The Wind Through the Keyhole

  The sighe darted back to the Covenant Man, made two airy circles around him that seemed to leave spectral, fading trails of greenglow behind, then rose and hovered demurely beside his cheek. The Covenant Man looked directly at Tim; a figure that shimmered (as Tim's own father had when Tim beheld the corse in the water) and yet was perfectly real, perfectly there. He raised one hand in a semicircle above his head, scissoring the first two fingers as he did so. This was sign language Tim knew well, for everyone in Tree used it from time to time: Make haste, make haste.

  The Covenant Man and his fairy consort faded to nothing, leaving Tim staring at his own wide-eyed face. He passed the wand over the pail again, barely noticing that the steel rod was now vibrating in his fist. The thin caul of mist reappeared, seeming to rise from nowhere. It swirled and disappeared. Now Tim saw a tall house with many gables and many chimneys. It stood in a clearing surrounded by ironwoods of such great girth and height that they made the ones along the trail look small. Surely, Tim thought, their tops must pierce the very clouds. He understood this was deep in the Endless Forest, deeper than even the bravest ax-man of Tree had ever gone, and by far. The many windows of the house were decorated with cabalistic designs, and from these Tim knew he was looking at the home of Maerlyn Eld, where time stood still or perhaps even ran backward.

  A small, wavering Tim appeared in the pail. He approached the door and knocked. It was opened. Out came a smiling old man whose white waist-length beard sparkled with gems. Upon his head was a conical cap as yellow as the Full Earth sun. Water-Tim spoke earnestly to Water-Maerlyn. Water-Maerlyn bowed and went back inside his house . . . which seemed to be constantly changing shape (although that might have been the water). The mage returned, now holding a black cloth that looked like silk. He lifted it to his eyes, demonstrating its use: a blindfold. He handed it toward Water-Tim, but before that other Tim could take it, the mist reappeared. When it cleared, Tim saw nothing but his own face and a bird passing overhead, no doubt wanting to get home to its nest before sunset.

  Tim passed the rod across the top of the pail a third time, now aware of the steel rod's thrumming in spite of his fascination. When the mist cleared, he saw Water-Tim sitting at Water-Nell's bedside. The blindfold was over his mother's eyes. Water-Tim removed it, and an expression of unbelieving joy lit Water-Nell's face. She clasped him to her, laughing. Water-Tim was laughing, too.

  The mist overspread this vision as it had the other two, but the vibration in the steel rod ceased. Useless as dirt, Tim thought, and it was true. When the mist melted away, the water in the tin pail showed him nothing more miraculous than the dying light in the sky. He passed the Covenant Man's wand over the water several more times, but nothing happened. That was all right. He knew what he had to do.

  Tim got to his feet, looked toward the house, and saw no one. The men who had volunteered to stand watch would be here soon, though. He would have to move fast.

  In the barn, he asked Bitsy if she would like to go for another evening ride.

  The Widow Smack was exhausted by her unaccustomed labors on Nell Ross's behalf, but she was also old, and sick, and more disturbed by the queerly unseasonable weather than her conscious mind would admit. So it was that, although Tim did not dare knock loudly on her door (knocking at all after sunset took most of his resolve), she woke at once.

  She took a lamp, and when by its light she saw who stood there, her heart sank. If the degenerative disease that afflicted her had not taken the ability of her remaining eye to make tears, she would have wept at the sight of that young face so full of foolish resolve and lethal determination.

  "You mean to go back to the forest," said she.

  "Aye." Tim spoke low, but firmly.

  "In spite of all I told thee."

  "Aye."

  "He's fascinated you. And why? For gain? Nay, not him. He saw a bright light in the darkness of this forgotten backwater, that's all, and nothing will do for him but to put it out."

  "Sai Smack, he showed me--"

  "Something to do with your mother, I wot. He knows what levers move folk; aye, none better. He has magic keys to unlock their hearts. I know I can't stop thee with words, for one eye is enough to read your face. And I know I can't restrain thee with force, and so do you. Why else was it me you came to for whatever it is you want?"

  At this Tim showed embarrassment but no flagging of resolve, and by this she understood he was truly lost to her. Worse, he was likely lost to himself.

