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A dark smudge moved on the crest of a nearby combe. Alert, Blackberry looked up from a patch of clover. Elil? A bird? A rabbit? She couldn't quite make it out.
Carefully, she crept closer. Yes, it was a rabbit, but it moved strangely, stiff and jolting. Was it injured? Or…ill? Fearfully, she thought of the White Blindness. She scented the air, but she was upwind of the strange rabbit. Still, she ought to investigate. Maybe it needed help. Or if it was a danger, Blackberry needed to find out what it was so she could warn Hazel.
As she approached, she realized there was something familiar about the rabbit. That strong frame and dark brown fur. One of his ears was half off, she noted in surprise as she drew near, and for a moment that difference made it harder to recognize him but it was Campion.
For one shining moment, the ache of grief melted away and her heart was full again. The war over, Campion alive—Fiver's words hadn't just been platitudes, he'd really sensed Campion was alive! Blackberry leapt forward, bounding up the hill to meet him.
"Campion, you're alive! It's really you!"
He didn't turn around. He stood still as a stone at the top of the combe, scarred and resolute and unheeding. He made no acknowledgement of Blackberry.
Hadn't he heard her?
"Campion?" she called out, slowing from her headlong rush. "Campion, it's me."
As she drew closer, she became certain that something was wrong. Would he not look at her? The wind changed slightly and it occurred to her that the scent was off. Her gut twisted at the thick, sickly-sweet smell of rot, rolling through the air like fog.
Sharply, stiffly, he turned his head. Blackberry gasped and stepped back.
His face was torn and mangled, one eye gouged and bloody. Dark blood matted the fur along his muzzle, neck, chest. The wounds festered, black and rotten, heavy with the scent of decay.
The wounds were far from the worst of it. She'd seen injuries before, and was less sensitive to blood than rabbits tended to be. She'd hardly expected Campion to look the same as he once had: It was miraculous enough that he'd survived. To survive uninjured would be impossible.
But there was something else about him, something that crawled under her skin. There was something wrong. That powerful scent of rotting flesh…
The veins on his ears were thin and black, standing out starkly against pale, bloodless flesh. His nose did not twitch at all—his whole body kept unnervingly still. Despite his open, putrefying wounds, there were no mites or flies about him. The light itself seemed to avoid him, casting him in a strange shadow.
His remaining eye was a dull, lifeless red. Blackberry remembered something from Dandelion's stories.
"You're not Campion," she whispered. She couldn't say the name aloud.
"No," agreed the Black Rabbit of Inlé.
Her breathing came fast and ragged. She'd never known the Black Rabbit to walk among the living. Was he here for her? Why was he wearing Campion's body?
"I am not here for you," he assured her. His voice was cool and flat, but not cruel. "You have many seasons yet. Leave me to my deeds."
Blackberry wouldn't be dismissed when Campion was here—dead? hurt?—in front of her. "What do you want with him?" Her voice was high and tight with fear.
"Nothing. His trail is run."
Nothing? Then—
"Let him go!" cried Blackberry. How cruel was it to drag this out, control him like this? Campion didn't even speak with his own voice. Was he still there? She stared at the dead red eye in hope that it might change somehow, return to the deep green of the buck she knew.
"He is not here," the Black Rabbit answered, his stony voice issuing from Campion's broken, bloody jaws. "He is beyond you now. This is only his body."
No. No. She couldn't believe that, not after seeing him speaking and walking—
She surged forward, pressing her nose into the fur of his shoulder, wanting to feel the warmth of Campion's body and the strong beat of his heart, to find his scent under the rot, and maybe then he'd come back and she'd hear his voice again—
There was no heat. He was cold as snow and still as stone. No breath, no heartbeat, no reaction to her touch. Nothing to differentiate him from something dead.
She jerked back, trembling, mute with horror, for many heartbeats tharn.
The Black Rabbit watched dispassionately. He knew well death and fear.
Slowly, Blackberry sank into the grass. "He's really gone then," she whispered, more to herself than the reaper. This was not Campion, had no trace left of Campion, was only dragging his body about in a mockery of life. She could not clean the blood from his wounds and get him back because it was not him beneath it all.
The Black Rabbit did not reply.
"Why use him?" she demanded, hot tears slipping from her eyes. "There were dead Efrafans—why not them?" She wouldn't pretend to understand why the Black Rabbit needed the body of a dead creature, but she couldn't accept that he needed Campion. Poor, broken Campion who'd already suffered so much and given so much of himself up.
"He came to meet me." The Black Rabbit's voice echoed like he was in the caverns beneath the warren. "He leapt into my embrace and came willingly to Inlé. The others were angry and confused. This shell was the easiest to inhabit."
Blackberry shook her head. The fur of her cheeks was soaked with tears. "No. I don't believe that. He wanted to stay with me—I know that!" But still she remembered his last moments. Him leaping away to protect Woundwort of all rabbits, meeting her eyes with full knowledge of what he'd done as the stone caved in above him. She knew what she'd seen. She hated it.
But the Black Rabbit spoke plainly. There was neither sympathy nor malice. Blackberry might have preferred malice—something to rage against. But he only spoke the truth, and that truth was cold and bleak.
"Return home," the Black Rabbit told her. The scent of rot was overpowering, making Blackberry dizzy. "You cannot reach Campion here. Return to the days Frith has given you."
Puppeting what was left of Campion, he turned away with a horrible crack of joints, sudden and stiff like something that didn't know how to move. He staggered over the crest of the combe and began to move in a tight, lurching gait. For a moment Blackberry watched, her heart yearning to go after him again and help him even as she knew in her mind that he was no longer Campion.
She didn't want to go back to the warren, not now. She didn't want more pity.
She bowed her head and cried.