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  “I don't deserve this! I do not!”

  Somewhere far away, something tremendous and kind agreed with her and took an instant's pity on' her. It allowed her to hear a music human beings almost never hear, the sublime harmony that rules and arranges all things.

  The final government of the world is this music, coming from no throat nor bird, but from what fingers the harp of creation.

  The blessed music of the Leannan's harp faded into me rustle of the beetles. It wasn't much, but it suffused Amanda with a new and rare strength. Despite the beetles she raised herself to her full height. Even so, her face did not clear their mass. In these few seconds she had sunken deep into the hordes of them, so deep that she was swimming beneath their surface.

  If she opened her mouth—

  She raised her arms, she began to claw slippery handfuls of them, pulling herself upward, crushing hundreds of them at a time in her struggles.

  Music, indeed! This part of creation at least was all disharmony.

  The voice of the Leannan: “You chose this, remember.”

  Amanda's lips were tingling, and feelers were coming in between her teeth and tickling her tongue.

  “I don't really have a body! So this isn't actually happening.”

  But it felt more real than the sharpest living moment.

  Her flailing right hand connected with something solid. She felt, she grabbed, she clutched. And she pulled herself out onto the root structure of one of the stumps. The bird was fluttering and shrieking. “I thought you were a goner, goner, goner!”

  Amanda dragged herself up out of the morass of beetles. As long as you stood on the dam things, they were no problem. Just don't relax. Never relax, not if you are trying to cheat death.

  Amanda took a deep breath, and when she did, became aware of a most perplexing new odor.

  It was the tang of gingerbread.

  She moved by her nose, in the direction of the smell. “That's right, right, right,” the bird shrilled. Soon another scent was added, of warm chocolate. And then one of jelly beans. And then just a hint—wasn't it—of searing steak?

  The bird darted, it flopped, it peered at her with its silver eyes. Amanda followed because the smells were from life. They brought tears of remembrance. She had loved gingerbread, and she had baked it often.

  It was the essential smell of the best of her past, a mamma-smell from before Amanda could even talk. Poor Mamma. What a tragedy to leave life unatoned. It is so much harder later.

  “Here we are, are, are!” The bird swooped off into a clearing. Amanda's eyes almost popped out when she saw what was there. Nestled in the center of the clearing, in its own pool of thin yellow light, was a most charming little cottage. It was decorated with chocolate drops and jelly beans and taffy whorls. The walls and roof were made of slabs of gingerbread, the chimney was a gleaming licorice top hat. Thick green smoke poured out of it, rising into the hazy air.

  Amanda wondered who she saw moving behind that rock-candy window.

  The trees pressed closer. The creature in the cottage bustled back and forth past the frosted window, and the smoke poured from the licorice chimney. The little bird spiraled up into the sky and disappeared. Lucky little bird.

  Amanda had no intention of going into that cottage. But not to worry, the door was opening.

  The wind curted some smoke across the clearing, and Amanda caught a whiff of overcooked pork. A strangely familiar smell. School food.

  There was a dark figure in the open doorway. Amanda stared, almost unable to believe what she was seeing, the long black dress, the white around the face, the silver cross on the breast.

  What was a nun doing in a place like this? “I'm Mother Star of the Sea. Glad you've come to see me.”

  Amanda thought it better not to say hello.

  “Come on in, Amanda, darling. Time for our lesson to begin.”

  Oh, yes, it was her all right, despite the fact that she now had the rough voice of a stevedore.

  “I think I'll stay out here.”

  “Oh, no, my dear. Look, I've got all sorts of goodies for you—candies, cakes, gingerbread.”

  “No, I'm okay out here.”

  Mother Star of the Sea came forward, prancing, mincing, her arms akimbo, her head lolling from side to side, her jaw snapping.

  Perhaps she intended to be amusing, but she could hardly have chosen a more unwelcome appearance. Ever since she I was three and she'd been chased by a man dressed up as Mr. Peanut, Amanda had loathed and despised all forms of puppets. Little puppets made her skin crawl, but big puppets—life-sized puppets—they rattled their gums in her nightmares.

