Marcus glanced at Devin. “Is it hard walking?”
Lavender flicked a fly from her bare toe. “We will need to walk carefully. The woods can be cruel.”
The woods had obviously been cruel to Lavender, Devin thought. Life had been cruel to her just as it had been cruel to Angelique. One of them had a chance at redemption; whether it was too late for Lavender remained to be seen. He ran a hand over his eyes, hoping his blurred vision corrected itself soon. It left him feeling unsteady and nauseated. He slipped down and rested his head on his hand, letting Marcus’ questions and Lavender’s staccato answers be drowned out by the wind in the trees and the rush of the stream below them.
Chaotic dreams had the wooden heads speaking to him, one after another, hinting at terror and brutality that existed long before René Forneaux. Their jabber became constant. Each of them interrupted the other, their voices becoming louder and louder until Devin couldn’t separate them. Without Lavender to identify them, they might as well have been an angry mob intent on violence.
Devin tossed and turned, chased by terrifying shadows of the past and a clear image of his enemy in the present. The wooden head of the Captain of the Guard suddenly opened its mouth crying “Danger! Danger!” until it dislodged itself from the others on the rock ledge and rolled off down the ravine, its mouth screaming its alarm until it landed with a plop in the stream below. It bobbed along as the stream carried it and its garbled warning off toward Calais and the sea where it would be lost forever. The other heads watched in horror as it bobbed away on the current.
Devin wakened with a start. Lavender lay curled like a pile of rags, her father’s head in her hands. Marcus stared out at the woods below them, starlight tracing glistening ribbons in the water. “Don’t you ever sleep?” Devin hissed.
Marcus glanced at him. “I sleep better than you, apparently. What was all the excitement about?”
Devin shook his head. “Strange dreams. I wonder whether I’ll ever be rid of them.”
“Forneaux?” Marcus asked.
“And his ilk,” Devin said quietly. “If Lavender’s home was burned and this town she’s taking us to was destroyed, obviously, there have been evil men at work in these mountains who lived long before René Forneaux.”
Marcus stretched out his right leg, the barrel of his pistol glinting for a moment before he came to rest. “There have always been evil men, Devin.”
“There’s something else, though,” Devin said. “Don’t you feel it? Lavender must have lost her home fifty years ago, at least. Forneaux couldn’t have had anything to do with that.”
“I’m not certain you can believe anything she says,” Marcus replied. “She thinks she is the Lavender from the Chronicles and that she had a white pony.”
“Perhaps she did have a white pony,” Devin countered. “She may also have been named for the legendary Lavender and now she confuses the two in her head.”
“Those damn heads give me the creeps!” Marcus said with a shudder. “And she’d better not expect me to carry them for her. There must at least forty of them!”
Devin suppressed a laugh. “If my dreams have any element of truth, there are now thirty-nine. The Captain of the Guard is no longer with us.”
“What?” Marcus asked, giving him a strange look. “Go back to sleep. You’re as crazy as she is.”
“I’ll explain in the morning,” Devin assured him.
Devin wakened to the sound of sobbing. He rubbed blurry eyes with one hand to see Lavender scouring the ledge above them, her muddy hands feverishly patting the rock. Some of the wooden heads cradled in the remnants of her skirt had fallen to lie in the dirt at her feet. Devin prevented two of them from falling with the toe of his boot as they rolled precariously close to the edge of the ravine.
“He’s gone! He’s gone!” Lavender sobbed. “We can’t go on without him to protect us!”
“The Captain of the Guard?” Devin asked resignedly.
Lavender turned to fix him with a suspicious eye. “How did you know?”
Devin sat up. “I didn’t actually know for sure. But I dreamed about him last night. He kept shouting, ‘Danger! Danger!’ and then he rolled off the ledge and down the ravine. I watched him float down the stream toward Calais.”
Lavender rose to her diminutive size, her hands on her hips. “You didn’t even try to stop him? To save him?”
“I was asleep!” Devin protested. “I saw this in a dream. Have you asked Marcus if he heard anything?”
Marcus shook his head. “I certainly didn’t hear him roll down into the stream, Lavender.” He gestured at the wooden heads scattered around her feet. “Are you certain he isn’t there?”
She flopped onto the dirt, sorting balls into groups around her, murmuring each name lovingly to herself. Devin watched her, wondering how much of reality she had any true hold on. She looked so pathetic, tears drying in dirty streaks down her cheeks, her fingers shaking as she tallied up the only remnants of her family and friends that she had left.
“What have we done to our people,” Devin whispered to Marcus, “that they have been left so fragile and pitiful? Angelique’s story shocked me when I realized how much she had to bear and then there was Elsbeth, Dariel Moreau’s wife. She went to the market and came home to find her husband tortured and murdered on the floor of Tirolien’s Bardic Hall. Who knows what unhinged Lavender’s mind or how many more there are like her? How many children have watched their parents die and have been left orphaned to …”
“Just stop!” Marcus demanded. “Why are you so maudlin this morning? It won’t help anything to dwell on this. You’ll end up spouting gibberish yourself, if you haven’t already.”
“He’s not here,” Lavender wailed suddenly. She glared at Devin. “I can’t believe you wouldn’t help him! He would still be here if you had caught him when he fell.”
Devin sighed in exasperation. “Well obviously, I didn’t. I wasn’t even awake, Lavender. I thought I dreamt the entire thing.”
“He took the time to warn you!” she pointed out with an accusing finger. “And it cost him his life.”
Devin resisted the urge to point out that a wooden ball was not alive. “He may have warned me,” he said quietly. “But he didn’t tell me what he was warning me about.”
“We can’t stay here,” Lavender stated, gathering the wooden heads in her tattered skirt. “We need to move on, now. Surely you can understand that!”
“Perhaps he was warning us about the deserted town down the mossy steps,” Devin said. “There is more than one place here where we may encounter danger.”
“Well, I’m leaving,” Lavender said with a huff. “I don’t need to be told twice that my life is in danger. If the Captain of the Guard gave his life to save me, I would be foolish to disregard his advice and so would you!”
Marcus dropped his head in his hands. “God! This is insane!”
“Call it what you will,” Lavender replied sulkily. “But remember that I warned you.”
Marcus clapped a hand on Devin’s shoulder. “Let’s go! There’s no use arguing with her and call me a bleeding-heart moron, but I won’t let her go on alone.”
Devin smiled and stood up, one hand