When I awoke the second time, I saw the cat’s-head outcropping of stone not far down the road. Beyond that pinnacle was the hill where we had gathered flowers when I was a child, where I had first met Bill and the others. To my left was the old well we called the shepherds’ well, where the flocks were watered on their way to market in East Sawley. Nothing looked the same, and yet everything looked familiar—oddly familiar, as though I had only remembered it wrongly. The pinnacle was too short, the hill too low. The trees were too huge, too vast. There were no trees like these, anywhere, anytime. I leaned against one of them, feeling the scratchy roughness of the bark. No. There had been trees like these, once. It was just that I hadn’t seen them for a very long time.
I slipped off the boots and rose to my feet, putting one hand toward the hedge to help myself and withdrawing it with a howl of pain. The rose-wall was furred with thorns, small ones and large, an upholstery of needles. The four-petaled pink blooms were sweetly fragrant, though the scent was faint, more like a smell remembered than one present, like an old sachet, left long in a linen drawer, remini-scent. I turned to see an old horse grazing nearby, one eye watchfully on me. When I moved, he turned to stare at me, ears forward, not yet sufficiently surprised or frightened to move away.
I played games in my head, saying words to myself to see if I knew what they meant. Retreat. Regroup. Realize. Resume. The horse whickered at me, coming forward with its neck stretched out, nostrils wide. I put an arm across his back and together we walked away from the hedge. When I looked back, I was unable to see the top. It seemed to arch away from me at the height, and the farther I walked, the taller the green mass stretched into the sky.
Under the cat’s-head stone, I searched for my fortune. There were flowers growing between the stones, and a silver-leafed shrub grown well down among the rocks I had used to stop the hidey-hole. It was clear I had returned some little time after I had gone. The rocks had to be levered out with a dead branch, and they came unwillingly, bound about by roots. Inside the hollow was a scattering of coins and gems, but no sign of the leathern bag that had contained them. A mouse, I thought, finding signs about: a whole company of mice. I picked the coins and jewels up and put them into my sack, feeling here and there for the warrant I had left behind. Parchment, it had been. To a mouse as goodly a chewable as a leather bag! Then something rustled under my hand and I pulled the parchment out, dry and whole, not badly stained, nibbled only at the edges. Perhaps the small creatures had not liked the flavor of the ink.
After retrieving my belongings, I trudged up the wildflower hill, turning at the top to look down on Westfaire as I had done a hundred times in my childhood. There was no Westfaire. There were no towers. No high banners whipping in the wind. Nothing there but an escarpment of green, a great whale-back of verdure, a monstrous and overgrown mound, a spined and impenetrable barrow of roses. If one did not know what was under it, one would think it merely a hill covered with thorns, not worth the scratches it would take to explore.
Something shoved me. I turned to find the old horse nosing at my sack. He whickered at me. I stroked his soft muzzle and he pushed his nose into my shoulder.
“I have no grain. Will you be ridden? Saddle or no?” I grasped a handful of mane and drew him toward a rock, climbing upon it and leaning across his back. He made a sound, almost of pleasure. I slid a leg across. He waited. I lowered my weight upon him, fully expecting to be tossed onto the rocky ground. Instead, he turned to look at me, as though asking, “Where do we go now?”
“Down the River Welling is a little hamlet called Sawley Minor,” I said aloud to see how the words sounded, trying for the remembered words and accents of this time. “Where the miller lives. Let us go there.” When I had played at being Havoc, the miller’s son, Sawley Minor had been the place I imagined as home. If I received no welcome at the mill beside the Sedgebrook, the abbey lay only a little farther down the River Welling, and beyond it the village of East Sawley. East Sawley was a village of some size, occupied by woodsmen and sawyers, and I could undoubtedly find lodging there. I nudged the horse with a leg, showing the way, and he moved slowly down the hill in the direction I had indicated.
When the horse moved, I felt the pain in my groin, like a knife. Jaybee had torn me there. There were raw places, and I could feel warm stickiness on my legs. Getting on the horse had started the bleeding again. I shook with fear and rage and loneliness, and the horse turned his head to fix me with his round, incurious eyes. “My enemy isn’t here,” I said, convincing myself. “He doesn’t have boots, so he can’t get here without the machine, and he’d have to go back to the twenty-first to use the machine, and he probably wouldn’t dare do that even if he could. Besides, he could not imagine I have returned here. No one knows I had the means to do that.”
Grumpkin stirred against my thigh, like a hand, stroking me. That reminded me of Bill, and I felt the blood leave my face. Bill knew. No. Bill didn’t know I could come back, that
