For a moment he looked at Bogdan, wanting desperately to believe in his safety—but it was shameful, it was horrid, Bogdan believed in no one's promises, and Bogdan was saying trust and believe that the queen had no wicked purposes.
"This is only the beginning," the witch in the wood said, standing beside him. "Is this someone you love? She'll find them, every one. She'll take them all from you, if you stand in her way. Believe what I say, believe what / say, and lend me your strength, boy, and there's nothing we can't do."
But nothing else had proven what it ought. And he felt cold in her touch, he saw shadow about him, and edged away.
"Not wise," she said.
He turned away and flung himself desperately at hall doors that shut in front of him—turned to run and found himself in the witch's forest cottage again, caught in an embrace that clung with frightening strength, arms with nothing of softness or flesh about them. Everything was lies—he had not seen his brother in that place, it could not have been Bogdan, no more than he had stood just now in the goblin hall. He began to push away with all his might, tore from the witch's embrace and caught himself against the table, the wall, the draperies. The door was shut. The bolt was shot. When had that happened?
"Tamas," the witch reproved him, as his cold fingers struggled with the bolt. He heard the rustle of her garments behind him and he could only move in nightmare slowness.
"Are you afraid, Tamas? Look at me. Look at me, Tamas. I showed you a symbol of things as they are. But will you run away now, and be blind to what will be? Do you want the truth, Tamas? Have you no courage for the truth?"
He shot the bolt back. The door resisted like heavy iron. He scraped through the slight opening he forced and caught a breath of cold clean air as he fled, stumbling over the uneven ground on legs numb as whiter chill. He met a shadowed trunk, clung to it and struck out for a further one as his knees went to water. Lwi was standing where he had left him, and he flung himself in that direction, but the empty space was too wide. His knees gave way beneath him and sent him sprawling in the damp leaves.
"Well, well," a deep voice said, a voice that made his heart jump—but he could not recall if that voice belonged here, with a witch in this woods. He lifted his face from the leaves and rubbed the grit from his eyes . . . saw Azdra'ik standing among the trees.
They're in league, he thought. The witch and the goblins, all of them—
With a dry rattling and a whisper of cloth and leaves, the witch arrived beside him, her skirts in tatters, her feet—her feet beneath that hem were a pale assemblage of bone, which moved as if flesh contained it.
Azdra'ik sauntered closer. "Three wishes, mistress, wasn't that the term? I think I do remember your swearing it once upon a time, in exchange for my services." Three long-nailed fingers ticked off the items. "My first wish, I recall, was that you have no further power over me. My second ... that you never oppose my purpose. And the thud ... the third, I fear, must be this wretched, foolish boy."
"Damn you," the witch whispered.
"Oh, I've served you more faithfully than you know-certainly more faithfully than you deserve. Now he's mine. By the terms you yourself proposed, he's mine. So begone, Ylena!"
A sound of breath, or angry wind. A soft and bitter laugh. "Cheaply bought, that third wish of yours. I feared so many worse things. But they're done. You can't banish me hereafter, ng'Saeich. I never need fear you again!"
"Begone, I say!" The goblin stood up tall and flung up his arm, and for a moment there was a dreadful feeling in the air. Lwi whinnied as a gust of wind blew decayed leaves and grit into Tamas' face, chilling him to the bone. He ducked his face within the protection of his arm, and hoped only for a cessation of the wind that turned his flesh to ice.
But in the ebbing of that gale an armored boot disturbed the ground near his head. A strong hand dragged him to his knees, up and up toward Azdra'ik's very face. He tried to get his feet under him, and Azdra'ik struck him across the mouth, bringing the taste of blood.
"You are an expensive bit of baggage, man. Shall I begin by breaking your littlest finger, and work up to your neck? I would do that ever so gladly." A second blow, harder than the last. "Stand up, damn you!"
He tried. Azdra'ik seized him by the hair and by that and a grip on his belt, half-dragged, half-carried him as far as Lwi. He staggered against Lwi's yielding body and groped after the saddle with the desperate notion of breaking for freedom, if he could only get a foot in the stirrup, if he could only find the reins, if Lwi could do more than stagger away from this cursed place.
Azdra'ik grabbed his shoulder and faced him toward him, his back against Lwi's shoulder. "You," Azdra'ik said, "you can walk, man. You richly deserve to walk."
"Where's Ela?"
"Oh, where is Ela? Where is Ela? Now we're concerned, are we?" The goblin flung him away and took Lwi's reins in hand as he staggered for balance.
"Tool," Azdra'ik called after him, and somehow he found the strength to walk, shaky as his ankles were. Azdra'ik had neglected even to disarm him. So had the witch, that was how much threat he was to them. He might draw the sword now and offer argument—he might die on the spot instead of later, less quickly. He was no match for Azdra'ik as he was: he suspected that not on his best day was he a match for a goblin lord—foolish Tamas, Tamas who had no natural talent with the sword, Tamas who was scarcely able to keep his feet under him at the moment, who needed all his effort to set one ahead of the other—he was cold, cold as if no sun would ever warm him. When he faltered, whenever Azdra'ik overtook him, Azdra'ik struck him and made him walk, but that he felt anything at all began to be welcome—anything to keep him awake and moving and on his feet.
"You cost too much," the goblin said again, hauling him up by the scruff when he had fallen. Azdra'ik struck him hard across the face and cried, in this space distant from the witch, "Do you know what you've done, man? Do you remotely comprehend what I paid for you?"
"A wish," he murmured through bloody lips, the only answer he understood; and Azdra'ik shook him.
"A wish. A wish. —She ruled this land when these trees were acorns, and she's not all dead, do you understand me? Wizards can be trouble that way, and among witches in this wood it's a plague! Didn't you see the warning in the forest? Didn't you apprehend there's something wrong in this place, before you went guesting in strange houses?"
Curiosity stirred, not for Azdra'ik's question, but for his own: incongruous curiosity, held eye to eye with an angry goblin, but pain seemed quite ordinary by now. "Why?" he asked Azdra'ik. "Why pay so much? What am I worth to you?"
A long-nailed finger jabbed his chest. "Because, thou innocent boy, if she had had the rest of you she would have gained you, and gaining you—gained substance in this world, among other things neither you nor I would care to see. But thou'rt mine, thou art mine, man—she can't touch the horse while I hold him nor touch me or thee by the terms we agreed to. So walk! You're bound to the witchling by magic nor she nor we can mend, and, by the Moon, you're going to find her!"
He did not understand. Bound? By magic? He stared stupidly at Azdra'ik, until Azdra'ik flung him loose, with:
"Walk, man, or fall down that hill, I care nothing which, but find her you will, so long as you have breath in you— don't look back, don't look back now!"
It was his worst failing, curiosity: the moment Azdra'ik said that, he could not but look back—and he saw the witch as if she were very far away, in the dark between the trees. Faster and faster she came as he watched—
"Fool!" Azdra'ik shook him and spun him about to face him. "Don't go back, you've no right to go back now, don't think of her!"