“Let’s do it,” Blue said.
He stood aside so that Cal could swing his leg over the sill. Sara watched as Cal tentatively tested his weight on the makeshift rope, then began his slow descent.
I’m next, she thought.
The idea of having to make her way down two stories on that flimsy sheet-rope made her feel a little queasy. The way the Kendell luck seemed to be running these days, she’d probably lose her grip about halfway down, fall and break her neck.
Don’t think about it, she told herself and concentrated on watching the shadows under the trees, looking for movement. Beside her, Blue was going over last-minute instructions with Emma for the umpteenth time.
“Just hold everybody together up here,” he was saying. “Keep the guards rotating so that nobody gets too bored or tired and misses something.”
“I know, Blue.”
“And if things do seem real quiet for much longer, you might try to get a work detail together to move some of those corpses out past the barricades. They’re already drawing flies; when the smell starts to hit—”
“Enough already,” Emma said.
Cal had reached the ground, dropping the last few feet and landing, awkwardly but safely. When he’d regained his balance, he unslung the rifle from his back and hung it over his shoulder where he could bring it up quickly if he needed to. Keeping an eye on the forest, he steadied the rope for Sara.
Sara took a deep breath—Chin.
Store up the inner strength like a drawn bow.
Focus.
—and swung her own leg over the sill. She grabbed hold of the rope, her hands sweating inside their gloves, and glanced inside. Judy gave her a thumbs-up. Emma was kissing Blue. She stepped back and pushed him toward the window.
“Be careful,” she said, including Sara in her caution.
As soon as Sara started her own descent, the muscles of her back and shoulders tensed and started to cramp. She drew on the focused energy of her taw and forced herself to ignore the cramping muscles. Bracing her legs against the wall the way that Cal had, she slowly made her way down. The end of the rope came far sooner than she expected it to. Cal stepped aside to give her room and she let go, landing as awkwardly as Cal had, but all in one piece.
“Everything still seems clear,” Cal told her.
He spoke over his shoulder, his attention concentrated on the forest in front of him. Sara moved out from under the rope. She looked up, frowned at the owls, then held the rope for Blue as he made his descent. Just as he landed on the ground, knees slightly bent to absorb the shock, there came the crashing sound of a large body moving through the underbrush.
Cal brought his rifle up to his shoulder. Blue scrambled to get his own unslung. Sara stood frozen, expecting she didn’t know what—another bear, another boar, maybe a dragon for all she knew—but it was a stag that came bounding out from between the trees. It skidded to a halt on the grass, antlers glinting white in the light that spilled from the House’s windows as it turned its head back and forth.
“Hold your fire,” Blue said softly.
They waited a long moment. Sara wondered if this was the same stag that Ohn and Sean had confronted inside the House.
Don’t let it attack, she thought. She hated the idea of their having to shoot anything that looked so beautiful.
The stag held its ground for a few heartbeats longer, then turned and walked slowly away, following the thin strip of lawn that still lay between the garden’s forest and the House. Sara let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding.
“Let me give you a leg up,” Blue said to Cal.
“You sure you don’t want me to come along—just in case you need an extra gun?”
Blue put his hand on Cal’s shoulder. “We need you here more,” he said.
He cupped his hands. When Cal stepped onto them, Blue gave him a boost up. He and Sara waited to make sure Cal reached the window; then Blue turned to her.
“Which way do we go?” he asked.
Sara just pointed straight ahead to where the shadows lay thick in the tangled undergrowth.
Blue stepped forward. “Man. How’re we going to get through that?”
Let’s see if Pukwudji’s trick works for a herok’a, Sara thought.
She moved ahead of Blue. Laying her hands upon the nearest tangle of boughs, she closed her eyes and reached out to the forest with her heart, asking it for safe passage. The strains of the moonheart air sounded in her inner ear; a moment later she sensed a response to that tune that Tal had given her. The twigs and leaves moved away from under her hand. She heard Blue whisper a muffled “Jesus,” then opened her eyes to see a path leading into the forest.
They waved one last time to those watching them from the window; then Sara led the way onto the path.
“Where do we start looking for him?” Blue asked when they’d been following the path for a couple of minutes.
“I guess we’ll just call him,” Sara began; then she paused. “Can you hear that?”
Blue shook his head. “I don’t hear any—no, I guess I do. It sounds like a flute.”
“It’s Pukwudji,” Sara said.
As though trained to see to her needs, the path veered in the direction of the music. The flute-playing grew not so much louder as more present with each step they took—an accelerated process as though somewhere there were a volume knob being turned up.
It was the forest, Sara thought. However far Pukwudji had really been when they’d first heard his flute, the path was using its magic to transport them quickly to where the honochen’o’keh played.
It took only a few moments before the path opened up to a space under an apple tree—the Apple Tree Man himself, Sara realized, still here in what remained of the House’s garden. The undergrowth was cleared away from the tree. Leaning against its trunk, sitting on his heels, was Pukwudji. He brought the flute down from his lips as they approached, but the echoes of his music continued for a few breaths longer than it seemed they should have.
