Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
They almost made it.
Almost home dry, Duncan almost daring to believe his hastily cobbled-together strategy had held up, when instead it all fell apart.
Shotgun blasts and hoots and screams and frantic plowing through unforgiving undergrowth, dragging a terrified four-year-old by the arm.
Everything he’d wanted to avoid.
Looking back on the whole thing with a cold, postcombat eye, Duncan would have to allow that Mebhuranon probably did her best to honor Stordalen’s word, and that things just got out of hand.
Hard to explain the mess it all became, otherwise.
—
He gave Meb a while to clear her band out of the village, stood on the footplate of Thunder Child’s cab, watching intently for any sign that any of them had stayed, with or without her command.
The station door did its bang-open, bang-shut trick a couple of times, like the bark of bitter laughter down the platform, but after that everything grew silent and still.
The platform, the station building, the just-visible loom of the church tower up the hill beyond.
The moon untangled itself from the trees, put a frosted light on everything.
Even the breeze seemed to have made itself scarce.
“Are we going now?” Miriam asked him, playing with her rag doll, walking it carefully along one of the myriad pipes that crossed the boiler backplate.
“In a little while,” he said. Still not quite able to believe they were going to get away with this.
“In a little while,” she repeated to the doll, barely above a whisper. “We’re going in a little while. Mummy’s waiting for us.”
She must have felt his stare on her. She huddled the doll up closer to her face, peeped timidly sideways at him. He looked away.
“Not long now,” he said gruffly.
He gave it another half hour by the Mappin & Webb.
Impatience was the enemy, the itch that moved you too early, too fast, got you a sniper’s bullet in the brain.
He’d stepped over too many tumbled bodies in the trenches, privates and officers alike, not to learn the lesson.
He waited and watched the platform outside.
The little girl went on playing. From time to time, he caught her sneaking glances at him, then whispering very low to the rag doll in her hand.
“All right,” he said finally. “Come over here, Mimi. Listen to me carefully.”
She stopped playing on the instant, turned her face dutifully toward him. He crouched in front of her, put hands on her shoulders, went very slow.
“We have to walk out of here now, Mimi. We’re going to go down the platform, follow the carriages back, and then walk between the rails until we get where we’re going. You can do that, can’t you?”
Timid nod.
“That’s good, Now, there are two things I want you to remember, because they’re very important.
First of all, whatever happens, I want you to always stay between the rails.
They’re made of iron, and the faeries don’t like iron, so they won’t want to come close as long as we walk in the middle.
It’s like if they had to jump over lava. Understand?”
He got the nod again, more emphatic this time.
“Right, now the second thing—this is a long walk and you’re probably going to feel tired before the end.
But it’s very important you keep up with me.
I’ll go as slowly as I can for you. If you can’t keep up, if you need the toilet, if you need anything at all, you tug at my coat—like this, look—and you tell me what’s wrong.
But quietly, all right? We have to be quiet. ”
“I can be quiet,” she whispered.
“That’s good, then. We—”
“When Mummy’s tired, I walk like a faerie not to wake her. Susan says I’m light as a feather when I…”
Tears welled up in her eyes, some sudden flood of memory buried for months.
Her lower lip quivered and he saw abruptly how chapped both lips were.
How dry. He cursed himself silently for not spotting it sooner.
The Fae were slipshod hosts at the best of times, but here he was, woodsman and savior, doing no better.
He dug his canteen hurriedly out of the pack.
“Here—would you like a drink of water before we go?”
She wiped at her eyes. Voice a scratchy husk. “Yes, please.”
He unscrewed the cap, passed the canteen over.
She put down her doll, drank deep, up-tilted bottle overlarge and awkward in her tiny hands, throat working with the effort of trying to quench her thirst. He steadied it for her.
She choked a little, and he tilted the canteen back down—easy, wean, easy—and she wiped her mouth and made a satisfied ahhhhh sound that had him wanting to laugh.
He wondered who she’d copied it from, because it didn’t fit with the image he’d had of her mother at all.
“And are you hungry?” he asked.
The answer in her face was pretty clear. But she hesitated.
“Is it…usual food? It’s not…” She swallowed hard. “Not breathing?”