  "What is it you want?"

  "Only to send word to my mother, will it please ya. Tell her I've gone to the forest, and will return with something to cure her sight."

  Sai Smack said nothing to this for several seconds, only looked at him through her veil. By the light of her raised lamp, Tim could see the ruined geography of her face far better than he wanted to. At last she said, "Wait here. Don't skitter away wi'out taking leave, lest you'd have me think thee a coward. Be not impatient, either, for thee knows I'm slow."

  Although he was in a fever to be off, Tim waited as she asked. The seconds seemed like minutes, the minutes like hours, but she returned at last. "I made sure you were gone," said she, and the old woman could not have wounded Tim more if she had whipped his face with a quirt.

  She handed him the lamp she had brought to the door. "To light your way, for I see you have none."

  It was true. In his fever to be off, he had forgotten.

  "Thankee-sai."

  In her other hand she held a cotton sack. "There's a loaf of bread in here. 'Tisn't much, and two days old, but for provender 'tis the best I can do."

  Tim's throat was temporarily too full for speech, so he only tapped his throat three times, then held out his hand for the bag. But she held it a moment longer.

  "There's something else in here, Tim. It belonged to my brother, who died in the Endless Forest almost twenty years ago now. He bought it from a roving peddler, and when I chafed him about it and called him a fool easily cozened, he took me out to the fields west of town and showed me it worked. Ay, gods, such a noise it made! My ears rang for hours!"

  From the bag she brought a gun.

  Tim stared at it, wide-eyed. He had seen pictures of them in the Widow's books, and Old Destry had on the wall of his parlor a framed drawing of a kind called a rifle, but he had never expected to see the real thing. It was about a foot long, the gripping handle of wood, the trigger and barrels of dull metal. The barrels numbered four, bound together by bands of what looked like brass. The holes at the end, where whatever it shot came out, were square.

  "He fired it twice before showing me, and it's never been fired since the day he did, because he died soon after. I don't know if it still will fire, but I've kept it dry, and once every year--on his birthday--I oil it as he showed me. Each chamber is loaded, and there are five more projectiles. They're called bullets."

  "Pullets?" Tim asked, frowning.

  "Nay, nay, bullets. Look you."

  She handed him the bag to free both of her gnarled hands, then turned to one side in the doorway. "Joshua said a gun must never be pointed at a person unless you want to hurt or kill him. For, he said, guns have eager hearts. Or perhaps he said evil hearts? After all these years, I no longer remember. There's a little lever on the side . . . just here . . ."

  There was a click, and the gun broke open between the handle and the barrels. She showed him four square brass plates. When she pulled one from the hole where it rested, Tim saw that the plate was actually the base of a projectile--a bullet.

  "The brass bottom remains after you fire," said she. "You must pull it out before you can load in another. Do you see?"

  "Aye." He longed to handle the bullets himself. More; he longed to hold the gun in his hand, and pull the trigger, and hear the explosion.

  The Widow closed the gun (again it made that perfect little click) and then showed him the handle end. He saw four small cocking devices meant to be pulled back with the thumb. "These are the hammers. Each one fires
a different barrel . . . if the cursed thing still fires at all. Do you see?"

  "Aye."

  "It's called a four-shot. Joshua said it was safe as long as none of the hammers were drawn." She reeled a bit on her feet, as if she had come over lightheaded. "Giving a gun to a child! One who means to go into the Endless Forest at night, to meet a devil! Yet what else can I do?" And then, not to Tim: "But he won't expect a child to have a gun, will he? Mayhap there's White in the world yet, and one of these old bullets will end up in his black heart. Put it in the bag, do ya."

  She held the gun out to him, handle first. Tim almost dropped it. That such a small thing could be so heavy seemed astounding. And, like the Covenant Man's magic wand when it had passed over the water in the pail, it seemed to thrum.

  "The extra bullets are wrapped in cotton batting. With the four in the gun, you have nine. May they do you well, and may I not find myself cursed in the clearing for giving them to you."

  "Thank . . . thankee-sai!" It was all Tim could manage. He slipped the gun into the bag.

