They didn’t turn. They passed over. Probably it didn’t take more than ten or fifteen seconds, which I read somewhere is all the time dreams are supposed to take, at most. They passed over, and the rage of their passage faded off toward Sherborne, and I stood still, straining after them, listening for a sound I’d never heard before when the Hunt went by. It was a voice, a man’s voice, but shrieking in such awful terror that I almost couldn’t tell it was human. We don’t have pigs at Stourhead, but the Colfaxes do—they’re the next farm over—and you can hear pigs screaming all that way when they know they’re about to be slaughtered. It’s horrible, it’s the most horrible thing I know, but it sounds more human than that voice, that night, flying just ahead of the Wild Hunt.

They were gone. Mister Cat quieted down to the kind of growl he’d use for some idiot dog, and the billy-blind crawled out of hiding, looking scared, but not the least embarrassed at having grabbed the one bit of shelter for himself. He cleared his throat. “Aye, so, advice you want, advice you’ll have. Stay clear of them, stay away from that place I’ve told you about—”

“You never did, you never said what place—”

“—and you’ll stop rousing the Willoughby, stop walking out with her! There’s no good can come of it, nowt but danger for you and worse for her. Let be, girl, there’s the billy-blind’s advice for you—she was well enough till you came worreting at her—”

“No, she wasn’t, and I didn’t—”

“—and what’s moving, what’s waiting, it can’t come into that little secret place of hers. It didn’t know then, it can’t know now—”

“It? What, the Wild Hunt? No, you mean the Other One, that’s it, right?” Mister Cat hissed in my ear, because I was losing my cool again, but I was miles past listening even to him. “What then? What then are we talking about? What can’t it know? What’s waiting for Tamsin?” I was reaching for him, I was actually going to grab him and shake him. I wonder what would have happened if I had.

Headlights bouncing off the sky; the sound of a truck engine climbing the hill. Evan and Sally. The billy-blind and I stared at each other in absolute silence for a moment. I couldn’t read his eyes at all, but he didn’t seem angry at me. He said, “You go back to school, don’t be asking that big Whidbey girl for help—she don’t like you above half. And sit near the window in that Spanish class.” He had to yell that last bit after me, because I was already heading for the house, with Mister Cat bounding along beside me. We were in bed—me still in my jeans, but with my eyes tight shut— by the time Evan and Sally came in.

Neither of us slept that night, not me and not Mister Cat. He knew a lot better than I what he’d been challenging, and now he crept under the blankets with me and snuggled into my armpit, and stayed there. But every time I looked at him, his eyes were open, and all night he kept moaning really softly to himself, no matter how much I petted him and told him what a hero he was. He only stopped doing it after Miss Sophia Brown showed up toward morning—she just appeared, popping into sight like a silent movie projected on a bedsheet. I almost jumped out of bed when she got under the covers, too, and curled herself right next to Mister Cat. But I didn’t, and that’s the way the three of us stayed until the first cocks went at it before dawn. I remembered a snatch of an old, old ballad Evan sings with Sally sometimes:

I don’t know what a channering worm is, or what it’s chiding about, but the song’s about ghosts. Miss Sophia Brown stood up and stretched herself, just like a real cat, and she gave Mister Cat’s nose one quick lick and disappeared. And I fell straight off to sleep, and got a good five or ten minutes before Julian barged in to tell me it was stupid canteloupes for breakfast (Julian hates fruit), and he wanted to go visit Albert and the sheep afterward. There are days, even now, when I’m quite proud of myself for letting Julian live. Because there were options.

We started school again sharp at the beginning of September, and we landed running. The English don’t believe in easing you back into the classroom—I had all I could do just to keep halfway even with people who must have been studying all summer. The boys were pretty much in the same mess: Tony hadn’t done a thing but dance, and Julian had mostly been doing very weird experiments and reading Asterix comic books in French. As for me, there’s not much to say. I was ready for something that fall, but it wasn’t Sherborne Girls.

As the billy-blind had advised me, I kept away from Penelope Whidbey, and grabbed a seat by the window in Spanish class. (Yes, my grades did go up—not a lot, but some.) When anyone asked me how I’d spent the summer, I’d roll my eyes and sigh, and do my best to look too expensively debauched for words. It didn’t work worth a damn—everyone knew I didn’t have a boyfriend—but I liked doing it anyway, just because I’d never have dared to try it at Gaynor. Meena said it embarrassed her, but it made her laugh, too. Which was good, because Chris Herridge was gone, and they hadn’t even been able to get together for a decent farewell scene. She hardly spoke in class, and hardly ate at all, and she stopped making any sound when she cried, which bothered me more than anything else, I don’t know why. So then I started clowning around, especially at school, doing and saying every silly thing I could think of to get her at least to smile. I got called for it a lot, until Meena made me stop. But it did help—after that, sometimes, I could just look at her across a classroom and she’d giggle a little. So that was something.

The Dorset rains were even worse that fall than they’d been the year before. They actually started before harvest was quite over, which meant we were all helping out in the fields—Sally cancelling her piano lessons, the boys and me right after school, and Evan and the hands going nonstop, dawn to dark, getting in as much of the crop as we could. It was muddy and cold and endless, and miserable, and I broke all my nails, but I still did as much work as Tony and Julian. Then we went and helped with the Colfoxes’ harvest. They had a bigger farm, but not as many workers, and they lost more than we did.

I’ve never been that tired. It got so just lifting my feet to get from one field to another—one row to another—felt like way more trouble than just standing still in the rain forever. I didn’t catch cold, like Tony, or pull a muscle in my back, like Evan. What I did was, I stopped thinking. I stopped thinking about everything except slogging along this row, cutting things off stalks, scooping sodden blue-black things up from the mud, wiping rain out of my eyes, moving on to that row. I learned more about Thomas Hardy that harvest than I ever learned in any literature class. A lot of his people stop thinking, too.

One of the things I didn’t think about was Tamsin—Tamsin and the night world she’d introduced me to. No, that’s not true. Sometimes, when I was most worn out, it was really easy to see myself being one of the people who’d have worked for Roger Willoughby, and all the Willoughbys after him: trudging their hills, plowing their fields, talking old Dorset, having children, losing half of them at birth, living on bread and cheese and beer, and whatever they could glean after the harvest; getting through one winter like this after another the best way they could—and still somehow feeling like part of the Willoughby family. It confused me—I didn’t know if Tamsin was to blame for the way they lived, just for being a Willoughby, or whether she’d never had any more choice than any of them.