Chapter 32

C HAPTER 32

"He was dead, " said Evermore, when they had all retreated indoors. "We cut his head off. I used the axe myself. And then we burned it. His body can't have just dug itself out of the ground."

Cordelia put her face in her hands. "He's not a real horse," she said, through her fingers. Her mind was an empty horror. "He just looked like one."

"He's got no head!" said Imogene. She sounded more outraged than frightened, as if the notion of monsters going around without heads was a terrible social faux pas. "Things don't just walk around without heads!"

"Chickens, sometimes," offered Willard.

"That was not helpful, Tom."

"No, but I've already poured tea, so I'm afraid I've run out of helpful things to do at the moment."

"What if he's even less like a horse than we thought?" asked Hester, into the glum silence that followed. "What if he's like a ghost?"

Cordelia jumped, wondering if Penelope had seen what happened, but heard nothing. She resolved to ask her the next time she spoke.

"You can't cut off a ghost's head," Hester went on. "Or I suppose you could, but it doesn't do anything, because they're not using their head to think with. They're a spirit. All the thinking bits happen… I don't know, somewhere else. Another plane of existence."

"He was rock solid, though," said Evermore. "It wasn't a ghost that bit off Old Bernard's ear."

"But familiars are tame demons, aren't they? Or tame spirits, anyway." Hester rose to her feet, patting absently at her pockets. "Where's that book… I must have left it in my room… not that the author knew either. Familiars can touch things and move things in the real world, but that doesn't mean they follow the same rules as the rest of us."

"He doesn't have to eat," said Cordelia. "He can, I mean. I think he did when he was pretending to be a horse. But he doesn't have to."

Imogene yanked out a deck and began dealing cards so rapidly that several spun across the table and had to be rescued by Willard. "I feel like there's a big difference between not having to eat, and being able to gallivant around without a head!"

" Is he gallivanting?" asked Willard. "Has anyone seen him?"

"We'll know soon enough," said Hester, making her way to the door. "The geese will tell us."

It was a little after sunset. Hester sat on the little patio that led into the garden from her rooms. She was quite certain that the room that she had been given was not actually a bedroom, but a former parlor with the furniture moved out and a bed moved in. There were no stairs between it and the main floor, though, and only three down from the patio to the garden. Her knee was grateful for Richard's kindness. Her pride wasn't sure how to feel.

A single candle on the table was no longer enough light to read by, but Hester had stopped reading. She rubbed her eyes wearily. The books were exhausting to read. Sometimes, for a few minutes, she could pry some sense out of them, but then it would all fall apart into nonsense about immortality and homunculi and magnetic fields. The foolishness of it seemed to actually steal meaning from the other parts, until she was no longer sure that there was anything there at all.

Maybe I'm deluding myself that I understand any of it. Probably you have to be an alchemist or a member of a secret society or a scholar of ridiculous texts.

She stared broodingly across the low stone wall at the patio's edge. Only a narrow band of rosebushes separated her from the lawn, and across the lawn, the almost tropical lushness of trees. Normally she loved the woods that bordered Evermore House, but now they seemed oppressively secretive. Their green depths might conceal anything. Even a horse risen from the dead.

She reached for her wineglass. The glass door behind her opened. She didn't turn her head, hoping that it was Richard, suspecting by the lightness of the tread that it was not.

"I am right," said Imogene, "and I can prove it." She dropped a book on the table. "Prepare to be dazzled."

Hester stifled a sigh. It didn't surprise her that Imogene had managed to keep her focus. Being right was the one thing that she loved more than winning at cards.

"Very well," she said. "Dazzle me."

"I found a chart of alchemical correspondences. It's like the bodily humors, I think, only they've made it infinitely more complicated." She opened a book and shoved it across the table. "Look. It breaks down how they defined people as water, wine, salt, or… well, there's a lot of them, I'm afraid."

Hester picked up the book, realized she couldn't read it in the gloom, and was reaching for the candle when she froze.

There was a light in the woods.

"Imogene," she said, her own voice very calm in her ears, "look over there."

Imogene turned her head, just as the distant honking and hissing of agitated geese reached them.

Falada was coming through the trees.

"Oh no," said Imogene. "No, no, no." She rose to her feet, knocking over the chair.

Without a head to anchor the eye, the horse's outline had gone dreadful and alien, like a half-crushed spider scrabbling across the grass. The remains of his neck flopped limp and bloodless. Hester stood, frozen in horror, as the dead familiar scurried toward them.

She might have sat there until he actually reached the stone wall, petrified like a rabbit under a hawk's shadow, if not for the geese.

The flock landed heavily on the grass, led by the short-legged gander. Falada veered, trying to avoid them, but they struck at his legs, hissing and flapping. Suddenly he reared up, striking out, that bloodless neck flapping horribly, and the unmusical squawk of a goose in pain cut through the night.

