Tonight would end the same as all the other nights. He and she would reluctantly depart with the sun coming up, knowing that they had done their duty to her husband’s memory, to the promise she’d made.
Filib climbed up on stiff legs, turned to walk over to where Janet sat on the hillside, wrapped in heavy blankets. His back was to the spot in the moment that his shadow was suddenly thrown ahead of him in flickering green radiance.
Filib crouched back down. He looked about sharply for a nearby gathering, a new tithe being shoved nakedly into the clear space they watched, but no one was there below. No one had opened the way. The green line split and spread into a circle as if on its own, and moments later a lone knight in spiky black armor emerged, riding a huge black stallion—at least superficially in the dark it looked like a stallion. Closer observation revealed that it was one of their beasts, with smoldering red eyes. Odd, he thought, he’d not beheld one of them alone riding out before, though invariably some always seemed to be on hand for the ritual of the teind.
Unexpectedly, Janet flung off her blankets and crept down the hill. Filib didn’t dare even call out for her to stop. What was she doing? Why was she taking this risk? He hurried cautiously after her, pulled his dagger, uncertain what he could do if she revealed her presence. Would he dare to kill one of the demons?
The knight turned the beast in a tight circle, then started to get down. He seemed weary, as if crossing between worlds had thoroughly exhausted him. His shaggy black hair shone in the moonlight, shadowing his face.
Then, before Filib could reach her, Janet Lynn charged out of the bushes beside the ruins and straight at the knight, who had one foot in his stirrup and was swinging his other leg over the gilded saddle.
She would get them both killed. Elves were known to be lethal, and this one wore a broadsword. Filib ran after her anyway.
Janet tackled the knight, who cried out, and twisted around, unprepared, his sharp gray face a mask of terror . . . Then suddenly her hands circled an enormous hissing serpent, writhing and squirming hard enough to send them both to the ground.
The saddled beast stamped and backed away.
Filib reached them just as the serpent became something huge, warty, and hideous like Filib imagined trolls to be. Janet clung round its thick neck—he didn’t know how. This had to be excruciating for her.
The elf transformed again, into a snarling creature with huge teeth and a mane like a kelpie. Abruptly it was an elf again, this time with its helm pushed back and its gray mottled skin, and wild silvery hair uncontained, whipping about. It could easily have flung her off, but it transformed instead into a huge wolf, as though it couldn’t settle upon any one form for long. The wolf swatted at her as she rode its back, then rolled upon the ground, rolled on top of her. Filib stood stupefied. Janet lost her hold and was thrown aside.
Clutching her side, she yelled, “Stop it, stop, my love! Please!” The wolf, facing her, took two steps and simply melted away, falling straight into her arms. And there, to Filib’s amazement when he reached her, lay Tàm Lynn, dressed just like the elf knights who had escorted victims through the hole, his hair black again and matted against his forehead.
Disbelieving what he saw, Filib kept his dagger out. Twenty years. If somehow he had survived and escaped the elves, it was a miracle. Tàmhas Lynn was weeping, shivering. His hands cupped Janet’s face, smearing it with dirt, his lips kissed her cheeks, her mouth, and he murmured her name over and over as if he’d been starved of hearing it. Finally, he sagged in her grasp. She lay him down gently on his back.
She reached out to Filib. He tucked his dagger away and hurried to aid her. He helped her to her feet and remained to steady her. They stared down at her husband.
For all he must have endured, the clean-shaven Tàm Lynn looked as young as the day he’d vanished, younger than Filib himself. Would he know what had happened to Sìleas? Was she still alive and preserved on the other side of that green fire, too?
For the first time, Filib thought that they might rescue his sister.
As he lay unconscious at their feet, he shivered, and his body rippled uncertainly between states, from elf with long, slender fingers and sharp face, to serpent, troll, kelpie, wolf, and back to trembling Tàm. Steam rose off his skin as if on the inside he was on fire.
Janet worried, “What if he’s fleeing them? What if they’re chasing him right now?”
Filib saw the round and glittering stone in Tàm Lynn’s hand, bent down and picked it up. He’d watched how those people like Baggi had opened and closed their fiery circles, just like the one Tàm had ridden through using something small and flashing with this same light. He got up and hurried past the beast. It regarded him warily, seeming to focus upon the stone in his hand. He knelt and just stared at it a moment in his hand. It looked like nothing but a polished and scalloped stone set with bright jewels, more like something he and his brother might have skipped across a pond than an object of magic.
