The Problem with False (18)

They did not descend like most books chronicling long wars would have had False believe. It had nothing to do with descending. It had to do more with swarming, he thought, like little erratic insects, from too many directions to count. And swarms did not really descend, they arrived. He had seen one witch distinctly, whipping around Judith’s mushroom cloud by air. And he could parcel out features—brown hair flying about in a weave, eyes surrounded by dollops of shiny blue paint. Her arms were blue midway down, clasping onto what looked to be a staff of some gem, not unlike Judith’s except that it was formed more into a zig-zag. This was one witch, and after her arrived the swarm, which appeared to him one mass writhing in circles by air and—past the haze of Judith’s explosion—by land.

For the most part it didn’t seem as though any of the swarm really concerned itself with the three of them sitting in a collective pile on the grass (for Jove was now sitting, her shoulders fallen, toppled over like a vase from its pedestal.) She was alert but could not seem capable to defend them. False watched her warily every few minutes while he kept an eye on the raging bugs, flushing about against the blackening sky, illuminated eerily by their many whirling spells and thunder. There must have been a thousand of them, False thought, at least. One thousand witches all arrived for one little blonde twit whose only true defense thus far had been to run. False could not find Pam now among throngs of witches pocking the earth with pointed shoes or bare toes. They were scrambling around something which he assumed might have been her, being their focus. But a second group focused elsewhere in the blue haze, so he assumed that to be Judith.

Suddenly there came an enormous shock of pale green lightning not reaching from the sky but to it, accompanied by fleeting accessory bolts, and followed by a wave of energy—it was formless, but False felt it hit them with less ferocity. It quite nearly pushed Jove over, but he and Urn could hold fast. Witches flew a small distance and fell flat, recovering slowly, dragging silver and orange hair out of the dirt, bearing mud on the satin or burlap of their dresses. For a moment False thought he had seen Judith turning through advances, and then an explosion of green, sickening yellow revealed itself as close to them as the witches were, and following that a large white orb formed, crackled, and burst just over the ground. Little purple spells flew and tumbled, fizzled, no contact. He had thought it silly that they sent so many witches—he had not realized how weak, how insignificant, they were. To have magic only, to possess a flicker of it only in one place, was an immense disadvantage.

They looked on as witches were tossed nearer. Urn stood close to Jove, observing, and False lay behind, not himself at all and feeling time was nothing he owned. Thoughts and notions had been forming in his head of himself always on the outside, always struggling to do something with the magic he supposedly naturally had. He had once fallen to the ground in forfeit as Judith came under attack in House, then again as he was pursued by witches looking for her here. He was pressed flat and sliced and each time the dreadful pain and fear had oppressed him. Now he supposed his nothingness was empowering. This could not be the war that ended Judith, he realized, because she still had a duty to House. And if there was anything he could do for House, he thought he had better do it.

It was against him—or his idea of himself. But House could not cease to exist, and he had some concept of how to make magic happen. There was a wave, a shock of orange foam, which promptly pushed a line of witches back, rolled them out flat and disappeared.

“I remember that one,” Jove said, presumably about Pam. “When she was learning, she filled the entire Checkneye Inn with foam.”

So False, whose mind was ever turning now, targeted one fallen witch in particular on a whim, whose hair was in knots like a rope all down her back. She began to recover, took up her fluorescent magenta staff, and propped herself up, posed to sit there and strike at some target from a distance. She spared a look at a very green witch coming to her feet alongside, and shouted loud enough for False to understand.

“Who is the other one?” the green witch hollered, getting her legs about her. “They’re taking us for a ride!”

“Not sure!” the knotted one called, taking her place firmly upon one knee. She held her staff up close to her chin, pointed out into the swarm. “Tired of full-on, I’m taking longshot!”

“Luck then, but you don’t need it!” the green cried, and she went running to rejoin her hoard, becoming again a mass among too many other masses, smoke, and fireworks.

False, thinking that taking a longshot’s post in such a battle was the cowardly thing to do, turned his eyes seriously on her and he thought, what should I feel? He supposed, first of all, he should feel against her, because he was. Second of all, he should imagine her staff broken into many useless pieces. And third, he imagined her buried in a shallow grave. He closed his hand into a sopping, drip-dropping fist and thought all those things at once, bored them into his conscious.

