The Hex Witch of Seldom (10 page)

Out of the woods ahead of them rattled a mud-splattered pickup. Headlights swept onto the bridge, caught them in high beams. Even Shane could not dodge them. There was nowhere to go. Trapped on the narrow road between railings, all he could do was keep running. Atop the black horse, Bobbi passed the pickup so close that in the greenish glow of the dashboard she could see the startled face of the man behind the wheel as he stared back at her.

Shane barreled into the woods on the other side. Ducking branches, Bobbi swore, “Damn.” It was not strong enough. “Oh, crap, damn, SHIT.”

The search would be hot after them again.

“There wasn't a single car on that road the whole time we sat there,” she grumbled to Shane.

She blamed herself for not watching the side road while he was intent on the expressway. She could have watched, she could have said something. Only, Shane had taken charge from the beginning, and she had gotten used to sitting on his back, carried away, swept away into adventure.… Riding Shane was utterly unlike riding a horse. It was more like riding a romance. But now she blamed herself for not putting reins on him, taking control of her own life. In woods behind her was a man lying dead by a downed motorbike, when maybe she would have handled it differently.…

Or maybe she would be raped, mutilated and dead instead of riding on a black mystery at midnight.

Closer to morning, now. Dawn was lightning the sky, and as soon as he could halfway see his footing Shane settled into a distance-covering lope. He would put as much forest as he could between Bobbi and the bridge before six kinds of cops swarmed out and the choppers started flying over. Bobbi tilted her weight forward, rocked like a baby by the rhythm of the canter, but her thoughts were uneasy. She was not used to being protected. That was one thing she liked about Grandpap. He always treated her like a man. Well, almost always.

Shane stumbled, regained his footing, and surged on. Hit a hidden hole or a root beneath the dead leaves on the ground, most likely.

Bobbi's stomach was nagging her with hunger, and there was nothing for her to eat. The Snickers bar had been last night's supper. By the time the sun was up, she felt so ravenous she could think of nothing else but how to find herself some food. She wished she had paid more attention when Grandpap and his cronies had talked about the wild-growing foods they used to gather. Too early in the year for most of those, anyway, even if she knew them. She would have to risk stealing from someone's kitchen. If she could get Shane to take her there.

Shane faltered in his lope and slowed to a walk.

The going was really too rough for a lope. No ordinary horse could have managed it. And the heavy flat-tire sound of a chopper vibrated in the distance. Bobbi turned her attention that way, and Shane speeded his gait to a trot, heading for the cover of some hemlocks.

Only the one copter appeared. Bobbi felt nearly insulted. As the day wore on, either it flew away or they left it behind, and they no longer had to hide from it.

She and Shane had struck a sort of flat-topped, leaf-strewn mound, a long mound that ran straight as a rifle barrel through the woods. It made much easier going than the rumpled slopes of the mountainsides, and Shane followed it. Trees grew out of it from time to time, but not as thickly as they did elsewhere. Creeks and ravines cut across it at intervals, and in those cuts Bobbi could see the remains of stone pilings. The mound was, in fact, an old tram bed, the built-up roadway for the tram line that had taken lumber out of these hills years before. It ran on southwestward for miles.

Thinking as she was of her stomach, it took Bobbi a while to notice that Shane was moving along at walk and jog trot, when this would have made a better place than most for a gallop. It was only half a day since the man in the pickup had seen them, and she, for one, still sweated at the memory; she would have thought Shane would be moving at top speed. But the mustang was picking his way down the sides of the streambanks, walking across the bottoms and trudging up the opposite slopes—and this was the same horse who had leaped a fifteen-foot ravine the day before! The thought struck her, making her stomach knot more sharply than hunger could, and she exclaimed aloud.

“Shane! Your hooves!”

Those small, black hooves, small as a dandy's polished boots, not really wide enough to carry the weight of a rider …

Bobbi leaned over and tried to look. She couldn't see whether they were cracked, or worn, or which one, or how. Shane was unshod, of course, and the rocks he had come across, the leaps he had taken, should have lamed any horse before now. But Bobbi had been thinking of him as more than horse, and she hadn't realized …

“Shane,” she demanded, “stop.” She wanted to see how badly his hooves were damaged.

