“It is you behind the voice,” Reynard said, peering with a squint into the gloom beyond the lean-to. “I have seen it in country fairs. It hath a silly name, like a wind among cards.”
“Mean you ventriloquist!” The King looked upon him with a sudden glowing smile, the growling voice forgotten. “A new word, soon minted. Thou know’st of fairs and those who work them? Tell me, what new tricks and plays? Have new mountebanks better puppets than I strutted before thee?”
“No evagation,” Widsith cautioned. “It is I who wander in person, not our minds. To the task—”
“The devil with ye!” the cat-growler said, then shrieked to a harpy’s pitch. Reynard ducked as something feathery swooped and puffed close to his scalp—something like an owl with the head of a lynx.
The King leaned his head to one side, and again twisted his grin. “I teased the Spanish. They thought to do harm, and, whilst some insist mine arts are best applied to lost lovers and stray children, they have other uses, that thou know’st well.”
“Thou it was didst lure the soldiers to where Eaters and drakes found them!” Widsith said.
“Not me, entirely,” the King insisted, hands flagging like old leaves. “Spanish hopes for murder and treasure guided them to their own doom. I filled mine old pans and laid trails of nuggets and coin, defended them with affrighting hags and tottering castles, into open fields and rocky heights, and the brutes followed their own vicious nature.”
Reynard had to be impressed by such a ruse, but then shivered at the calm he felt, exposed to all this strangeness. He was not afraid of Widsith, a most changeable man—and he was not afraid of the King, who seemed decrepit… but he had been afraid of the toppling hag and the striped red and white man. And so…
He had fallen for the King of Troy’s tricks, just like the Spaniards. Illusions worked for both the King and for Zodiako, it seemed. Did the tricks, the visions, work on or against the glassy-skinned Eaters? He thought not. Perhaps the Eaters were themselves illusions raised by greater sorcerers than the King. This Queen of Hell, for example, mistress of crabs and spiders, queen of devils, who had not yet been explained one way or another.
“Go!” the King insisted, hands working like autumn flags to warn them back.
“But I fear for thee, old friend,” Widsith said, with a hint of cruel jest, “and miss the tales we promise each time I leave and return!”
“Soon enough,” the King said. “But for now, in the company thou keep’st, all is unsettled, and some will visit thee I do not wish to meet.”
“When? Of what strain?” Widsith asked. “I have no fear of Eaters high or low—”
“Nor doubtless will this boy,” the King said. “But others wander from the waste not seen here for many centuries. Giants and bogles and smaller, stranger wights, and ghosts in shrouds, and those who shape signs in the dark—some visible, some not.”
“Attracted to the boy? Protecting him?” Widsith asked.
“Doth he want protection?”
“I saved and protected him,” Widsith said.
“Perhaps he is their goal, their guide, and not thee and thy tales, Pilgrim. I’ll do my best to make them pass us by, but ye should go now!”
Out of the Woods
IT IS STRANGE how I remember these woods and these trees,” Widsith said as they looked for the path back to Zodiako—a narrower and more winding version, Reynard guessed, of the road traveled by the wagon and its entourage. “Think’st Cardoza is still lost around here someplace, or hath he been found and put to better use? Is he even now spilling poison into the porches of the ears of eastern queens?”
Reynard shook his head. “Maybe he is dead.”
“Oh, no,” Widsith said. “He hath not the mark, and the Eaters did not finish him—merely dined. Someone about the waste, in the krater cities that serve Crafters, wished him preserved for other uses.”
“What be these kraters?”
“They surround the chafing waste at the island’s heart,” Widsith said. “A wide circle of great cups or depressions, served by cities and staffs of special Travelers. These Travelers go there to carry my tales, and not just mine—but the tales of any who arrive. I have never seen them. I have not been invited.”
Reynard looked through the trees. Left on his own he could never have found his way through the tangles of trunks and branches and roots. What presented a path to Widsith seemed but a puzzle to Reynard.
“What about the Spanish horses?” the boy asked. “Other than Cardoza’s. Did the drakes kill them as well?”
“I doubt it,” Widsith said. “The drakes know better, are guided better, if they were blunted by Dana’s people.”
“What about the Eater who looked at me?” Reynard asked. “The glassy girl.”
Widsith made a face. “No longer a girl,” he said. “Five or more centuries old.”
“Like the Eater who gave you years? He sounded awful, doing that to you.”
“Calybo. It did not feel pleasant to me, either. But necessary.”
“Is he an Eater?”
“Yes. A high Eater. The Afrique hath been here for much longer than I have been alive.”
“Who giveth him orders?”
“Guldreth,” Widsith said, looking askance.
“She it was we almost met on the island?”
This irritated Widsith. “Enough!” he said. “It is Maeve I report to when I return. But Maeve avoids me, thus far.” He lifted his brows and sighed. “None of the island’s women will have me, it seems.”
“You call Guldreth a woman?”
Another sharp look, very like his uncle’s displeasure at a question too clever by half. “Not in simple parlance, lad. Nor is the glassy one who studied you a woman now. No sane man expects favor from such, beyond the pact.”
“And what about other high ones, the Vanir? Are they truly in command of this island?”
“Not alone. It is Crafters who mold and command all around us… and inside, methinks.”
Reynard thought of the dark figure with the white shadow, and wondered whether Crafters controlled him, as well. Or the man with the feathered cap. Or the Queen of Hell, whoever she might be. He resumed his silence until they passed the field of dead Spanish, now almost empty, cleared by some group or some force, leaving only scattered items of clothing and a few rusty weapons no one thought worth collecting.
“I am truly to blame for this,” Widsith said quietly. “Always before, I returned alone, or with simple fisherfolk. Now the outside world makes that impossible. Our land is under siege. I should be among these dead. I should be a ghost!”
Reynard considered this and found it somewhat insincere. “God’s truth?”
Widsith gritted his teeth and gave Reynard a stern glance. “I have lived centuries by this strange grace. I do not wish it to end now, truly. Nor do I wish to lose Maeve and my reason for returning.”
“So long as the powers you know supply you with more years,” Reynard said.
“Foolishness doth make thee no more pleasant,” Widsith said.
“What did you witness, out there during the great sea battle with my people? What was that battle like for you? Did you feel protected?”
“I was in as much danger as any Spaniard—any Englishman. Many died around me.”
“And after, what made you lift me from the sea? Why would these people value me, or thank you for my life?”
Again, Widsith looked aside, as if thinking of matters still best left unsaid. “I thought I saw something in thee that could bring me favor, when the Spanish would not. Here, those of us just above the mud always seek advantage and favor from those just below the stars.”