“Right,” Cat said to Syracuse in a low voice. “Work, Syracuse. Walk on.”
Syracuse turned his head and stared at Cat. Me, work? said every line of him. And he simply planted himself and stood there, whatever Cat said.
“You can have another peppermint,” Cat said. “Just walk. We need your strength.”
Syracuse put his ears back and simply stood.
“Oh, lord!” Marianne said. “He’s as bad as Nutcase. You go and lead him, and I’ll pull on both halves of the rope.” She collected Cat’s side of the rope and stood in the middle, holding both lengths of clothesline.
If Syracuse decided to kick out, he could hurt Marianne there. Cat hurried round to Syracuse’s head and took hold of his bridle. He found a slightly furry peppermint in one of his pockets and held it out at arm’s length in front of Syracuse’s nose, before he dared pull on the bridle. “Now come on, Syracuse! Peppermint!”
Syracuse’s ears came up and he rolled an eye at Cat, to say he knew exactly what Cat was up to.
“Yes,” Cat said to him. “It’s because we really need you.”
Syracuse snorted. Then, when Cat was ready to give up, and to his huge relief, Syracuse started to trudge forward, stirring up clouds of broken dead leaves that got into Cat’s eyes and his mouth and down his boots and even somehow down his neck. Cat blinked and blew and urged Syracuse and encouraged him and willed at the barrier. He could feel Marianne behind them, willing too with surprising power, as she pulled on the clothesline like someone in two tug-of-wars at once.
The barrier rustled, grated, groaned, and keeled slowly over in front of Marianne. When Cat turned to tell Syracuse he was a good horse and to feed him the peppermint, he could see the long line of metal and creepers in both directions, slowly falling flat, piece by piece, rather like a wave breaking on a beach. He could hear metal screaming and branches snapping, off into the distance both ways. Cat was rather surprised. He had not expected to bring the whole thing down. But he supposed it must be because the barrier had been made out of just the one small piece, really.
“Hooray!” Marianne said quietly, letting go of the rope.
Though the barrier now looked like a pile of nettles, brambles, and broken creepers, there was still jagged metal underneath. Cat flicked the rope loose from it and undid the fastenings from Syracuse and, while Marianne busily pegged the pants back onto the rope, he tried growing a mat of ivy over the barrier, to make it safer for Syracuse to walk on. Chrestomanci was always telling him that he should never waste magic, so Cat fed the slab of magic that had fastened the rope back into the fallen creepers.
This was quite as startling as the way the whole barrier had come down. Ivy surged and spread and gnarled and tangled, a mature and glossy dark green, in a whispering rush, that put out yellowish flowers and then black fruits in seconds, not just in one place as Cat had intended, but off along the fallen barrier in both directions. By the time Marianne had turned round with the pants pegged back on the clothesline, the barrier was a long mound of ivy as far as she could see both ways. It looked as if it had been growing there for years.
“My!” she said. “You do have dwimmer, don’t you!”
“It may be the magic in this wood,” Cat said. He sent the clothesline back where it had come from, then he turned Syracuse round and led him carefully over the ivy bank and down into the mossy road beyond. While Marianne crunched her way across after them, Cat stopped and got Klartch down. Klartch immediately became hugely happy. He gave out whistling squeaks and went lolloping off toward the nearest bend in the road. The mossy surface seemed perfect for his clawed feet. Syracuse felt it was perfect for hooves too. He bounded and waltzed and tried to take off after Klartch so determinedly that Cat was dragged along in great hopping bounds, with Marianne pelting after them.
They whirled round the bend in the road with Klartch in the lead. The old cart was there, parked in a new place on the verge, with the seeming old white mare grazing beside it. Beyond that, the old man looked up in amazement from his panful of mushrooms and bacon. He just managed to let the pan go and brace himself, before Marianne rushed up and hurled herself on him.
“Gaffer!” she screamed. “Oh, Gaffer, you’re not dead after all!” She pushed her face into the old man’s tattered jacket and burst into tears.
