The Pooka nodded politely, and turned into something that would have had me wetting my pants at some other time. It was more or less a naked human from the waist down—and so hairy I couldn’t tell if it was male or female—but the upper part was like a huge stoat or weasel, with a weasel’s short clawed forelegs, a weasel’s humped back, masked face and pointed muzzle, and a mouth way too full of white teeth when it put its head back to laugh at me. It said, “Will this do, Jenny Gluckstein?”
The weird thing is, I couldn’t be bothered with it. The way I was feeling right then was so much worse than any monster the Pooka could have come up with that I just nodded and said, “Fine, sure,” as though he’d been a waiter asking me if my dinner was all right. I said, “How come Tony can’t see her?” Because I’d have known if Tony had seen Tamsin. I can’t say why I’d have known, but I would have. Jealousy has its own awful magic.
The Pooka said, “Not everyone is given to see such as Tamsin Willoughby. Indeed, not every ghost can perceive another. As for your brother—”
“Stepbrother—”
“Your brother sees his own ghosts,” the Pooka said. “Dances yet undanced, paces invisible to others that he must set down on the air for them. There is no room in his vision for Tamsin Willoughby, just as you cannot espy the spirits who come to partner him when he calls.” He gave me a weasel’s chattery grin, and added, “And so be easy, Jenny Gluckstein.”
I had myself pretty much under control by then. The shame and anger at myself hadn’t gone anywhere, but I figured I could face them later. “Well, if you know where she is, why didn’t you go there to give her your message? Why come to me?”
“The message is as well for you.” The Pooka came closer. He smelled like an entire weasel, not just half of one, and he towered over me in this shape, but I wasn’t afraid. He said, “You are the first she has ever spoken to.”
“I know that,” I said. “Mr. Guthrie told me.”
“It was not wise, that.” Far beyond the cold, thoughtless flare there’s always something a little like sadness in the Pooka’s eyes, only it’s not safe to look for it. He said, “Wisdom is no concern of mine—but for the dead to linger so long that they come to have speech with the living… this is not right. The least of boggarts would know that.”
I remembered the way Mr. Guthrie had looked at me when I said that Tamsin talked to me. I said, “Then you tell me where she’s supposed to be. Because she doesn’t know.”
The Pooka shook his fierce weasel head. “Not here. It is dangerous, it makes wrongness, and in time other wrongness follows. Somewhere a single stream runs backward—one tree flowers in deep winter—in one nest a hatchling devours its parent. A door meant to close behind Tamsin Willoughby bides open.” He didn’t say anything more for a moment: We just stood looking at each other, me and this completely impossible creature in a room only cats could find. The Pooka said, “This concerns me.”
“Well, me, too,” I said. “Whatever it means. Look, she knows she shouldn’t still be here—it’s not like she wants to stay. Something’s holding her, there’s some kind of reason. Maybe you ought to be concerned about that, instead of trees and doors and baby birds.”
The Pooka looked at me for a long time. Weasels have eyes like round maroon pinheads, but the Pooka’s eyes were as yellow as ever, and just as deep with danger. The weird thing was, though, that he also seemed the least bit uncomfortable—embarrassed, even—which was ridiculous. We hadn’t spent a lot of quality time together, but if there was one thing I already understood, it was that the Pooka doesn’t get embarrassed. He’s the Pooka.
What he finally said was, “That is not in my power.”
I said, “What? Oh, please.”
The Pooka actually almost smiled, I think—it’s hard to tell with weasels, even big weasels with human legs. He said, “I do not lie about such things, Jenny Gluckstein. If I could have been of help to Tamsin Willoughby, I might well have done so long ago, but I cannot. It is forbidden, which is only to say impossible. She is not of my world.”
“Please, ”I said again. “She’s a lot more of your world than she is of mine or anyone else’s. She’s like a damn tour guide to your world, for heaven’s sake.”
“Tours… I have seen such things,” the Pooka said, which surprised the hell out of me. Though I guess it shouldn’t have, when you think about it. “But this guide belongs no more to the world she reveals than do those who trudge behind her. Quick or dead, Tarnsin Willoughby remains human, and even I” —and when the Pooka said even I, you heard it— “even I cannot guide her in her turn. I might as well be the Black Dog, silently foreboding, or I might be the billy-blind, forever offering the right advice at the wrong time.” The weasel-head leaned over me; the Pooka’s golden eyes drew me up and in. The Pooka said, “Quick or dead, there’s no helping a human, but if anyone is to succor Tamsin Willoughby, it must be you.”
And if anything could have snapped me out of the blank enchantment the Pooka’s eyes always laid on me, that was it. I jumped back, right away from him. I yelled, “What?”
“Only you. And no chance of that unless you come rightly to understand her plight—which you do not, no more than she.” The Pooka got bored with the weasel and became a little gray rabbit with yellow eyes. He said, “Listen to the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt will tell you what you must know.”
“The Wild Hunt,” I said. I’m not even sure the words actually came out. The rabbit sat up on its haunches and began washing its face and fluffing its whiskers, just the way cats do.
“Listen to the Wild Hunt, Jenny Gluckstein,” it said again. Then it turned and leaped straight through that pointy dark window, in a flurry of wings that looked too big to fit. And left me standing alone in Tamsin’s room, which didn’t smell at all of vanilla when she wasn’t there.
So that was also the winter when I learned a lot more about Tony’s dancing than I ever expected to. If Tamsin was spending time in his studio, maybe I wouldn’t be so jealous if I were there with her, at least trying to understand what she got out of it. Tony was not crazy about the idea, even though I’d already been in his damn studio, and let him try out his moves on me, and generally behaved a lot better than his brother. I could have told him that there was a ghost watching him get into his tights and put on the legwarmers that Sally had knitted for him, but I didn’t. It took us a while, but we cut a deal. I promised to sweep the floor when it needed doing, and absolutely never to comment unless asked. And not ever to bring Mister Cat.
Personally, I think he’d been ready for a long time to have someone see him practicing. He just would have liked it to be someone who understood what the hell he was trying to do. Sally and Evan both love music, but even Sally doesn’t know much more about dance than I do. Poor Tony. Working by himself in a real vacuum—no one to study with, no one to talk to him or trade ideas with, hardly ever getting even a glimpse of real dancers—he finally had to settle on me as an audience, the best of a bad lot. Maybe.
And he couldn’t know that he had another one, a better one than all his family put together. I didn’t see Tamsin the first time I dropped in when he was working. (I’m saying “dropped in” because I tried hard to make it casual—just sort of sidling through the door, don’t mind me, and sidling over to sit in a corner.) I could smell her, but it took a while before I made her out, almost invisible on a chair that Tony was using for some of his stretching exercises. She wasn’t more than a few inches away from him— when he braced his foot on the chair to bend over it, he actually stepped through Tamsin’s own foot, and the hem of her white dress. It was a nightgowny sort of thing, and she looked like a little girl in it, staring up at Tony as he touched his forehead to his knee, then straightened, then did it again, and again. Usually he wears a headband when he works, but he didn’t have it on that day, and his sweaty brown hair kept flopping into his eyes. Once or twice Tamsin lifted her hand, as though she wanted to brush it away.