XLVI.
A scurrying over leaves.
A scent of rotten cranberries. These sensations and more lifted Raw fresh from the slumberous darkness. Perched on his knee, a fabulous plumed creature, grey with streaks of auburn, with tufted, triangular ears, fat furry paws with elongated claws, to climb trees, break casements of favourite eats. Small enough to sit where he was comfortably. Out of his jaw fell a krennut, into Raw's waiting palm.
"Thank you, my friend. Bring us news?"
Streaks of knowledge were legible on the back of the creature's eyes. Aware that the information had been passed, the creature forged a new roost on Raw's shoulder. The viewer rounded himself from the bedroll, glaring at the ground where his two companions lay. So much joy watching friends rest, so little joy in waking them to hustle along an unknown journey. But he tapped Jeb with his toe, woke Chessa with a touch of his hand at the top of her golden crown. When they had flung away the unwanted remains of dreams, he told them what he had learned. Jeb's doubting regard left Raw in little doubt of his own talent.
"Creatures are not greater than us, but we are equals here. We know what they cannot, and they know what we cannot. Hurry!" He waved and flapped his hands. "Hurry! We must go!" In the east, glimmers of green and silver shovelled through the masking clouds. Dawn was on its way, whether or not they wanted it to be. They had already lost a day.
Chessa rolled her bed in silence, feeling as pale and blank as the slate of morning allowed. Odd it was, in all her images of this adventure, not to have the fun she intended with DG, not to laugh with her, with Uncle Wyatt, companionable Glitch there to smooth them if they became too serious too soon. She had Raw at her back, and Jeb at her side. But she knew them so vaguely. Raw spent most of his time holed away, a hermit of the woods beyond the outer rim of Issilthrush. He came for holidays, birthdays, celebrations of various kinds; he came for harvest, for apple-picking, to clear away the pumpkin patch when the breath of snow began to threaten. For all of this, she knew him hardly at all. Jeb was remembered best galloping across the hayfield of Mirrewuine, blond as the suns and straw, quiet, industrious. Who was this stranger before her? She didn't know him better now than then.
"We must go this way." Raw led the way, loosening the reins of their horses from knots in the brambles. They walked their horses at first, holding silent their tongues to let the morning filter work. Raw let them be still. He wished, too, what they wished. That they hadn't made mistakes, too many so far. They had let Glitch and Wyatt out of their sight. But largest of the errors he couldn't see, he could only feel: They hadn't travelled with a witch. At home, they had left DG. It shouldn't have been done. A journey to a witch's home without a witch, a situation determined to bring trouble. He sensed the fastenings of this adventure beginning to unwind. And what was lodged within the creature on his shoulder was not knowledge housed in the mind, but fear—the worst of it held in the heart.
The road swung back from fields to woods, through a series of undulations topped with tors, its sides dripping with sweet clover, dandelions, and grasses dense and almost unnaturally green.
Then they were in the woods again, a still place much more alive than the deadness they sensed at its newer, fresher end. Too many times to count did Chessa let her hand reach for the hilt of a knife sheathed at her side. All at once she'd feel combustible from the forest's intensity, then it would fade, like a waning moon, and she would forget where they were and earlier beliefs that they should have left that path to spirits dead rather than spirits living.
The Ternbitt so long clinging to Raw dashed off, spontaneously, for the nearest tree. Raw went on, ignoring the departure. He sensed a foulness in the place. It didn't come from the trees, from the earth, but the general proximity of the forest had been breached, the borders of it wrenched, kinked, broken, snapped.
He turned, fidgeting, looking between Jeb and Chessa.
"We—too late."
Jeb unfolded the rifle from his back, but had no enemy to aim towards. He sighed, then slinked downwards from shoulders to head. He massaged away a pain lodged behind his brow. "Too late…"
The hurt in Chessa tried to transform her turbid, begrimed insides to petrous indifference. She fought and dug in to the pain. Breaths quickened, rising in speed with the heat of surfacing tears. "Too late… It's Ambrose… Ambrose has come back, and we are—we are too late."
Raw was at a loss. The decision must be theirs. After Jeb had postulated the bad, evil, decent and good that might come from each side of choice, he nodded, took up the rifle, and pressed on.
"If Ambrose has gone on to seek the witch himself and destroy her, then we'll let him. But I must find Father."
And when they found him, tied still to the rotund old willow tree at the rim of a gulch streaming with snowmelt, lucidity was not profound.
Though his murmurings, as he was freed, slipping to the ground, were full of a shared proclivity.
"We shouldn't have come," he swallowed, taking Chessa's hand, "without DG."
-x-
XLVII.
The superiority never lifted from Ambrose. It walked with him wherever he went, through woods and vale, sunshine, sunset. He met it smiling, triumphant, wanting to weep with the gladness of liberation. This was his escape, his escapade into frontiers unknown. He had left Glitch to do the work, to find out what he and the others might know of the spell, the path of bone, the witch who bore the symbols needed to carry the cost of conjuration. Glitch had found these things, and Ambrose had taken them.
He beat Glitch to within an inch of his life. Throwing him against trees. "Shut UP, you idiotic idiot! Shut up, fool!" And toss him again, again, to bark that began to take a blood red hue.
