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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Emily had fitted on the oiled spectacles several times during the long stormy trek to Ponden Kirk, and though she hadn’t wiped off the rainwater for fear of losing the oil on the lenses, she had been able to see that her crowd of following ghosts had lingered on the north side of Dean Beck; and as she and Curzon had moved on and covered the last mile—along flooded paths and over rock-studded hills—flashes of lightning had let her glimpse the frail, flailing shapes of ghosts coming through the rain from all directions.

And at last Ponden Kirk had loomed black against the dark gray sky, standing upright on the slope below the western plateau, its flat top level with the plateau. From this angle Emily couldn’t see the entrance to the fairy cave at the base of it, but even after seventeen years she remembered the way up to it.

She paused, staring up through the veils of rain, and only when Keeper barked a warning and she exhaled involuntarily did she think to pull the spectacles from her pocket again and look around through the blurred lenses.

The bag-headed things were clustered closely around her, and she consciously took a deep breath against their ineffective resistance, forcing herself not to gag at the rotten-egg smell of their open mouth holes. She believed she could sense frustration in the ghosts, and she hurriedly batted her way out of the crowd to take several breaths of air that smelled only of wet stone and soil.

The ghosts drifted after her, and she and Keeper stepped rapidly up the slope to where Curzon stood.

Under the brim of his dripping hat, Curzon narrowed his eye. “They’re still right with us, I gather,” he said.

“Yes.” She took off the spectacles. “Give me your flint and steel.”

He handed them to her, and she slid them into a pocket of her coat along with the spectacles. Then she crouched beside Keeper. “You,” she told him sternly, “stay. For now.”

The big mastiff understood her, and though he gave her a mourful look, he sat down beside Curzon’s boots.

Emily turned to look down the slope. Without the specactles she couldn’t see her insubstantial pursuers, but the wind was turbulent around the towering black edifice. She exhaled in the direction of the ghosts—then faced the plateau and begain scrambling up the slope.

When she had pulled and scuffed her way to the bottom blocks of Ponden Kirk, she hurried around the corner of it and hiked herself up into the narrow opening. Water sluiced noisily through channels between the stones. The cave was in darkness, but she found that she remembered where the ledge was on which she and Anne and Branwell had perched, seventeen years ago.

She didn’t have to put on the spectacles again to know that the ghosts had followed her up the slope—when she paused, her breath was abruptly sucked out of her lungs. She inhaled forcefully in response.

She crawled into the little cave and felt her way across the wet, tilted stone surfaces to the narrow opening at the far end—the gap, she recalled, through which superstitious girls would crawl in hopes of marrying within the year.

From her pocket she tugged the rain-soaked bundle of manuscripts—hers, Anne’s, and Branwell’s—and laid it on the stone where the three of them had sat, so long ago. She shook her head and crawled to the gap between the stones at the far end of the little cave.

Bracing one hand on a stone surface close above her head, she unfolded her legs out through the opening into the wind; then rolled over and let herself slide out until her boots touched the mud of the slope outside. She blew strongly back into the cave, and felt spiderweb touches against her face. Clearly a number of the ghosts had followed her into the fairy cave—perhaps all of them, since they occupied no appreciable volume.

“Goodbye, poor—” she began, but she was interrupted by an echoing howl from the valley. She looked to her right and saw Curzon and Keeper ten yards away down the slope, facing an enormous mastiff—and sitting astride the beast’s shoulders was a figure that even at this distance she recognized as Branwell.

Quickly she fumbled the flint and the curved steel rod from her pocket, and she struck the steel with the flint.

Sparks flared in the darkness of the cave, and she ducked; and a gout of flame shot out of the narrow opening over her head, lighting the blocks of Ponden Kirk’s south face.

Emily slid down the hill, able to see projecting rocks in her way by the radiance of new fire behind her. She ran down the last few yards to the roughly level ground.

Curzon had clearly engaged the monstrous wolf-creature, for his coat was in tatters and the blades of the dioscuri he held glittered red in the glare from Ponden Kirk behind him; and the beast now reared back, baring its fangs and flexing its hind legs for a lunge—when, mounted on its back, Branwell screamed and convulsed, bending so far backward that Emily thought he must snap his spine.

