Chapter Eleven: The Tower

Soundtrack for Chapter 11:

"Leave It"—Yes
"Let It Go"—the Frozen soundtrack
"As the World Falls Down"—David Bowie

"Here, Toby," Karen Williams said, pressing the keys in her son's hand. "You'll have to drive. I'm too angry." And she was angry. She was a towering fury, but no one but her family would have seen it.

His father had been brief and direct, when Bee had been allotted his phone call. It had been an unusual call. Suspicious of his claims to be the son of the Honorable Robert Williams, yet too intimidated by the possibility of it being true, they'd brought him to one of the inner offices of the police department, where a glaring man in a brown suit overheard the entire part of Toby's conversation. There wasn't much to hear from Toby's end, about four lines in all. "I'm in jail. No, I haven't been booked yet. No sir. Yes sir." And with that he'd turned the receiver over to the officer, who confirmed his father's identity, and, incidentally, his own, and glanced occasionally over at him with disbelief and contempt. At that point, Bee tuned out. His thoughts were entirely with Finnvah, wondering if his friend were dead.

His father had given him pointed instructions. Keep his mouth shut. Wait. Robert was going to send someone to collect him. After a more thorough interview, his parents would decide whether he was going back to school, or if he'd be doing community service for the next six months. All as promised.

Finn, Finn, Bee anguished. Are you all right?

All thoughts of anguish were banished when Karen stepped into the station, in her fur coat and perfectly coiffed blonde hair, big blue eyes lit up with an inner rage at her son and his predicament. She was gracious to the officers, and took her son's hand and led him out as though he were a very young child.

Only when they were in the wide shiny black car did she unload on him.

"What have you done to yourself?" She snapped. "You disappear for months, your father claims it's some sort of internship with the city, and today he tells me you've been picked up for public vagrancy and trespassing. And I find you down at least twenty pounds, looking like some sort of hoodlum from the MTV. Robert says you're going to tell me everything. I think you should start now."

"How much do you want to know?" Bee asked. His calmness seemed to fan his mother's fury.

"Begin by telling me why you look like a cheap faggot," Karen practically screamed at him.

Toby started the engine. He turned to face his mother, angry with her, feeling (unfairly!) that his predicament was all her fault. "Because I am a faggot," he sneered. "I'm fucking gay, okay? Are you happy now?"

She slapped him. Neither of his parents had ever hit him, not even the time he'd broken the picture window playing baseball in the front parlor. It was not a light slap. Her eyes sizzled, and he gave her his fiercest, most defiant look in return. She slapped him again.

"You are going to ruin your father's career," she gasped. She pressed her offending, richly gloved hand against her mouth, never taking her eyes off him. "What have you done with my son? Who are you? I don't even know you anymore!"

"Tell me I'm not your son," Bee said. His cheek hurt where his mother had hit him. He felt in that moment that he hated her. "Tell me to get out of this car. There are people in trouble who need my help. My boyfriend first, but Sarah and Jareth second. Tell me I'm not your son, and I'm gone. I'll disappear." He had more invective prepared, but the way his mother looked at him, as if she didn't know him at all, as if he were some sort of poison wearing her child's skin, broke him. He lay his forehead against the steering wheel and cried. There was a moment of deja-vu, where he remembered crying at the wheel of this car or one very much like it, when Sarah had come home for her mother's death and subsequent funeral. He didn't want his mother dead. He loved her, and she hated him.

"Mom," he sobbed. "I need your help."

He felt her lean over, smelled the perfume of her furs, and he almost flinched, afraid that this was some new assault. But no. She held him. She was his mother. "I'm sorry, Toby. I'm sorry I hit you. My poor baby." She hugged him and rocked him until he'd cried himself out, and then fastidiously wiped his tears from her coat and fastened her seat belt.

"Are you sorry you called me a faggot, too?" Toby asked, with just a note of rebellion.

"Yes, I'm sorry about that too," Karen sighed testily. "I'm quite lost here, Toby. Will you explain? But first, tell me if you're on drugs. Or if you've had an AIDS test. I need to know just precisely how angry I should be—with you, and with your father, and with Sarah and her husband, and this so-called boyfriend, all in that order."

