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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Through the front window Emily saw Alcuin Curzon walk up past the churchyard in the morning sunlight, and she was sitting on the green leather couch in the parlor when he knocked at the door.

Her father stood by the parlor window, his long scarf wrapped so many times around his throat that it supported his chin. Anne and Charlotte sat in chairs at the table, but when Tabby led Curzon in, Emily stood up and said, “I want to talk to Mr. Curzon alone for a moment.” She knew that a couple of scratches on her cheek were visible, but she was careful to give no indication of her bruises and stiff joints.

Her father and her sisters looked at one another, then Anne and Charlotte got to their feet and the three of them followed Tabby away down the hall.

“Do sit,” Emily told Curzon.

“After you,” he said, waving at the couch behind her. “You had a strenuous night. You’ll be seeing a doctor?”

Emily pulled out a chair at the table and sat down, willing herself to do it as if effortlessly, and Curzon took a seat across from her. His shoulders and shaggy head were silhouetted by the bright window behind him.

“I’m grateful,” she said, “my whole family is grateful, that you found me last night and brought me home. No, I don’t like doctors. I’m in good health.”

“I suppose you probably are. From what I’ve seen of you, you’re more at home on the moors in bad weather than within four walls.”

“Sit over here,” she said, waving at a chair to her right. “I can’t see your face there.”

He got up and moved to the indicated chair. Now she could see the guarded expression on his rugged dark face, and his one exposed brown eye.

Emily spoke carefully. “When Branwell and Keeper and I visited you at the house you took in the village last year,” she said, “you greeted us with your eyepatch flipped up. I believe it was a courtesy. Will you raise it now?”

He set his big hands flat on the table. “No.”

She had asked him last night if she should fear him. His answer had been Never again. You may rely on it.

She cocked her head. “I’m told you all spoke of penances last night.” Quietly she asked, “Was it a penance?”

His eye closed. “I meant my penance to be exile from the world, for the rest of my life, at the monastery at Rocamadour. I thought that would be adequate. And I lived a quiet ascetic life among the old monks for half a year—but when I received your letter I realized that exile was an evasion of the penance I actually owed.”

“Owed to God,” she said.

“Owed to God, yes. And to you.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked away. “Irrevocably?”

“Yes, child, with a dioscuri.” He touched the eyepatch. “I’m now a traditional member of the Huberti.” He sat back and exhaled. “Last night on our long walk, you told me some of what happened to you out there. Tell me again, thoroughly.”

Emily shook her head at the thought of what he had done. Owed to God, yes. And to you. She made herself meet his eye, and said, “My father and sisters need to hear it all too. We haven’t told him about the dealings you and I have had with . . . an ancient goddess, so please don’t trouble him with that.” She stood up and turned to the door, then hesitated, looked back, and bent to touch his nearest fist. “I am genuinely obliged to you.”

“Not obliged. It was owed.”

“Nevertheless.” She walked down the hall to the kitchen, and when she came back she was accompanied by her sisters and her father and Tabby.

When her family had sat down and Tabby stood in the doorway, Emily began, “Last night Branwell went out, and Anne noticed that he opened the kitchen door with his left hand . . .” She had to pause to explain to Curzon and her horrified father that since September Branwell’s left hand was either lifeless or controlled by Welsh; then went on, “So Keeper and I went in pursuit of him . . .”

When she described the impossible grove of willow trees that had appeared beside the Boggarts Green stone, and the gargantuan oak tree with its arches and balconies, the faces of her father and sisters were blank with concealed disbelief, but Tabby nodded and spoke up.

“The old hill folk have heard of it,” she said. “My great-grandfather said a woman led him there one midsummer night, but she disappeared and when he finally found his way out he was miles from the stone.”

When Emily came to recount the conversation between Branwell’s possessed body and Adam Wright, Anne took her father’s hand and looked uneasily at Curzon.

“What can be done,” Curzon said firmly. “I find I owe a debt to this family.”

