Abarat

But all his reassurances could not persuade the Princess Boa to change her mind. She wrote back to him with great tenderness, but there was always uncertainty in what she wrote. She wasn't saying no , outright, because her father agreed with Carrion and saw a great opportunity for peace between Day and Night if his daughter and the Lord of Midnight were to marry. But for her to say yes, she would have to be rid of all the questions that haunted her.

She had dreams, she had written, that did not reassure her.

He had written back, asking her what dreams these were.

The Princess Boa had not been specific in her response. She'd only said that the dreams frightened her, and though she did not doubt Carrion's good and honorable intentions toward her, she could not put these visions out of her head.

As he walked through Gallows Forest, the vultures and the ravens kept pace with him, the ravens flying from tree to tree overhead, the vultures hopping at his feet, fighting between themselves for the place closest to his heels. He remembered how he had labored over the letters he had written back to her, determined to convince her that the dreams she was having were of no significance, and that she should take comfort in his undying devotion to her.

'I will protect you ,' he had written, 'from any power that threatens you. I will put myself between you and Death itself. Please, lady, be assured: there is no demon in air, earth or sea that can threaten you .'

Whenever he had sent a letter to her there had always been a trial by hope while he had waited for her reply. And then a terrible moment when that reply had finally arrived and his fingers had become thick and fumbling with unease as he struggled to open the envelope.

The answer never satisfied him.

He pressed her, over and over, to stop punishing him with indecision. And finally, after much importuning on his part, the Princess had given him a clear answer. It could not, indeed, have been clearer. She did not love him, could not love him, and would never love him.

He'd almost drowned in the wave of self-hatred that had broken over him when he read that final reply. He knew why she was telling him no, and it had nothing to do with her nightmares. It was something else; something far simpler.

She hated him.

That was the terrible truth of the matter. However tenderly phrased her refusal, he could read between the lines of her letter. She thought he was an ugly, scarred, nightmare-ridden grotesque, and she hated him with all her heart.

That was the beginning, the middle and the end of the matter.

His long, meditative amble through the trees had brought him into the heart of the forest now, where the great gallows of the past had been planted. Some still had rotted nooses tied to their beams, and a few of those nooses still supported the remains of executed men and women, mummified in their last, ghastly poses, mouths stretched grotesquely wide. Some had had their tongues plucked out by hungry ravens, and many of the birds in this vicinity had come to possess the voices of those whose tongues they ate. Now they chattered like men as they hopped around on the bloodred branches that had sprouted from the gallows.

'What a night to be hanged, eh?'

'I was hanged on a night like this. How my wife cried!'

'Mine didn't.'

'Why not?'

'She was the reason I had a noose around my throat!'

'You killed her?'

'I surely did! She cooked the worst bread- puddinginTazmagor !'

The Lord of Midnight put the absurdly grim gossip out of his head and let his thoughts go back to the girl he had seen through the moth's eyes on the towers of the Yebba Dim Day. Though she had fallen out of the air when the moth was killed, she was still alive; of that Carrion was irrationally certain. And sooner or later he would find her and speak to her.

Did he dare believe that perhaps this girl had come from the Hereafter as fortune's way of compensating him for what he'd suffered at the hands of the Princess Boa? Perhaps that was why he thought he recognized the girl: because she was a gift to him from circumstance.

The thought lifted his dark mood somewhat. He walked on through the trees, toward the cliff edge, where he would have a view toward the islands of the west. Including, of course, the Yebba Dim Day.

His route took him past a place among the trees where two masked men who'd been warders in his prison and had developed a deep enmity for one another were fighting with clubs. The pair were brothers, Wendigo and Chilek, and Carrion had amused himself some days earlier by casually sewing a seed of discord between the two (a rumor, no more, whispered in each ear, suggesting that one brother was attempting to become the prison's warden behind the other's back). It was a test, really, to see how long it would take for jealousy to overcome the once powerful love that the two brothers had borne one another. Not long, was the answer. Here they were now, fighting to the death over something that wasn't even true.

Unseen, Carrion watched from the shadows as the fight reached its grim conclusion. One brother slipped in the mush of rotted gallows leaves beneath their feet and went down in the dirt. The other man didn't give his brother a chance to beg for mercy. He raised his club and delivered the coup de grace with a whoop of boyish glee.

The victor's moment of triumph didn't last very long. The whoop died away, and the surviving brother seemed to wake from his trance of envy and bloodlust. He shook his head and pulled off his mask. Then—letting both mask and club drop from his hands— he fell to his knees beside his sibling. Recognition of what he'd done flooded his face.

Carrion laughed, hugely amused. Hearing the laughter, Wendigo looked up from his brother's body and stared off into the shadows.

'Who's there?' he demanded of the darkness.

The sudden grief in his voice disturbed a flock of gallows ravens in the branches overhead. They too had been watching the fight, it seemed. Now they called to Wendigo as they swooped down around him.

'Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!'

He tried to wave them off, but they weren't about to be driven away.

Around and around they flew, some even daring to land on the man's head to hop there and laugh into his ears. He struck wildly at them, but they were up and away before he could catch hold of their black and spindly legs. Defeated, now alone with his crime, Wendigo sank down sobbing in the dead leaves.