  Even though Mother Star of the Sea was a tremendous puppet, she moved with sinister human purpose. In another second she was going to grab Amanda with those intricate hinged hands.

  Her painted eyes were blank, yet curiously avid. When Amanda turned to run, she found herself pressing against the rubbery flesh of one of the trees that surrounded the cottage. The skin was gray and weak and it gave way. Inside something sucked and swarmed about on itself—a fat, brown serpent of a thing lubricated with yellow mucus.

  It had the head of a human being. She thought, perhaps, the face was familiar. Was it Hitler? Stalin? She couldn't be sure. It bubbled words, “Help me, he-e-e-lp me. . .” Then it snarled, its body whipped out, and in an instant coils as hard as iron had swarmed around her.

  She saw flashes, she heard an old song, “Lili Marlene,” a German song from World War II. And she felt hot wires digging into every part of her body, digging and exploring.

  She felt herself disappearing, becoming less than nothing.

  The wires were its teeth: it was eating her soul.

  But then there came a rippling surge in the rock flesh, and the song changed to hissing, spitting invective, a Gotterdammerung of gutter German. It spat.

  Then Amanda was free.

  Mother Star of the Sea: “Don't go near those trees!”

  “I didn't know!”

  “Now, will you please come with me? The class is waiting.”

  “The class?”

  “Of course, Our Lady of Grace is a school, isn't it? Therefore we have classes, or haven't you put those two amazingly unrelated facts together yet, my bright girl?” She clamped Amanda's ear into one of her mechanical hands and started dragging her toward the cottage. “These woods are really far more dangerous than any place on earth. There you can do no worse than die. But here—oh, dear!”

  Our Lady of Grace had been a grim place, a Gothic pile full of pale nuns and semidelinquent girls in jumpers and oxford shoes. “But I went to public school!”

  “Not when you were eleven. We had you then.”

  That was true. “It was only a few months.” Mamma had gotten hepatitis that year and Dad couldn't begin to cope: they weren't Catholic, but Our Lady was the closest place Amanda could be stashed.

  Mother Star of the Sea clapped her hands. “I'm in the hells of all my girls' It's so nice to be needed.” Amanda had hated Our Lady. Sausages were called bangers there and you had to eat them especially if you thought they were greasy and awful, and you had to kneel before the Madonna of the Upstairs Hall when you were bad. And they gave tongue-tashings that made you feel guilty for just being alive.

  “You taught me music.”

  “And you're still dancing to my tune!”

  “No.”

  “All right, now, in you go.”

  The cottage was really a classroom. That classroom. It was the most terrible place in her life, so terrible that she had crusted her memory of it with thick amnesia. There she had learned injustice, she had learned to hate, she had learned what evil is.

  “Or was it that simple, my dear? Didn't I love you?

  Didn't I hold you when you cried, sent to school by your father with a black eye? Amanda, you've hurt me. You've wronged my lovely name. Aren't you ashamed?“

  The chalk-dust smell of the classroom made her clench her fists. She remembered that Bonn
ie Haver had once stolen her crayons. When Amanda complained. Mother Star of the Sea blamed her for not finishing her work, and punished her while Bonnie went free.

  “I was afraid of Bonnie, dear. She destroyed me, you know. I couldn't punish her, I had to let her go.”

  That afternoon after gym Bonnie and two other girls, Daisy and Mary, had—

  “They drew on me with crayons! They drew all over me and you made me kneel to the Madonna of the Hall because I was a filthy, dirty little girl. They drew on me with my own crayons, and you punished me, you punished me again and again and again, and I said one day I would see you burn in hell, you evil, sadistic old bag of bones!”

  “So here you are, feeling guilty for hating me. As you should. And punished you will be!” Her voice got lower, like the growl of a hunting cougar. “Sit down.”