The witch he stared at fell flat suddenly as if pressed to the earth by a giant hand, and as her staff fell under the same pressure it appeared to warp and disfigure—but it didn’t stop there. Whatever pressed down on her forced her into the earth, sank her down, carving a four-armed star into the squelch and squick of the mud. However far she went down into the earth had been left to the spell, since False had released responsibility of it. Spells, he realized, often would do what they wanted for a little while after you left them (if you let them).

Urn had a way of feeling magic immediately. He had been keeping an eye on the witches who fell or were tossed particularly close, and as she made her descent through the mud he turned a sharp eye at False, peering around the back of Jove. Jove, too, had turned to look at him.

“What are you doing?” Urn wailed. That was familiar—his voice rang in False’s ears from ages ago. What are you doing throwing hexes? “You’ll worsen, and you’ll draw attention! We’ve been unnoticed over here, you’ve ruined us!”

“She’s still sinking and no one has noticed,” Jove observed. “Their focus isn’t particularly on us, in any case. If he hadn’t done it, I might have. She was too close.”

“I’ve had a thought,” False said to Urn, pushing himself up on bowing feet, teetering on his sliced ankle just in the slightest. He could stand, though, and he was much too tired of sitting on the borderlines. Judith had a duty to protect House. He wouldn’t allow sheer numbers to overwhelm her—he couldn’t betray his home in that way. “I’ve thought that I’ve been dead since about five minutes ago.”

“False—where are you going? Stop!” Urn cried, bristling and fumbling along over the mud as False began toward the swarm, trudging and thinking of everything he hated about a war, and about the defiling of home. It was as though a ring of armed wreckers stood ready and waiting outside the Door to slaughter everything sleeping or awake, to pierce the comfort and sanctity of the room and of the personal life continuing harmlessly therein since the Door had been closed. And what were they doing in there? he wondered. Were they worried? Did they think they would stop existing soon? What qualified them as enemies to witches no longer occurred; shadows were surviving in there without involvement in the warm world, so what was it to any of them now? Why should they destroy the place?

Jove and Urn alike yelled after him, perpetually close by. Urn’s voice traveled upward likely as he climbed onto Jove’s shoulder for an anchor. There were a few explosions, small ones that left many a witch overturned and still in their wake, of colors he didn’t quite remember. He trudged and found witches suddenly frothing around him at regular intervals, continually going at and being turned away from two different locations as if circling some repulsive carrion. They were all so focused that, until False came up on them, thought hatred and the eternal why? and flipped them head-down, buried them, or tripped them in a wrap of their robes, they couldn’t spare any notice toward him. For all the powerful things False felt, some of the magical effects were underwhelming. But it was only his feeling; if he had known formulas and had proper training it might have amounted to more. For the most part, unlike the witch he had sunk, his spells only served to part the witches in his way, vex them, and above all alert them. He moved as lightly as possible (though he limped and bent in disconcerting ways) and had his head on a constant swivel, looking out for witches, but more importantly looking for someone familiar among the swarm. Had Judith not cut her hair down, it might have been simpler to see her.

“False, what are you”—Urn had started to say, and his voice caught in his throat. False glanced back and caught a glimpse of Jove moving sharply to block a close throw from a witch with red stripes down her face. Urn hadn’t been holding steadfast enough to her shoulder and he toppled forward and off, hitting the ground below with a smuck against the mud. He recovered at an instant, paying Jove little mind as she blocked again, sent a beam of yellow light just past the target—which only had the effect of scooting the witch to one side slightly—and immediately as the witch moved Jove swung her other hand, releasing a clap of invisible thunder that jolted the witch far out into the distance. The witches who had been near faltered and stumbled away, gaining some ground between them and their new opponents.

“Go back! What are you going to do?” Urn continued, trying to maintain False’s eyes. “You’re no great sorcerer! You’re no help! Now they’re aware of us!”

False just shrugged—and ducked out of the way of a bullet of sparkling fire, which careened into a witch on the other side. His foot caught on a witch lying immobile on the ground in his path who was smeared with blue and purple and seemingly harmless. He stepped over her and kept his head swiveling; Urn caught up with him and scaled his clothes up to his shoulder.

“You’re in the thick of it now, and are you proud of yourself?” Urn scoffed in his ear.

Around him he heard distinctly, from the swishing crowd of many who had broken from the whirlpool of focus to observe them and ponder their next moves, “That’s Jove,” and, “I thought she’d died years ago,” and, “Careful, go in groups,” and, “On your toes, we’ve a shadow over here!”

