Merlin dragged himself up and Susan turned to him.
“Overtaxed her strength,” muttered Merlin. “She’ll be okay. . . .”
“What about you?” asked Susan anxiously. She started to pull Merlin’s trousers up to see how bad the breaks were, but he stopped her, holding her wrists.
“Both legs broken,” he said, grimacing. “Spiral fractures. Very bad.”
“The Sipper spit . . .”
“Can’t mend broken bones . . . not quickly,” said Merlin. He was breathing in short pants, obviously in extreme pain. He pulled the Smython out of his bag and held it out butt first. “Take my revolver. I see your salt-bloodied knife is better than a sword against the Cauldron-Born. You have to distract Southaw—”
“But—”
“You can . . . do . . . what you did to that . . . one.”
“But how will I even know what Southaw—”
“The Totteridge Yew,” gasped Merlin. “His locus is a tree! It will be clear to you, and he’ll be with the cauldron. Head for that.”
“But what do I do?” asked Susan.
“I don’t know! Shoot the tree, chop branches off with the knife, anything to take his attention away from the contest of wills,” croaked Merlin. “I’ll follow, but crawling . . . there isn’t time! You’re our only chance.”
Susan hesitated for an instant before leaning in to kiss Merlin full on the mouth. He lifted his shaking right hand and ran his fingers across the stubble on her head. They held the kiss for an electric second, before both slowly broke away.
“Stay alive,” whispered Merlin.
“You too,” said Susan. If they lived, she knew there would be much more than a single date in their shared future.
If they lived.
She grabbed the revolver, hefted her knife, turned, and walked swiftly into the fog. She knew exactly where the Copper Cauldron was, and she headed straight to it.
Merlin looked at Vivien again, took a knife out of his sleeve, and sat up, grunting with the pain. He bent forward and slit his trousers from the knees, inspecting his fractured legs. With his steady left hand he drew out a vial of Sipper blood, swished it in his mouth, and spat it on his left leg where a piece of twisted bone protruded through the skin. He let it pool there, then settled his left hand on the bone and with one quick motion pushed it back in place—and fainted.
Susan did not look behind her. She walked as straight as she could towards the cauldron. She could sense its location. It wasn’t far away, but the fog was still so thick she couldn’t see anything but the field a few yards in front of her. The grass was higher here, strewn with stones, a natural clearing rather than the work even of primitive agriculture. Southaw had indeed removed his demesne to some ancient part of England, far back in time.
Susan readied her knife, every nerve on edge, ready for a sudden attack by a Cauldron-Born, be it human, bear, or whatever. But before she’d taken a few steps, she realized this would not work. She couldn’t creep around the fog, fearing attack.
Merlin had said to distract Southaw. To do that, she had to get his attention, not skulk herself.
Susan walked faster and filled her lungs to shout as loudly as she could.
“Hey, Southaw or Holly or whatever you want to call yourself! Shithead! I’m coming for my cauldron! Yes, that’s right! My cauldron! MY CAULDRON!”
Her words had an immediate effect. The fog swirled and thinned, visibility increasing enormously. Modern noises suddenly filtered in, though distant. The sound of sirens, far away, and a helicopter. Both faded away again almost at once, but the fog did not return.
Faint sunshine lit up the stony field, its light soaked up by the darkness of the ancient forest that clustered around the open space. A hundred yards in front of her, Susan saw a single, lonely tree. A yew already ancient even in this place, a cracked and gnarly thing with a massive yellowish bole that rose only three or four feet before splitting into five subsidiary trunks that rose up thirty feet. Its branches spread wide, thick with poisonous leaves and berries.
Somewhere below this yew, in a hollow between the roots, lay the Copper Cauldron. A vast bowl of hammered metal, six inches thick, big enough to hold and cook an ox, each of its three squat legs the size of Susan’s torso. The metal shone with internal light, but the interior of the cauldron was darker than any night, defying all mortal sight.
Susan broke into a run, screaming words she didn’t even know, some ancient war cry of her father’s that had come into her head. At fifty yards she stopped to fire at the tree, but the revolver almost bucked out of her hand and the shot went wild.
But the boom of the gun did distract Southaw from his unseen struggle with the booksellers who were trying to reel him back into the flow of time. The sounds of the New World broke in again, louder and closer. Susan saw it now, like a mirage superimposed on what was already there, a blurry, double-vision view of a modern road cutting across the stony field ahead of her, a church rising up behind the yew, big expensive houses with well-clipped hedges shimmering into existence to her left and right.
There were people, too, ghostly, blurred figures. She knew they were booksellers from the blobs of bright silver that marked their hands. There were lots of them gathered in a ring around the ancient yew, like the goblins who’d danced her to the May Fair. There were even more booksellers behind them, left-handed ones with shadowy weapons, abstract lines in place of swords and axes. Susan heard Una’s commanding voice, but far off, as if carried by the wind from some distant place. But there was no wind here; the air was still and wet, even though the fog had gone.
Roads, buildings, and booksellers were not yet real in this place, and might never be, if Southaw won the contest of wills. Susan stopped and held the revolver tighter, firing at the tree again, four more times, until the gun was empty. She thought she hit it, but Southaw was not distracted again.
The New World faded out again. Susan screamed in anger and ran forward, lifting her little knife high. She wanted to hurt Southaw, punish him for everything he had done. He had enslaved her father, ruined Jassmine’s life, killed Merlin’s and Vivien’s mother—
No Cauldron-Born rose to stop her, no sudden flight of starlings. For a few moments a sense of exaltation filled Susan; she would reach the tree and hack at the branches with her knife . . . the sharpened butter knife. . . .
But what would that do? Shooting at it hadn’t achieved anything. She already knew she couldn’t bind Southaw, not with salt and steel and blood.
She didn’t need to hurt Southaw. She needed to distract him. Make him fight a battle of wills with her as well as the booksellers.
Susan stopped, and raised her hands, once again taking in a deep breath.
“The Copper Cauldron is mine own! I call upon its powers and deny them to all others!”
A flash of bright copper-red light from beneath the tree answered her words. She felt a sudden giddy influx of power, only for second, before the harsh will of Southaw shut her off from it. It was not enough for her to simply claim the cauldron. It would take more than that.
The Ancient Sovereign responded in another way as well. The tree moved, a great root tearing out of the earth, or so it seemed. Susan slowed and blinked. It was not the physical tree that moved, the thing of branch and leaf and bark. It was as if the shadow of the tree was leaving it. But this was no shadow, it was a thing of that same intensely dense, gray, and greasy smoke she’d seen become a raven atop the Old Man of Coniston.