The next morning, they veered the wagons onto the smaller road known as the Ravenswood Spur. While the main highway curved away south, the new road wound north and east toward the Carpathians. Day after day, the wagons clattered toward the looming gray mountains, stopping only to rest the mules or for the goblins to snatch a few hours’ sleep.
There were no human travelers on the road, but they did encounter several goblins—a small caravan of surly Blackhorns and a solitary Highboot whom Kolbyt would most certainly have robbed had they not forbidden it. The skies were growing ever heavier, ever darker as they headed northeast and began to climb again into hilly terrain.
Past a windswept hillock, Max saw the first evidence of Prusias’s war. It came in the form of a caravan that had been driven off the road and into a pond of brackish water. At first Max thought it was the water’s steam rising into the chill morning, but it was smoke still trickling from the charred crumble of wagons that had been incinerated down to the shallow water-line. Among the grisly spectacle, Max saw the twisted forms of burned horses and several others that were vaguely man-shaped. As Skeedle halted the mules, Max got out to scan the road as it climbed up into the mountains, winding amid the jutting clefts until it disappeared in the mist. Glancing about, he saw no evidence of the attackers; no hoof marks or even boot prints were pressed into the frosted soil. Several ravens hopped about the wreckage, eyeing Max suspiciously as he walked about the water’s edge. When he stepped into the icy shallows, they cawed and flapped heavily away.
Kolbyt bellowed something in his guttural speech. Max turned to see the goblin swaddled in wolf pelts next to Toby, whose plump, haggish face looked cold and miserable.
“He says we should move on,” reported Toby. “We’re too exposed out here—better that we get up into the mountains.”
Max nodded and took one last look at a scorched carcass before heading back inside the wagon.
David glanced up from his solitaire game. “What was it?” he asked.
“Four, maybe five wagons. All burned to a crisp and piled atop one another in a bog. No sign of survivors. No sign of the attackers, either.”
“I imagine we’ll see many such things before we get to Piter’s Folly,” remarked David, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the roof as the wagon bounced over a rut.
“I wish we were already there,” Max muttered. “I’ve been thinking about Walpurgisnacht. Your grandfather magicked us back to Rowan in an instant—without any tunnels or the observatory’s help. How did he do that?”
David smiled and lay down a final card.
“Because he’s Elias Bram. My grandfather’s capable of many things that are beyond my power. People like to make comparisons between us, but in truth there is no comparison.”
“Well, why couldn’t he have brought us to Piter’s Folly?” Max wondered, calculating that they had at least another week of hard travel through dangerous country. “It would have been so much faster.”
“You sound like Ms. Richter.” David smiled. “She’d like nothing better than to hand the Archmage a list of miracles to perform. But Prusias and the Workshop aren’t his priorities, much less some smuggler in a backwater like Piter’s Folly. Imperfect as it is, my tunnel has still gotten us where we are almost a month faster than
“And what is that?” asked Max.
“Hunting Astaroth,” replied David, pushing aside the cards and pouring Max some coffee. “Not such an easy task—the Demon might not even be in this dimension, much less this world.”
“You still call him ‘the Demon,’ ” Max noted. “Even after what your grandfather said.”
“If that’s what Astaroth’s pretending to be, then that’s what I’ll call him,” replied David. “Knowing what something
Sipping his coffee, Max considered this and gazed out one of the portholes. The marshy land was gone, the hardscrabble terrain growing hillier as the wagons climbed higher into the mountains. He spied a withered hawthorn clinging to life among the rocky soil. There was something vaguely unsettling about the tree, the way its limbs twitched and waved while its neighbors were still. Max shifted to keep it within view, half expecting to glimpse Astaroth peering back at him from behind its black trunk. As the wagon rumbled onward, the tree was lost from view, but Max’s worries remained. He brooded upon the Demon’s white, masklike face, a face that rarely blinked and always smiled.
As they crossed the Carpathians, Max asked several times if Skeedle would like a rest, but the goblin declined. He sat low in the driver’s seat, his hat scrunched down upon his knobby head while he clutched the reins in his calloused hands. Max was puzzled by the goblin’s taciturn mood. Given the road’s sinister reputation, Max thought they’d enjoyed tremendous luck. They’d encountered hardly any travelers, much less the bandits or armies that Alistair had warned of. They’d passed several burned out farmhouses and homesteads but seen no trace of anything on a larger scale. If war had begun in earnest, it had not trodden heavily on the region.
Descending the mountain passes, they followed the Ravenswood Spur through dark forests and shaded hills until they were a stone’s throw from a snowy riverbank. Shortly after noon, Max was sitting next to Skeedle in the driver’s seat when the goblin called out for his cousin to halt.
“It’s too quiet,” Skeedle whispered. “No birds, no foxes … not even a wolf has come sniffing after us and you know how they crave goblin! We’re but two wagons and there have been no bandits or highwaymen. It’s not natural. Th-there’s something out here and it’s watching us. I think it’s been with us since the mountains. My mind’s playing tricks—I’m seeing things in the trees and rocks. Faces.” The little goblin was absolutely trembling. Mopping his forehead, he peered up at Max with an expression of shameful desperation. Tears formed in his shiny black eyes. “I—I don’t know if I can go any farther,” he stammered. “I thought I’d be brave enough, but the Spur’s not like what I expected. The sooner I go home, the happier I’ll be. Would you think I’m a coward if I turn back?”
“No,” said Max gently. “I think you’ve already taken on more than I had a right to ask. Let’s give the mules a rest while I talk to David and Toby.”
While Skeedle and Kolbyt fed the mules and tinkered with the wagon, Max explained the situation to the others. Consulting his map, David glanced at the river and traced his finger on the parchment.
“I think that river’s the former Vistula,” he said. “We have maybe another seventy or eighty miles to Piter’s Folly. We can go on alone if Toby thinks he’s gotten enough information from Kolbyt.”
“I know everything he knows—or at least everything he can recall,” Toby sniffed. “Broadbrim clan lore ad nauseam, their history with Madam Petra, how to enter Piter’s Folly, et cetera, et cetera. I’m a certified expert on everything that rattles around that goblin’s head, and I’ll confess there’s a great deal I’d rather not know. He’s indecent.”
“So Toby can bluff his way in,” Max concluded. “But how are we going to get in to see her?”
“Toby’s been studying Kolbyt, but I’ve been studying Toby,” David revealed. “A smee’s greatest skill is his ability to mimic another creature’s aura. I think I can create an illusion that will do the same. We’re going to become goblins, Max. I’ll be Skeedle and you’ll be our bodyguard. Choose a name.”
“Hrunta, I guess,” said Max, recalling a thuggish Broadbrim he’d once met. “But I don’t speak goblin.”
“Relax,” said David. “Nobody bothers speaking to the bodyguard; just grunt. Toby, see if you can become Kolbyt.”
“I shall relish the change,” declared the hag.
A moment later, Kolbyt stood next to them—complete with the goblin’s hat, leather armor, wolf pelts, and iron-soled shoes. Max pinched the pelt between his fingers.
“How do you do that?” he wondered. “Do you just create the clothes out of thin air?”
“Ouch!” exclaimed Toby, swatting his hand. “No, I do not—you are ruining the elasticity of my magnificent epidermis. Everything you see is smee. In fact—OH!”
The startled smee backed away from him. Max was puzzled until David handed him a mirror. Within its surface, he did not see his own face but that of a toady-faced goblin with a forelock of black hair and a lipless mouth that stretched from ear to ear. As Max smiled, the ghastly reflection did likewise, revealing several rows of sharp, mossy incisors.
“Is that really you?” Toby whispered.