“Adam Wright,” said Patrick incredulously, “the sheepherder?”

“Yes,” Emily told him. Still hoping to spare her father the whole truth about his son, she said, “He has tempted Branwell, in the past.”

“In the most dangerously wrong direction,” Anne clarified. Meeting her father’s frown, she added, “It was while you were away in Manchester.”

Patrick pursed his lips but said nothing.

“To drive Welsh out of Branwell,” Emily said, “I cut Branwell’s forehead with both points of a dioscuri knife. And then I stabbed Adam Wright in the hand.”

Emily went on to describe the fissures that had opened in the earth, and the leap the ghost Keeper had been able to make to join her as she fell into one. Her account of the voices of the unquiet dead, and the collapsing tunnel, drew gasps from her sisters and an exclamation from her father—and a nod from Curzon.

“The ghost Keeper led me out, and then,” she said to Charlotte, “I found myself in a scene from Jane Eyre.” She told them about the ignis fatui women inducing her to call up an inviting vision. To Charlotte she added, “I’ve always thought that scene is like something from a fairy tale.”

“A nasty sort of fairy tale they made of it,” said Charlotte.

“So I ran from them, and then Mr. Curzon and Keeper found me, and Mr. Curzon’s horse trampled them, and he put me on his horse and brought me back here.”

“I knew from the start, sir,” said their father in a shaky voice, “that you might be an ally. I could not have imagined how crucial a one.”

Anne was looking at Curzon. Emily could see that she was recalling past conversations, and when Curzon was facing their father she turned to Emily and, with raised eyebrows, touched her cheek below her left eye. Emily gave her a slight nod.

“Ahh!” Anne whispered. She looked back at Curzon with new curiosity and, Emily thought, wondering respect.

“Is Branwell available?” Curzon asked.

“He caught a terrible chill last night,” said Charlotte doubtfully.

“I daresay he can walk downstairs and up again,” said Emily.

“I should be the one to rouse him,” said Patrick, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. “He won’t be as contrary with me as he would be with one of you.”

When he had left the parlor, Curzon said, “Today I’ll visit the place Miss Emily and I found last year. I hope—” He paused, looking at Anne; but she bit her lip and waved at him to go on. “The Romans learned to defeat, at least partly, the sort of creature that threatens you all. I’m hoping that at the shrine they frequented I’ll be able to learn it too.”

“Pagan magic,” said Charlotte.

“Magic of the land,” Tabby suggested hesitantly.

“It’s what can be done,” said Emily, repeating what Curzon had said moments earlier. She turned to him. “What you mean is that you’ll be seeking a task from her, not just . . . local news. I can ride, if the horse doesn’t gallop.”

“I’ll be walking.”

Of course, thought Emily. A man on horseback on the moors is conspicuous—and if spotted, a man afoot can get out of sight more easily.

“And you,” Curzon added firmly, “are in no state to accompany me.”

“You caught a chill yourself,” Anne said to Emily.

“Remember how sick you got at the school in Brussels,” added Charlotte.

“I was sick there because I was separated from here. I shake off chills.”

Footsteps echoed from the stairs down the hall, and Charlotte said, “We mustn’t discuss any of this in front of Branwell.”

“Good Lord, no,” agreed Emily. “Or Papa either.” She shifted unobtrusively in her chair to stretch an aching leg.

Their father appeared in the doorway, and stepped back with a wave toward the table. Branwell came shuffling into the room, without his spectacles and blinking in the morning brightness shining in through the window. He was wearing a fresh shirt and trousers and slippers, and above the bandage on his forehead his ginger hair was in a rare state of disarray. His eyes were red and he was mopping his nose with a handkerchief.

“Emily hasn’t given me my eyeglasses yet today,” he said thickly. “What’s—” He peered at the figure of Curzon and flinched, then stood up straight. “I think we’ve met before, sir!”

“Yes, lad,” said Curzon tiredly.

