Forest Kingdom Trilogy 3 - Down Among the Dead Men

dozed off for a moment.”
    “That’s not like you,” said the Dancer.
    “No,” said MacNeil thoughtfully. “It isn’t.”
    Constance looked at Flint, started to say something, and then changed her mind. “Your dream,” she said finally. “What was it?”
    Flint frowned. “I dreamed about the time I fought a walking dead man. Only in my dream, I lost.”
    “I dreamed about a werewolf I killed a few years back,” said the Dancer. “Only … things were different in the dream.”
    Constance looked at MacNeil. “What about you, Duncan? What was your dream?”
    “What does it matter?” said MacNeil. “It was just a nightmare.”
    “It might be significant. Tell me.”
    No,
Constance. I can’t tell you. I can’t tell anyone. I can’t tell anyone about the time I almost turned and ran
.
    “I dreamed I was back in the long night,” he said finally “Fighting the demons again.”
    Constance frowned. “Demons …”
    “I hardly think that’s significant,” said MacNeil. “I mean, we were talking about them earlier on, weren’t we?”
    “Yes,” said Constance, “we were.” She thought for a moment, and then looked seriously at MacNeil. “My dream was different. You all dreamed of things that happened to you in the past. I dreamed of what happened here in the fort, not long ago.”
    “A kind of Seeing?” said Flint.
    “I don’t know. Maybe.” Constance shuddered suddenly. “I saw the people here go insane and kill each other and themselves.”
    For a while, no one said anything.
    “That’s certainly one explanation,” said MacNeil. “But if that is what happened, where are all the bodies?”
    “They haven’t left the fort,” said Flint. “We’d have seen the tracks.”
    “I don’t know,” said Constance. “But what I dreamed is what happened here.”
    “Are you sure?” said MacNeil.
    “Of course I’m sure! I’m a witch! There’s something in this fort with us. Something powerful. It sent us those nightmares. It’s testing how strong we are, looking for weak points. Only I was stronger than it thought, and I Saw something of the truth.”
    MacNeil chose his words carefully. “I think you’re reading too much into this, Constance. I’ll agree it seems likely these dreams were sent to us, but that’s all they were—dreams. Anything else is just guesswork. We’ve been through every room and corridor in this fort; there’s no one here but us.”
    “Don’t look now,” said the Dancer very quietly, “but that’s no longer true. Someone’s watching us from the door.”
    In the quiet of the night, a lone figure stepped out of the trees at the edge of the Forest, and scurried quickly across the clearing toward the fort. Moonlight filled the clearing as bright as day, and there wasn’t a shadow anywhere for Scarecrow Jack to hide in. He ran on, head down and arms pumping. If the guards had left a lookout on the battlements he was a dead man; they couldn’t avoid seeing him in this much light. But he’d waited almost an hour, hoping in vain for a cloud to cover the moon, and in the end all he could do was make a run for it and trust to his luck. Given the small number of guards he’d seen, the odds were they hadn’t bothered to post a lookout, but Jack hadn’t survived this long in the Forest by trusting his luck. Except when he had to. His nerves crawled in anticipation of the arrow he’d never see before it killed him. The fort finally loomed up before him, and he threw himself forward into its concealing shadows. He sank down on his haunches and leaned against the cold stone wall until he got his breath back. The night lay dark and silent all around him.
    Scarecrow Jack was a tall, slight man in his mid-twenties. Long dark hair fell to his shoulders in a great shaggy mane that hadn’t known a brush or comb in years. A thin length of cloth knotted around his brow kept the hair out of his eyes, which were dark and narrowed and always alert. He wore a collection of roughly stitched green and brown rags that barely qualified as clothes and seemed to be largely held together by accumulated dirt. They smelled rather pungent, but in the Forest the green and brown rags enabled him to blend perfectly into the background, hiding him from even the most experienced of trackers. No one found Scarecrow Jack unless he wanted to be found.
    Jack had started out as a footpad, a lier-in-wait, but almost despite himself had slowly developed into a local legend. He’d lived