IN THE DARK of the woods, stray beams dropped pools of silvery light on what appeared to be nine or ten kitchen middens or, charitably, caches of firewood larded with the bones of cattle and horses and pigs—all but skulls—and draped rags, ornamented around the base with rusty iron pots, the slop and scrap of many a meal. Reynard remembered the spectral ladies that had taunted him in the wood, and how these dames had, in fade of sun, revealed inner workings of bone and stick, like marionettes wrapped in dream and strung with flesh and hair.
“Is this your trick yard?” Reynard asked.
“So some claim,” the King of Troy answered, and pointed them toward a lean-to within the ring of six wide-rooted and towering oaks. “Thou bring’st the boy for my denial, or my confirmation?”
“I was not myself sure,” Widsith said. “It has been so very long since we have seen the like.”
“By which thou mean’st, one who attracts the special attentions of Eaters? And like thee, mayhaps hath value to the Crafters? And this from a man who has never had an audience with one!”
“No,” Widsith admitted.
“Well, I will think on’t. Thine instincts may be good. What I must ask is, why have the Travelers not yet gathered this boy into their wagons and ferried him to the kraters? If he is their duty and treasure, more than you, they have always moved quick to take advantage. Or is there something I know not, that you do?”
He stared accusingly at Widsith, then Reynard, and Reynard flushed at the suspicion that the magician knew he had lied.
“My question for thee is, would he be of so much use to the Travelers that they would imperil this island by bringing him here, along with Spaniards—along with me?” Widsith asked.
“Not the Travelers as such, but others, those just beneath the sky, who also serve Crafters. I can see a little into thy thoughts,” Troy said to the boy. “Thou hadst a woman who taught thee the languages of Ogmios?”
Reynard nodded. Stone people.
“But your line is clean,” the magician said. “Thou dost remember, but I cannot see. Well, whatever these truths add to, I would take the boy to those better able to appraise him, and I would do it soon. I am busy enough here, Pilgrim, and will venture no further opinion.”
“I see thy labors, magician,” Widsith said. “Too many balls to juggle, doubtless, what with distracting the Spanish, or the Spanish arriving here at all, and now, with the village.”
“I am perplex’d by this, and likely many others around thee,” the King said. “Was Cardoza aware of this island? If so, who told him, and who told that one? Thou seemest most immediate, Pilgrim. Didst thou?”
Widsith made a bitter face. “Cardoza would not have been my choice for a leader of troops. No, I did not tell him.”
“And yet he is here.” The King of Troy stared around at the trees, the leaf-covered ground, and blew out between pressed lips, a blatting appropriate for neither him nor the circumstance. “There are many layers on this island,” he said. “I see some, not all. If thou, fisherboy, fox-boy, canst see deeper, down to the base, that would indeed make thee a treasure. Thou couldst control immense magicks, not look-see-wonders. What dost thou perceive beneath this seeming wood?” He waved his arms and performed a faltering, clumsy pirouette, then peered goggle-eyed at an astonished Reynard. “Well?”
Widsith looked between them.
“I know nothing of layers,” Reynard said. “God made the world and put us in it.”
“Ah,” the King said. “Be that what thy grandmother taught thee?”
“No,” Reynard said. “She did not speak of Bible matters.”
“Didst thou know that by grace of the Crafters, and Hel, insects once ruled, that our world was an insect world?”
Reynard, aghast, was too stunned to answer or play their game.
The King waved his hand again around the woods. “And of course spiders and crabs and the like. What a fine mystery that is! We like it not that Hel might have for a time resembled a crab, or a grasshopper, and shared their thoughts and hungers. But she shared not our prejudices in any way. I would imagine that crabs, spiders, and insects were experts at ogham! So many pointed legs to align on a branch or trunk. And they were far smarter than we can now imagine, and larger as well. The drakes are but a remnant of that world. And beneath those insect masters, in the earliest layer —”
A deep, loud voice grated from the trees beyond the lean-to. “Are we not engaged, old Troy?” the voice roughed and gargled. “Who are these that distract thee?”
