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She held the gun out to him, handle first. Tim almost dropped it. That such a small thing could be so heavy seemed astounding. And, like the Covenant Man's magic wand when it had passed over the water in the pail, it seemed to thrum.
"The extra bullets are wrapped in cotton batting. With the four in the gun, you have nine. May they do you well, and may I not find myself cursed in the clearing for giving them to you."
"Thank . . . thankee-sai!" It was all Tim could manage. He slipped the gun into the bag.
She put her hands to the sides of her head and uttered a bitter laugh. "You're a fool, and I'm another. Instead of bringing you my brother's four-shot, I should have brought my broom and hit you over the head wi' it." She voiced that bitter, despairing laugh again. "Yet 'twould do no good, with my old woman's strength."
"Will you take word to my mama in the morning? For it won't be just a little way down the Ironwood Trail I'll be going this time, but all the way to the end."
"Aye, and break her heart, likely." She bent toward him, the hem of her veil swinging. "Has thee thought of that? I see by your face thee has. Why do you do this when you know the news of it will harrow her soul?"
Tim flushed from chin to hairline, but held his ground. In that moment he looked very much like his gone-on father. "I mean to save her eyesight. He has left me enough of his magic to show me how it's to be done."
"Black magic! In support of lies! Of lies, Tim Ross!"
"So you say." Now his jaw jutted, and that was also very like Jack Ross. "But he didn't lie about the key--it worked. He didn't lie about the beating--it happened. He didn't lie about my mama being blind--she is. As for my da' . . . thee knows."
"Yar," she said, now speaking in a harsh country accent Tim had never heard before. "Yar, and each o' his truths has worked two ways: they hurt'ee, and they've baited his trap for'ee."
He said nothing to this at first, only lowered his head and studied the toes of his scuffed shor'boots. The Widow had almost allowed herself to hope when he raised his head, met her eyes, and said, "I'll leave Bitsy tethered uptrail from the Cosington-Marchly stake. I don't want to leave her at the stub where I found my da', because there's a pooky in the trees. When you go to see Mama, will you ask sai Cosington to fetch Bitsy home?"
A younger woman might have continued to argue, perhaps even to plead--but the Widow was not that woman. "Anything else?"
"Two things."
"Speak."
"Will you give my mama a kiss for me?"
"Aye, and gladly. What's the other?"
"Will you set me on with a blessing?"
She considered this, then shook her head. "As for blessings, my brother's four-shot is the best I can do."
"Then it will have to be enough." He made a leg and brought his fist to his forehead in salute; then he turned and went down the steps to where the faithful little mollie mule was tethered.
In a voice almost--but not quite--too low to hear, the Widow Smack said, "In Gan's name, I bless thee. Now let ka work."
The moon was down when Tim dismounted Bitsy and tethered her to a bush at the side of the Ironwood Trail. He had filled his pockets with oats ere leaving the barn, and he now spread them before her as he'd seen the Covenant Man do for his horse the previous night.
"Be easy, and sai Cosington will come for thee in the morning," Tim said. An image of Square Peter finding Bitsy dead, with a gaping hole in her belly made by one of the predators of the forest (perhaps the very one he'd sensed behind him on his pasear down the Ironwood the night before) lit up his mind. Yet what else could he do? Bitsy was sweet, but not smart enough to find her way home on her own, no matter how many times she'd been up and down this same trail.
"Thee'll be passing fine," he said, stroking her smooth nose . . . but would she? The idea that the Widow had been right about everything and this was just the first evidence of it came to his mind, and Tim pushed it aside.
He told me the truth about the rest; surely he told the truth about this, too.
By the time he was three wheels farther up the Ironwood Trail, he had begun to believe this.
You must remember he was only eleven.
He spied no campfire that night. Instead of the welcoming orange glow of burning wood, Tim glimpsed a cold green light as he approached the end of the Ironwood Trail. It flickered and sometimes disappeared, but it always came back, strong enough to cast shadows that seemed to slither around his feet like snakes.
The trail--faint now, because the only ruts were those made by the wagons of Big Ross and Big Kells--swept left to skirt an ancient ironwood with a trunk bigger than the largest house in Tree. A hundred paces beyond this curve, the way forward ended in a clearing. There was the crossbar, and there the sign. Tim could read every word, for above it, suspended in midair by virtue of wings beating so rapidly they were all but invisible, was the sighe.
