THREE

ECHOES

Aster felt him, as he lowered himself upon her, but most of her attention was on the knife, as she realized he wasn’t merely threatening her with it.

He was going to cut her throat.

His other hand was between her legs.

She couldn’t move. All she could do was watch it happen, feel it happen. And she wasn’t ready.

The knife touched her throat . . .

Vilken screamed. His body jerked up and off of her as he clutched at his face, staggering backwards until he slammed into the wall.

Aster didn’t know what had happened, but she knew she hadn’t done it. Her brain was as dead to magic as it had been a moment before. Her limbs felt like they were made of marble. She tried to move anyway and succeeded in rolling off of the bed, landing clumsily, painfully on the floor. She crawled toward the door.

She heard him whimpering, but she didn’t dare look. She needed all of her focus to move her arms and legs, to reach the door . . .

Then he was there, in front of her. His face was blanched, and one of his eyes was bleeding, but he was standing. He heaved her up by the armpits and threw her roughly back on the bed. Then he sat back down. She saw he still had the knife in his hand, but it was shaking, like an old man with palsy. With a cry, he tossed the knife away.

“Your father’s curse,” he said. “I thought I was done with it.”

When Vilken was Mr. Watkins, her father had put a spell on him to seek her out and bring her back to him. The spell had included an inner compass that allowed Mr. Watkins to always know what direction she was in, and an obsession that made sure he would never stop trying to find her.

Obviously, it had included something else.

“Of course, you asshole,” she said. “You think my father would send some guy after me—make him obsessed with me—without including an anti-raping-and-murdering clause?”

“Shut up,” he said.

“You shut up,” she said. “You’re a disgusting clown, and I’m going to see the end of you. I swear that on my mother.”

He pushed his hair back.

“You’ll see no such thing,” he said. “Your father’s curse lost most of its force when I took this body. The part that remains—now that I’m aware of it—I’ll find a way to deal with. We will take this up again, I promise you.”

He rose, pulled his robe back on, picked up the knife in his still-trembling hand, and went out the door. She heard it lock, and bolts slide into place.

She picked up her robe and put it back on, still feeling as if she was living in slow motion.

Only then did she begin to cry.

And not just for herself. There were hundreds of girls on the island, and because Vilken hadn’t been able to have her, he would have another. Because she lived, someone else was about to die. Maybe more than one.

There was nothing she could do until the drugs wore off. She knew he would never let that happen.

She was right. A few minutes later, the door burst open, and ten divlings came into the room—bigger, nastier, less human than any she had yet seen. They held her down and forced her to drink something bitter and black. She tried to resist it as it crept into her brain, but it was no use. Everything began to dissolve into nightmare. But she was still aware when they put her in the box and covered her with flowers.

Stop, she tried to tell them. I’m not dead.

They put the lid on anyway.

After a few hours, Errol realized he was going in circles—or, rather, the road was. He had passed the same oak several times now, he was sure, but to be positive, he marked it with the tip of his sword and continued, straight.

Half an hour later he saw the oak again, with his mark on it.

The weird thing was, he couldn’t see that the road curved at all, one way or the other.

He tried going back toward the gypsy camp, but the result was the same. The road no longer had a beginning or an end, only this middle, this little section.

There was no use staying on it. The problem was that the road was surrounded by blackwater swamp, which looked to be hard going. But he couldn’t keep going in circles, could he?

He found a way that looked relatively clear and started out, wading first ankle deep then dropping very quickly to above his waist. Eventually he came to a long hummock and climbed out on that, only to see a maze of lowland and swamp stretching out in every direction.

He couldn’t see the road anymore, and he suspected that if he went back to find it, he probably wouldn’t.

Night came, solid black and full of bugs. He climbed up into a tree and dozed fitfully, waking once to what he was sure was the sound of music—drums and voices—faint and faraway.

The dawn was slow to come, and murky when it arrived. Errol wondered if the curse was still spreading, if day and night were teasing apart even here in the marches. Would it eventually affect his world, what these people called the Ghost Country?

He didn’t see how. Day and night were caused by the rotation of the Earth, and if the Earth stopped turning, one side of it would probably burn up and the other would freeze. His world wasn’t magical—any miracles that happened there were strictly imported from elsewhere and had limited affect. According to Dusk, people in his world didn’t even have souls. If you died in the Kingdoms, you were reincarnated. If you died in the Reign of the Departed, that was it. You were done.

But he had seen his father, or thought he had—when he was dying in his hospital bed, and the woman in white came for him, his father had appeared, and tried to protect him. He hadn’t been able to, but there had been something, right? At least a wisp of something remaining of the man he loved so much?

Or maybe it had merely been his brain cells going dark. It had felt real, but so did a lot of things that weren’t. Maybe Earth really was the last stop for souls that had worn out their welcome with the universe.

