The toad-children chased Heather through the mire. They were about the same size as a human, leaping up through the water on spindly, slimy limbs. She tried again to activate her power. You likely won't have the same power that you do here; you might have to use your natural charm, her grandmother told her. Maybe Heather Chandler would beat the odds and do everything she was capable of. "Let me through," she called. "Stand down. Leave me alone. Obey me." She rushed at the toads, shouldered one aside. A slimy tendril wrapped itself around her ankle. She stomped down as hard as she could with her heeled boot and it released her. Another hopping thing moved just ahead of her. They were all going to grab her, force her down into the muddy water in a pile of toad-children. "Stop. I command you. Everyone does as I tell them to. I'm Heather Chandler. You will not win."
She felt it, that time. Something awakening in her, unfurling like a tulip rising in spring. Her power. "Bow," Heather commanded. "Don't - " One of the toad-children struck at her anyway, slimy arm wrapping around her shoulders. She dug her nails into its skin. "Get off me!" Heather screamed.
Then she saw a light. Through the darkness before her rode a knight in shining armor. His horse was buttercup-yellow, and he bore a glowing white sword. His shimmering shield was blazoned with a six-pointed silver star and a red rose. He rode among the toad-children and beat them down with the flat of his blade, galloping toward Heather.
Heather jumped away from the toad, and felt her own power finally come to her. The toad backed away. But it wasn't because of any command - it was because of the fiery heat Heather suddenly felt at the tips of her fingertips. Her hands blazed with fire, fire that surged at her command.
If this is my power here - I can work with that.
"Stay back, toads!" she called, and fire blazed around her as she fought them off. But more came to her nonetheless, stifling her flames with their wet slime, grappling with her legs and feet.
The knight rode toward her, clearing the path. He bent and scooped Heather up on his saddle, saving her. The toads scattered as his yellow horse reared up and struck with his hooves, giving them blows as fierce as if he'd been shod with iron.
"Why?" Heather asked. In her experience, knights in shining armor didn't generally save damsels in distress without some prior scheduled repayment plan. She reached for her power again, and threw down a fireball at a pursuing toad. She sat awkwardly on the saddle-horn, bumped and jostled with every movement. The knight turned his horse to gallop for the exit once more.
"High goals attract good company," said the knight. "You have come to save your friend, and for that cause you may call on my shield and sword. But let us ride before their father seeks us out."
Instead of the British accent Heather had expected, either real or hilariously fake, the knight spoke like a modern Midwesterner despite the Renfaire speech pattern. And she wasn't a man, either.
The black tunnel walls seemed to fall away from them as they rode like hell away from the toad-children and their dreadful miry den. The knight seemed to know the way out, turning through the black maze as if she'd travelled and fought here before. At last they were in a place that felt like natural light, a conifer forest that smelt of pine and stone fossils. The knight carefully helped Heather down from the saddle. She sunk gratefully on top of an old log, wallowing in the exhausting pain after being jolted up and down for unending hours over the buttocks of a yellow horselike four-legged fiend of Satan.
"Who are you and who do you work for?" Heather said.
"I am the Paladin, and I serve the Attic Above," said the knight. "My horse is Primrose." She patted the creature's head; the yellow horse seemed to give a horsey smile, which revealed a greater number of large tombstone-like teeth than any creature ought to be allowed.
"And this Attic is ... " Heather prompted.
"The Attic Above cannot be fully understood unless you choose to go beyond, from where there's no return," said the Paladin. She dug inside one of her saddlebags and pulled out an apple, of all things, and her horse munched messily on it while she made her speech. "I choose not to go beyond while I can still do good, and you have far too much life in you to make that choice. The dwellers of the Attic Above are beings of righteousness and justice that strive to help others on their way. Their agents aid others whenever they can and uphold light and life. When I first came here, I was lonely and lost, much like you. Then I sought out the Star, and asked for a boon to grant me the power to help others. I bargained for this armor and shield and cause, and I now help mortals who wander here. I protect lost souls and dreamers. We make a difference for the better."
Got it, knight on a crusade, like the fairytale version of Mizz Phlegm, Heather thought. More useful than Mizz Phlegm, since she did save me. She looked up at what passed for the sky here. It was patchworked colours of light in unnatural orange and green and navy and white. Shining dots lay within it like stars. Something called the Star apparently grants wishes here, Heather thought. That might be good to know.
"I take it that means you don't want a reward for saving me," Heather said. The Paladin shook her head. Heather thought she looked amused in the tilt of her head, though with the helm covering all her face it was hard to tell. "Where is my friend?"
