Night Gate (10 page)

Rage thought of something that one of the white-faced women had said. “How will they know
I’m
not a witch woman?”

Billy shrugged. “When we reach Fork, you must say you have come from one of the outer villages to be banded. I just wish we knew exactly what banding meant.”

“It’s getting metal things on your arms, like the bracelets those women in the cart wore,” Mr. Walker said. “Like getting a dog collar.”

“If that were all, what would stop witch women putting on the same sort of bands and coming to steal magic from Fork for the wild things?” Billy asked. “I think the keepers have some way of making sure magic can’t be taken from the ground, and I think the bands are part of it.”

A chill crept up Rage’s spine as she understood what Billy was trying to say. “You think being banded is more than just getting those bracelets?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“If banding stopped women from working magic, why would they be kept in Fork for so long?” Mr. Walker asked.

“So they can’t have daughters who might be recruited by the witches?” Rage suggested.

“Maybe,” Billy said. “Anyway, if we see anyone else on the road, we must be sure to ask about banding. When we get to Fork, they will want to band you, and we need to understand what that means.”

They did not meet anyone else until it was almost dusk, and by then Mr. Walker was asleep in Rage’s oversized coat pocket and Bear had disappeared into the trees alongside the road.

A wild-looking girl came round a bend in the road in front of them. She was flanked on either side by two coppery red winged lions, only slightly bigger than Bear in her dog form. The lions could only be wild things. Rage’s heart beat fast at the sheer wonder of them.

Goaty moaned in fright and stopped, trembling from head to cloven hoofs.

“Good dusk,” the girl greeted them in a thin, high voice. Up close it was clear that she was a wild thing, too. Her eyes were an impossible hue of violet, and her great tangle of black hair rippled as if breezes blew through it. She wore a ragged bit of a shift that showed a lot of her skinny greenish limbs, and her wrists were unadorned.

The winged lions began sniffing Billy, who laughed. “It tickles,” he said apologetically.

The sprite cocked her head at the lions. “They ask why you do not answer their greeting. And they ask what manner of thing you are.”

“I’m a dog,” Billy said.

One of the lions licked his toes, then looked at the sprite. “He says you smell like and not like a dog, as does your friend.” She pointed to Elle, who was now being examined by the lions. Fearless as ever, Elle ran her hands through their manes. The sprite laughed and danced across to caress her golden hair. “Pretty. Strong. And what are you?” she asked, coming to Goaty and tugging at his ringlets. “Soft. Pale. Half human, half beast. Are you not a wild thing?”

Goaty tried to speak, but the winged lions converged on him, and he fell into a quaking silence.

“They say you stink of fear,” the sprite said, tilting her head curiously. “You do not need to be afraid. We will not hurt you. Why don’t you come with us to Wildwood? I will make a crown of living ivy for your hair, and you shall learn to dance and ride on my friends as I do, and you will forget fear.” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed Goaty passionately on the cheek.

“Oh, please don’t eat me!” he shrieked.

“Don’t be a fool! She’s trying to kiss you, not eat you,” Mr. Walker said crossly, poking his head out of Rage’s pocket.

The sprite stared at him in delight. Sighing, Rage let him out onto the ground. The lions sniffed at him, and the sprite knelt to look at him. “I thought you one of the little people, but my friends say you are like that one and that one.” She pointed to Billy and Elle. “A not-dog.” Her face grew puzzled. “The witch women ask us to tell them of things that smell of magic but are not wild things.”

Rage felt even more wary of the witch women now that she knew they were responsible for draining magic from the land. “We are not magic, but magic has been worked against us,” she said carefully, knowing the centaur would tell the same story if the witch women asked. Better not to speak of the firecat and the hourglass. “We are looking for the wizard, to see if he can undo what has been done to us,” she added.

“The witch women also seek the wizard, for they say only he can restore magic to Valley,” the sprite said. She bent to pet Mr. Walker. “You are a pretty thing, with your soft ears and big eyes. Magic has made you into this shape, and whence comes the magic?”

“An enchanted gateway brought us here and changed us,” Mr. Walker said, twitching his ears.

“Where is this gateway?” the sprite asked. Mr. Walker started back in alarm from the sudden hunger in her eyes. The sprite looked abashed. “I did not mean to frighten you. It is just that magic is so scarce here now, and we are hungry.”

“You haven’t come from Fork?” Billy asked.

The sprite nodded. “Wild things cannot eat unless food is magicked for us, and there are no witches there. My friends and I went to the High Keeper to ask if they would not allow the witch women to come to Fork and create food for us. We had to wait a long, hungry time. Then he looked down from his seat of dead willow and said it was best that we fade, since we were never natural things and upset the Order of the land.”

“I’m sorry,” Rage said. “I wish we could help, but we really don’t have any magic.”

The sprite nodded sadly. “My friends say your words smell of the truth.” Then she stopped and listened to the lions again. “My friends say there is another….”

Bear came lumbering out of the trees lining the road, and the lions turned as one to regard her with their flaring golden eyes. Rage suddenly felt frightened that they might hurt her. But before she could say anything, she saw that the lions were merely sniffing Bear, who strangely allowed it. They then withdrew and sank on their bellies before her, purring loudly and spreading their glowing scarlet wings.

“They humble themselves before your companion,” the sprite told Rage. “They say your companion is…I do not know a word for it. Greater magic? My friends can see a little into the future, and what they see makes them honor this great dark beast. Can you not hear them?”

“I can,” Mr. Walker said with uncustomary shyness.

