FIVE

NOON

Errol wasn’t sure how long they flew. Most of the time they were in the clouds: sometimes cottony, gently glowing mists with glimpses of blue sky—at others, black tempests slashed with terrifying coils of lightning surrounded them. Most often it was monotonous grades of white and grey. Only seldom did he see anything beneath—glimpses of a sparkling sea, a vast green jungle, a gloomy marsh dissected by a thousand grey streams. He nearly fell asleep a dozen times, but each time his grip on Dusk loosened—and he began to fall—he woke.

The clouds broke apart, became cottony puffballs, and eventually cleared entirely. The sun stood at noon and was so bright that most of the sky was the color of butter, although it faded to a pale blue at the horizons. It reminded him of a day at the beach in the middle of the summer.

The landscape resembled a beach, too, but without an ocean. Hills and plains of yellow sand rolled off in all directions. He was reminded of pictures he had seen of the Sahara Desert.

They flew on, and after a time Dusk’s weird mount began to descend toward a snaky green line in the sand. As they drew nearer, he saw it was a canyon cut through chalky white stone. They flew down through the feathery tops of incredibly tall, slender trees that resembled palms, landing near a shallow stream verged by reeds.

On their side of the stream, a few yards away, he saw what looked like the mouth of a cave, mostly concealed by fernlike bushes.

Dusk swung down, and Errol followed right behind her, incredibly happy to have earth beneath his feet again.

Dusk leaned the wooden horse against a tree. She knelt by the stream and splashed some water in her face.

“Refresh yourself,” she said. “The water is fresh, and good to drink.”

He wanted to refuse, to get right into it, but he realized he was parched. The water was good, cold and clean and slightly minerally and nothing like the chlorinated tap water at Laurel Grove.

When he stood back up, she was regarding him with an amused smile.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s still strange, seeing you like this,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. Until now, Dusk had known him only as the automaton Aster had built to contain his soul. “How did you know it was me?”

“I told you once that appearances were unimportant,” she said. “I know you, Errol. I would know you whatever form you wore.”

“That sounds nice,” he said. “Like you never cut off my leg.”

“You did have a choice, Errol,” Dusk said. “You could have chosen me, but you chose her instead. There are consequences, you know. And yet, I did not slay you as I might have.”

“Yeah,” Errol said. “Thanks a whole bunch for not killing me.”

“I do not apologize for my actions,” Dusk said. “I do not act without reason, and at the time I followed the course of action I deemed necessary.”

“And I guess if I really understood it all, I would forgive you?”

Dusk shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “You had your own priorities. They were not the same as mine. We fought, you lost. It is the way of things.”

Errol wanted to respond to that, but there was something so brutally honest about it that he found it was hard to sustain his anger.

“So why am I here?” he asked.

“Because things did not go as I planned,” she said. “I find I have need of help.”

“And what makes you think I would help you? Like you said, you have your priorities, and I have mine.”

“Exactly,” Dusk said. “When I first met you, we shared a goal. And we worked so well together. Against the Snatchwitch. In the battles against the Sheriff and the giant. We were excellent companions, whatever our differences later. Right now, I believe our purposes align again. I traveled a long way under that assumption, anyway. You should at least hear me out.”

He didn’t want to. She was evil and couldn’t be trusted, he knew that.

But she was beautiful, and fierce, and . . .

He could almost hear Aster muttering in his ear, about how stupid women made him. How he was such a sucker for a pretty face. And it was true. Of course it was true, and he had Veronica, anyway.

But he was also here, wherever this was, with no idea how to get back, how to find Veronica or Aster or anyone else. He was at Dusk’s mercy, and in this puny body, without magic on his side, she absolutely had the upper hand.

“Sure,” he said. “I guess I can hear you out. This is about Aster’s father, right? After you left us, you went to get him.”

She smiled. “It was you who told me about him, remember? About his affliction, his inability to remember.”

“Yeah,” Errol said. “I remember.”

“I thought I could convince him I was Aster,” she said. “I believed with him on my side, I could set things right.”

“But it didn’t work?”

“It did, at first. But then things went wrong. Badly wrong. So—” She broke off as if she had heard something.

“No,” she sighed. “They were more alert than I hoped.”

“What’s going on?”

“There isn’t any time,” she said. “Someone is coming for me.”

“Then let’s run. Get back on the horse—”

“There’s no time,” she said. “They will catch us both. With you still free I have a chance.”

She ran over to the wooden horse and said her magic word. For a moment he thought she was going to fly off and leave him, but instead she flew it into the cave. She emerged a moment later.

“Hide in the cave,” she said. “Wait until they are gone—until you are very sure they are gone—before coming out. Do you understand?”

“Then what?”

She smiled. “If I don’t return it means they caught me. They will take me to the glass pyramid. Be very careful. I don’t know all of the measures they might take. Stay alive. Be smart.”

“Wait—”

“No time,” she said. “I trust you Errol. I trust you will help me. Now, go into the cave. When you come to the glass pyramid, bring the things you will find there.”

He glanced at the cave. It was shallow and dropped off quickly in the back, really more of a rock shelter.

“This won’t hide me,” he said.

“It will,” she said. Then, suddenly, she leaned in and kissed him. It felt like the most pleasant punch in the gut he’s ever experienced.

Then she pushed him in.

“Skiuyes,” he heard her say, and the light from outside suddenly dimmed, as if he was seeing everything through tinted glass. She smiled briefly and then turned her back. As she walked away, he saw her footprints in the sand—and his—smooth away.