"I think you're going to be pretty angry," Bee answered, buckling his own seatbelt and putting the car in gear. "I'm not on drugs and I've never had sex" –bending the truth a little— "and I didn't want to come out to you the way I just did. But before I get to where I got here, can we make a stop at the last place I was with Finn? I don't know if he's… dead." His voice warbled.

"It's that bad?" Karen asked faintly. Then there was resolve. The foot, as the saying went, came down. "No, Toby. We absolutely are not stopping anywhere. You made a promise to your father, and you are my son, and you are in danger. We are going straight home. And on the way, you are going to talk."

"Mom, please," Bee begged.

"No!" she said, and the hectic marks of exasperation shone red through her make-up. Bee recognized that expression. It was the one she most often wore discussing Sarah. He was momentarily amused to finally belong to the give-Karen-an-aneurysm club. But his mother was right. He had promised his father. Being with Finn had reinforced his sense of the seriousness of promises.

But maybe if he talked, she would understand. And maybe if she understood, she would relent. And if she relented quickly enough, they could still double-back and hunt for Finn.

"I guess it really begins at Sarah's wedding, when we all went to the Labyrinth," Bee said. "That's where I first met Finn." Was that the right place to begin? Was he choosing the right path through this tangle of words and meaning? Would he reach his goal?

Glancing at his mother's face again as he pulled out into the street, he very much doubted his chances.

The interior of the mountain had been deformed by extrusions and gates of ice, and Jareth had difficulty picking his way through, always taking the third door, always moving down. It was dark, it was cold, and he was unfamiliar with the path, having not used it for what felt like centuries. His night-vision was wrecked, and his broken eye reminded him not to take recourse to bilocation. His candle, though—a bastard Hand of Glory—gave just enough light to see by. Like its source, what it showed was both doubtful and upsetting.

The ice persisted in showing him visions he didn't want to see. Sarah holding out bloody stumps of her arms, young Finnvarrah's headless body dancing on marionette strings. Company's fingertip perversely insisted on pointing them out, but Jareth was canny enough to ignore them. They were only a distraction, only false alarms, and he'd constructed enough of his own to understand their nature. When the ice became impenetrable walls, he tickled it with his candle and it marvelously melted.

And what about when I get out? He wondered. How am I going to get back to my castle? I suppose I could fly, but the winds are strong enough to stop me. I could walk back, but it's so very cold.

"No," he said aloud. First things first, get out of this maze. One thing at a time. And with a thrill, he saw he had found his way to the exit.

The door had a lock, and Jareth had no key. He set the candle down on a stone ledge and prepared himself for arctic conditions, buttoning up his coat, putting his gloves back on, and pulling his gaiter up over his nose.

"Open," he commanded it, in a language that stone understood.

The door remained closed, possibly through sheer obstinacy. But then, why should anything or anyone obey him any more? It wasn't like he was a king. He would have to ask, and ask politely.

"Lovely door," he said coaxingly. "Open for me, please."

"No," muttered the stone. "It is Winter, and I stay shut tight."

Jareth considered this answer quietly, even as he thought about the precious minutes ticking by, about the vulnerability of his kingdom, about the armies even now massing upon his borders, perhaps even crossing those borders, and Sarah alone, and Hoggle with her saying the gods only knew what. He'd never felt so powerless, never, not even locked into the lunatic's asylum. He wanted to wail and beat his hands against the closed door, beg and threaten and scream. In his younger days, this had all been beneath his dignity. Not so much now.

I escaped then by trickery, he reminded himself. This need be no different.

"Dutiful door," Jareth coaxed, in an agony of impatience barely concealed. "You are obedient and true, but you misunderstand. You are shamefully open. I can see the world outside, and all the weather is whipping the hearth-fire to ashes in here."

"No, no," said the door, "I will close myself now, and you will stay inside." And with a creak in its internal mechanism, the door slid open. Mounds of white fluffy snow poured inside like a sea of meringue.

"A pity," Jareth said. "Now I can't get out."

"Aaah," replied the door, satisfied.

He almost picked up the candle and brought it with him, his magpie instincts telling him to snitch every last item he could get, but then refrained. True, the candle might be of some use outside the Observatory, but Jareth had the impression that carrying any part of John Company out of his prison might be tantamount to carrying all of him out, a synecdoche of sympathetic magic that would set the King of Winter free.

