“The village is closer,” she argued. “They can tell us who the castle belongs to, and if the wizard owns it, we can still go there.”
Mr. Walker looked mutinous.
“What if we vote?” Rage suggested, thinking it had been easier when they were dogs.
“I vote for the village,” Billy said promptly.
“I vote for the castle,” Mr. Walker said.
“I vote for the castle, too,” Elle said enthusiastically.
“Oh dear, oh dear.” Goaty sighed and wrung his hands. “I suppose each way will be as bad as the other. In fact, surely the most sensible thing is to stay right where we are. That’s what I vote for.”
“We can’t just stay here forever,” Rage protested. “We ought to try to find the wizard.”
“I expect he will just want to eat us when we find him,” Goaty said in a depressed voice.
“I think a wizard would have better ways of getting food than cooking his visitors,” Mr. Walker said coldly.
“I would like to see what a castle smells like. Let’s go there at once,” Elle said impatiently.
“No use in going to castle,” said a familiar slinky voice. “Nothing there but spiders scuttling. No food. No treasure. No sleeping princess.”
“Who said that?” Mr. Walker demanded, his high-pitched voice barely audible over the ferocious rumbling growl of Bear. She looked much more like a bear than a dog now that she was curling back her lip and showing her teeth.
“It’s the firecat,” Rage whispered.
“It’s the thing that unlocked the gate for me,” Goaty observed gloomily.
“I don’t like this one bit,” Mr. Walker whispered loudly.
“Not liking hairy little man-dog, either,” the firecat said.
“Where have you been?” Rage asked. “You said all of my questions would be answered when I came through the bramble gate!”
“Firecat is having many things to do. Many important things,” the voice said sulkily.
Rage bit her lip to stop herself from saying that since it had convinced her to come through the bramble gate, it ought to regard her as important. Instead she said, “Where is the wizard and what does he want us to bring to him?”
In answer there was a lurid flash of purple smoke. A tiny hourglass full of pale, glittering sand appeared on a stone knoll. Rage bent down and gingerly pinched its waist between her finger and thumb. It was surprisingly heavy for such a small object because the bottom and top were capped in densely patterned silver. The glass felt thick and was faintly discolored. A few glimmering grains of sand fell through the neck of the hourglass as she watched.
She turned it upside down, but instead of the grains running in the other direction, a few more gleaming fragments floated up from the bottom chamber and into the top.
“A magic hourglass,” she murmured, glad it was not a golden ring.
“Hourglass telling how to find wizard,” the firecat said.
Rage examined the hourglass and found there were two lines of ornate lettering engraved into the silver:
BRING ME TO THE SHORE OF THE ENDLESS SEA
STEP THROUGH THE DOOR THAT WILL OPEN FOR THEE
“These are not proper directions!” she protested.
“Ragewinnoway clever. Figuring out riddle,” the firecat said.
“No!” Rage said. “You send us back home at once.”
“Home?” the firecat echoed with a tinge of mockery. “Home-going needing powerful enchantment. Only wizard having such magic.”
Rage’s anger turned inward once more. Why had she chosen to go through the bramble gate? The worst thing was knowing that she had gone through it solely because she hadn’t believed it was magic. Now they would not be able to get back home unless she could figure out the wizard’s whereabouts from the riddle on the bottom of the hourglass.
If only she had not gone through the magic gate…
If only she had not run away from the Johnsons’…
If only her mother had not been in an accident…
“I wouldn’t trust that cat thing one bit,” Mr. Walker said.
Bear said shortly, “Any fool could tell it was a liar. It smelled like a liar, and it sounded like one.”
Rage hung her head and said nothing.
Billy put his arm around her shoulders and said stoutly, “We should go into the village to see if anyone knows anything about the wizard. Maybe it won’t be as hard to find the Endless Sea as it sounds.”
Rage feared it would be every bit as difficult as it sounded, but before she could say so, Bear growled impatiently and began to descend the hill.
“We’ll all be killed,” Goaty sighed glumly as they set off after Bear.
It was midday before they reached the road. Going down had turned out to be a lot more difficult than going up, especially where the steep rock face was slippery from rain. At least the weather had warmed up, but Rage was beginning to feel dreadfully empty. The animals must be as hungry as she was, and she feared they would expect her to feed them, just as she always had. Maybe they would be able to get something in the village. In books, people always begged, or chopped wood for their supper. Sometimes they stole it. Rage had never stolen anything, but in stories it never seemed as awful to steal as it did in real life.
“We must be careful, though,” she muttered to herself when they were in sight of the road. She had got them into enough trouble by failing to think things through. She could not make the same mistake again.
“I’ll protect us!” Elle declared, brandishing her stick.
“Put that down before you do poke someone’s eye out,” Mr. Walker said crossly.
Rage peered along the road in both directions. It seemed to be deserted, but she looked to Elle, whose superb bull terrier eyesight seemed to have been carried over into her new form. “Do you see anyone coming?”
Elle looked along the road in the direction of the castle and shook her head, but when she looked toward the river, she frowned. “Something is coming….”
“Someone, you mean,” Mr. Walker corrected.
