Tangle Box (40 page)

She paused, her eyes gleaming with expectation. “He bed me as if I were his—”

“No!” Willow’s voice was as hard as iron, the single word a forbidding that cut short the witch as surely as a cord about the throat.

“He was mine!” the witch of the Deep Fell screamed. “He belonged to me! I should have had him forever if not for his dream of you! I lost everything, everything but who I am, the power of my magic, the strength of my will! Those I have regained! Holiday owes me! He has stripped me of my pride and my dignity, and he has incurred a debt to me that he must pay!”

She was white with rage. “The child,” she whispered, “will satisfy that debt nicely.”

Willow went cold. She was shaking, her throat dry, her heart stopped. “You cannot have my child,” she said.

A smile played across Nightshade’s lips. “Cannot? What a silly word for you to use, little sylph. Besides, the child was born in my domain, here in the Deep Fell, so it belongs to me by right of law. My law.”

“No law condones the taking of a child from its mother. You have no right to make such a claim.”

“I have every right. I am mistress of the Deep Fell and ruler over all found here. The child was born on my soil. You are a trespasser and a foolish girl. Do not think you can deny me.”

Willow held her ground. “If you try to take my child, you will have to kill me. Are you prepared to do that?”

Nightshade shook her head slowly. “I need not kill you. There are easier ways when you have the use of magic. And worse fates for you than death if you defy me.”

“The High Lord will come after you if you steal his child!” Willow snapped. “He will hunt you to the ends of the earth!”

“Silly little sylph,” the witch purred softly. “The High Lord will never know you were even here.”

Willow froze. Nightshade was right. There was no one who knew she was in the Deep Fell, no one who knew she had returned from the fairy mists. If she was to disappear, who could trace her footsteps? If her child was to vanish, who could say it had ever existed? The fairies, perhaps, but would they do so?

What was she to do?

“Someone will discover and reveal the truth, Nightshade,” she insisted desperately. “You cannot keep such a thing a secret forever! Not even you can do that!”

The witch gave a slow, disdainful shrug. “Perhaps not. But I can keep it a secret long enough. Holiday’s life is finite. In the end, I will be here when he is gone.”

Willow nodded slowly, understanding flooding through her. “Which is why you want his child, isn’t it? So that he will leave nothing of himself behind when he is dead. You would make the child yours and wipe away all trace of him in doing so. You hate him that much, don’t you?”

Nightshade’s thin mouth tightened. “More. Much, much more.”

“But the child is innocent,” Willow cried. “Why should the baby be made a pawn in this struggle? Why should it suffer for your rage?”

“The child will fare well. I will see to it.”

“It isn’t yours!”

“I grow tired of arguing, sylph. Give the child to me and
perhaps I will let you go. Make another child, if you wish. You have the means.”

Willow shook her head slowly. “I will never give up my baby, Nightshade. Not to you, not to anyone. Stand aside for me. Let me pass.”

Nightshade smiled darkly. “I think not,” she said.

She was starting forward, arms lifting within her black robes, intent on taking the child by force, when a familiar voice spoke.

“Do as she asks, Nightshade. Let her pass.”

The witch stopped, as still as death. Willow looked around quickly, seeing nothing but the trees and misty gloom.

Then Edgewood Dirk stepped into view from one side, easing sinuously through the heavy brush, silver coat immaculate, black tail twitching slightly. He jumped up on the remains of a fallen tree and blinked sleepily.

“Let her pass,” he repeated softly.

Nightshade stiffened. “Edgewood Dirk. Who gave you permission to come into the Deep Fell? Who gave you the right?”

“Cats need no permission or grant of right,” Dirk replied. “Really, you should know better. Cats go where they wish—always have.”

Nightshade was livid. “Get out of here!”

Dirk yawned and stretched. “Shortly. But first you must let the Queen pass.”

“I will not give up …!”

“Save your breath, Witch of the Deep Fell.” A hint of weary disdain crept into the cat’s voice. “The Queen and her baby will pass into Landover. The fairies have decided, and there is nothing more to say about it. If you are unhappy with their decision, why don’t you take it up with them?”