The candle made up its mind for him when it threw itself from the ledge and inchwormed away from him, at a fast maggot's pace, back to the heart of the Observatory. That settled that. The door began to close again. With two hands free, Jareth swam through the great drift, sweeping piles of snow aside with his arms and tamping it underfoot, and felt the stone slab just brush his heel as it came to rest in its proper place.

He hoped he would have air enough. It would be a fine thing, he thought, swimming ever-upward, if he had given up his crown and bested John Company only to suffocate in a snowdrift. With one last push, he broke the surface, and the snow became a sandblast as the angry winds greeted him.

Well now, he thought. That answers that. An owl can't fly in this. How was he going to get back? He needed to talk to Sarah before she did something foolhardy. As I have been foolhardy. Company was right. I'm a walking disaster. He huddled at the mouth of his snowdrift tunnel, feeling cold and low and sorry for himself. He listened to the song of the wind, and imagined he could hear it mocking him. The wind moved through his clothes like they were made of paper, tickling him lasciviously, tempting him to sleep, to freeze, to die.

"No," he told the wind. "I won't. Do you think I don't know whose creature you are? Do you think I don't know what I've given up, just to live?" It was like shouting down a black hole, but Jareth shouted nonetheless. "You can't stop me!"

The wind stopped, as if a stone door had been shut upon it. The snow fell and fell, but he felt something moving through it, moving toward him with intent and purpose. He stood upright to face whatever his doom was with all the pride he had left.

Out of the shadows of the snow, a red shadow on white, came the silhouette of a giant stag, antlers spread over his head like the gnarled branches of a winter oak. And on the tip of each tine, the ghost of a flame danced.

The stag approached him, steam huffing from its frost-wet nose. It nudged him hard in the chest with that nose, and the deadly spikes of its antlers encircled him safely, the fire bringing a moment of warmth and light.

"You're here for me?" Jareth asked breathlessly.

The giant stag said nothing in any language, but looked at him benignly, almost sorrowfully, with one liquid-black eye. He tossed his head and then jutted his chin over his shoulders.

"I can't order you," Jareth said. "I can't even bargain. I have nothing to pay you with. I have nothing. I can only ask."

The flames in the stag's antlers glared forth in golden light. A flash, a moment, a vision: the death of the Autumn Oracle, and an oak tree bursting forth in a glory of flame.

"Fire comes at the end of all things," those profound eyes told him.

"No," Jareth said. "I don't want to."

The stag knelt in the deep snow, patient as death. Eventually, Jareth climbed on his back. The stag's pelt kept his belly warm, but his back froze, and all the feathers lining the inside of his coat came loose and fluttered like confetti behind him.

"He's coming," Sarah said, squeezing the crystal so tightly in her palm that she thought it might shatter. "Tell them to open the gates."

"For an owl?" Zoe asked, tucking the blankets in around her firmly, as if trying to bind her in.

"He's not flying. He's mounted," Sarah said. "Hurry. Go tell them. He'll need all the help he can get."

Zoe left without further questions, grabbing her coat as she went. Ludo went with her, less quickly, lurching. Sir Didymus kept up his guard position by the wardrobe door, seeming to ignore every threat or suggestion Hoggle made from his makeshift prison. Ambrosius was less immune. His ears kept shifting backwards to listen, and he shuddered on occasion, baring his teeth with tension. Sarah was glad she couldn't hear much beyond the dwarf's tone. She stared down into the crystal. She'd been unable to summon Jareth to her with it, but she'd at least been able to summon his image. She had seen him jab a fork into John Company's wrist. She'd seen him cut off John Company's fingers. And she'd seen him come out of darkness into the light of a winter's day, and climb up a stag's back after many minutes of weary stubbornness, and be carried over the snow as fast as Bobtail's sleigh.

"Leave me," Sarah told Sir Didymus and Ambrosius.

And now he was riding through the streets of the Goblin City, the doors spread wide to receive him, and now he was dismounting at the gates of the Castle Beyond, and he was thanking the stag who'd borne him, and he was running as quickly as he could, staggering, only his forward momentum keeping him upright, running up the stairs, running to her, and he was flinging himself through the doors, and he was in her arms.

