The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [185]
AS ANNE WHEELED HER mount from the road and into the forest, a wind blew through, resurrecting the dead leaves into aerial dancers pirouetting in vorticose ballet. A faint chorus of women’s voices attended them, thin and without depth, as if the song had fallen from a great height and been stripped and broken as it fell until nothing was left but a memory imprinted in the air, with that fading, too.
She thought she heard her name and then only the thumping of Tarry’s hooves and her breath, which seemed almost to hover around her rather than come from inside. The tree boles went by hypnotically, one by one, rows of columns that never seemed to end.
Tarry leapt a fallen log and nearly stumbled on the slope beyond, but he recovered, and then the slope evened out. For that brief moment when she seemed to float, sunlight seemed to explode around her, melting the trees down into green grass and misty rinns far below, and she was again on Faster, hurtling down the Sleeve, terrified, giddy, and blissful with life.
For an instant she held it, but then it was gone, and she realized with a leaden heart that that, too, was only a memory of something irrevocably lost. That life, that childhood, was gone forever, and even if she made it home it wouldn’t be the home she knew.
Tarry squealed and stumbled again, legs buckling, and in a fog of golden light Anne hurled forward through the dancing leaves and fertile smell of promised rain. She hit the ground and bounced, heard something snap, and pain like nearby thunder detonated in her thigh. She felt the flesh skinning from her elbows and arms as she wrapped them to protect her head, and finally fetched to a stop against a stump amidst the scents of turned earth, blood, and broken roots.
For a time she forgot where she was, and puzzled at the branches above, wondering what they could be, as something beat toward her like an approaching drummer.
She saw a face she ought to know but couldn’t quite place, before it—like the wind and her childhood—faded.
Something lapped around her like the tongue of a giant dog, or waves on the strand, irregular in rhythm, soothing. Anne tried to open her eyes, but they seemed infinitely heavy, so instead she looked through the lids and saw her room—except it wasn’t her room. It resembled her room, but the walls were falling in, and through a great hole near the ceiling red light streamed in that terrified her even to look at, and nearby—from the corner of her eye—she saw the door opening, and someone stepping through who shouldn’t be there, whom she couldn’t look at, and she knew suddenly that she hadn’t awakened at all, but was still in some Black Mary of waking.
She tried harder to wake, then, to force her eyes open, to pry apart the wall of sleep and step through. But when she did, she was back in the room, and the red light was stronger, the door swung wider, and the shadow stepped in. Her skin felt a thousand stings, as if she lay in a bath of scorpions, and she woke, and it all started again . . .
She sat up and heard a voice screaming, which she took a moment to understand was her own. Her chest heaved as she clutched at strange bedclothes and prayed this was finally an end to sleep, and not another trick of the Mary. Then she felt the pain in her leg where the arrow had pierced her, and looked around in a fresh panic. She’d awakened before, not knowing where she was, not recognizing anything, and then gradually realizing she was in a familiar place made strange by the linger of dream. But as she stared about the room, it did not become familiar.
The lapping of her dream turned out to be the fire in the hearth a few yards away. Heavy tapestry drapes covered the windows, so she couldn’t tell if it was day or night. A wolf pelt lay flat on the floor, and near the fire there was a loom and a stool to sit at it. Other than that, there was only a door, wooden and solid with iron bands.
She threw back the bedclothes. She wore an amber dressing gown worked with golden roses on the hem. She pulled it up until she could see her leg, and found