Rage thought of her mother and began to cry.
“Oh, Mam,” she whispered. The wind snatched the words from her lips and turned them into a mockery of wailing filled with self-pity. Rage felt a surge of disgust at herself. At her stupidity and selfishness. No wonder Logan and Anabel and Mrs. Somersby disliked her. No wonder the people she loved left her. She was stupid and dull and ugly.
Billy didn’t leave, even though you would have left him, she reminded herself. And Logan is your friend now….
Rage clung to the reminder, and to the truth she sensed in it, because Billy hadn’t left her, and she knew he would never willingly do so. And Logan might be a new friend, but there was something in him, too, that she felt to be as steadfast as Billy. If I am worthy of their friendship and love, I am worthy of Mam’s, Rage thought, and it seemed that the storm winds hushed for a moment. Only then did she become aware that they were no longer running against the wind but barely shuffling forward.
The others were hardly visible in the dimness, but Rage saw their dull, sorrowful expressions and understood that they must have been hearing their own voices of doubt. “It’s the storm!” she shouted at them. “Don’t listen to it!” Rage saw the other two stir and shudder as if she had awakened them. Billy gave her a strange, desperate smile, and on impulse she threw her free arm about him and kissed his cheek. “I love you, Billy,” she shouted.
Billy must have heard her, because his arm tightened, squashing the breath out of her. Then he turned and hugged a startled Nomadiel, too.
“How much farther to Deepwood?” Rage shouted.
Nomadiel looked about, she sniffed, and her face changed. Eyes alight, she pointed, then nodded so dramatically that Rage knew they must be very close.
The moment they stepped onto the path leading into Deepwood, the pounding force of the storm was muted. Rage wondered if this was magic or merely the closeness of the trees. Then she saw that there was no snow on the trees except for those bordering the road at the edge of Deepwood. Nomadiel led them off the main Deepwood trail to a round, windowless bark hut with a solid door and roof.
Once the rickety door had been pushed closed behind them, the deafening growl of the storm was cut even more. It was pitch black, but Nomadiel lit a rush torch and set it in a groove in the packed-earth floor. There was a small fire pit at the center of the floor, and once a fire had been lit, Nomadiel filled a pot with water from an earthenware jug set by the door and set it to boil on crossed sticks. She added potatoes and onion from the knapsacks given them by the centaurs, then cut bread from a brown loaf. Handing a fork brusquely to Rage, she told her to toast the bread.
Rage did not mind being ordered about. The savagery of the storm had beaten all the will out of her. It was not until they had eaten the soup that she felt restored enough to ask questions.
“What happened to your crow?”
“He is not my crow,” Nomadiel said in the disapproving voice she seemed to save especially for Rage. “Rally flew ahead to the castle when we mounted Galantir Longleg,” Nomadiel went on. “He will have let my father and Elle and the others know we are coming.”
Rage went out to relieve herself. It was raining quite heavily, and the wind seemed louder than ever as she made her way to the nearest tree. On her way back to the hut, a hand descended on her shoulder.
Rage screamed and leapt around, only to find Gilbert and Mr. Walker staring at her. She was slightly taken aback to see that Gilbert’s long ringlets were glowing as well as saturated. But otherwise he looked his dear, familiar, gloomy self, and she flung her arms around her friends and hugged them hard. Then Billy threw open the door, his face wreathed in smiles as he announced that he had smelled them. He pulled them all inside, banging the door closed behind them.
“It is so good to see you both!” he cried, hugging Goaty and Mr. Walker exuberantly.
Gilbert! Rage reminded herself firmly, knowing how much it had meant to the faun to have his own name at last.
“You’re wet!” Billy said.
“Just a minute.” Gilbert lifted his fingers and made a peculiar twisting motion. Just like that, he was dry.
“You can do magic!” Billy cried.
“I am the wizard’s assistant now,” Gilbert said shyly.
“What about me?” Mr. Walker demanded.
“Oh, sorry.” Gilbert made the same twisting gesture toward Mr. Walker, but this only made the tiny man wetter. Water puddled on the floor under his feet. “Sorry! Sorry!” Gilbert muttered. “I’ll just try that again—”
“No!” Mr. Walker said, looking exasperated. “With my luck, I’m likely to explode.”
Rage gazed at the little man, seeing in his pointed ears and nose and his bright eyes the tiny Chihuahua that he had once been. Then because she could not help herself, she gathered him into her arms. He had grown, she realized, almost doubling the size he had been when he had first come to Valley, while Nomadiel was the size he had once been.
“It is good to see you,” he said softly. “And you,” he added, looking up at Billy. “We hoped that you had gone with Rage, when you jumped after her so suddenly, but we never knew because the wizard straightaway dismantled the bramble gate. I thought that I would never see you again, and yet it seemed impossible that I should not. Like a story with the last page left out.” Mr. Walker suddenly spotted Nomadiel, and his weary smile faded to a grimness that Rage had never seen before.
“What are you doing here?” His voice was so cold as to be almost unrecognizable.
“I had to show them the way, Father,” Nomadiel said calmly, but her face was pale. “If they had gone to the council house as they intended, Councillor Hermani would still be discussing whether or not to send them.”
