River Runs Deep Read Free

whistle in and out. But he would not cough, he promised himself. Just breathe shallow, he thought, you can cough when you’ve caught him up. . . .
    He was in a new part of the cave, an area just past the ward, down the path from the way he had been brought in. And then he realized that whoever—or whatever —he was following wasn’t carrying any light. How could he not be carrying a light?
    Elias heard movement far off at the end of the passage, then footsteps once again. He walked on, sure he’d found his ghost-who-was-not-a-ghost. “Go back!” came the voice, the same voice that he’d heard at his window, but this time harsher, a whisper-shout like the cry of some banshee.
    In all the stories Elias had heard about faeries or spirits that led knights astray to trap them, he never once heard of those spirits telling the knights to go back. He reckoned maybe, somehow, that might be a good sign.
    So he continued picking his way through the chamber and down to the tunnel he’d heard the voice shouting from. At last, he saw light ahead of him. His heart thudded, and he worried he might commence to wheezing or coughing, but he had to keep up. To his surprise, the light ahead wasn’t moving. It was fixed in one spot, just beyond a bend to the right. He slowed as he drew closer, craning his neck around the corner to see his ghost for the first time.
    But it wasn’t a ghost at all. It was Stephen Bishop. Stephen wasn’t wearing the fancy getup he’d been in that first day when he guided Elias in: just a pair of ragged old pants, cotton shirt, and thin wool coat. He appeared younger out of his finer clothes, and Elias guessed he couldn’t be much past twenty, the mustache over his lip still filling in.
    Stephen sat cross-legged, writing in a little book with a nub of a pencil, the lamp perched up high on a rock. Elias noticed his printing was as neat as a pin, square and even as he wrote on a page already half filled up.
    â€œStephen?” Elias said, looking around the low tunnel.
    â€œYou should be in bed, Elias.” Stephen didn’t even look up.
    â€œBut—” Elias began before his cough finally caught up to him. He braced his hands on his knees, rode out his bucking lungs, and searched the tunnel ahead and behind him to make sure that he hadn’t passed his ghost by mistake. Finally his cough died and he could finish. “But I was following . . .”
    Stephen tilted his head. “What?”
    Elias shrugged. “There was something at my window the morning after I got here. I could only see the eyes, and then just now they were back, and he talked to me. . . . Said he weren’t a ghost—”
    â€œGhost?” Stephen was incredulous.
    Elias felt foolish now. “He was there!” he insisted, “I followed him. Whoever it was, he was running ahead of me without a light.”
    Stephen blew out his breath quick and sharp. “Only ones who know the cave well enough to go without a light for any length are me and Nick and Mat, and we do that only up by the entrance. And it sure wasn’t Nick or Mat, and it wasn’t me, was it?”
    â€œWhich one’s Mat?”
    Stephen almost laughed. “You’d have known if it were Mat. Trust me.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œI think you maybe just got a touch of cabin fever.”
    This was true ten ways from Sunday, but to Elias’s ear, it sounded as if maybe Stephen was trying a little too hard. He stayed quiet. “You figure on finding yourself a ghost, is that it?” Stephen asked. “Mercy. All you’re going to do is make yourself into one, running off in the cave alone.”
    â€œI—”
    â€œNever you mind about chasing haints.” Stephen patted the cave floor. “Now sit down and catch your breath.”
    Elias sat, shamed and annoyed, certain none of the Knights of the Round Table ever got such a