“I need to find Antlerdale’s book,” I gasped, but I heard the loud dogs baying not far from here and their barks sounded hungry and violent.
The sound stabbed directly into my heart, making it gallop with fear. It was not only myself I was risking here. It was my beloved husband and his entire world slung around my neck.
“And how do you plan to do that?” Sparrow asked coolly, the only one of us unaffected by the baying of the Hounds. She merely seemed merely impatient at not being informed of my plan.
“They should be everywhere,” I said, my words laced with anxiety. “Grosbeak said that Antlerdale gave them out like candy. Everyone should have copies, and all I need to do is find the tenth chapter and the thirteenth paragraph.”
“I see your predicament,” Sparrow said with a lifted brow. Shouldn’t she be screaming at me to run, too, or was it normal for her to discuss literature while listening to Grosbeak chant a song that either repelled dogs or drew them in, I wasn’t sure which? “And it’s a bad one because you can’t just grab any copy of the book and look.”
“Why not?”
“Because Antlerdale is constantly rereading the book and every time he does, he changes something and reissues the book. ‘Each correction brings us closer to perfection,’ I believe he said. So you’ll need the original.”
“And where is that?” I asked. Was that a snuffling I heard? It was getting closer.
“At his home,” Sparrow said calmly.
“So we’ll go there, then,” I agreed.
“Now. We go now, right?” Grosbeak whined. “Now!”
And then a loud bark made me jump and down the row of collapsed houses, through the ashes filtering down from — yes, Grosbeak had been right — a crescent moon that had turned to blood and was dripping in the sky, leapt a three-headed Hound so large it made me wonder if we were accidentally dragon-fly sized again.
I spun in every direction looking for escape. Not Bluebeard’s house. It had collapsed. As had every house we could see. Not the mushrooms, they had fallen, leaving black smears the size of army barracks where they had been.
I could try to run, but I couldn’t outrun a normal-sized dog when I was utterly unburdened. I had no hope of outrunning this one.
Before the barking, slathering, short-haired Hound, denizens of the Wittenhame fled. A pair of figures mounted on an oversized fox flung arrows behind them at the beast, but the arrows were the size of pine needles compared to the spittle-flecked dog, and it didn’t seem to notice them even when one stuck into one of its six eyes.
No fighting, then.
A group of tiny flying fairies kicked up like a swarm of sand flies, fluttering panicked in every direction. Someone screamed. Some others started to cry out but were cut off.
I spun again and caught sight of a toad the size of a horse leaping past. To my shock, Grosbeak whistled to it and it paused. It was my toad. The one from the joust.
I didn’t stop to think, I just leapt onto its back, hoping that Bluebeard would stay tied to me and that I could hold onto the lantern with one hand as I tossed the candle behind my back and grabbed for one of the knobs on the back of the toad. He was leaping before I could steady myself, careening wildly from side to side as the barking grew louder.
There was a crack as something snapped its jaws beside me. I didn’t look back, just gritted my teeth and held on for dear life as droplets of moisture that smelled like wet dog and old meat misted over us.
“Teeth of the Gods! Lords have mercy! Saints and scepters!” Grosbeak screamed.
A doggy foot landed right in front of the toad and he froze as a wet nose snuffled down, down. I caught a single glimpse of it and screamed just as the toad suddenly hopped again, brushing against fur edged in flame, and then coming down close to a towering tree and burrowing into a dank hole under a root. The roots ripped at my hair as soft earth cascaded around us. Behind us, the dogs howled their excitement and I heard the distinctive sound of a canine digging.
There was no time to dwell as the toad burrowed deeper and deeper, pressing fresh earth around me so tight and close that I could barely breathe, never mind hear the garbled screams of Grosbeak and Sparrow.
“Use the key, my mad folly,” a breathy voice whispered in my ear.
Wordlessly, I fumbled for the key around my neck. I had two. One for the Wittenhame. One for the Room of Wives and in the darkness, I could not tell one from the other, but I pulled out the first one I could find and twisted it in the air.
CHAPTERFOUR
We leaptout into the mist-filled, washed-out passage between worlds. The toad perched half within a steaming swamp, half on a tuft of grass, as the sounds of the terrorized Wittenhame disappeared and were replaced by the cloying silence of the mist.
The light filtering into this strange half-place was so grey that I could hardly tell whether it was a dark afternoon or a very bright night. I only knew by the whisper at my ear. Bluebeard would never speak to me in the day, lest the curse fall on us all. A curse, I might add, that he had never explained to me in full.
“Let my captains guide the toad, jewel of the Wittenhame,” he whispered. I shivered at the feeling of his breath on my neck and then his thoughts hit mine in a jumble again. A sudden memory, as vivid as if it were my own, of a young Vireo and a young Grosbeak laughing together as they rode on bundles of straw that had been lashed together with glittering bands of what I could only think was magic to form the figures of horses. The straw animals ran and whinnied just like real horses and I felt a burst of delight that must have been young Blubebeard’s, just before young Grosbeak’s straw horse leapt over the river and suddenly burst into chaff, the lashings falling apart and dumping him into the water.
I swallowed and my husband’s shared memory faded.
