death shares their bed.”
He sprawled onto his side, his legs jerking.
Baldie sat stricken. “Thomas Rimor?”
“Then it is he,” said the alderman. “O, glorious day. We account for him at last.” He paused only an instant before he charged Waldroup, so fast and close that it was all Waldroup could do to spring aside; a hoof struck him a blow in the hip and spun him in a new direction, where he landed hard against the edge of a gravestone.
Thomas heard it all. With all of his will, he made himself rise to his knees.
The alderman rode past him, and like a man half his age he leapt from his horse. It only took him two steps to reach the spot where Onchu had been taken, raise his hand as if to command the sky, and then begin to draw downward, leaving a crooked line of green fire burning in the air.
Waldroup sprang clumsily off the gravestone where he’d fallen, both hands raised over his head. As he dropped he plunged his remaining knife into the alderman’s shoulder. Stroud howled, and dropped a small black object he’d been holding. The green fire burned like a puckered scar but no portal expanded from it. It was too small and malformed. Waldroup tumbled to the ground and Stroud kicked him in the head.
Thomas reached for the spilled arrow, dragged it to him, and slapped it against his bow. From his left, Baldie charged, and he barely rolled away before the hooves could strike him.
Instead of coming for him again, Baldie kicked his horse faster to ride down Waldroup, sword now drawn for the kill. Thomas rolled to his knees again and with the bow laid horizontally fired his one arrow. It struck Baldie square in the back and threw him against his horse’s neck. The sword flew from his grasp and his horse ran on past Waldroup, nearly knocking down Stroud.
The alderman fled on foot. He wove among the graves and ducked through the opening in the broken corner of the old abbey before Thomas could scrabble to nock another arrow or stand up.
Baldie’s skewbald horse had come to a stop. It turned, backed up, sidestepped, responding to confused signals from its rider, until it had come about. Baldie tried to sit upright. The gory head of the arrow pushed out from between his ribs. Hunching, he held both hands wide in a gesture of surrender. “Now, wait, Thomas, wait.”
Thomas held another arrow ready for his bow. “You told everyone I drowned my own brother.”
“We had to offer some story that would be believed. You were both gone.”
“You took my sister, stole her will, swapped her baby for a . . . a thing.”
Behind him, Waldroup groaned. He gasped out, “‘A wake be their joining,’ hey?”
“I’m Balthair. Listen, I’m your brother-in-law now, Thomas.” He wrapped one hand around the shaft of the arrow and tried to pull it, but it was slick with blood and his hand slid around the tip. It must have cut him, but he didn’t react. He kept attempting to pull it to no avail.
“Baldie drowned. I saw him. E’en held him for a moment.”
Blood was trickling from Baldie’s mouth, bubbling and foamy on his lips with each labored breath. His skin was pale, gray. He squeezed his eyes shut in pain, though even then his expression remained cold and uncanny. He leaned forward until he lay against the horse. When he opened his eyes next, for one brief instant he was Baldie again, a friend behind his boasts. “Hey-o, Tommy,” he wheezed. “Thankee.” His body began to shake then. A red mist burst into the air as if erupting from his pores. It was like nothing Thomas had ever seen and it evaporated in an instant. Then Baldie’s face went slack and more than slack. His mouth seemed to slough down toward his chin. The skin around his eyes, his cheeks, the flesh on his outstretched fingers, all melted like candlewax, and he pitched sideways and fell. He landed in the wet snow like a rupturing winesack and lay still.
Waldroup managed to pull himself up against a gravestone to view the corpse. Mud and blood smeared his face. “Sweet Jesus. What was he?”
As if in reply, from the depths of the old abbey behind them came an inhuman screech.
“He was Baldie, but he wasn’t anymore. Only at the very last . . .”
Waldroup tried to stand, but almost stumbled, and clung to the gravestone, wincing. “I’m going to need a minute or two. The alderman, Thomas. He has our answers. We have to stop him escaping, can’t let him bring others.”
Thomas got up, gathered his arrows back into his quiver. Then, cautiously, he approached the line of green fire. Close, it hissed like fatty meat dripping on a spit. He crouched and retrieved the black thing the alderman had dropped. It was a peculiar stone, the same one he’d used to open the way before the Queen of Ailfion. It was circular, polished, and black with greenish-gray pebbling. One edge was scalloped, something like the way a flint ax head might look, but much more precisely cut. Indentations ran from between the scallops, and each one seemed to glow a deep glittering blue, a crescent of jewels. It fit his hand, and was warm as if it had been set near a fire.
He glanced at Waldroup, balanced on one leg and warily watching; then he touched the stone to the bottom of the fire, drew upward back along the line. The fire vanished as if he’d wiped it away until there was nothing but a thread of smoke.
Waldroup sighed with relief. “I thought sure ’twould kill you if you touched it.”
“So did I.”
“Brave or foolish lad you are, Tommy.”
“If we can close it, then probably we can open it again, too.”
“Well, leave it closed for now. I don’t want to face more of them. Save opening for another time.” He gestured to the abbey door. “The alderman.”
“What screamed?”
Waldroup shook his head. “He maybe let something loose in there. Wait for a moment and I’ll come with you.”
Thomas smiled but proceeded.
“Be careful, then, little brother.” It was what he had called Thomas the first time they’d met on this spot, the same thing Onchu had always called him. “I’ll be right behind you, if a bit slow.”
Thomas crept to the ruins, bow at the ready, and peered around the edge of the hole. Then he stooped and ducked inside the abandoned abbey.
X. Among the Ruins
Light poured down into the abbey, most of it through the open sections where the roof thatch had rotted away. Some thatch lay upon the floor, covered with unblemished snow, no footprints to indicate that anyone had fled to the far end. The only footprints descended the stone steps to the dark crypt beneath what had been the nave.
Thomas stood at the top, motionless, taut as his bowstring. Then came the sound—a faint, grating, scraping sound. Stone against stone.
He went cautiously down the nine steps, knowing he was vulnerable, visible in the one large shaft of light, the narrow space confining him to pressing his bow close, no way to fire it.
New pressure grew in his head. He stopped, ready to fight off the seizure, to lurch back up the steps, but no fit manifested and the pressure remained. As his panic subsided, he took stock of the sensation, recognized how it was different, yet familiar. He knew it now: the pressure of the Queen and her soldiers as they’d passed him by on that summery day—the chirring whispery words of a language he did not understand. Where was it coming from now? Had the alderman opened a new gate to his world after all?