"I'll be good," Glitch murmured between huffs that he would not permit to be sobs. "I swear, I swear, I'll behave. I won't say a word, not a single, single word… Just stop, Ambrose, stop flinging me into things… Things that don't move, things that hurt me." He could hardly walk, imbalanced then, stumbling now, scurrying in an crooked line to Ambrose. Night began to fall, and Ambrose sometimes vanished into it, becoming too swarthy, and the skirts of his greatcoat fuliginous. Ink from the earth seemed to leak from pits and dents, to swallow Ambrose bit by bit. Never whole, but to inhume him limb by limb. Glitch squinted, eyes petering out, and crashing to the cold loam. He whimpered, sure that Ambrose would stomp back, rousing mad, with perfervid derisions, recalcitrant to Glitch's need for release.
But Ambrose delayed, not hesitating from kindness, for he possessed none. But hesitating to watch Glitch, the shape of him splayed across renitent ground. Compassion, if he met it at all, was a truant, ungodly source to be filed away under the guises of insanity. Sympathy, if he met it, too, met with a treatment very much the same.
He had to find the witch first, and destroy her.
"So I can get rid of you," he said to Glitch, standing over him, looking down into the face of the living creature that possessed everything he didn't. "Goodness, kindness, love, health—and fear."
Glitch heard the words between the beats in his ears, the murmurs inaudible to his captor. Love and fear were incorrect.
Sorry, my dear, but you'll never have me if you think that love and fear have only me.
Glitch rolled upon his back. Ambrose was out of his sight. The stars shone down, unveiled, cold, bold, too beautiful to be frightened of the emptiness surrounding them. He wanted Wyatt. He wanted DG. He wanted this over so he could be left in peace. No matter how it ended. What did death matter now? He could die and float away, into the stars and lay among nebulae forever.
"Don't you love me?" he asked of Ambrose.
"Only as a moth loves flame."
"Out of need."
"Out of a needful hate."
"I want Wyatt. Where have we put him?"
"Wyatt is dead. Wyatt has always been dead." Ambrose knelt, cuddling Glitch. Poor, sodden Glitch, damp with the dew of the grasses, as though he had lain for hours, hours, and watched the stars weep until their tears fell into drops of dew. "You have me… I'm here. I'm here."
"Where's DG?"
"DG is dead." He wrapped the greatcoat tails around his shimmering companion. "DG has always been dead. You remember that."
"I do…" Glitch nodded, squinting to bring more blankness to the night. "I do remember. A funeral. The scent of rose oil. The fire where I burned lilies. If I could burn all the lilies of all the world, I would. I would travel far and wide, a scorcher of lilies. There shouldn't be lilies in the world without her in the world. I'm so very, very cold, Ambrose. But that's because I remember…"
He lost all of it then. What he had come for. What he had been given. He had Ambrose. Ambrose would look out for him.
"Do not leave me." Glitch punctured the solemn night air with the immediacy of his need. "Do not leave me here on this strange road alone. Even the stars don't know me now, and I don't know them."
"I'm staying."
"Until when?"
"Until one of us is dead."
Glitch smiled, a soft nod following. "Good… Good… That is what I would wish."
-x-
XLVIII.
DG was not to be found in the morning by those sent in search of her. When discovered to be absent from her room, the Queen was told, and the mice dispatched to search for her. Poised before the front window of her office, looking out across the city, the cylinders of buildings, the softness of angled roads across the hill, the darkness where the shadowed layers slept, the Queen found a viable annoyance with her youngest. She swept back stray grey hairs, a gift of magic for the gift of life, and did what she had learned to do for twenty annuals: wait. Ahamo supported the unwanted notion that DG had run off, in spite of her injuries. The Queen, at first, wouldn't hear of it.
"She has more sense than that."
"No one has sense when it comes to love," Ahamo argued. The Queen might love DG, and show it more, in divers ways—but Ahamo understood DG better, as his wife understood Azkadellia's pain. "These are her friends, and we cannot forget that Chessa is out there as well. I do not pretend to know the nuances of their relationship," his face went into his palms, "but they are friends if they are not lovers. And if I had to sail to the bottoms of oceans to save a friend," he tried to shirk the sting that then came to him, "I would do it."
A knock preceded the entrance of Zero. He bowed, and divulged his information and resource. "I have checked the stables and garages. The princess hasn't taken a horse or car."
"She is on foot." Ahamo angled to the Queen. "Let me send out the knights. They'll scour the circumference of the city, and not return until they have found her, or been summoned back."
The Queen stood, deep in thought, penetrating gaze over the cityscape. She inhaled deeply, kneading fingers into fists. "Fine. Captain, assemble a small search party, and look for my daughter. I will not expect your return if she is not with you."
Again, a reverential tip from Zero, then a silent withdrawal. Disgusted with herself, the Queen retreated to the rim of her desk, lowered to it, arms folded.
"I will not relent," she was tired of those words. It was so rare that Ahamo changed his mind about anything. If only she could change her mind about Zero. "It is bad enough that we consented for DG to marry an Issilthrush Cain. But we cannot allow our eldest to marry the captain of the guard. He was by her side when she—when she ruled the realm beneath blood and sorcery."
"You accuse him, now, of being a man of questionable venality? He stood by her side then, and stays by her side now because he loves her. A man in such a position can do nothing else—!"
"No man can be redeemed through love and a song! Where does that happen? In the poetry of old monarchs, but not in this age. You see it as well as I do. It will never last."
"That is an inarguable phrase. Zero may die still, we don't know, and we are not the ones who can decide that. But why are you always convinced that there is only one way to love someone? Because we have been fortunate in the ways of our hearts doesn't mean that others will experience the same. Should they? No… No. I don't believe they should."
He turned away, taking leave of her, while words of protest stuck in her throat.