More and more of them turned. False felt a little sheepish, a little stupid. Some shadows, like Lye, were great threats, but he was no such shadow. In some way, however, he also felt very clever. He was turning the army around from their previous focus—he felt more explosions and teetered on a couple shockwaves, tripped on a few arms where witches lay still. Wherever Judith was out there, the eyes were not so focused on her now. She might stand an easier time of making a thick battle thin in short time, False thought. If they weren’t watching, they weren’t prepared. But there were a lot of eyes to be divided.

They were pointing their staffs as he wandered and looked, appearing quite lost and confused, but for the most part they seemed to allow him through. They were watchful but not immediately malevolent, which he thought was quite contrary to their nature. But Jove was at his side, however frail, and the wind carried her violet tresses around him, like a hand on his back. He seemed to feel that they abstained attack because Jove was present, but he could not be sure.

“Judith should be nearby,” she whispered to him. “We will find her.”

Judith was his last remnant, aside from Urn, of home. That was what he preferred to think of, not a swarm of magic and agitation. Granted, they were thoughts of blunders and disappointments, but the point was that they all occurred in his home, within familiar walls, inside of his intimate privacy which nothing could really sully. He did want to find her. He wanted to give her the upper hand if he could, and preserve her for the saving of House. She still had to figure out, once this was over, how to reopen the Door. Then remained the curse, if it existed.

“We’re looking for Judith?” Urn scoffed. “Why? Let her do her job.”

No one answered him. In their fluctuating, staring perimeter, False heard, “Shadowphile!” and “Traitor!” But Jove appeared to pay no particular attention to the accusations. They seemed to rest on some delicate armistice, shuffling their way around looking for familiarity. As they moved, the witches did, too, and threatened.

Then there was a distracting blue burst of electricity, and the flying of grass clods every which-way. So False called out, “Judith!” innocently enough, and to a bunch of distracted heads this voice was provocation enough—it startled the lot of them and they became vicious, little black eyes glinting and skin painted and blazing, some claws shining in the night, some with tails flicking. A grey flame bit the ground just in front of False; Urn squeaked and False stumbled backward into Jove, who kept him in place as the entire circle descended at once with their staffs.

Only then did Jove extend her hand and from empty space pull a long, gnarled, wooden thing, leafing and pointed like a bolt of lightning at the top, circled with golden twine. She twirled the staff and pointed it out, swishing it in a circle around them, drawing a fluorescent indigo line in the air at the height of False’s knee. From that line burst forth a wave of indigo creepers, vining over the open space, encircling and tripping the entire first wave, holding them tight until they either fainted or died—False wasn’t sure which.

Again False heard, “It’s Jove!” across an approaching crowd. Yes, he thought, Jove, familiar only by her hair and apparent magical reputation. But it took all she had just to hold the staff—she was veering forward and backward, shaking her head as if to clear dizziness. She had to drop her staff, and it dematerialized into purple-painted leaves and then nothing. The approaching waves of witches were cautious and the space between them was large. False constantly looked at writhing groups of witches out in the distance, crowded together and focused on something else. He turned his head to the right, where he saw a similar enemy crowd. But this crowd seemed to be thinning, not with any explosive measure. They were just dropping in large quantities to the ground, and as a space cleared he caught an orange spark and a flicker of blonde.

The voices of the witches in their circle were changing as Jove’s strength of presence fled. “Are you sure that’s Jove?” they murmured. “No one else has magic like that. What’s eating her?” “What is that thing?” they whispered, their eyes hovering over False. He supposed he looked very little like a shadow anymore—and more like some lesser evil, a strange monster of the warm world.

Then there was a great uproar to False’s right, where he had seen that possible image of Pam somewhere in that witching wilderness—he looked and saw individual witches falling backward and dematerializing, so to speak. They would hit the ground and burst into bits of paper, it looked like, or shiny clouds, and leave nothing behind. And through the group that had fallen out of her way appeared Pam, hovering just over the clamor. A sloppy half circle of witches gained at her back and she seemed to be trying to gain some distance from them. There was a sound at False’s right, a sputter and gag, and as he looked he saw that Jove had fallen, suddenly, to her knees, her hands sinking down into the mud. Urn made a noise at the back of his throat and False, for the first time since he had known her, thought to reach for her and at least try to pick her up.