Syracuse stopped dead when he saw the old unicorn. She raised her head from the grass and looked at him inquiringly. A ray of sun, slanting between the trees, caught her horn and lit it into pearly creams and greens and blues. Or was that blue and green and white, like the tiles in Woods House, Cat wondered. Syracuse tiptoed respectfully toward her and put out his nose. Graciously, the old unicorn touched her nose to his.
“He’s got unicorn blood in him somewhere,” she remarked softly to Cat. “I wonder how that happened.”
Beyond her, Klartch was creeping toward the pan of mushrooms and bacon with his beak out. Cat thought he ought to go and drag him away. But Marianne was kneeling in the old man’s arms, sobbing out what seemed to be private things, and Cat was embarrassed about interrupting. However, while Cat hesitated, the old man swiveled himself around and spared an arm from Marianne in order to tap Klartch firmly on the beak. “Wait,” Cat heard him say. “You shall have some presently.” And he went back to listening attentively to Marianne.
“Do you understand a little more about dwimmer now?” the unicorn said conversationally to Cat.
“I—think so,” Cat said. “Irene has it. Marianne keeps saying I’ve got it too. Have I?”
“You have. Even more strongly than my old Gaffer,” the unicorn told him. “Didn’t you just grow several miles of ivy?”
Nearly a year ago now, Cat had been forced to accept that he was a nine-lifed enchanter. That had been hard to do, but he supposed it made it easier to accept having dwimmer too. He grinned, thinking of himself stuffed full of every kind of magic—except, he thought, Joe Pinhoe’s kind. But then, when he thought about it, he knew that Joe had been using dwimmer to animate that stuffed ferret of his. How muddling. “Yes,” he said. “Can you tell me what I ought to be doing with it?”
“We all hoped you might ask me that,” said the unicorn. “You can do many thousands of folk the same favor that Irene did for her househob, if you want.”
“Oh,” said Cat. “Where are these people?”
Syracuse nudged up to the unicorn and snorted impatiently.
“I’ll have a long talk with you in a moment,” she said to him. “Why don’t you graze on this tasty bank for a while?”
Syracuse looked at her questioningly. She stumped forward a step or so and flicked her horn affectionately along his mane. All his tack vanished, saddle, bit, reins, everything, leaving him without so much as a halter. He looked much better like that to Cat’s eyes. Syracuse twitched all over with relief, before he bent his head and started tearing up mouthfuls of grass and little fragrant plants.
“If you can taste it through all the peppermint you’ve eaten,” the unicorn remarked drily. She said to Cat, “I’ll put it all back later. The folks are here. Hidden behind. Imprisoned for no fault that I can see, except that they scare humans. Can’t you feel this?”
Cat examined the wood with his thoughts. It was quiet, too quiet, and the silence was not peace. It was the same emptiness that he had felt whenever he rode out with Syracuse, by the river and on the heath, and behind the emptiness was misery, and longing. It was the same thing that he had felt in Home Wood when he first encountered Mr. Farleigh. As for this wood, he remembered Chrestomanci saying, rather irritably, what a dreary, empty place it was. But here there seemed to be no rack of dead animals to act as a gate between the emptiness and the misery in the distance behind.
“I don’t know what to do about it,” he told the unicorn. He had not managed to do anything in Home Wood, even with a gate. What did you do here, against complete blankness? “You can’t clean a wood the way Irene cleaned those tiles.”
“You can make an opening, tho
ugh,” the unicorn suggested quietly. “Make a road between the background and the foreground. That’s how roads usually go.”
“I’ll try.” Cat stood and thought. If he thought of it as like stage scenery, he supposed he could make the empty wood seem like a solid sort of curtain that had been drawn across the real scenery, the blue distance behind, and then tightly fixed. “Draw it like a curtain?” he asked the unicorn.
“If you want,” she answered.
The trouble was, it was only the one curtain. There was no opening, the way there was with window curtains, where you take hold of the two sides and pull them apart. Cat could not see himself tearing trees and grass and bushes in two. Even if he could, it would kill everything. No. The only thing to do seemed to be to find the edge of the curtain, wherever that was, and pull it from there.
