Willow Read online

“Right!”

  Reluctantly, Willow rowed the small craft back to the beach and carried Elora into the nearest hut with a sound roof. “Sleep well,” he said, kissing her. “I won’t be long, and they’ve promised to look after you.” He gave Franjean a small bladder of the fox milk he had gathered the night before. “Give her this if she wakes up, and keep her warm.”

  “Of course.”

  “And dry.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And safe.”

  Franjean peered out the door, up and down the empty beach. “Nobody! Deserted! What can happen in the time you row out there and back? Off with you! Stop your silly Peck fretting.”

  So, Willow rowed alone to the island. The lake had changed. It was no longer silvery, no longer clear and sparkling. It had become opaque, darkening to the color of lead. And it had thickened, too. It dragged on the boat, and when Willow dipped his oars they got so heavy he could hardly lift them to pull again. The island, which had seemed so close to the shore, now receded as he approached.

  It was slow, hard rowing, and by the time the prow ground into the gravel of the island beach, Willow was exhausted. Worse, he was frightened. The morning had grown ominously black during his crossing. Rumbling thunderheads moved in from the north, and strange winds came scudding down the valley, swirling clouds of sand around the mainland beach. He could no longer see the hut where he had left Elora with the brownies. Soon, he could no longer see even the mainland.

  The island was eerily still.

  Willow scrambled up the bank and laid his hand right on the face of a brown skull.

  He screamed, lurching back. “Fin Raziel! Where are you? Come out, please! Help us!”

  The black clouds closed down around the island. A flock of dark birds swooped low, hard eyes all fixed on Willow.

  “Please! Fin Raziel!”

  “Go home! Get away! Are you mad?”

  He spun around. He had backed against the trunk of a large tree, and the voice came from overhead. A furry creature hung there by its tail, snarling. It had a skinny tail, black legs, and squirrellike claws. It was alert, intelligent, and energized.

  “Are you mad?” it asked again. “Who are you?”

  “I-I’m Willow Ufgood, and I’m here to find Fin Raziel, the great sorceress.”

  “That’s me! I’m Raziel!”

  “What? No! It can’t be true!”

  “It is true. It is!” Chattering, the creature swung in furious little circles. “Bavmorda transformed me! First she imprisoned me on this island and then in this wretched body.”

  “But the legend didn’t tell . . .”

  “I can’t be responsible for the legend! Well, why have you come here? Why have you risked your life?”

  “Because of this,” Willow said, drawing out the wand, which glowed and shimmered in the growing darkness. “From Cherlindrea.”

  With a wild shriek the little creature leaped off the tree onto Willow’s chest, her claws digging through his shirt and into his flesh. “Cherlindrea! Then the prophecy has come true? The Empress Elora has been born?”

  “Yes. She’s here. On the shore. And she needs you, Fin Raziel.”

  “Here!” The little creature howled a bitter cry of rage and fear. She scrambled up onto Willow’s shoulder and peered toward the shore, now invisible behind the clouds and spray of the wind-lashed lake. “Hide the wand! Bavmorda knows she’s here! She’ll destroy you if she can, and the child! Hurry! Into the boat! We must get off this island and into shore!”

  “But the lake! The storm!” Willow shouted over the howling wind.

  “Don’t think! Trust me! Into the boat, quick!”

  She scampered across the shore and into the little craft, one paw beckoning Willow to hurry. He launched them out into the maelstrom. “Row for your life, Willow Ufgood! Row for the Empress!”

  With all his might, the little Nelwyn strained toward shore. “Oh Mims,” he whimpered. “Ranon. Oh, Kiaya!” If he had had a free hand he would have taken his wife’s braid from his pocket and pressed it to his lips, for he was certain he was doomed. Never, never would he cross that lashing strait and reach the mainland safely. Never again would he see his beloved family.

  “Kill him!” Fin Raziel shrieked suddenly. “Kill him!”

  “What?” They were in the middle of the lake, driven toward the falls by winds and towering waves. The mainland was invisible, the island had vanished.

  “Kill him!” Fin Raziel screamed again, pointing at the prow of the little boat.

  Willow turned.

  The boy he had seen earlier, in the shallow water at the village, was climbing over the gunwale. He was as radiant and as innocent-looking as ever, his face creased in a broad smile, his flaxen hair windblown.

