Page 68 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle
Macha tittered like she’d heard a pleasant joke at a garden party. ‘Oh my dear, the lad clearly has a very large place inall this. Was he not with you when you first met my merry bunch of revenants…and destroyed all of them? Which I’m most unhappy about, in case you hadn’t gathered. And did he not traipse off with you to Harvington Hall –?’
‘By chance.’ Silas shuddered to wonder how much of their lives were known to this sorceress. ‘He was at my side through chance alone. I took him to the hall to ensure his safety. Charlie should not be punished simply because his path crossed mine.’
Macha dug beneath her cloak and pulled forth a slender stick. Or rather a reed, thought Silas, noting the knuckled joins along its length. She danced it about in the air like a conductor with an invisible orchestra, whispering as she went. The moves were distinctly circular, but Silas could see no other notable feature to the seemingly random movements. She darted the reed forward, pointing the tip towards the open floor that lay between the dais and where he and Pitch were chained.
And where there had been nothing before now lay two glass structures, wedge shapes he could think of as nothing else but coffins.
‘No…Charlie…’ His words died upon his lips.
The lad lay in repose, hands folded on his chest over the thin cotton of a patient’s shirt and pants, but the straitjacket was gone at least. He looked peaceful, if Silas were to choose a word, the auburn flecks in his hair standing out as much as the freckles on his cheeks.
Silas needed to take a breath, to inhale before the white spots in his vision grew worse, but his shock kept his lungs still.
His gaze moved to the second glass coffin, with its edgings of silver, very like the prism that had held the spirit of the forest. The lieutenant was similarly laid out, his face drawn and rings the colour of bruises beneath his closed eyes. He wore the same simple garb as Charlie, the material faintly chequered and the dreary colour of duck eggs.
Bile struck the back of Silas’s throat. His bones felt turned to jelly, save for his damaged shoulder, which burned well as any bloody campfire.
‘They were innocent.’ He gagged upon the past tense. ‘What have you done?’
‘Ensured her own demise, if ever it had been in any doubt.’ Pitch spoke so coldly Silas shivered where he knelt.
‘Oh gracious, don’t fret so. They are not dead. Not yet.’ Macha sounded frighteningly disappointed about that. ‘They are merely sleeping…the sleep of the dead, as it were.’ She giggled at her own black humour. ‘I’ve a talent for slumber hexes, as you know. If you recall, your steeds were dreaming of sunshine and hay whilst we dealt with you at Gidleigh.’
Silas pictured wiping that grin off her face in the most dastardly of ways.
‘But never mind all that. Now come, come, ankou. If your little purebred friend was thereonly by chance, are you suggesting his presence here…at my asylum, offering words of encouragement to the daemon’s whore is utter coincidence too? You best think carefully before you insult my intelligence.’
Silas couldn’t think at all. He stared at Charlie, searching for a sign the sorceress spoke truly, looking for a rise of the chest that would denote the lad still resided in the land of the living.
Christ, he lay so still.
‘Pitch, what do we do?’
The daemon didn’t answer. He was watching the sorceress on her dais. His face as lifeless as Edward’s and Charlie’s.
The male harpy toddled to the sorceress’s side, and she leaned so he could whisper in her ear. ‘Very well, then. I did promise you that you’d see the nasty daemon punished for what he did to your kin on the greensward. And I’m ever so keen to see that Mr Mercer knows he cannot go around ruining my revenants. So best I get to it.’ She stood up. She was not tall, no greater in height than Charlie, but her presence was much, much larger. She touched the tip of her reed wand to her lips, whispering a word that did not reach them, and pointed it once more at the glass coffins.
A cry wrenched from Silas as the lad and the lieutenant vanished as though never there at all.
‘Where have you sent them?’ he demanded, venting some of his frustration towards Pitch, who was frustratingly quiet. Usually the bastard couldn’t hold his tongue to save himself. ‘We must do something, damn it.’
‘Oh, they are around.’ Macha leaned down to reach for something beneath her chair. Her cloak flowed out around her on the dais like a spreading stain. ‘Here we are.’
She held aloft a macabre trophy. A severed head, one that had long since been separated from its body. The skin was the colour of an abandoned campfire, all various shades of black and grey, and clung so tight to the bone it looked set to tear across razor-edged cheekbones. The sorceress held the head by long lengths of pale auburn hair tied up with a clashing vibrant pink ribbon. Not, Silas decided, an original feature.
A black tongue, like a deformed truffle, poked from between slashes of flesh that once were lips.
The Dullahan’s mount let out a piercing whinny.
Macha puckered her lips, and with the head dangled high, she pressed a vile kiss to a sunken, shrivelled cheek. Hard enough to leave behind a mark of the black rouge from her lips.
‘Dullahan,’ she cried. ‘Your master, the Erlking, has made you beholden to the Morrigan, so heed me now. I wish to see the ankou and the daemon punished for the atrocities they have inflicted upon us.’
‘Oh fuck.’ Pitch tilted his head ‘Truly you do go on.’
Macha pointed a black-gloved finger at the daemon, only to let it slide a path through the air to land upon Silas. ‘I have not begun to go on yet. Ready yourself, Dullahan. Let us see if the daemon has such a sharp tongue when his ankou screams.’
The Dullahan’s mount reared up, pivoting as his rider gave the reins a vicious tug. With flashing hooves so near, Silas shrank back, only to cry out as his damaged shoulder roared with pain.