The ghost girl stood where she was, trembling, staring at them.
“She’s stuck,” Sarah said, her voice shaky, but sounding otherwise normal.
Grey waddled over to the ghost girl, looked up at her, and shook herself all over. Neville returned to Nan’s shoulder, feathers bristling, as he stared at the shadow woman trapped in Puck’s net.
“She doesn’t know where to go, or how to get there, or even why she should go,” Sarah continued, pity now creeping into her voice.
“Oh so?” Puck took a step or two toward the ghost girl, peering at her as if he could read something on her terrified young face. “Welladay, and this is one who can see further into a millstone than most… no wonder she don’t know where to go. Hell can’t take her and heaven won’t have her, but there’s a place for you, my mortal child.”
His voice had turned pitying and welcoming all at the same time, and so kindly that even Nan felt herself melting a little inside just to hear it. He held out his hand to the ghost girl. “Come away, human child, or what’s left of you. Come! Take a step to me, just one, to show you trust your dreams and want to find them—”
Shaking so much her vague outlines blurred, the ghost girl drifted the equivalent of a step toward Robin.
He laughed. Nan had never heard a sound quite like it before. Most people she’d ever heard, when they laughed, had something else in their laughter. Pity, scorn, irony, self-deprecation, ruefulness—most adults anyway, always had something besides amusement in their voices when they laughed.
This was just a laugh with nothing in it but pure joy. Even the ghost girl brightened at the sound of it, and drifted forward again—and Robin made a little circle gesture with his free hand.
Something glowing opened up between him and the ghost girl. Nan couldn’t see what it was, other than a kind of glowing doorway, but the ghost girl’s face was transformed, all in an instant. She lost that pinched, despairing look. Her eyes shone with joyful surprise, and her mouth turned up in a silent smile of bliss.
“There you be, my little lady,” Robin said softly. “What you’ve dreamed all your life and death about, what you saw only dimly before. Summerland, my wee little dear. Summerland, waiting for you. Go on through, honey sweetling, go on through.”
The ghost girl darted forward like a kingfisher diving for a minnow. A flash, and she was into the glow—and gone. And the glow went with her.
Now Robin turned his attention to the shadow woman, lying motionless under his spiderweb net. “Heaven won’t have you neither, and you’re not fit for Summerland,” he said sternly. “Nor am I the one to call hell to come and take you. But you’re too much mischief in the world, my lady, and I can’t leave you free.”
Neville suddenly made a sound Nan had never heard him make before. Something like a quork, and something like a caw, it made Puck glance at him and nod.
“Right you are, Morrigan’s bird,” he replied. “That’s all she’s fit for. It’s the Hunt for her, and well rid of her this middle earth will be.”
He turned to Nan and Sarah. “Close your eyes, young mortals,” he said, with such an inflection that Nan could not have disobeyed him if she’d wanted to. “These things are not for the gaze of so young as you.”
She kept her eyes open just long enough to see him take a cow horn bound in silver with a silver mouthpiece from his belt, the sort of thing she saw in books about Robin Hood, and put it to his lips. Her eyes closed and glued themselves shut as three mellow notes sounded in the sultry air.
Suddenly, that sultry air grew cold and dank; she shivered, and Neville pressed himself into her neck, reassuringly, his warm body radiating the confidence that the air was sapping away from her. All the birds stopped singing, and even the sound of the river nearby faded away, as if she had been taken a mile away from it.
She heard hoofbeats in the distance, and hounds baying.
She’d never heard nor seen a foxhunt, though she’d read about them since coming to the school, and it was one of those things even a street urchin knew about vaguely.
This, however, did not sound like a foxhunt. The hounds had deep, deep voices that made her shiver, and made her feel even less inclined to open her eyes, if that was possible. There were a lot of hounds—and a lot of horses, too—and they were coming nearer by the moment.
She reached out blindly and caught Sarah’s hand, and they clung to each other as the hounds and horses thundered down practically on top of them—as the riders neared, she heard them laughing, and if Puck’s laugh was all joy, this laughter was more sorrowful than weeping. It made her want to huddle on the ground and hope that no one noticed her.
The shadow woman shrieked.
Then dogs and riders were all around them except that, other than the sounds, there was nothing physically there.
Feelings, though—Nan was so struck through with fear that she couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it. Only Sarah’s hand in hers, and Neville’s warm presence on her shoulder, kept her from screaming in terror. And it was cold, it was colder than the coldest night on the streets of London, so cold that Nan couldn’t even shiver.
Hoofbeats milling around them, the dogs baying hollowly, the riders laughing—then the shadow woman stopped shrieking, and somehow her silence was worst of all.
One of the riders shouted something in a language that Nan didn’t recognize. Robin answered him, and the rider laughed, this time not a laugh full of pain, but full of eager gloating. She felt Neville spread his wings over her, and there was a terrible cry of despair—
And then, it all was gone. The birds sang again, warmth returned to the day, the scent of new-mown grass and flowers and the river filled her nostrils, and Neville shook himself and quorked.
“You can open your eyes now, children,” said Robin.
Nan did; Neville hopped down off her shoulder and stood on the ground, looking up at Robin. There was nothing out of the ordinary now in the scene before them, no matter how hard Nan looked. No shadow woman, no ghost girl, no dark emotions haunting the bridge. Just a normal stone bridge over a pretty little English river in the countryside. Even Robin was ordinary again; his fantastical garb was gone, and he could have been any other country boy except for the single strand of tiny vine leaves wound through his curly brown hair.
“What—” Sarah began, looking at Puck with a peculiarly stern expression.
“That was the Wild Hunt, and you’d do well to stay clear of it and what it Hunts, little Seeker,” Robin said, without a smile. “It answers to me because I am Oldest, but there isn’t much it will answer to, not much it will stop for, not too many ways to escape it when it has your scent, and there’s no pity in the Huntsman. He decides what they’ll Hunt, and no other.”
“What does it hunt?” Nan asked, at the same time that Sarah asked, “What is it?”
Robin shrugged. “Run and find out for yourself what it is, young Sarah. And go and look to see what it hunts on your own, young Nan. There’s mortal libraries full of books that can tell you—in part. The rest you can only feel, and if your head doesn’t know, your heart can tell you.”
“Well,” Nan replied, stubbornly determined to get some sort of answer out of him, “What was that thing at the bridge, then?”