We reached my village as morning was beginning to gray the sky. It seemed deserted, unnaturally so, as the city had been. On a regular morning, a village such as this, surrounded by farms and full of those who needed to rise early to work and perform their chores, would already be bustling.
I hoped that the seemingly dead streets were due to the villagers still hiding successfully in the woods and not due to any more sinister reason—and I hoped above all that Da was all right. I had barely allowed myself to think about him, but now all my love and worry came back in a rush.
I looked around at my companions. Millie still slept, of course, concerningly pale and blue about the lips, but the infinitesimal rise and fall of her chest reassured me that she was still alive.
Cornelius woke and stretched. I could see he was a little stiff still, but otherwise he seemed back to his normal self.
I nudged Sylvester, who appeared to be sleeping as deeply as Millie. For a moment I panicked, thinking he would not wake up, but he opened his eyes at last, as if it were a great effort.
“We’re here,” I said gently.
His eyes stayed soft and unfocused with sleep for a minute, then cleared and hardened as he remembered where we were. What we were attempting to do.
“I hope the villagers made it to the forest,” said Sylvester, echoing my earlier thoughts.
“Do you think they would still be safe there?” I asked.
“No, but it might slow my father down a little,” said Sylvester.
The horses’ hooves rang loud and tinny on the cobblestones. We rounded the corner that opened up to the village square and realized at once that our hopes had been in vain.
It was crowded with people who stood unnaturally silent and still, pale around the lips, and ringed with the ornate magic-workers’ carriages, with a shimmering row of yellow gray mist behind those, providing a shifting, sinister backdrop to it all.
It could have been a theater performance, so carefully arranged was it, and I had the feeling that was exactly what it was meant to be—a stage set for our final meeting with the king, planned and orchestrated entirely by him.
He had known exactly when we would be coming, it seemed. We were already at a disadvantage, and the irony of facing the king in the place where I had met Sylvester for the first time was not lost on me.
“It is no matter,” Sylvester said to me quietly, seeing the worry on my face. “We knew we would have to meet him, after all. If he is expecting us, that changes nothing. And remember—he’ll want to keep you alive. You are useful to him.”
“Very comforting, thank you.”
I recognized villagers I knew, and some that I didn’t, but I could not see Da among them, no matter how I squinted. They were clearly enchanted—either that, or had been harvested already, because they had the glazed and passive look of the thralls.
I suspected, though, that the king would have left them untouched for our arrival, all the better to manipulate us. I suppose I was grateful I still had some usefulness to him, but the idea of those old hands getting anywhere near me again made my skin crawl.
As our carriage pulled up and halted, the sorceresses stepped down from their own carriages one by one. The array was quite dazzling. The initial impression was one of Beauty with a capital letter; Beauty times eleven; Beauty beyond comprehension.
It made you want to drop your gaze. It made you feel unworthy. And, as I knew, it made you long to uproot your whole life and follow them to destruction.
The final and most spectacular carriage, of course, held King Darius. Half a dozen footmen scurried to open the door and help him down the stairs. He cut an impressive figure, I had to admit, crown and all, despite his ugliness.
He gave a grisly grin. But worse than the gaudy line of sorceresses, worse than the wizened figure of the king in his puce robes that made his skin more corpselike than ever, were the carts hitched behind each of the carriages.
They were ornate, too—the magic-workers never missed a chance to spangle anything over with jewels and curlicues—but stacked high with jars full of that golden preserving liquid, and hearts.
I could only imagine the sound as they traveled—the jars knocking against each other, sloshing that liquid about, and sending the hearts flapping and slapping against the glass sides. It turned my stomach.
Sylvester was even paler than usual; he might as well have been a pen-and-ink drawing for all the color on him. Cornelius stood with his back paws on the seat and his front paws on the carriage windowsill, staring out, while his fur stood like the bristles of a brush along his back.
“You stay in here, Cornelius, and watch Millie,” I said. “You can slip away unnoticed if you need to. I doubt the king knows about you.”
“We’ll see,” said Cornelius grimly.
As we stepped out, we were able to look more closely at the assembled crowd. My whole village was there, but it wasn’t the only one.
There were hundreds of people, bespelled and harried from their homes for the harvest, travel-weary, dusty, and swaying on their feet in the square where we had once all stood and marveled at the sorceresses’ carriages as a pretty novelty and distraction from our daily lives—once a danger that brought us a pleasant thrill now and then, and little more.
I imagined that line of people snaking all the way back to the city—those who were unable to keep up with the unnatural speed of the magic-workers’ procession, but felt the irresistible desire to follow them anyway, to keep pace with those carts loaded with their clinking stock of jars and their obscene contents.