The stallion responded only by speeding his walk into a trot. Hooves struck the ground in hard-driving rhythm. Bobbi felt the slight unevenness of that rhythm.

“You're going lame,” she stated. “Let me down. I'll walk.”

Shane lifted his head angrily and trotted faster. Bobbi put her arms around his neck, slid down over his shoulder and hung there, dragging her heels in the dirt until the horse came to a stop. Then she stood up, wobbling a little. Shane faced her with his blue eyes blazing, plainly furious. He stamped his hind feet.

“Kick me if it'll make you feel better,” Bobbi retorted, and she stooped to examine his hooves. “God,” she added in a different tone. “I could kick myself.”

All four hooves were worn and ragged, but the front ones were the worst, because they bore the most weight. Shane's front toes were worn so short that his hooves stood almost upright, straining his pasterns. Far worse: up his left front hoof ran a crack, and the pressure of every step widened it and forced it longer.

“I bet that started yesterday. I should have seen it before. I shouldn't have been riding you. Now it's worse.”

Bobbi turned away with tears stinging her eyes and began to walk. After a moment Shane followed her down the overgrown tram road.

By midday, with no food in her stomach, Bobbi was reeling, but she kept stubbornly on. She stopped being aware of the forest around her and saw only the ground beneath her feet. Another damn creek. Down the bank, slosh through the water, don't bother to find the driest way, up the other side, good. Shane, following her, stepping clear of the rocks in the creekbed, plodding through the water. Cold water probably felt good on those hooves. They had to hurt.… She didn't look at his head, his eyes, only glanced back at his legs from time to time as he followed her. She felt her feet starting to stumble and tried to correct them, but it was all she could do to put one in front of the other. She concentrated on that. Left foot step, right foot step, left foot again. Staggering a little. No longer much aware even of the black-horse-not-a-horse behind her—and then a gentle nudge in the middle of her back sent her toppling onto the ground.

It was soft as a bed down there, springtime-damp and leafy. Bobbi lay blissfully still a moment before she realized what had been done to her and pride made her move.

“Hey,” she protested weakly, rolling over to scowl at Shane.

Looming above her, he seemed gigantic. His eyes, a blue glow—no, white. Shane was the world. Shane-blaze took her, she saw nothing else, and in it, in his eyes, she saw—the gypsy dancers, the dragon with gray hair, the old woman with the walking stick that moved, the young beauty in the flounced and ruffled dress, and—and the man in the black shirt. He had turned to look straight at her, and his eyes under the broad brim of his black hat blazed piercing blue, fire and ice. The shirt glistened; silk. Something white glinted at his neck, under the open collar.

“Bobbi,” he said.

She felt her mouth fall open in astonishment. “Shane,” she blurted, “you can talk to me!”

“Sometimes. Listen. There's no need for this. Get up on me and ride. It's not much farther.”

“But you weren't meant for that!” Still lying on the ground, looking up at him, too weak and dazed to care that she was being crazy and seeing things again, Bobbi said, “You were meant to be the rider. You had—a big horse, the best in the world. You rode—”

“Hush,” he said. His face was youthful but not boyish; it was hard, clean-shaven, lean and sunburned. The lines of his brows and nose and jaw were straight, with a set look about the jaw. Small weather-marks showed around his eyes; perhaps he was not young after all, but ageless. His mouth was strong, somber. The form behind his form was that of a horse, a black mustang. Bobbi had no trouble thinking of him as man and mustang both.

He said, “I've been eating. I can go for the little while longer it will take. You can't. Get up and get on me.”

“The crack will get worse.” Bobbi's eyes never left his.

“It will be only for a few hours. Until the tram line ends.”

“And what is there?”

“A friend. Shelter, food.”

Bobbi had not blinked, but the blue-white blaze vanished, and with it the man in the black silk shirt. She was staring up at Shane the wild horse, and the mustang had turned his head away.

Bobbi rolled to one side and got up off the ground with an effort. She steadied herself with one hand against the nearest tree.

“I hate to do it,” she told Shane. “If I had any choice, I wouldn't.”