The witches had taken advantage immediately and drew themselves in on the three rogues, but Jove would not let them quite yet. He had never seen her in outrage, but False supposed that the situation provoked it out of her. She rose a hand and clenched it into a fist and the first wave of witches approaching her burst into shiny, glasslike fragments. Jove shuddered and put her hand back down. False reached for her arm but paused—she was coughing up those red fluids into the black mud, little tears drippling down from her eyes as she closed them. So False, all-too-vulnerable, looked toward where he had seen Pam, trying to muster magic feeling in his breast, finding none. He raised his voice as loud as he could to signal her, and as she had finished casting a foam repellant at a bunch of red-eyed rabid magicfolk, she turned to the harkening, face drawn taut and tense, and her eyes became large white voids.

She began to drift a little urgently toward their situation, swiping her hands around her, giving inaccurate attacks in any direction to deflect the swarm at her dangling feet. False’s attention drifted between her approach and the two witches enclosing him on his right—one with striped red and black hair, another with a face painted in green and yellow, streaked together. They each held staffs out to push him back, but False had no real place to back away; his leg was planted and stationary just beside Jove. And Pam, if she had been coming steadily, should have arrived by then, but as False searched for her, he witnessed her careening down into the mud, her ankle ensnared by a spell. She made contact with the ground with a smuck and lay there but a minute before she propped herself up on her elbows. But witches had come down on her, too, and one jabbed its staff into the small of Pam’s back, sending her into convulsions and shrill cries.

Jove had heard and turned her head up at once—to see two new witches, jamming their shoes into Pam’s ribs as she clawed her fingers into the ground and tried to drag herself away. They threw staffs at her, pulled at the short crop of her hair…like a pack of Muckett’s finest seeders. And Pam, terrified, clasped her hands over her head and just screamed, sending whiplashes of orange magic out around her, enough to deflect a few but not the great many arriving upon her all together. The more they attacked her, the less she could retaliate, the more she screamed in tiny, fragile, infant tones.

“Pamela!” Jove cried, and coughed wickedly, her chest heaving. Perhaps only at that point the witches around them realized the full alliance between False, Jove, Urn, Pam, and Judith—or perhaps they didn’t, but the way they fell upon Jove, seizing the trail of her hair, encircling her in red, glowing rings, holding her to the ground with their boots upon her back, suggested as much. The two witches near False needed only grab his arm and twist it and down he went—they took their hands away immediately and grimaced at the black tar that coated their skin, looking on False’s melting form with full bewilderment. Urn hopped from False’s shoulder and stood beside him, eyes darting frantically around, and as one of the two witches seized False’s neck with her staff and held him, Urn ducked back—stepped forward—and ducked away again.

And suddenly, like a fleeting vision, the mass of witches struggling in the background parted to an immense shockwave that startled everyone surrounding False and Jove and paused the world a moment, and forth in a cloud of savage blue broke Judith. It was only right to believe she was coming for False—of course she was. But there, now, False thought—why did it appear that she was running away from him? Was it a trick of his mind, or—no, she was. In her route she slung that black tourmaline so sharply that witches struck by its wake flew out of sight and the rest of the wave took sudden extreme caution. Those that surrounded Pam had not been paying any particular attention, however, and in a great, crackling swing Judith cut into them with what seemed like very little effort and a great deal of rage.

Her eyes blazed green from afar, little glow marbles in the spell-lit night, and each witch in her way either simply ceased to exist or had fallen away in piles. One leftover witch gave her some trouble and interlocked staffs with her, and Judith whisked the staff out of her opponent’s hand, tossed it, and struck her in the throat with the tourmaline—so the witch’s limbs compressed and her body dropped down into the form of a tiny little white mass which scampered away thereafter, lost in the grass. There were plenty of witches left to approach thereafter, but they limped away for one solid, thoughtful moment and reconsidered…as Judith, with such great care that False had never quite seen, took up Pam by the arm as one would lift False in his delicate state—and supported Pam on her shoulder. Pam’s legs dragged and Judith took on the majority of her weight, pulling her slowly and not employing any extra magic to lift her. Slowly and deliberately she raised her head in False’s direction, as if to say: “Now I will help you.”

The witch who had False’s neck in her staff pushed him flat on the ground suddenly, and Urn, in quick flight, appeared from his fragile camouflage in shadow to try and deflect the witch, but he could not bring the spell forth for all his worth, just a prickling of the fur on his neck—so, backing down to avoid a reaching staff, he cried out for Judith.