He sagged and rolled off into the mud, and the creature lowered its forelegs and wailed as it turned its massive head to look down at him.

Blinking rainwater out of her eyes, Emily thought at first that her brother had immediately sprung to his feet. Peering more closely, she saw that his body still lay in the mud, and the figure that had leaped up was a piebald thing made of bubbling mud and wriggling clumps of grass.

It turned to face the radiance of the fire up in the fairy cave. A mouth opened in its featureless head, and a windy voice issued from it, haltingly, apparently attempting to form words.

Emily thought Keeper leaped at the man-shaped thing and tore out its fibrous throat, but Keeper nudged her thigh and she realized that it was the ghost Keeper that was attacking the thing.

And she knew then that the mud-and-grass figure was the fully exorcised ghost of Welsh, cut off at last from Branwell by the cleansing fire in the fairy cave, and that it had managed to draw up substance from the ground to form this last crude approximation of a body.

The ghost Keeper evaded the big werewolf’s thrusting jaws and leaped again, and tore the Welsh figure’s head free of its body; it collapsed, now just a pile of soggy dirt in the rain. The ghost dog vanished.

The beast pawed at the sodden remains of its twin and lifted its head to wail again into the low sky. Keeper loped to the sprawled figure of Branwell, set his teeth firmly in the back of Branwell’s coat, and began dragging him away from the monstrous creature that stood above them on four massive legs.

The big werewolf lowered its head and lunged toward Emily, but Keeper let go of Branwell’s coat and leaped at the thing’s face, clawing its eyes before springing clear and landing poised to attack again; and Curzon darted in and drove his dioscuri at one of the thing’s eyes.

It jerked its head to the side, knocking Curzon onto his back, and for two seconds its fangs tore at him as he repeatedly stabbed up at its eyes and nose; then it fell back, howling, and he rolled free. With one more double-edged slash at the thing’s face, Curzon retreated up the slope, hunched and clutching his stomach with his free hand.

Branwell had sat up, and for a moment gaped at the monstrous creature as it dug its claws into the ground, and then he was crawling rapidly away from it; after a few yards he got to his feet and ran blindly up the slope.

He rushed past Emily with no sign of recognition and went clawing his way up the rising ground on the north side of Ponden Kirk.

Keeper had feinted at the werewolf and then hurried back to where Emily stood, and as he turned and bared his teeth at it, she raised her dioscuri; and a moment later Curzon was beside her with his own. His wet face was gaunt and haggard, his coat was gone, and his flayed shirt was drenched in blood. His free hand still clutched his abdomen, but his extended hand was steady, and the four blades, his dioscuri and Emily’s, gleamed in the shifting orange light from behind them.

The creature gathered its hindquarters for another leap, but a simultaneous white glare and crash of thunder shook the ground—a bolt of lightning had struck a tree some dozen yards behind the werewolf, and the creature convulsed; Keeper sprang back and Emily felt an electric tingle in her legs.

Then, over the ringing in her ears and the constant thrash of the rain, she heard her father’s voice—

“Emily!” her father bellowed. “Make distance!”


Branwell had scrambled up the shallower slope on the north side of Ponden Kirk, and in his disoriented panic he hadn’t spared a glance at the flames billowing out of the fairy cave to his left. Within a minute the ground under his grasping hands and thrusting boots had leveled out, and he was standing on the plateau.

Scarcely visible through the rain, a little stone building he’d never seen before raised its thatched roof against the low sky to his right, while ahead of him two figures stood gesturing on the level top of Ponden Kirk. The cold wind blew streamers of smoke around them, and their faces were underlit by the inexplicable blaze below.

One of them—Branwell rubbed his eyes and peered again—one of them was, impossibly, his father!

A third figure was rapidly approaching the two from the direction of the low stone building—a short upright column with waving arms but no distinct head. Achingly aware that his father was standing on the edge of a long drop, Branwell ran across the intervening mud and out onto the flat wet stones that were the top of Ponden Kirk.

The man standing beside his father turned around and visibly flinched, either at the sight of Branwell so close or the moving thing that had come out of the stone house; and he raised a knife.

With a last exhausted sprint, Branwell shoved the man away from his father, though the two blades of the descending knife slashed the back of his own wrist.

