Silvertongue (4 page)

He looked at the horse, at the strip of blackness joining it to the Stone. The tendril was thinning out, as if the darkness in the Stone were nearly all gone. And as the flow of darkness dwindled, so the split in the Stone was closing up.

“What do we do?” said the Old Soldier.

“Warn people,” said the Duke. “You go now; go fast and don’t look back. Warn them so they can try to find a way to put whatever this cursed genie is back in its damned Stone.”

“Right,” said the Young Soldier. “You heard the man, off we go. . . .”

The Old Soldier wasn’t in such a hurry to leave. “What about you, sir?”

“Me, sir?” The Duke smiled and looked from the horse to the split in the Stone. “I don’t know. But I think we must stop that crack from closing, or we shall not have even a sword’s-breadth of hope left. . . .”

The Old Soldier knew what he was going to do the instant before he did it, and greatly to his credit tried to jump between the Duke and the Stone.

“No, sir!” he shouted.

The Duke sprang past the Old Soldier and plunged his sword into the crack in the Stone, right up to the hilt.

There was another silent detonation, and a great blast of heat pulsed out of the Stone. The horse reared high on its back legs and snorted in rage, and the Duke . . .

The Duke melted into a frozen gout of bronze. The only thing left to show of him besides a curve of liquefied metal was his hand, still clenched unflinchingly to his sword handle, the blade of which was held fast by the crack.

The two soldiers looked at each other. The young one opened his mouth to speak.

The old one just grabbed the boy by his shoulder and ran.

Behind them, the Dark Horse pawed the snow and felt new power in its limbs, recalling how it felt to move, because the darkness had remembered one of the ways it had walked the earth all those aeons before its imprisonment.

It had walked the sleeping hours of men on four strong legs like this.

It had ridden through their dreams, spreading terror.

It was the Night Mare.

D
eath came for Edie on the beach, but he didn’t come immediately. To start with she was alone, and she was running, not a panicked run, but a solid and unrelenting jog across the shore.

The beach was divided by low walls, long barriers of weathered wood marching down from shore to sea at thirty-yard intervals. She knew she could run better if she got off the beach and ran on the track along the shore, but some kind of repellent magnetic force kept her as far from the track as possible. The tide was out, so every now and then the pebbles gave way to hard sand, ribbed by the current. When she hit these patches she picked up speed, but the ribs made it painful and uneven going, and she was always in danger of turning her ankle. Whenever she came to a short wall, she scrambled up and tumbled over it and kept on running.

As she ran, something gnawed at the back of her mind—not a thought so much as a sense of need. She was missing something, but she couldn’t spare the time or the energy to figure out what it was. She knew it was important, but not as important as keeping on running.

As she thumped down on an unexpected stretch of sand on the other side of a particularly high barrier, her ankle did finally turn, and she stumbled and fell.

Something small and powerful and gray was surprised by her dropping out of the sky, and started running at a fast lope up the beach away from her. It was a hare. She watched it crest the pebble ridge, where it stopped and stared back at her, long ears outlined against the sky. For a long moment the world seemed strangely still and silent as she stared back at it. Then there was the sound of a distant bell, tolling once only, and the hare twitched its tail and was gone. Edie hauled herself to her feet and made herself keep going.

The sea to her left was the same expanse of dark water she’d drowned in before. It lapped back and forth gently and relentlessly at her side, and though she was apprehensive about it, she was less scared of the water she could see than whatever it was that she couldn’t quite catch sight of up on the shore to her right.

Because, of course, although she couldn’t see it, she knew that it was death she was running from.

On the edge of her vision, a great gray seabird flew parallel with her on the seaward side, as if keeping distant company. Other than that, the beach, the sea, and the shore were empty.

The walls were, she realized, getting taller. Each one was higher and harder to get over. And they were increasingly covered in limpets and seaweed and ever sharper barnacles, which scratched and cut her legs and hands.

But she climbed them all.

And still she ran.