  “The desks—they have straps. I don't think—”

  “Have a goddamn seat! I'm your teacher. You're here to leam about yourself. Now, sit in the desk.”

  Amanda sat. With a great clatter of fingers Mother Star of the Sea strapped her into the chair. “There. Bonnie dear, time to come out and play.”

  “Oh, no, not her. Not that—”

  “Bully? Yes, she was a bully when she was eleven. Too bad you didn't know her more recently. She's gotten really mean.”

  Amanda writhed. She really didn't understand this at all. Why was she here? This wasn't her hell. She hadn't done anything to be ashamed of at Our Lady. She'd been a good girl.

  “You shouldn't have despised me. It's a sin called calumny.”

  “You deserved it! You did!”

  “I deserved compassion. It would have soothed me like rain.”

  What little evil she had done, she had done in those months at Our Lady. There she had hated and hurt, and spread disappointment—but only because she was herself so sad.

  Bonnie pranced down the aisle, blond and delicious in her schoolgirl greens, her ponytail flouncing behind her, a vicious-looking ruler in her rattling hand.

  “Open your palms.”

  “I haven't done anything.”

  “No, but I've got a right to my fun. Now, open your palms. This is going to hurt you more than it does me.”

  This was crazy. She was getting the same kind of injustice she had gotten at Our Lady, and for no better reason.

  “Both hands. Perhaps we can beat some sense into you. Remember, dear, we just might be your friends.”

  Unwillingly, sure she was making a mistake, Amanda did as she was told. The ruler whistled a familiar tune, then came down cr-a-ack across two quivering palms.

  “That's one?”

  From the front of the classroom Mother Star of the Sea commenced a wooden rumble of applause.

  Again the ruler snapped. Despite herself, Amanda yelled. It fell once more. Then another time and another and another. Her palms became purple. The room was echoing with her cries and the laughter of her tormentor.

  “Oh,” Bonnie said, pushing an akimbo curl out of her left eye, “that was fun.”

  So this was how the demons torture the damned in hell, very artfully. “Please let me out of here!”

  “What? Let the pig out of the slaughterhouse? Come on, dear, there isn't a chance of escape. Smile, or we'll feed you to the trees.” Bonnie glared down at her with sparkling, furious eyes. “This cottage is the heart of the forest. And Mother Star of the Sea—she's Satan herself.”

  Amanda looked at her pulsing, agonized hands. “If she's Satan, who are you?”

  “I'm her wife.”

  The straps were tight. Amanda bowed her head in defeat and sorrow. She wept, and her tears were real.

  They were the first sign of life in the basement where her body lay, a miracle in the secret dark. They fell from the dead, open eyes of her corpse, rolled down her cold cheeks, and dripped onto one of the Bic pens George had dropped when he was doing his own dying.

  They dripped also onto the Covenstead, in the sorrow of the afternoon, onto Ivy's cottage. They made their way through the thatch and pattered down in front of Robin, who sat frozen with grief, staring at the tabletop, and at nothing at all.

  Chapter 23

  As far as Ivy and Robin were concerned, a drip of perfectly ordinary water spattered on the oilcloth table that stood in the middle of Ivy's cottage. “I hate thatch,” she muttered. From the hollow of his loss Robin lifted his eyes and watched his sister stomp about. “Damn,” she said, “double damn!”

  “Water bind it, no one find it.”

  “I'm not angry, Robin!”

  “I didn't say you were.”

  “Oh, no. You just recited the last two lines of the anger spell instead. Anyway you're right. Of course I'm mad. A man got burned to death and my thatch is leaking and we lost Amanda!”

  Robin got up from the table and put his arms around her. He kissed the tears that were forming in her eyes. She laid her head against his chest. “How are we going to go on without her?” she whispered.