The man stepped back, and overbalanced; and in the startled moment when it was clear that he would not be able to right himself, he tossed the knife toward Branwell’s father. Then he had toppled silently away out of sight below.

Branwell’s father had caught the knife by its grip, and he turned toward Branwell. Branwell stared at the weapon in alarm, and saw that it was actually two knives, tied together. And Branwell noted the detail that for once his father was not wearing his scarf.

Branwell held his hands out to the sides. “It’s me, Papa!”

One of Patrick’s eyes was bruised and swollen shut, but he peered at Branwell with the other, then exhaled and dropped the makeshift dioscuri. The old man turned back to face the valley.

Patrick raised his arms, and the crude figure from the stone house moved up beside him. Now that it was only a few feet away, Branwell could see that it was a bundle of straw, with two smaller bundles like arms, one of which now extended to touch his father’s back.

Branwell reached out to stop it. A moment later he found himself sitting in wet grass several yards behind the two figures who stood at the edge of the drop.

His father flung his arms down, and a simuntaneous flare of lightning and bellow of thunder shook the midair raindrops and rocked Branwell back.

“Emily!” his father roared. “Make distance!”

Branwell was never able, afterward, to fully describe what he saw in the ensuing seconds.

Where his father had stood was now a taller figure, in metal armor that mimicked a bare torso; but when it turned its helmeted head toward him he recognized his father’s face. Beside that figure now stood a woman radiating blue light—she too was very tall, and Branwell was profoundly glad that he was seeing only her back, for he was sure that this was a goddess, and that his soul would be crushed if she were to turn and look him in the eye.

Patrick’s one open eye blazed in her blue radiance.

The giant that was his father turned back to look down at the valley below Ponden Kirk, and he raised both arms again and then flung them down by his armored sides.

In the same instant a second bolt of lightning lanced down out of the sky with a crash that shook the ground under Branwell.

Branwell could see nothing but the afterimage of the jagged fracture the lightning had made in the sky, but he could feel hot blood on his wrist, and in spite of the fire below, the wind up here was mercilessly cold. He stood up and blundered forward carefully until his groping hand met a frail cold hand that he was sure was his father’s.

From the undazzled corner of his eye Branwell was able to see the recognizable silhouette of his father against the fire glow from below, and he pulled the old man away from the edge and off the stone onto grassy dirt. His father looked over his shoulder, and Branwell hastily looked back too; but the figure that had been a bundle of straw in one moment and a goddess in the next was gone, and there was only familiar flat ground where the stone building had briefly stood.

They both sat down. “Papa,” Branwell gasped, “what happened? Who were you, there?”

“I was . . . Brontes. Do hush, boy.”

After taking several deep breaths, his father shook himself and began laboriously getting to his feet.

“That man who fell,” Patrick said. “He’s probably hurt. We should attend to his injuries.”

Branwell thought of asking whether the man had in fact been threatening his father; then decided that he didn’t want to know, yet.

He stood up too. “The slope is shallower on this side,” he said, leading his father away from the top of Ponden Kirk toward the way he had come.


Emily, Curzon, and Keeper had retreated halfway up the slope toward the flaring oven that was Ponden Kirk when the second lightning bolt struck, and all three of them were knocked down by an electric shock as the air shivered to the hard blast of thunder.

Emily had made herself roll over to look down the hill, and she quickly glanced right and left before she realized that the exploded smoldering wreckage on the level ground down there was the remains of the big werewolf—Welsh’s twin, now as thoroughly banished as Welsh.

Beside her, Keeper thrashed his legs and then stood up, fur bristling, looking around and growling. Curzon had rolled down the slope, and Emily crawled to him on her hands and knees.

He was lying facedown, and she braced one boot against a stone and rolled him over. His one eye was open but his arm flopped loosely; his coat and shirt had been ripped away by the werewolf’s fangs, and as rain diluted the welling blood she could see great rents in the flesh of his chest and abdomen. She leaned down over his face, and felt fast, hot breath against her cheek.

“Alcuin!” she said clearly. “Alcuin!”

His lips parted. “Go back,” he whispered, “to your sheep, girl.”

Footsteps crunched on the slope to her left, and she groped around until she found her dropped dioscuri—but it was Branwell and, incredibly, her father who were making their way across the uneven incline, their wet faces lit in coppery chiaroscuro by the flames that still billowed out from the sides of Ponden Kirk.