It freed Hester from her paralysis. How dare this monster attack one of her geese?! She shoved herself upright, grabbing at her cane, as the flock scattered and the familiar came on, moving almost sideways, like a crab.

"What are you doing?!" Imogene snarled, grabbing her shoulder. "Get inside! It'll kill you!"

"The geese—"

"Can fly! You can't! "

Very much struck by this logic, Hester hobbled toward the door. Imogene snatched the book from the table and followed. They slammed the door behind them, and Imogene grabbed for the chest of drawers. "Mary! Mary! "

Hester's maid appeared in the doorway. "Eh? What's all the commotion?"

"Take the other end of this and help me bar the door," snapped Imogene, getting a grip on the dresser. "I don't trust the glass to hold."

"Hold against what ?"

"Mad horse," said Imogene shortly.

Mary's expression indicated that she thought the horse wasn't the only thing that had gone mad, but she grabbed the other end of the dresser and helped Imogene drag it. Hester grabbed the bellpull and yanked on it until the servants' rooms must have sounded like a church belfry.

Crash! Glass shattered as something— "something" my ass, you know what it is —hit the door. Jagged silver rained down and the dresser was knocked back several inches. Mary screamed, as much in shock as fear. Imogene snatched up an ornamental vase and flung it in the direction of the door. Her aim was terrible and it smashed against the wall, leaving a dent and a second spray of shards.

Hester abandoned the bellpull and grabbed a chair, shoving it toward the broken glass door. Imogene hefted the second vase of the pair. On the patio, geese hissed and screamed and something thumped hard against the stones.

Then silence.

After a long, long moment, broken only by the surly mutterings of geese, Imogene lowered her vase. "Is it gone?" she whispered.

"What the hell is going on?" Mary demanded.

And finally, finally, someone answered the bell.

"Get Richard," Hester gasped to the shocked footman who burst into the room. "Tell him it's come back."

Cordelia lay in bed, her mind stuffed full of horrors. Falada wasn't dead. Or rather, he was dead, but it hadn't stopped him. He had dragged himself out of the earth and God only knew where it would end.

Can Mother raise the dead? Or is it because he's something else? A spirit, like Hester said. She closed her eyes. Please, god, let it be because he's a spirit. Because if Mother can make the dead walk…

She could hear Evangeline's voice saying I made you, just like I made Falada and imagined being dead but still obedient, her body still walking and talking and simpering. Would she know? Would she still be trapped inside, screaming, while her mother wielded her dead flesh like a puppet?

Cordelia shuddered.

By the time that Lord Evermore had organized any kind of response, Falada had vanished into the woods again. Cordelia had thought to offer her help—not that she knew where he was going, but at least he wouldn't hurt her. She had seen Evermore holding Hester tightly, though, and Hester looked so gray and worried, and for once wasn't pushing him away, so Cordelia slunk off, unwilling to interrupt them.

The whole house was locked down. The doors were barred, the windows bolted, and no one was allowed outside. The word put around was rabies, even though no one had ever heard of a rabid horse attacking people. It was easier than trying to explain the truth.

Sleep seemed impossible, and when it finally came, there was no relief from the dread that crawled along her spine and soaked her skin with sweat. Instead she dreamed of a blackened horse skull looking down at her, its mouth opening and closing in a mockery of speech.

Hello, Cordelia, said Falada silently.

The surface of the skull was charred and pitted, and as she watched, bits of ash flaked off and tumbled away, leaving discolored bone beneath.

If only your mother could see you now, the skull said.

No, no, it's not real, this is a nightmare, he doesn't talk, he never talked—

Not to you. Your mother and I talk all the time. More ash flaked away and the jaw gaped open in a horrible approximation of a smile. I tell her everything, remember?

Shut up, shut up! Cordelia tried to put her hands over her ears but it didn't help because the skull was talking without sound, just as Penelope did, except that Penelope's voice was different—

Is it? asked the skull. Are you sure? Perhaps I'm the one who's been talking to you all this time. The jaw gaped wider, the long row of molars rising from charred gums. You know that you always tell me all your secrets in the end.

" Shut up! " screamed Cordelia, sitting up in bed.

"Miss?!" The door to her room was flung open, and she heard Alice blunder through, run into a piece of furniture, and curse. "Miss, what's wrong?"

She took a shuddering breath. Hands came out of the dark as Alice found her and gripped her shoulders. "You're having a night terror," she said, practical as ever.

"It was a dream," rasped Cordelia. "It was just a dream. It wasn't real."

"That's right. Do you need some tea?"

