Tamsin

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 ru

“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—”

He glanced over me, not at all as though I weren’t there, but as though my being there was something he’d always meant to take care of and kept forgetting about. I got one last clear look at his eyes—dead as newsprint, they would have been, if not for the hatred that had been holding him together all these centuries, the way Tamsin’s memories kept her who she was. All his memories were of pain and vengeance, and—I’m really ashamed of this— there was one moment, just one, when I felt sorry for Judge Jeffreys. I’ve never said that until now.

I never did find out exactly what he had in mind for me, because Tamsin cried out, “Je

And I just might actually be the only living person in England who’s ever been chased by the Wild Hunt. They made one long sound together, like a fiery sigh of relief, and came after us, not yelling now, but silent as the Black Dog. Which was much worse, strangely, because of course I couldn’t keep from looking back, and they always seemed nearer than they were. But they weren’t racing through the clouds now; they were on the muddy Dorset earth, like me, and if it sucked at my skidding shoes and made me fall twice, it slowed their horses, too. The Huntsmen may have been ghosts themselves, but those beasts were alive, wherever they came from. Maybe in the sky the wind and rain didn’t touch them, but down here they were as soaked as everything else, and having to pick their way over the crops they crushed and the ditches and irrigation pipes under their feet, and they didn’t like any of it. As long as the fields kept slanting uphill, I actually had a bit of an edge.

Tamsin never left my side. She could have flown on to be with Edric, even if it meant ru

I don’t honestly know what kind of danger I was in. They’d been ordered to get Edric back on the rails, and to bring Tamsin to Judge Jeffreys, but I’m not sure even the Huntsmen knew what he had in mind for me. But Tamsin did—I’m sure of that—and she kept driving me on when I could have lain down right there and gone straight to sleep in the rain and mud. Absolutely crazy, when you think about it: scrambling and stumbling through what people here call a real toadstrangler of a storm, with a ghost who couldn’t even touch me trying to protect me from another ghost—who maybe could—and also save her ghost-boyfriend from the pack of immortal hellhounds hunting us all. But I think if not for her I could have wound up where Edric had been, and with no Tamsin to come and find me. I think so. I don’t know.

I remember the maddest things about that flight; in fact, the mad stuff is about all I do remember. I’d swear I remember Tamsin singing to me, for one thing—just snatches of her sister Maria’s nursery song——.

I know Tamsin had us ru

And I couldn’t tell you for certain how we reached the Alpine Meadow without crossing the wheatfield, because you can’t, but we did. The name’s just a joke of Evan’s: It isn’t alpine, and it isn’t a real meadow at all—maybe it was long ago, but now it’s useless to anyone short of Wilf’s billygoat. It’s just a huge stretch of brush and sinkholes and twisted, nameless shrubs, with a few dead cherry trees left from some Willoughby’s vision of an orchard. It’s a blasted heath, like in Macbeth, and nobody goes up there much. Evan says you could still do something with the land, but Evan always says that.

I’ve never gone back to the Alpine Meadow since that night. I do dream about it once in a while: me scrabbling along out there in the storm, with the rain bouncing off me like hail and the Wild Hunt on my track—sometimes they’re right on top of me, sometimes not—and it’s so dark that all I can see is those two lights fluttering just ahead. Tamsin and Edric, twinkling away like Tinker Bell, for God’s sake. My legs are unbelievably painful, and I can’t get my breath at all—it’s like my lungs are full of broken glass— but Tamsin won’t let me give up, so Edric won’t either, even though there’s no point, no hope, no damn reason. I’d rather breathe, I’d rather breathe than anything in the world, and those damn ghosts won’t let me. In the dream I’m always angrier at them than I am at the Wild Hunt and Judge Jeffreys.

The Huntsmen’s horses were still having trouble with the mud and gaining only slowly, if they were gaining at all. But Judge Jeffreys was on us all the way, swooping and howling, popping out of the dark so close to my face that I’d jump back and fall, and then slashing in at Tamsin or Edric when they came to me. And he was hurting them, though I couldn’t see how. I don’t know what ghosts can actually do to other ghosts, but when the light that pulsed around him even came near them, their own light would go dim for a few seconds, or whip around and flicker as though the storm wind was almost blowing them out. I was really scared to see that, really frightened that they would go out and leave me alone; but they always came back, bright as before. It just seemed to take a little longer each time.