kind of glowing doorway, but the ghost girl’s face was transformed, all in an instant. She lost that pinched, despairing look. Her eyes shone with joyful surprise, and her mouth turned up in a silent smile of bliss.
“There you be, my little lady,” Robin said softly. “What you’ve dreamed all your life and death about, what you saw only dimly before. Summerland, my wee little dear. Summerland, waiting for you. Go on through, honey sweetling, go on through.”
The ghost girl darted forward like a kingfisher diving for a minnow. A flash, and she was into the glow—and gone. And the glow went with her.
Now Robin turned his attention to the shadow woman, lying motionless under his spiderweb net. “Heaven won’t have
Neville suddenly made a sound Nan had never heard him make before. Something like a quork, and something like a caw, it made Puck glance at him and nod.
“Right you are, Morrigan’s bird,” he replied. “That’s all she’s fit for. It’s the Hunt for her, and well rid of her this middle earth will be.”
He turned to Nan and Sarah. “Close your eyes, young mortals,” he said, with such an inflection that Nan could not have disobeyed him if she’d wanted to. “These things are not for the gaze of so young as you.”
She kept her eyes open just long enough to see him take a cow horn bound in silver with a silver mouthpiece from his belt, the sort of thing she saw in books about Robin Hood, and put it to his lips. Her eyes closed and glued themselves shut as three mellow notes sounded in the sultry air.
Suddenly, that sultry air grew cold and dank; she shivered, and Neville pressed himself into her neck, reassuringly, his warm body radiating the confidence that the air was sapping away from her. All the birds stopped singing, and even the sound of the river nearby faded away, as if she had been taken a mile away from it.
She heard hoofbeats in the distance, and hounds baying.
She’d never heard nor seen a foxhunt, though she’d read about them since coming to the school, and it was one of those things even a street urchin knew about vaguely.
This, however, did not sound like a foxhunt. The hounds had deep, deep voices that made her shiver, and made her feel even less inclined to open her eyes, if that was possible. There were a lot of hounds—and a lot of horses, too—and they were coming nearer by the moment.
She reached out blindly and caught Sarah’s hand, and they clung to each other as the hounds and horses thundered down practically on top of them—as the riders neared, she heard them laughing, and if Puck’s laugh was all joy, this laughter was more sorrowful than weeping. It made her want to huddle on the ground and hope that no one noticed her.
The shadow woman shrieked.
Then dogs and riders were all around them except that, other than the sounds, there was nothing physically there.
Feelings, though—Nan was so struck through with fear that she couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it. Only Sarah’s hand in hers, and Neville’s warm presence on her shoulder, kept her from screaming in terror. And it was cold, it was colder than the coldest night on the streets of London, so cold that Nan couldn’t even shiver.
Hoofbeats milling around them, the dogs baying hollowly, the riders laughing—then the shadow woman stopped shrieking, and somehow her silence was worst of all.
One of the riders shouted something in a language that Nan didn’t recognize. Robin answered him, and the rider laughed, this time not a laugh full of pain, but full of eager gloating. She felt Neville spread his wings over her, and there was a terrible cry of despair—
And then, it all was gone. The birds sang again, warmth returned to the day, the scent of new-mown grass and flowers and the river filled her nostrils, and Neville shook himself and quorked.
“You can open your eyes now, children,” said Robin.
Nan did; Neville hopped down off her shoulder and stood on the ground, looking up at Robin. There was nothing out of the ordinary now in the scene before them, no matter how hard Nan looked. No shadow woman, no ghost girl, no dark emotions haunting the bridge. Just a normal stone bridge over a pretty little English river in the countryside. Even Robin was ordinary again; his fantastical garb was gone, and he could have been any other country boy except for the single strand of tiny vine leaves wound through his curly brown hair.
“What—” Sarah began, looking at Puck with a peculiarly stern expression.
“That was the Wild Hunt, and you’d do well to stay clear of it and what it Hunts, little Seeker,” Robin said, without a smile. “It answers to me because I am Oldest, but there isn’t much it will answer to, not much it will stop for, not too many ways to escape it when it has your scent, and there’s no pity in the Huntsman. He decides what they’ll Hunt, and no other.”
“What
Robin shrugged. “Run and find out for yourself what it is, young Sarah. And go and look to see what it hunts on your own, young Nan. There’s mortal libraries full of books that can tell you—in part. The rest you can only feel, and if your head doesn’t know, your heart can tell you.”
“Well,” Nan replied, stubbornly determined to get
“And I need to tell you what you already know?” Robin shook his head. “You work it out between you. She’s not been here long, I will tell you, and I should have dealt with her when she first appeared, but—” he scratched his head, and grinned one of those day-brightening grins, “—but there was birds to gossip with, and calves to tease, and goats to ride, and I just forgot.”
Nan snorted at the evasive answer, but Sarah smiled. “You never will answer anyone straight up, will you?” she asked with a sidelong glance.
“It’s not my way, Missy Sahib,” Puck replied, and tickled her under the chin with a buttercup that suddenly appeared in his hand. “Now go you back and not a word of this to your schooling dame. Just your bad luck that two things came together and you as the third made some things happen that might not have, otherwise. That was bad for you, but good for the little mite. Then came your good luck, that it all made a mighty big stir-up of the world, and that got my attention. And me knowing you, that called me. An hour one way or the other and this would never have happened. The shadow would have claimed the mite, and no doubt of it.”
Nan could well believe that. And she also had no intention of telling Mem’sab about it.
But she was going to find out what that shadow lady had been, and why she was at the bridge.
No one had missed them by the time they got back, and evidently there was no sign of their misadventure clinging to them either. Nan and Sarah stood in the garden doorway for a moment, assessing the mood in the manor, and exchanged a look.
“Think I’m gonna talk to th‘ kitchen maids,” Nan said thoughtfully. “If there’s gossip about, they’ll know it.”
“I’m going to see if Robin was right about the Hunt being in books,” was Sarah’s answer. “There are a lot of oddish things in the library here.”
With a nod, they separated, and Nan ensconced herself, first in the kitchen on the excuse of begging toast and jam and milk, then in the laundry, then in the dairy as the two dairymaids finished churning the butter out of the second milking, and turned the cheeses as they ripened.
By that time, the bell had rung for dinner, and it was too late to talk to Sarah about what she’d found out. She could tell that Sarah was bursting with news, though, and so was she—
The news had to wait. After dinner came the nightly chore Mem’sab had set Nan to doing, helping put the littlest ones to bed. And Sarah went to help Tommy catch fireflies—he had a scheme to put enough in a little wire cage he’d made to read under the covers by, but he couldn’t get the wire bars close enough and they kept escaping, much to the delight of the bats that flew in and out of their open windows at night—
That had been something that had shocked Nan the first time it had happened.
The children from India were all used to it; the same sort of thing happened in their Indian bungalows all the time. But Nan hadn’t ever even seen a bat before, and the first time one had flitted in the open window and fluttered around, she hadn’t known what it was. A lot of the maids hated them, and shrieked when they were flying around a room, pulling their caps down tight to their heads (because bats allegedly would get tangled in your hair).