  She put her hands to the sides of her head and uttered a bitter laugh. "You're a fool, and I'm another. Instead of bringing you my brother's four-shot, I should have brought my broom and hit you over the head wi' it." She voiced that bitter, despairing laugh again. "Yet 'twould do no good, with my old woman's strength."

  "Will you take word to my mama in the morning? For it won't be just a little way down the Ironwood Trail I'll be going this time, but all the way to the end."

  "Aye, and break her heart, likely." She bent toward him, the hem of her veil swinging. "Has thee thought of that? I see by your face thee has. Why do you do this when you know the news of it will harrow her soul?"

  Tim flushed from chin to hairline, but held his ground. In that moment he looked very much like his gone-on father. "I mean to save her eyesight. He has left me enough of his magic to show me how it's to be done."

  "Black magic! In support of lies! Of lies, Tim Ross!"

  "So you say." Now his jaw jutted, and that was also very like Jack Ross. "But he didn't lie about the key--it worked. He didn't lie about the beating--it happened. He didn't lie about my mama being blind--she is. As for my da' . . . thee knows."

  "Yar," she said, now speaking in a harsh country accent Tim had never heard before. "Yar, and each o' his truths has worked two ways: they hurt'ee, and they've baited his trap for'ee."

  He said nothing to this at first, only lowered his head and studied the toes of his scuffed shor'boots. The Widow had almost allowed herself to hope when he raised his head, met her eyes, and said, "I'll leave Bitsy tethered uptrail from the Cosington-Marchly stake. I don't want to leave her at the stub where I found my da', because there's a pooky in the trees. When you go to see Mama, will you ask sai Cosington to fetch Bitsy home?"

  A younger woman might have continued to argue, perhaps even to plead--but the Widow was not that woman. "Anything else?"

  "Two things."

  "Speak."

  "Will you give my mama a kiss for me?"

  "Aye, and gladly. What's the other?"

  "Will you set me on with a blessing?"

  She considered this, then shook her head. "As for blessings, my brother's four-shot is the best I can do."

  "Then it will have to be enough." He made a leg and brought his fist to his forehead in salute; then he turned and went down the steps to where the faithful little mollie mule was tethered.

  In a voice almost--but not quite--too low to hear, the Widow Smack said, "In Gan's name, I bless thee. Now let ka work."

  The moon was down when Tim dismounted Bitsy and tethered her to a bush at the side of the Ironwood Trail. He had filled his pockets with oats ere leaving the barn, and he now spread them before her as he'd seen the Covenant Man do for his horse the previous night.

  "Be easy, and sai Cosington will come for thee in the morning," Tim said. An image of Square Peter finding Bitsy dead, with a gaping hole in her belly made by one of the predators of the forest (perhaps the very one he'd sensed behind him on his pasear down the Ironwood the night before) lit up his mind. Yet what else could he do? Bitsy was sweet, but not smart enough to find her way home on her own, no matter how many times she'd been up and down this same trail.

  "Thee'll be passing fine," he said, stroking her smooth nose . . . but would she? The idea that the Widow had been right about everything and this was just the first evidence of it came to his mind, and Tim pushed it aside.

  He told me the truth about the rest; surely he told the truth about this, too.

  By the time he was three wheels farther up the Ironwood Trail, he had begun to believe this.

  You must remember he was only eleven.

  He spied no campfire that night. Instead of the welcoming orange glow of burning wood, Tim glimpsed a cold green light as he approached the end of the Ironwood Trail. It flickered and sometimes disappeared, but it always came back, strong enough to cast shadows that seemed to slither around his feet like snakes.

  The trail--faint now, because the only ruts were those made by the wagons of Big Ross and Big Kells--swept left to skirt an ancient ironwood with a trunk bigger than the largest house in Tree. A hundred paces beyond this curve, the way forward ended in a clearing. There was the crossbar, and there the sign. Tim could read every word, for above it, suspended in midair by virtue of wings beating so rapidly they were all but invisible, was the sighe.

  He stepped closer, all else forgotten in the wonder of this exotic vision. The sighe was no more than four inches tall. She was naked and beautiful. It was impossible to tell if her body was as green as the glow it gave off, for the light around her was fierce. Yet he could see her welcoming smile, and knew she was seeing him very well even though her upturned, almond-shaped eyes were pupilless. Her wings made a steady low purring sound.