“I told you not to leave the city,” Mr. Walker said. “It is dangerous on the road. This storm cycle might have caught you in the open—”
“It would have caught them in the open if I had not been with them,” Nomadiel pointed out tightly.
“You disobeyed me,” Mr. Walker said.
Nomadiel flinched. “You speak as if I am not your daughter who will someday be king of the little people. It is you who told me that a ruler must know his own mind.”
“A ruler who cannot also obey at need is one who will rule by whim and self-indulgent fancy. I will not allow you to become such a one.”
“Sometimes rules must be broken,” she said. Her voice had taken on a formality that suggested she was quoting someone else, and from her mutinous expression Rage gathered that her father must have said these words. “If I had not disobeyed, your precious Rage Winnoway would have perished in the storm. Then where would Valley be if it is true that she is its last hope?”
“You are arrogant, daughter. You make too many judgments based on your certainty about a future that can only ever be uncertain. You must act based only on what is right in the moment that you act, and upon things that are known to you.”
“She is right, though, Mr. Walker,” Billy put in apologetically. “If she hadn’t helped us, we would have been in trouble when the storm came. As it is, we are only here so swiftly because she sent her bird to get help from some centaurs….”
“Her bird,” Mr. Walker echoed, still staring at his daughter.
“I do not call Rally mine,” she said tightly.
“No, but why do others name it so if you do not claim him with your manner?”
“If I claim him, then it is no more than he claims me, and I do not object to it,” Nomadiel said.
“Perhaps this is not the time…” Gilbert interrupted gently.
To Rage’s surprise, Mr. Walker turned from his daughter to bow slightly to Gilbert. Rage caught the look of hurt, quickly masked on Nomadiel’s face.
“Rage,” Mr. Walker said, turning back to her, “we came because Rally told us that you had arrived in Fork and were journeying toward Deepwood. Rue told us that you would come directly to the castle.”
“I meant to,” Rage admitted. “But some
thing went wrong. I guess I haven’t quite got proper control of this dream-traveling stuff yet. I thought that we ended up in Fork because I was thinking about Elle right before I went to sleep. But Nomadiel said she left Fork days before we got there, so I don’t know why we went there.” Rage stopped, struck all at once by how unlikely it would be for Elle to have stayed at the castle while Gilbert and Mr. Walker braved the foul weather to reach them in the hut.
Billy might have read her mind because he asked why Elle had not come. Gilbert and Mr. Walker exchanged a glance, then Mr. Walker said, “I think we ought to go up to the castle before we speak of Elle. The center of the storm will pass over Deepwood soon, and we must be ready to move when it does.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the storm is over before we leave this hut, if it is so dangerous?” Rage asked.
Gilbert gave her a morose look. “One storm is followed by another, in a cycle that lasts for weeks at a time. The gaps between the cycles grow shorter and shorter. One day soon there will be nothing but endless storms.”
“What is the center of a storm?” Billy asked curiously.
“Each storm has a center of stillness,” Gilbert said. “We cannot predict how long the gaps between cycles are, but the center lasts for about one hour. In that time, we can reach the castle.”
“You came here without waiting for a center,” Rage objected.
“I used magic to shield us,” Gilbert said.
“His magic makes you feel as if someone is chewing your brain out,” Mr. Walker said flatly. “It is a very unpleasant experience.”
Gilbert looked upset. “It ought not to be, but since my master left, I have been so worried that I can’t seem to concentrate properly, and it is terribly important to concentrate with magic.”
The wind abruptly stopped its shrieking, and they all instinctively looked up.
“It is the center!” Gilbert cried, wringing his bony fingers. “We must leave now.”
Outside, it was utterly silent, but it was not as dark as it had been. Now Rage could see the clouds overhead, a great boiling mass streaked with livid yellow. Such a sky arching above such stillness made her feel uneasy, as if the storm were watching them with some great malevolent eye. Perhaps Deepwood felt the same, because the trees seemed to rustle of their own accord.
“I wish that you would tell us what has happened to Elle,” Billy said as they hurried along the path, following Gilbert’s glowing shape. “It’s obvious she is not at the castle.”
“She went through the winter door,” Mr. Walker said flatly.
“No!” Nomadiel cried, looking at her father in dismay.
Gilbert made an agitated movement with his horns, which caught in the branches of the tree overhead. They stopped while he untangled himself.
“Now see what you have done!” Mr. Walker snapped at his daughter.
They went silently after that, in weariness. Deepwood was very similar to Wildwood, except that the trees here grew so entwined that you could not see where one ended and another began. There was also a brooding sense of purpose about the trees, but Deepwood made no effort to test them or to put any barrier in their way. It was a long, tiring climb, but they came at last to an open field. Across the field, they could just make out the castle, no more than a great blot of darkness with a few lit windows set high above an encircling wall. They were nearly across the field, approaching the wall, when Rage felt a queer vibration in the air.
“Run!” Mr. Walker shouted. “The center is passing!”