"I have heard from the Attic that another presence came to the Thorn Lady's domain," the Paladin said. She brought out something that looked like a map, a black sketch on parchment with messy ink and notes. A compass rose marked it in four directions and she jabbed it to point to the west. "This is the likeliest place where your friend waits - the likeliest of almost any, since she must be sleeping to be so difficult to find. This pit here is called Sleeping Bramble, a particularly treacherous portion of the Thorn Lady's grounds. The lady does not take kindly to trespassers. Of the other mortals who came with you, one may be in the hunter's cliffs of High and Over, for she smells strongly of potential power; one in the Iron Tournament, a faint signal; the last rests in the west, under Grey Willows. Which shall be the first for us to save?"
Crap. God knows what trials Grandma sent Duke and Veronica to. They didn't have to come, dammit, Heather thought. Guess we have to rescue them too.
"I have power," Heather said. Her fire was ready within her. "Let's split up; it'll be faster." That and I'd almost rather fuck Peter Dawson than ride that ridiculously colored horse again. "Give me that map."
"It will be only a rough guide. Geography changes rapidly here," the Paladin said, but handed it over readily. "Are you certain you wish to go alone? You have courage, though also a stain on your soul to atone for."
Martha, probably. Heather hated this Paladin daring to see so far into her. "Take off your helm. At least let me see who I'm dealing with," Heather ordered.
She dreaded seeing air, nothing, a headless horseman, a bleeding neck stump, a skull, a noseless mutilated monster with bulging flesh streaked with acid burns, a face so terrible that the Paladin hid it for a damn good reason. But the Paladin reached under her neck-piece with no consternation, releasing the hinges that joined her helm to her gorget. She lifted her helm free.
Heather saw an ordinary, pleasant-looking woman, middle aged, with plain flyaway light brown hair sticking up in wisps that clung to the helmet. Heather studied her, considering what her look meant. "You don't have to trust me," the Paladin said. "But it would be my honor to fight for your cause."
Heather jabbed her fingers on the paper. "The Sleeping Bramble is where my friend-possessed-by-a-spite-ghost ended up, isn't it? That's mine. As for you ... " She thought about Grandma Chandler giving her a gold ring to carry, and how she'd found herself in the Toad-in-the-Well's horrible mire with shining treasures in mud. She'd seen the grey plant pass through J.D.'s hands. "Go to the Grey Willows place. Save the human you find there."
Heather walked forward on her quest, alone again. She consulted the map of the shifting lands around her. She'd not learned nothing of how to navigate, taken in some of what J.D. guessed and Grandma Chandler let slip.
"I killed Cock Robin," she said, and the path below her feet buckled slightly. Rhymes and children's tales had power here. "My power of words and will alone created a mortal ill. I'll lay my ghost and redeem my friend. I'll find her if I have to walk to the world's end.
"Now show me the way before I incinerate you."
She summoned fire to her hand like she held the link, the funeral-lantern in the rhyme, and travelled the path to the Thorn Lady. To her best friend.
—
Martha went a familiar way through Betwixt-and-Between. She looked like herself again, dressed in a linen shirt, sensible trews, and good boots. This place seemed different to when she'd passed before with the Fire Woman. It was lighter and less threatening, somehow, opening on woods that seemed open and free instead of tangled and aggressive. Maybe it was she who had changed.
I would never have sought revenge if I'd known what it would do, Martha thought. Or was that just something she wanted to tell herself? She'd certainly made a mess of her vengeance. You warned Chandler because something in you didn't want to kill, the dark boy had told her. She'd like that to be true. She'd like it to be more than wanting Heather Chandler to suffer first. If that was true, Martha was as bad or worse a bully as the Heathers.
It's brave of Heather Chandler to come here after Heather McNamara, Martha thought. The two of them might be real friends. They were walking into a danger Chandler didn't know about. Or in Heather McNamara's case, sleeping in a danger. The Thorn Lady had captured another victim in her bramble wood.
Martha bowed to an olive tree blooming with grey-eyed owls on its branches, almost absently. It allowed her to take her path onward. Into the thorn bushes to find the sleeping princess. The sleeping cheerleader. The Thorn Lady's gnarled visage seemed to glare at Martha from every aged tree, but she walked on nonetheless. The Thorn Lady's only virtue was that she held firm to her bargains and contracts, and Martha had requested no boon of her and made no oath. She was free to pass. Brambles resisted her and scratched her trews, but Martha gave them a stern look and they loosed enough for her to walk through. The Thorn Lady did not make the way easy for her, but Martha set her chin and grimly marched, muttering a rhyme the Fire Woman once gave her. It worked well enough.
Heather McNamara's spirit slept. Her eyes were closed and brambles had grown all over her body. If not for her golden tangles of hair falling through the thorns, Martha would almost have walked past her.
Martha remembered the steak knife she'd stolen from the school cafeteria that night. She imagined it in full detail, the heavy sharp steel and black plastic weight of handle, and let something like it appear in her hand on her will.
