Feast?
'Who is to say where you are?' Mirkady asked lightly. 'Some say there is a different world for every story ever told or untold, that there is no such thing as the here and now, only the unfolding of infinite possibilities, all of them real in some place or other.'
'In which case,' Dwarmo said, vastly amused, 'there is no such thing as a mistake.'
Michael was lost. The battlements, the forest, these companions, they blurred in his eyes as though they were on the verge of metamorphosis. He dragged his gaze away.
'Cat.' She at least was real, unchanging. She appeared as stern as a nun in the golden sunlight—like the nuns who had taken Rose away in the black car. The black car driven by the tall priest into the night...
Rose.
He could no longer remember his aunt's face. When he tried to summon it up all he could see was Cat. They were almost twins in his mind. But Rose was dead—wasn't she?
She had died having that baby she had told him about. She had never come home.
A voice singing a coronach off in the trees... Dead love, a lost lover.
I'm in mortal sin, Michael. I'm a fallen woman.
The mead (had it been mead?) was fogging his mind. He felt he was on the edge of something. It was on the tip of his consciousness, hovering like a swimmer about to dive.
There had never been a funeral. Why?
Unless she was not dead. Unless she had simply disappeared somewhere...
Michael's eyes widened. The other three regarded him unsmilingly. Was it imagination, or were King Mirkady's ears pointed, his mouth too wide to be human?
Rose.
'She's here,' he said, the knowledge bursting in on him. 'This is where they took her. They brought her to this place:
'Who?' Dwarmo asked. His armour was somehow dimmed, ragged at the edges.
'You knew about Rose, Cat. That's why you brought me here. You knew!'
Again, that resemblance, the almost-recognition.
There were no battlements, no white walls. They were standing in an earth-ceilinged cavern with tree roots lacing the black soil like old bones. In their hands were wooden cups, and up and down the cavern old hides and furs covered the bare earth. They were spattered with clay plates and jugs, gnawed bones, discarded scraps. A host of nightmarish creatures of every shade and form sat busily around a flaming fire pit, the light of their eyes as green as jade and their hubbub an indecipherable din of noise.
'Bravo,' Mirkady said, and he winked one brilliant eye at Michael.
'My God,' said Michael weakly, and the din at the fire lessened. 'Your God,' Mirkady agreed. 'Not ours.'
Michael ignored him. He grasped Cat by the upper arm. 'Who are you, Cat? Where did you come from?'
'I was not baptized,' Cat said. 'That is all I know. It is how the Wyrim were able to take me in.'
'Infants left out by the villagers to die, unwanted and cursed, we claim as our own,' Mirkady said. 'It was the Horseman left Sister Cat here, at the Howe, shouted the name "Catherine" into the trees and then rode away. But he always comes back to claim his own—Michael Fay.' Mirkady's voice was almost a sneer. 'You make our sister mortal, so that she feels cold and hunger. You make her human, and so the Horseman hunts her.'
'Is it true, Cat? Did you know?'
But she would not meet his eyes. She looked disturbing in his uncle's clothing, at once seductive and child-like.
'The Horseman sired her, as he sired us all in the beginning,' Mirkady went on implacably. 'We are kin to the wolves of the forest. Everything in the Wildwood belongs here, but you and your kind.'
'The Brothers,' a low murmur from the fire pit said, and there was a general growl of agreement.
'The tribes, the villagers. They were all one once, the remnants of a proud people driven over the mountains from the lands beyond and led by a crippled man into the Wildwood so long ago that they do not remember themselves. So they clear the trees and bum the ground and rape their crops from it—call it theirs ¬while we, the dark folk, who have been here always, are pushed into the deepest parts of the Wood, to lurk in the impenetrable fastnesses there. Some worship us as the spirits of the woods and the earth and hang their offerings in the trees, but more often we are hated, feared as children of the Devil.'
'So call me a changeling, then,' Cat said bitterly and pulled her arm out of Michael's grasp. But he was hardly aware of her, of any of them.
Rose was in this place somewhere, still alive. He was sure of it.
He could find her and bring her home.
'That's why I'm here,' he said, dazed. Cat broke away from them and squatted at the fire pit to swill from a discarded cup. She stared into the flames as though she were contemplating some private hell.
'We have to go,' Michael told Mirkady. 'I have to find her if she's here. She's ... ' He glanced at Cat. 'She's family.'
'Blood is thicker than water,' Mirkady said, his mouth a lipless gash across the triangle of his face. 'Do members of your family make a habit of wandering between worlds?'