“Some small rented house down in the village.” Branwell looked around at the others as his father walked in and resumed his chair, then back at Curzon. “I’m summoned—did you want a portrait done of yourself?” He coughed and dabbed at his nose with the handkerchief. “There are certain colors I don’t customarily keep on hand, which I’d have to purchase.”

“Hush,” said Emily, embarrassed for him. This man is undertaking a perilous task, she thought, to save you . . . for my sake. “We’d like to hear what happened to you last night.”

Branwell squinted at her. “You were nowhere to be found when I got home,” he said. “In any case I don’t care to discuss family affairs in front of a . . . stranger.”

“He knows about Welsh,” Patrick said.

“He doesn’t, you know, actually. None of you do. Last night? I went for a stroll, and was caught in the rain. I got lost, but Keeper found me and got me pointed toward home.” He started to turn toward the doorway. “Was that all? I should be in bed.”

“How did you cut your forehead?” asked Emily.

“Keeper—when he found me he jumped up—his claws—”

“No,” she said gently. “You have no idea how it happened, do you?”

“I want my eyeglasses.”

“Not today, I think.”

Branwell seemed about to protest angrily, then just turned and stalked away down the hall. Emily got to her feet and caught up with him before he reached the stairs. Keeper was right beside her.

She took her brother’s shoulder and turned him around. Quietly she said, “Those aren’t the cuts of a dog’s claws, Branwell—they’re from the two points of a knife I poked you with.” Over his surprised, angry sputtering she added, “If I had not done it, you’d be possessed by Welsh even now, and God only knows where you’d be.” She let go of his shoulder. “You know it’s true.”

He shrugged, looking at the floor. “You had to cut my face?”

“Your hands were moving targets, and I couldn’t be sure of both points striking you if I put them through your clothing.” She gave him a crooked smile. “I missed your throat, at least.”

From the corner of her eye she saw her father step out from the parlor doorway down the hall. She waved him back.

“Where was I?” Branwell asked.

She blew out a breath. “A very odd place. Marshy, with willows—”

“And,” Branwell interrupted, suddenly very excited, “very old little people? And an enormous house made out of a living oak tree? I was there, when he lost his hold on me for just a moment or two. Where is it?”

She was uneasy to hear a tone of eagerness in his question. “It’s not anywhere. But I found you in it, and you were Welsh, so I stuck you with the knife.”

He touched his bandage. “Yes, one of those damnable double-bladed affairs, or the cuts would have healed by this morning. How did you get into that place?”

“Keeper led me in.” The ghost of a dog with that name, at least, she thought.

“But from what mundane place? Where had Welsh taken me, to be able to enter it?”

Emily recalled what Curzon had said about the mundus loci: a spider outside of reality, its widely planted legs straddling this Yorkshire locality. “Why? Do you want to go back there?”

Branwell cocked an eyebrow. “I suppose not, on the whole.”

Moving on quickly, Emily asked, “What were you doing, when he took you? I gather you were in your room?”

“Yes, I—no, I was reading ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ and I wanted to ask you about the lines ‘The many men, so beautiful! / And they all dead did lie; / And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.’ ” He peered back down the hall, then went on, “And I got up and walked to the top of the stairs to call you . . . and that’s the last thing I remember before I found myself sprawled on the wet grass beside Keeper.” Then he looked up at her, startled. “And I did call you—then!—not even aware, for a moment, that time had passed!”

Emily thought of her brother alone in the rainy night, bleeding, far from home. “I’m sorry I couldn’t hear you call for me,” she said.

“Keeper did.” Branwell ruffled the fur on the dog’s head, not having to bend down to do it. Keeper stood still, not wagging his tail. “It was wrong of me to blame him for the cuts on my face. Do explain to the others.”

He looked over his shoulder at the stairs. “If you are all quite finished with me, I’m going back to bed.”

Emily laid her hand on top of Branwell’s on the dog’s head. “We’ll never be finished with you,” she said.

He managed a smile. “You and Keeper, at least.”

He turned away and began making his way up the stairs; like an old man, Emily thought.