“Drop that one and help us!” he yelped, and False, over the mud, could see Judith straighten like a bolt, resuming her priorities. If she had Urn’s fur, False supposed that she would have bristled. But she had Pamela’s heavy form slung over her—she glanced from Pam to False, to Pam, and to False—and before she could move to act in any way, be it to cast a spell to carry Pam or to drop the witch and run to False’s aid, some witch’s staff was on her wrist and she fought it and held fast to Pam at the same time. And False tried to lift his head, but was forced back down, this time facing Jove. Her attackers had pulled her hair as taut as it would go and their heels forced themselves into the curve of her back. False presumed her dead—but though the circles under her eyes were deep and red fluid smeared her cheek from the corner of her mouth, she stared at him flat and hard. She needed say nothing—her stare conveyed to him, in silent language, a secret confidence, some reassurance that she was in control of something.

He gave her a short onceover and realized that she had been, with her free-lying hand, scraping small trenches into the mud with her sharp fingernails. This process generated tiny white sparks that fizzled into nothing—but she seemed to be changing the atmosphere. False had already been hot, but now it was an electric heat. Everywhere the long hair of witches seemed to be rising upward. And overhead had pulled mysterious grey clouds that gave peals of deep-throated thunder, lighting the effervescent curves of the sky. The witches around Jove glanced up curiously, then down at her, and up again. But before they could express the panic that crossed their eyes, darts of white hot lightning, many and vicious, made contact with almost every enemy witch False could see. He could see, on his level, feet scattering and fleeing, and everywhere the bodies of witches stricken, wrought with electricity, briefly revealed their inside structures—bones like False had seen but a few times—and became nothing but thin air.

False and Urn were unaffected. The staff around False’s neck fell slack and clattered down—before he bothered to loosen it he met eyes with a freed and disheveled Jove, whose hair had fallen in dirty disarray. He could not look at her straight because her eyes were closed in rest; a sort of deep rest, in which the shadows of her features were lesser, were few, and her face was still and expressive of a particular Elysium, grave but not buried. Her clawing fingers were still in their trenches and False was, at once, startled. What it meant to him he did not know. A simple feeling rested like a piece of twine in his throat, quiet but disconcerting. And he felt sick to see her at such peace, for reasons he could not fathom.

Urn appeared in False’s peripheral vision, frantic about returning to the cottage because there were still some excessively perturbed witches left, but False had been too busy watching Jove to abide. Her skin began, odd though it was, simply leafing away…into purplish petals, leaving holes in her solidity. Whereas other witches had burst without grace, her form sort of collapsed, dazzlingly, with a fluttering tune, in the way that Guck Trees shed themselves bare following the Thorough Wind. Little by little she became pearly purple pieces that drifted into the mud and dispersed as sparks into the ground. What was left was empty space—save for a tiny glowing chip from her center. It hovered in limbo a minute after the rest of her had gone, conspicuously constant and somewhat lifelike. And suddenly, as False watched and Urn clamored, that small piece shot up toward the blackness and stars of the sky. Time had slowed in the palette of his memory and after it vanished he could see it steal away slowly in his mind, again and again.

He had witnessed something he felt hopeless at comprehending. But it had nearly seemed to him that she had been all but a seed—except it hadn’t looked like a seed. It had been like a star, trapped a while in the body of a witch and freed after she departed. All witches were not this way; full many a witch had become but pieces on this battlefield, False thought. Yet Jove had left something extra behind, perhaps not of the warm world at all.

And then someone had him by the arm and pulled him out of the mud a little too fast. A large quantity of him kept to the mud not surprisingly, and he came away frail and skeletal, though he had no real bones to hold him up. He felt it was Judith who had seized him—and she exclaimed in horror as she picked him up and stood him on his feet, realizing how much of him had melted away. She tried to set him up to stand on his own, but False could no longer stand. He swayed forward, his eyes sticky and tired, and Judith caught him again, and held him close.

“Your seed!” Urn hollered, standing at False’s feet. False looked down and realized, with a sort of paltry distance, that he could see it very slightly—or he thought he was seeing it through his semi-transparent clothes in the cavity of his stomach, for he had never seen it before. It was but a small, misshapen lump occupying a solid place within his transparency. Urn looked desperately to Judith. “They’re regrouping! Hurry!”

Pam floated out ahead of them, toward the visible cottage standing in the distance, and signaled for them to follow in retreat. Judith lifted False entirely on her own with little effort and no magic and rushed after Pam, Urn catching a ride on her shoulder.

