Legacies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,78

there usually is—we do a whole Winter Carnival thing,” Burke said offhandedly. “You know: full-scale ice sculptures and all that. I think you’ll really enjoy it. If, uh, we’re all still alive by then,” he added in belated realization.

The reminder brought Spirit back down to earth with a thump. “What do you think Edgar Saw?” she asked cautiously. “I know he Saw . . . whatever took Seth, but . . .” But whatever it was he Saw, he didn’t tell us the details, and we really need to know.

“At least we know more than we did. It’s something that hunts at night. Something that—we know because of Nick—disappears at dawn. Something that drives you mad if you even see it. Hunters, riders, horns—both Nick and Edgar mentioned horns . . .” Burke said.

“Something that needs to be Tithed,” Spirit added grimly.

“Yeah,” Burke said unhappily. “That should be enough. We just have to put it all together.”

Neither of them spoke the rest of the way back to the house, each lost in their own thoughts.

The Wild Hunt,” Muirin said with fierce satisfaction.

Muirin said at breakfast Tuesday that she’d found their answer, so the five of them were risking a meeting. They were meeting that evening at the swimming pool. And Muirin was casting an illusion to make the indoor pool area look as if it were empty, so maybe nobody would come and wonder why they were here in the first place.

“That’s the Whatever?” Burke asked. “But the Wild Hunt’s English.”

“It’s found in Germany, Ireland, Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, and there are similar legends in parts of North America,” Muirin recited in bored tones.

Addie was making waterspouts in the center of the pool. First one, then two, then three, drawing them up thinner and finer until they towered twenty feet in the air and the level of water in the pool itself had dropped several feet.

“The details vary a little bit from place to place, but they’re consistent enough that this really seems to be what we’re looking for,” Loch said.

“Okay,” Spirit said, trying to ignore the dancing waterspouts. “But what is it?”

“Aside from—apparently—real?” Muirin said. “Which is a little something Ms. Groves has conveniently forgotten to mention in her really long and boring History of Toads, Newts, and Bats?”

Between the two of them, Loch and Muirin managed to deliver a concise and disturbing lecture—which was even scarier for what they didn’t know.

The Wild Hunt appeared in legends all across Europe. The basics were always the same: a supernatural group of hunters, mounted on things from horses to goats to other people and accompanied by hunting hounds, chasing across the sky or across the ground in wild pursuit of . . . something. Depending on which story it was, the hunters were the Fair Folk, or ghosts, or the souls of the damned, or outright demons. The leader of the Hunt was the demon Hellequin, or Herne the Hunter, or Odin, or just whoever’d been unlucky enough to encounter the Hunt as it rode out, because anyone who saw the Wild Hunt might be driven mad by the sight, or hunted down by it and never seen again, or forced to join it—and according to the tales, any attempt to leave again resulted in instant death.

“—and all the sources Muirin and I could find said that the Hunt appears ‘mostly’ in the fall and winter, but, uh, obviously ‘mostly’ isn’t ‘always,’ because the rest of this fits so well that this has got to be what we’re looking for,” Loch finished.

“But are they elves or ghosts or demons?” Addie asked. The waterspouts all collapsed at once, but before any of them could get splashed, all the water in the pool curled up and in, until it was a large round glob of water sitting in the middle of the pool like a loaf of bread in a pan. Addie looked at the rest of them. “You know as well as I do that what works against one of those isn’t going to work on the other two.”

“I guess we’re going to have to go prepared for all three, in that case,” Burke said.

“Gosh, gang, more research!” Muirin said, opening her eyes very wide. “Just what I was looking forward to!”

Amazingly, Burke snorted with amusement. “If you don’t know at least three ways to get rid of a ghost by now, Muirin, you haven’t been paying attention in class. You leave the ghosts to me. It’s if this Hunt