  “What? But he’s a child!”

  “No, no!” Raziel shrieked. “He’s no child! Look!”

  The boy now had one foot in the boat, but it was not a foot. It was a webbed fin. And although he was still smiling, the smile revealed sharklike teeth. His innocent eyes had reddened with the lust for blood.

  Willow swung an oar and jabbed it as hard as he could into the middle of this creature. Laughing, it flipped into the churning lake, bobbed porpoiselike, and vanished.

  “Too late!” Fin Raziel wailed, her voice tiny in the roar of the wind.

  Back the creature came! He was huge, now. His furry back foamed through the troughs of the waves. His eyes glowed red out of the depths of the lake. His jaws with their rows of glittering teeth, yawning open to engulf the boat, loosed a gagging stench of death and decay. Willow choked, tumbling back, seeing the front half of the boat vanish into the creature’s maw. He had time only for one solid crack with the oar on the thing’s snout, and then he was overboard and sinking, his legs tangled in the old fishnet and rope that bound him to the monster. So fast was the creature’s downward rush that Willow’s lungs were bursting before he found his knife and slashed himself free of the beast.

  He bobbed through the surface like a cork, sputtering and gasping. Huge waves rolled him over. Clinging to the wreckage of the boat, Fin Raziel shrieked unintelligible warnings, but Willow was too far gone to hear her properly. In fact, he heard nothing. All had gone silent for him. In silence the great breakers rolled over him. In silence the maw of the returning monster yawned open to gulp him down. And in silence, with the last of his meager strength, Willow groped into his pocket, fumbled out one of the magic acorns, and threw it.

  No force lay behind that throw. Had the monster not been rushing forward, the acorn would have fallen short. As it was, it looped up and dropped straight down his gullet.

  Sheer momentum carried the beast over Willow and a few feet farther. But the horrible hairy scales that brushed against the Nelwyn were not soft now, but rock-hard. The dreadful red eye was fixed forever in gemlike brilliance, and the jaws with their quartzite teeth would yawn through eternity. The acorn had done its work.

  Bavmorda’s monstrous guardian had been turned to solid stone. And like a stone he sank.

  “Willow!” Fin Raziel was crying. “Hold on!” He heard her voice like a glimmer of light in darkness. Reflexes kept him alive, kept him afloat, kept him paddling while breakers foamed over him. Reflexes opened his eyes at the sound of her voice, and drove him forward with his last energy to clutch the end of the oar shoved out from the ruined boat. Clinging to that oar and to the sound of Raziel’s voice, Willow lost consciousness.

  He was not aware when the wind fell, when the waves subsided and the sky cleared. He was not aware when the hulk of the little boat to which he and Fin Raziel clung was drawn away from the precipice of the falls and borne on friendly currents to the beach, or when Franjean and Rool hurried anxiously down to drag him up on shore.

  The first thing Willow Ufgood knew after his defeat of the monster was the laughter of Elora and the delighted clapping of her small hands.

  “I don’t know why she’s so happy,” Franjean grumbled. “You just ruined a boat and near
ly killed yourself. You didn’t even bring Fin Raziel!”

  “I am Raziel, you idiot! Willow, tell him! And stop this lout from poking at me!” She swatted away Rool’s hand with a tiny paw.

  “Talking possum,” Franjean grunted. “All we need.”

  Willow choked and coughed. He struggled to sit up. “It’s true,” he said. “She is Raziel.”

  “What! Why is she so fuzzy?”

  “Why so small?” Rool asked.

  “Bewitched, that’s why,” Willow said. “By Queen Bavmorda.”

  “Satisfied, you two? Now then, Willow, you must undo the spell. You must transform me back again. Thank goodness you’ve come! Go ahead, speak the charm.”

  “What?”

  “Use the wand. Speak the charm.”

  “What charm?”

  “What charm! You mean you don’t know? You’re not a sorcerer?”

  “Well, not really. Not yet. I’m a farmer. I know a few tricks. If you tell me what to do . . .”

  “Farmer! Tricks!” Squealing, the small animal scampered in tight circles.

  “Hysterical possum,” Franjean said. “Ouch!”

  Raziel nipped his ankle. “Idiot! Cherlindrea sent you, Ufgood, and you’re not even a sorcerer! What was she thinking of? What madness . . .”