Nightshade shot a withering look at Willow, then turned to face the cat. “The fairies cannot tell me what to do!”

“Of course they can,” Edgewood Dirk said reasonably. “I have just done so for them. Stop fussing about this. The matter is settled. Now step aside.”

“The child is mine!”

Dirk gave one paw a short, swift lick and straightened. “Nightshade,” he addressed her softly. “Would you challenge me?”

There was a long pause as witch and prism cat faced each other in the half light of the Deep Fell. “Because if you would,” Dirk continued, “you must surely know that even if I fail, another will be sent to take my place, and another, and so forth. Fairies are very stubborn creatures. You, of all people, should know.”

Nightshade did not move. When she spoke, there was astonishment in her voice. “Why are they doing this? Why do they care so about his child?”

Edgewood Dirk blinked. “That,” he purred softly, “is a good question.” He rose, stretched, and sat back down again. “I grow anxious for my morning nap. I have given this matter enough of my time. Let the Queen and the child pass. Now.”

Nightshade shook her head slowly, a denial of something she could not articulate. For an instant Willow was certain that she intended to lash out at Dirk, that she would fight the prism cat with every ounce of strength and every bit of magic she possessed.

But instead she turned to Willow and said softly, “I will never forgive this. Never. Tell the play-King.”

Then she disappeared into the gloom, a wraith simply fading away into the shadows. The baby woke, stirring in its mother’s arms, blinking sleepily. Willow glanced down into the cloak’s deep folds. She cooed softly to her child. When she looked up again, Edgewood Dirk was gone as well. Had he been with her all the way? The fairies had sent him once again, it appeared, although with the prism cat you could never be entirely certain. He had saved her
life in any case. Or more to the point, saved her child. Why? Nightshade’s question, still unanswered. What was it about this child that mattered so to everyone?

Cradling the baby in her arms, she began to walk on once again.

It was nearing midmorning by the time Ben Holiday reached the country just south of the Deep Fell. He would never have gotten there that fast if Strabo had not offered to trade him a ride for possession of the Tangle Box. The dragon had wanted the box from the first, but Ben had refused to give it up, not convinced that it should be in anyone’s possession but his own.

“Let me have it, Holiday,” the dragon had argued. “I will keep it in a place no one can reach, in a fire pit deep within the Wastelands where no one goes.”

“But why would you want it at all?” Ben asked. “What would you do with it?”

The dragon had flown back from his assault on the demons. They were alone in the center of the meadow. Horris Kew slumped on the ground some yards away. Questor Thews and Abernathy had not yet reached them.

The dragon’s voice was wistful. “I would take it out and look at it from time to time. A dragon covets treasures and hoards precious things. It is all we have left from our old life—all I have left, now that I am alone.” Strabo’s horned head dipped close. “I would keep it hidden where it could never be found. I would keep it just for me.”

Ben had interrupted the conversation long enough to intervene between a sodden, angry Abernathy, who had just come rushing up, and a terrified Horris Kew, and assisted by Questor Thews had restored some small measure of peace between them. The conjurer had saved their lives, after all, he reminded his much-distressed scribe. He went on then to dismiss Kallendbor and his army, exacting an oath from the Lord of Rhyndweir to appear before him in one
week’s time for an accounting of his actions. He ordered his Guard to disperse those people who had come looking for mind’s eye crystals and found a great deal more than they had bargained for, back to wherever it was they had come from.

Then he remembered Willow. He went immediately to the Landsview and found her just as she was climbing free of the Deep Fell. Nightshade’s domain, he thought in horror, and no place for the sylph. He was thinking of Nightshade’s parting words to him. He was thinking what the witch might do to Willow if she were given half a chance.

It was a two-day ride to the Deep Fell—far too long under the circumstances. So he struck a bargain with Strabo. A ride to the Deep Fell and back in exchange for the Tangle Box, if the dragon promised that no one else would ever set eyes on it and no one, including the dragon, would ever attempt to open it. Strabo agreed. He extended his firm and unbreakable promise. He gave his dragon’s oath. It was enough, Questor Thews whispered in a short aside. A dragon’s word was his bond.

