The Watchtower

what seemed like excessive enthusiasm.
    Will pressed himself into the corner of his plush seat, virtually into the carriage frame, as if to be as close to exiting as possible. Then he gazed out the window at the woods lining the road while they drove on. Uncertain as it was, the natural world seemed for the moment all he had to hold on to. Moonlight silvered the crowns of close-grown oaks and maples, casting dappled shadows on the road. Here and there Will thought he could see a larger, more furtive shadow moving amid the tanglement of the woods, with no idea what it could be from. A boar? A large dog or an apprentice escaped from an oppressive domicile? He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He clasped his hands together in his lap for comfort. They were still a ways from the city. But, for the first time since his flight from Swan Hall, Will had the sense that London was home, the place where returning meant comfort. A ways away.
    They traveled on in silence, the pounding of hooves the only constant. Every once in a while the screech of an owl slit the air like a razorstroke lathered by moonlight, but otherwise Will had his conflicting thoughts to himself. Maybe the farther he got away physically from Dee, the better, he considered. But maybe he was being too hard on his somewhat peculiar host. Likely Will couldn’t have made things worse by seeing him. And maybe he’d made them better. Will scented that black flower of hope again. It wasn’t a sweet scent, yet it wasn’t half unpleasant either.
    But another jolt came when the driver pulled over in the middle of nowhere. Will, skittish about an additional passenger in light of his tense mood, and the alteration in the driver’s voice, had at least hoped for a signpost, or a house with a lit window. Where the driver had stopped had no marker at all, just the shadow-dappled woods on one side and an open field on the other, tall grasses stirring there in the caress of a soft breeze.
    “How will he find us?” Will asked. “With nothing to guide him?”
    “Who?”
    “The new passenger—your friend.”
    “Calm down, Hughes,” the driver said, chuckling. “He knows the road well.”
    Will glanced around at the blankness. “I’m going to stretch my legs,” he told the driver, stepping down from the carriage onto the hard dirt road before the man could reply. Will began to pace up and down at the edge of the woods, observing brilliant pinpoint stars above him, listening to the wind rustle through leaves so brightly green they shimmered in moonlight, and to louder and not easily explained rustles coming from only a few yards into the woods.
    Oh, to be back in my meager bed, Will thought. But better to shudder out here than return to the carriage and its creepy driver.
    He heard an enormous rustling from farther into the woods, one that made him pause in his strolling to listen keenly, and even as he paused, he observed, from the corner of his right eye, a gigantic black bird rising over the open field opposite, flapping huge wings slowly. The woods immediately fell silent, or at least back to their murmur of crown sway, branch creak, and twig crack. Those moving shadows still seemed to move.
    Will’s gaze was fixed on the black bird, in growing astonishment. He began to realize that the bird was of truly spectacular size. Indeed he was afraid to estimate the wingspan, but when it hovered in line with the moon, it blotted out that white curve entirely. And when it soared higher, the wind seemed to pick up, as if its flight contributed materially to the wind’s force.
    Will was startled again by a man’s voice coming at him from the open window of the carriage, the same window that he had moments earlier been staring out of.
    “ Pardon moi, monsieur. It is a beautiful night, yes, admittedly, but I am on an urgent errand toward the city. If you’d be so kind…?”
    Will squinted into the darkness to make out the man’s face, but he was wearing a cloak with a hood pulled low over his forehead, making it impossible to see his features. The man must have come from the other side of the road and clambered aboard without Will’s hearing him. So many sounds were abroad at the moment that they thwarted any logic to hearing. Perhaps the grass had been high enough to conceal the man’s presence when they first pulled over. Will didn’t want to consider any other explanations until he was safely home in bed.
    Rather than ask the newcomer to give