He looked for the edge. There was miles of this curtain. Like a sheet of rubbery gauze, it stretched and stretched, out across the country, out across the continent, over the oceans, right to the edges of the world. He had to stretch and stretch himself to get near it, and the rubbery edge kept slipping away from his imaginary clutching fingers. Cat clenched his teeth and stretched himself more, just that little bit further. And at last his reaching left hand closed on the thin, slippery edge of it. He put both hands to it and hauled. It would hardly budge. Someone had pegged it down really firmly. Even when the unicorn came and rested her horn gently on Cat’s shoulder, Cat could only move the thing an inch or so.
“Try asking the prisoners to help,” the unicorn murmured.
“Good idea,” Cat panted. Still hanging on to the distant end of the curtain, he pushed his mind into the empty blue distance behind it, and it was not empty. The ones inside were all swarming, drifting, and anxiously clustering toward the other side of the curtain. “Pull, pull!” he whispered to them. “Help me pull!” It was so like making Syracuse pull down the barrier that he almost offered them peppermint.
But they needed no bribery. They were frantic to get out now. They swooped on the place where Cat’s imaginary hands were clutched, in a storm of small, fierce strangenesses, and fastened on beside Cat and heaved. Beside Cat, the unicorn put her horn down and heaved too.
The curtain tore. First it came away in a long strip across the middle, making Cat stagger back into the unicorn. Then it tore downward, then diagonally, as more and more eager creatures inside clawed and hauled and pulled at it. Finally it began flopping down in wobbly dead heaps, which folded in on themselves and melted. Cat could actually smell it as it melted. The smell was remarkably like the disinfectant spell Euphemia had used on the stairs. But this smell was overwhelmed almost at once by a sweet, wild scent from the myriad beings who came whirring out past Cat’s face and fled away into the landscape. Cat thought it was, just a little, like the incense smell from the meadows by the river.
“Done it, I think!” he gasped at the unicorn. He slid down her hairy side and sat on the bank with a bump. He was weak with effort. But he was glad to see that the trees of the wood were still there. It would have been a mistake to have tried to tear the wood in half.
“You have,” the unicorn said. “Thank you.” Her horn gently touched Cat’s forehead. It smelled like the meadows too.
When Cat recovered and sat up properly, he saw that the old man was still talking earnestly with Marianne. But he knew what had been going on. His bright brown eyes kept turning appreciatively to the woods, although he now had the pan on his knees and was feeding a soothing mushroom to Marianne and then some bacon to Klartch, as if there was no difference between them.
“But, Gaffer,” Cat heard Marianne say, “if you’ve been trapped here all these years, where do you get your bacon from?”
“Your uncle Cedric puts it through the barrier for me,” Gaffer said. “And eggs. They all know I’m here, you know, but Cedric’s the only one who thinks I might need feeding.”
While they talked, the wood was making a great rustling and heaving. Like a sail filling with wind, it seemed to be filling with life around them. Cat looked down and saw, almost between his knees, a multitude of tiny green beings milling and welling out of the ground. Other, bigger ones flitted at the corners of his eyes. When he looked across the road, he could see strange gawky creatures stalking among the trees and small airborne ones darting from bush to bush. There seemed to be a tall green woman walking dreamily through a distant patch of sunlight. Someone came up behind Cat—all he could see of him or her was a very thin brown leg—and bent over to whisper, “Thank you. None of us are going to forget.” He or she was gone when Cat turned his head.
Hooves sounded on the mossy road. The unicorn, who was now standing head to tail with Syracuse, presumably having the talk she had promised, looked up at the sound. “Ah,” she said. “Here comes my daughter, free at last. Thank you, Cat.”
Cat and Marianne both found themselves standing up as a splendid young unicorn dashed along the road and stopped beside the old man’s cart. She was small and lissome and silvery, with quantities of white mane and tail. Cat could see she was very young because her horn was the merest creamy stub on her forehead. Syracuse, at the sight of her, began to prance and sidle and make himself look magnificent.
“Ah, no,” the old unicorn said. “She’s still only a yearling, Syracuse. She’s been a yearling for more than a thousand years. Give her a chance to grow up now.”
The small unicorn ignored Syracuse anyway and trotted lovingly up to her mother.