She and Keeper walked back to the parlor. Her father and sisters still sat at the table, but Curzon was gone.

“Mr. Curzon didn’t know how long you’d be with Branwell,” said Anne, “and since he has a long trip ahead of him, he asked us to convey his apologies.”

“Hah!” said Emily. “He thinks I won’t go with him!”

“Go with him?” exclaimed her father. “Where? To Ponden Kirk? Back to this magical grove by Boggarts Green? Certainly not!”

Anne didn’t look at their father. “You need to rest,” she said. “I can see the effort you’re taking to act as if you’re not in pain.”

“I’ve got to be the judge of my capabilities,” Emily told her, “and they’re more than you suppose. He can’t get far in the time it will take me to load my pistol.”

“Will you obey your father?” Patrick demanded.

“When I can, Papa,” said Emily. “And please trust me when I can’t.”

She hurried away down the hall.


Emily had wondered if she would be able to keep up with Curzon across the miles of uneven terrain to the site of the Druidic temple, but as soon as she was away from the parsonage the cold heather-scented wind cleared her head with its familiar hints of a remote, wild music, and she let the light crunch of her boots on the path’s damp earth provide a fleet counterpoint to it until she was nearly dancing. She pushed her straw hat off and let it swing on her back by its drawstring. Keeper trotted at her side, tilting his massive head to sniff at the wind and evidently finding nothing objectionable in it.

Last night’s rain had left the sky clear blue between towers of dazzlingly white cumulus clouds, and patches of green and purple shone in the divided sunlight on the hills.

She reflected that hoping to meet a goddess from the remote past, on such an assertively new day as this, should seem incongruous; but the heather and wind and stone were timeless, and the lonely paths traced the same ways they did when it was Roman or Celtic or Pictish feet that had trod them.

She saw the figure of Curzon on the northern path, pacing along with a tall walking stick, and she quickly caught up with him. His coat was unbuttoned, flapping like a cape, and his unruly black hair stuck out from under a tweed cap.

He didn’t stop or turn around, but when she and Keeper were a yard behind him he said, “I could order you to go back.”

“As you have before.” Much of the stiffness in her knees had already vanished with the exercise. The aches in her shoulders could take their time.

“I might threaten you with my stick.”

“Keeper would find that exciting.”

She was walking beside him now, courteously on his right, and he glanced down at her several times as the three of them variously strode and loped along. Eventually he said, “I note an angular bulk in your coat pocket.”

“Lead and church-bell scrapings,” she said with a nod.

They crossed the River Worth by the same old stone bridge as before, and now the wider extent of moorland hills and valleys lay ahead of them.

Curzon seemed to be watching to see if she’d tire, or ask for a rest, but Emily was invigorated to be away from the close sights of walls and roofs and chimneys, out here where her vision could embrace distant hills and rocky outcrops across miles of clear air.

She thought of the word Curzon had used last September—parallax—and she wondered if to him the landscape had no depth now, with relative distances a matter of interpretation.

Emily knew the way to the hilltop that overlooked the site of the druidic temple, and she was ready to correct Curzon if he misread the inevident landmarks. As he had done last September, he avoided hilltops and ridges, and whenever possible made his way down slopes to follow new rain-fed becks in ravines and narrow valleys, but the temple was always ahead of them.

When their course did take them over the top of a ridge, Curzon always looked around at the horizon, frowning when he saw an occasional ruined stone farmhouse in the distance, but it was Emily who spied the figure of a man standing beside a juniper tree on a hilltop a mile to the west.

She pointed the figure out to Curzon. “Alan Wright, is my guess,” she said. “I think he only means to track us—his right hand won’t be of much use to him.”

They were following a familiar old dry-stone wall now, and it ended at a flat field of lush reeds bending in the wind—the marsh they had crossed last year. Emily looked across the expanse at the willow tree, and the hawthorn bushes that had turned into old women on that stormy day, but by daylight they were just a tree and bushes, and she found their verdant ordinariness almost mocking. But perhaps Curzon had killed the ignis fatui spirits last night, trampling them.