"Jareth," Sarah sobbed, wrapping her arms around him and kissing his frostbitten face. He had come to her so quickly that he'd brought the cold with him, right into their bed, but she didn't care. "Jareth. Jareth." She pulled him into the bed next to him almost by main force, willing him warm with her hands and throat. His teeth were clenched shut; his left eye was weeping tears tinged pink from blood.

"I'll go nowhere without you," he said, practically hissing the words, and she was startled because even his breath was cold. And his body began to shake. "Sarah," he gasped. "Go nowhere without me."

"I promise," Sarah said, shaken, afraid now with his fear.

"Where's the dwarf?" he asked her, breathlessly.

"I locked him in the wardrobe."

"The wardrobe?" he asked incredulously. A smile cracked his frostbitten face, and he did something she'd never seen him do—he began to giggle. "You locked him in the wardrobe?"

"It seemed the best thing to do," Sarah said, grinning despite herself. And she began to giggle too, finding it a strange and suitable counterpoint to her heart-thudding anxiety. "As long as there's no portal to Narnia, he should still be in there." Their hysterical laughter fed on itself for a few moments, but then he sat up on the side of the bed and turned his face away from her, still laughing. And his hands were hiding his face and the sounds of laughter became indistinguishable from sobs.

She stroked his back, rested her hand on his spine, over his heart, and waited for him to finish.

"Tell me what's happened," she said, when the aftershocks of his weeping seemed done. Jareth, why won't you let me hold you? Why won't let me see you cry? Is it that you're ashamed?

"I've done something terrible," he said quietly. He half-turned and she saw he was holding his amulet in his hand. "I don't have the right to wear this anymore. Sarah, I should never have gone to him. I should have listened to you."

"You didn't ask me," Sarah said, a bit more crisply than he'd intended. "But I would have told you not to go." She paused, watching his thumb stroke the surface of his amulet, and his words sunk in. "Why don't you have the right to wear that?" Afraid and angry, anticipating the response, she shook him by the arm. "Tell me," she demanded fiercely. "What have you done?"

"I've sold my throne," he said, not looking at her. He pulled his amulet over his head and laid it on the rounded curve of her belly. And then he looked at her. "I sold it to buy your life. And the baby's life. For young Finnvarrah and Toby, your parents, and all of those who were once my subjects. And in that order, Sarah. There was no other way."

"To the King of Winter?" Sarah asked, trying not to shake, clapping her hand over the amulet so it was safe against all the world, like Egg. "Please, no. Not to him, Jareth."

"Not to him," Jareth confirmed, and Sarah was able to breathe again.

"Tell me," Sarah said. "Tell me everything."

He ran shaking hands through his hair and did. He told her all, omitting nothing, not even his plans to commit a murder on their own doorstep. And this, she could see, was the root of his shame, and the almost-crime that had pushed him to seek out a confrontation with the King of Winter in the first place. His hand happening upon the crystal she'd summoned, left where she'd dropped it among the bedclothes, and he took possession of it as if it were his.

"We're going to have to leave here, Sarah. Now. Today."

"Abandon the Labyrinth?" she asked, appalled anew. "Leave your kingdom?"

"Your kingdom," he said curtly—bitterly. "I told you, I'm no longer King here. My power is all but hollow. And you—you don't have the strength to hold it. Don't you understand? The Labyrinth is feeding on our child. It will suck the very life out of her, and when it is done, it will move on to you. And then onward, until all is dead, and it feeds on itself and there's only a nothing-place where it used to stand."

"But—"

"Sarah, I'm desperate enough to do anything. Any awful thing. Do you hear? If it's a choice between you and a kingdom or the world entire, I choose you." He touched her face again with trembling hands. And while she wanted to dismiss the import of his words as his habitual theatricality, she could feel, as he touched her, how entirely serious he was, and how he wouldn't be moved. And she felt angry again, warm with anger. She was going to have to obey him. He wouldn't listen to anything but submission from her. Damn his fear.

"I'll go, then, since you haven't given me any choice." She put the amulet back around his neck, settled it against his breastbone. "I'm not wearing this. It's your burden. Maybe if you wear it, you'll remember what happens when you treat me like a game-piece. You always lose."