With some trepidation, he reached out and touched it to the green fire. His fingers tingled. In his head was a humming drone. Squinting and ready to jump away, he started to draw it up, diagonally. The very bottom of the fiery ring appeared to pull loose and attach itself to the stone, sealing and then vanishing after it. Halfway up, he looked through the opening that remained; he beheld what looked like an enormous abbey cresting a hill. The sun was coming up there the same as it was here. It didn’t look like what he imagined Elfland to be. The abbey vanished from view. A few seconds later, the circle was gone as if it had never existed.
Filib found the beast still watching him with its dark red eyes. Its polished black head looked as much like a machine as it did a horse.
“I don’ think anyone was coming after ’im,” he said. “Prolly we shouldn’t wait about to see, though.” He glanced down. The unconscious Tàm Lynn seemed to have resolved into himself, finally. No steam poured off his unconscious form now.
Together they loaded his body across the beast’s odd saddle.
Filib dropped the stone into his small purse, tied at his belt. Kester would surely want to see it. The beast was definitely watching it, too.
He took the reins and led the beast after Janet, remaining as far away from its black bony head as possible. Its three-toed hooves left odd markings in the ground, nothing like a horse’s hoof. “This might be a problem,” he said. Janet saw where he pointed. “Anybody’ll see and follow these prints easy.”
She studied the ground. “All right.” After a moment she suggested, “What say we go up over the hills and come in from the east, over the rocky hilltops. Less likely to leave any tracks there. It might confuse them.”
They walked on awhile before he added, “Still, they’re gonnae come to my house, because it used tae be yourn. First place they’ll look no matter where we send ’em ’ere.”
“Then you must be home and sleeping and innocent. Give me the reins and I’ll walk this beast. We’ll come up far from you, far from where you enter. I won’t tell you where. Then you cannot possibly know and none will find the knowledge in you.”
That appeased him somewhat. They went on. He continued thinking it all over. “What d’you suppose happened ’im, makes him able tae change like that?”
“I’ve no idea. Something the elves did to him.”
“We’re sure it’s him, then?”
“I am,” she replied.
“Yeah.” He thought a moment. “Maybe it’s all glamourin’, hey? You could ask yer father’s friend, Forbes. ’e tells my wee ones all manner of stories of elves and fairies dancing on the Tweed waters by the mill.”
Janet made no reply.
Probably it wasn’t the best idea to bring up the miller Forbes. After all, he’d offered her his hand in marriage repeatedly since Tàm had vanished. She’d refused, but then as something of a consolation, after her father’s death had allowed him to advise her on commodities. The last time he’d pressed his suit had only been a week ago. She hadn’t yet given him her answer. So, then, not the man you went to and announced that your long-lost husband has returned. Besides, tales of faerie folk didn’t mean he knew anything about anything. Everybody knew some tales. Filib had witnessed enough now to know that most were nonsense. There was nothing friendly or kind about the elven.
He’d begun by accompanying her on these vigils, doubting that she was more than a mad, grieving widow of a man who’d run off—until the night he’d witnessed a teind being taken. That had kicked him back on his heels. Thereafter, one of them—Janet, he, or Kester—had kept watch most nights. They’d all beheld people and elves splitting open a night and taking some poor lost soul through the green fire to nowhere—sometimes it was someone they knew. They’d all seen the gray spiky bastards, and understood that Tàmhas had not left of his own volition and so probably nor Sìleas.
She asked for the reins. He handed them over, but the beast snorted and tried to bolt. She gripped them tight, but the beast twisted away, as if it wanted to go with Filib. “Wait,” he said. He opened his pouch and took out the odd stone. The beast calmed down. “Here, missus, I think you have tae possess this.”
Sure enough, the beast tracked the handing over of the stone. Janet pulled the reins lightly and the creature started walking docilely behind her. She stopped. “Thank you, dear Filib,” she said, and came back to him. “Thank you for never quitting on me. I know perfectly well you and your brother have thought me mad all these years.” She leaned forward and kissed him.
He smiled stupidly, blushing. Quickly, he waved her off and walked away, headed up toward his house, the house that had been built by Tàmhas Lynn more than twenty years ago. He could never tell her the real truth, which was that he’d been in love with her since she’d first placed her hands around his, enclosing a stylus that together they pushed across a parchment in his first attempts to write.
After reaching his home, he lingered beside the byre and looked out over the hills, but she and the beast had disappeared. He had no idea what path she’d taken. Janet had found her Tàmhas again. Full well he knew that nothing good was going to come of it.