She and Curzon followed Keeper across the marsh, and Curzon knew now to poke at doubtful patches of mud with his stick before setting his boot on them. The stagnant smell that Emily thought of as froggy was hardly detectable on the wind.

“A bit south of here,” Curzon remarked, “is where Keeper found you.”

“Tabby says those things wander at night.”

On the far side of the marsh they were ascending a grassy slope, and there was one of the primordial paths to follow northward. Within another mile they were climbing the hill with the two standing stones at its crown.

The wind was stronger at the top of the hill. Emily crossed to the steep northern slope and looked down at the green heath below, and soon identified the stones that intermittently outlined the remembered square within a square, both transected by a now-wider beck, a hundred feet out from the foot of the hill.

Grass and gorse thickly covered the ground, and she couldn’t see where the fissures and holes had opened up on that day last year; but she recalled Curzon falling into one, and she touched her pocket and remembered shooting at the rippling spot of air in which Keeper had recognized Welsh.

She looked at Curzon standing next to her. His eye was narrowed and his brown profile was taut, and she realized that he was afraid of what he was about to do—more afraid than he had been last year. Seeking a task from a goddess can be costly, he had told her last night, and having undertaken to fulfil it, you’re generally in mortal peril if you fail. Immortal peril, I should say.

She wondered what his life at the monastery had been like; the life he had abandoned after cutting out his own left eye, largely for her sake.

“I’ll be right beside you,” she told him, “like it or not.”

“At this moment,” he said, “selfishly, I’m glad.”

His right hand moved halfway to his face and then dropped, and she guessed that he had been about to make the sign of the cross but had thought better of it. He was, after all, about to attempt the conjuring of a pagan goddess.

He cleared his throat and exhaled through pursed lips; and then, loudly and carefully, called a dozen syllables. Again Emily couldn’t identify the language, though she was sure it was a different question or statement than what he had called out here last year. The unknown words sent a shiver down her arms.

Remembering what happened on that day, she turned and looked south; but today there were no crows in the sky. Welsh is wounded, she thought—waiting.

She walked across the grass to the steep north slope and crouched, then began hopping and sliding down, with one hand catching at stones and tufts of grass. Keeper bounded past her on one side, and on the other side rolled rocks and clumps of dirt loosened by Curzon descending behind her.

At the bottom of the slope she stood up, careful not to wince at the renewed aches in her knees, and brushed out her crumpled dress. Curzon came sliding down a couple of yards to her left, and he got to his feet with some evident effort.

Emily shaded her eyes and looked across the empty heath.

The first line of stones lay a hundred feet ahead, and from ground level the stones were hardly visible in the tall grass. Curzon led the way forward across the uneven ground, and paused when they stood over the intermittently marked outer boundary.

“Across the threshold together,” he said, “as before.”

Emily caught Keeper’s collar, nodded to Curzon, and the three of them stepped over the row of stones.

This time Emily was able to remain standing when the ground shifted, and she only blinked when abruptly she found herself in darkness, with a crescent moon high overhead. Daylight came back so suddenly that it was as if the brief experience of night had been a hood whisked away, and she shifted her boots in the grass as the ground tilted again—and then she was once again standing a few yards in front of the low stone temple with the tall, conical thatched roof. The open doorway below the wooden lintel beam showed only shadows and the narrow opening in the far wall; she couldn’t see the effigy of the goddess.

She shivered with the old liberating excitement.

Around the primitive building the grassy heath still stretched wide between distant rocky promontories. The only evident change in the landscape in the last few moments was that the stream bisecting the squares was not here, now.

And two dogs were standing beside her.

She touched their equally solid, furry heads, and remembered her entrance into the mundus loci beside the Boggarts Green stone last night. To Curzon she said, “I don’t think we could ever have got here without Keeper’s companion—in spite of your hilltop incantation.”