So off Ben went aboard Strabo, winging through the storm winds and rain, finally passing out of black clouds and into blue skies. The sun shone anew on the land, spilling golden light across the grasslands and hills running north, cutting a swath of brightness through the fading dark.

“She is there, Holiday,” the dragon called back when they grew close, its sharp eyes finding the sylph much quicker than Ben’s.

They swooped down onto the crest of a hill, a scattering of woods running right and left. Willow appeared from across a meadow of wildflowers and Bonnie Blues, and Ben ran to meet her, heedless of everything else. She called to him, her face radiant, tears coming into her eyes once more.

He raced up to her and abruptly stopped, the bundle in her arms a fragile barrier between them. What was she
carrying? “Are you all right?” he asked, anxious to be reassured that she was well, eager just to hear her voice.

“Yes, Ben,” she answered. “And you?”

He nodded, smiling. “I love you, Willow,” he said.

He could see her throat constrict. “Come see our child,” she whispered.

He came forward a step, closing the small distance between them, expectation and disbelief racing through him. It was too quick, he thought. It was not yet time. She had not even looked pregnant. How could she have given birth so fast?

The questions vanished in the afterglow of her smile. “The baby?” he said, and she nodded.

She parted the folds of her cloak so he could see. He bent down and peered inside.

A pair of dazzling green eyes stared boldly back.

The interviewer sipped a pineapple-strawberry smoothie in the living room of Harold Kraft’s palatial Diamond Head home and looked out across the vast expanse of lanai and swimming pool to the only slightly vaster expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It was late afternoon, and the sun was easing westward toward the flat line of the horizon, the gradual change in the light promising yet another incredibly beautiful Hawaiian sunset. The granite floors of the living room and lanai glittered as if inlaid with flecks of gold, the stone ending at the pool, one of those knife-edge affairs that dropped into a spillover as if falling all the way to the ocean. A Jacuzzi bubbled invitingly at one end of the lanai. A bar and cooking area dominated the other end, complete with hollow coconut shells used for tropical drinks at the frequent parties the author gave.

The home was conservatively valued at fifteen million, although the price of real estate is always subject to what the market will bear and its measure is not an objective exercise.
Homes around it had sold for ten million and up and lacked both the extensive grounds and the unrestricted view that took in most of Honolulu. Bare land went for five million in this neighborhood. The numbers were unimaginable for most people. The interviewer lived in Seattle in a home he had bought fifteen years ago for somewhat less than what Harold Kraft earned in a month.

Kraft wandered in from his study where he had gone to answer a private phone call, leaving the interviewer to sip his perfectly mixed drink and admire the view. He strolled over to the bar with a brief apology for taking so long, fixed himself an iced tea, crossed the room to the couch where the interviewer was patiently waiting, and sat down again. He was tall and slender with graying hair and a Vandyke beard, and he moved like a long, slow, elegant cat. He wore silk slacks and shirt and hand-tooled leather sandals. His tanned face was aquiline, and his sandy eyes were penetrating. There were rumors of reconstructive surgery and a rigorous training regimen, but that was fairly commonplace with the rich and famous.

“Good news,” he announced with a smile. “Since you’re here, I can share it with you. Paramount just bought rights to
Wizard
. Two million dollars outright. They want Sean Connery for the title role, Tom Cruise for the part of the Prince. What do you think?”

The interviewer smiled appreciatively. “I think you’re two million dollars richer. Congratulations.”

Kraft gave him a short bow. “Wait until the merchandising kicks in. That’s where the real money is.”

“Do you write your books with an eye toward movie sales?” the interviewer pressed. He wasn’t getting nearly enough out of Kraft to satisfy either himself or his magazine. Kraft had published three books in two years and dominated the bestseller lists for most of that time, selling more than five million copies in hardcover. But that was practically all anyone knew about him. For all his notoriety and success,
he was still very much a mystery. He claimed to be in exile, but he wouldn’t say from where. He claimed to be a political refugee.

“I write to be read,” the author replied pointedly. “What happens after that is up to the consumer. Sure, I want to make money. But mostly I want to be happy.”

The interviewer frowned. “That sounds a bit …”