“She finds anything he left behind and she stuffs it in the only fire still burning early in the morning. The cook stove fire.”
“Which makes me think he left a note,” I said. “Something sappy and overdone. I’d bet you two new horseshoes he even asked her to burn his note in the note. That’s probably what gave her the idea to toss in his boots as well.”
Gertriss nodded. “Reckon the worthless lying bastard had that coming.” She practically dripped venom when she spoke, and for the first time I wondered if perhaps Gertriss had left her quaint country village for reasons that might surprise even Mama Hog.
“What matters to us is finding out who he left behind. She’s the only one who might tell us what he was doing, and who he was doing it for.”
“So you reckon he did set them bandits on us?”
“Set those, not them. And yes. I think friend Weexil may have been someone’s eyes and ears here at House Werewilk, and I think someone didn’t want us to arrive on time and breathing.”
Gertriss just nodded, and kicked at a pinecone.
We tramped about, not talking, just looking. House Werewilk covered a lot of ground, as did the other structures that filled the woods behind it.
Arranged in a ragged half-circle a bowshot from the main house were two barns, overflowing with loose hay, a huge old slate-roofed stable, three two-storey houses much newer than anything else that looked to be servant’s quarters, a smithy, a lumber-mill, a fenced vegetable garden sporting thirty rows of tall green corn, a well-house, and a row of privy-houses that must have made Gertriss long for the plain country comforts of home.
Cows mooed and dogs barked and chickens clucked, but Lady Werewilk’s command that all should dine in the House was obviously being obeyed by one and all.
“Remember where things are in relation to each other,” I said to Gertriss. “And let’s make it a rule now. If we should get separated, never mind the reason, let’s try to meet back at the far barn. Yes, that one, with the bad roof.”
“Good place to hide.”
I looked around. Huge old blood oaks surrounded us, their boughs tangled overhead, all but blotting out the sky.
A shiver ran right the Hell up and down my spine.
Gertriss saw.
The dinner bell clanged.
“I don’t like it either, Mr. Markhat. I tell you plain, someone is watching us, right now.”
I’d left Toadsticker upstairs. I wasn’t even wearing my armored dinner jacket. The tiny hairs on my arms and the back of my neck began a desperate attempt to crawl to safety.
Way up above the blood-oak limbs, a cloud raced across the late afternoon sun. Midnight’s ghost swallowed us suddenly up.
“I need to know, Gertriss. How good is your Sight?”
“It’s good, Mr. Markhat. Very good.”
“As good as Mama’s?”
“Better.” She crossed her arms, but that didn’t stop me from seeing her shiver.
“So we’re really being watched. By someone with eyes.”
She nodded, took a deep breath, closed her eyes.
I’ve seen Mama do the same thing over and over. But when Gertriss did it, the wind suddenly bore whispers, and the shadows around us began to dart and scurry.
The huldra. Back again, risen from its hiding place.
“There,” said Gertriss, pointing, but my eyes were already fixed on the spot.
Ahead of us. Two hundred feet, maybe. Call it thirty feet off the ground. My eyes told me there was nothing there but the same shadows that enveloped us, but the remnant of the huldra saw something else.
“What is it?”
“It watches,” replied Gertriss. Her eyes were still shut. Her hands were outstretched, moving, as though performing some intricate unraveling of the empty air before her.
I shook my head, willing the huldra’s dry crackling voice to be silent.
“Does it have a crossbow?”
Gertriss opened one eye.
“You are not going to just go stomping up to it, are you?”
“Not if it has a crossbow. Is it an it or a he or a she? Or a them?”
Gertriss started moaning.
I whirled. Her eyes had rolled up, so that only the whites showed. Her hands twitched and groped. She took a step forward, and I caught her by her elbows.
She tried to keep walking. Her moaning rose and rose, becoming a shriek.
A shriek to match the one now sounding through the blood-oaks.
I felt it too, now. Eyes, eyes upon me. The huldra’s ghost gibbered and screamed, telling me words I didn’t know, urging me to hurl magics I no longer commanded.
“Sorry,” I said.
And then I grabbed the back of Gertriss’ hair and yanked.
She erupted into a whirlwind of claws and knees, but her howl died and her eyes rolled back down, wide and angry and hurt.
The shriek in the trees died with hers, choked off just as suddenly.
Gertriss stopped struggling, grabbed my hand and charged for the House, dragging me along after.
I didn’t resist. Much. One-man charges against unknown foes may be the stuff of legend, but then so are gruesome deaths and shallow graves.
We hoofed it back to our side door and didn’t stop until it was securely closed behind us.
We leaned on the walls and panted. Gertriss wrapped her arms tight around her chest and fought back a serious case of the shivers. I patted her shoulder in a fatherly there, there fashion and tried not to shake myself.
“I begin to see why the staff doesn’t line up to patrol the grounds.”
Gertriss nodded.
“Any idea at all what that was?”
She shook her head.
I gave up trying to coax words out of her just yet. But of course there was only one word on both our minds anyway.
Banshee.
What else lurks about, ready to issue its trademarked plaintive howl upon being spotted? The howl, together with Gertriss’ earlier sighting of a near-naked woman, certainly suggested it.
But even Mama had scorned the idea of a real banshee. Mama, who routinely trafficked with everything from haints to clover-fairies.
But something had been in the trees. Something had howled. Something had nearly drawn Gertriss into a trance that would have sent her stumbling blindly into the woods.
A Banshee. Or some sort of sorcery.
“Take your pick,” I muttered.
“Pick of what?”
“Bad or worse. You all right? What happened out there?”
“I saw something, Mr. Markhat. So I looked closer, and then it saw me.”
She shivered again. I urged her down the hall, away from the door. Just in case.
“Male or female? Armed, unarmed?”
“It was the same woman I saw on the way here,” said Gertriss. She set a brisk pace and impressed me by lowering her arms to her sides and forcing a deep breath. “Unarmed. Watching. No, more than just watching. I think…I think she’s looking for something.”
We were back in the painting room. There was no sound from the hall, so I hoped our arboreal howling witch
