Darkwood (28 page)

From her hiding place Annie watched Pip ferry buckets back and forth between the cooking pot and whatever was hidden beneath the covered wagon. A light shone dimly inside the tent, but the front of the wagon, the seat and shafts, remained in darkness.

Baggy wore a bridle but no harness or saddle. Working fast, Annie cut her petticoat into strips and tied them together
into a rough sort of harness: a strip across his chest connected to another strip around his middle, behind his front legs. There was only enough petticoat left for one of the reins, so she had to cut the other one out of her cloak. The fabric was thick and full of lumps and knots. She and Rinka had fought over this part of her plan; he had insisted it would take too long. Now she felt his eyes on her, impatient.

Finally, she backed Baggy between the shafts. He stood patiently while she threaded her bootlaces through the holes in the shafts and tied them to the harness, as though he too was relieved to know what was expected of him. Impulsively, Annie dropped the frizzled waistband of her petticoat over the horse's head, decorating him for battle.

“Girl! Knife! Kinderstalk!”

Chopper burst from one of the tents. “What is it, man? What are you saying?”

“Girl, knife!” Smirch babbled.

“What girl? What knife? Pull yourself together!”

Annie was already up in the wagon seat, the reins in her hands.

“Rinka!” she cried. “Through the middle! Of one wolf, twenty!”

Rinka burst into the light, snapping and snarling. Men screamed. The closest wolves, frenzied by hunger and the men's fear, leapt into the fray.

“Hup, Baggy! Hup, hup!”

The horse surged forward. Snow flew from beneath his hooves, and the cart, with a great groan, rolled into motion. The apothecary's tent, still tied to the wagon bed, stretched taut, then the stakes pulled free from the ground and the cloth went slack. Following Rinka's path, Baggy turned sharply and charged through camp, heading south. Annie had a brief impression of astonished faces and flailing limbs as men and wolves jumped clear of the wheels. Then they plunged back into the shadows on the other side of camp. Baggy dodged trees and rocks, jerked the wagon through ditches. Wherever Rinka led, he followed. The din of camp, the howls and cries, Chopper's staccato voice shouting orders, all began to recede except for one noise, a terrific, high-pitched shrieking that seemed instead to come closer. Annie turned in her seat. A scream caught in her throat.

The apothecary, inside the tent when it had torn free, was still clinging to the burlap, riding behind them as though on a sled. She was shrieking with rage, her child's face contorted into a fierce grimace, the black teeth bared. Her small fingers proved remarkably strong: Annie realized with horror that she was not merely hanging on, but dragging herself hand over fist across the burlap, getting closer and closer to the wagon. Her shrieks were not just random sounds, but some kind of incantation.

“
Salma, mach, minera, Scion! Salma, mach, minera, Scion! Scion, Scion, Scion!
” she shrieked, hiccupping when the tent hit a bump. She was so tiny that her body barely touched the ground as they sped along, her cloak whipping out behind her. Snow stuck to her clothes. Already she had crawled to
the middle of the tent—a few more feet and she would reach the wagon bed. Her eyes were so huge and dark that Annie couldn't see any iris or pupil; it was as if she were staring through holes straight into the darkness inside the apothecary's head.

Annie snapped into action. She hadn't wanted to look at what was under the cloth, but now she took her knife from her boot and began to saw at the ties that attached the tent to the back of the wagon. Annie hewed away frantically, but her fingers felt too thick and stiff to work properly. The knife slipped and nicked one forefinger. Blood welled to the surface and Annie realized with deepening horror that she didn't feel any pain, not in her finger and not in the calf where Rinka had bitten her.

The apothecary reached the back of the wagon and began crawling across the wagon bed, still chanting her spell. Where her weight pressed into the burlap dark stains appeared. The burlap began to smoke, but the apothecary seemed immune to the poison. Her hands were not so much hands as talons, Annie saw, the skin shiny and tough.

The first tie gave way suddenly under Annie's knife. One side of the tent flapped free, flinging the apothecary nearly perpendicular to the wagon bed. She only gripped the fabric tighter and kept crawling toward the wagon seat, chanting incessantly.

Annie could see what Gibbet had prepared for the wolves. Rabbits, or what had once been rabbits, now badly decayed. Some were little more than skeletons. Drifting through the stench of death was the tantalizing odor of the poison Pip had poured over the bodies. Annie felt her mouth water and spat violently.

Her fingers had become so stiff that she could only hold the knife by pressing the handle between her palms. Panting, she gave a little cry of victory as the second tie snapped apart. But the tent did not drop off the cart. Now that the apothecary was in the wagon bed, her weight held the fabric in place. One hooked hand gripped the back of the wagon seat. The woman was close enough now that Annie could see the blue veins running beneath the pale skin of her face, the delicate mesh of capillaries covering her scalp. The terror she had felt watching the apothecary in camp overwhelmed her.
Like dark falling. Like the dark, before I could see
.

Annie pressed herself as close to the front of the wagon as she could, but still the woman reached for her. Her long nails snagged the fabric of Annie's cloak. Her smile was unmistakable now. The stiffness in Annie's hands and arms had traveled up to her shoulders. She could feel it in her calves now and her thighs, stiff as planks. In panic, Annie realized that
she
was the target of the apothecary's spell. Somehow the witch was making her immobile. If she could just get away … but there was nowhere to go. Her hips and torso grew rigid, as though all the blood in her body had simply stopped circulating. Annie lay nearly flat on her back now, the apothecary looming over her, a knee on her chest, the other foot still planted in the wagon bed. Annie's arms lay heavy and useless at her sides. She could still feel her feet—did her boots protect her somehow?—so Annie pushed hard with her heels, scooting across the seat. The apothecary lost her grip for a moment, startled by Annie's sudden movement. If this wagon was like Serena's, and if she was facing the right way … she pushed again, until her head and
shoulders hung clear of the seat. From the corner of her eye she could see the ground racing away beneath them. But there it was, the wooden lever.