“The man who fell is dead,” called her father through the downpour. Emily hadn’t known that anybody had fallen. He peered past her. “Has Mr. Curzon . . . left us as well?”

Branwell shambled up, just staring at Curzon’s wounds and shivering. His left hand was streaked with blood, but he was able to brush wet hair from his forehead with it.

“He heals,” Emily said, “but help me drag him up closer to the fire.” Curzon’s dioscuri was lying next to his right hand, and she picked it up and slid it and her own into the pocket of her coat.

“We should all be closer to the fire,” said her father, clearly trying to address immediate concerns in order to hide vast bewiderment. He looked up the slope. “But it won’t last till morning.”

“I don’t know,” said Emily. “Ghosts must have a lot of memories to burn.” She got to her feet and peered through the rain down the dark valley. “Afterward I should check on your horse.”

Her father waved dismissively, and Emily guessed that the horse he must have ridden here had been tethered too close to the first lightning strike—which he himself had surely summoned.

Emily! she recalled his shout. Make distance!

One of her father’s eyes was closed and the skin around it was bruised and swollen. She would have questions for him soon.

Keeper and Emily did most of the work of dragging Curzon’s heavy body up to within a few yards of the base of Ponden Kirk. The air was hot—on both sides of Ponden Kirk flames gushed from the two openings of the fairy cave, and the gaps between the big facing stones glowed. Emily sat down beside Curzon, and she noticed the body of a man lying in the weeds nearby. Keeper sniffed at it and came back to her.

She rubbed the big mastiff’s head and ran her fingers through the wet fur along his shoulders and flanks and legs, and was reassured to find only superficial cuts. She patted her own arms and legs and ribs, but bruises seemed to be the only injuries she had suffered.

Curzon was lying on his back, and she saw that his ravaged chest was still rising and falling. She lay back on the grass and let the rain drum on her face as she tried to get her aching muscles to relax. “Who was he?” she finally asked her father.

Patrick was sitting closest to the fire, warming his spread hands. “Evan Saltmeric,” he said over his shoulder. “An enemy who became an ally in the end. He brought me here.”

Emily rolled her head to look again at the body, though all she could see from where she lay was one boot. Who were you? she wondered; then reached up to pat Keeper’s shoulder.

Branwell was hugging himself and alternately looking at the dead man and up at the top of Ponden Kirk. Once he gave his father a searching glance, then quickly looked away.

Her father shifted on the wet grass and stones. “We must find shelter. Do you know of any cave, old farmhouse, nearby?”

Emily sat up and turned to face the furnace that was the fairy cave. “We couldn’t move Mr. Curzon,” she said, “and I won’t leave him.” She turned the other way and looked out into the dark rainy night. “Mr. Saltmeric’s horse may have survived. One of us might ride back and get help.”

Her father shook his head. “Saltmeric and I didn’t come on horseback.”

Emily raised an eyebrow. “You certainly didn’t walk.”

Curzon was suddenly breathing in harsh gasps. His eye was now tightly shut, and his fingers clawed at the grass.

Emily bent forward to gently pat his shoulder. To the others she said, “He’s healing.”

“Before our eyes?” said her father, eyeing Curzon with alarm. “Is he himself—one of the—”

“He was,” said Emily. “He . . . made himself unable to change, just as the Huberti used to do.”

It clearly meant nothing to Branwell, but old Patrick raised his eyebrows and sat back. “Ah, God!” he whispered, touching his own cheek.

For a while none of them spoke, and the rain did not abate.

Emily shifted to get the heat of the fire on her back. “How did you and”—she waved toward the dead man—“Mr. Saltmeric get here, then?”

Her father had been facing the fire, but now turned toward her. “What? Oh—I doubted you yesterday, you know, when you told us your story about the magical grove of willows accessible by Boggarts Green. But Mr. Saltmeric knew of it, and he and I rode to that stone and entered that—hub place, that—”

Mundus loci,” Emily supplied.

“Yes—yes, that’s what it was. The willows, the giant tree, the lost children—”

“Those dwarves?”

Patrick closed his unswollen eye and nodded. “I believe those are the children that have been stolen by the gytrashes and boggarts, over the years.”