“We won’t be trying it again.” He wiped his hand across his mouth and took a step, but Emily caught his shoulder.

“I may have established a rapport,” she said, “through my father.”

He hesitated, then nodded reluctantly and stepped aside.

Emily and the two dogs started forward, and when she followed them under the lintel beam she was able to make out the remembered wicker figure standing on a stone block in the dimness. When she had first seen it last year it had seemed to be nothing but a primitive basketwork effigy, but today it was palpably a presence.

Emily recalled what Curzon had said then: She was known to the Celts down around Bath as Sulis, and the druids in these northern parts called her Brigantia . . . There’s the remains of a Roman road up by Skipton, and the Romans used to come down here to consult her. They knew her as Minerva.

A prehuman power, she thought—no doubt diminished now, but still existing on levels she could never comprehend.

She heard Curzon scuff in behind her, and then tiny white lights appeared in the effigy’s empty eye sockets, and brightened. Emily was suddenly certain that the faint lights of the nocturnal ignis fatui were a perverse mimicry of this radiance. It was sentient, and pure—she got no impression of malevolence from it, but also no impression of human qualities like compassion or mercy.

As if from long-dormant instinct, the two dogs crossed the narrow chamber and sat down on either side of the stone block that supported the crude figure of the goddess, like attendant demigods. With an audible creaking, the shapeless straw cylinders of the goddess’s arms extended outward and down, and touched the heads of the dogs. Then the arm that had touched her Keeper’s head rose and extended out toward Emily. The white glow from the figure’s eye sockets was bright enough now that Emily saw the bristly shadow of the straw arm on the stones of the wall to her right.

Recalling that no harm had come to her when she had touched the straw arm last year, Emily reached out and touched it again—

And she almost snatched her hand back, for something had cut her left forefinger, though in the brightening glow she could see nothing but dry straw at the end of the goddess’s shapeless arm. But she didn’t lower her hand until the arm withdrew. She resisted the impulse to suck her finger, and drops of blood fell unregarded to the stone floor.

Emily was surprised to see Curzon kneel—then saw that he had pulled a handful of bird bones from his coat pocket. The bones he had left on this floor last year were gone, and he leaned forward to toss this new handful like dice.

As before, the bones fell on the dirt in a distinct, nonrandom figure. He gathered them in and threw them again, and the shadows of the symbol the little bones formed made it seem to stand out in high relief. Emily yawned to correct the pressure in her ears.

Six more times Curzon threw, scanned, and gathered in the bones, as the light from the goddess’s eyes intensified; he and Emily were both squinting now to see the symbols the bones formed, though to Emily they meant nothing.

She was watching his hand as he scraped up the bones one more time, and so the glaring flash of light that rocked him over backward only made her hunch her shoulders and close her eyes. But a moment later her knees gave way and thudded into grassy dirt.

Peripherally, around a retinal afterimage of Curzon’s closing hand, she saw that she was kneeling on the heath in a cold wind under a clear sky, and she scrambled around to peer behind her and to the sides—the stone temple was gone, Keeper was nuzzling her shoulder, the ghost dog had disappeared, and Alcuin Curzon was standing a couple of yards away, staring expressionlessly at nothing.

“Curzon,” Emily said, struggling painfully to her feet. “Alcuin!”

He seemed not to hear her. She walked up to him and shook him by the shoulder; he swayed, but his face didn’t change.

She stepped around in front of him, and she stood on her toes to meet the blank gaze of his single eye. “Alcuin!” she shouted into his face.

His eye didn’t move. She leaned in close to him and was relieved to feel his steady hot breath on her cheek. She stepped back and then slapped him hard on the cheek without the eyepatch—and his face remained stiff.

She walked away, and noticed that the sun was low over the hills to the west. Hours must have passed, here in reality, during the separate time they had spent in the temple of . . . Sulis, Brigantia, Minerva.

Only now was Emily frightened. Once before, she had left him out on the moors while she went to get help, but even though he had been badly wounded then, she had not doubted that he would recover. And when she had come back, then, with the Sunderlands, he had been gone.