He heard distant hoofbeats—followed by more, many more, along with the baying of hounds, and stranger cries that might have been human or animal but to Errol sounded not quite like anything he had ever heard before.

He didn’t move; he tried not to even breathe too loudly.

After a time, things quieted down and he started to feel a little antsy. He took a look around and saw some bundles near the back of the cave he hadn’t noticed before.

One contained Dusk’s armor, carefully wrapped in soft cloth. He was about to open the other when he heard a faint sound.

He froze when he saw someone was at the cave entrance.

It looked like a boy, a young one, maybe no more than ten. Maybe it was, but something about it gave Errol the creeps right away. Maybe it was that he almost looked like he was made of gold; his skin, his curly hair, even his eyes were all of nearly the same metallic shade. He wore a white sash and a sort of short skirt, and not much else, but he had a quiver of arrows on his back, and a short but powerful looking bow in his hand. He reminded Errol of a Valentine’s Day cupid gone bad.

At first, Errol thought the boy was looking right at him, but then he saw the weirdly colored eyes weren’t quite focused.

This time, Errol did hold his breath.

Bad Cupid reached his free hand toward the cave. He seemed to encounter something. But then he shook his head, shrugged, and moved on.

Errol didn’t take any more chances. He sat motionless in the back of the cave staring out its mouth for a long time, until he was as sure as he could be that there was no longer anyone out there.

Finally, he turned his attention to the second bundle.

This one contained armor, too—a chest plate, greaves, whatever you called the pieces that went on the arms—but unlike Dusk’s, it wasn’t made of metal but of wood. Along with the armor was a sword, also made of wood. He reached for that.

It was warm to the touch, and he felt sudden disorientation, as if his hand had become longer, heavier.

More curious than ever, he studied the weapon, noticing that the grip was made of bone, or at least inlaid with it, a peculiar design that looked familiar, like a little man . . .

Then he understood and dropped it with a grunt.

“Holy crap,” he said.

The sword and armor were made out of—him. From the wooden body that had once housed his soul.

He stared at it, trying to put it all together. Dusk must have gone back to the old castle, looking for him, the place where they’d found the water of health. Where she had betrayed them. She hadn’t found him, but she had found—this. The thing that had been him.

As he watched, a little tendril sprouted from the sword where he had touched it, reaching toward him, like he was the sun . . .

“Oh, no thank you,” he yelped, scrambling out of the cave, through the bushes and all the way to the edge of the stream.

If he put it on, what would it do? Grow onto him?

He had no intention of finding out.

Belatedly, he realized he was exposed to whoever might still be hunting for him, but it had been a while since he had heard anything, and being out in the open felt better than being in the cave with—that.

He splashed some water on his face, then tried to make sense of things. Horse hoofs had marked up the sand, along with bare footprints, dog tracks, and the impressions of several pairs of boots. At least they wouldn’t be hard to follow if that was the plan. But was it?

The glass pyramid, Dusk had said. She was counting on him. The question was, did he care?

Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. But at the moment, he didn’t have any other plan. He could try to go back the way they had come, but that was a very long trip, and he knew enough about the Kingdoms to know that simply going in more-or-less the right direction wasn’t guaranteed to get you where you wanted to go.

So he would look for this pyramid, and Dusk. When he found her, he could always change his mind, if that seemed like the thing to do.

Something was nagging at him, and after a few minutes he figured out what it was.

He had been in the cave for hours.

But the sun hadn’t moved at all. It was still straight up, right in the middle of the sky.

He broke a reed and planted it in the silt near the creek, turning it so it cast no shadow.

He counted slowly to a thousand, and it still didn’t cast a shadow.

The sun wasn’t moving.

“Well, that’s not right,” he muttered.

But what else was new?

Reluctantly, he went back in the cave.

Could he make the horse fly? It was worth a try, he decided. He dragged it out of the cave and took a seat on it.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go. Fly.”

Nothing happened.

When Dusk had started the thing, it had still been on the carousel. He tried to remember exactly what had happened. She had used a word, in her language. He’d understood it, because Aster had once magically given him understanding of their speech so he could understand her father. What had Dusk said?

“Not fly,” he said. “Remember.”

The horse shifted a little beneath him.

“Remember,” he said. But that wasn’t exactly right. The way Dusk and Aster said things when they were doing spells wasn’t exactly like when they were just talking. He forced himself to think about the actual sounds he was saying, to skip the shortcut his brain was doing in translating it. When he thought “remember”—like he was asking or suggesting someone to think back—it came out as zemerese. If he told someone to “remember,” it came out a zemeredi.

But Dusk hadn’t said either of those. There had been a little syllable in the middle of the word.

“Zemeryese,” he said.

The horse shifted upright and lifted slightly off the ground. “Okay,” he said. “Great.”

The next thing he knew, he was flying through the air, but not on the horse. As he slammed into the sand, he saw his erstwhile mount arc into the distance, finally vanishing is it dropped below the line of sight allowed by the canyon walls.

“Well, crap,” Errol muttered. “I guess it’s walking, then.”

He got up, hoping nothing was broken or sprained. He went back into the cave.

After a moment’s assessment, he decided he could carry one set of armor, but not both. That worked out, because he didn’t want anything to do with what was plainly supposed to be his set. He bundled up Dusk’s stuff, arranged it best he could to carry on his shoulders, and set off following the tracks.