XXIV. Sink, Galloon
Glitch woke and thought he'd died. He touched his heart, it was somewhere near where he laid his hand, and felt for it. One. Steady. Rhythm. All his own.
Wyatt was now part of it.
"You—you're—"
But no more words forced their way from him. He was up, pressing forward, removing his hand from his heart to test the warmth of Wyatt's neck. It was hot, the power of solar warmth, with the promise of blood behind it. In case it was a dream, Glitch leaned in, mouth poised over Wyatt's lips. Breath landed on his cheek. A mouth landed on his. He wanted to glide, shift, fade: he wanted to sink into Wyatt kiss by kiss.
"You're not dead," he finally revealed the source of confusion. His bewilderment brought a tighter cling to Wyatt, caresses across a bristled chin, tugs of cloth lapel and shirt collar. "You're not dead."
"Glitch," Wyatt's stern voice was roughened by the lust in him, "listen for a second… Do you know what's happened?"
"To me?" He pointed to himself, gleeful and giddy. Then it evanished amid a rainfall of dismal doubt. "To you? To DG?"
"DG's fine. Like I am. She's here with— She'll be back. She went into the village for some food for you. We think it might've been days since you've eaten."
"Not days, I—"
All at once afraid of where he'd been, how he could've been so mistaken, Glitch clung to Wyatt. His ear pressed against the chest, the breathing within mixing across the curls atop his head. The life in him, undeniable, beautiful. He could stay forever, listening.
"What happened?"
"I'll tell you when DG gets here. You must've had some kind of trip, Glitch. We've been tracking you for months."
But he vowed no more, only holding, clinging, pressing. When the earth shuddered from the sound of feet, Glitch rose, Wyatt with him. Out of the parting of trees, DG emerged. Glitch engulfed great sobs of joy at the beauty of her. She laughed and leapt into a hug. They waltzed, fell, rolled on the ground, careless as cats playful in the noonday sun. Wyatt took up the lunch pail and rooted through it, glancing at his loved ones when he heard DG giggle for the first time since Glitch had gone. Love freed them, imprisoned them, then liberated them once more. He remembered his life before them, despised what he'd been, and knew how they had saved him. The cost of his retribution pained him still. Every love, he knew, had an overlay of deceit somewhere. DG couldn't be theirs forever. It was always a lie she told, one he never believed.
Glitch purred and smiled, folding his hands into DG's hair. Her body moulded to his as though she hadn't been gone from it. He wrapped his legs round hers, kissed her with all his feeling. "Precious, lovely you, what have I been doing without you? Where've you been? How did I think you were dead?"
"Ambrose," DG whispered. She scurried to her feet and, for comfort against the implications of his nefarious name, hid behind Wyatt.
Glitch stared at him, resolved to have the answers, if he had to be still, if he had to clutch the intangible, beady, slippery ends of them. "What did I do? How did I let Ambrose control me?"
"You got this idea in your head, Glitch," Wyatt started. It was voted by the two of them that he would lead this discussion. The language was difficult to sort through, what words to use, what words might be damaging or cursed.
"Right," he nodded. Thoughts that were once his own, spoken again—they were easy to follow, like a road through a glen. "Right. The breaking spell. Oh—did I tell you? Or did— Did I tell you? I found out from some hag who turned into a crow—or, wait, no— It was some old man in galligaskins. Miles back, in a village by some trees. Well, that could be anywhere, couldn't it? He said that we would find the witch if we found the path of bones. Path of bones, Wyatt!"
Glitch shook Wyatt until his words glistened in exuberance.
"Path of bones! Do you hear me? Not sweet, sweet paths lines with rose bushes or tomato plants, or found by climbing old stone walls covered in brambles, like in old fairy stories. Just a path of bones…" His fingers hovered over his bottom lip, where DG had left his kiss, as he drifted further into significant contemplation. "I thought I'd found it, the path of bones, when we met the owl-man."