There was no fallen tree nearby, and she knew she couldn't vault on from the ground this time. She walked as far as the next cut, holding onto Shane's mane at the withers to support herself. Then he stood partway down the bank and she eased onto his back from above.

That afternoon seemed very long.

Giving up her pride, Bobbi had laid her head on Shane's neck when she felt his already-slow walk turn yet slower, then stop. It took her a moment to gather the strength to sit up and open her eyes.

Shane stood within the last fringe of trees before a tiny mountain town: just a dozen tumbledown buildings, half of them empty, strung along a narrow, winding dirt road that vanished back into forest again. It was dusk. For some reason Bobbi noticed with great clarity the minute, white spring flowers blooming in the woods trash at Shane's feet. Yellow light glowed gently from the windows.

The woods pressed on the town the same way they pressed on the Yandro farm, so that the trees seemed to push the shacks and trailers, the vacant single-room store and the square wooden post office down the steep slopes toward the road and creek at the bottom. The nearest house, a plain, two-story frame house, stood half in forest. Its front porch faced the downhill slope and the town. Its back stoop stood hidden in laurel, and taller trees fingered its roof, leaving mossy marks.

Shane looked at the lay of the land a moment, then drifted forward as silently as a mountain cat toward the back stoop, that house.

Though she could not possibly have heard them coming, a square-built old woman came to the back door, the one facing the woods, and looked out at the twilight. She stood in the doorway with the light streaming through from behind her back; Bobbi could not see her properly, only her housedress and her smooth silver hair. Shane had stopped. The old woman turned her head, and Bobbi knew she had somehow perceived the black horse standing in the nightfall, and though Bobbi could not see the old woman's eyes, she felt as though they had looked on her naked.

The old woman beckoned, reached inside the door and turned off the brightest light, leaving the porch in near-darkness. Then she went back inside.

Shane carried Bobbi forward.

Straight up to the stoop he took her, and the fast, half-frightened beating of her heart gave her strength to dismount lightly, stand on her own and slip quietly in at the open door. The kitchen door. In the soft light coming through an inner door from what seemed to be a parlor, she could see the oilcloth-covered table, the ladder-back chairs. A good smell of cooked chicken greeted her. “Set down there at the table,” a throaty old voice told her. But Bobbi froze where she was, on the braided rug. The old woman standing at the cookstove was the one she had seen in Shane's eyes.

Shane came in behind her, up the wooden porch steps and right into the house, and the old woman scuttled over and shut the door behind him.

PART 2

Witch Hazel

“The trickster must first win trust,” the bearded man whispered to his wand at midnight. “It is tiresome, I know, my beauty, but 'twill be worth it in the end. And the years are short to an immortal.”

The wand lay in his callused hands without moving or speaking. It was made of wood stolen centuries before from a tree in a cemetery in Italy, a cypress then already old, with its roots deep in the dead heart of a Borgia, stolen in the dark of the moon, rumor said, with a sacrifice of human blood. The staff was black with age, thick as a blacksmith's arm and very powerful, but still and mute as the tomb.

Bearded nearly to his waist, but with no mustache on his upper lip, the whisperer turned the death-wand in his hands. He caressed its steel-clad head between his palms. He murmured to it as if to a lover. Overhead hung a single dim, bare electric bulb, casting a sheen in the polished metal. The whisperer held the wand upright between his two hands, scrying in the steel, and there he saw a black stallion with a white brand on his neck and a tired girl on his back. And he saw an old woman in a mouse-colored hickory rocker, waiting.

He smiled and lowered the dark cudgel so that his shadow fell across it and the sheen in its metal sheathing dimmed. “I knew he would come to her when he needed help,” he whispered. “I knew it before she knew it herself. Simple-minded old woman. Stupid with her own goodness.” Whispering, he sibilated the words, sending forth stealthy, snakelike sounds into the night.

“Soon,” he whispered to the wand. “Very soon, now. Goodnight, my beauty.” Then with casual ease he passed one hard hand down the length of the wand while he held it in the other. Without even looking he laid it down, turned out the light and went away, out the large barn door, up the unlit yard to the house.