Wagging his tail, Osbert follows me as I tiptoe through the wagon.
I open the door to a gorgeous scene: Ancient hemlock trees encircle the wagon and tower above me. All the light here is stained green by the passage of sunlight through thick, high branches. Osbert pushes past me and rushes off into the forest as I step down onto a springy brown carpet of little needles.
Job and January stand nearby, unhitched and untethered, with buckets of water and oats at their disposal. They are used to the wandering life and have spent many a night in strange forests and fields. They nod their noble heads in greeting, and I reply in kind.
From here, I cannot see the road. Strangely, although I am surrounded by dancing bits of sunlight, I cannot see beyond a depth of five or six trees. I shiver, no longer so taken with the place. There is magic in this wood, and I am not certain which kind.
“Good morning,” O’Neill calls from the doorway. “Lovely place, is it not?” He yawns and stretches before leaping to the ground.
“Are you certain it is safe?” I whisper. “Something about this place makes me uneasy.”
“Scarff and I have a pact with the faerie folk of this forest. You are more than safe here.”
I am not sure if he is teasing me or telling the truth. Instead of risking hurting his feelings, I do not reply.
He takes a brush from a cubbyhole beneath the wagon and begins to groom the horses. “Shall we cook breakfast, or would you prefer a cold meal and a quick return to the road?”
“We should keep moving,” I say without a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll check on Maren and then slice some bread and cheese.”
Osbert bursts out of the blackness, a piece of fabric flapping from his well-toothed jaws. He stops at O’Neill’s feet and drops it.
Lifting the wet fabric between two fingers, O’Neill says, “Osbert, what have you been up to?”
The wyvern wags his tail and points with his snout in the direction from which he came.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I believe it is a sample of Simon Shumsky’s trouser leg. According to a pair of doves I spoke to last night, he’s been following us ever since we left Llanfair Mountain. He must be close now.” O’Neill pats Osbert’s head. “Good fellow,” he says.
“Following us? Why?” Wild thoughts somersault through my mind, visions of Simon taking Maren or killing O’Neill in a jealous rage. But he was always such a kind young man. Perhaps he only wants to find out if what he thought he saw through the window was real.
“Simon has seen a mermaid, and some men cannot stay sane once they do so. Why do you think sailors wreck their vessels chasing after them?”
“He loved her,” I say. “He asked her to marry him, and he believed that someday she would consent.”
O’Neill’s face is grim. “That makes it all the more likely that his mind has turned. He is mermaid-stricken, poor fellow.”
“Why are you not afflicted, when you have seen her and touched her and lived with her all these weeks?”
He unbuttons his left cuff and rolls up his sleeve. On his wrist, drawn in ink the color of blood, I see a series of small symbols. “Madame Vadoma gave me this before we left the gypsies’ camp,” he says. “A tattoo that gives protection against mermaid enchantment.”
“Poor Simon,” I say, for even as I fear what he might do, I cannot help feeling sorry for him. “Did you know he was recently married?”
“Poor Mrs. Shumsky,” O’Neill says. “She is as good as widowed, I am afraid. Simon is beyond all help, even the magic kind. It is a tragedy. But we must not stop here any longer.”
Together, O’Neill and I make quick work of hitching the horses to the caravan. Minutes later, we are moving again. Every hoofbeat brings us closer to the ocean. Closer to Maren’s home—and farther away from Simon, if we are lucky.
Our next campsite is an abandoned farm.
After thoroughly inspecting the place to ensure that it is indeed abandoned, I throw open the faded red barn doors and O’Neill drives the caravan inside. The back doors of the barn lead to a fenced pasture where tender spring grasses carpet the earth. Job and January are promptly loosed from their harnesses. Whinnying their delight, they frolic in the sunshine like colts before lowering their heads to nibble the green feast laid out before them.
Osbert, too, dances about on his taloned feet. He stretches his wings to their full breadth and sprints into the pasture. As he gains speed, he beats his wings slowly until the wind catches them and lifts him from the ground. He swoops and circles above O’Neill and me, and then dives down to tease me by running the tips of his claws through the top of my hair. He squawks with wyvern joy. After a while, he soars toward the wooded hills in the west and I can see him no more. I hope he has spotted a rabbit or pheasant to chase, and not a mermaid-stricken young husband.
O’Neill brings Maren’s tub out of the caravan. She is awake, and she watches him adoringly as he inspects the wagon for any need of repair.
“I’m going to the spring house we passed on the way in,” I say, unhooking the buckets from beneath the wagon. “Our mermaid is due for fresh water.” And I am due for time away from young love, I think.
Maren waves and blows me a kiss before resuming her adoration of O’Neill. I hear him singing as I exit the barn, a Scottish ballad Scarff used to sing after dinner. Those dinners seem a hundred years ago.
“Kraa, kraa!” Pilsner announces that he will accompany me. He flies just ahead of me, as if I might forget the route. I suspect that O’Neill has charged him with protecting me from Simon. I suppose the raven could cause a good deal of harm with claws and beak if he were so inclined.
“Do you miss your home, Pilsner?” I ask. “Do you have a wife somewhere? A nest full of featherless babies?”
Without acknowledging my remarks, he flaps his wings and veers to the east. He perches on the crooked lightning rod, which sticks up from the roof of the farmhouse like the antenna of a wounded insect. From there, he watches me steadily until I return to the camp with buckets sloshing.
After supper (two large trout provided by Osbert, a salad of dressed dandelion greens and fiddlehead ferns provided by O’Neill, and an unfortunate pan of singed biscuits made by me), O’Neill stands and pats his trim belly.
“Ladies, wyvern, and raven,” he says with a grand gesture of his arms, “I shall now entertain you as you have never before been entertained.”
Maren clasps her hands on her chest. Her sigh sounds like the tiniest of waves caressing the smoothest sand.
“Do excuse me for a few moments while I prepare to dazzle and astound you!” He scampers into the barn, where the caravan is parked.