  “Just tell me what to do,” Willow said. “I’m willing to learn. Honest. It can’t be that hard.”

  “Of course it’s hard! Why, if you misspoke a charm . . .” Raziel shuddered. Her tail twitched.

  “Well then,” Willow said, “teach me properly!” He punched the dirt floor of the hut and rose shakily to his feet. “Abuse! That’s all I’ve had since I started this trip! I’ve been laughed at by fairies, mocked by brownies, persecuted by Daikini louts, and half killed in seven different ways. Now I get a scolding from an irrational squirrel!”

  “I’m not a squirrel!”

  “I don’t care! If what you say is true, Raziel, and if you want to be human again, settle down and teach me to be a sorcerer!”

  The brownies sat abruptly, blinking.

  Fin Raziel stopped running in circles and stared. Again the only sound in the hut was the soft laughter and light applause of Elora Danan.

  “All right,” Fin Raziel said. “I’ll teach you.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course. You’re right. It’s our only hope. Come outside and bring the wand.”

  Willow staggered after her out of the hut, groping for the wand in the long pocket of his cloak. Fortunately for all of them, he had not drawn it out before he emerged.

  Sorsha was waiting on the beach. Behind her stood three Nockmaar troopers, arms at the ready. A dozen more held their horses at the edge of the village.

  On his knees in front of them, his face bloody and his arms bound tight at his back, was Madmartigan.

  I X

  SORSHA

  “Hullo, Peck. Would you please cut these ropes? I’d like to strangle this hag, this . . .”

  “Quiet!” Spurring up, a Nockmaar sergeant thumped the heel of his boot between Madmartigan’s shoulderblades and sent him sprawling into the wet sand.

  “Don’t kill him yet,” Sorsha said.

  Raziel shrieked and scurried along the beach, but a trooper easily overtook her and snatched her up by the tail. At arm’s length he carried her back, dangling and struggling. “A little rat for the dogs.” He laughed.

  Willow ran into the hut and snatched Elora out of her basket. But there was no escape. Sorsha strode in behind him, drawn by the child’s screams. “I’ll take her.”

  “No! You won’t! Help, Franjean!” But the two brownies were nowhere to be seen. Sorsha easily overpowered Willow, holding him with one hand while she yanked the papoose-basket away from him with the other. Dispassionately, she opened Elora’s clothing and exposed her left arm. She smiled when she saw the Sign. It was an expression of relief and of triumph. But it was a sad smile too, the kind of haunted smile that sometimes came to Sorsha’s face at the end of a long, hard hunt, when it was time for the kill. “Get out, Peck!” She booted Willow off his feet and sent him sprawling through the door. “Tie him up,” she said to her sergeant. “Put him on a pack mule.”

  “Your Highness,” the man asked, “is that the child?”

  “It is.”

  “Then why should we be bothered with this Peck and this Daikini scum? Why not slay them now?”

  Sorsha considered. She stared at Willow. She looked at Madmartigan and her chin lifted slightly. “No. My mother may want them for the Ritual. Who knows what powers the child may have given them.”

  “More than Bavmorda has, Sorsha!” Fin Raziel shrieked, still dangling from the trooper’s fist. “You’ll see! More powers than exist in all of evil Nockmaar!”

  Sorsha drew her sword and tipped up Fin Raziel’s head with the point of it, gazing into her small, smoldering eyes. “Look at you. Fin Raziel. What a pathetic creature! How can you talk of power? You will have a special place in Bavmorda’s Ritual, I think.”

  Around her, the Nockmaar troopers chuckled. Sorsha thrust a foot into her stirrup and swung up onto Rak. “Throw her into a cage. Put her on the mule with the Nelwyn. As for him,” she nodded to Madmartigan. who had struggled to his feet, “let him walk.”

  Madmartigan grinned up at her. squinting into the sun and spitting sand. “Good idea! Why don’t you come down and walk with me, Princess? You and I, we’ll take a little walk back into those woods . . .”

  Sorsha spurred Rak and the great horse lunged forward, smashing Madmartigan back onto the beach. “Come!” she said, beckoning to the troopers. “We have a long journey.” Rak trotted along the water’s edge, hooves splashing, and Sorsha gazed on the dilapidated huts and sheds as she passed them. At the far end she wheeled and casually flung her arm in the same gesture of destruction that she had seen Bavmorda make many times. “Burn this place!”

