Peter Beagle - Tamsin

That got me on my feet fast enough. I yelled, “Pooka!” and stumbled to him against the wind, but he backed away, shaking his shaggy head. I kept yelling, “You have to, you have to! I have to get to her!”

“Do you remember her words on the day we met?” The Pooka’s voice was as calm and low as though the Wild Hunt weren’t still raging over us, and his mane weren’t trying to whip itself loose by the roots. “She warned you never to trust me, never to mount my back, for I would surely hurl you into a bog or a briarpatch and abandon you there. I am still what I am, jenny Gluckstein.”

I put my hands on him. I said, “I know, but I can’t worry about it now. just try to dump me someplace near where she’s gone.” And I grabbed his mane and scrambled aboard, not giving myself time to reconsider anything. I was braced for matted, soaking horsehair, but the Pooka’s back was completely dry, even warm. I actually yelped in surprise, and the Pooka slanted one eye back at me in the usual wicked amusement. Then he took off.

I’m not a big horse person, and I never have been. I know young girls are all supposed to go through a stage of thinking about nothing but horses, but there wasn’t a lot of that on West Eighty-third Street. The boys both like horses better than I do, and Meena’s nuts about them—it’s the only time she’s ever boring, when she starts in on horses. Not me. I used to have a thing about snakes, though, when I was really young. I still like them.

But the Pooka isn’t a horse. The Pooka is the Pooka, and he didn’t run like a horse at all. He didn’t gallop, he bounded , like Mister Cat, like a lion or a cheetah, the way I’ve seen them on nature shows. He was in top gear around the second stride, driving off both hind legs together, with his back bowing under me, moving in great flowing leaps that melted together into a hunter’s glide that felt as though it could outrun the Wild Hunt itself. I flattened myself along his neck, because the storm and his speed together would have had me on the ground in a minute if I’d tried to sit up like a real rider. It was hard to breathe: All I could do was grab onto his mane, and bury my face in it, while we tore through orchards whose branches almost raked me off his back, fields that I could only pray he wouldn’t trample, pastures where sheep gaped sleepily up at us and the wind froze my fingers and pounded at my face. I knew where we were, more or less, but I was as groggy and stupid as those sheep. All I could do was hang on.

The Wild Hunt was downwind of us, their nerve-numbing howl making me want to throw myself off the Pooka’s back and crawl away into the dark and wet, where they’d never find me. But each time I opened my eyes, we’d drawn closer to that terrible rainbow, because the Pooka was traveling . The half-moon was a crayon scrawl on the horizon, and the trees on both sides of us had blurred into a sort of grayish tunnel, but I could see the Hunt clearly—and I could see Edric Davies now, running and running in the black sky. The Huntsmen were so close behind him that it seemed to me as though they were playing with him, that they could have caught him any time they wanted to, but maybe not.

What did he look like, Tamsin’s lost lover? What do you think you’d look like after three hundred years like his? Horrible, right. I’ll tell you what’s horrible. What’s really horrible is that I’d seen worse . I see worse than Edric Davies damn near every day, and so do you—on TV, in newspaper pictures, in photographs we get so totally used to that they don’t make us puke our guts out every time we look at them, the way we should. There’s only so much you can do to a person, to a human body, even if you’re the Wild Hunt or Judge Jeffreys. I grew up knowing that, and you probably did, too.

The Pooka said quietly, under the storm and the Huntsmen’s baying, “It ends here.” And I saw Tamsin directly up ahead of us, standing in a field of young corn. Her head was thrown back, her hair fallen loose—though she hadn’t wasted any time remembering how it would have blown around—and she was stretching her arms up toward the Wild Hunt, and Edric Davies. She was calling, crying out words, but I couldn’t hear them, because of the wind.

But the Wild Hunt heard. The riders out in front, so close on Edric Davies’s heels, swung away from him, banking straight down toward Tamsin. The others followed as they caught sight of her, filling the sky with their spears and their skulls and their screaming laughter, lunging forward over their mounts’ necks as if they couldn’t wait to get at that small white figure in the cornfield. But she never took one step backward—she kept on beckoning, challenging them down, away from Edric to her. I was too dazed and too scared to be proud of her then, my Tamsin. But I dream that moment sometimes, these years later, and in the dream I always tell her.

Then the Pooka dumped me. Nothing dramatic about it—he just stopped dead and I shot over his head at about a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and landed on my butt in soft mud, practically at Tamsin’s feet. I jumped right up, howling like the Wild Hunt myself, but the Pooka actually bowed his head to me and I shut up. He said, “Here is your friend, and here is the Wild Hunt. This is your affair, not mine. Tend to it, Jenny Gluckstein.”

And he was gone, exactly that fast—I thought I spotted a frog hopping away through the cornstalks, but it was dark and crazy, and you can’t ever tell with the Pooka, anyway. Tamsin hadn’t turned her head for a moment, because the first of the Huntsmen had touched down, the wet earth hissing under their horses’ feet. The rest were circling like stacked-up planes, coming in one by one, as they must have done when Judge Jeffreys called them to the cow byre where Edric Davies waited for Tamsin Willoughby. The corn was smoking where they trampled it, and I wondered, somewhere far off, what I’d say to Evan when nothing ever grew in this field again.

They didn’t keep up their racket once they were on the ground. Even the hounds quieted down and dropped back alongside their masters, and the horses—or whatever they were—stopped foaming flames, though they kept on growling very low, meaner than the dogs. Tamsin just stood there, solid as a living woman, smiling as each rider dropped to earth and moved in on her. You’d have thought she was welcoming company at the front door.

I didn’t know what the hell she had in mind, and the Wild Huntsmen were as hung up as I was. They kept advancing, but they did it slowly, fanning out a little bit, as though she were Sir Lancelot or someone, ready to leap at them and mow them down five and six at a time. I was just behind her, shaking so hard I could barely stand, watching them come on.

I’ll never know who they were. Who they had been. I’ll never know how you get to be a Wild Huntsman, nor if you have to be one forever. What I remember—this is weird—is their smell. If Tamsin smelled of vanilla, you’d have expected these guys and their beasts to smell all meaty and hairy and blood-sticky, like the lion house at the zoo. They didn’t: Close to, even the worst of them, the ones with no real faces, but only a smeary collection of holes and skin and cindery snot—even those had the faintest smell of the sea, of fishing boats, and sails drying in the sun, the way you see them at Lyme Regis. Maybe they were all old pirates— who knows? The one thing I’m sure of is that I can’t ever be afraid of anyone again. The Wild Hunt gave me that.

Tamsin spoke to them, proud and clear over their fearful stillness. She said, “I take back what belongs to me. You have no claim on him, nor did you ever. The evil was mine alone, and long will I be in atoning for it. I take Edric Davies back from you now.”