The realisation thundered, clashed, bore Glitch away in a hurricane of guilt, remorse, anguish. The doom he caused reared, surfaced, and led him, staggering, into a willow. DG and Wyatt rushed to catch him. Grateful as he was to have them to lean into, comforted by their warmth, he couldn't let them love him without telling them first.
"Wyatt… You know what it's like… DG wouldn't. Angels mustn't get their wings soiled… But you know." He clung with strength in his fisted hands to Wyatt's shirt, looking up into the face that loved him. "You know what it's like—when you just have to kill a man."
He fainted clean away. Wyatt fetched DG's look with an unequivocal stare.
"Kill a man?"
DG's chin shook, tears coming as diamonds into her eyes. "It must've been Ambrose, if it happened at all. Ambrose," she gulped, gazing upon Glitch, "Ambrose could kill a man. Wyatt… Wyatt, we have to do something. Path of bones, what is that? We should get back to the village, get a room. We should telegram Chessa, at least, and let her know we found him. I should tell Az…"
She knelt with Wyatt next to Glitch, held his other hand. Glitch between them received her sympathy, simple as it was, as it had always been. Her instantaneous laugh turned into a sob.
"It was supposed to be easy. He was looking forward to it… Finding out what the spell was, all just to fix him."
"I know. What he's been through, I'm not sure, DG. I'm not sure he can really come back. Spell or no spell." He reached across Glitch, the golden galloons on his coat worn thin with weather and age, stole DG's hand and pressed. "We'll take him to the village when he wakes up."
XXV. Truculence, Life
The village was named Camden, by a creek that fed a series of flourishing flour mills. Among such hard-working denizens, all of them that summer shuffling about in a constant cloud of unsettled dust, it was not unusual, as Wyatt discovered, to arrive at the local inn with an unconscious man over his shoulder.
"Room for three then, yeah?" asked the innkeeper, taking a look at the arriving trio, summarising and finalising the story of their lives. They come and go, like all the rest. Destined to pass through, never destined to stay. A man, his man, and maybe one of the man's daughter. The innkeeper wasn't too sure. A key was slapped on the counter, and the registry book signed. Wyatt Cain, of the Issilthrush principality. "Long way from home."
"Well," he bobbed his head to indicate his burden, "he was a whole lot farther, that's all."
DG found their room, in the back corner, away from the bustle of the road, with trees by the window and an empty field beyond. She threw open the windows, then helped Wyatt lay Glitch on the bed. He roused then, touching his forehead, grunting softly, turning on his side.
"Now where am I?" One reluctant eye peeked open. When the other came up, there was truculence, and he flung himself about, answers demanded. "Did I have too much to drink? Oh—oh, I told you." He filled with plea, the song of it resounding. "I told you about—about the dead man."
"Glitch," DG tucked her knees beneath her, taking his hand. "You're sure Ambrose killed somebody?"
"I saw it." He reclaimed his fingers from her. She shouldn't touch him. He was damaged. That was something she had to know. "I saw him die. I checked to be sure. Only, the red on my hands… Seas of red, and feathers—feathers of red." He looked at his palms, pink and white, flat and thin, white at the plateaus, with veins blue through them. The accuracy of his story was doubted. They went on, disbelieving; he went on believing, as he did in the path of bones, in the existence of a witch who would help him.
"I can show you."
So vehement was the declaration that DG and Wyatt refrained from responding.