She was afraid now that she could leave him and come back in a week, and find him still standing here like this.

And he had presumably learned here, today, what task the goddess had imposed to save her family from Welsh.

She blinked tears out of her eyes and walked back to where Curzon stood; and she pulled her pistol from her coat pocket and thumbed back the hammer. With her free hand she took hold of his left hand and lifted his arm. Remembering a wounded hawk she had found on the moors and nursed back to health, she impulsively kissed his palm, and then raised his hand and fired the pistol between his palm and his ear.

The blast was loud. His arm was jerked out of her grasp and his head turned sharply away in the burst of white smoke. He shook his burned hand and blinked tears out of his eye.

“What?” he barked hoarsely. “Who’s shooting? Damn it—”

“Nobody!” Emily shouted in his face. “Can you hear me?”

“No, I can’t hear you.” He blinked at the smoking pistol in her hand and then stepped away from her and squinted around at the empty landscape. “What were you shooting at? You’ve near deafened and blinded me!” He held his burned hand up to his streaming eye. “Did you shoot at me?”

“No—I wanted to wake you up!”

“Damn, girl! Wait here, don’t move.” He strode over the outer line of stones and crouched to plunge his hand into the rushing water of the stream that bisected the ancient squares. He splashed water liberally over his head and shook his wet black hair. “I wasn’t asleep!” he called over his shoulder.

“What did she say?” Emily yelled.

“What? Who?”

Emily glanced around before calling the name. “Min-er-va!”

Curzon was shaking his left hand. “What, last year?”

“Just now!” Emily waved at the inner square of stones. “When you threw your bird bones!” He tilted his head back and stared at her in evident incomprehension, and she added desperately, “Bright light, remember?”

He started to speak, then cast a glance at the setting sun.

“The dogs sat on either side of her plinth!” Emily held up her left hand. “She cut my finger!”

Curzon hurried across the grass to stand beside her a few feet outside the line of the bigger square.

“Step over the wall line now,” he said, and as Keeper followed at Emily’s knee Curzon took her hand and tugged her forward. A moment later all three of them stood inside the bigger square of low stones, and that was all: the stones all lay inert in their ancient lines among the grass, and no temple appeared.

“We already did it,” Emily said, yanking her hand free. “And the ghost Keeper is gone now.”

“What do you mean, we—” Curzon bared his teeth at the darkening sky. “Ach! So late in the day, in an instant?”

“We already did it,” Emily repeated distinctly.

For several seconds the wind across the heath was the only sound. Then Curzon spoke, and his voice was urgent: “Did she answer? Did the bones form symbols?”

“Yes!” Emily felt tears welling up in her eyes, and she looked away so that Curzon wouldn’t see them. In a resolutely level voice she added, “And don’t ask me if I remember what they were!”

Curzon walked past the inner line of stones, onto the patch of dirt where the temple had been. He fell to his knees and clawed at the dirt with his right hand, then struck his fist against the side of his head.

“Damn me,” he said. “I believe you.” He stood up. “We’ve got to get you home. When did that Wright fellow send to London for the twin’s replacement head?”

“Yesterday, Wright said. Probably at dawn.”

“With fast couriers they could have it at Haworth tomorrow night.”

Emily sighed and let her shoulders sag. “You remember nothing of your meeting with Minerva just now?”

He closed his eye and frowned, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, truly. Nothing.”

They began walking away from the empty expanse of grass, back toward the hill slope.

“I’m sorry I wrote to you,” Emily said. Curzon nodded, looking to the left at their long shadows, and she added quickly, “Please understand what I mean—I’m sorry I called you away from your monastery, and provoked your penance.” And, she thought, you’ll no doubt have to pay the cost for failing in whatever task those bones spelled out for you.

“The penance was due in any case, child. Ah, look—Keeper prompts us.”

