"Danny?" Ceridwen called.
A rustle of snapping thorns and branches came from just ahead of her. Startled, she took a step backward. Her tunic caught on a blackthorn tree and the ocean-blue fabric tore as she tried to pull herself free. Her chest hurt as though a hole had been punched through it, this place where she ought to have felt the air and water and fire of this place, where the trees ought to have whispered to her. She felt empty. Drained.
Yanking herself from the thorns was too great an effort. Ceridwen stumbled sideways and fell to her knees, thorns cutting the marbled white flesh of her arm. She swore, mewling in pain, hating the weakness in that noise.
"Ceri!" Arthur cried.
Then he was beside her, blue mist spilling from his eyes. Though he was being affected by the nature of this place, clearly it was not so debilitating for him. He crouched by her and held her arm, plucking out a thorn that had torn loose of its branch and stuck there. She stared at the wounds in her flesh as if the arm did not belong to her, amazed by the searing pain. They would heal quickly enough, even as weakened as she was, but the pain had come so suddenly and it burned like a flame in her mind.
"I don’t understand," she whispered.
Conan Doyle caressed her cheek and she gazed at him a moment before he helped her up.
"What don’t you understand?" he asked.
Before she could answer there came a crack of breaking branches and Danny emerged from the blackthorn trees just ahead. There were scratches on his dark, leathery skin and thorns had caught at his clothes. A branch dragged from one of his sneakers. Yet he seemed barely bothered by the prickers.
"Found us an easier path up ahead," he said, frowning as he saw Ceridwen’s wounds. The demon boy glanced at Arthur. "Figured I’d clear you a trail to get there. The Cyclopes turned out to be a’ight, but he’s no thinker. Might be easy for him to stroll through here, but.. " He shrugged and met Ceridwen’s gaze. "You all right?"
"I will be," she said with an assurance she did not feel.
She rose to her feet with Arthur steadying her, took a deep breath of the dank air of the Underworld, and then together they continued on. He was by her side with one hand at the small of her back as they walked. Though Ceridwen did not really need the support, she did not break away. Down here in the blackthorn forest, in the midst of an ancient death realm, she was so far away from Faerie and from the Blight that the bruises he had once left on her heart seemed to mean very little. Despite his words, her pride had been preventing her from completely accepting that he still loved her, that perhaps his departure all those years ago from her world had been as difficult for him as it had been for her.
In this place the distance she had kept between them seemed foolish, and she cherished the closeness they had in those moments. With Arthur beside her, Ceridwen had hope that she would see the flourishing forests of Faerie again. Yet she could tell by the furrow of his brow and by the silence in which he had been traveling before that he did not take the same comfort from her, or could not, for some reason.
"You’re thinking about Eve," she said.
Arthur nodded. "Of course." As he walked, the heavy coins in his pocket clinked together. The Cyclopes had left them by his fire for a time and returned shortly with a massive handful of them, meant to pay the ferryman that would take them across the River Styx.
"Gull would not have taken her only to kill her," Ceridwen said, hoping to soothe him.
"That is not my concern. Eve has survived enemies far more ruthless than Nigel Gull."
Ceridwen did not like his tone. There was a faltering uncertainty in it that was unusual for Arthur, and it unnerved her. "What is it, then?"
He hesitated, his head inching to the left as if he sought some specter than lingered in his peripheral vision. After a moment his attention returned to her. Ahead of them, Danny paused and looked back, impatient to move on. It was not the blackthorn forest, Ceridwen was certain, that had him so anxious. The boy did not want to pause anywhere in this world for very long. There was no telling what might menace them next.
"Arthur?" she prodded, her voice lower.
The pressure of his hand upon her lower back increased and they both quickened their pace. He glanced at her and a small, apologetic smile appeared upon his face, only to quickly fade.
"There are two things, truly," he said, his voice an old man’s rasp, no matter how young his body remained. "First, I have been attempting to deduce Gull’s purpose in bringing Eve to the Erinyes."
"Have you been successful?" Ceridwen asked, ducking beneath a thorny branch that overhung their path, then moving carefully between a pair of trees uncomfortably close together.
"I have a theory."
Ceridwen reached up quickly in spite of her sapped strength and tugged him by the ear, just as her mother had done to get her attention when she was a tiny girl. Arthur blinked in surprise and stared at her.
"I hate when you do that," she said. "Speak all, or not at all."
Her once and perhaps future lover nodded. "My apologies." He rubbed his ear. "I have told you of my history with Nigel. Of our rivalry — or at least his view of it. He chose to study shadow magicks, dark powers of ancient times that would have been better left to molder in the tombs of dead gods."
Conan Doyle glanced around, apparently aware of the odd resonance of his words. He stroked his graying mustache with his free hand and Ceridwen thought he might have shuddered.
"The cost for what he learned was his face. His features were deformed, twisted to reflect the deformity of spirit that resulted in his trafficking in such ugly sorceries. The Erinyes… the Furies, they have been called… might have the power to erase that taint, to undo the curse upon him."
Ceridwen shook her head. "I don’t know. Do you really think Gull would do all of this just to be handsome again?"
"You didn’t know him before. You did not see the change he underwent within and without. It would not surprise me."
"But why Eve?"
The ground had begun to slope down and the blackthorn forest to thin. To either side distant mountains could be seen, cliffs that went up and up, but were really only the walls of the cavern, rising toward that unseen ceiling, that stone roof that separated this realm from any other.
Arthur paused and studied her a moment, taking her hands in his. Without preamble he raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them, just once. Ceridwen did nothing to stop him, nor did she protest. Conan Doyle took a deep breath and then he turned to peer into the gloom, gaze hunting for Danny Ferrick and for the path ahead.
"This is not the Christian Hell. We’ve discussed that. But that does not mean that sinners go unpunished here. It is possible to be damned in the Underworld. And those sinners are given over to the Erinyes for their punishment. They are scourged for eternity — or for as long as this theological construct lasts, as long as the worship from the Second Age is not completely forgotten.
"If Gull wants something from the Erinyes, he’ll need something to give them in exchange. What better than the ultimate sinner?"
"Eve," Ceridwen whispered.
Arthur nodded.
Ceridwen took a moment to process that. After a moment she took his hand and the two of them began walking again. They emerged from the blackthorn forest only to find Danny standing at the edge of a steep hill. They joined him there, and found themselves looking down on the broadest, swiftest river any of them had ever seen.
The Styx.
"All right," she said, staring at the river. "You said there were two things concerning you. What was the other?"