"Look, I'm serious! If you have a map, I can tell you where we were! I had a map, once. I even had a compass—for a little while. But it was broken and Ambrose threw it into a fen somewhere in Lorraggabu. That was the end of it. I don't remember the map. There was a tarot-reader who turned into a crow. She follows me sometimes, on the sly. She's always sly. Witches have to be, I suppose. But she didn't tell me what I wanted to know. She didn't tell Ambrose, either. Nothing, not a thing, not a word, a breath, a syllable, about the path of bones. She said we were fools. Fools." He played with the word inside his mind, recalling the image on the card, the man hanging by his toes over nothing, nothing, nothing at all. "Fools who would own the world if we walked the right path. Never mind, never mind… I'm tired of it. If you don't think Ambrose killed a man, then you know that I didn't kill a man. How could I? Ambrose… I hated him. He terrified me, tortured me. Look, look! I'm serious…"
He lifted the sleeve of his coat and showed them the scar, long and jagged over the plain of his wrist bone.
"He did this. Every bit of it. I know this is a stupid question."
Glitch paused. The shock had yet to abate for them. Too much, all at once, sending them floating from him horror by horror.
A frigid DG moved a little in the icy water. Like a black pool with stars floating in it. Ambrose did that to her, brought about this painted image, so sticky it worked through her like taffy, molasses, until she was stuck with it.
"What question?" she finally asked. Wyatt was too pale for queries. From the old wound of Glitch's, Wyatt hadn't lifted his eyes. It haunted and hurt. They wanted the spell, or they would be forced to forfeit him.
"But you—" He glanced rapidly between them. Their faces were as sweet and beckoning as always. Something foreign lingered in the dark dots of their irises, where the light reflected and the pupil swallowed it. Something foreign, husky, obscured, fuscous. "You haven't seen him, have you? Ambrose. I think he's gone. I want to be sure."
He responded to Wyatt's fingertips on the bump of his wrist. "He's gone, Glitch."
"Oh… Oh, all right, then. We still need the spell, don't we? I mean, I still want the spell." The something foreign in their eyes caught in his throat. He didn't want them to look at him like that for all the days he had left. He choked on the pain, the fear, the anxiety. "I just want myself back. I want my life back. The spell's the only thing that will fix me."
DG comforted him, Wyatt kissing his brow and massaging his shoulder volunteered to see about food, find a map, and send a telegram to his niece. Chessa, he knew, would be worried to tears over this.
"It'll be all right, Glitch." DG lay beside him, stretched beside him, her head pressed to his chest, her arm over him. "We travelled through all weathers and all seasons to find you. When we heard you hadn't arrived in Central City, we panicked. Mother called, and Azkadellia called. They were paranoid something had happened to you then. And with Azkadellia's vicious run of suitors flitting about the palace in town, they were all the more concerned. Of course, once we realised that there was a limited trace of you, that you'd seemed to wander immediately from your course, well, suitors were forgotten."
He kept repeating in his head "Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods…" And asking what he had done. What had he done?
"Did I ruin Azkadellia's chance at matrimonial bliss?" He tried to laugh at it. The thought, the thought… Azkadellia, she was just a puppy, really, dressed in funny furbelows and sent out to do tricks and gimmicks for a crown and a ring.
"I don't think so. I think it was pretty tainted before you were involved, Glitch." She pressed lips to a spot along his jaw, one she'd missed. "Are you feeling all right?"
"All right? I should say I do! I'm with you and Wyatt now. What can possibly go wrong? And we'll find out that the owl-man wasn't real, that he didn't kill a man; we'll find the path of bones that will lead us to the witch. I know we will. And I'll belong to you two again. Things will be as they should be. Our lives will resume. There." He cuffed her wrists in his hands, plunking kisses wherever they happened to fall. "Is that ridiculously optimistic enough for you?"
"Ridiculously."
He saw the foreign spark emit its foreign energy again.
Some transference. An inference unspoken.
It frightened.
Wyatt, DG thought.
Wyatt will have to tell him.
XXVI. Street
Glitch recognised places on the map that Wyatt brought. Food was there, too, but food was ignored, for a long while, in favour of the map. The names of streets, towns, forests, cemeteries, all were absorbed rapidly. His eyes beamed upon the printed paper. A weightless thing, practically, but holding invaluable release: the exoneration of Ambrose's crime.