  Of the Covenant Man there was no sign.

  The sighe spun in a playful circle, then dived into the branches of a bush. Tim felt a tingle of alarm, imagining those gauzy wings torn apart by thorns, but she emerged unharmed, rising in a dizzy spiral to a height of fifty feet or more--as high as the first upreaching ironwood branches--before plunging back down, right at him. Tim saw her shapely arms cast out behind her, making her look like a girl who dives into a pool. He ducked, and as she passed over his head close enough to stir his hair, he heard laughter. It sounded like bells coming from a great distance.

  He straightened up cautiously and saw her returning, now somersaulting over and over in the air. His heart was beating fiercely in his chest. He thought he had never seen anything so lovely.

  She flew above the crossbar, and by her firefly light he saw a faint and mostly overgrown path leading into the Endless Forest. She raised one arm. The hand at the end of it, glowing with green fire, beckoned to him. Enchanted by her otherworldly beauty and welcoming smile, Tim did not hesitate but at once ducked beneath the crossbar with never a look at the last two words on his dead father's sign: TRAVELER, BEWARE.

  The sighe hovered until he was almost close enough to reach out and touch her, then whisked away, down the remnant of path. There she hovered, smiling and beckoning. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, sometimes concealing her tiny breasts, sometimes fluttering upward in the breeze of her wings to reveal them.

  The second time he drew close, Tim called out . . . but low, afraid that if he hailed her in a voice too loud, it might burst her tiny eardrums. "Where is the Covenant Man?"

  Another silvery tinkle of laughter was her reply. She barrel-rolled twice, knees drawn all the way up to the hollows of her shoulders, then was off, pausing only to look back and make sure Tim was following before darting onward. So it was that she led the captivated boy deeper and deeper into the Endless Forest. Tim didn't notice when the poor remnant of path disappeared and his course took him between tall ironwood trees that had been seen by the eyes of only a few men, and that long ago. Nor did he notice when the grave, sweet-sour smell of the ironwoods was replaced by the far less pleasan
t aroma of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. The ironwood trees had fallen away. There would be more up ahead, countless leagues of them, but not here. Tim had come to the edge of the great swamp known as the Fagonard.

  The sighe, once more flashing her teasing smile, flew on. Now her glow was reflected up at her from murky water. Something--not a fish--broke the scummy surface, stared at the airy interloper with a glabrous eye, and slid back below the surface.

  Tim didn't notice. What he saw was the tussock above which she was now hovering. It would be a long stride, but there was no question of not going. She was waiting. He jumped just to be safe and still barely made it; that greenglow was deceptive, making things look closer than they actually were. He tottered, pinwheeling his arms. The sighe made things worse (unintentionally, Tim was sure; she was just playing) by spinning rapid circles around his head, blinding him with her aura and filling his ears with the bells of her laughter.

  The issue was in doubt (and he never saw the scaly head that surfaced behind him, the protruding eyes, or the yawning jaws filled with triangular teeth), but Tim was young and agile. He caught his balance and was soon standing on top of the tussock.

  "What's thy name?" he asked the glowing sprite, who was now hovering just beyond the tussock.

  He wasn't sure, in spite of her tinkling laughter, that she could speak, or that she would respond in either the low speech or the high if she could. But she answered, and Tim thought it was the loveliest name he'd ever heard, a perfect match for her ethereal beauty.

  "Armaneeta!" she called, and then was off again, laughing and looking flirtatiously back at him.

  He followed her deeper and deeper into the Fagonard. Sometimes the tussocks were close enough for him to step from one to the next, but as they progressed onward, he found that more and more frequently he had to jump, and these leaps grew longer and longer. Yet Tim wasn't frightened. On the contrary, he was dazzled and euphoric, laughing each time he tottered. He did not see the V-shapes that followed him, cutting through the black water as smoothly as a seamstress's needle through silk; first one, then three, then half a dozen. He was bitten by suckerbugs and brushed them off without feeling their sting, leaving bloody splats on his skin. Nor did he see the slumped but more or less upright shapes that paced him on one side, staring with eyes that gleamed in the dark.