She focused on the pool, filling it with her anger, pouring her rage into the Water, polluting it with her wrath. She bundled her fury, allowing it to grow heavy and sink to the bottom. Rosheen let loose a frenzied cry of release, violently jerking her ire back into herself. The water erupted from the pool, spitting forth with wet concussion, showering the woods with muddy Earth. The gruagach was thrown backwards into the air, striking a tree with snapping force and landing face down on the forest floor. Throttling old sow.

Padric choked, coughed, gagged up sticky water and spat it out. His ears were stuffy and throbbing, his body numb and shivering, but there was air and he drank it in gasps. He was lying in thick mud at the bottom of a depression, the horrible creature and the drowning water having been ripped away from him. He turned his head and came face to face with a pale, bloated thing. A cry gurgled in his throat and he jerked away from the corpse, rolling to his feet. The eyes were large, clouded over in milky death, the pale blond hair tangled with debris, rank with mud. The small, bare feet stuck out from under a log, where the body was jammed. Maeve. The real Maeve, left to rot at the bottom of a forest pond.

Padric looked up and saw Rosheen still hovered above, her gaze fixed on a crumpled heap lying just out of the bowl that was once the awful pond. The heap twitched unnaturally and the crone’s head jerked up, hair hanging wet and lank beside the sunken, grinning face. The pretender’s face. She cackled wetly in her throat and lurched upright, her features twisting, elongating. The skin split, tore and peeled back, falling with the child’s dress to the ground. An emaciated black goat stood in the pile of ruined flesh and rags, its dead eyes burning with otherworldly malice.

It turned and sprang away into the woods. With a snarl, Padric rushed after it, leaping up and scrambling out of the muddy hole. He heard Rosheen call his name, but he paid no heed and continued his pursuit. The goat was blacker than the night and Padric could see it darting between the trees ahead of him. He ran on, leaping shadowy logs, ducking the phantoms of low hanging limbs. He slung his pack off on the move, plucked his axe from inside and discarded the rest, never breaking stride. The wooden haft felt good in his hand, the iron head jumping into view with every pump of his arm, pulling him forward. Faster he ran, the black of his quarry a smudge on the natural dark of the night forest.