Emphatically, he pointed to one splotch. A wooded area between towns one and two, by cliffs and a thin brook that burgeoned out to a river down south.
"This is where the owl-man was. The owl hunter, he called himself that. I remember it very well. Did you send a telegram to Chessa?"
Wyatt nodded, assuring him that it'd been done. "Said you were fine. Said we didn't know when we'd be back." Wyatt tugged gently to rid Glitch of the map. "Eat something, would you? I want to speak to DG for a minute, so I'll take her outside."
"Can't you say it in front of me?"
"It's about—it's about—" He was whelmed by the amount of silence between them. For months, he'd been with DG only. Actions happened that neither of them escaped. "Glitch, I don't know…"
Glitch straightened his shoulders. The sandwich in his mouth removed before the bite was taken. "What? What? Is someone hurt, sick, gone, dead? Someone's always dying. It's the way of things."
"Glitch," DG trampled over his words, remembering them from a long while ago. The way of things… Certainly, this was not the way of things. Harsh and cruel and fixated on damaging her from core to skin. "Glitch, um…"
Wyatt felt her glance, met it, encouraged her with a touch at the elbow. It was enough. She wanted him to say, but realised it wasn't his place.
She was shaking her head, mimicking an outlandish outcry to the words, done in pantomime. "They want Azkadellia to get married, fast. They're bringing in suitors—and—and if they're rejected, or if she—if they don't want her—they're passed to me."
His expression contorted into confusion, torment, bitterness. DG threw her palms over her eyes. Crying answered nothing, but responded to the ache within.
"They want me to get married, me! This is exactly what I wanted to avoid, all of it! I've run from suitors before, and I can do it again."
For a long while, Glitch went still, the sandwich in his lap turning stale. Then he reached, reeled her in. She toppled over when her knees met with the mattress. Sandwich, map, canvas bag, crunched, crinkled, beneath her. There was no laugh, just a smile, timid with serenity.
"You can't run forever, kitten," said Glitch. "Find a nice one, willing to accept your unusual lifestyle commitment. I don't really think…" How could he talk like this? A week ago, he was mad—madder than he'd ever been. He'd seen the depth of Ambrose's darkness and walked in its trail, its berth ever widening to create havoc from within, facilitate the rise of hatred, and leave it to swallow him. "I don't really think you're likely to fall in love with any of them. What's this have to do with Chessa? Oh, I only ask because the subject of the telegram Wyatt sent to Chessa brought us into this subject. The two must be connected. How?"
"Chessa's going to meet us at the palace in Central City," Wyatt confirmed. Glitch was like that, impossible to discern, at first, his mind too brilliant, not vertical, not an inch of him encompassing the lateral logic of boring genius. Everything in him was extraordinary. "And we'll be there… as soon as we've confirmed that the owl-hunter wasn't real."
"I had blood on my hands," Glitch argued, tone holding the truth of what he saw, what he'd touched.
The cold, he frequently remembered the cold.
"Glitch."
Wyatt held him enraptured by his voice. How pleasant it sounded, how it smoothly resounded in every crease outside and within him. He slipped his hand over Wyatt's knee, comforted by the nearness. He no longer feared wandering alone come the loss of suns, the rise of moons. The stars blinded his sense of reality, turning the opaque translucent. Objects faded at the edges. But not Wyatt. Not DG.
"Glitch, you've been sick." Wyatt leaned in, kissed his spouse on the forehead, between grey and black twisted locks. He smelled of brambles, mud, willow trees. "You might've dreamed it all. We don't know yet."
"That's why I need the spell." Glitch reassessed himself. How sick he was! He'd almost forgotten. The reunion was too much, too much… It had overtaken his senses. Daintily, as if issuing that he remembered his illness and went about treating it, he reclaimed the sandwich, compacted now, bruised a little, and began to eat.
He wanted to leave in a while.
"How soon can we be there?"