Cordelia took another breath and let it out. Her hands were cold with sweat where they gripped Alice's. "No," she said. "No, I'm… I'm fine. It wasn't real. I just needed to wake up, that's all."

"No wonder you're having nightmares, with monsters gadding about in the woods," said Alice. "Everybody belowstairs is in a tizzy about it."

"Oh dear. What are they saying?"

The maid snorted. "All sorts of nonsense. That the lord killed it and now it's a ghost horse back for vengeance, or that it's got the hydrophobia and Old Bernard's next." She rolled her eyes. "And one of the scullery boys says he saw it and it's got eight hooves and no head, like a big old spider. I don't believe a word of it."

"No, of course not," said Cordelia faintly.

"Do you want me to stay up with you, miss?"

She was tempted to say yes. If she was talking to Alice then she wasn't thinking about the skull's words. It isn't true. It was a dream. He's not Penelope. That's just the nightmare talking. But Alice had to get up very early, and it wasn't fair to keep her here half the night, just because the last few days had spilled over into Cordelia's nightmares.

"It's all right," she said instead. "It's over now. Thank you."

After Alice had left, she lay in bed, curled on her side, listening to her heart thudding in her chest, like the hooves of a running horse.

"I have good news and bad news," said Hester, when they had gathered together in the library the next morning.

"Please, god, give me some good news," said Richard. He had dark circles under his eyes that hadn't been there a week ago. Hester wanted to smooth them away. Unfortunately her news wasn't likely to do that.

"Imogene and I have gone through all the texts we can find, and we finally determined how they… err… type the individuals." She glanced at Imogene and added, "Imogene was right, I was wrong."

"Damn straight."

"So now we actually understand who is water, who is wine, who is salt."

"And who's a dozen other things," Imogene put in. "The alchemists recognize a vast number of elements, including fire, air, quicksilver, iron, stone, wood, sulfur, gold, lead, and tin. Fortunately for our purposes, there's some overlap. In theory, someone who was quicksilver could perform the wine part, and someone who was stone could perform the salt part."

"There's a chart of cross-potencies," said Hester. "It looks like utter balderdash, mind you, but here we are. It looks like we just got lucky getting two of three right."

Richard rubbed his forehead. "I don't pretend to understand, but I haven't understood any of this so far. So we can find someone to do the wine part, then?"

Hester and Imogene exchanged a look. "That's the bad news. Apparently nobody bothered to write down how you tell which is which."

Richard put his head in his hands and moaned.

"We're working on it."

"Something attacked one of the storage sheds last night," he said, straightening.

"Attacked?" Hester saw Cordelia sit up, suddenly alert. "How do you attack a shed?"

"As far as I can tell, they broke down the door with some kind of dull instrument. A mallet, say. Or hooves."

Cordelia's face blanched to the color of wet bone. "Was anything damaged?" she whispered.

"The contents were smashed. Jars broken, sacks slashed open. It was mostly gardening equipment, but it was thoroughly trampled." Richard's lips pressed together in a grim line.

"Falada," said Cordelia.

"Falada."

They sat in dead silence for a few moments. Willard shook his head. "Is there any way to find where he goes to ground during the day?"

"I've got the head gamekeeper looking. He knows these woods better than anyone. I'm hoping that perhaps it sleeps during the day—although why an undying headless horse has to sleep, I'll be damned if I know."

"We'll keep looking," Hester promised.

"I'll start sorting books looking for anything about alchemy," Cordelia offered.

"Please do." Richard sighed. "I have too many responsibilities today, but I'll join you when I can."

They put their heads down to work. Willard brought sandwiches, and Hester scoured books that seemed to be written half in some other language, trying to make sense of any of it. "Arsenic is the most transformational of all metals, excepting only Quicksilver, and thus is it called the Swan, for just as the Cygnet becomes the Swan, so does Arsenic transform itself between the crystalline and the metallic"… holy mother of God, what does this have to do with anything?

She leaned her head back against the back of the chair and closed her eyes, wishing that the past two months had never happened. Back when my largest concern was running out of the proper color of embroidery floss. How lucky I was, and didn't even realize it.

"I found something," said Imogene. "Sort of."

"That's good!" She opened her eyes.

"It requires access to a birth chart, aqua regia, a magnetic field, and about two ounces of platinum. Also it takes thirty days."

The sigh that echoed through the library came from Willard, but Hester rather felt it spoke for them all.

"Trial and error would work better," she said. "Have someone stand in the circle and try to invoke the wine. I imagine we could go pretty quickly that way."

Willard cleared his throat. "May I point out that forcibly involving those belowstairs in something that the Church would very much frown upon is neither kind or wise?"

"I know," said Hester glumly. "I know."

Richard didn't return to the library until late that evening, and when he did, he brought news that the head gamekeeper had been found trampled to death at the edge of the woods.