Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Yes, Mrs. J.” Meredith hunched in the chair opposite her, voice small and contrite. “Sorry, Mrs. J.”
Standing behind him, David rested a hand on his shoulder without thinking.
“I’m partly to blame. I ought to have discouraged the idea to begin with instead of going along with it.
” He had discouraged it, but he had also found it all too easy to give in, and in light of the disastrous results, he was not so sure that that he deserved any credit for the attempt.
“Yes,” she said, “you ought. Frankly, Mr. Carew, I expected better judgment from you.” With a shake of her head, she rose and went to the bookshelf along the far wall, from which she withdrew a scarred leather-bound tome.
“But I only wanted to pick some sweet woodruff!”
Mrs. Jupiter didn’t look up from leafing through the pages. “And how did that work out for you?”
Meredith hung his head. “It was awful,” he whispered.
David squeezed his shoulder, and then, to his surprise, Meredith reached up to take his hand.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Jupiter. “I expect it was.” Then she relented, her tone softening as she admitted, “It pains me to watch you place yourself so recklessly in danger. And I will not lie to you—you face a fearsome enemy in the Erlking, and the danger has not passed simply because you managed to elude him this time.”
“I’m sorry,” said David, “but I’m still not sure I understand. I mean to say, surely there’s not much he can do if he’s in the Wood and we’re out here.” As he spoke the words, he realized that he was not sure of any such thing. “Is there?”
Mrs. Jupiter was silent for a moment, drumming her fingers against the yellowed pages of the volume in her hands. At last she said slowly, “Your account of this most recent encounter troubles me. You are absolutely certain he made no attempt to give pursuit?”
Meredith shook his head. “No, he just let us go after I told him off.” He paused to consider. “Do you suppose I ought not to have done that?”
Her expression grew still more perturbed. “He did nothing whatsoever to stop you?”
“Well, he did try, a bit, but it seemed as if he couldn’t touch me without hurting himself somehow. Then he just went on shouting after us about blood and whatnot, like I told you, and how he’d get us in the end, you know, the usual sort of thing, but I didn’t really follow.”
“The hawthorns,” said David, his heart sinking. He’d pieced it together, back in the Wood, but Meredith evidently hadn’t. “Don’t you remember, the weekend before last when we went hunting for herbs and you pricked your finger on that hawthorn bush?”
“That? But that was just such a little bit of blood,” Meredith protested, “and Mrs. J fixed me right up afterwards.”
“I’m afraid that blood is blood, my dear,” said Mrs. Jupiter. “In this case, the quantity makes no difference. The single drop you’ve given him is all he needed to stake his claim.”
“Oh.” Meredith looked once again as though he were about to cry. “I am sorry, Mrs. J, I didn’t mean to.”
“So to answer your question, Mr. Carew, I would not discount the ability of the Erlking to enact his will at a distance and find some way to do you an injury yet. I fear you are in grave danger indeed.”
Meredith shrank back against David, who rubbed his shoulder and hoped he could somehow convey his reassurance through touch.
Then again, he was not so sure he had any reassurance to offer.
Frowning, Mrs. Jupiter paged further into her book. “Tell me,” she said, “what exactly do you know about this Erlking? I admit he is somewhat outside the scope of my own knowledge, and there is only so much to be found in the literature of magical research.”
Meredith considered. “Well, there’s all different stories—I found that out later on—but the one I always knew was the poem, the Goethe one.
” He traced over the scarred wood of the table, running a fingertip along the joint between two boards.
“In the story, it’s this man, and he has a child, you see, and the Erlking wants to take him away—the child, not the father—and he tries to, and—well, in the end, he dies. ”
“The child,” said Mrs. Jupiter.
“Yeah. My grandfather read it to me once when I was little. I was quite terrified,” said Meredith with a laugh. “Didn’t sleep all night after, just cried and cried. My dad was furious, of course.”
“At him? For frightening you?” asked David quietly.
“Well, that, too, I suppose,” agreed Meredith, “but mainly at me, for crying.”