Billy scooped up Nomadiel as they all ran. The first raindrops fell, stinging viciously, but it was only a few steps to the arched doorway in the wall. Passing through, they found the wall was so thick that they were in a short tunnel. Rage went to the other end and peered out. The castle was still largely invisible because of the driving rain. Rage turned back to see Billy setting Nomadiel gently on her feet. Gilbert and Mr. Walker opened a door in the side of the tunnel, and as soon as the glowing faun went through it, the tunnel fell into darkness. The rest of them followed his glow through the door. It led to an enormous chamber constructed within the wall. Mr. Walker and Gilbert began to light rush torches.
“What are you doing?” Rage asked.
“It is too late to reach the castle now,” Mr. Walker said. “We will have to wait here until it is safe to leave.” He knelt to poke at the ashes of an old fire in a shallow hearth.
“But we’re almost there!” Rage said.
“If you went out in it now, you would discover that the rain will burn your skin. And then after the rain will come hail the likes of which you have never seen in your world, or in Valley before the winter door was opened by that hell-born firecat,” Mr. Walker said.
“Does such rain fall in Wildwood?” Rage asked.
“No, because the witch folk stop it, but they can only do that while magic flows,” Gilbert said. He sniffed despondently. “If only I were a better apprentice wizard. My master—”
“Be quiet,” Mr. Walker snapped. “We do not need your gloomy talk now.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” Billy murmured, having come to stand between them.
“Not forever,” Gilbert said. “You see, the rain is part of the cycle of each storm, and they always follow the same pattern. Last of all will come a sleety snow. That is when we can cross the yard to the castle.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Billy said. “If the storm is a circle, then the same things ought to be on both sides of the center.”
“I don’t know what makes sense, but that is what happens,” Gilbert said tiredly. “The wizard said the storms are sentient. Well, you must read his notes if you want to know more about it. I am far too stupid to be able to understand them.” He gave a half sob. “I do not deserve the name given to me.”
Rage took a deep breath. “You’d better tell us why Elle went through the winter door.”
Mr. Walker bent to poke at the fire. It was alight now, but the wood must have been wet because all it produced was black smoke and a feeble flame. Still staring into it, Mr. Walker said, “We waited for you as the witch Mother advised, though the storms grew worse and fell beasts roamed about: dark shape-shifters that rend the soul before they rend flesh. And illness. More plague and a strange disease that affects natural animals, humans, and little folk, making them waste away. Horrible. Elle woke this morning and said she could wait no longer.”
“How could she leave?” Nomadiel cried. “What of Fork? How will it bear her loss?”
“Fork must endure, as do others who have lost those they care for,” Mr. Walker said.
“Why would she decide to go so suddenly?” Billy asked.
“The wizard went suddenly, too,” Rage murmured, but no one heard her.
“Elle spoke of a dream this morning,” Gilbert said. “Then she said someone must go at once, and that it had better be her. She said the rest us should follow as soon as Rage arrived.”
Billy stiffened. “She went through the winter door this morning?”
Gilbert nodded. “Then that’s it!” Billy said. “That’s why we were drawn to Fork! Elle must have gone through at the same time as we were coming here, and once we were here and Elle wasn’t, the magic just took us to the closest thing to Elle. Fork’s dream of her.”
“What did the witch Mother say about Elle going?” Rage asked.
“She doesn’t know yet,” Mr. Walker said. “She was called away to Wildwood, for they had need of her magic. Ania arrived yesterday to take her place.”
“Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, letting Elle go,” Gilbert said mournfully. “My master would have been able to stop her.”
It gave Rage a strange feeling to hear Goaty calling the wizard master, for wasn’t that what animals called their owners?
“So both Elle and the wizard had dreams that made them go through the winter door,” Billy mused. “I wonder if they had the same dream.”
“I do not know what the wizard dreamed, b
ut I heard him tossing and turning, and several times he shouted out something about the winter door,” Gilbert said, wringing his hands. “I thought nothing of it until I found that he had gone. Then I went straight to the door.”
“Is it somewhere near?” Rage asked.
“Near, yes, but still it is a dangerous journey unless you pay strict attention to the storm cycle.”
“Did the wizard make the winter door?” she asked, wondering if that was why he had been so sure the firecat had not made it.
“The firecat made it,” Mr. Walker said in a harsh voice. “It let in the plague that killed Feluffeen. It deserves to have its head bitten off.”
Gilbert shook his head sadly. “My master believed the firecat thought it had created the door, when it merely activated it. He wrote about the door in his notes. Maybe you will find something I missed. I often muddle things. It is my fault—”
“For Bear’s sake, Gilbert, stop blaming yourself for everything!” Mr. Walker snarled. “I thought you had gotten over that!”
Gilbert looked hurt. “I am sorry, Prince Walker. I know that I am…”
“I am sure you are a very good assistant, Gilbert,” Billy said in a soothing voice. “Did the wizard say anything at all to you that might help us understand why he went through the winter door when he did?”
Gilbert shook his head, his eyes suspiciously bright. “There are only his papers, as I told you.”
“Did Rue look at them before she left?” Rage asked.
Gilbert nodded. “She began, but then she received the message from Wildwood and had to leave.”
Rage thought of something. “If you didn’t see the wizard go through the winter door, why are you so sure that he did?”