Keeper had started hopping and scrambling back up the hill, and Emily and Curzon climbed up after him, Curzon favoring his scorched left hand. At the crest of the hill, Keeper waited while they leaned on the standing stones to catch their breaths.

“Whatever the outcome,” Emily said, “I’m grateful for your strenuous and selfless efforts.” She pushed wind-tangled hair back from her forehead. “I expect you’ll be returning to your monastery now.”

“I expect I will,” he said, “if I’m not killed in your church tomorrow night. Your Protestant church.”

You don’t have to stay to the end with us, she thought, and she nearly reached out for the hand that she had kissed and then burned with the pan-flash of the pistol.

But she just gave him a wistful smile and said, “I should deter you from staying. But—yes—please.”

They walked quickly down the shallower slope on the south side of the hill and struck out across the shadowed moors. Curzon shook his head sharply from time to time, and looked back, and several times seemed about to speak, but waved off Emily’s questioning looks. She and Keeper led the way along paths that they had traversed many times over the years, and it was Keeper who took the lead in crossing the marsh.

Emily glanced to her left at the willow and the three dimly visible hawthorn bushes, but there were still no ignis fatui lights.

“Your horse must have killed all three,” she said. When Curzon grunted and turned to her, she pointed at the bushes.

Curzon stopped. “Three deaths,” he said.

Emily nodded. “The ignis fatui.”

“That was—” And then he would have sunk to his knees in the mud if Emily had not caught his arm and braced her feet.

“Yes,” he said, so softly that Emily barely heard him over the wind, “we were there, you and I, in her temple!—Yes, the dogs, I remember now—and I had called her from the hilltop, asked for her full attention, and a task, God help us!”

He straightened, and her hand fell away.

“Emily.” He breathed deeply. “In the bright light at the end I saw her, to the—tiny extent!—that I was able to comprehend her. And she saw me, this time. She dwarfed me, her vast age, her spiritual . . . enormity! I felt I was a mayfly being crushed just by her awareness of me!” He rubbed one hand over his face. “I fled her, hid from her, inward!—far down in the deepest recesses of my mind—and I might never have come out again if you had not fired your pistol at me.”

“Not at you. I’m glad it—”

“Wait, wait! Three deaths. The symbols in the bones, I remember them now: there was a figure that described something like a lethal parasite that doesn’t belong where or when it is, and then a reversing symbol, which would mean the banishing of it. The souls that it purchased must default, renege—forfeit privilege. They must surrender their lives—three deaths, as . . . penalty payment. And a sacrifice must be made from the harvest they’re now relinquishing, borne by the dead to the cancelling fire.”

“Ahh,” Emily exhaled. Keeper was walking away, and she waved in that direction. “Yes,” she said as the two of them resumed walking, “We’re to break an old, unsought bargain, and pay the penalties.”

For several seconds they plodded on through the marsh in silence.

“I’m sorry,” said Curzon finally. “I’m afraid the task the goddess assigned is for you.”

“It’s only right.”

The crests of a few hills in the east still shone pale apricot in the sinking daylight, and Keeper trotted ahead of Emily and Curzon, frequently looking back as if to urge a quicker pace.

Eventually Curzon said, “She cut your finger, this time?”

Emily held up her left forefinger. “Yes.” In the dusky light she couldn’t see the cut, but when she rubbed her thumb across it, it stung, and she felt the edges of broken skin. “The same finger I cut when I was twelve, to leave my blood in the fairy cave.”

Curzon nodded and sighed. “The moon won’t be up for a while,” he said, “but I imagine you see well at night.”

“And Keeper and I both know the way back,” she assured him.

He nodded, and she knew that he didn’t trust his one remaining eye to recognize features of the land in darkness.

Quickly he went on, “I’ve paid for three nights at that same house on Main Street. I don’t think the Obliques can get the twin’s new head to Haworth before dusk tomorrow. When would you have me come?”

“Morning,” said Emily. “An hour after dawn, say.”

“Prepared for a long walk, I expect.”

“Yes. And this time you might have to carry me back.”


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Framed