"You've made no bargain with this soul either, Thorn Lady," she said to the forest around her. No response came. "Even had you done so, I own her in prior claim, for she did me a grave wrong once. Thus I free her with or without your will, though I would much prefer with."
The brambles did not change or part around Heather McNamara. So Martha sawed through the brambles with her knife, one by one. The thorns had never cut Heather's pristine skin, but they were as harsh against Martha's fingers as they were soft on her. Martha felt pain and bled, but sawed on, pulling back stem by stem and showing the other girl's face inch by inch. She rooted out the brambles from the ground, forcing the knife deep under their roots and ripping them away whole.
Martha took her time to clear the entire lot of brambles away before she tried to touch the girl inside them. She'd not have her wake and stir and cut herself by accident. Martha put away the knife and wiped away the sweat on her face. Her hands were filthy and she cleaned them as best she could on the back of her trews. Heather McNamara looked like a fairy-tale princess, tall and slender with fair hair and smooth skin. She breathed faintly, her strawberry-pink lips slightly parted.
Martha shook her shoulder in lieu of the traditional method of waking sleeping princesses. When she was alive, she'd read the original story where the princess was woken up by one of the twins she gave birth to, which was completely messed up and wrong; that Prince deserved to go to jail. Martha didn't want anything bad to happen to McNamara, not any more.
"Mom?" McNamara muttered. "Don't want to go to school today ... " She fought against waking up from her dream, though she wasn't much of a fighter, faintly turning her head aside.
"Please," Martha said, shaking her gently again. "Heather needs you."
"Oh shit Heather - " McNamara suddenly sat up. Her eyes grew full of fear as she looked around an unfamiliar place. "What the hell is this? You're not Heather. Oh, shit - Martha the ghost - I'm sorry I'm so sorry!"
Martha sat back from her. She extended a hand, letting McNamara choose if she wanted to take it or not. "I forgive you," Martha said. "I'm sorry too. I've come to take you home."
McNamara brushed some of the stray mud off her skirt, looking bothered by the dirt. "Where is this, Kansas?" she said, and giggled. "My dad bought me red shoes like the movie, but Heather made me give them to her. It's not that I don't like Heather, she just ... sometimes makes you do things you don't want to do. But Heather's my best friend. She doesn't really like Heather and Veronica's too different from the rest of us." McNamara sighed and drew her knees up to her chest. "Is Heather dead? I dreamed she was dead."
"Definitely alive," Martha said. In spite of my ever so brilliant plan, she thought, chagrined. "I'll take you to her. We need to move fast. We're in the Thorn Lady's domain, and she can be a touch ... possessive."
Martha looked up at the rapidly darkening sky above them. Days and seasons ran at irregular intervals in the Betwixt-and-Between, compelled by the moods of the lands they travelled to. The black storm-clouded sky was definitely a bad sign, not to mention the sparks of lightning that began to flash. Then the rain began to pour.
They ran through the damp and dark. "Like Snow White," McNamara panted. "Are the trees ... alive?"
Yes, Martha thought, but wouldn't tell her at that point. They stopped in their tracks as a flash of lightning illuminated the hollow in an old tree before them. A figure appeared in the blackness.
They saw a girl in old-fashioned clothing. She wore a straight-lined dress hung all over with beads, a flapper. She had pale curly hair in a short bob and would have been pretty, if she hadn't been translucent and frightened looking. She raised a hand to them. "Please help me," she said. "My mother sold me to the trees. Please help me."
It wasn't that Martha didn't want to be kind, but she had seen too many of these tricks and traps in the Betwixt-and-Between. "Who are you?" she asked.
"I don't know. It's been so long that I've forgotten my name," the girl said. "Mother traded me for a boon. Fetch me out of this place."
McNamara reached out to her, fear mixed with trying to help, but Martha held her back. "Either she's a trick of the Thorn Lady or she's beyond our help," she said. "She must have died many years ago."
The girl ghost wept tears that mingled with the rain, but she stayed in her hollow. Martha and her friend went on.
—
It was no use running. Veronica stayed in place, lifting her hands. "Technically, I didn't even harm either of you ..." she said. Kurt and Ram weren't listening much. "That's not a good argument for you guys, is it? I suppose nothing is a good argument if you're dead and preferred to diet your grey matter in order to get a lower wrestling weight class when you were alive."
She looked at both of them, trying to show no fear on her face, making some atavistic prey-instinct stir in the back of their neanderthal brains, flickering a thought that maybe the clever Veronica Sawyer had something up her sleeve after all.
"You could just grab me, or I could make it really good for you," Veronica offered. "Strip for me."
—
"High goals attract good company" - Utena: The Movie