Out of the darkness gleamed two wide-spaced balls of green fire and below them a frog-mouth rimmed by gleaming teeth, and over all of it–the teeth and balls of fire–the impression of a head or face so outrageous in its formation, so chilling in its outline that the mind rejected it, refusing to give credence to there being such a thing. The mouth was froglike, but the face was not. It was all angles and sharp planes and above it rose the suggestion of a crest. And in the instant that Duncan saw it, there was slaver at the corner of the mouth, a drooling hunger that yearned toward the campfire circle but was held from coming out–perhaps by the snarling Tiny, perhaps by something else.
He saw it only for a moment, and then it was blotted out. The balls of fire were gone and so were the sharp and gleaming teeth. For an instant the outline of the face, or the hinted outline of the face, persisted; then it, too, blinked out.
Tiny took a quick step forward, the growl rising in his throat.
“No, Tiny,” Conrad said softly. “No.”
Duncan surged to his feet.
“They’ve been around the last hour or so,” said Conrad. “Prowling in the dark. But this is the first we’ve seen.”
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“No need, m’lord. Tiny and me were watching. They were looking us over only.”
“Many of them? More than this one?”
“More than one, I think. Not many.”
Duncan put more wood on the fire. Tiny was pacing around the campfire circle.
Conrad spoke to the dog. “Come in. Tame down. No more of them tonight.”
“How do you know there’ll be no more tonight?” asked Duncan. “They just looked us over. But now they’ve decided not to tackle us tonight. Maybe later on.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Don’t know. Just guess is all. A feeling in the bones.”
“They have something planned for us,” said Duncan.
“Maybe,” Conrad said.
“Conrad, do you want to turn back?”
Conrad grinned viciously. “Just when it’s getting good?” he asked. “I mean it,” Duncan told him. “There is danger here. I do not want to lead all of us to death.”
“And you, m’lord?”
“I’d go on, of course. Perhaps alone, I could make it. But I don’t insist that the rest of you…”
“The old lord, he said take care of you. He’d skin me alive should I come back without you.”
“Yes, I know,” said Duncan. “It has been that way since the time that we were boys.”
“The hermit,” Conrad said. “Maybe the hermit would go back. He’s been bitching ever since we started.”
“The hermit,” Duncan told him, “is a self-proclaimed soldier of the Lord. He needs this to restore his self-respect. He feels he was a failure as a hermit. Scared witless, he’d still not turn back unless the others of us did.”
“Then we go on,” said Conrad. “Three comrades-in-the-arms. But what about the witch?”
“She can make her choice. She hasn’t much to lose, one way or another. She had nothing when we found her.”
So, no matter what Ghost may have told them, Duncan thought, it was not only the hairless ones who were watching and keeping track of them. Meg had been right. The others were about, had been there all night, perhaps, watching from the darkness. Even when he’d sat beside the campfire during that first watch, they had been out there without his knowing it. And what was more, without Tiny’s knowing it. Only the witch had known it. And strange as it might seem, she had not been greatly perturbed by it. Despite knowing they were there, she had curled up beside the saddle and the packs and had slept like a baby, making those little crying noises that had made her seem more babylike.
Perhaps she had sensed somehow that they were safe, that there’d be no attack. And how could she have known, he wondered, and why had those others not attacked? Huddled as they were around the campfire, one swift rush from the outer darkness would have taken care of them–there would have been no way a small party such as they could have stood them off.
And in the days ahead, how would they stand them off? Surely there would come a time when the Harriers would set out to kill them. They would stay vigilant, of course, but vigilance was not the entire answer. If enough of the Harriers were willing to meet death themselves, they could do the job.
Yet, he told himself, he could not turn back. He carried with him a certain talisman that might keep the lights still burning, beating back the ancient darkness. And if he did not turn back, neither would Conrad, neither would the hermit.
Dawn was near at hand. The darkness was filtering from the trees and one now was able to see a ways into the woods. A flight of ducks went over the camp, crying as they flew, perhaps heading for a favorite feeding ground.
“Conrad,” he asked, “do you see anything strange?”
“Strange?”
“Yes, the way this place looks. It seems to be all wrong. Not the way it was when we camped last night.”
“Just the light,” said Conrad. “Things look different in the dawn.” But it was more than the dawn light, Duncan told himself. He tried to place the wrongness and was unable to. There was nothing definite that he could put a finger on. And yet it was different. The woods were wrong. The stream was wrong. The sense of things was wrong. As if someone had taken the geography in hand and had given it a slightly different twist, not changing it too much, but enough to be noticed, enough to give a viewer the feeling that it was skewed out of shape.
Andrew sat up, levering himself upright with his elbows.
“What is wrong?” he asked.
“There is nothing wrong,” growled Conrad.
“But there is. I know it. It is in the air.”
“We had a visitor last night,” said Duncan. “Peeking from the bushes.”
“More than one,” said Conrad. “Only one peeked out.”
Andrew came swiftly to his feet, snatching up his staff.
“Then the witch was right,” he said.
“Of course she was,” said Meg, from where she was huddled by the saddle and the packs. “Old Meg is always right. I told you they were skulking about. I said they were watching us.”
Daniel lunged to his feet, took a few quick steps toward the campfire, then paused. He blew fiercely through his nostrils and pawed with one hoof at the ground.
“Daniel knows as well,” said Conrad.
“All of us know,” said Andrew. “What do we do about it?”
“We go on,” said Conrad. “That is, if you want to.”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t want to?”
“I thought you would,” said Conrad.
Meg threw back her blanket, got to her feet, shook her rags into some semblance of shape about her.
“They are gone now,” she said. “I can’t feel them any more. But they have enchanted us. We are in a trap. There is a certain stench to it.”
“I see no trap,” said Conrad.
“Not us,” said Andrew. “We are not the ones enchanted. It is the place that is enchanted.”
“How do you know?” asked Duncan.
“Why, the strangeness of it. Look over there, just above the stream. There is a rainbow shiver in the air.”
Duncan looked. He could see no rainbow shiver in the air.
“The Little People sometimes try to do it,” Andrew said, “but they do it very badly. As they do most things very badly. They are tumblers.”
“And the Harriers are not?”
“Not the Harriers,” said Meg. “They have the power. They do a job of it.”
It was all insane, thought Duncan, to stand here so calmly, saying there was an enchantment on this place. And yet, perhaps there was. He had noticed the strange way in which the geography seemed to have been skewed about, slightly out of focus. He had not seen Andrew’s rainbow, but he had noticed how the place was slightly out of joint. Looking at it, he saw that it still was out of joint.
“Perhaps we should get started,” Duncan said. “We can have breakfast later. If we move immediately, we may get out of this strangeness that you call enchantment. Surely it cannot cover a great expanse of ground.”
“It will get worse farther on,” said Andrew. “I am sure that a deeper enchantment lies ahead of us. If we should go back we might soon be out of it.”
“Back is where they want us to go,” said Conrad. “Otherwise why enchantment? And we are not going back. M’lord has decided we go on.”
He reached for the saddle and threw it on the back of the waiting Daniel.
“Come on,” he said to Beauty. “‘Tis time to get you packed.”