How many in their madness had clung to that promise? How many blinded by longing and made foolish with desire? Yet another, the exile thought. Yet one more, alone in a silent house on a hill.
Asleeping potion couldn’t have made them sleep more soundly. After days of being parched, of running in the heat without end, they had drunk and drunk and then collapsed beneath the broad moon and slept like stones until the late-morning light turned the mouth of the cave into a bright circle.
They woke to barking.
Max opened his eyes and tried to place himself. He was lying on the edge of Nell’s blanket. Peaches had rolled from it across the cave and glowed gold in the shadows.
Outside, the noise sounded too close. It was no longer a distant part of the din of the wood, sometimes lost amid the voices of squirrels and birds. This was sharp, insistent, and nearby.
“Susan! Nell! Get up! How long have we slept?”
They rolled over, sat up, listened. Susan leaned out of the cave and squinted at the sky.
“It’s late! Nearly noon!” she gasped. “They’ve had all this time!”
Panicked, she looked wildly around the cave. “Can we still outrun them?”
They had to try. There was no time to collect the peaches, but Jean grabbed her doll. They fled the cave and scrambled up the rise, out of breath with the sudden exertion.
Below, a dog barked frantically, its pitch rising to an excited whine.
“Susan!” Max huffed. “Do you think you can make the wind blow? You know how now, don’t you?”
He tried to do it himself, desperate to throw the dogs off their scent, but found he couldn’t. He kept thinking of the pungent heat rising off his skin and signaling to the dogs, like a pointed finger, like a whistle. He shuddered and tried to focus. The sound of barking shattered his concentration.
Susan, too, was trying. As Max watched, a faint breeze swept the dirt. He looked up into the trees. The leaves had begun to lift.
“Send it up the mountain!” he said. “Throw them off!”
Susan’s forehead creased, and she bit her lip, but they could hear the sound of the search getting closer. Someone shouted in the distance. She shook her head. “I can’t keep it up!”
The effort made it hard to run. They’d fallen behind the others. Nell turned, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Come on!” she begged. “Hurry!”
For another second, Susan and Max kept at it, but they could hear the dogs shuffling through the trees now, not far beneath the nearest ridge.
Susan let out a shuddering breath and shook her head.
“It’s no use!” she said. “We can’t do both!”
They ran. Nell bounded up the mountain with the younger girls, half dragging them over rocks and helping them scramble over sudden rises. Max sprinted to keep pace, but below him, he could hear individual dogs now, amid the frenzied baying and clamoring. He looked behind him. Six huge black-snouted beasts streaked through the trees, ears up and teeth flashing.
“Faster!” he shouted.
The girls charged ahead. Max’s lungs ached, but he pushed himself to speed up. He came abreast of Kate, her arms pumping, face pink, curls flying.
He could hear the dogs panting, hear their feet hit the dirt. Their barks rose in pitch.
Faster!
The barks turned to growls, and then Kate shrieked and fell, a dog on her back. Before Max could do a thing, a second one lunged at him, snatching his sleeve. Teeth grazed his arm, and the dog yanked him sharply to his knees. He hit the ground so hard, his jaw rattled.
“Susan!” he panted. “The wind!”
Max squeezed his eyes shut, mind scrambling. He tried to see the wind swooping through the trees as it had swept across the tiled room, throwing off the dogs and toppling the men he could hear coming. But the dog’s hot breath fired his wrist, and the animal shook him until his arm flailed and he fell onto his back, feet bent beneath him. He cried out.
At last the dog held still, pressing his arm painfully to the ground. He tried to find the others. Susan stood trembling, her back against a red oak. One of the dogs had leaped up and pinned her there, its paws on her shoulders. She stood with her eyes squeezed shut as it growled in her face. Another dog had Nell by the shirt, and still another had clamped its teeth around Jean’s skirt and pinned her to the ground. Kate lay with a cheek pressed to the dirt, eyes wide, struggling for breath beneath the dog’s weight. A sixth animal circled the others, snarling.
Think, Max told himself. Focus! But his thoughts ricocheted through his head. The dog shook him like a doll, wrenching his arm nearly out of its socket.
A zip of electricity, like a static shock, nipped at him, and dirt rose in a puff nearby. He looked to Susan and hope surged through him.
Then he heard the sound of running feet, and the breeze died. Two soldiers, muskets up, broke through the trees.
“Good dog!” one of them said. “You hold him!”
The dog wagged its tail and jerked Max’s arm. He winced and twisted to look at the soldiers.
The first was a ruddy-faced, middle-aged man whose round knob of a nose looked out of place amid the rest of his strange, stretched, and stubbled features. His companion was a hard-eyed, thick-bodied young man with light hair. He glared at Max.
“Stand up, you! You’ll be coming back with us now.”
He snapped his fingers at the dog, and it bobbed its head, yanking Max’s arm wrong way back. Max yelped and writhed, twisting until he was able to scramble painfully to his feet. The dog answered by tugging his arm so sharply that he stumbled, sleeve shredded, and fell back to his