Emily shuddered, recalling the stunted, wizened creatures. Beyond rescue now, she thought.

“To be remembered in our prayers.” Patrick opened his eye and went on, wearily: “And Mr. Saltmeric gave them—a werewolf’s fingers!—in exchange for—”

“I gave those to Anne!” interrupted Emily, suddenly anxious. “How did he get them?”

“She’s come to no harm!” Patrick assured her. “After the twin,” he went on, with a wave toward the still-smoldering ribs and scattered bones at the bottom of the slope, “broke out from under the ledger stone and started for here with . . . well, she gave the fingers to him. After she all but baptized him.”

Curzon rolled away from the others and raised his knees to his chest. “Go,” he said hoarsely. “Leave me.”

“I never do,” Emily told him.

“I’ll be,” he grated, “fine, in an hour or so. You people—in this rain—will not.”

“There’s a fire, too costly to waste.” Emily turned to her father.

“In exchange for the werewolf’s fingers,” he resumed, raising his hands, “the children showed us an archway in the trunk of that axis tree. I went through—and it led directly to a primitive stone temple up there on the plateau, at the top of Ponden Kirk!”

Branwell moaned and looked at his father with something like fear.

“It was Minerva’s temple,” said Emily in a voice that she forced to be level. “She gave you what you asked for, forty years ago: the armor—and weapon!—of the cyclopes.”

Patrick let his hands drop. “Yes. For a moment I was one of them, wielding the lightning.”

“Brontes,” said Branwell. “I saw it, and I saw her, for a moment, from the back—”

“From the back? You’re fortunate,” said Emily, recalling that Curzon had nearly been driven out of his senses by facing Minerva.

Branwell was clawing his sopping hair with the fingers of both hands. “I’m alone now, I have no one but me.” He let his hands slide down to clasp his chest. “But the armor of the cyclopes? The lightning! Truly?”

“I’ve kept things from you,” Emily told him. “We all have. But I’ve never lied to you.”

“But how could I know none of this?”

His father spoke slowly. “It’s a shameful story that I hoped to take to my grave . . . but last year I had to inform your sisters. You were—”

Branwell nodded miserably. “Possessed. And now I’m left empty. Even Northangerland has abandoned me.”

“You’re still God’s possession,” Emily told him, “even if He’s left you out in the weather a bit.”

Branwell shivered in the rain and didn’t reply.


The rain had already begun to lessen, and within half an hour it had stopped. The fire in the fairy cave was still burning at dawn, though in the early sunlight the flames that had been glaring through the night were just gold-tinted heat ripples in the air. Branwell and Patrick had moved closer to it several times during the night, and Branwell was now in a light, restless sleep. Emily and Keeper reclined against a rock a few feet away from them. Curzon had got to his feet during the last hour; when Emily twice tried to speak quietly to him he waved her to silence. Clothing was still damp, but not cold, and when Emily rubbed Keeper’s fur she found it entirely dry.

By the time the sun had risen high enough in a cleared blue sky to light the valley, Branwell had snapped and blinked awake, and stood shivering beside his father. Emily and Keeper had already climbed the slope on the north side and found only the old familiar cracked pavements on the plateau, and slid back down to rejoin the others. Curzon had discarded his ruined shirt and taken the dead man’s wool scarf and coat; the coat was tight across his shoulders and chest, but he was able to fasten all the buttons.

Emily gave him back his dioscuri, and he slid it into the pocket of Saltmeric’s coat.

He caught her disapproving look and said, “Should I leave a couple of coins for him in payment?” He squinted down the valley. “I can walk.”

“Slowly,” said Emily’s father as he stretched and rubbed a shoulder, “for all our sakes.” He took a few steps down the hill and looked back. “We can send a party to retrieve Mr. Saltmeric’s body.”

None of them metioned the conspicuous other body, the charred and exploded carcass of the werewolf god whose fragments were scattered across a wide patch of blackened heather. Branwell looked away as they shuffled past it, but Emily looked closely at the ruin, and was pleased to see that the big skull was shattered even more thoroughly than the one she had shot last year.

And the four of them began the long, slow trek back across the windswept moors to the Haworth parsonage, with Keeper loping watchfully ahead.


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