The billy-blind wasn’t smiling anymore. If you just looked at his face like anybody else’s, he could have been twenty-five, fifty, sixty. I’m terrible at guessing ages, anyway. But when you stared into those jewelled eyes—I couldn’t have told you what color they were, then or now—you had to realize that he was older than Tamsin, way older. He said, “I give advice, lass. I don’t explain. There’s different.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, couldn’t you just once make an exception? I mean, she’s your friend, and it’s very important.”
Snort. “My friend, oh aye—yet she’ll not heed the billy-blind’s counsel, never, not she! Sit still? Don’t I see her traipsing the night with you, showing herself to any who’d wish her ill? Don’t I, then?”
Snort. Stamp. Billy-blinds don’t just hand out advice, it matters like mad to them if you take it or not. I said, “Who is it who wishes her ill? If I knew that, maybe I could do something, get her to stay out of sight the way you want. What would it hurt you to tell?”
I was starting to snort a little myself, and the billy-blind was looking almost amused. “Always so, always so. The ones I fancy, they never know how to behave with the billy-blind. Not her, not you, always so.” When he scratched his head with both hands, I still think I maybe saw a pair of bumpy horns, the same color as his hair, but maybe not. “Well, I’ll say this much to you, for that’s a good girl, Tamsin Willoughby, manners or no. But you’ve roused her, that’s your doing, and that shifts things, that makes things to move, d’ye see? And I can’t signify what’s to come of it, indeed I can’t, but there’s looking now, there’s waking and hunting besides hers, beyond hers. Do you see, girl?”
His eyes had hold of me the way the Pooka’s yellow eyes had done, except that these eyes were almost pleading, almost human for that moment. I said, “That’s the Other One.” The billy-blind didn’t answer me. “But he’s gone,” I said. “She told me—Tamsin told me. He’s gone, and he can’t come back.”
The billy-blind said, “You’ll remember to drink eight full glasses of water a day. Grand for the system, that is.”
“I could have gotten that off a damn cereal box!” I yelled at him. “What about the Other One?” But the billy-blind was looking past me, he was listening to something I hadn’t heard yet. When I did hear it, I first thought it was Evan and Sally driving in, and I went on telling myself it was them as long as I could, because I didn’t want it to be what I already knew it was. I’m going to come back and fix that sentence later.
Most times, like I’ve said, it had to be a really fierce night for you to hear the Wild Hunt in the sky. But this night was as calm as calm, even with that bit of a breeze, and that’s what made it so terrible. Because suddenly they were up there, right overhead, the horses and the dogs, the howling and the horns and the rattling hoofbeats, the screechy laughter that didn’t sound like wild geese for a damn minute—all of it, all of it. And I wasn’t safe in the house, behind walls and a window with Julian holding my hand too tight, but out on the open ground, where they could see me— and they saw me, I felt it—that was the storm, their awareness bursting over me. I stood where I was, not because I was brave, but because there wasn’t any room under the woodpile, with the billyblind already there. I just stood alone in the storm, like Tamsin, looking up.
Anyway, I was alone until Mister Cat landed on my shoulder. I hardly felt him, I was so paralyzed, until he dug in his claws and shoved in close to my neck and yowled like a banshee at the Wild Hunt. His fangs were bare to the gums, and his fur and tail were fluffed up so he looked twice his normal size; and if those Huntsmen had understood Siamese, they’d have turned and come for us in a flash. But Mister Cat didn’t care if they did—he was ready to take them all on, and the horses, too. Maybe he was just showing off for Miss Sophia Brown, but I’ve never been so proud of him.
They didn’t turn. They passed over. Probably it didn’t take more than ten or fifteen seconds, which I read somewhere is all the time dreams are supposed to take, at most. They passed over, and the rage of their passage faded off toward Sherborne, and I stood still, straining after them, listening for a sound I’d never heard before when the Hunt went by. It was a voice, a man’s voice, but shrieking in such awful terror that I almost couldn’t tell it was human. We don’t have pigs at Stourhead, but the Colfaxes do—they’re the next farm over—and you can hear pigs screaming all that way when they know they’re about to be slaughtered. It’s horrible, it’s the most horrible thing I know, but it sounds more human than that voice, that night, flying just ahead of the Wild Hunt.
They were gone. Mister Cat quieted down to the kind of growl he’d use for some idiot dog, and the billy-blind crawled out of hiding, looking scared, but not the least embarrassed at having grabbed the one bit of shelter for himself. He cleared his throat. “Aye, so, advice you want, advice you’ll have. Stay clear of them, stay away from that place I’ve told you about—”
“You never did, you never said what place—”
“—and you’ll stop rousing the Willoughby, stop walking out with her! There’s no good can come of it, nowt but danger for you and worse for her. Let be, girl, there’s the billy-blind’s advice for you—she was well enough till you came worreting at her—”
“No, she wasn’t, and I didn’t—”
“—and what’s moving, what’s waiting, it can’t come into that little secret place of hers. It didn’t know then, it can’t know now—”
“It? What, the Wild Hunt? No, you mean the Other One, that’s it, right?” Mister Cat hissed in my ear, because I was losing my cool again, but I was miles past listening even to him. “What then? What then are we talking about? What can’t it know? What’s waiting for Tamsin?” I was reaching for him, I was actually going to grab him and shake him. I wonder what would have happened if I had.
Headlights bouncing off the sky; the sound of a truck engine climbing the hill. Evan and Sally. The billy-blind and I stared at each other in absolute silence for a moment. I couldn’t read his eyes at all, but he didn’t seem angry at me. He said, “You go back to school, don’t be asking that big Whidbey girl for help—she don’t like you above half. And sit near the window in that Spanish class.” He had to yell that last bit after me, because I was already heading for the house, with Mister Cat bounding along beside me. We were in bed—me still in my jeans, but with my eyes tight shut— by the time Evan and Sally came in.
Neither of us slept that night, not me and not Mister Cat. He knew a lot better than I what he’d been challenging, and now he crept under the blankets with me and snuggled into my armpit, and stayed there. But every time I looked at him, his eyes were open, and all night he kept moaning really softly to himself, no matter how much I petted him and told him what a hero he was. He only stopped doing it after Miss Sophia Brown showed up toward morning—she just appeared, popping into sight like a silent movie projected on a bedsheet. I almost jumped out of bed when she got under the covers, too, and curled herself right next to Mister Cat. But I didn’t, and that’s the way the three of us stayed until the first cocks went at it before dawn. I remembered a snatch of an old, old ballad Evan sings with Sally sometimes: