"I have to face him alone."
The words pounded in Sarah's head, a counterpoint to the thudding of her sneakers on the stairs and the throbbing in her left knee as she ran. Stupid, she thought angrily to herself. All that heroic nonsense about adversaries meeting each other on an even playing field, shaking one another's hands, maybe offering each other tea before the final showdown. If there was one thing she'd learned from this nightmare, it was that no one ever played fair. And why had she left her hard-won companions behind? Just for some nagging feeling that this was the way things were supposed to be done! If she'd brought them with her, Hoggle could be acting as lookout, Sir Didymus would find the right path through this impossible room, and Ludo. . . Ludo could grab the Goblin King and sit on him. Or something. Now she was lost, so near the end, and heaving like a bellows as she forced her legs to keep running. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of red and white. Oh god, could it be? The seductive voice of the Goblin King echoed from every wall, but she couldn't hear the words. If this was a trick, she was done for. But if it wasn't. . . Sarah sprinted towards that spot of color.
Her heart threatened to hammer its way out of her chest as she saw that it really was Toby, oblivious as only a baby could be as he happily played with something shiny. He was sitting on one of the impossibly suspended squares of stone a long, long way down. Between them, a chasm gaped at least thirty feet wide. Sarah didn't let herself think, didn't slow down a notch as she launched herself into empty space.
Around her, the room suddenly began to break into pieces. Huge stone staircases spun by in a languid dance defying all physics as she floated gently down. Sarah kept her eyes focused on Toby, reaching out to him with every ounce of her will as she fell towards him as lightly as a feather on the wind. At last she felt the crunch of stone against the toes of her sneakers as she hit the ground very hard indeed - she had been falling at the usual velocity after all, tricked one last time by the Labyrinth. Her much-abused left knee twisted underneath her and pain bloomed in the joint. Holding on to consciousness with the grip of desperation, Sarah flung herself onto Toby, scooping him into her lap and pressing her cheek against the bit of fuzz he had for hair.
"Oh Toby, oh honey," she sobbed, wildly rocking him back and forth as she clutched him in relief. "Everything's going to be all right now," she promised, ignoring the persistent (and by now very familiar) feeling of dread in her belly. She had done it, she had solved the Labyrinth and found her brother - but here they were, surrounded by bits of stone falling impossibly slowly towards the horizon, trapped in the goblin city. All along, the game had shown itself to be unforgiving and deadly, and Sarah was acutely aware that she still didn't know the rules.
Suddenly, *he* was there. She knew it by the change in the wind, by the humming of the stones, by the tilt of the stars. Sarah raised her head to look at the Goblin King.
He appeared out of the ruins of the staircase room, covered in white from head to foot, eyes glinting paired sapphire and obsidian. Sarah would have expected the color to look wrong on him - after all, she knew from firsthand experience that his heart was as black as his oubliette - but it didn't, somehow. In fact, she was struck by a strong impression that this was closer to the truth than anything she'd seen of him yet, illusion finally abandoned at the end of their long contest. She was shocked when her brain finally found the right word to describe it. He looked vulnerable. One white boot took a step in her direction, and Sarah instinctively backed up and tightened her grip on Toby, who squirmed against all this restraint. She knew how the story went from here; she could recite it in her sleep.
Glaring at him from where she crouched on the flagstones, she began the litany. "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered," she recited, loud and clear as a bell, "I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City, to take back the child that you have stolen."
His shuttered eyes betrayed no surprise, but he was quick to step in and interrupt her. "Now Sarah - "
"For my will is as strong as yours," she continued without pausing, "and my kingdom as great." There was more - the final bit, the most important part, but it wouldn't come. The pain in her knee was overwhelming, the world was crashing down around her, and even Toby was distracting her with his thrashing, and the words wouldn't come. Sarah felt tears prick at her eyes as the cold claw of panic grabbed her throat. To come so close, to have victory snatched away here at the very end!
"Think of what I'm offering you, Sarah," his silver-smooth voice whispered in her ear. "Your dreams." A white-gloved hand lifted one of his glass spheres, holding the promise of rest, of no more pain. "Just love me, serve me, do as I say - and I will be your slave," he urged, his hand on her hair as gentle as a kiss and as relentless as a vise. Sarah felt the tears spill over and slide down her cheeks, blurring her vision. Misery choked her as a sense of ancient sorrow sank into her bones, the sadness left behind by each and every person who lost a child to that terrible Labyrinth.
She might not know the right words, but she could say the truth. Solving the Labyrinth had at least taught her one thing. The Goblin King could put her in situations over which she had no control, but how she responded was always her choice, her decision what to do with what she had, and in that sense she would always be free. Raising her eyes to his face, she defied him one last time as she said, "You have no power over me." Somewhere, a clock struck the hour. A great wind wrapped itself around Sarah and Toby and bore them away, and the last sight that presented itself to her astonished gaze was the cold face of the Goblin King, vanishing in a spate of white feathers.
The next thing she knew, Sarah was standing in her own living room surrounded by the fading sound of beating wings. The grandfather clock in front of her was striking midnight and she could hear a car pulling into the driveway. That started the wheels of panic turning again, because she was back, but had Toby come with her? Sarah took one step towards the stairs, then yelled in agony as her weight came down on her left knee, which promptly collapsed and dumped her in a heap at the foot of the staircase. That was where Karen and her father found her when they entered the living room a moment later, resting her forehead against the carpeted edge of one of the steps as she gathered her strength for one last push.
"Sweetheart!" her dad cried, dropping to his knees beside her.
"My goodness, Sarah!" Karen exclaimed. "Are you all right? What on earth happened?"
Sarah looked up at their concerned faces and told the first of many lies about that night. "I was coming down the stairs too fast, and I tripped." Attempting to straighten her leg, she winced at the resulting lancet of pain and added, "I think I need to go to the hospital. First, though, can you check on Toby for me? I, uh, might have woken him up when I fell." But she hadn't, because when Karen popped her head into the nursery to look, he was sleeping in his crib just as soundly as could be.
* * * * *
From the spreading pine tree in the Williams' front yard, Jareth watched with owl eyes as Sarah's parents helped her hop one-legged to the car. That leap had been a last act of complete desperation. Not one in a hundred thousand people would have attempted it, and in truth the girl was lucky she hadn't dashed out her brains on the hard stone floor. He had seen countless people face other, equally daunting obstacles, and they had all quailed or died. Not this one, though. Yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness as he watched the progress of the vehicle down the street. Launching himself from the branch, he spread his conjured wings and followed.
Soaring above the scattered remnants of the night's storm, Jareth turned his flight moonward and relished the sensation of cool air sliding through his feathers. Something was stirring in him, like the waking of memory after a long sleep. The girl had run farther and faster than any he had ever seen, and still he had only watched her so that he could better plan how to bring her to grief. The game had suddenly changed when she fell into his oubliette. As she defied him in the catacombs, Jareth felt a sliver of her anger bury itself in his heart, and the burst of warmth and wild hope it produced was the most terrifying thing that had happened to him in centuries. He didn't understand the sensations or why an unremarkable mortal child inspired them, but he did know that hope was a weapon in the hands of the Phantom Queen, and anyone who brought such feelings must be destroyed. The Labyrinth, too, had tasted something in Sarah that it did not like at all as she crawled through its belly, and their common purpose should have been more than enough. The girl should have died, should have lost her way amid the thousand traps so cunningly laid, but instead she had grown stronger! As he swooped lazily above the Williams' car, Jareth's mind spun in a vortex of images from those brief hours.
She had grown stronger, and his treacherous subconscious had tricked him into thinking that he had found the perfect solution. After all, what young lady could resist the lure of a masquerade? He would catch her with storybook endings and destroy her, winning the contest and purging himself of irrational hope in a single blow. That had been the plan at least, but it had only lasted until she had kicked her way through the be-ribboned crowd of his imagination and planted herself, with her usual willfulness, squarely in his arms. Surprised and taken off guard, Jareth met her gaze full on. In the depths of her brown eyes he saw himself as he once had been, and as the monster he had become. A small and traitorous part of him had already realized that he had lost. She was only a child. The darkness she woke in him was best left buried.
That moment had shaken him to the core. His kingdom took precedence over everything else, of course, and therefore his ends justified his means, but the innocence in her steady eyes was an accusation that cut through his guard as easily as if she had buried a knife in his gut. Her presence drew him as implacably as his attraction repulsed him. Caught in uncertainty, Jareth circled above the hospital to watch, and wait.
* * * * *
For the week following her operation to repair the torn ligament in her knee ("That must have been some trip down the stairs," the nurse commented), Sarah wallowed in the attention of her family and in her drug- induced stupor. Everything was lovely, even Karen was lovely, and Toby was especially lovely. Sarah kept him as near to her as possible, watching him play as if she wanted to devour him with her eyes whenever she couldn't actually hold him on her lap. The painkillers kept all unwanted thoughts at bay, and she drew out this period of mindlessness as long as she could. One sunny morning, however, Sarah woke up and knew that it was time. Instead of taking her medicines, she gritted her teeth and asked Karen to bring down her journal. Toby seemed to have weathered his trial unchanged, although he had acquired an unfortunate penchant for playing with glass things, but the same could not be said for Sarah. The colors and smells of the Goblin City were already dulling in her mind, and in the bright sunlight the whole adventure seemed unreal. She had fought an incredible struggle in that city and she didn't want to lose a moment of it.
It took more than a month to get the story written down to her satisfaction, and even then she thought the details rang a little hollow. How could she describe the feel of Ludo's fur or the breaking of one of Jareth's crystals when there was nothing like them at all in this world? She couldn't even begin to approach the Bog. At last, though, she had the bare bones of the story, complete with clumsy illustrations, which all told took up two bound journals. She finished it with this paragraph: "This is a faithful account of my trip through the Goblin City, and I swear that everything written here is the truth. This is for me, in the future, so that I will know it was real. I've seen a white owl flying away from the tree in our front yard a couple of times since I got back, and I know better now than to take anything for granted. I'm making a promise to myself, that every time I touch the scar on my knee I'll remember what really happened." She looked at the words for a long time, then closed the book, tied both volumes up with string, and hid them in a box under her bed.
* * * * *
On its surface the earth nurtured life, its sun-warmed soil giving foundation to all things that grew or crawled. Like herself, however, its heart was silent and cold. It was coldest in her belly where light never penetrated, while her back baked in the sun. She recognized the constant heat as unnatural because it lacked the sting of real sunlight and because it never set, though she couldn't see the strange, unworldly color it cast over the Labyrinth or the web of spells that held it in place and kept it alive. Heat and cold were almost the only sensations left to her, although she could sense the pressure of running feet across her stone skin and could still savor destruction. The heat of a body as it fell into her depths was like wine; the rage of defeat against her walls was like opium. When she brought her hands together, towers crumpled and the creatures scampering through her maze cowered in terror. These amusements made her captivity bearable, but the thought of Annwn, rich and pulsing with life outside her grasp, tormented her.
The time was soon approaching when that little kinglet, Abnoba's arrogant son, would burn in the heat of a thousand bonfires and freeze in the ice of a thousand winters before she let him die. First, though, he must be made to help her. She was close, so close to breaking him completely. She could practically taste his despair as he wandered her catacombs and governed this mockery of a kingdom from his toppled throne. At only one moment had she feared for her plans - a few heartbeats past, when the careful work of countless years had nearly come undone as that slip of a girl-child had faced him down and reclaimed her brother.
She had to be careful at this last, most critical stage. One slip would fan the embers of the kinglet's resistance, fueling a blaze instead of puffing out the last sparks, and timing was of the essence. It was therefore highly inconvenient that rock and earth had a rather unique sense of the passage of time. Her heartbeats were measured in eons now, which made it difficult to keep to a schedule since decades slid by like seconds. She let him alone for what seemed, to her, to be the space between two long, earthy breaths, and then whispered words that would bring her to his attention, wherever he was in his ruined city.
Some unknown amount of time later, she began to rumble in annoyance at his tardiness, recasting her magic to seek him out. This time the spell returned with an answer: he was no longer in Scailtara. The Phantom Queen shifted testily, whole sections of the Labyrinth rearranging as her ire swept through its expanse, and thought about where he could have gotten to. There was really only one possibility, for the seals into Annwn were still closed. He must have gone into the mortal world on his own, but why under seven suns would he do such a thing?
Suspicion curled in her stony breast, knocking a hole through an oubliette and sinking the Firey's forest into a mire. That girl, the one who had beaten the Labyrinth. Something about her had tasted unusually foul, the hint of a threat and a menace that could foil the schemes wrought so carefully in secret. Grinding her bones in anger, the Morrigan sifted through all the tastes and tidbits that rested in her great belly until she found the one she wanted, then cast her thought to its source. Bound as she was, she could only cross the border in visions, but her sight was as sharp as in the old days when men had cowered before her as she prophesied their deaths. She found the girl easily enough, tossing and turning as she slept, and found Jareth there too, watching her window through yellow eyes. Gnashing her teeth (and grinding up a quarter of the Goblin City in the process), the Morrigan called him back to Scailtara with the voice of the Old Powers.
The force of her summons caused the girl to jump wide awake as the magic banged at the glass, wrapping itself around Jareth. It surrounded him, started to squeeze - and slipped right off him to fall heavily to earth, where it wriggled about until it frayed into nothingness. Jareth didn't even notice, owl eyes fixed unblinking on the girl's shuttered window. The Morrigan screeched in shock. It had taken years to leash him to her call, and now all was undone! Snarling under her breath, she smashed a few alleys to make herself feel better, then settled in for some serious thinking.
She was losing her influence over the king, that much was clear, and it was equally obvious that the mortal girl had something to do with it. Perhaps the situation could be redeemed. The girl might even be made to be the fulcrum around which Jareth's surrender hinged. Mortal lives were so fragile, so easily disrupted, and surely Abnoba's overconfident offspring would recoil before the very thing that had killed his mother. Stone lips curved in a cruel smile that altered the course of several major roads, and the Morrigan set to work.
She had always done her best craft in the dark. Jareth's unchanging sun was an annoyance, but she dove downward to the cold dark at her center until she was surrounded by ice and blackness. There, she hummed and spat and brought out her collection of dreams, captured from nightmares throughout the ages. Snuffling through it until she found the bits she wanted, she drew substance out of the darkness to spin a delicate thread of dream-stuff. The vat of her imagination dyed it the caustic colors of blood and betrayal, a burning skein twisting in the dark. When the thread was ready, she wove it into a cloak as thin as gold leaf and as slippery as wet moss. With the work complete in her hands, she waited for the dark of the moon in the mortal world.
It took her many casts before she caught a trace of what she was looking for. He had buried himself away from the world of men, sealed beneath a windswept hill to dream of hunting. She found him sleeping, and in delight she danced a quick caper that turned the goblin barracks upside down before she tossed her sly cloak over his massive form. Instantly, he became restless and uneasy, his slumbering hounds whimpering in the grip of his dream. The Morrigan smiled, for she had woven very well indeed, and the one who lay before her was already half-mad with years of wandering in desire and despair. Under her cloak, her brother dreamed of the joy of the Hunt and of the sealing of the way into Annwn that had cleaved him from his quarry. Into this framework of truth she plaited a thread of clever lies, whispering of a way to break the barrier and reopen the path. She filled his sleep with images of guilt and betrayal, of blood magic and dark plots, all tied to a mortal line whose lives gave the sundering spell its power. In the dream, she showed him that now there was but one of them left. A young girl. . .
Cernunnos woke with a start, struggling to rise until his huge antlers caught in the soft earth of his barrow and he saw the shadow of the Morrigan before him. "Sister," he greeted her, his voice cracked with disuse. His eyes burned like flames in the dark under the hill. "Is this true?"
"It is true," the Morrigan confirmed. She saw the madness of bloodlust in his eye and quickly pressed her advantage. "One Hunt, brother, is all it will take. Name her your quarry and the way into Annwn will open again!"
Heaving upwards, the Horned One tore the earth asunder until he had pulled himself out of the hill, his new-woken hounds at attention behind him, eager to be on the scent. "I hunt!" he cried, bringing a massive hunting horn to his lips and sounding a long, lonely note. "Who shall be named?" he demanded, spreading his great arms against the stars that spilled across the sky.
The Morrigan grinned and hissed, "Sarah Williams."
"Sarah Williams!" Cernunnos howled, and his dogs raised their white throats and howled with him, then set their red ears against their skulls as they streamed into the night. The Horned One himself stayed only long enough to raise a hand in salute to his dark sister, and then the earth shook under his feet as he raced away to the sea. Though the quarry lay over mountains and across the water, she could not hope to escape the Wild Hunt. Sighing in satisfaction (which caused a small earthquake in the Goblin City), the Morrigan returned her shadow to its stone prison. Not for much longer, she sang to herself. Not much longer.
Neither the Morrigan nor her brother noticed two bright button eyes peering out from the copse of rowan trees growing rather unexpectedly at the base of the bluff. After all sound of the dogs' passage had faded, a round little woman huffed and puffed her way out of her hiding place and stumped up the hill to poke at the disturbed earth with her stick, then turned her face to the west to gaze after the Hunt.
The words pounded in Sarah's head, a counterpoint to the thudding of her sneakers on the stairs and the throbbing in her left knee as she ran. Stupid, she thought angrily to herself. All that heroic nonsense about adversaries meeting each other on an even playing field, shaking one another's hands, maybe offering each other tea before the final showdown. If there was one thing she'd learned from this nightmare, it was that no one ever played fair. And why had she left her hard-won companions behind? Just for some nagging feeling that this was the way things were supposed to be done! If she'd brought them with her, Hoggle could be acting as lookout, Sir Didymus would find the right path through this impossible room, and Ludo. . . Ludo could grab the Goblin King and sit on him. Or something. Now she was lost, so near the end, and heaving like a bellows as she forced her legs to keep running. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of red and white. Oh god, could it be? The seductive voice of the Goblin King echoed from every wall, but she couldn't hear the words. If this was a trick, she was done for. But if it wasn't. . . Sarah sprinted towards that spot of color.
Her heart threatened to hammer its way out of her chest as she saw that it really was Toby, oblivious as only a baby could be as he happily played with something shiny. He was sitting on one of the impossibly suspended squares of stone a long, long way down. Between them, a chasm gaped at least thirty feet wide. Sarah didn't let herself think, didn't slow down a notch as she launched herself into empty space.
Around her, the room suddenly began to break into pieces. Huge stone staircases spun by in a languid dance defying all physics as she floated gently down. Sarah kept her eyes focused on Toby, reaching out to him with every ounce of her will as she fell towards him as lightly as a feather on the wind. At last she felt the crunch of stone against the toes of her sneakers as she hit the ground very hard indeed - she had been falling at the usual velocity after all, tricked one last time by the Labyrinth. Her much-abused left knee twisted underneath her and pain bloomed in the joint. Holding on to consciousness with the grip of desperation, Sarah flung herself onto Toby, scooping him into her lap and pressing her cheek against the bit of fuzz he had for hair.
"Oh Toby, oh honey," she sobbed, wildly rocking him back and forth as she clutched him in relief. "Everything's going to be all right now," she promised, ignoring the persistent (and by now very familiar) feeling of dread in her belly. She had done it, she had solved the Labyrinth and found her brother - but here they were, surrounded by bits of stone falling impossibly slowly towards the horizon, trapped in the goblin city. All along, the game had shown itself to be unforgiving and deadly, and Sarah was acutely aware that she still didn't know the rules.
Suddenly, *he* was there. She knew it by the change in the wind, by the humming of the stones, by the tilt of the stars. Sarah raised her head to look at the Goblin King.
He appeared out of the ruins of the staircase room, covered in white from head to foot, eyes glinting paired sapphire and obsidian. Sarah would have expected the color to look wrong on him - after all, she knew from firsthand experience that his heart was as black as his oubliette - but it didn't, somehow. In fact, she was struck by a strong impression that this was closer to the truth than anything she'd seen of him yet, illusion finally abandoned at the end of their long contest. She was shocked when her brain finally found the right word to describe it. He looked vulnerable. One white boot took a step in her direction, and Sarah instinctively backed up and tightened her grip on Toby, who squirmed against all this restraint. She knew how the story went from here; she could recite it in her sleep.
Glaring at him from where she crouched on the flagstones, she began the litany. "Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered," she recited, loud and clear as a bell, "I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City, to take back the child that you have stolen."
His shuttered eyes betrayed no surprise, but he was quick to step in and interrupt her. "Now Sarah - "
"For my will is as strong as yours," she continued without pausing, "and my kingdom as great." There was more - the final bit, the most important part, but it wouldn't come. The pain in her knee was overwhelming, the world was crashing down around her, and even Toby was distracting her with his thrashing, and the words wouldn't come. Sarah felt tears prick at her eyes as the cold claw of panic grabbed her throat. To come so close, to have victory snatched away here at the very end!
"Think of what I'm offering you, Sarah," his silver-smooth voice whispered in her ear. "Your dreams." A white-gloved hand lifted one of his glass spheres, holding the promise of rest, of no more pain. "Just love me, serve me, do as I say - and I will be your slave," he urged, his hand on her hair as gentle as a kiss and as relentless as a vise. Sarah felt the tears spill over and slide down her cheeks, blurring her vision. Misery choked her as a sense of ancient sorrow sank into her bones, the sadness left behind by each and every person who lost a child to that terrible Labyrinth.
She might not know the right words, but she could say the truth. Solving the Labyrinth had at least taught her one thing. The Goblin King could put her in situations over which she had no control, but how she responded was always her choice, her decision what to do with what she had, and in that sense she would always be free. Raising her eyes to his face, she defied him one last time as she said, "You have no power over me." Somewhere, a clock struck the hour. A great wind wrapped itself around Sarah and Toby and bore them away, and the last sight that presented itself to her astonished gaze was the cold face of the Goblin King, vanishing in a spate of white feathers.
The next thing she knew, Sarah was standing in her own living room surrounded by the fading sound of beating wings. The grandfather clock in front of her was striking midnight and she could hear a car pulling into the driveway. That started the wheels of panic turning again, because she was back, but had Toby come with her? Sarah took one step towards the stairs, then yelled in agony as her weight came down on her left knee, which promptly collapsed and dumped her in a heap at the foot of the staircase. That was where Karen and her father found her when they entered the living room a moment later, resting her forehead against the carpeted edge of one of the steps as she gathered her strength for one last push.
"Sweetheart!" her dad cried, dropping to his knees beside her.
"My goodness, Sarah!" Karen exclaimed. "Are you all right? What on earth happened?"
Sarah looked up at their concerned faces and told the first of many lies about that night. "I was coming down the stairs too fast, and I tripped." Attempting to straighten her leg, she winced at the resulting lancet of pain and added, "I think I need to go to the hospital. First, though, can you check on Toby for me? I, uh, might have woken him up when I fell." But she hadn't, because when Karen popped her head into the nursery to look, he was sleeping in his crib just as soundly as could be.
* * * * *
From the spreading pine tree in the Williams' front yard, Jareth watched with owl eyes as Sarah's parents helped her hop one-legged to the car. That leap had been a last act of complete desperation. Not one in a hundred thousand people would have attempted it, and in truth the girl was lucky she hadn't dashed out her brains on the hard stone floor. He had seen countless people face other, equally daunting obstacles, and they had all quailed or died. Not this one, though. Yellow eyes gleamed in the darkness as he watched the progress of the vehicle down the street. Launching himself from the branch, he spread his conjured wings and followed.
Soaring above the scattered remnants of the night's storm, Jareth turned his flight moonward and relished the sensation of cool air sliding through his feathers. Something was stirring in him, like the waking of memory after a long sleep. The girl had run farther and faster than any he had ever seen, and still he had only watched her so that he could better plan how to bring her to grief. The game had suddenly changed when she fell into his oubliette. As she defied him in the catacombs, Jareth felt a sliver of her anger bury itself in his heart, and the burst of warmth and wild hope it produced was the most terrifying thing that had happened to him in centuries. He didn't understand the sensations or why an unremarkable mortal child inspired them, but he did know that hope was a weapon in the hands of the Phantom Queen, and anyone who brought such feelings must be destroyed. The Labyrinth, too, had tasted something in Sarah that it did not like at all as she crawled through its belly, and their common purpose should have been more than enough. The girl should have died, should have lost her way amid the thousand traps so cunningly laid, but instead she had grown stronger! As he swooped lazily above the Williams' car, Jareth's mind spun in a vortex of images from those brief hours.
She had grown stronger, and his treacherous subconscious had tricked him into thinking that he had found the perfect solution. After all, what young lady could resist the lure of a masquerade? He would catch her with storybook endings and destroy her, winning the contest and purging himself of irrational hope in a single blow. That had been the plan at least, but it had only lasted until she had kicked her way through the be-ribboned crowd of his imagination and planted herself, with her usual willfulness, squarely in his arms. Surprised and taken off guard, Jareth met her gaze full on. In the depths of her brown eyes he saw himself as he once had been, and as the monster he had become. A small and traitorous part of him had already realized that he had lost. She was only a child. The darkness she woke in him was best left buried.
That moment had shaken him to the core. His kingdom took precedence over everything else, of course, and therefore his ends justified his means, but the innocence in her steady eyes was an accusation that cut through his guard as easily as if she had buried a knife in his gut. Her presence drew him as implacably as his attraction repulsed him. Caught in uncertainty, Jareth circled above the hospital to watch, and wait.
* * * * *
For the week following her operation to repair the torn ligament in her knee ("That must have been some trip down the stairs," the nurse commented), Sarah wallowed in the attention of her family and in her drug- induced stupor. Everything was lovely, even Karen was lovely, and Toby was especially lovely. Sarah kept him as near to her as possible, watching him play as if she wanted to devour him with her eyes whenever she couldn't actually hold him on her lap. The painkillers kept all unwanted thoughts at bay, and she drew out this period of mindlessness as long as she could. One sunny morning, however, Sarah woke up and knew that it was time. Instead of taking her medicines, she gritted her teeth and asked Karen to bring down her journal. Toby seemed to have weathered his trial unchanged, although he had acquired an unfortunate penchant for playing with glass things, but the same could not be said for Sarah. The colors and smells of the Goblin City were already dulling in her mind, and in the bright sunlight the whole adventure seemed unreal. She had fought an incredible struggle in that city and she didn't want to lose a moment of it.
It took more than a month to get the story written down to her satisfaction, and even then she thought the details rang a little hollow. How could she describe the feel of Ludo's fur or the breaking of one of Jareth's crystals when there was nothing like them at all in this world? She couldn't even begin to approach the Bog. At last, though, she had the bare bones of the story, complete with clumsy illustrations, which all told took up two bound journals. She finished it with this paragraph: "This is a faithful account of my trip through the Goblin City, and I swear that everything written here is the truth. This is for me, in the future, so that I will know it was real. I've seen a white owl flying away from the tree in our front yard a couple of times since I got back, and I know better now than to take anything for granted. I'm making a promise to myself, that every time I touch the scar on my knee I'll remember what really happened." She looked at the words for a long time, then closed the book, tied both volumes up with string, and hid them in a box under her bed.
* * * * *
On its surface the earth nurtured life, its sun-warmed soil giving foundation to all things that grew or crawled. Like herself, however, its heart was silent and cold. It was coldest in her belly where light never penetrated, while her back baked in the sun. She recognized the constant heat as unnatural because it lacked the sting of real sunlight and because it never set, though she couldn't see the strange, unworldly color it cast over the Labyrinth or the web of spells that held it in place and kept it alive. Heat and cold were almost the only sensations left to her, although she could sense the pressure of running feet across her stone skin and could still savor destruction. The heat of a body as it fell into her depths was like wine; the rage of defeat against her walls was like opium. When she brought her hands together, towers crumpled and the creatures scampering through her maze cowered in terror. These amusements made her captivity bearable, but the thought of Annwn, rich and pulsing with life outside her grasp, tormented her.
The time was soon approaching when that little kinglet, Abnoba's arrogant son, would burn in the heat of a thousand bonfires and freeze in the ice of a thousand winters before she let him die. First, though, he must be made to help her. She was close, so close to breaking him completely. She could practically taste his despair as he wandered her catacombs and governed this mockery of a kingdom from his toppled throne. At only one moment had she feared for her plans - a few heartbeats past, when the careful work of countless years had nearly come undone as that slip of a girl-child had faced him down and reclaimed her brother.
She had to be careful at this last, most critical stage. One slip would fan the embers of the kinglet's resistance, fueling a blaze instead of puffing out the last sparks, and timing was of the essence. It was therefore highly inconvenient that rock and earth had a rather unique sense of the passage of time. Her heartbeats were measured in eons now, which made it difficult to keep to a schedule since decades slid by like seconds. She let him alone for what seemed, to her, to be the space between two long, earthy breaths, and then whispered words that would bring her to his attention, wherever he was in his ruined city.
Some unknown amount of time later, she began to rumble in annoyance at his tardiness, recasting her magic to seek him out. This time the spell returned with an answer: he was no longer in Scailtara. The Phantom Queen shifted testily, whole sections of the Labyrinth rearranging as her ire swept through its expanse, and thought about where he could have gotten to. There was really only one possibility, for the seals into Annwn were still closed. He must have gone into the mortal world on his own, but why under seven suns would he do such a thing?
Suspicion curled in her stony breast, knocking a hole through an oubliette and sinking the Firey's forest into a mire. That girl, the one who had beaten the Labyrinth. Something about her had tasted unusually foul, the hint of a threat and a menace that could foil the schemes wrought so carefully in secret. Grinding her bones in anger, the Morrigan sifted through all the tastes and tidbits that rested in her great belly until she found the one she wanted, then cast her thought to its source. Bound as she was, she could only cross the border in visions, but her sight was as sharp as in the old days when men had cowered before her as she prophesied their deaths. She found the girl easily enough, tossing and turning as she slept, and found Jareth there too, watching her window through yellow eyes. Gnashing her teeth (and grinding up a quarter of the Goblin City in the process), the Morrigan called him back to Scailtara with the voice of the Old Powers.
The force of her summons caused the girl to jump wide awake as the magic banged at the glass, wrapping itself around Jareth. It surrounded him, started to squeeze - and slipped right off him to fall heavily to earth, where it wriggled about until it frayed into nothingness. Jareth didn't even notice, owl eyes fixed unblinking on the girl's shuttered window. The Morrigan screeched in shock. It had taken years to leash him to her call, and now all was undone! Snarling under her breath, she smashed a few alleys to make herself feel better, then settled in for some serious thinking.
She was losing her influence over the king, that much was clear, and it was equally obvious that the mortal girl had something to do with it. Perhaps the situation could be redeemed. The girl might even be made to be the fulcrum around which Jareth's surrender hinged. Mortal lives were so fragile, so easily disrupted, and surely Abnoba's overconfident offspring would recoil before the very thing that had killed his mother. Stone lips curved in a cruel smile that altered the course of several major roads, and the Morrigan set to work.
She had always done her best craft in the dark. Jareth's unchanging sun was an annoyance, but she dove downward to the cold dark at her center until she was surrounded by ice and blackness. There, she hummed and spat and brought out her collection of dreams, captured from nightmares throughout the ages. Snuffling through it until she found the bits she wanted, she drew substance out of the darkness to spin a delicate thread of dream-stuff. The vat of her imagination dyed it the caustic colors of blood and betrayal, a burning skein twisting in the dark. When the thread was ready, she wove it into a cloak as thin as gold leaf and as slippery as wet moss. With the work complete in her hands, she waited for the dark of the moon in the mortal world.
It took her many casts before she caught a trace of what she was looking for. He had buried himself away from the world of men, sealed beneath a windswept hill to dream of hunting. She found him sleeping, and in delight she danced a quick caper that turned the goblin barracks upside down before she tossed her sly cloak over his massive form. Instantly, he became restless and uneasy, his slumbering hounds whimpering in the grip of his dream. The Morrigan smiled, for she had woven very well indeed, and the one who lay before her was already half-mad with years of wandering in desire and despair. Under her cloak, her brother dreamed of the joy of the Hunt and of the sealing of the way into Annwn that had cleaved him from his quarry. Into this framework of truth she plaited a thread of clever lies, whispering of a way to break the barrier and reopen the path. She filled his sleep with images of guilt and betrayal, of blood magic and dark plots, all tied to a mortal line whose lives gave the sundering spell its power. In the dream, she showed him that now there was but one of them left. A young girl. . .
Cernunnos woke with a start, struggling to rise until his huge antlers caught in the soft earth of his barrow and he saw the shadow of the Morrigan before him. "Sister," he greeted her, his voice cracked with disuse. His eyes burned like flames in the dark under the hill. "Is this true?"
"It is true," the Morrigan confirmed. She saw the madness of bloodlust in his eye and quickly pressed her advantage. "One Hunt, brother, is all it will take. Name her your quarry and the way into Annwn will open again!"
Heaving upwards, the Horned One tore the earth asunder until he had pulled himself out of the hill, his new-woken hounds at attention behind him, eager to be on the scent. "I hunt!" he cried, bringing a massive hunting horn to his lips and sounding a long, lonely note. "Who shall be named?" he demanded, spreading his great arms against the stars that spilled across the sky.
The Morrigan grinned and hissed, "Sarah Williams."
"Sarah Williams!" Cernunnos howled, and his dogs raised their white throats and howled with him, then set their red ears against their skulls as they streamed into the night. The Horned One himself stayed only long enough to raise a hand in salute to his dark sister, and then the earth shook under his feet as he raced away to the sea. Though the quarry lay over mountains and across the water, she could not hope to escape the Wild Hunt. Sighing in satisfaction (which caused a small earthquake in the Goblin City), the Morrigan returned her shadow to its stone prison. Not for much longer, she sang to herself. Not much longer.
Neither the Morrigan nor her brother noticed two bright button eyes peering out from the copse of rowan trees growing rather unexpectedly at the base of the bluff. After all sound of the dogs' passage had faded, a round little woman huffed and puffed her way out of her hiding place and stumped up the hill to poke at the disturbed earth with her stick, then turned her face to the west to gaze after the Hunt.
