He skids to his knees beside the path and claws at the soil. The Gallorini tree whispers, Tomasso, and in horror he stares. It has no mouth, no face he can recognize, but again his anguished name floats through the darkness from it.
The thunder grows. Thomas twists around.
The Yvag knight is but a speck in the distance, but will surely ride him down in less than a minute. The way everything collapses on itself here, it could be seconds.
No time. He casts about, pictures Gallorini calling Strega! after them, remembering what the poor man carried.
Across the reddish soil the glint of Gallorini’s sword reveals itself; like a compass needle it points at him. He clutches the wide wootz-steel blade, pulls it to him. The sword’s quillons catch and flip up the bolt of a crossbow, and then the stock. With a tug he drags both to himself through the dirt and the fingery roots. His whole body shakes as if from the thunder of hooves and the growing threat. Down the path, the knight draws a sword, holds it out, positioned to lop off his head as it passes him.
Training consumes his panic, takes over.
The bolt fits into its channel, kept in place by the whipcord bowstring. The Italians taught him the basics of the crossbow. He tugs the stock, unceremoniously falls back to a seated position, and slaps the crossbow down between his legs. The knight is almost on top of him. He shoves his feet against its sides, and inelegantly pulls the bowstring back by hand as hard as he can, nocking it. Tension boils out of him in a howl.
The Yvag is huge, surely larger even than Ađalbrandr. It seems to grin impossibly wide at this easy, seated, defenseless prey, showing nothing but the white of those teeth.
In one quick motion, Thomas leans back, tilts the crossbow up and fires. Then, as the knight’s sword slices straight at his neck, he throws himself back and to the side.
He rolls into the roots, which wriggle up. They don’t grab him securely the way they did Gallorini, but he hacks them to pieces nevertheless. The chopped, bleeding roots slither back into the dirt, and Thomas pitches away, coming up on his knees just in time to watch the hulking Yvag knight crash down over the back of its moon-white mount, slam into the path, and then lie still. The bolt sticks up above its helm.
The pale beast the knight rode slows to a stop, looks back as if uncertain what to do next.
He gets up, walks unsteadily around the body, sword at the ready.
The bolt’s driven into the skull from beneath the chin. The body quivers, and like some immense eel the shiny black uniform pulls loose, slides off the form, and pools on the ground beside it, leaving a wide strap attached to a hard scabbard for the sword. The thing is not Ađalbrandr, no, not even Yvag.
The body is bone white, the same as the beast it rode—another Þagalwood construct, assembled in the shape of a knight, with an elongated oval of a head and empty eye sockets. There’s no mouth. What he took for a grin was the white bone of its face beneath the black helm. He can’t even be sure it’s dead, can he?
Gallorini’s sword slices right through the neck. Thomas kicks the head away, off the path. The body never moves, but he still doesn’t trust it. In any case, it carried no ördstone the way an Yvag might have.
How many other construct guardians of the Þagalwood are right now waiting to ride him down? Better not to find out.
Using the sword like a staff, he lowers onto his knees again and pats frantically at the ground all around the path, side to side, working methodically up the path from the body. How far did they stand from Gallorini? Farther than this, but Waldroup thought he’d lost the stone before the little Italian showed up. If not, Thomas will have to keep searching back that way. He scrapes across the surface with the sword blade, flipping up pebbles, bits of dead root.
Then, on the far edge, where his palm passes over the dirt, one spot suddenly glitters, sparkling blue. And there’s Waldroup’s ördstone.
He keeps the guardian’s spiny black blade and the stone, puts on the strap so that the sheathed sword sits comfortably between his shoulder blades; he discards the boltless crossbow and Gallorini’s fine sword. Blearily and without ceremony, he runs around the bonelike corpse, slices the air, then grabs the reins of the untended beast and hauls it after him through the fiery-edged portal.
Quickly stepping past the beast, Thomas knelt and sealed up the green fire. Then he turned.
On the hilltop above stood a Cistercian abbey, an immense silhouette rising against the early streaks of dawn sky, its shape all too familiar. He was in Italia.