“Beautiful!” Gaffer said admiringly. He put the food down on the grass for Klartch and leaned over to concentrate on the young unicorn.
Klartch, to Cat’s surprise, turned away from the food and went shambling and stumbling across the road, making squeaks and hoots and long quavering whistles. The sounds were answered from inside the wood by a deeper whistling, like a trill on an oboe. A blot of darkness that Cat had taken for a holly brake stirred and stretched and moved out into the road, where she lifted great gray wings and put her enormous horn-colored beak down to meet Klartch. Cat knew it was the creature that had landed on his tower before Klartch was hatched. She was surprisingly graceful for something that huge, gray and white from her sleek feathered head to her lionlike furry body and swinging tufted tail. She lifted a feathered foot with six-inch talons on the end and gently, very gently, pulled Klartch in under one of her enormous wings.
She was Klartch’s mother, of course. For the first time in his life, Cat knew what it was like to be truly and wretchedly miserable. Before, when he had been miserable, Cat had mostly felt lost and peevish. But now, when he was going to lose Klartch, he felt a blinding heartache that not only devastated his mind but gave him a real, actual pain somewhere in the center of his chest. It was the hardest thing he had ever done, when he heaved up a difficult breath and said, “Klartch ought to go with you now.”
The mother griffin drew her beak back from Klartch squirming and squeaking under her wing and turned her enormous yellow eyes on Cat. Cat could see she was as sad as he was. “Oh, no,” she said in her deep, trilling voice. “You hatched him. I’d prefer you to bring him up. He needs a proper education. Griffins are meant to be as learned and wise as they are magical. He ought to have teaching that I never had.”
Gaffer said, rather reproachfully, “I did my best to teach you.”
“Yes, you did,” the mother griffin replied. She smiled at Gaffer with the ends of her beak. “But you could only teach me when I got out at full moon, Gaffer man. I hope you can teach me all the time now, but I’d like Klartch to have an enchanter’s upbringing.”
“So be it,” Gaffer said. He said to Cat, “Can you do that for her?”
“Yes,” Cat said, and then added bravely, “It depends what Klartch wants, though.”
Klartch seemed surprised that anyone should question what he wanted. He dived out from under the griffin’s big wing and scuttled over to Cat, where he leaned heavily against Cat’s legs and wiped his beak against Cat’s riding boots. “Mine,” h
e said. “Cat mine.”
The pain lifted from Cat’s chest like magic. He smiled—because he couldn’t help it—across at Klartch’s mother. “I really will look after him,” he promised.
“That’s settled, then,” Gaffer said, warm and approving. “Marianne, my pet, would you do me the favor of running down to the village and telling your dad I’ll be along shortly to sort things out? He won’t be too pleased, I’m afraid, so tell him I insisted. I’ll follow you when I’ve tidied up here.”
Chapter Eighteen
Now that Marianne was leaving, Cat realized that he ought to be going too. Joss Callow would have complained to Chrestomanci by this time. He went up to the big griffin and held his hand out politely. She rubbed it with her great beak. “May I visit Klartch from time to time?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” Cat said. “Any time.” He hoped Chrestomanci wouldn’t mind too much—he hoped Chrestomanci wouldn’t mind too much about all of it. He would have to confess what he had done to Mr. Farleigh sometime soon. He decided not to think about that yet.
When he turned round, Syracuse was stamping irritably because his saddle and bridle were back. Marianne was staring at the two unicorns.
“Gaffer,” she said, “when did old Molly turn into a unicorn?”
Gaffer looked up from cleaning out his pan. “She always was one, pet. She chose not to let people see it.”
“Oh,” Marianne said. She was very quiet, thinking about this, as she walked along the mossy road with Cat and Syracuse. The old gray mare who took Luke Pinhoe to London and then came back on her own—had that been Molly too? Unicorns lived for hundreds of years, they said. Marianne wished she knew.
Cat was letting Klartch bumble along behind them since the surface suited his feet so well. Around them, the woods were full of green distances that had not been there before and alive with rushings, rustlings, and small half-heard voices. There was laughter too, some of it plain joyful, some of it mean and mocking.