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.
Then the Pooka dumped me. Nothing dramatic about it—he just stopped dead and I shot over his head at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and landed on my butt in soft mud, practically at Tamsin’s feet. I jumped right up, howling like the Wild Hunt myself, but the Pooka actually bowed his head to me and I shut up. He said, “Here is your friend, and here is the Wild Hunt. This is your affair, not mine. Tend to it, Jenny Gluckstein.”
And he was gone, exactly that fast—I thought I spotted a frog hopping away through the cornstalks, but it was dark and crazy, and you can’t ever tell with the Pooka, anyway. Tamsin hadn’t turned her head for a moment, because the first of the Huntsmen had touched down, the wet earth hissing under their horses’ feet. The rest were circling like stacked-up planes, coming in one by one, as they must have done when Judge Jeffreys called them to the cow byre where Edric Davies waited for Tamsin Willoughby. The corn was smoking where they trampled it, and I wondered, somewhere far off, what I’d say to Evan when nothing ever grew in this field again.
They didn’t keep up their racket once they were on the ground. Even the hounds quieted down and dropped back alongside their masters, and the horses—or whatever they were—stopped foaming flames, though they kept on growling very low, meaner than the dogs. Tamsin just stood there, solid as a living woman, smiling as each rider dropped to earth and moved in on her. You’d have thought she was welcoming company at the front door.
I didn’t know what the hell she had in mind, and the Wild Huntsmen were as hung up as I was. They kept advancing, but they did it slowly, fanning out a little bit, as though she were Sir Lancelot or someone, ready to leap at them and mow them down five and six at a time. I was just behind her, shaking so hard I could barely stand, watching them come on.
I’ll never know who they were. Who they had been. I’ll never know how you get to be a Wild Huntsman, nor if you have to be one forever. What I remember—this is weird—is their smell. If Tamsin smelled of vanilla, you’d have expected these guys and their beasts to smell all meaty and hairy and blood-sticky, like the lion house at the zoo. They didn’t: Close to, even the worst of them, the ones with no real faces, but only a smeary collection of holes and skin and cindery snot—even those had the faintest smell of the sea, of fishing boats, and sails drying in the sun, the way you see them at Lyme Regis. Maybe they were all old pirates— who knows? The one thing I’m sure of is that I can’t ever be afraid of anyone again. The Wild Hunt gave me that.
Tamsin spoke to them, proud and clear over their fearful stillness. She said, “I take back what belongs to me. You have no claim on him, nor did you ever. The evil was mine alone, and long will I be in atoning for it. I take Edric Davies back from you now.”
The Huntsmen didn’t do anything. They sat their horses and stared at Tamsin, and not one head turned when Edric Davies walked between them to her side. I’d lost sight of him when the Pooka dumped me, so I’m not sure exactly where he’d been, but I can tell you that he walked as though he were afraid the planet would buck him off at any moment, back into the sky. Tamsin hadn’t glanced at me once in all this time, but Edric did as he passed me; and although he looked like an entire train wreck all by himself, he winked at me! He winked, and I saw what it was that Tamsin had loved three centuries ago. She took her eyes off the Wild Hunt for the first time, and she and Edric stood there looking at each other, and they didn’t say a thing. Not a hello, not a cry of pain or sympathy, no apologies—not one single word of love. They just looked, and if somebody ever looks at me the way the ghost of Edric Davies looked at the ghost of Tamsin Willoughby, that’ll be all right. It won’t happen, but at least I’ll know it if I see it.
By and by, Tamsin turned her attention back to the Huntsmen. “We will go,” she said, haughty as could be. “You will pursue Edric Davies no further, nor me neither. You have no power here. Go back to your home beyond the winds—go back to the bowels of the skies and trouble us no more. Hear me, you!” And she stamped forward, right at them, and swung her arms the way Sally does when she’s shooing Mister Cat out of the kitchen.
For one crazy minute, I thought she was going to get away with it. The Wild Huntsmen seemed paralyzed, in a funny sort of way: They might almost have been human, ordinary Dorset people, sitting their shuffling horses in the rain, sneaking sideways peeks at each other to see if anyone had a clue about what they ought to be doing next. A couple of them even backed away, just a step, but that’s how close she came. I really thought she’d make it.
Then Judge Jeffreys screamed.
Twenty-six
You wouldn’t have thought that soft, scratchy voice—a dead man’s voice—could make that sound. He was hanging in the air over the cornfield like some awful glowing kite, and he screamed like someone losing a leg or having a baby—there was as much pain as rage in the sound, maybe more. I couldn’t even make out the words at first, simple as they were. “Never! They’ll not walk free of me, neither of them, never! The Welsh bastard fell at my hand, there in the muck of the byre, which was nothing but his vile due—and I did enjoin you by certain cantrips to harry his spirit away, which was his due as well, as it ever shall be! Obey me! Living or dead, I command you yet!”
When I think about it now, I’m sure even the Wild Huntsmen must have felt anyway the least bit bewildered and pushed around, what with Tamsin running them off on one hand and now Judge Jeffreys badgering them to get after Edric Davies again. They weren’t making any sound among themselves yet, but their beasts were growling and shifting, and I saw the riders who had edged away from Tamsin nudging their horses back toward her. Judge Jeffreys saw that, too.
“No!” he rasped, and the Huntsmen were still. That’s when it struck me that he’d maybe had dealings with the Wild Hunt before Edric Davies. They knew each other, anyway—I’ll always be sure of that much. Judge Jeffreys said, “The woman is mine, as God yet wills her to be. The Welshman is yours, as I mean for him. As for that one—”