In something like awe, he pushed back the helm and let the night air ruffle his hair and cool his sweat. He was with Waldroup again for a moment, having just survived their first encounter with the Þagalwood, about to discover that Waldroup had collected all the Yvags’ ördstones from the crypt of Old Melrose. They all need to cut their way home, he’d said.
“Yes,” Thomas answered the remembered words. “We all do.”
The sleek monster beside him, black now, stood patiently, having nothing to do. Thomas gripped the ördstone again. His weird inhuman fingers shook and he feared he might drop it. He had been thinking of Gallorini and Waldroup and apparently had opened a doorway to the last place they had all been together. If he was right, the ördstone was somehow attuned to his thoughts, his memories: It brought him where he wanted to go.
He blinked sweat from his eyes, concentrated hard upon the image of Old Melrose, then carefully sliced the dawn air, ready to draw the sword in case soldiers came pouring out of the opening. None did, and there on the other side of the spitting green ring stood the ruins. No red reflective tunnel leading first through Ailfion, Þagalwood, whatever it should be called—this was a doorway between two places as if they stood side by side.
The shiny black steed waited patiently, and he swung up into the saddle. The beast didn’t react, didn’t try to throw him off the way a horse might have done. Maybe it didn’t distinguish one armored rider from another. Maybe given how it was assembled, it had no allegiance to anything, simply knew its job. He didn’t care. Home was right in front of him. Home. His eyes flushed with tears. “Janet,” he whispered.
He kicked the steed into motion and they rode through the circle, from Italia to Scotland in four short steps.
With a sob of thanks to God, he offered a silent prayer to Taliesin. The old man had saved his life. He’d escaped from the inescapable prison. He had survived.
Now he must dismount and seal up the portal. He drew the beast to a stop and started to swing down—at which point something struck him from behind and dragged him to the ground.
PART FOUR:
RECKONINGS
XXX. Filib & Janet
Filib Lusk squatted in the overgrowth that was steadily devouring the remains of Old Melrose. He kept his hood up because it was cold: Winter was coming, and soon enough these nightly vigils would be suspended until the thaw.
Even with those iced-over months, in the time that Filib had accompanied Janet Lynn to watch for her husband’s return, he had witnessed three occasions where people were taken by the elves as tithes. Twice the ceremonies had been conducted by men; once, by two men and a woman. All were people he recognized as powerful members of society, including landowners, a prioress, and even the previous sheriff of Roxburgh. Always one or two of the black-armored elves joined or accompanied them. He’d come to appreciate that his childhood notion of elves bore little resemblance to the sinister reality of them, and that whatever they were up to involved a conspiracy of his neighbors—powerful people assisting them. No doubt they received some benefit in return—maybe even the power they wielded. And no doubt if they spied him watching, his life wouldn’t be worth a pence.
None of that affected him; Filib accompanied Janet out of more guilt than any threat of death could discourage. In showing his copy-work to a magistrate named Baggi, he had been the cause of both Tàm Lynn’s and his own sister’s abductions: They had both vanished on the very night that Baggi, seated in The Blind Fiddler, had abruptly clutched his throat and, in front of a dozen screaming witnesses, melted like a human taper. Some who hadn’t run off immediately claimed that his heart had burst right out of his chest and taken flight. He’d had Filib’s parchment with him still, but afterward nobody would touch it, covered as it was in Baggi.
He’d never told Janet nor anyone else about giving his parchment to the magistrate, and the guilt of that secret ate away at him. He continued to accompany the widow every night she chose to come here, even though he’d long since given up that they would ever see her husband or Sìleas again. Taken people traveled in but one direction—and that was into the ring of green fire.
Deep down in his soul he might have wanted revenge for his sister’s absence, but he knew better than to act upon it. He was just a simple farmer, not someone skilled in fighting demons. He wasn’t even a soldier like Tàm Lynn, who had proved no match for the elves in the end, either.
No, Sìleas had been a warning to him and Kester not to pry or interfere, unless they wanted to disappear, too. Aiding Janet Lynn had to be enough, and he thought probably it wouldn’t be for much longer. She was ill, he knew, though she hid this well and never spoke of it.