False, from over Judith’s shoulder, watched little droplets of himself fly out and crash into the mud behind them—individual witches were becoming a mob where he looked, and seemed to be catching on.

“There are still so many,” Judith said, and False felt the vibration of her deep voice all through him. “What will the cottage help?”

Urn did not reply. False saw the doorway rush over him and the door proceeded to slam behind them. Furniture walked itself over to the area and blocked the door feebly. All False heard was incessant panting—Pam, floating side to side, frantic, was gasping for air, her knees bloodied and muddy, her face full of bruises, wringing her hair at the root. She murmured incoherent, incomprehensible phrases and Judith, coming down on her knees and resting False against her, gave a few paranoid looks in her direction.

“They will be here, they will be…” Pam said, loud enough to be heard. All of a sudden she dropped her hover and crashed to the floorboards, picking herself up with some difficulty, trying to drag her bottom half into a more favorable position than where it had landed. “And Jove,” she cooed, “and Jove…”

“Pick yourself up and help us, already!” Urn demanded. “One of you, do something! We have but a few minutes and I wont…and I won’t…”

“She can’t,” Judith said with her usual blunt charm, cradling False’s head in her arms. “She can’t use her legs. She has to hover.”

“Then sit on the ground and figure out the Door! The witches are coming upon us! They’ll be here,” Urn cried, “in a few minutes, and I’m not going to—

“We’re finished!” Pam roared suddenly, her mouth hanging open. She slouched and scratched at her scalp. “There are still scores and I’ve all but exhausted…we’re finished and I can’t fight the whole city of Drole…” Her breath came hard and heavy, vicious, sick and stupid. She rolled her back forward, crunched her torso, planted her forehead down on the floorboards, and wheezed. She would cry and whimper and rock, and could not seem to hear Urn. “And Jove…” she repeated. “Oh…”

Judith could only stare. If she feared anything, she was well-trained at masking it. She stared as though no great danger existed for them. As if False were not in danger, as if Urn were silent. False watched her curiously, wondering what she thought or planned, wondering if she understood the situation at all.

Then came the first bang on the door, and whether Judith knew it or not, she held False’s head a little closer, tilted his face toward her a little further. The door, unremarkable on its own, bowed inward with great elasticity as if bound to break in shards at any moment—and yet it paused in breaking, cracked though it appeared, and snapped back with a loud swick, suddenly undamaged. Judith allowed the door and Pam successive, hard gazes. And then she turned her long nose down at False and met his eyes. He cared to look at her if only a little, if only because he didn’t have the strength to turn his head. She reminded him of days spent awake before ten, and ruined truths, and a bucket of smoking tar. Her fingertips were still stained with it, dipped so many times for the purpose of painting the ugly, streaked face he now saw, still blotted with the remnants of her red handprints. Her hair spanned her shoulders in volume and a halo of frizz encircled the top of her head.

The door bowed inward again and groaned like something living, pushing furniture out of its way—almost, almost snapped in two, groaned and folded, and returned to its original shape. The furniture reassembled before it steadily. Pam had all but collapsed, her arms strewn about her in frantic wailing. She dug her fingernails into the wood and consistently uttered phrases the likes of, “I won’t die! I can’t die!”

“We’ve taken enough of them,” Judith said suddenly as Urn paced back and forth, his feet pit-pattering “We can take the rest. We might try.”

“What is it worth anyway?” Urn wailed. “What is it worth to you, Judith? Our world is not yours and here’s your proof—in very little time your one connection to it will be gone!” He nodded toward False, stared a moment as if regretting the fact, and resumed his pacing. “Useless, the lot of you! Two True witches, nay, three! And all this time—useless! I believed…what did I believe anyway? I believed it could be sorted! Useless!”

Judith’s eyes fell away from Urn in the way that said she hadn’t been listening, not truly. To her he was but a fleck, as he had always been. As a child his every criticism bored her, and disturbed her not the least that she had ever shown. She glanced only briefly at False and closed her eyes hard until the lines above and below them were deep set and still. Unconsciously, her fingers twitched over False’s face. Her arms had taken the black stain of his being up to the elbow—now, False observed, she appeared more like a shadow than she ever had.

