A Different Kingdom(102)

These things he told Cat in a desultory fashion, knowing that if it snowed he would not be here to set his footprints in it. It was his last night in this world. In the moments before dawn he would take Fancy and swim up the chill river into the cave mouth, and he would never come back. Cat must know that, but she refused to speak and the twisting grief and guilt within him began to glow into anger against her stubbornness.

'I'm going home in the morning, Cat,' he stated bluntly at last. She poked at the fire with a stick. The yellow light threw into relief the hollows under her cheekbones, the seamed scar at her neck where a wooden wolf had almost ended her life.

'Will you come with me?'

'No.' She looked up, and her pale face was shut against him.

She seemed middle-aged, gaunt, like a saturnine spinster.

'Why not?'

'It's not my world there. I don't belong. You will be returning as a child, a boy, and I will remain the same. My place—my home—is here. Once I thought yours was also.'

'I never said that.'

A dry smile bent her mouth.

'I told you before: I didn't think it would be like this. I didn't know what it would do to me. Christ, Cat, I thought it would be some sort of fairy tale complete with knights and castles.'

'But it is.'

'Not the way I imagined them. How could I stay here? You saw the Horseman at the edge of the wood. He'll never leave me alone and you neither, maybe.'

'I'll take my chances.'

'There are no Wyrim to look after you, Cat. Mirkady and his folk were on the Horseman's side all along. That's why they gave us the Wyr-fire. So it would transform us into something like them— something the Horseman could control.'

'It saved our lives,' she said, her face becoming animated.

'It wasn't meant to. We turned the wood's power against itself.'

'Michael'—and her voice was full of scorn—'you don't know a thing about what you're speaking.'

'Don't I? I've had a long time to think it out. You nearly became one of the Forest-Folk yourself, and even I felt the change that was possible. If it hadn't been for Brother Nennian—'

'The priest who was going to confront the Horseman in his castle, the one who would have challenged the whole Wildwood if he could.' She was contemptuous.

'Yes. That was what he wanted, and he saw us as a means to his end. But he kept me sane, Cat, or I would have been drinking that black water and having green fire fill my eyes just like you. I felt it too.'

'But truth and justice and the God you follow won out?'

The hostility in her voice shook him, but he ploughed on regardless.

'If you like. Those wooden wolves attacked us because we were almost at the castle, and 1 was not going to change. The Horseman had failed, so he was going to destroy us. He didn't think the Wyr-fire was a two-edged sword.'

She was silent, her face a mask of baffled anger and grief.

'We can't stay here anymore, Cat,' he said softly, willing the words across the fire as though they were missiles. 'I love you, lass. Please come back with me.'

There was a brightness in her eyes, as though the firelight had caught there and writhed behind their windows.

'We've come a long road together, you and I,' she said. 'And yet we're back where we began. As though we came no distance at all. Like a dream.'

Perhaps it was like a dream, he thought. A dream of trees and dark beasts, of other wonders. He could not speak. It was as though the width of the flames were a yawning gulf, Cat an unbridgeable distance away, lost for ever.

'Oh, Michael—' she said, and her voice broke.

They both moved in the same moment, crossing the distance, and were in each other's arms. He could feel her bones under his hands, the lean warmth of her, and he kissed the satin skin below her ear.

'I can't,' she whispered. 'I don't belong. This place is where my bones must lie.'

You will be the death of me, she had once said. The phrase came back to him and he felt as helpless as the boy he had so recently been. There was to be no happy ending, for either of them. This world did not work that way.

They made love for the last time at the side of the fire, whilst around them the cold wind picked up and moaned round the treeless hills. When they slept at last the sky was crowded with dark cloud, the stars invisible, and in the darkness the snow began to fall, kissing their upturned faces and shrouding the hard earth.

IN THE LAST dark moments before the dawn he left, the water iced around the banks of the river. Its chill grip made him cry out, and he clung to Fancy's mane as the mare struggled through the slow-moving current towards the dark cave mouth and the world that waited on the other side. He was going balk to his home, his boyhood, the land he had been born into, but half of him was still with the dark girl who watched from the snowy bank behind. He felt bruised and bleeding, tom in two, and as the black entrance closed over his head he was weeping like a child into the icy river.