the dishes at a Chinese restaurant.
Mrs. Fallowfield’s dog-bat-alligator-sheep thing growled at him, but stopped when she touched its horrid head. She looked at Judge Jeffreys for a long time, not saying anything. The night was clearing—I could see a few stars near the half-moon—but I was drenched and hurting, starting to shiver, starting to be aware of it. Tamsin saw. She started to come to me, but Mrs. Fallowfield shook her head. Edric moved closer to her, and there I was—cold and jealous. I’d have hugged that creature of Mrs. Fallowfield’s just then, if I could have, for comfort as well as warmth. Hell, I’d have hugged a Huntsman.
Mrs. Fallowfield said to Judge Jeffreys, “I remember you. Blood and fire—soldiers in my woods. I remember.”
“Ah, the great work,” he answered, as proud as though he were pointing out those tarred chunks of bodies stuck up on trees, fences, steeples, housetops. “They’ll not soon forget the schooling I gave them, the rabble of Dorset. I felt God’s hand on my shoulder every day in that courtroom, and I knew they all deserved hanging, every last stinking, treacherous Jack Presbyter of them. And I’d have done it—aye, gladly, with my whole heart, I’d have rid King James of all of them but the one. All but her.”