Suddenly coherent, and quick to interrupt after the third banging of the door had startled her and kept them safe inside, Pam’s head shot up amidst the blonde scrabble of her hair and she shot Judith a defeated gaze. “Oh, throw it in,” she murmured, her voice dry and raggedy. “Even if you get the Door open, False is too weak to void us there.”

But Judith never heard. Ever softly her hands trembled, and her eyes squinted—False could see them moving underneath her lids. Pam, seeming softer about it now, gazed on with a dead face, on which streaks of tears deepened the black and blue colors of the blotches on her cheeks. Urn still paced, glancing every now and again at Judith with perturbation and muttering nonsense to himself. Continually he shook his head at no one in particular.

So Judith’s eyes came open eventually and to a rather unenthusiastic crowd. If she had been successful it would have had no effect on any of them except, possibly, False, who would have reveled in the fact that shadows could now pass into the warm world and try to retaliate. But from the moment she opened her eyes he could see the failure in their dullness. She blinked at False, and False completed a whole blink in return about eight seconds later.

“Even if,” Pam breathed again, and Judith’s eyes met hers immediately—not in a biting way by any means, but when Judith was paying attention she always overwhelmed her target with it all at once, undividedly.

“I heard you,” Judith said.

Pam’s shoulders fell lower and they exchanged a coupled, unmalignant gaze. So Pam sighed, and her eyes fell. “Your friend is dying,” she whispered, keeping her eyes soft on False. “I would rather we retreat in here with him…than leave him in solitude to fight.”

“He won’t die,” Judith said, “if I can do something.”

Pam, for whom difficult conversation was not an art, appeared to struggle through her thoughts. The door banged a fourth time, giving her leave for distraction. With immense difficulty the door maintained its hinges and the wood cried aloud, returning to its firm position somewhat crookedly. The furniture reorganized against the door, busted though some articles were.

“If you use such things with enough care,” Pam observed as if reading from a book, looking toward the blockade, “they begin to take on a life devoted to you…” As the door resumed its position in the frame she glanced at Judith in such a sad way that Judith’s fingers strengthened their hold on False. “By the time you had done anything,” Pam added, “he will have liquefied through the floorboards. There is nothing I can do. Oh, Judith. Oh…Jove. Oh, the lot of us. Oh.” She pressed her forehead again down to the floorboards and fell into a silent weeping.

Urn ceased his pacing very suddenly to cast a look at False. As he viewed him again, bare and skeletal and mostly formless, very nearly chancing his seed to the open atmosphere, he drew nearer and sat alongside, tail flicking, eyes hard and stuck in a sour glare with some hint of care deep inside it, like a pearl within a gnarled, crumpled shell.

Judith stared harshly, very suddenly, into False—or very nearly through him. “I couldn’t open the Door,” she said, rocking the room some with the unadjusted volume of her voice.

“We’re all aware by now,” Urn grumbled, keeping his voice tight.

At first Judith’s face became still and in some way serene, as though the waves of the Dark Sea washed into her immediate consciousness, pulling her thoughts back to them and to the shore, and the darkness. In the silence her eyes had become all pupil with only the hint of a thin green circumference, looking as Urn’s eyes did when he had taken the form of a cat, and been startled. Her chest rose and fell so slowly, she may have been dying in turn.

“I couldn’t break the curse,” she said, and Urn gave her a stern glance.

Her arms encircled his neck in fractions—False’s clothes were becoming flat and his shoes had fallen from the stubs of his feet. He blinked, and as he pulled his eyes open again he saw that small, glistening shores had pooled at her lower lids, giving her eyes the illusion of liquidation. The corners of her mouth tightened and he watched, quite nearly shocked, as the tears dribbled out of her eyes and carved cleaner streaks on her skin. She sucked her bottom lip in and bit on it, leaning far over him, keeping him. She seemed to swell, False thought, as he sat painless. Swell and bear, he supposed, but what was she storing inside that could weigh her down so well?

Suddenly, her teeth lost hold of her lip and her mouth came open, breathed hard, and quivered, and like a quick high tide her eyes blinked rapidly and squeezed shut, dripping heavy, hot tears onto False’s face. Exhaling largely, her entire top half bent, seemingly compressing every inch of air she held. She pressed herself nose to nose with False and came away a fraction, holding him tighter than he could manage.