"Sarah," he said, disappointment dripping on her name. She could see how she'd hurt him.

"Jareth," she said, in the same tone. "What happens now? We sneak out some back door? You carry me away like another piece of luggage? And what about all the people who are still here? Goblins and trees and Ludo and everyone else? Do we just leave them here to die? We don't have to. We can still fight."

For one moment, just one, she thought she had reached him. He tugged on his amulet like a bell-pull, hurting himself, turning the idea over. But then he turned his face away again, and she saw that he still thought of her as something he owned. Loved, yes, certainly, but owned. Where the meat hit the marrow, he was too cautious to trust in her. He was too afraid to hear any of her ideas, unless she forced him to. And she was too tired to force any confrontation.

"No," he said. "It's best we go. I can make provision for the ones who must remain. It's something I couldn't have done while I was still King."

"What?" she asked, flatly exhausted. Certainly she hadn't woken up; this was a nightmare.

"I'm going to light the balefire," he said. "And then we will close the doors behind us."

Guilty, blithe, as if he didn't know all he was asking of her, he kissed her forehead. And turning on his heel, he left her.

Two hours before dusk, the iron bells rang in the Goblin City, summoning all to the Castle Beyond. They came, all. There were those who had lived in the Labyrinth from the very beginning and questioned nothing, only dimly surprised that once again the King had deigned to ask for them, and the newer residents who were becoming quickly used to upheavals. It had been a season of surprises: first Sarah—though some cannier ones said only "Her, again"—and then rain, and the return of the King with the woman, and then a brisk chill to the air and the first snowfall any could remember ever within these lands of perpetual brittle heat. No matter: the call had gone out, and all who were able to come came.

The goblins had accepted the arrival of others with equanimity, because the King had wished it so, or at least because he had asked that others might have it so, and so the crowd that poured itself into the Castle Beyond was generally a mixed lot; bald-headed dryads and outlandishly sized animals, silent sages and talking amphibians who walked on two legs. Bullywoogs and gingersnips, fire-spirits and earth-spirits and outlandishly girdled putti, and creatures whose faces were stone, and, of course, the goblins, who were recognizable as a common tribe only because out of all these different people, the goblins' differences were all of a kind. Far fewer people there than there might have been a month ago, a week ago—many more had chosen to leave the kingdom than had chosen to stay.

The air was cold, and the sky was dark, and they came into the very heart of the castle.

Some, of course, most, had never been inside the castle, and fewer than that seen its heart, but they were all brought in, and sorcerously, there was room enough inside for all.

The heart of the Castle Beyond the Goblin City was the heart of wonders. A domed roof that seemed to end in radiance, not shadows, and couched beneath an ancient wonder of a peach-tree, one that bore flowers and fruit on the same branch, and filled all the air with the rich warm scent of drowsy sunny summer. On every branch, a little fairy, fat and sticky with pollen and juice, and at the light footstep upon every branch, flower-petals and glitter were shaken down upon them like confetti.

What did he do then, the Goblin King, and his wife, round-bellied with fruit of her own that somehow set the bounty of this magical fruit at a lesser price?

He gave them gifts.

He reached up into the tree which released its fruit in showers of petals and glitter, plucked enough peaches that it seemed everyone who wanted one might have one, and everyone wanted one. And still, this vast harvest kept some few fruits still on the tree. And he told them he was no longer their king, and that he must leave. Some few, even goblins, wept and remonstrated piteously. The king was implacable, and his wife inscrutable. The little fairies wailed and swarmed away from the tree, and the crowd parted before a red stag that carried fire on the prongs of his horns.

There were almost none, besides the Goblin King himself, who had been present at the end of the Autumn Oracle's reign, a fierce and rampant monarch of the hunting season, but those few quickly informed their neighbors, who in turn informed theirs, until the entire kingdom understood that they were to witness a funeral pyre—if not for a king, then for a season of kingship that was now over. The fire of this tree, heart and root of their strange king's magic, would burn for an age, burn without going out. Magical fire, balefire, and all were to take a burning branch with them and distribute them like torches around the perimeter of the city. Inside would be warmth and heat that, while it couldn't kill the cold season, would keep the cold at bay. And he took a handful of fire from the stag's antlers (was this the ghost of the Autumn Oracle himself, some wondered, or only perhaps a merrybegot descendant, or nothing but the illusion that came to provide the necessary shape to things, that one defeated king should acknowledge another?)