  The question intensified Robin's own grief. Outside, the evening wind whispered through the grass. Constance had carefully prepared him for her coming so that when he finally met her he felt a kind of ecstasy. She was a luminous woman, worth the year's anticipation, all the rituals, and the long hours of instruction. He did not love her, although she was physically appealing. Not until the Wild Hunt did his heart open to Amanda. It was not her increasing power that won him, but rather the open, innocent way she threw herself into the ritual hunt, doing her best to succeed. Her courage and her vulnerability were what made him love her, as well as the old tales and the dim memories. . . when he was Robin to Maid Marian, so very long ago.

  “Now she was dead, and his grief was like a brown cloud spreading not only through his new love but through his hopes for the future as well.

  The unstated truth lay in the silence that had fallen between Robin and his sister. The combination of the pressures from Brother Pierce and the death of Amanda could kill the witches' dream. You could feel as a sort of weight on the air that the heart of this place was beating more weakly than it ever had before.

  Robin took a deep breath. He could never stand this kind of silence for long. “If we're real witches, maybe we can do something about it.”

  “Like what, asi'de from burying Amanda?”

  “What if we raised the cone of power?”

  “In our present state of mind we'd never succeed.”

  “Then we'd better change our state of mind! Look, what if the Vine Coven raised such a cone of power you could see it with your eyes closed on a sunny day. Then what?”

  “So what do we do with it?”

  “Don't you see—we raise it over Amanda's body, and we send a wish with it, for her to return to life.”

  “Bill—”

  “Please use my right name. We're still witches.”

  “Sorry, Robin. Amanda Walker is really, truly dead. Her body is rotting in a basement over on Maple Lane. We don't even know if there is a life after death, in the final analysis.”

  “You sensed her in the cauldron circle this morning-. We all did.”

  “We felt something. The same kind of strange, enigmatic something we always feel.”

  “It was Amanda—I could even see her, sort of.”

  “You understand, don't you, that this whole business of witchcraft could just be—I don't know—sort of self-hypnosis.”

  “Oh, no, it's not. It isn't hypnosis at all. You know as well as I do that it's magical thinking, which is a very different thing. The Leannan's power stems from magical thinking. You and I can do it, to an extent. We can create vivid visions in our minds, which affect reality. You know, you do magic.”

  “I know, I guess I'm just losing heart. I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach.”

  “We've got to try!”

  “But you're talking about raising the dead. That's a lot more than magical thinking. That'd be a true miracle.”

  “I can't think of her as dead. She was so aliv
e. When I heard her on the Wild Hunt, that unchained voice echoing through the whole of Maywell—well, I discovered how powerful a sudden love can be.”

  “Robin, if we try and fail, don't you see that it'll demoralize the Covenstead even more? People are in despair. Not only that, they're scared to death of Brother Pierce. They're saying we're under a curse, and I for one think they're right.”

  “Surely people who're willing to believe in curses are willing to believe the dead can be raised.”

  “She's been dead for hours!”

  “It's been done in history. Not often, but it has been done.”

  “History is a tissue of lies.”

  There were voices outside, latecomers back from their day's commute. Their laughter was comforting. As soon as they heard the news, though, they became as silent as the rest of the witches.

  Soon the six o'clock gong rang. There were no cooking odors among the cottages, and no lights in the night of mourning.

  Despite Ivy's arguments, Robin made the decision that they were going to try this impossible thing. But he had to be careful. Ivy wouldn't be alone in objecting. People didn't like to attempt things they thought were beyond their power. Failures weaken magic, and too many failures destroy it.

  He had to handle this very carefully. “It's time to go in and get her,” he said, “if we're going to bury her here on the Covenstead.”

  “Up on the mountain. Near where she saw the Leannan.”

  “Yes, there.”

  He went out into the village, knocking on the doors of the dark houses until he had the Vine Coven assembled. Some of the others wanted to come, too, which was fine with him..The only trouble was a lack of transportation. “Why don't (he rest of you prepare a lying-in-state?”

  “At me house?” a voice asked from the dark.

  If he sent them up to the house, they would all discover the secret of how dejected Connie had become. She had retreated there, he knew, to hide that fact from her people. “I have a feeling Amanda would have preferred it on the Fairy Stone.”