He stepped closer, all else forgotten in the wonder of this exotic vision. The sighe was no more than four inches tall. She was naked and beautiful. It was impossible to tell if her body was as green as the glow it gave off, for the light around her was fierce. Yet he could see her welcoming smile, and knew she was seeing him very well even though her upturned, almond-shaped eyes were pupilless. Her wings made a steady low purring sound.
Of the Covenant Man there was no sign.
The sighe spun in a playful circle, then dived into the branches of a bush. Tim felt a tingle of alarm, imagining those gauzy wings torn apart by thorns, but she emerged unharmed, rising in a dizzy spiral to a height of fifty feet or more--as high as the first upreaching ironwood branches--before plunging back down, right at him. Tim saw her shapely arms cast out behind her, making her look like a girl who dives into a pool. He ducked, and as she passed over his head close enough to stir his hair, he heard laughter. It sounded like bells coming from a great distance.
He straightened up cautiously and saw her returning, now somersaulting over and over in the air. His heart was beating fiercely in his chest. He thought he had never seen anything so lovely.
She flew above the crossbar, and by her firefly light he saw a faint and mostly overgrown path leading into the Endless Forest. She raised one arm. The hand at the end of it, glowing with green fire, beckoned to him. Enchanted by her otherworldly beauty and welcoming smile, Tim did not hesitate but at once ducked beneath the crossbar with never a look at the last two words on his dead father's sign: TRAVELER, BEWARE.
The sighe hovered until he was almost close enough to reach out and touch her, then whisked away, down the remnant of path. There she hovered, smiling and beckoning. Her hair tumbled over her shoulders, sometimes concealing her tiny breasts, sometimes fluttering upward in the breeze of her wings to reveal them.
The second time he drew close, Tim called out . . . but low, afraid that if he hailed her in a voice too loud, it might burst her tiny eardrums. "Where is the Covenant Man?"
Another silvery tinkle of laughter was her reply. She barrel-rolled twice, knees drawn all the way up to the hollows of her shoulders, then was off, pausing only to look back and make sure Tim was following before darting onward. So it was that she led the captivated boy deeper and deeper into the Endless Forest. Tim didn't notice when the poor remnant of path disappeared and his course took him between tall ironwood trees that had been seen by the eyes of only a few men, and that long ago. Nor did he notice when the grave, sweet-sour smell of the ironwoods was replaced by the far less pleasan
t aroma of stagnant water and rotting vegetation. The ironwood trees had fallen away. There would be more up ahead, countless leagues of them, but not here. Tim had come to the edge of the great swamp known as the Fagonard.
The sighe, once more flashing her teasing smile, flew on. Now her glow was reflected up at her from murky water. Something--not a fish--broke the scummy surface, stared at the airy interloper with a glabrous eye, and slid back below the surface.
Tim didn't notice. What he saw was the tussock above which she was now hovering. It would be a long stride, but there was no question of not going. She was waiting. He jumped just to be safe and still barely made it; that greenglow was deceptive, making things look closer than they actually were. He tottered, pinwheeling his arms. The sighe made things worse (unintentionally, Tim was sure; she was just playing) by spinning rapid circles around his head, blinding him with her aura and filling his ears with the bells of her laughter.
The issue was in doubt (and he never saw the scaly head that surfaced behind him, the protruding eyes, or the yawning jaws filled with triangular teeth), but Tim was young and agile. He caught his balance and was soon standing on top of the tussock.
"What's thy name?" he asked the glowing sprite, who was now hovering just beyond the tussock.
He wasn't sure, in spite of her tinkling laughter, that she could speak, or that she would respond in either the low speech or the high if she could. But she answered, and Tim thought it was the loveliest name he'd ever heard, a perfect match for her ethereal beauty.
"Armaneeta!" she called, and then was off again, laughing and looking flirtatiously back at him.
He followed her deeper and deeper into the Fagonard. Sometimes the tussocks were close enough for him to step from one to the next, but as they progressed onward, he found that more and more frequently he had to jump, and these leaps grew longer and longer. Yet Tim wasn't frightened. On the contrary, he was dazzled and euphoric, laughing each time he tottered. He did not see the V-shapes that followed him, cutting through the black water as smoothly as a seamstress's needle through silk; first one, then three, then half a dozen. He was bitten by suckerbugs and brushed them off without feeling their sting, leaving bloody splats on his skin. Nor did he see the slumped but more or less upright shapes that paced him on one side, staring with eyes that gleamed in the dark.