Jareth, Goblin King, took up the fire in his hand and he set the tree to burn.

The tree, or the king himself, made a terrible sound, as if screaming in pain, or singing about pain. And the tree went up quickly. The flames were all colors—pink and blood-red and witch-fire green, but the fire was simultaneously the mellow gold of gold, and of ripe peach-flesh gilded in its own juice. And then the tree wasn't singing, or screaming; it made a chorus of itself, like an inception of abrupt choir-chords that were the prelude to some song that seemed about to begin. The petals and the leaves still fell endlessly and gracefully, but they were perfected gold, light as ash, luminescent as light. The fire in the upper branches was so bright it seemed the sun entire. And the ones who reached out to touch discovered that though this tree burned, and burned without being consumed, it only burnt itself. One could grasp a burning brand quite comfortably, and feel only the light tickle as if of a pleasantly warm breeze stirring against the skin.

The Queen spoke to them, as they were hushed in wonder, and her words, being far more direct, are better remembered. "We are coming back," she said fiercely. "Don't forget us. Wait for us."

There has been some speculation in days since, in the Labyrinth, that she was the far more dangerous of their two acknowledged monarchs. Rumors that she had made a dreadful alliance with the mysterious dwarf, Hoggle, were somewhat borne out by the news, to those living in the castle and privy to its inner court, that the dwarf had come to treat with her directly, and that she had let him escape with his head, for the King was hot for his blood. You could see that the King and the Queen were wroth with each other, though apparently still in love. Uncertain, these rumors, but certainly later no trace of the dwarf remained within the castle or the city. He presumably had escaped or been afforded escape, or, more likely, never been there at all.

Jareth the king lifted his wife lightly onto the great red stag's back, which carried her with seeming pride. Two saddlebags, small, one servant, and a burning branch full of flowers and fruit to light their way. That was all they took. And then they were gone.

It is said that they took a narrow gate, a last secret door, and a terrible one at that. No trace of their passing out has been recorded within the Labyrinth. But it is said that Jareth demanded of his wife to lock the last door shut behind them with her implacable key, and that she refused. So it was that the king who was no longer a king had to do the locking-up himself. Thenceforth, no passage existed between the Labyrinth and the world beyond. A great hush descended, as the snow fell endlessly upon the abandoned kingdom.

"This place," Jareth gasped in relief. "I thought we might have come out on the madhouse."

"No," Sarah murmured from between the vast collar of her wool cloak. Snowflakes fell on her eyelashes, kissed her brow. "Luck favors fools."

It was the park where she'd spent so many hours playacting and pretending, dressed in her white dress and reciting snippets of a play she hadn't comprehended so much intellectually as psychosexually. Beautiful, this park, only a short fifteen-minute walk, or a five-minute desperate run from her childhood home. The pond was icy, the obelisks covered in snow.

"Are you all right?" Jareth asked her anxiously. Zoe was a silent shadow in the larger shadow of the red stag.

Sarah shook her head. Her seat was comfortable and easy; the dip of the stag's back was as wide and ensconcing as a couch, even sidesaddle. She ran her gloved fingers through the thick pelt of his neck in gratitude. "I'm fine. Take me back to my father's house." She didn't need to say the rest: Since you've lost yours, and brought me out in the winter like the refugees we are. She felt disdainful and heavy, but just as she was well-situated on the stag's back, Egg was well-situated in her belly. More kindly: "Take us home, Jareth."

He searched her face and saw how calm; she had schooled her face to calmness. But the world appalled her with its ugliness, even in the night, in the snow, when it seemed as though the four of them were the only people in the world entire. She saw all the small petty cheapness of the world, the things she hadn't noticed because they were so common: bundles and lines of black electrical and telephone cables, the stink of car exhaust, the filth the cars had churned the snow into, and above all the gross mathematical symmetry of the streets and buildings. How quickly she'd forgotten.

The deer stepped lightly down the suburban city streets; they came to her father's house, the place that had been her home. Would her father and Karen welcome them? Would they, please God, have any word of Toby, or of Finn?

