The horses must have spooked when the fires first broke out and galloped this far and then tried to turn hard when they saw the cliff in front of them. The carriage was overturned, two wheels splintered and askew. One of the horses was down tangled in its gear, not kicking, just lying quiet as if it had tired itself out. She didn’t think it was injured. The other stood with its eyes rolling in fear as it caught Ribs’s scent. There were three other horses, loosed from the burning stables, that must have followed these into the dark and that stood now with eyes rolling in terror, shying sideways whenever a kid got close.
“Stay back,” she said to Ribs, wherever the girl was.
Far out across the loch she could see the island where the ruined monastery stood, the island where Charlie had gone. Something was happening there, something strange. There were lights rising from the trees like tiny moths, circling and spiraling upward. A strange blue glow was pulsing in the ruins, flickering out across the dark waters.
The first horse snorted, tossed its head. The second one suddenly kicked out, trying to get upright.
“Easy,” Alice murmured. She had her hands up and stood so that the first horse could see her clearly. “It’s all right,” she soothed, “it’s all right. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
The horse was calming. She reached up and lay a hand on its damp neck murmuring all the while.
But then Oskar cried out in a panic. Alice stepped smoothly back and looked.
Ragged and smoldering, striding down toward them like a figure of wrath, was Jacob Marber. Even at that distance Alice could see the blood in his beard and the wounds where his ear had been torn away. His clothes were ripped. His big hands were raised.
“For fuck’s sake,” she snapped.
She took out her Colt and leveled it and fired five times directly into Marber’s chest, staggering him. But he did not fall. Calmly, quickly, she opened the chamber and dumped out the shells and began to reload. She shouldn’t have released the keywrasse so soon.
She saw Oskar lifted into the air and thrown like a child’s toy down the slope, toward the cliff’s edge. The boy lay where he landed, unmoving. Three other kids tried to run and were swept bodily out into the darkness, screaming. She saw Komako, hands raised, struggling, falling to one knee, then the other, her long braid sweeping out behind her. A cloud of dust encircled her. Still Marber came on, toward her, Alice. Then her revolver was loaded and Alice dropped to one knee and held her revolver over one wrist to steady it and she shot out Marber’s legs.
That stopped him. His legs went out from under him sideways and he fell hard. Alice was already up and running for the others, for Oskar and for Komako, and she was shouting at Ribs to get the horses out of their harnesses. That was when the island exploded.
It blew in a vast blue fiery conflagration and the weird flames arced upward and spilled out over the loch. Alice staggered back, seeing it, thinking of Charlie out there, her heart suddenly breaking. But there wasn’t time—Marber had got back to his feet, was screaming at her, coming at her now at a run just as if he hadn’t been shot at all, or crushed, or torn up by the keywrasse, and she saw it and knew even as she lifted her Colt that there was no stopping him.
Not by her.
Something massive and dark bounded out of the night darkness and smashed into him. It was snarling and swiping at his head and then it and he tumbled and rolled down the slope toward the cliffs. It was the keywrasse: many-legged and fanged and clawed and filled with a fury Alice hadn’t seen before.
But she didn’t stop to watch. She was hauling Oskar up out of the dirt and running for Komako and lifting her to her feet and then they were all climbing onto the horses, unhitched now by Ribs, and they rode out bareback three on each; they rode fast and crowded and leaning low over the horses’ necks and Alice, with her heart breaking, only looked back long enough to see the keywrasse seize Marber’s skull in its powerful jaws and drag him kicking to the edge of the cliff, and then both of them plunged over into the brooding black waters below, the surface of the loch closing over them, rippling outward, going still. In the illuminated night, the island crumpled in upon itself, collapsing. Alice’s cheeks were wet. Her bitten shoulder was on fire. Behind them the old manor burned and burned in the darkness. Their horses ran.
EPILOGUE
The sky in the east was red. Charlie found Miss Davenshaw in the ruins just as day was breaking. She was still alive, the only one. He helped her up the ridge and lay her down in the moss at the edge of the cliff, bloodied, streaked with ash and soot, her clothes torn. Carefully he covered her with a singed blanket salvaged from the smoking wreckage and gently he put a hand to her face and silently he begged her not to die. His wrist where Berghast had gripped him was still hurting. Below he could see in the gathering light the smoldering shell of Cairndale Manor, two walls standing yet, and he knew among its dead lay all the old talents and the beasts in their stables and others, servants, groundskeepers, young talents whose names he’d never learned. In the black waters of the loch the island had crumpled in upon itself so that nothing now remained but a deep scarred depression, filled still with the night’s dark and slow to illumine.