The Tangle Box

With the Lady and the Gargoyle.

The truth stunned him so that for a moment he could not breathe or move. He held onto Willow as if their positions had been reversed and now she was the lifeline that kept him from being swept away. She sensed his shock and looked up at him quickly, and her hands came up to hold his face.

“Ben,” she whispered anew. “Please. It’s all right.”

With a massive effort he shrugged off his immobility. There was a tearing at the corners of his vision. The dream that bound them was fragmenting, coming to a close, the magic expending itself. Willow could feel it as well. With the ending of the dance, the dream could not sustain itself. She moved to dress, ignoring the small sounds of fury that emanated from the mists, come back to herself once more and determined that she would not be tricked again. Clothed, she bent to the earth across which she had danced and scooped a handful of the soil into the pouch she carried.

Ben watched her without understanding. He started toward her, then found he could not move. He looked down at himself and saw to his horror that he was fading away.

“Willow!” he cried out in warning.

She rose at once and hurried toward him. But he was already losing shape and definition, returning to his dream, to his sleep, to the prison that still held him. He heard her call out to him, saw her reach for him, watched her try to hold him back. But she could not. The magic that had joined them from the fairy mists of two worlds was breaking up.

“Willow!” he cried out again, desperate now, unable to slow his going. "I'll find you somehow! I promise! I’ll come for you!”

“Ben!” he heard her call to him one final time, and then he was lifting away, transparent in the mists, a bit of air and wind borne back across the gap that separated them in waking, back into the sleep from which he had come.

Alone once more in the silent clearing, Willow stared skyward at the roiling gloom. Ben was gone. The magic of her vision had been strong enough to bring him, but not to hold him. He had set her free of the dance, but could not stay to help her further. She felt a renewed desperation settle through her and fought back against her tears. But there was no time for grief, for anything but her child, and she used her anger as armor and wheeled on Edgewood Dirk.

“I want to go home,” she said quietly, deliberately. “Right now.”

The prism cat blinked. “Then go, Queen of Landover.”

“You will not stop me?”

“Not I.”

“Nor the fairies that ring this clearing?”

Dirk yawned. “They have lost interest in playing this particular game. Interesting, don’t you think, how they failed to challenge Holiday?”

She considered. It was interesting. Why had they let him go? And her. What was it that stopped them from interfering?

“What path do I take, Dirk?” she asked him.

Edgewood Dirk rose and stretched. “Any path will do. All lead to where you are meant to go. Your instincts will guide you. As I said earlier, you are stronger man you think.”

She did not respond to him, too angry with what had been done to her to accept compliments. He had helped her in his own peculiar way, whether by accident or on purpose she still wasn’t certain, but the prism cat was no friend in either case. The fairy mists and the creatures who lived within them, Dirk included, were anathema. She wanted gone from them all.

“You are not coming with me?” she questioned.

“No,” he answered. “You have no further need of me. Your quest is finished.”

So it was. She had the soils she had been sent to gather, the soils of the three worlds to which her child’s blood could be traced. If the Earth Mother spoke the truth, the birth of her child could take place now. There was nothing more for her to do, nothing else required. She could go home.

Folding her cloak about her, clutching her pouch of soils close against her body, she turned and began to walk. She did as she was told and followed her instincts. Surprisingly, they seemed quite clear. They took her in a straight line through the trees.

They took her deep into the mists until she disappeared.





Wakening



Ben Holiday awoke with a start. His eyes snapped open, and he stared straight ahead through the predawn gloom into the trees of the Labyrinth. He did not move; he could not make himself. He was frozen in place as surely as if he had been encased in ice. Questions raced through his mind, one after the other, whispers and dark teasing. Had he dreamed of his meeting with Willow or had it actually taken place? Was it truth or a wild concoction of his imagination? How much of anything that had happened to him that he could remember was real?