Duncan held back a harsh laugh. Fae food, he knew, could take some getting used to in its more exotic forms. He dug out the can of stewed peaches.
“No, it’s not breathing,” he said gently.
He opened the peaches and fed the girl some slices, tried her with the cured sausage and cheese as well.
She fell on the food like a starved dog, stopped only once to wipe peach juice from her chin and to look suspiciously at him, as if this, all this, might yet be some trick, some dream she’d wake from, back into the nightmare of the Forest…
When she was done, Duncan gave her more water, sipped sparingly from the canteen himself, recapped and stowed it.
He made the pack ready, stuffed his various pockets with Kegg bombs—still an even dozen left after the fight at the Haughton place.
More than enough—he fervently hoped—to see off any mutinous young Huldu males who might get the wrong idea. He checked the load on the McCulloch.
“Time to go,” he announced.
Mutely, she held out the rag doll. “Will you carry Siggy for me? I don’t want to lose her.”
“Sure. We’ll put Siggy right here in the pack, look? Nice and safe and warm.”
“Will they come after us? The…the faeries?”
She almost managed to keep the quaver out of it. But he could see the terror in her eyes. Could see she’d been holding down the question this whole time.
“Shouldn’t think so,” he said breezily. “They’re scared of me.”
“Of you?” She seemed dubious about it.
“Well.” He gave her a crooked grin, put a cheery confidence into his voice that he was a long way from feeling. He hefted the McCulloch. “Of me and this, anyway.”
“That’s a gun,” she said solemnly.
“Aye, it is. And you know what it shoots, Mimi—it shoots big bits of iron. That’s like lava for the faeries, remember. They won’t want me shooting that at them, will they.”
She shook her head with comical ferocity.
“Well, if they come anywhere near you—that’s exactly what I’ll do.”
Abruptly, she cannoned into him. He rocked back on his heels with the force of it, tried to make sense—realized that she was trying to hug him. Her arms went across him as tight as she could manage, her fingers dug into the fabric of his coat. She made a tiny sniffling noise against his chest.
He leaned back into the fireman’s bench behind him, set the McCulloch aside, and hugged Miriam Rush back, gingerly, as if she were made of finest Edinburgh Crystal and might shatter easily in his arms.
This one, he promised with savage intensity. This one comes home safe and sound.
—
The platform was moon dusted and silent as they stepped out.
Duncan looked warily up and down its length, then took Mimi’s hand and led her back past the long black iron tender and silent line of carriages beyond.
The sound of their own footsteps on the concrete seemed to follow them down the line.
They went down the slope at the end of the platform, picked their way along the weed-grown hardcore as the track began to curve away.
The carriages loomed over them now, darkened windows peering down.
He imagined decayed passengers lolling in the seats on the other side of the glass, desiccated, skullish faces, withered skeletal arms protruding from dusty sleeves.
Imagined the stir and rustle as they felt the soft warmth of the two bodies pacing past outside, and crowded to the windows to peer out.
From the look on Mimi Rush’s face, she was working through something similar.
He cleared his throat. “It’s a shame we can’t use this train, isn’t it.”
“Is everybody dead in it?”
“Oh no,” he invented rapidly. “The people all left, because it was broken. They walked home, just like we are.”
“Did the faeries break it?”
“Aye, they did.” And everything else with it.
“Why do they break things like that?” Then, in a sudden, vehement rush. “Why are they so mean?”
He glanced at her. “Were they mean to you? I thought they said you were a princess.”
“Yes, but…”
They walked in silence for a few moments, and he thought she wouldn’t speak again. She at least seemed to have forgotten about the brooding carriage windows.
“They looked at me,” she said in a small voice. “They had mean eyes. They looked at me like…like they wanted to eat me.”
“Aye.” Duncan groped for a way to explain it to four-year-old ears—the possessive hunger that mortal children seemed to trigger in the Fae.
Miriam Rush might go another decade before a mortal man looked at her that way, and likely several more years before she was able to digest it for what it was, find some way to face it with equanimity.
After a couple of fruitless seconds, he gave up, said weakly: “They do that, don’t they. ”