The King tried to usher them away from that copse. “Pilgrim, ’tis awkward for thee here. And more awkward for this boy, at the moment. I wish thy company and witness, but God’s truth, best ye be off to Maeve and serve her needs.”
Widsith peered with an intense frown into the shadows behind the King’s rude shelter. “Why the toppling sweven, Troy, and why the red-and-white trim and fringe?” he asked.
“Send them to the Inferno!” the voice called, followed by a coughing howl like a jungle cat. “Do it, and show me next the way!”
Troy seemed bemused. “A stray spirit of Dante,” he said, “who once visited me when his poetry lagged and sputtered.”
Widsith shifted between the King and Reynard, as if to protect the boy, but clearly he did not know what was out there, or why the King was warning them back.
“As I say, a mere wisp of the past!” the old man said. “I have seen behind and around this boy, and confirmed him for thee, and thus performed my work for Zodiako,” the King insisted, eyes doing their bleary yellow best to carry his irritation. “Time now to serve other patrons, fulfill other contracts and duties.”
“It is you behind the voice,” Reynard said, peering with a squint into the gloom beyond the lean-to. “I have seen it in country fairs. It hath a silly name, like a wind among cards.”
“Mean you ventriloquist!” The King looked upon him with a sudden glowing smile, the growling voice forgotten. “A new word, soon minted. Thou know’st of fairs and those who work them? Tell me, what new tricks and plays? Have new mountebanks better puppets than I strutted before thee?”
“No evagation,” Widsith cautioned. “It is I who wander in person, not our minds. To the task —”
“The devil with ye!” the cat-growler said, then shrieked to a harpy’s pitch. Reynard ducked as something feathery swooped and puffed close to his scalp—something like an owl with the head of a lynx.
The King leaned his head to one side, and again twisted his grin. “I teased the Spanish. They thought to do harm, and, whilst some insist mine arts are best applied to lost lovers and stray children, they have other uses, that thou know’st well.”
“Thou it was didst lure the soldiers to where Eaters and drakes found them!” Widsith said.
“Not me, entirely,” the King insisted, hands flagging like old leaves. “Spanish hopes for murder and treasure guided them to their own doom. I filled mine old pans and laid trails of nuggets and coin, defended them with affrighting hags and tottering castles, into open fields and rocky heights, and the brutes followed their own vicious nature.”
Reynard had to be impressed by such a ruse, but then shivered at the calm he felt, exposed to all this strangeness. He was not afraid of Widsith, a most changeable man—and he was not afraid of the King, who seemed decrepit . . . but he had been afraid of the toppling hag and the striped red and white man. And so . . .
He had fallen for the King of Troy’s tricks, just like the Spaniards. Illusions worked for both the King and for Zodiako, it seemed. Did the tricks, the visions, work on or against the glassy-skinned Eaters? He thought not. Perhaps the Eaters were themselves illusions raised by greater sorcerers than the King. This Queen of Hell, for example, mistress of crabs and spiders, queen of devils, who had not yet been explained one way or another.
“Go!” the King insisted, hands working like autumn flags to warn them back.
“But I fear for thee, old friend,” Widsith said, with a hint of cruel jest, “and miss the tales we promise each time I leave and return!”
“Soon enough,” the King said. “But for now, in the company thou keep’st, all is unsettled, and some will visit thee I do not wish to meet.”
“When? Of what strain?” Widsith asked. “I have no fear of Eaters high or low —”
“Nor doubtless will this boy,” the King said. “But others wander from the waste not seen here for many centuries. Giants and bogles and smaller, stranger wights, and ghosts in shrouds, and those who shape signs in the dark—some visible, some not.”
“Attracted to the boy? Protecting him?” Widsith asked.
“Doth he want protection?”
“I saved and protected him,” Widsith said.
“Perhaps he is their goal, their guide, and not thee and thy tales, Pilgrim. I’ll do my best to make them pass us by, but ye should go now!”