The Pooka looked at me for a long time. Weasels have eyes like round maroon pinheads, but the Pooka’s eyes were as yellow as ever, and just as deep with danger. The weird thing was, though, that he also seemed the least bit uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—which was ridiculous. We hadn’t spent a lot of quality time together, but if there was one thing I already understood, it was that the Pooka doesn’t get embarrassed. He’s the Pooka.
What he finally said was, “That is not in my power.”
I said, “What? Oh, please.”
The Pooka actually almost smiled, I think—it’s hard to tell with weasels, even big weasels with human legs. He said, “I do not lie about such things, Jenny Gluckstein. If I could have been of help to Tamsin Willoughby, I might well have done so long ago, but I cannot. It is forbidden, which is only to say impossible. She is not of my world.”
“Please, ”I said again. “She’s a lot more of your world than she is of mine or anyone else’s. She’s like a damn tour guide to your world, for heaven’s sake.”
“Tours… I have seen such things,” the Pooka said, which surprised the hell out of me. Though I guess it shouldn’t have, when you think about it. “But this guide belongs no more to the world she reveals than do those who trudge behind her. Quick or dead, Tarnsin Willoughby remains human, and even I” —and when the Pooka said even I, you heard it— “even I cannot guide her in her turn. I might as well be the Black Dog, silently foreboding, or I might be the billy-blind, forever offering the right advice at the wrong time.” The weasel-head leaned over me; the Pooka’s golden eyes drew me up and in. The Pooka said, “Quick or dead, there’s no helping a human, but if anyone is to succor Tamsin Willoughby, it must be you.”
And if anything could have snapped me out of the blank enchantment the Pooka’s eyes always laid on me, that was it. I jumped back, right away from him. I yelled, “What?”
“Only you. And no chance of that unless you come rightly to understand her plight—which you do not, no more than she.” The Pooka got bored with the weasel and became a little gray rabbit with yellow eyes. He said, “Listen to the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt will tell you what you must know.”
“The Wild Hunt,” I said. I’m not even sure the words actually came out. The rabbit sat up on its haunches and began washing its face and fluffing its whiskers, just the way cats do.
“Listen to the Wild Hunt, Jenny Gluckstein,” it said again. Then it turned and leaped straight through that pointy dark window, in a flurry of wings that looked too big to fit. And left me standing alone in Tamsin’s room, which didn’t smell at all of vanilla when she wasn’t there.
So that was also the winter when I learned a lot more about Tony’s dancing than I ever expected to. If Tamsin was spending time in his studio, maybe I wouldn’t be so jealous if I were there with her, at least trying to understand what she got out of it. Tony was not crazy about the idea, even though I’d already been in his damn studio, and let him try out his moves on me, and generally behaved a lot better than his brother. I could have told him that there was a ghost watching him get into his tights and put on the legwarmers that Sally had knitted for him, but I didn’t. It took us a while, but we cut a deal. I promised to sweep the floor when it needed doing, and absolutely never to comment unless asked. And not ever to bring Mister Cat.
Personally, I think he’d been ready for a long time to have someone see him practicing. He just would have liked it to be someone who understood what the hell he was trying to do. Sally and Evan both love music, but even Sally doesn’t know much more about dance than I do. Poor Tony. Working by himself in a real vacuum—no one to study with, no one to talk to him or trade ideas with, hardly ever getting even a glimpse of real dancers—he finally had to settle on me as an audience, the best of a bad lot. Maybe.
And he couldn’t know that he had another one, a better one than all his family put together. I didn’t see Tamsin the first time I dropped in when he was working. (I’m saying “dropped in” because I tried hard to make it casual—just sort of sidling through the door, don’t mind me, and sidling over to sit in a corner.) I could smell her, but it took a while before I made her out, almost invisible on a chair that Tony was using for some of his stretching exercises. She wasn’t more than a few inches away from him— when he braced his foot on the chair to bend over it, he actually stepped through Tamsin’s own foot, and the hem of her white dress. It was a nightgowny sort of thing, and she looked like a little girl in it, staring up at Tony as he touched his forehead to his knee, then straightened, then did it again, and again. Usually he wears a headband when he works, but he didn’t have it on that day, and his sweaty brown hair kept flopping into his eyes. Once or twice Tamsin lifted her hand, as though she wanted to brush it away.
It took me a while to get her attention, because she was so totally caught up in watching Tony at work. He didn’t do anything terribly glamorous or dramatic: It was all fits and starts—a slow half-turn here, a sudden little run there, or a burst ofjumps, and then most likely a shake of the head and a mumble, and he’d be trying it over a different way. It wasn’t dancing, it was making a dance, which is about as boring as making anything, unless you’re the one doing it. Believe me, I know.
But Tamsin couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop breathing with him, if you can imagine that, considering that she didn’t breathe. The more she watched, the clearer she grew, until she was practically as distinct as Tony, and still he was too absorbed to notice her. He was using the chair as a center to work around, now spinning away from it, now sort of bouncing off it, now actually picking it up and dancing with it—holding Tamsin in his arms, though he didn’t know. He didn’t see her, and she didn’t see me, and there was a moment when I really couldn’t have said just whom I was jealous of.
Then it was past, and Tamsin did notice me, and came to be with me in my corner while Tony went on dancing with the chair. She didn’t look like such a little girl now, but someone closer to my age, or Meena’s—that’s it, she looked like Meena watching Chris Herridge playing football. She said without looking at me, “Oh, Jenny, but he’s a springald, your brother—a gerfalcon, if ever I saw one—”
“Stepbrother. You know he’s my stepbrother.” I was whispering as low as I could but Tony said, with his head practically touching the small of his back, “No comments from the cheap seats. That’s part of the deal.”
“La, stepbrother then, what of it?” I’d never seen Tamsin this wound up. “Jenny, I’d no notion—we never had such a mode when I…” Tony was scribbling something on a yellow pad—he has his own kind of dance notation—and Tamsin watched him at it, fascinated, not taking the least note of me. “How Edric would love this,” she whispered, so low I could hardly make it out. “Edric would play such music for such dancing.”
“He’s just practicing, for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen, I have to talk to you.” Tony turned and pointed at me. He didn’t say anything, but I shut up and waited it out, until he’d worked himself down to a dripping rag—Tony never knows when to quit, even now that dancing’s what he does all the time. Then he said, “That’s it, show’s over,” and limped off with a towel around his neck to take a shower. I really thought Tamsin was going to follow him, but she came outside with me instead.
February still, but this was one of those gentle afternoons that Dorset slips in now and again, even in the middle of a miserable Dorset winter. Two of those in a row, and tiny green and white things start peeking out of the mud, and I always want to run around pushing them down again and yelling at them, “Don’t fall for it, stay low, it’s a trick!” It is, too, always; but right then it was what people here call a soft day, with a breeze pushing against me like a dog’s wet nose. Tamsin’s white dress seemed to flutter a little, even though it couldn’t have.