‘Ho there!’a young woman’s voice called up.The silhouette raised one arm in nervous greeting.The other gripped a walking stick.‘I’d no notion the spot was occupied.I’ll move along, then.’
Some of the tension faded from Jareth’s shoulders.No ghost, then, but a girl.Alone, crossing the Windmarsh in the dark.He knew, from stories bandied about by the ladies of the Daisy and Drake, of the kinds of lives that forced young women to flee home by moonlight and seek their own fortunes.The night wind caught her pale dress and pressed it against a willowy, malnourished frame.She was some villager, surely, of peat-cutting or mining stock, fleeing a husband who beat her, or a father with malformed desires, or simply the poverty of a peasant’s life in these hard, haunted times.
There was danger in meeting strangers on the road, of course, but he had never seen a less dangerous-seeming stranger.A slip of a girl, desperate, without any weapon.In need of protection, surely, more than a threat to his own safety.
‘It’s only a single wall, but you’re welcome to share!’Jareth called down.‘At least until dawn!’
She hesitated a moment, then resumed her trek towards him, picking her way with her walking stick through the brambles and weeds over treacherous ground.She carried no bundle, nor any bags that he could see.Truly a desperate flight, then, to match his own.
Hazy visions, dreamlike, drifted through his mind as she drew near and the moonlight caught the sharp outline of her handsome, comely face.A spray of freckles over pale, striking cheeks beneath flaxen hair that glinted in the moonlight, even in the shadow of her hood.This was a second turn of good fortune.Fate had brought her to him, her rescuer from whatever torment she had escaped.He recalled the unlikely, destined meeting of Polon and Bithia upon the moors of Llysbryn that begat their whirling storm of romance and passion.
Might his life not mirror art?The destitute youth raised up from poverty, first to wealth, then to love, then to fame?Granted, only a generous interpretation of his age might class him a youth, but the fates worked in their own time.
The girl smiled shyly as she reached the top of the hill.Jareth matched her smile, then dipped a half-bow and gestured to the wall.‘Make yourself comfortable, my dear,’ he said.‘I regret that I have no fire, nor any victuals to offer you.I, too, was called to sudden nocturnal flight.I am called Jareth, of the Silver Lake Troupe.You might have heard tell of us.’
The girl lowered herself to sit against the wall, bracing her walking stick in the crook of her arm and rubbing warmth into her bony hands.There was a dull glint on her thumb.An unpolished silver ring, perhaps a family heirloom taken in the hope that it might pay her way to freedom.‘Afraid not, sir,’ she said.‘We don’t get much news of such things as troupes where I’m from.’
Not only a peasant girl, but one of such isolated, impoverished stock.Yet he could see the light of true intelligence in her wide, frightened eyes.She had the look of promise, beyond her simple beauty.
‘Where is that, my dear?’he said.‘And what are you called?’
‘Sara, from a little mining village just on the far side of the Afoneang, north of Caer Palu,’ she said, tucking her hair behind her ear and drawing her hood close.‘Lucky thing I passed you here, mister.It’s been a lonely road.I could swear I’d heard rimewolves howling in the night, and seen ghosts in the air.Feels safer in company.’
‘I’m glad for it,’ Jareth said, though her talk of beasts and haunts stirred up his own fears afresh.‘Not rimewolves, though, surely, this far south?’
‘Couldn’t say, mister,’ she said.‘Likely just my fears adding teeth to the wind over the hills.Where are you bound to?And where from?’
‘From Parwys, where no fear or rumour is needed to add terror to the wind.I’d not go that way if I were you, dear Sara.’
Her eyes lit up at that.‘Oh?What happened?’
Jareth felt uneasy sharing Siwan’s and Llewyn’s secrets, but neither could he let this poor, naive creature walk into the charnel house Siwan’s curse had made of the festival grounds—if not the entire city.‘You have heard rumour, even in your little pocket of the world, of the haunting that claimed the life of the king?It assaults Parwys even now with renewed ferocity.I was an actor in the festival there, called to celebrate Prince Owyn’s coronation, but I fled the horrors.I go to Afondir now, a city yet spared the haunting, where I will seek my fortune on the world’s greatest stage.I would welcome your company if you’ve need of an escort.A longer road than to Parwys, but a safer one.’
‘Thankee for the invitation,’ Sara answered.‘But my errand takes me to Parwys after all, it would seem.’
‘Your errand?’Before he could ask more, the deep howl of a wolf split the air.Bess stamped and whickered, pulling at her reins till mortar cascaded where Jareth had tied them.He reluctantly turned his back to the girl and stroked the mare’s face and neck.‘It’s all right,’ he whispered, hoping to soothe her, though his own hackles stood high.Sara had not been mistaken, it seemed, about wolves in the hills.Simple grey wolves come down from the Greenwood, surely, not the white monsters that prowled the Windwall and the northern coast.Still, an unwelcome voice in the night.
‘What did you say your troupe was called, again?’Sara asked.
‘The Silver Lake Troupe, but it’s no matter now.I’ve left them behind.As I said, I intend—’
He gasped as pain shot through him, rising from the small of his back.Shuddering, he looked down to find a glistening spar of wood protruding from his belly.The spar tore free of him, and the warmth of his body poured out with it.He grabbed at anything to keep his feet, clutching in futility at his saddlebag as he collapsed beside Bess, who screamed, her eyes rolling.
‘What…?’He wheezed, then sputtered.Brackish blood poured from his torn stomach into his mouth.Sara stepped over him.Dark droplets fell from her walking stick, now narrowed to a wicked, red-stained point.Her peasant’s clothes had vanished, replaced by a tunic woven of autumn leaves.The pale softness of her skin had become rough, bark-like ridges.
Llewyn?Jareth thought, his mind a fog of pain and confusion.This girl could be his daughter.The same sharp angles to her face.The same dark, inhuman depth in the eyes that now stared down at him, considering.
‘P-please,’ he begged, uncertain what he asked for as reason drained out of him.
She turned away.With two quick slashes of her walking stick she cut Bess’s reins and the straps of her saddle.It fell in a jangle of harness and clatter of coins.Gold royals spilled from the saddlebag, rolling through the spreading pool of Jareth’s blood.The girl pulled herself onto Bess’s bare back and wheeled her about.The horse’s forelegs churned the air.
Jareth flinched from fear that they might fall and crush out the last of his life.What felt an eon passed before he opened his eyes again, now to a puff of hot, rancid breath on his frigid cheek.A white-furred face as broad as a bear’s peered down at him.Its muzzle was sharp and pointed, its jowls pulled back to show teeth like arrowheads.A whistle split the air and the rimewolf turned to follow its master.
Jareth took a wheezing breath into cold, fluttering lungs.He swallowed blood into a ruined stomach and thought with agony of The Rose and his mother’s golden curls.
‘There she is, little one.’ A goddess, distant and impossible, haloed by the lanterns of the stage.
Bright memories that faded as darkness whirled down.
