“Oh, not you. I took possession of you already well before now and you are mine, toy. However, we’ve timed our taking of you to coincide with our culling.” She turned to Ađalbrandr. “Where are the pilgrims?”
“They are coming,” answered the knight, rising.
The Queen of Ailfion said, “Thomas Lindsay Rimor de Ercildoun, your family have indeed given us much. One final thing from you will settle our debt.”
“My life?” he asked, his throat suddenly constricting.
She replied, “Why, mayfly, I have that already.”
Slowly, out of the dark rain, the remaining three pilgrims emerged from around the ruins of the abbey, the leader distinguishable by his wide-brimmed hat. He held a rope that tugged a stumbling fourth party along behind him.
She said, “Tonight, we’ll have your wife for our teind.”
Thomas screamed but no sound came out. He wrestled to break free of the Yvag holding him, but his body remained still. She had spoken his name, his full name, his true name, and now controlled him exactly as his own riddle had surmised. The magic, it seemed, cut both ways, and he only knew a part of hers. Perhaps he had stung her, but he could not take her over, could not win against her.
Queen Nicnevin gestured with both hands as if pulling the air and re-collecting it. Something like a wind, a stream of energy, flowed out of the hole to the other world and into her hands, where it pulsed and glowed like a small sun. She threw it in his face and a searing pain roared through him. He fell to his knees, unable to resist. His mind seemed to crack apart, to scatter upon the night before it coalesced again, into something alien and confused.
Where he had stood, a shaggy ram had replaced him.
The Yvag who had held him knocked his skinny legs out from under him and he fell. He tried to shout but it emerged as a trumpeting bleat. The Yvags tore the remaining clothing off him. They bound his legs—his hooves—with straps, tight, secure. Another handed them a pole and they jammed it under the straps and lifted him into the air, where he hung upside down. Helpless.
Upside down, he watched a woman stumble forward on the end of the rope tied round her neck, a hood drawn over her head, her clothing sodden with mud, her feet bare despite the cold. Even as he took her in, she was pulled out of his line of sight.
He strained to no avail, bleated his rage. Tried to shout her name: “Janet!” It came out as another fearful blat.
The pilgrim leader handed the rope to Ađalbrandr. To the Queen he said, “According to our Yvagvoja in Roxburgh, he married his neighbor’s daughter. But tonight that Yvagvoja is no more. He has killed it and lich both.” The pilgrim pointed accusingly at him.
“Yes, we know. We must seek another to replace the magistrate.”
Seemingly deflated by this dismissal of what he’d thought was a revelation, the pilgrim turned instead upon their captive. “We caught her sneaking back to the house from wherever she’d run, my Queen,” he said.
Bending down, to Thomas the Ram, the Queen said, “This is what comes of meddling in our affairs. Even an idiot should know to stay away from elves and faeries.” She was practically laughing at him, but mercurially shed her amusement, adding sternly, “You should have enjoyed what was given you, and not sought revenge for that which our need necessitated.”
The pilgrims by now were circling Janet. He knew what was happening even before the chirring sound began, the strange chanting of the Yvags. Soon it stopped and he heard ripping, tearing. Rags of cloth were tossed away from the group. He did not have to see to know that his wife was now naked, spelled to walk to her doom, exactly as Onchu had done.
The Queen turned her mount about. “Bring them both, Ađalbrandr. We shall provide a family reunion. Briefly. And, you, seal up the rent after us.” The pilgrim nodded.
The Queen rode into the circle and was immediately swallowed in the blood-drenched gloom of the other side. Again, for an instant her momentum appeared to hesitate, and then she was inside the other world. Thomas was carried toward it, helpless, her trophy. Behind him another Yvag kicked Janet forward. Upside down, he could only see her stumbling feet behind him.
What had she done, left Morven with her father and then rushed back to aid him? He could not blame her for it, nor for anything. Neither he nor Alpin had heeded the danger, either. They’d challenged these creatures at every turn and it had become his obsession. Janet had been brave, that was all.
But bravery saved nobody.