The apothecary stopped chanting and in the sudden quiet Annie could hear the air wheezing in and out of her own lungs. The witch pressed her knee into Annie's chest, just above her heart, so the flesh there began to stiffen. She looked into Annie's face with an expression of almost ecstatic tenderness.

“
Salma mach minera, Scion
,” she whispered. Then the apothecary shook her head and, as if Annie had spoken aloud, placed a cold finger against her lips to quiet her. Annie felt her throat tighten. Her tongue dropped into the back of her mouth.

In this last moment, using all that was left of her muscles, she managed to rock herself partway onto her side and hook her chin over the handle of the lever. Then she let herself fall back again. Her body, stiff and heavy as a corpse, bore the lever down with it. The lever slid smoothly along its track, the back of the wagon opened, and the wagon bed tipped down.

For a moment, nothing happened. The apothecary gazed at Annie with the same terrible expression of tenderness. Then, suddenly, her face changed. Baggy veered sharply to avoid a fallen tree, and part of the loose tent fabric snagged on one of its branches. Horse and wagon kept moving, but the tough burlap stretched taut, tightening like a noose around the apothecary's foot. The apothecary's body was lifted, suspended, and still she would not let go of Annie's cloak. Then came the sound of ripping fabric and the apothecary's scream as her body jerked clear of the wagon.

Sensation flooded back into Annie's limbs. Her hands flew to her breast and touched the cloth of her dress where the cloak had been torn away. Beneath her dress she could feel warm skin and the strong beating of her heart. Quickly then, she pushed the lever back into position, righting the wagon bed, but not before several of the rabbits had fallen off. The last thing Annie saw before she turned her face south was the apothecary lying facedown in a drift of burlap. Dead rabbits dotted the ground around her, each carcass surrounded by a circle of bare steaming earth where the poison burned through the snow.

Rinka kept up his swift, three-legged gait, but Baggy, so full of fire at the beginning, had started to flag. They couldn't be far from the farm now. The trees had thinned out, and the tracks of men and horses showed plainly in the snow.

“Come on, Bags!” Annie urged. She heard, or imagined she heard, the clamor of Gibbet's men in the distance. Gray light filled the eastern sky. Had the night passed so quickly? Was Gibbet even now sending the first wave of wolves into battle? She turned, sickened, from the sight of the rabbits. At least they accomplished one good thing: Baggy, long since having lost interest in running toward anything, was running as hard as he could away from the smell of death.

Then, blessedly, the dark outlines of the farm buildings appeared ahead of them.

“We're here, Bags! We made it!”

Nothing about Chopper's farm had changed. The rose bushes still bloomed on either side of the farmhouse door.
The fruit trees still drooped with fruit. The lawn spread green and awful over everything.

Rinka circled the yard, nose low to the ground. His tail swung from side to side. He stopped at a circular patch of snow and started to dig.

“Brisa! Brisa! Are you there? Can you hear me? Are you badly hurt? Brisa! Brisa!”

Annie dropped to her knees beside him, scraping away handfuls of snow. There was the broad wooden disk with the iron ring at its center. Even as she tried, Annie knew she couldn't move it. Rinka barked frantically, clawing at the cover until he had raked deep furrows in the wood.

“I know she's in there. I can smell her—she's alive. Why won't she answer me?”

Annie couldn't answer him either. Was it all to end here, back at the pit, because she was still too weak to open the door? Baggy whinnied. Wolves, perhaps fifty of them, had broken through the line of trees. They flowed over the fence in a long wave.

Annie stood to meet them. She felt tall and awkward and bare, somehow. She pulled her hair forward over her shoulders.

The wolves stopped a few yards short of her. The run seemed to have cost them no effort. They regarded her intently through bright eyes.

“I am glad to see you,” Annie said.

One of the wolves stepped forward. She had a short muzzle and small, almost dainty, paws. “You speak Hippa well, girl. So tell us this: where are you keeping Brisa, our queen?”

“Me? I'm not keeping her. I—”

The wolf interrupted her with a snarl. “We know you killed Rinka, and now you have his mate.”

“You know this from Gibbet?” Annie said.

The wolf narrowed her eyes. Then, as suddenly as if she had been shot, she dropped to her stomach and rolled over, lifting her chin so her neck was completely exposed. Until now, Rinka had been hidden from the wolves' view by the wagon. Now he stepped from behind it, head held high. As Annie watched in amazement, the wolves dropped to the ground in one motion, offering their throats in deference to their leader. He did not immediately tell them to rise.

“Gibbet has betrayed us,” Rinka said. “I made a grave error in dealing with him. We will have our revenge, but first, the queen. Rise, all of you.” The wolves came up fluidly, as if one body. They were thin, terribly thin, their fur dull and matted.

The wolf who had spoken to Annie lowered her head.

“What is it, Mira?” Rinka asked.

“When Gibbet learned that the girl had taken the wagon, he sent us after her, as well as a small troop of men. Rumors passed through the camp that you were alive but we did not—of course we did not know you were with the girl.”

Rinka nodded. “And the rest of the pack?”

“Two hundred already gone. He was preparing to send the rest when we left. As for men, they look so alike, it's hard to be certain. The ones he sent after us here are poor soldiers, I think, but well armed.”

“Quickly, all of you. The queen.”

The wolves began to dig at the hard earth around the pit. Annie watched them as if through a gauze curtain. A thousand wolves. A thousand wolves after the king, which meant a thousand wolves after Page.
Oh, please, let him not have found her
.