The sprite touched his face, then drew a deep breath. “Well, we must go back to Wildwood.” She turned to Bear and made a low, graceful curtsy. “Farewell, Great One. If I have done naught in my life but look on you, it is enough.”

The lions rose, and all three of them went on down the road.

“Well!” Elle said, staring after them. “What was all that about?” But no one answered, for they were staring at Bear.

She growled at them to leave her be. “I don’t know why those creatures acted like that. There’s nothing special about me. Nothing at all.” She turned away and went back into the trees. She disliked being in the open now, even more than when she had been a dog.

“Could you really hear those lion things talking?” Elle asked Mr. Walker, as they set off again.

“I said so, didn’t I? But it wasn’t exactly talking. It was sort of a deep, purring music. A bit like the firecat’s voice, but not so sneering and sly.”

“We should have asked that sprite about the firecat, and we forgot to ask about banding, too,” Billy said, but his eyes were on the bushes where his mother had gone.

“I don’t suppose she would have known much about banding,” Rage said. “And I don’t think we should tell anyone anything about our business anymore.”

“Maybe the firecat is a wild thing,” Elle said.

“It couldn’t be,” Billy said. “Wild things can’t work magic to feed themselves, and the firecat uses magic every time it appears.”

“Maybe it can work magic because the wizard made it, and he is more powerful than the witch women,” Mr. Walker said.

Rage said nothing. The encounter only seemed to have produced more questions. The sole interesting thing they had learned was that the witch women believed the wizard could restore the lost magic to Valley and were searching for him.

“Dangerous wild beasts,” Goaty said, looking down the road after the sprite and the winged lions.

“She was very small,” Mr. Walker said, and he sighed.

Not long after, the sun sank. They were beginning to think about finding a place to sleep when Billy pointed out an arc of light on the horizon.

“I bet the bridge to Fork is just over this rise,” Rage said, excited.

But she was wrong.

It wasn’t a bridge but a river port. Rage and her companions looked down on it from a low mound beside the road. The gray donkey and cart were tethered to a wooden pier with a hut built at the end of it. Obviously the little girls and the women in kimono dresses had already gone across the river. Rage noticed a big metal winch with thick, twisted iron cables stretching out across the water, which pulled the ferry across the currents to the opposite bank.

The darkness and width of the river meant that she could not see the other side. “Elle?”

“I see nothing, but I smell water and stone on the other side,” Elle reported.

“I have been thinking,” Billy said when they had been standing there staring down silently for some minutes. “The High Keeper told the sprite that wild things ought to be allowed to die because they upset Order here, and the woman in the cart said the wizard would not return until Order had been restored. What if the keepers are letting the wild things die because they think that will bring the wizard back?”

Rage stared, beginning to feel just a little bit awed by the way Billy was able to figure things out. She did not know what to say to his grim idea, but it struck her that a lot of people in Valley were looking for the missing wizard.

“Let’s go down,” Elle said impatiently. “We have done enough thinking, and talking about thinking.”

“Going down is always a bad idea,” Goaty murmured.

“I don’t think we should go down just yet,” Rage said. “Let’s wait until a boat comes.”

The others agreed. Billy suggested they travel in two groups when the time came to cross the river. “Rage will go as a human girl I am escorting to Fork to be banded, and the rest of you can pretend to be wild things,” he explained. “You can be going to plead your cause to the High Keeper, like the sprite and the winged lions.”

“I don’t want to see the High Keeper,” Goaty protested. “He sounds horrible.”

“He does,” Billy admitted. “But remember how the sprite said they were made to wait a long time to see him? He won’t see you at once, and that woman in the cart said there were lots of wild things in Fork, so they must be able to move around the town.”

“What about the other wild things?” Mr. Walker protested. “They will smell that we are not wild things.”

“You’ll just have to avoid them,” Billy said, sounding exasperated. “You have to go as wild things, otherwise we will have to explain about the bramble gate and admit to coming from another world.”

“I don’t understand,” Elle said. “I thought we were going to see the keepers about the wizard. Surely we’ll have to tell them everything.”

Billy glanced at Rage, and she saw that, like her, he had come to the conclusion that they had better avoid the keepers. “I think we should learn a bit more about the keepers before we reveal ourselves to them,” he said.

Elle cast herself down on the grass with an expression of utter boredom and said she might as well sleep if they were not going anywhere. Goaty lay neatly beside her, and Bear and Mr. Walker curled up to sleep, too. Billy stayed beside Rage, gazing down at the pier. Several people were moving around the hut and the winch. They looked like workers, not passengers.

“What do you suppose the lions smelled on Bear?” Rage asked Billy.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was very strange. That sprite said they saw something in her future.” He shivered. “I could not bear it if something bad happened to her, Rage. Her life has been so hard already.”

Rage understood. She felt the same about Mam. But she was beginning to see that something had been wrong with Mam even before the accident. That was why they had moved so often, and why Mam never made any friends. Rage had thought they went back to Winnoway for Grandfather Adam’s sake. Now she wondered if they had come back because Mam hoped to heal whatever had been hurt inside her.

But Grandfather Adam had been just as cold and hard as ever.

Strangely, instead of hating her grandfather for the way he had been, she found herself trying to imagine what had happened to make him so blind to joy and laughter, so stony to Rage and her mother. It couldn’t be because of Mam and her brother running away, as she had always thought—Mrs. Johnson had said Grandfather Adam was like that even before he married Grandmother Reny. That meant something must have happened to him even before Mam was born.