Magnus had sat on the center plank and taken up the oars. He hesitated, and Matthew realized he was trying to decide to go on or not. “What’s up ahead?” Magnus asked the girl, his voice a harsh rumble. “More Indians?”
“No. But other things.”
“What other things?”
“Spirits,” she said. “They wander, lookin’ for peace…or revenge. The river leadin’ you on and on, and the swamp takin’ you in and makin’ you lose your way. The quicksand pits and the snake nests, trickin’ you to step in ’em. I know from hearin’ tales…it’s a bad place.”
“Tales,” scoffed Magnus, yet his voice wasn’t as strong as it had been a moment before. A flicker of heat lightning shot across the sky to the west. “Matthew, what do you say? Do we go onward or back?”
As soon as this uncomfortable question had left Magnus’ lips, there came the sound of a distant gunshot. The noise rolled to them through the weeping willows, the gnarled oaks and along the river’s flow. In a few seconds another gunshot—likely a pistol this time, the sound a little higher register than the first, which was probably a musket—rang out. Following it almost immediately was a third shot, from another musket.
Then silence, but for the voice of the swamp.
Magnus waited. He glanced back at Matthew. “Three shots. Three runaways. Maybe got ’em all.”
Matthew looked for the red wash in the eastern sky that would be the coming of daylight, but it was not there. Time seemed to have slipped its boundaries. His shoulder had begun to throb with deep pain that radiated up the side of his neck. He had no idea what to do with the girl; she had to be taken back to Rotbottom, but still…he couldn’t be sure the three shots had killed the runaways, and there was yet the chance to save them.
“I say we go on,” Magnus decided. “Come this far, we should go on. You bear with that?”
Matthew didn’t like the idea of taking the girl any further upriver, but it seemed that the die was cast. “I bear with it,” he said, and Magnus began rowing them onward with strong strokes.
“Brought some things,” Quinn said. She reached down into the bottom of the boat and brought up a small yellow gourd topped with a cork and equipped with a leather strap. “Fresh well-water,” she said, and sloshed the liquid around for them to hear. She uncorked the gourd and offered it to Matthew, who drank gratefully and then passed it to Magnus, who also drank. The gourd was recorked and hung around her neck by the strap, and then Quinn brought up a paper wrapping of what, unwrapped, revealed several chunks of dried meat.
“Alligator?” Matthew asked before he took one.
“Surely,” she answered. “Go ahead, it was a big fat one.”
In spite of what he’d witnessed this night, he was hungry enough. He ate a piece, but he couldn’t help wondering what had made this particular reptile so fat. It had a taste somewhere between chicken and fish, with more gill than cluck. Magnus took two of the chunks and put them down his gullet as if they were from the finest steak in Charles Town. “Obliged,” he said.
Quinn reached down and brought up a third item to show Matthew: a rusted-looking pistol that likely would explode at the pulling of the trigger. “Got a tinderbox, a bag of powder and some shot too,” she said, holding up a deerskin bag.
“This belongs to your father? Or your husband?” Matthew asked.
She stared into his eyes for a few seconds before she replied. “It was yours,” she said. “I thought…maybe…you’d know it.”
“Listen to me,” Matthew told her. “I’ve never seen you before. Who do you think I am? Someone named Daniel?”
“Your name is Matthew now.” She gave him a small smile that held within it both a great grief and a heart of hope. “But you’ve done what you said you’d do. What you swore. I don’t want to rush it on you, ’cause I figure you might not remember. But you will remember, in time.”
Matthew thought the girl was beautiful—a flower among the swamp weeds—but she was surely mad. As Magnus rowed, Matthew closed his eyes and tried to find some rest, aware that Quinn was pressed against him as tightly as a new waistcoat. He was wet with sweat in the humid night, and the insects were back with a vengeance around his face and the shoulder wound. Behind his closed eyes, the cutting scythe rose and fell and the headless bodies jerked and shuddered beneath the children with their knives. He had known horror before, many times, through his dealings in the case of the Queen of Bedlam, the vicious killer Tyranus Slaughter and just lately his meeting with Professor Fell on Pendulum Island, but that scene of bloody celebration at the gamefield had nearly unhinged his already-shattered door. It had been the knowledge that he was waiting for his own head to be delivered to the game paddles that had been the worst, and everything he had wanted to do or planned to do or expected to do in this world would have been ended with the slash of the scythe.
He felt Quinn’s hand, gentle upon his cheek, and he opened his eyes to see her face very close to his own, as if inhaling the essence of him. “Daniel was your husband?” he asked.
“Is my husband,” she said. “Always will be, ’til the stars fall out of the sky.”
“He’s dead?”
“Alive,” she answered.
“In me, you think?”
“You’ll remember, soon enough.”
“I am not Daniel,” said Matthew. “No matter what you believe, I’m not him.”
She smiled, ever so faintly. Her fingers traced the line of his jaw, which was stubbled now with a day’s growth of beard. “You’ll remember,” she replied. “Soon enough.”
Magnus ceased his rowing and let the vessel drift. “Boats pulled up on shore ahead,” he announced. “Looks like…five or six of ’em. Shots likely came from here. I’m puttin’ us out.”
“All right,” Matthew agreed, as Magnus aimed the boat toward the others pulled up in the brush and weeds. When they were lodged upon the bank, Matthew took up the sword and Magnus accepted the rusty pistol and the powderbag from Quinn. Magnus spent a moment loading the thing. Quinn gathered up the water gourd and the rest of the ’gator meat. Matthew’s head spun a little upon stepping onto the slimy shore, and he stumbled a step but Quinn was quickly there to keep him standing.
The glow of a fire could be seen through the trees not far ahead. Magnus went first, leading Matthew and Quinn through the tangle. Soon the voices of men could be heard, talking quietly. Magnus eased into the firelight, causing some of the fifteen or so men who sat around the fire to jump to their feet as if being visited by a bearded and muddied giant hai’nt of the swamp. Swords, muskets and pistols pointed in the direction of the new arrivals.
“Ease up, boys,” said the gravel-voiced Baltazar Stamper, who sat on a length of rotten log. Under his raven-feathered hat his hard-lined face was placid and unconcerned, but his musket was close at hand. “Just Muldoon and…well, look who’s joined the party.” He was staring past Matthew at the girl, and he smiled thinly and tipped his hat to show a mass of unruly black hair with tendrils of gray on the sides. “Where’d you come from, young miss?”
“Rotbottom’s my home,” she answered in a tentative voice, as she came fully into the firelight beside Matthew.
“Ah, Rotbottom!” This was spoken by the black-garbed and gaunt preacher Seth Lott, who remained on his feet and gave Quinn a slight bow and a sweep of his ebony tricorn. His hair was cut close to the scalp, like a sprinkling of dark sand. Matthew noted that the man’s keen-eyed gaze covered all of Quinn’s body from head to feet and then travelled upward again, with a couple of joyously wicked stops on the journey. “I am told much sin abides in Rotbottom, since you have no preacher there?”