“Hey, Sara!” he cried, scrambling to his feet.
Sara was so happy to see him that she closed the distance between them in a few quick steps to give him a hug. She hadn’t realized until this moment just how worried she’d been that he might not have stayed to wait for her.
“You remember Blue, don’t you?” she said.
“Oh sure.” Pukwudji thrust his flute into his belt. “Blue-Rider-of-Thunder, that’s what Ur’wen’ta named you, hey?”
Blue smiled. “Something like that.”
“But you have no thunder to ride tonight.”
“Didn’t want to scare up any more ghoulies,” Blue said.
Pukwudji nodded seriously. “The forest is full of unhappy thoughts tonight and unhappiest of all is the forest itself.” He turned to Sara. “Are we going now?”
“We’re going,” she said. “But not home. Can you take us back to Ottawa?”
“What for?”
Sara waved her hand in a motion that took in the forest. “To stop the one’s responsible for all of this.”
Pukwudji didn’t say anything.
“What did you mean about the forest being the unhappiest of all?” Blue asked.
“It’s like a baby,” Pukwudji replied, still looking at Sara. “It’s newborn, but already it begins to die.”
“Who’s killing it?”
Now Pukwudji turned to Blue. “All things die—except for Grandmother Toad’s little mysteries, hey?”
“If you say so. But that doesn’t tell us who—”
“Someone woke this forest,” Pukwudji said. “Called it up from where its ghost lay sleeping in the ancient of days. Once called, a force such as this forest is not easily controlled—that takes a great magic that only very few herok’a may wield. But the one you seek, who called up and controls this forest, is that strong; strong enough even to kill it.
“To try to count coup against such a being is the same as taking your own life, hey?”
“We don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter,” Blue said.
Pukwudji looked at Sara. “Is this true?”
Sara nodded.
“You want to go?”
“No,” she said. “But we have to.”
“If we die, I won’t see you anymore. I’ll come back, but you...
Sara swallowed thickly. “I know.”
“I’ll miss you,” Pukwudji said. His saucer eyes were suddenly shiny with unshed tears.
Blue kicked at a twig that lay by his feet. “This guy—he’s really that strong?”
“He’s a maker,” Pukwudji said, as though that explained it all.
Blue turned a questioning look to Sara.
“The rath’wen’a say that there’s different kinds of magic-workers: users and makers,” she explained. “Most use what’s already in the world; they’re the ones who recognize a being or object—or even a place—by its true name. By naming it, they can manipulate its properties: heal it, change it, use it.”
“And these makers?”
“They can create something out of nothing—like make real a forest that never was.”
“But that’s like naming it, isn’t it?” Blue asked. “I mean, this guy knew about the first forest and just called up a piece of it, right?”
Pukwudji shook his head. “This part of the first forest never existed before—it’s only what might have been, not what was—so there wasn’t even a memory of it to name. The man responsible for all of this created the forest—he made it—using a memory of that first forest, a ghost impression, but creating something entirely new.”
“And this is... rare?” Blue asked.
“Almost unheard of,” Pukwudji said.
Sara nodded. “There are stories about the makers, but they’re just legends—even in the Otherworld.”
“Can they be killed?”
“All things die,” Pukwudji began.
“I know,” Blue said. “Except for the little mysteries. So a maker can be killed.” He looked from Sara to Pukwudji. “Anybody know how?”
“By someone stronger,” Pukwudji said. “Do you still want to go?”
“Knowing all of that doesn’t change a thing,” Blue said. “We’ve still got to try—right, Sara?”
Sara hesitated. What she really wanted to say was: Why can’t somebody else take the responsibility for a change? We’ve already been through something like this once before and we only just survived by the skin of our teeth. Nobody gets that lucky twice.
But she knew that because of their ties to the House and Jamie, it was their responsibility.
If Jamie hadn’t disappeared, if the House hadn’t been left unprotected...
“Sara... ?” Blue said.
Sara didn’t trust her voice, so she just nodded.
“All right,” Pukwudji said. He took Sara’s left hand in his right, clasped Blue’s free hand in his left. “I’ll take you.”
His voice was subdued. The touch of his small knobby fingers felt dry against their palms. There was a vague sense of vertigo—here and gone in less time than the space between one breath and another—and then the overpowering presence of the forest surrounding them was suddenly lifted.
They still stood under an apple tree, in the garden’s orchard in the middle of the House, but the forest was gone. Beyond the gables of the building they could see the glow of the city’s lights, hazing the stars.
They had returned from the Otherworld to their own.
“You did it!” Blue cried.
His momentary happiness at knowing there was a way to get back faded as he looked at Sara. She stood shivering, her hand still clasping Pukwudji’s.
“Oh, God,” Sara said in a small voice. “I can feel him. He’s so close; the touch of his mind is so cold...”
Blue couldn’t look at her. He looked away, back to the roofline of the House, only to see owls perched there—two, three, a dozen of them, all in a row, staring right back at him.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” he said.
Neither of his companions responded.