PART THREE:
TYWYLLWCH
LLWYR
XXI. A Road to Hel
The red road to the woods extends seemingly into eternity. A road through hell. It feels as if they float along it for days—float because no one seems to be walking and yet, hung upside down, he’s swaying on the pole as the furrowed bloodred tunnel ripples past, recedes in the distance. It’s as if the tunnel itself is compressing and expanding, moving around them while they stay in place. It’s as if they’re inside the body of an earthworm, an idea so grotesque he dismisses it. Was it like this before, with Waldroup? It was hard going, he recalls; they seemed to run in place and get nowhere but then to have traveled some distance. Now he can’t be sure. Disoriented and dizzy, confused, he can’t be sure of anything at all. Even of time: Has it been days or mere moments? Can it be both at once?
Awaiting the Queen on this side are five mounted knights. What’s strange is that on this side their mounts and hers are almost luminescent: Instead of the polished blackness of their bodies, they are radiantly white here, forged from congealed moonlight.
Eventually, the red ribbed sides disappear and a darkness enfolds them as if they’re journeying through a lightless cavern deep underground. He’s sure he didn’t pass this way with Waldroup. Not that it matters. He’s helpless, however they go, wherever and whenever they arrive. He expects he won’t die until then. Closing his eyes, he tries to insulate himself from the journey by concentrating on all the unanswered questions.
How do they pick their victims, and why? Is it a matter of convenience? Onchu from Ercildoun, and then many years later the girl from Carterhaugh—it seems they’re careful not to select too many from one area, a notion reinforced by the pilgrims, who seem to have arrived at his door from multiple locations. And, of course, there’s what Waldroup saw on the battlefield: how they pluck victims where no one will miss them. Thomas was lucky up till now. Once they arrive wherever they’re going, though, if given the chance he will insist on taking Janet’s place. She has a daughter, an influential father. She’ll be missed. He won’t. Let her go home to Morven. He’ll be their teind. . . . Just please let them return him to human form again that he might bargain, exchange his life for hers. But what if they don’t? The Queen can do anything she likes to him. He has no say in anything on this side of the veil. What is the fate of the teind? Thus far the only fate he knows of here is the fate of those who stray from the path and in among the Þagalwood trees. He and Waldroup speculated that Onchu had become . . . what Gallorini became, but there’s no proof of it. Torment and torture might take a million forms among these creatures. He thinks of Janet, and has to fight down his terror. Think! he screams silently. Even upside down and helpless, he needs to think, but all he can think of is Janet being tossed in among those skeletal trees and the flesh ripped from her bones, while they stretch and twist into another hideous, spindly moaning form. The image makes him cry out, one more ragged inhuman bleat, and he panics, opening his eyes again, straining against his bonds to rock side to side, twisting his neck for a single glimpse of his wife. Of course it’s near-pitch-black here. What did he expect? She was behind Ađalbrandr. At least this dark route is not that path he and Waldroup cut open in Italia.
He has just taken small comfort in this when out of the darkness on either side of him the spectral trees finally emerge; carried this way, he can’t see the network of branches overhead. But having thought of Gallorini, he watches for that small bony tree.
When they pass it he almost gasps.
So this now is the path he followed with Alpin; they have connected to it from a different route. The way from Italia isn’t the way from Melrose.
He is carried past Gallorini without slowing, which makes him hopeful that such is not the fate of the teind. Wouldn’t there be more of those small ones by now—the girl from Carterhaugh who was taken would be here, too? And others, surely many others. Especially Onchu. Even deformed by this forest, his brother would be recognizable to him, he’s sure of it.
The Gallorini tree itself is no taller than the last time he saw it, as if planted only yesterday, one tiny sapling among the tall and deformed trunks. And then he wonders if it’s only been days or weeks here since that incursion. Time is some other measure in Ailfion. He and Waldroup were here for only an hour or so, while the whole night passed by in Italia. Who knows how many hours are racing by at home as they float along here? He cannot attune himself to it.
Around him, now and again, the Yvag knights speak to each other in that strange thrumming that he doesn’t understand. It’s like birdsong—he knows there’s a conversation there, but its meaning is opaque.
There’s enough light to see. He rocks and twists his head back again, and finally for a moment manages to glimpse Janet’s muddy legs and feet on the red ribbon of road. She isn’t lifting them any more than the knight ahead of her, isn’t plodding along despite how everything around them flows past, and again he has the disorienting sense of the world about him compressing and expanding to move them all along.
All at once they come to a complete stop so abrupt it’s as if time itself has ceased.
