Somewhere below this yew, in a hollow between the roots, lay the Copper Cauldron. A vast bowl of hammered metal, six inches thick, big enough to hold and cook an ox, each of its three squat legs the size of Susan’s torso. The metal shone with internal light, but the interior of the cauldron was darker than any night, defying all mortal sight.
Susan broke into a run, screaming words she didn’t even know, some ancient war cry of her father’s that had come into her head. At fifty yards she stopped to fire at the tree, but the revolver almost bucked out of her hand and the shot went wild.
But the boom of the gun did distract Southaw from his unseen struggle with the booksellers who were trying to reel him back into the flow of time. The sounds of the New World broke in again, louder and closer. Susan saw it now, like a mirage superimposed on what was already there, a blurry, double-vision view of a modern road cutting across the stony field ahead of her, a church rising up behind the yew, big expensive houses with well-clipped hedges shimmering into existence to her left and right.
There were people, too, ghostly, blurred figures. She knew they were booksellers from the blobs of bright silver that marked their hands. There were lots of them gathered in a ring around the ancient yew, like the goblins who’d danced her to the May Fair. There were even more booksellers behind them, left-handed ones with shadowy weapons, abstract lines in place of swords and axes. Susan heard Una’s commanding voice, but far off, as if carried by the wind from some distant place. But there was no wind here; the air was still and wet, even though the fog had gone.
Roads, buildings, and booksellers were not yet real in this place, and might never be, if Southaw won the contest of wills. Susan stopped and held the revolver tighter, firing at the tree again, four more times, until the gun was empty. She thought she hit it, but Southaw was not distracted again.
The New World faded out again. Susan screamed in anger and ran forward, lifting her little knife high. She wanted to hurt Southaw, punish him for everything he had done. He had enslaved her father, ruined Jassmine’s life, killed Merlin’s and Vivien’s mother—
No Cauldron-Born rose to stop her, no sudden flight of starlings. For a few moments a sense of exaltation filled Susan; she would reach the tree and hack at the branches with her knife . . . the sharpened butter knife. . . .
But what would that do? Shooting at it hadn’t achieved anything. She already knew she couldn’t bind Southaw, not with salt and steel and blood.
She didn’t need to hurt Southaw. She needed to distract him. Make him fight a battle of wills with her as well as the booksellers.
Susan stopped, and raised her hands, once again taking in a deep breath.
“The Copper Cauldron is mine own! I call upon its powers and deny them to all others!”
A flash of bright copper-red light from beneath the tree answered her words. She felt a sudden giddy influx of power, only for second, before the harsh will of Southaw shut her off from it. It was not enough for her to simply claim the cauldron. It would take more than that.
The Ancient Sovereign responded in another way as well. The tree moved, a great root tearing out of the earth, or so it seemed. Susan slowed and blinked. It was not the physical tree that moved, the thing of branch and leaf and bark. It was as if the shadow of the tree was leaving it. But this was no shadow, it was a thing of that same intensely dense, gray, and greasy smoke she’d seen become a raven atop the Old Man of Coniston.
It was the spirit of the tree, the essence of Southaw.
Another shadowy root came free of the earth, and another, and a smoky duplicate left the actual tree, branches stretching out like grasping arms. The whorls and fissures of the physical tree were in this thing huge pupil-less yellow eyes, and the rotting crack in the bole became a gulping maw that opened and shut and ground splintered teeth together in exasperation at its challenger.
Southaw stalked towards Susan, growing taller as he came, now a fifty-foot-tall creature of dense malevolence. The real tree behind it seemed tiny now, ordinary and merely old, no longer imbued with power.
But Southaw’s grip on his demesne did not waver. There was no hint of the New World, no faint vision of road or church or people.
“What does it take,” groaned Susan, watching the apparition stalk towards her, her mind momentarily blank with fear. If she couldn’t distract Southaw . . .
Bright light flashed again from the Copper Cauldron, like a beacon calling to her. She could see in her mind’s eye, nestled in an earthy chamber beneath the physical yew, half-buried in the humus from the tree’s dropped bark and needles decomposing over time.
Susan turned and ran, not directly away from Southaw, but at a right angle. The huge shadow tree turned to follow, moving fast, many great roots propelling it like a centipede, sending it scuttling over the ground faster than Susan could run. Its leading branches reached out fifty or sixty feet ahead, all too like a spider’s forelegs, the ends curling and snatching at the air, as they would snatch at her in a very few seconds.
Susan turned again and raced for the copper-red glint. Southaw turned, too, not so swift as