Strangely, she was both exhausted and yet never exactly tired enough to stop. She felt every lurch from leg to leg, and her feet were sore, but there was also something comforting and familiar about the rhythm of running and breathing hard. She knew she was sobbing for breath, but that didn’t hurt anymore either, not in an important way.

She seemed to be able to run and run forever.

And just when she felt she really would go on like this forever—she couldn’t.

The next wall was an unscalable cliff of vicious shell-shard barnacles and treacherously slippery bladder wrack. To her right the beach slanted sharply in an upsweep of pebbles, shortening her horizon so that she could no longer see the shore behind it. The wall looked climbable at the top of the incline, but anything could be waiting for her up there, just lurking over the lip of the slope. She decided to wade around the seaward end of the wall rather than risk meeting it.

As soon as she was ankle-deep in the inky water she knew she’d made a bad mistake.

Her foot was sucked into the beach beneath the water, and when she pushed with the other one to get her leg free, it just went deeper and held fast. She struggled against the suck of the quicksand, but within seconds she was knee-deep. She had a horrible feeling exactly as if hands had grabbed her ankles and were pulling her down. She knew this was just fear and too much imagination, so she reached for the end of the wall to try and haul herself out, but it was just too far away. Her hand caught a trailing tendril of bladder wrack, but when she tugged at it, it just came loose and tumbled into the sea beside her.

She bent over one knee and pushed on it with both hands, trying to lift the other foot even an inch. Nothing happened, but the sea seemed to rise a little. She stared at it in horror.

“Help!” she shouted, and looked up.

And there he was, in the water.

Striding toward her.

Smiling and reaching out a helping hand.

“Edie. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

George.

George stood there, with a sudden wind blowing his hair back off his face, smiling into the light.

Smiling into her face.

She felt suddenly giddy with relief and happiness.

“Grab my hand. If I come farther it’ll get me too.”

Their fingers reached for each other. She missed on the first attempt and nearly fell.

“Come on, it’ll be fine. I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

And as she looked up from the water, she caught the glint of the little blade held in his other hand. And then her gaze continued up his arm and took in his face and the appalling thing that was happening to it.

It was melting and shifting so that it was George and then it wasn’t George, not completely, not very, not really, not hardly, and then . . . not at all.

It was her mother’s partner. Her stepfather. The smiler with the knife, right down to the streak of blood across his face where she had scratched him with her nails as she’d made her escape from the beach hut and the horrors she had glinted within.

It was death on the beach, a death delayed, a death from what seemed a lifetime ago.

“Don’t be silly. I’m not going to hurt you,” he wheedled, a smile curdling across his red face, and she caught the rank bar-and-tobacco smell on his breath. “Why would I hurt you?”

“I killed you!” she yelled.

He laughed. “Didn’t kill me, love. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but girly can’t never hurt me, eh?”

When he laughed, his eyes fluttered, and she remembered how creepy she’d always known he was, creepy from the first moment her mother had brought him home to the last time she’d seen him, after he’d told her about her mother dying. After they’d gone for the walk on the beach and he’d tried to be nice to her.

Before he’d tried to make her go into the old beach hut, where she’d seen the full horror of it all.

He lurched deeper into the water and grabbed at her. She couldn’t dodge much because her feet were caught fast, and he quickly got her.

As his hand grasped her upper arm and pulled her, something else happened. A blast of wind from the sea hit them, followed by another and another, building in strength. And then she saw that it was not wind but the downdraft from the wing beats of the huge bird that she’d seen keeping level with her as she’d run. Close to, she saw it was an owl. And for a reason that she neither understood nor questioned, she knew it meant her no harm.

The man saw it at the same time.

His mouth crumpled into a loose
O
of shock, then widened into a scream as the bird screeched at him. The power of the noise blew the tops of the wavelets around them flat. Maybe because the screech wasn’t aimed at her, Edie’s ears only rang with the force of it, but the man seemed suddenly maddened by the sound. His hands bunched over his ears as the great gray bird hung in the air between him and Edie, staying in place with thunderous wing beats.

The man slashed desperately at the owl with his knife.

