From what Zee told me, time in Underhill could be capricious—but not as badly as in the Elphame of the fairy queen I’d encountered. We might lose or gain a few days or possibly a week. But we were unlikely to lose years or decades.
I turned slowly. We had a clear field of vision, but I couldn’t see anything that looked out of place. At the thought, I turned to look for the small building we’d exited from—but there was no sign of any building anywhere.
“Do you know which way to go?” I asked. “Have you been here before?”
“I don’t think that I’ve been here, precisely,” he said. “But I know which way to go. Mostly I find my way around by the way it feels here.” He thumped himself on the chest.
I tried, but I couldn’t feel any kind of pull or push in the magic.
“It took me a while,” he said. “This way.”
And he set off, straight up the hill. We walked for hours. Aiden’s terror subsided, though it never quite left him. Adam ranged a little, his nose to the ground and his ears alert, but he never traveled out of sight. He didn’t chase the white bunny that first appeared in glimpses, then ran across our path. Twice.
“He’s not a dog,” I commented loudly, spinning in a slow circle to look for something, I don’t know what it was. “He’s not going to chase a rabbit and leave us behind.”
I could feel the urge to chase that rabbit, and I seldom felt the need to hunt when I was on two feet. Adam didn’t even lunge at the rabbit when it emerged from a hollow just beyond his nose.
He did growl, though.
“It’s not a real rabbit,” said Aiden unnecesssarily. “After a while, even before I had magic, I learned to tell the difference. I survived a long time without magic—but I had friends then.”
“What happened?” I asked.
He laughed without humor, but his voice was relaxed. “No need to sound so careful,” he told me, his gaze on the strange sky. “It was a very long time ago, even by my reckoning. There were five or six of us humans left behind when the fae were banished. At first, we were overjoyed. We played all day long and ate the food in the larder—and there was always food in the larder. Last time I went back there, a very long time later, there was still food there—but there are other things living in the Emerald Court now, things that feed on those weaker than they. Like me and like you.
“Evander died first,” Aiden said. He was walking faster as he talked, and he kept looking behind us. “He was the youngest of us—you learned caution very quickly in that court, or you died. I don’t think Evander would have survived long even if we hadn’t been abandoned in Underhill. Evander first, then Lily and Rose—I don’t remember what their human names had been. Lily just disappeared from her bed one day, and Rose quit eating. Then it was just Willy and me. For a long time, it was Willy and me. Then we found this pretty little girl crying next to a stream. We took care of her and told her stories.”
There was nothing behind us that I could see or smell. I touched Adam lightly on his head and looked at Aiden. Adam watched him a moment, then broke free to run down the hill half a dozen yards before circling back.
There was nothing following us. Aiden didn’t seem to take note of Adam’s useless search. He looked up at the sky again, and as he did so, I realized that warm feeling on the back of my shoulders was gone. Above us, dark gray clouds roiled, and as soon as I saw them, a chill wind picked up.
“Willy figured it out first,” Aiden said, picking up the pace again. We weren’t running, but it was a swinging walk that would take us places fast. “He said it was because she always knew where to find berries and which path we should take. But Willy always had a bit of the gift—he could see things that others didn’t.”
He paused, this time looking down at the path we were on. He turned a little to the left, a steeper climb. “Never follow a path while you’re in Underhill,” he told me. “The only things here that make a path are things you don’t want to meet.”
The hill was steeper than it had been, steeper than it looked.
“He talked to me about it first,” Aiden said. “But I didn’t believe him. Underhill was just where we were—like Caledonia or Ulster, right? Willy could make up things, too—he was the best storyteller. I thought he was making up a story right up until he died and proved himself right.”
For all that he’d said it was a long time ago, Aiden’s breath was shaky. “Underhill can’t kill, not directly. But if she wants you dead, you die. Sometimes quickly but usually slower. She can’t feel pain, so it fascinates her.”
A cold wind blew down my neck just then. “Aiden,” I said, “we’re on a path again.”
We walked—and now Aiden wasn’t the only one who could feel something following us. I felt as though if I turned around, I would see someone. When I did, there was no one there—except the ghosts.
Underhill was a haunted land. Most ghosts I’ve been around—and I’ve been around a lot of them—haunt places where people might be found. Churches, homes, stores—places like that. The ghosts that I’d been seeing were tucked into hollows under trees and hiding under branches. All of them were children. One of them had been following us since Aiden had started talking about the children he used to run around with. I wish I could believe that it was the ghost who was watching us—but his regard felt desperate, as if he thought we might be able to save him.
The watcher who made my shoulders itch, that one was not desperate, just . . . predatory.
But the ghost was worrisome, too.
“I think it might be smarter not to talk about dead friends while we are here,” I told Aiden. “Can you tell how much farther?”
“Not far,” he said. “But I thought that was Underhill watching us, and it wasn’t. I think we should move faster.”
He broke into a jog that I kept up with easily—one thing I do very well is run. I could have maintained that pace for hours. Knowing that Adam was behind us was the only thing that kept me from looking.
Normally, running is the last thing I would do when I thought we were being pursued. But Aiden had survived this place for a very long time, and he was, as Jesse said, our guide.
We topped the rise and found ourselves on a flat, broad plain with waist-high grass. The wind whipped through the grass and sent the few stray hairs that had escaped my braiding this morning straight into my eyes. A huge old tree stood in the middle of the plain, and about thirty feet up the thick trunk, there was a tree house perched where the trunk split into three.
“Run,” shouted Aiden, heading for the tree at full speed.
Adam hesitated, looking behind us—but there was only the endless plain. If there was something hidden in the grass, the wind disguised its passage.
“Don’t ignore your experts,” I told Adam. “Run.”
I bolted, catching up to Aiden in ten strides. The kid could run—but I could run, too, and my legs were longer. Beside me, Adam followed at an easy lope.
Aiden ran like a sprinter, head back, arms and legs pumping as fast as he could. Ahead of us, I could see that, though there were hand- and footholds carved into the side of the tree, the first ten feet were smooth.
“I’m going to go ahead,” I told Aiden. “When I get to the tree, I’m going to make a foot pocket of my hands. I want you to step into it, and I’ll toss you up.”
He nodded, and I threw myself forward, imitating Aiden’s very good technique. Adam stayed with Aiden. I spun when I reached the tree, letting the trunk on my back eat up the excess momentum. I laced my fingers, and Aiden, not slowing a bit, stuck his boot in my hands and I tossed him up. He landed on the tree like a spider monkey and scrambled up.