“It’s not a people,” Elle said slowly. “It’s…something biggish and brownish and it has…a lot of legs.”
“Probably a giant poisonous jumping spider,” Goaty said.
Rage resisted the urge to smack him. She was not afraid of spiders exactly, but she preferred them to stay on the ceiling or on the other side of the room. It occurred to Rage, rather horribly, that whatever was coming might be something worse than a spider—some sort of monster. Unlike Goaty, she kept this terrifying possibility to herself. They agreed to stay hidden until whatever it was came nearer and they could judge if it was dangerous.
“Probably it will sniff us out,” Goaty said.
“At least if it eats us, someone will have a full stomach,” Mr. Walker said, giving Rage a sideways look.
She bit back a retort and shifted to a spot that allowed her a clear view of the road. As she waited, Rage was surprised to find her eyes growing heavy despite her apprehension. Mr. Walker climbed into her lap and fell immediately asleep. Beside her, Billy was silent, lost in his thoughts. Only Elle seemed wide awake, standing and rubbing a stone along her stick to smooth it. Goaty, who was as fond of her in this shape as in the other, held the stick steady for her, from time to time looking back up the hill with dreamy longing.
Rage’s eyelids grew leaden, and finally she could not resist letting them close. She drifted into a dream of her mother crying, only Mam was a little girl, younger than Rage.
“Sammy! Sam! Don’t go!” Mary wept.
“Let him,” her grandfather said coldly, his hair black instead of silver. “He does not care that he is leaving you. People who go never care what they leave behind them.”
Rage woke with the queer, unhappy thought that by falling into a coma, Mam had gone away and left her.
Mr. Walker growled.
“It’s nearly here,” Billy whispered to Rage, and a thrill of terror ran through he
r veins.
She listened hard, but what she could hear did not sound the least bit spiderish. It sounded more like a horse clip-clopping lazily along. She pushed Mr. Walker off her lap and got up just as a woman on a horse came riding into view. It took a second more for Rage to realize that the woman and the horse were a single creature. The bottom half of her was a horse, but from the waist up she was human.
“It’s sort of a horse,” Goaty whispered.
“It’s a centaur!” Rage breathed, enchanted.
“Is it really? I can’t see,” Mr. Walker complained, and Billy picked him up. “It is a centaur,” he said, sounding delighted. “I wonder if they really do have a human stomach and a horse stomach.”
“Stay here. I’m going down to talk to it,” Rage said, determined to be Rage-Winnoway-whose-name-was-Courage, as the Firecat had advised. After all, if anyone would know about magic, it must surely be this legendary beast. In the stories she had read, centaurs were always noble and honorable creatures. She slithered down the last bit of the hill overlooking the road, meaning to stop herself at the edge and climb down with dignity, but it was steeper than she thought, and she flew out and landed hard on her bottom.
“What in the wild!” exclaimed the centaur, coming to an abrupt halt.
Rage could feel her face growing very hot. She got up with as much dignity as she could muster and brushed her clothes off. “Good afternoon, centaur,” she said, noting that the fur from the creature’s horse half grew up into a sort of shirt for her human half.
The centaur lifted beautifully arched brows. “Good afternoon to you, too, girl. What are you doing here without any sort of keeper?”
Rage felt this rather a rude thing to say. Somehow she would have imagined a centaur to have a high and poetic way of talking, with lots of thee-ing and thou-ing. “I am looking for the shore of the Endless Sea. Do you know the way?”
The centaur snorted in a very loud and horsy way. “I have never heard of it.”
“What is this place called?”
“We are on the road that runs between Wildwood and Deepwood and leads to the River of No Return.” She tilted her head. “How is it that you know so little about where you are?”
“Because I don’t belong here!” Rage burst out. “It’s all a mistake. I came through an enchanted gateway that disappeared, so I couldn’t get back.”
“Ah yes, well, they do that. Many gates in but only one out,” the centaur said absently. “Enchanted gate, you say? That means you used magic?”
“You said there is a gate out?” Rage asked eagerly.
“I was just repeating an old song my dam used to sing to me. But tell me, you used magic to come here?”
“I said the gate was magic,” Rage said.
“But there is magic where you come from?”
“There are lots of stories about magic, but I didn’t know it really existed.” Rage hesitated. “I…I heard there was a great wizard this side of the gateway who could work powerful magic.”
“Once, long before my creation, a wizard lived in the castle on the hill in the middle of Deepwood,” the centaur answered. “He made Valley, they say, so he must have been very powerful.”
So Valley was the name of the world they had come to, Rage thought. “Where does the wizard live now?”
The centaur shrugged. “No one knows. The witch women say he got sick of the keepers coming to the castle for advice all the time when he was trying to do his spells, so he magicked Deepwood into a thick tangle, to make it hard to get to the castle. Then one day he just wasn’t there anymore.”
Rage’s heart sank. Witches! And who or what were keepers? And how on earth was she to find a wizard who had disappeared ages ago? More importantly, why had the firecat told her the wizard wanted something brought to him? She remembered uneasily that Bear had said it smelled like a liar.
She thought over all that the centaur had said. “If the witch women are magical…,” she began.