Anyway, that was all stuff that didn’t matter right now. What was important now was getting out of the swamp. He climbed down from the tree and started slogging along again.

About midday somebody started shooting at him.

He thought he’d caught a branch or something and it had whipped him in the chest—until he realized an arrow had just skipped off his chest plate.

“Hey!” he shouted. He ducked behind a tree, which was useless, because he wasn’t sure where the attack had come from.

He didn’t have to worry long, because another missile whizzed by and a third hit him in the shoulder. Once again, his armor saved him from being shish-kabobbed, and now that he knew intimately how that felt, he was more grateful than ever that he’d put it on.

He had a glimpse of the shooters through the trees. They were dead white—not beige or tan or pinkish, but white like a sheet of paper, except where they were speckled—on their backs, a little like trout.

“I’m not looking for trouble!” he yelled.

His answer was another eight or so arrows. They were made of switch cane and fletched with black feathers.

“Dammit!” he grunted, and started to run, hoping they would get the message that he wasn’t interested in a fight.

Of course, they might not be interested in a fight, either—given the way things fell out in this part of the Marches, they might be hunting him to present as the main course at some sort of banquet.

He had a sword, but what he knew to do with it came strictly from movies and television. Anyway, a sword didn’t quite have the reach of a bow . . .

He hit water and churned through it as best he could. Something else splashed nearby, loudly. The good news was, by now he would normally be laid out from exhaustion, but with the armor he was barely breaking a sweat.

He was almost to the other bank when the water in front of him fountained up.

It was a man, and a big one. He was probably thirty years old. His front was the same frog-belly white he’d glimpsed already, but his flanks and the tops of his arms were mottled green with blue speckles. His glossy black hair was tied up in a topknot.

He shrieked in Errol’s face and brandished a big wooden club. It looked sort of like a baseball bat planed flat with garfish teeth set along the thin edges.

“Look,” Errol said. “I’m just trying to get out of here.”

The man swung the club. Sheer reflex made Errol raise his arm, and the weapon hit him, hard, sending a numbing shocked through his arm and shoulder and knocking him sideways into the water.

When he came up, the guy was starting another swing. Not knowing what else to do, Errol drew his sword.

His arm seemed to jump up on its own, catch the descending club at an oblique angle, then cut forward, pulling him with it. The warrior dodged back, but only barely. He came back at Errol, the club singing through the air as it came down on him.

The sword stopped that, too, and this time the return cut hit the man on the arm. Blood spurted from a nasty-looking cut, and the guy fell back, dropping his club and grabbing at his wound.

Errol sloshed out of the water and started running again, but now they were everywhere, yipping and screaming. Arrows hissed and snapped all around him; one dug into the armor deep enough to hurt.

He was finally starting to tire; his lungs were burning and his legs were getting wobbly, and running wasn’t getting him anywhere. He didn’t want to fight these guys, but it looked like he didn’t have a choice.

He stopped, put his back to a tree, and yelled.

“Come on!” he said. “Let’s do it!”

For a moment, they did. He counted maybe fifteen of them starting to fan out in a circle around him. He eyed the nearest; if he could knock a couple down, maybe break through their circle . . .

They stopped coming forward. The warrior he’d cut arrived and approached a little closer, but then he, too stopped, looking past Errol.

Their eyes turned up. And up, as if watching something rise into the sky.

Every single one of them turned and ran.

“What?” Errol started. He looked behind him and saw a bunch of trees falling his way.

“Holy crap!” he yelped and took off after his erstwhile enemies.

The ground beneath his feet shivered once, twice, again. The din of shattering cypress was ridiculously loud. Looking back, he couldn’t make out what it was, only that it was big, far taller than the trees. And coming fast.

His breath, on the other hand, whistled in his chest, and his whole body ached. The armor made him stronger and faster, but it didn’t make him a superman. He noticed almost absently that he was oozing red where the sharp-edged club had hit him, but he didn’t have time to consider the consequences of that before something came down, through the tops of the trees, breaking limbs above his head before slamming him into the ground and holding him there, pushing the breath out of him. It almost felt like a gigantic hand, but almost as soon as he had that thought, it was gone, the pressure released, and he was lying in an Errol-shaped depression in the mud, water slowly filling in around him.

He hurt. Everywhere. But everything appeared to be working. He pushed himself up with his arms, then clambered to his feet.

Above, something had cleared the canopy so he could see the sky, and behind him was a long swath cut through the forest, a lot like the path of a tornado. But whatever huge thing had been after him was no longer visible.

Then he heard a faint groan and tracked his gaze down into the undergrowth of cane and ferns.

A young man lay there, about his own age, naked as the day he was born. He looked up at Errol with a blank expression on his broad, brown face.

Errol blinked. He knew the fellow.

“Billy?” he said.