  When the last troopers had flung their torches into the village and galloped northward. Franjean and Rool emerged from their hiding place in the woods. Pyres blazed and ashes smoldered where the fishing village had been, and smoke hung in a heavy pall over the windless lake and the island of Fin Raziel.

  “We ran,” Rool said.

  “Certainly we ran. We’re not idiots, Rool! Do you know what sport those Nockmaar thugs would have had with two brownies?”

  “But we promised.”

  “To protect the child. You’re right.”

  “And they’ve got her.”

  “And the Daikini. And the Peck.”

  “And Fin Raziel. Franjean, we should help.”

  “Don’t be honorable, Rool! It’s not what brownies do. Say rather, ‘We should continue this adventure, Franjean!’ ”

  “We should continue this adventure, Franjean.”

  “You’re right, Rool. Let’s get started. You heard what the princess said: it’s a long walk.”

  “Maybe we could find an eagle.”

  “Maybe a hawk.”

  “Maybe a seagull?”

  They looked hopefully up and down the beach, out across the lake through the drifting smoke. But as far as they could see, there was no life at all.

  “Again!” Fin Raziel hissed. “Try the chant again!” She pressed her face against the bars of a crude cage, gaze fixed desperately on Willow.

  “Hear her?” he asked. “It’s Elora. She’s crying. She’s cold and hungry.” He struggled against his bonds to see over the head of the plodding mule, past the thick bodies of Nockmaar troopers. “Sorsha’s not looking after her up there. She doesn’t know about babies.”

  Raziel bounced and quivered. “Don’t worry about her now. The charm, Willow! It’s the only hope for the child or for any of us! Get it right!”

  “Cut these ropes and give me a good sword and I’ll show you another hope,” Madmartigan muttered. He was plodding beside the mule, a rope around his neck tied to the pommel of the Nockmaar sergeant. The sergeant was occupied, busy sharing some joke with two of his men.


  “She’s cold. She’s . . .”

  “The charm!”

  “Oh, all right. Let’s see. Tanna . . . looth . . . I can’t remember the middle part.”

  “Locktwarr!” Fin Raziel hissed. “That’s the word that pleads for change.”

  “Locktwarr, locktwarr . . .” Willow murmured, eyes shut tight.

  “Look out! Quiet!”

  Willow opened his eyes to see Sorsha approaching, riding beside the file of soldiers. Beyond her, only a few miles ahead, rose the snow-capped peaks of the mountains. She rode calmly, confidently, her red hair free, surrounded by her own frozen breath and the horse’s.

  “Witch!” Madmartigan said.

  “Quiet!” The sergeant jerked the rope, suddenly efficient in Sorsha’s presence.

  “Young woman,” Fin Raziel squeaked as Rak came alongside the mule, “you reminded me of your father just then. He, too, was a . . .”

  “Silence!” Sorsha’s riding crop cracked across the bars of the cage. “You insult me! My father was a weakling! A fool! An enemy of Nockmaar!”

  Raziel cringed but continued. “So your mother says, but it was not true, Sorsha. Enemy of Nockmaar perhaps, but fool and weakling? Never!”

  “Princess Sorsha,” Willow pleaded, “please, let me help you with Elora. She needs food. She needs warmer clothes in this cold.”

  Sorsha hesitated. She glanced at the head of the column, where the child was wailing pitifully in the embrace of the lieutenant. For a moment she seemed about to relent, but instead she shook her head. “We’ll feed her soon enough, when we bivouac. As for warmth, she’ll have all she needs in my mother’s Ritual.”

  Gritting his teeth, Madmartigan twisted around against the pressure of the rope. “Do you know what you are, Princess? You’re a nasty, mean-spirited little . . .”

  The sergeant cursed and yanked the rope, and Madmartigan staggered, strangling. “And if you’re not careful,” he croaked, “you’ll grow up just like your damned mother!”

  Sorsha flushed scarlet. She spurred Rak around the plodding mule and raised her riding crop.

  “Go ahead!” Madmartigan wheezed. “You and your boys do your worst!” He twisted again, running sideways against the pressure of the rope so he could look up into her eyes. His jaws were clenched, but he was grinning. “And I promise you, when my turn comes I’ll do my best!”