Wyatt raised his gaze from the map. The back of his neck received a brief massage from his hand. "I don't know… A few days… We can rent some horses. Can you ride?"
"Sure," Glitch said peremptorily. "I've an ass, haven't I? That's all one needs to ride. Don't need to be in your right mind, really. Just need an ass."
XXVII. Frame, Unexpurgated
The spot where death had been looked as vacated as the horizon.
He'd left it like this, and scurried into the underbrush when tears had been shed. "But he was here." Glitch averred it, repeatedly, as best he could, to make his friends understand that a spirit had been stolen right where he stood.
Only bracken and soft-grass, blooming bright-eyed blue at its ends, sprouted.
To hide the end result of knife and bloodshed.
Not a bone,
Not a toe,
Not a finger,
Not a feather,
Not a tooth.
Nothing, nothing. Only bracken and soft-grass.
"He was here. It's a fact," Glitch glanced equally between Wyatt and DG, "it's a fact, not a lie. I can't—I can't lie about something like that."
"It's all right, Glitch." DG held his shoulder, wanting to comfort him, but beheld her inability to do so. His capriciousness tended to comfort first. "Look, there's no body, so there's no crime. What say you to that, Marshal Cain? You do this sort of stuff for a living."
He eyed her pensively. Conclusions on the scene were reached before she suggested he examine it critically. "If it happened when Glitch says it did—"
"It did."
"Then it happened too long ago for evidence to linger. I think we should go to the nearest village, talk to some of the people there, and find out if they knew this owl-man."
On the red brick road to the village of Turrstine, they passed a woman, short, round, in rags, who looked like a dead blossom clinging to a once verdant vine. She glowed, with rich phosphorescence. The timid like show formulated a memory of Ambrose's into his.
"The molten woman." His haggard whisper stopped him, stopped her, and yanked in Wyatt and DG.
"Ah, ah," the molten woman gave her insights like laughs, "it's you, is it? Lost your shadow again, Peter Pan? Ah, oh, I see you found your proper replacements."
Glitch ignored every syllable, and introductions failed to faze him. "Do you know the owl-man? The owl hunter? He used to wander these woods… What are you doing?"
She stooped, lowered, with the help of her crooked, knurled walking stick, to the ground. Out of a canvas satchel at her hip, she brought out the tarot cards, and, taking one from some random place in the stack, laid three out.
"Do you need this to tell me if you know the owl hunter? Seems superfluous."
"It is my way," Mother Kooky told him. She had the World, Strength, and the Empress. All were crossed by the Ace of Wands. "You should journey home, lad. Forget about the owl hunter, if he existed."
DG saw the old woman hide the cards. "What do you mean by that?"
"What do I mean by that? Trickery in my words, dearie? You could suss it out, you could, you could." Mother Kooky bobbed her head, her troll-like frame moving awkwardly along the road. Draggled underskirts, annuals and annuals worth, dragged across the broken brick. "Ah, eh…" Chortles turned into hacking. The farther she stepped from them, the blacker her back became; she transformed into a black speck amid greenery and purple wood sorrel.
Glitch watched her go, heart sinking into the unknown.
DG's hands rotated to her hips, as she rotated about. Her face filled with stubbornness.
"We're going home—to the palace, anyway. This guy you saw, Glitch, this owl hunter guy, I think he might be a legend. I'll have to check my Book of Unexpurgated Fairy Tales when we get back, but I think I know who it is you saw. And he was a phantom, a spectral man that inhabits woods and is seen by—" she hesitated, "by travellers."
Noting nothing untoward in her statement, Glitch nodded, glared behind him once more for a trace of the owl hunter, for Mother Kooky, but then his silent oath took hold.
A vow to ponder it no more.
His arm hooked with DG's, begged Wyatt to put away the map. What did they need it for?
"Let me tell you about Mother Kooky," he said. "I think she's been guarding me from peril. But since I'm with the two of you again, she has gone her own way. Such as it should be…"