"There's always the garage," Sarah murmured to herself, half-smiling.

"We'd do better to take her to the nearest hospital," Zoe said to Jareth, carefully, deferentially.

"Please, no," Sarah sighed. "Not tonight. Tomorrow." The two of them paused and evaluated her. "I told you. I feel fine. And if there's trouble, I'd rather it be in my room with my family than in the middle of some germy hospital where I have to be alone. No," Sarah said, as she saw the two of them exchange glances. "Not until tomorrow. That's my final word."

And they came to the house, sitting high up on the ridge, overlooking a sunken wilderness of undeveloped scrub and wetlands. All was dark except for the carriage-lights bestriding the front door. Jareth lifted her down, light as a feather, and Zoe took the bags. She'd taken so little, but she resented seeing the young woman treated as a beast of burden; she had her own belongings to carry. She'd brought Zoe down in the world just as surely as Jareth had brought her down, in all ways literal and figurative. She looked away, not wanting to see.

"Thank you," Sarah said instead, to the stag. She wished she had a lump of sugar to give him, or a slice of apple, but she had nothing. Instead, she put her arms around his neck and hugged him. Such strength there, and generosity. She hoped he understood how grateful she was. "If you ever need anything, come to me, and I'll give it."

The stag pawed up some dirty snow and turf from the lawn, bowed his head once, and bounded away into the darkness, like a wild thing startled. Jareth supporting her on one side, Zoe on another, they climbed the steps. Sarah rang the doorbell, hard, like the stranger she felt herself to be.

She heard feet flying down the stairs, and her heart leapt. She heard the locks drawn with impatience, the door flung open, and surely it wasn't, surely it couldn't be—"Toby!" she laughed, and cried, and Toby was crying too, and laughing to see her.

"Sarah! Dad! Mom! It's Sarah!" But her father and her stepmother were already hurrying down the stairs, her father looking overjoyed, Karen fretful, and both bleary-eyed from interrupted sleep, and in their nightclothes.

"Dad, Karen," Sarah said wearily. "You remember Jareth, my husband. This is Zoe, a friend of mine. I know you have questions, but we're all exhausted. Can we stay here tonight?"

Karen took Robert's hand, and stretched out her other to Toby, who seemed just out of her reach. She looked at the four of them, and then up at Robert, and nodded.

"It won't be that bad," Jareth said, tucked into the bed close beside her. She'd longed for him, ached for him, it seemed, for months, wanting to feel him sleeping near her, helping her feel safe. And now she had her heart's desire, and it was bitter. The bed was hard, and his hand against Egg felt too warm, too covetous—and there wasn't room in the narrow bed to pull away. She put her hand over his and squeezed until his knuckles cracked.

"Don't you dare lie to me," Sarah whispered, trying to be quiet though the house seemed fully asleep, Zoe down the hall on a cot in the sewing room. "It's that bad, and worse is coming to worst. No one knows where Finn is, if he's even alive. We've left the Labyrinth, and I don't like the world anymore. Everything is ruined." She realized she was crying, in silent gasps that were soaking her pillow. "I'm so unhappy."

"I know," he said, and she could hear the anguish in his voice, but he didn't join her in crying. No. Instead he was blowing cool air across her sweaty skin, tucking his pillow against her heavy side, giving her something to lean on. "I know you're unhappy. Be unhappy, then. Be anything you like. Just be it with me."

Outside, the weight of the snow poured down out of a black iron sky, Winter coming into its full strength. God knew if it would ever end.

END ACT I

Next… Chapter Twelve: "The World"

Author's Notes: Jareth's attempt to open the locked door is borrowed with all praise from Tanith Lee's Delirium's Master, where Prince Chuz coaxes a gate to open in just such a way.

There's a quote from Q, from the ST:TNG episode "Q Who?" where he snidely informs Captain Picard, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."

This is how I've felt for the longest time with this story—timid, afraid to take a bloody nose, or to make the characters take one, even though this has been the plan since the beginning. So it's been hard to write this chapter, even with the elements of wondrousness that delight me. On the other hand, The Empire Strikes Back is my favorite Star Wars movie, because I love perseverance and integrity in the face of visible and compounded defeat. Please consider leaving me a review if you share any of these sentiments.