“Don’t go away,” she wheezed, glancing with cloudy eyes at his arms, down to small twigs, and to his middle, where the ghost cotton of his garments, transparent in itself, still revealed the small husk of his seed. She looked to him, so wracked, so desperate that she did not seem like Judith at all. She resembled herself ages ago, toddling about and crying—but these tears were so sincere that False did not quite know what to compare her to. A witch, he supposed, would cry this way. Unless, he thought, she meant happiness by this expression, which False highly doubted. Judith blinked tears free of their anchors left and right, and as the door slammed twice, lightly, she hissed, “Don’t go away yet.”

Urn had been thoroughly irritated. “What should I have to endure?” he cried, standing swiftly, his face wrinkled as much as it possibly could be. “All of this, for what? This should have been sorted! You should have sorted this!” He shot his eyes like darts between Judith and Pam, now both attentive. “If you had sorted it, then we wouldn’t be sitting here all dying. Matter of fact, if that fool hadn’t stolen you into my home in the first place, nothing would need sorting! Ruined! And how dare you all! Useless, the lot of you!”

Judith’s crying had slowed to observe him, listening and susceptible for the first time to his every insult, possibly pinpricked by every syllable.

“Why do I care for you at all?” Urn hissed, simmering down to room temperature as more knocks came to the crying, whining door and as Pam tilted her befuddled face. “Of all things and you”—he stole a glance at False, who locked eyes with him straight on as best as he could—“you!”

Urn’s eyes twitched, impatient and backed up with screams and hollerings aplenty, appearing to bloat himself with the very restraint, until all of a sudden his agitation poured over and he cried, “FINE! Fine, already!” He cast a sharp eye at the ceiling and back down. “Are you satisfied? Fine, I give! Hecate almighty, boil my poison—the lot of you, and your—fine. Judith, stand clear.”

Judith, her eyes still bubbling with stray tears and her emotions still hot, did not quite understand him or did not hear him, and so she did not move. False, in a final stupor, wondered in an echoing fashion who Hecate was, and how Urn came to know her. He could see very clearly still but the images conveyed to his mind appeared and then slid away with little meaning.

And Urn, groaning and fidgeting, hissing under his breath, rolled backward into a furry round ball which, once formed, never again revealed the familiar face of the shapeshifter. False thought, is this what it’s like when Urn changes forms? He wholly expected to see a cat, nothing large, but the small furry ball began to glow softly—and oddly, it lost its softness, lost its small, consistent shape, and began to stretch tall and lean. From it grew long appendages, two near the top, like arms, and two at its base, like legs. The shape remained this way, limbs growing, only until the leg-like sticks touched the ground. Then, finally, the glowing form began to dissipate from the bottom up—revealing…a very nice, appropriate pair of shoes, not unlike a pair False would own.

As the quality of False’s mind degraded, he could only appreciate what quality pants materialized out of the form thereafter—black, hemmed with gold stitching. The double breasted black-and-gold coat was a noble choice, False pondered softly. And when the arms and gloved hands had appeared, a distinctly human head came through with regal blue eyes, intent and sharply gazing, and shoulder length, curly yellow locks. Quite human, False observed—but where had Urn gotten to?

Pam had regained her hover to observe the newcomer with brilliant fascination…just as the door gave way to at least three witches, who, in an attempt to stumble through at once, squabbled and became stuck in a frenzy. The newcomer, only annoyed at the surface, whipped his hand out at them and cried, “Out! Out! Out!” Whatever ground the enemies had gained indoors was null and void, and at once they were pushed from the doorway and thereafter blocked by black, warbling bars that jutted from one end of the doorframe to the other, blocking the space. As a witch’s finger touched the bar, it sizzled and boiled—so they recoiled and watched in confusion from the other side.

Pam, drifting too close for much comfort, was startled when the newcomer only very slightly pushed her back from him. She blinked hard and asked, very innocently, “Prince Maverick?”

From the other side, Judith murmured a faint, “…Urn?”

This so-called Maverick, or Urn, turned with the unimpressed and jellied eye of a fish beneath low hanging brows. “And are you amused?” he snapped. “I’m sure. I’ve done with your pestering, you and your people prodding your sticks into my business and that sad excuse for a dark witch sullying my private space and then failing on every end to defend it, if she loves it so much! It’s a shame, that I feel anything! A shame! I’ve done.” In a huff, he turned stiff and straight and aligned his well-fashioned toes in Judith’s direction. She held fast and strong to False, head drawn back. “Judith, if you will not step aside, then the lot of you brace yourselves. I am about to break a very large…and very complicated, painstaking curse for this one whelp.”