David’s heart splintered once more, but he suppressed the urge to pull Meredith into his arms and instead gripped his shoulder just a little tighter.
Unconcerned, Meredith went on, “Florian would always tease me about it after that, you know, saying the Erlking would come and carry me off.”
David exchanged an uneasy look with Mrs. Jupiter.
“Meredith,” she began, then appeared at a loss for words.
“Oh, it was just childish nonsense and that,” said Meredith dismissively.
“Like being scared of monsters in the cellar. Anyway, Grandpa came to hear about the whole thing, and he said I oughtn’t to be frightened because if you know yourself, if you believe in yourself, the Erlking can’t hurt you at all.
Of course that was probably nonsense, too,” he conceded, “but I did believe it then.”
For a few moments, there was silence save for the sound of Mrs. Jupiter turning pages. At last she said, “I would surmise, then, that at this stage the Erlking cannot make away with you unless you should submit willingly, but—”
“Of course I won’t!” interrupted Meredith in indignation.
With a pointed look, Mrs. Jupiter continued, “True, his initial efforts to drive you both to despair have come to naught, but given sufficient time, a blood connection such as he has established seldom fails. Now, behold.”
She pushed aside the sugar bowl to set the open book on the table in front of them, though David could make little sense of the crabbed writing and strange symbols on its pages.
“The good news is that I can, in fact, counteract the Erlking’s claim on you. The bad news is that the spell requires elderflower blossoms and ratbonnet gathered at the new moon, which is more than a week away, and I’ll have to hunt down some extract of ragged tiger lily as well. In the meantime—”
“I won’t so much as look in the direction of the Midnight Wood,” promised Meredith.
“If you venture into his territory again, I can make you no promises about what may happen,” she warned.
“I won’t, I swear it! That awful man—the Erlking—he said he’d take Bianca, and he spoke to David in the most appalling way.”
“The worse news,” Mrs. Jupiter went on, “is that this spell will cancel only the blood debt itself. Any underlying factors that attracted his attention in the first place shall remain to be dealt with.”
Meredith waved away this information. “Oh, that’s all right. I don’t have any underlying factors.”
Mrs. Jupiter raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“I don’t!” he insisted. “He’s got it all wrong about me.”
Mrs. Jupiter caught David’s eye, and he had to look away. No, he didn’t believe it, either, but he was in no position to press Meredith further, not when they’d only just smoothed things over. Not with his own unwitting aid to the Erlking still fresh in his mind.
Mrs. Jupiter clapped the book shut with a bang that made them both jump. “Very well, I’ll leave that for you to sort out. And if you’ll excuse me, I really must be on my way. I’m quite late as it is for my appointment with the Moon Calf.”
“Sorry to have put you to the trouble, Mrs. J,” said Meredith meekly as she shepherded the two of them out the door.
“Yes, well, if the two of you could avoid placing yourselves in mortal peril while I’m out, I’m sure I’d be much obliged.” Gathering her shawl about her, she said in an icy tone, “Good afternoon, Meredith.”
David supposed he was being snubbed, not that he could blame her, but as he crossed the threshold, she caught his attention with a clearing of the throat. “Mr. Carew. A word, if you please.”
He turned back, guilt surely written all over his face. Though they’d again been sparing with the details, he didn’t doubt she’d filled in some of the blanks. “Yes, Mrs. J?”
Checking that Meredith’s attention was suitably occupied by a striped kitten amidst the flowering sage, she hissed, “I told you to be gentle.”
“I was! I—I thought I was,” David faltered.
“Clearly not. You know how he adores you—”
“Now, that’s overstating it a bit, I think.”
“—and you’ve hurt him immeasurably, even if he won’t admit it.”
“He did,” said David. “Admit it, I mean. Sort of. And I did apologize.”
Mrs. Jupiter plucked a bright pink azalea blossom and tucked it behind her ear, but her expression remained grim. “Well,” she said, casting one last glance around the garden, “perhaps that’s a start.”