“They work magic,” the centaur corrected her. “Only a wizard can make magic. Terrible curious the witch folk are about him. But the wizard became a recluse before they moved to Wildwood, so they never really had much to do with him. You would need to ask the keepers in Fork about him. Time was, there used to be a lot of coming and going between the castle and Fork.”
“Fork?” Rage echoed in bewilderment.
“Fork City. Other side of the River of No Return. Just follow the road to the crossing place.”
“Who lives in Fork?”
“Humans, of course. It and all of the villages along the road are keeper territory. It is the road that marks the land ruled by the keepers, not the river.” She stopped and suddenly glowered at Rage. “You’re not a keeper spy, are you?”
“Don’t touch her!” Elle cried, and bounded onto the road between Rage and the centaur. Billy jumped down, too, and stood boldly beside Elle, who was brandishing her spear.
The centaur stared at them both, then all at once the stiffness went out of her bunched muscles and she chuckled. “You are clearly not from Valley, for here no one would be foolish enough to provoke a centaur.” Without warning she reared up and drove lightning-fast hoofs into the earth between Elle and Billy.
Rage screamed in fright.
“Fear not, girl,” the centaur told her. “You are lucky that I am not one of my brothers, for they are far more warlike.” She turned to Elle. “Put aside your weapon, little warrior, for I mean no harm to your friend. What sort of things are you?”
“I’m a dog.” Elle was staring up at the centaur in admiration.
“Me too,” Billy said.
The centaur frowned. “There are dogs in some of the villages, but they do not look like you.”
“We were dogs before we came through the enchanted gateway that brought us here,” Billy explained. “It changed us.”
“There must have been a mighty magic in that gate,” the centaur said.
“I was told that the wizard made it,” Rage said.
The centaur shrugged her massive shoulders again. “Maybe he did. I don’t suppose gate making can be much harder than the making of Valley.” She gave a shiver, as if her skin were impatient to get moving. “Well, I must go. The witch women have summoned all wild things to a grand council at the heart lake in Wildwood. Would you like to come with me? I’m sure they’d be interested to hear about your world.”
Rage shook her head firmly. “We will go to Fork.”
“Be careful, then. Keepers rule their territories with hard hands and cold eyes. They don’t like anything out of the ordinary,” the centaur added, seeming to forget that it had been her idea to seek out the keepers. “Best not to call any attention to yourself. And obey all their rules.” Her skin twitched again. “Now I will say goodbye, for I doubt we will meet again.”
Rage watched the centaur vanish into the trees beside the road. A moment later she wished she had thought to ask about the firecat. She had no doubt now that it had deliberately lured them through the bramble gate with its promise of magical help from the wizard. The question was, why? It hadn’t told them about the wizard disappearing, but it had given them the magical hourglass with its riddled directions, so maybe the wizard was hiding somewhere, waiting for someone to unravel the riddle. Rage saw that they had no choice but to look for the wizard since he was their only way home.
“What a lot of words saying nothing,” Bear growled, lumbering out of the trees.
“I’m hungry,” Mr. Walker said, jumping down.
“Me too,” Goaty sighed, following him.
“Shall I go and look for food?” Elle volunteered.
“No!” Rage almost shouted. “I just need to think for a minute before we do anything.”
“Thinking is very useful,” Elle said doubtfully.
“I don’t like the idea of witches,” Billy said.
“Me neither,” Mr. Walker agreed. “Witches fatten you and eat you, or poison you with apples.”
“I d
on’t think we’d better rely too much on what fairy tales say about them,” Rage said, thinking that the centaur had not been much like centaurs in stories.
“There’s no need for us to go near the witch women,” Billy said. “After all, the centaur said that they didn’t have much to do with the wizard. We need to talk to the keepers.”
“What is a keeper?” Goaty asked.
Rage frowned. “I don’t know. A human adult, I suppose, since the centaur asked why I was without one.”
“They live in Fork, and the centaur said humans live in Fork, so they must be human,” Billy pointed out.
“They rule Fork,” Mr. Walker said. “Maybe the witch women rule the wild parts of Valley.”
Goaty looked around as if he expected a witch to leap out of a bush.
“She asked if we were keeper spies,” Billy murmured. “The keepers wouldn’t spy on the witch women unless they didn’t like them. Maybe they’re at war.”
Rage sighed impatiently. “It doesn’t matter whether keepers and witch women are at war! We’re not on either side. We’re only going to Fork to find out about the wizard.”
“I still think we should go to the village first. We have to get some food, and we can ask about the keepers and the wizard at the same time,” Billy said.
“I vote for food,” Mr. Walker agreed promptly.
The village they had seen from the top of the hill was less than an hour’s journey away. It lay in a place where the road curved inland from the bank of the river. As they approached, Rage could see that it consisted of about twenty houses and smaller outbuildings arranged into four twisty streets that radiated from a central square. A couple of men sat on a step smoking pipes, and another man was chopping wood. A group of old women went down a street carrying baskets and chattering. There were a lot more houses than people. Rage guessed that most of the villagers were inside or had gone off to work somewhere else.