Page 19 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6

‘Yes.’ A pirouette, a light leap onto a higher branch.

‘Where?’

‘In the water.’

That had Pitch’s head drawing up. ‘What?’

‘Silas in water.’

Another day he would ask why the blazes she could say the ankou’s name, yet he was to be known forever more as ‘fire man.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Pitch retorted, blinking through the fine mist of sodden air. ‘He hates the water.’

‘Yes. He hates sinking.’ Tilly leapt, grabbing easily at a neighbouring branch and swinging like the trapeze artist she would likely become.

‘Sinking?’ Pitch was not going to panic just yet. His information was coming from a child that still likely wet its bed, fae or not. ‘Stop talking utter nonsense. If you don’t know where he is, just say so.’

The changeling plonked onto her backside on a particularly straight branch and toppled backwards. Pitch gasped and took a step forward. Tilly locked herself around the branch, hanging by her knees, regarding him from her upside-down position as she swung there. ‘Silas in the pond. Sinking. Wet lady make him.’

‘Wet lady?’ Pitch was all manner of uneasy. ‘Tilly, stop fucking about.’

The changeling giggled. ‘Bad fire man.’

‘Tilly,’ Pitch snapped. ‘Where is Silas?’ His temper unfurled right alongside his fear.

The child pouted, and damn it, if she started to cry, he would consider slapping the sense into her.

‘That way.’ A chubby finger pointed down towards the far end of the garden. ‘I take you.’

‘I don’t need you to escort–’

Tilly waved her hands at the ground, and the drenched, packed leaves there rustled in their muddy confines. A clump rose up, gathering like a sickly-looking bird in the air.

‘Silas don’t like sinking,’ Tilly said, with a touch of sadness that had Pitch’s gut lurching.

‘No, he bloody well doesn’t. Show me where he is, Tilly.’

This didn’t make any sense. Who the hell was the wet lady? Bess would know if Silas was in danger, surely?

The cluster of leaves shot off, headed where Tilly pointed. Pitch ran into the rain, chasing the enchanted debris. His heart was already slamming as though he’d run a mile. Sinking? Fuck, this had better be a child’s gibberish. The wet woman could be a silly imagining of an infantile mind. Or more nefarious, like a Jenny Greentooth or, gods forbid, a siren, seducing the ankou into the depths.

Pitch barely noticed that his boots were double their weight with mud. His worries came at him, charging in like a bull, piercing him through.

Wet lady make him.

‘Fuck. Fuck.’

There was a traitor within the ranks of the Order. Macha had known of Pitch’s recovery from illness in the Village, and the ill-fated phone call to the Atlas from the Crimson Bow. So did the Morrigan already know of their hiding place? Had he been lying languid in bed while Silas was tormented? Why hadn’t the imbecile woken him? Pitch would have been persuaded to take a bloody stroll eventually. Silas need not have gone alone.

Pitch struggled to catch his breath, his thoughts in a spin as he ran behind the leaves that whirled about one another like a flock of sparrows. A pressure sat on his ribs, growing heavier with each step, as though the mud clung there too.

The garden was terribly overgrown. Silas had moaned about it several times the past few days, attempting to regale Pitch with his ideas for its improvement. As though he actually believed Pitch gave a shit about plants. Now the poor upkeep had him fuming. Pitch stomped over the brown skeleton of what might have been a rose bush and slapped at a birch that dangled its winter-silent branches in his way. He slipped in exposed patches of soil and stumbled over abandoned garden beds that sucked at his boots as though they intended to eat them.

The fucking rain was intolerable. He was as soaked as if he’d been standing out here all day naked. Ahead, a rundown cottage poked its roof through the clutches of a hedge of blackberries. Tilly’s guiding flurry of leaves jabbed itself towards the left-hand side of the cottage and then collapsed upon the ground, its work done.

He was close.

Pitch raced ahead, considering burning his way through the blackberries rather than taking a widened path around them. He called the flame to hand. And by the gods it must have been as exhausted as he was, for he’d never known it so slow to heed him.

‘Come on, come on,’ he snarled at his own hands, his own ineptitude. Seraphiel’s words curled at the back of his mind.