Blood ribboned between them, and spattered into the water.

“No!” she gasped in horror for the bird and the damage it had just sustained for her.

“Get off with you, or there’s more of that!” shouted the man, suddenly elated by his success. “I’ll have you! Get away!”

The bird stayed in its place, between Edie and the knife. It screeched, but this time the man both flinched and lunged. Edie saw the knife blade come through the wing, and then the man screamed even louder than the owl’s screech.

The owl’s talons gripped the man’s head on either side, and the great wings dragged him out of the water and up into the air. He shrieked again, and it lifted his kicking body higher and higher. The screaming grew softer as the bird lofted him higher into the sky and farther out to sea.

Edie stood in shock, the waves lapping above her knees as the bird and the man got smaller and smaller.

Her face didn’t change when the owl dropped its prey and the distant man-shape rag-dolled its way through the gulf of air between the bird and the sea. Because of the distance, the smack of impact that cut off the screaming arrived a beat after she saw him hit the water.

She still didn’t change her expression.

She watched the great owl’s slow wing beats as it flew back to her. She saw the blood on its breast, red against white, and then it dropped into the sea and was gone.

Edie gave a startled half-cry of disbelief.

Once more she was alone.

And then the sea’s surface burst open in a mighty wing beat, and the owl resurfaced, all traces of the blood washed clean away.

Edie allowed herself a smile of relief as it hovered overhead and powered its wings up and down without moving, while the water moved instead.

Somehow the owl was forcing the water back, making a kind of bowl around Edie’s legs. The water dropped below her knees, and she saw her calves stuck in the sand. The owl screeched and the sand began to blow away from her legs, revealing her calves, her ankles, and the hands that were holding her.

They were hands made from sand—women’s hands— and they gripped her ankles tight as they were exposed. Edie knew that all she had to do was reach down and brush them off, but something within her rebelled at the idea of touching them, and she hesitated.

The owl screeched again, a deeper noise, and Edie knew it was telling her to do it. She tried to touch the grasping sand hands, but she just couldn’t make herself. Although they were made of sand, she knew they were a dead woman’s hands.

“I’m sorry. I can’t,” she murmured, her voice low and graveled with shame. “I just can’t. . . .”

The owl roared. It wasn’t a screech. It was a deep thrumming noise, rumbling with age and power and primeval fury. It was such a profound and implacable sound that all Edie’s fear suddenly seemed irrelevant and petty by comparison. It was a roar that resonated through her bones and straightened her back, and when it stopped, her face was set and she felt washed clean by the noise that had just blown through her.

She looked at the owl.

It held her gaze long enough for Edie to notice how large and pale and moonlike its eyes were, then it blinked and looked away, as if uninterested.

Edie bent and rubbed at the sand hands tugging at her ankles.

As she had known, they just disintegrated into a scrabble of shell granules beneath her palms. She stepped out and looked back. As the water filled the depression in the sand, something gleamed and rose out of it.

When she saw that it was another hand, she stepped back a half pace.

The owl turned and looked at her pointedly. Edie watched the hand rise above the water and open out, revealing something small and familiar that blazed light at her.

Her sea-glass.

The thing she had felt the lack of while she was running away.

The thing she had forgotten to remember.

Her heart stone.

The owl hooted low and insistently, and Edie stepped back and took the sea-glass. The hand disintegrated and dropped back into the sea, leaving a momentary gray swirl in the water before all evidence that it had ever been there was gone.

The moment she held the heart stone in her hand, Edie knew she was whole again.

She looked up to the ridgeline of the land ahead of her and saw the silhouette of the hare against the pale sky. It seemed to sense her gaze, because it twitched its ears, dropped its head, and was gone. She walked out of the waves and up to where the rabbit had been, and sat leaning against the smooth wood of the wall, looking out to sea with no worry about what might be behind her on the land.

After a bit the owl came and sat on the wall next to her.

Other than staying close, it gave no sign of any particular interest in her. Edie sat gazing out at the dark water as the light changed.

“Thank you,” she said.