They were standing at the edge of a dark forest. Evergreen Manor was several hundred feet behind them. Liesl could see the oil lamp burning in the room in which she had been confined, from this distance no more than a small square of pale light.
Po was barely visible. The ghost was exhausted from the effort of expanding the opening between sides of existence. It was a thin, bare outline in the dark.
“We did it.” Liesl climbed to her feet. She was trembling a bit. She, too, was exhausted from her journey to the Other Side.
“Yes,” Po said simply.
“Thank you.”
“Yes,” Po said.
It was strange to think that only a minute earlier she had been carrying the ghost inside of her. Liesl did not know whether to feel embarrassed or exhilarated or sad, so she felt everything at once. For the first time it struck her as a strange thing, to have such careful boundaries around the self, and to be your own person and only your own person, always when you were alive.
Then Liesl began to giggle. She did not know why, exactly, but all of a sudden it seemed to her absurd: A ghost had just saved her life by leading her through the land of the dead. Once she started giggling, she couldn’t stop, and soon she had to double over and her stomach hurt from laughing.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Po said. Its outlines began to reassert themselves more clearly.
“Oh, Po.” Liesl wiped tears from the corner of her eyes and let out another bark of laughter. “You wouldn’t.”
Bundle went, Mwark.
“Well, come on,” Po said. “Will is alone in the forest. We’d better find him.” Again, the ghost sounded faintly regretful. And in fact Po would have liked nothing more than to leave Will languishing in the dark and cold on his own.
“I really don’t know what I would do without you,” Liesl said, with a rush of gratitude, as they set off into the forest. “I don’t know what I did without you. Now that we’ve found each other, you’ll never leave, will you?”
Po did not answer, but Liesl took his silence for agreement, and was happy.
Chapter Twenty-Six
WILL HEARD A TWIG SNAP BEHIND HIM. HE whirled around, brandishing a stick like a sword, and cried out, “Who’s there?”
“It’s all right, Will.” Liesl stepped out from behind a tree, followed by Po and Bundle. “It’s just us.”
Will lowered the stick, feeling slightly foolish. “I thought you might be the alchemist or the Lady Premiere.”
“The alchemist?” Liesl wrinkled her nose. “The one you used to work with?” While they were traveling from Cloverstown, Will had told her, in broad terms, about his work with the alchemist, although he had not confessed to being a lowly apprentice.
Will explained, “The alchemist and the Lady Premiere are after me, for losing a box of magic. The Lady Premiere was in disguise at Evergreen; she’s the one who dragged you into the house. I’m afraid I started this whole thing.” It was the first time Will had admitted to Liesl the real reason he had run away, and he hung his head.
Liesl rushed to reassure him. “It’s not your fault. My stepmother’s after me. She wants me dead.” Liesl bit her lip, puzzling it out. “I wonder how they knew where to find us. I wonder how they knew we were together. . . .”
“The Lady Premiere knows everything, I expect,” Will said glumly.
“She can’t know everything,” Liesl said. “She doesn’t know I escaped, for example. Is the box safe?”
Will nodded. “I hid it.” He stood on his tiptoes, reached into the large hollow of a massive oak tree, and extracted the box. “My plan was to . . .”
He trailed off, embarrassed. His plan was to hide the box and come to Liesl’s rescue, and before she arrived, he had been working on building a ladder out of twigs and whatever else he could find, but he had not gotten very far. He shuffled a little closer to the clumsy beginnings of his construction, hoping she would not notice.
But it was too late.
“What on earth,” Po demanded, “is that?” The ghost, recovered from its earlier exertion, showed quite clearly against the heavy black darkness of the forest. Now it flitted around the pile of sticks Will had begun to assemble and tie together, painstakingly, with hanging vines.
“Nothing,” Will said quickly, trying to block Liesl’s view. But she sidestepped him.
“Is that”—she wrinkled her nose—“is that a ladder?”
Will decided there was no point in pretending otherwise. “Yes,” he said miserably. “Po told me they had you up in one of the high rooms.”
“And you were going to rescue me?” Liesl asked.