4
When the dead bird twitched, Esmeralda was so startled that she almost opened her hand and let it fall from her grip. Her coyote-headed companion grinned at her, but she just gave him a fierce glare in return until he looked away. The fetish continued to twitch and move in her hands, filling with Jamie as Whiskey Jack drew the scattered bits and pieces of Jamie’s spirit from all the countless Otherworlds to which they’d been scattered.
Though Esmeralda would never admit it to her companion, or even let it show on her features where he could read it, the movement of the fetish spooked her.
There was magic and then there was magic. Most of it was logical enough, once you accepted that the natural boundaries of the world stretched a little further than the physics with which scientists had snared them: if Otherworlds existed, then it made sense that passage could be found between them; if the wind and the stars and the trees all had spirits, then of course you could communicate with them, once you knew their language; if you allowed that men and women had souls, then why couldn’t there be ghosts—spirits that hadn’t yet passed on to wherever it was that the dead finally went?
It was magical—wondrous—but then so was the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies, the flight of a hawk, the change of the seasons, the voice of the tide, the child growing in its mother’s womb. It was all part of what the First People called Beauty. But what Whiskey Jack did now—investing the fetish in her hand with the scattered parts of Jamie’s spirit—that seemed more like some wild-card magic; a magic where the rules were thrown out the window, where anything went.
With her zealous need for order and organization, this wild-card magic of Whiskey Jack left Esmeralda feeling as uneasy as it did those people she’d left back in the House, those who had no experience with magic of any sort. It was like being in a room and suddenly realizing that the walls went on forever; that they could be both solid and a veil that was easily drawn aside to reveal a world where the underpinning logic one used as a basis of reference no longer applied.
The jerk and quiver of the dead bird in her hand made it very easy for her to empathize with Richard Fagan’s panic attack. His poetry, the leaping and breadth of his imaginative process, hadn’t made him any more immune to the reality of the preternatural than her own otherworldly experiences would let her be immune to Whiskey Jack’s wildcard magic now.
A shiver of pure dread went scurrying up and down the length of her body before she could force herself to be calm. She told herself it was only Jamie’s spirit filling the fetish—gentle, soft-spoken Jamie; the man she’d had a mad crush on when she first came to Tamson House all that very long time ago. Jamie wouldn’t hurt her and Whiskey Jack couldn’t—at least not physically. They’d dealt with that a long time ago.
“It’s done,” Whiskey Jack said.
Esmeralda suddenly realized that his yip, yip, yip cry had long faded. He sat watching her, an unreadable expression in his mismatched eyes. The dead bird struggled in her hand, but she held it firmly.
“Is he... intact?” she asked.
Whiskey Jack shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. You’ll know when you return.”
“How will his spirit transfer back into the House?”
Again he shrugged. He dug the tobacco pouch from his pocket, built himself another cigarette and repeated the trick with the burning twig.
Exhaling blue-gray smoke, he added, “Just press the fetish against some part of the House and that should do it. His spirit won’t be able to help itself from entering the House.”
“No tricks?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
Esmeralda could think of a hundred reasons.
“I believed all your lies once, Jack,” she said. “The first time we met. I won’t believe them again.”
But she could still feel the pain of that betrayal. That was something that would never go away. She wond
ered sometimes how she could sit so calmly with him, when that hurt lay inside.
Because he was Coyote, she supposed. His betrayals weren’t malicious, they were just his way.
“I’ve nothing to gain from lying to you now,” he said, using the only argument that he knew she would accept.
“All right,” she said. “Thank you, Jack.”
He took another drag from his cigarette, rising to his feet as she stood.
“There’s a war between the living and the dead,” he said, his voice oddly casual as though it were just a bit of idle conversation he was making. “That’s what ghosts are—spirits that won’t step from one wheel to another.”
“Nobody wants to die,” Esmeralda said.
“Yes, but some people will do anything—any evil—if they think it will allow them to maintain their familiar position on the wheel of their life.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I just want you to know that there’s still going to be a price paid before this business is finished.”
“You said—”
“It won’t be old Whiskey Jack asking for payment.”
“What kind of payment?” Esmeralda asked.
“The usual: blood. A life; lives.” He looked away from her, out across the mountains, cigarette smoke curling incongruously from his coyote nostrils. “You see,” he added, when he finally turned back to her, “that man who’s causing us all this trouble in your homeworld—he’s one of those people who’ll do anything to hold off death.”
“Can’t you speak any plainer than that?” Esmeralda asked.
She didn’t really expect an answer; she might as well ask a river to run uphill. But he surprised her.
“Someone’s going to have to take him by the hand and lead him down the Path of Souls,” he said.
He tipped a brown finger against the brim of his hat, coyote grin laughing on his lips, though it never reached his eyes; then he stepped over the edge of the cliff and was gone.
Esmeralda didn’t bother to step to the edge and look down. He wouldn’t have fallen; he just liked to make a good exit. Right now he’d be in some other time, some other place, making mischief for someone else. Esmeralda just had to smile. He made it hard to stay mad at him—always had; always would.