by Ember Lane
Merl shivered. The farther north they’d ventured, the colder the nights had become. All around, the forest closed on them as they stole through it like thieves and fugitives. They made poor headway, and after a while Frank stopped, crouching and breathless. “This isn’t going to work. We didn’t think it through.”
“Why?” Desmelda’s question was blunt, much like all of their moods.
“Because we’re fighting the forest all the way. What if we get to a ravine and can’t go farther? It all seemed so easy on the ship. We’ll just have to find a road and risk it. Steal a cart and head north until Quaiyl tells us another way.”
Merl thought it unlike Frank to give up on anything this quick, and that was the measure of how slow and hard the route through the forest was.
“Tis a tanglin’ forest, that’s fer sure,” Billy added.
Desmelda agreed too. Merl couldn’t believe their great plan was already in tatters. A heavy feel of resignation hung over them as they continued on fighting their way north. They all carried a slump on their shoulders. To add insult to injury, the undergrowth grew thicker, and the ground underfoot became more and more uneven. Moss-covered rocks turned their ankles. Reaching roots tripped them. Thorns clawed at them and spider webs clung to their faces.
By dawn they were miserable and defeated. Even in the daylight, they only made slow headway. As soon as they came across the tiniest of clearings, Frank conjured his hut, the fire, Desmelda’s cauldron, and her bed.
“That’s it,” he said. “No farther without some plan. We’d have been better off leaving Quaiyl on the ship and finding Stobart Torped the old-fashioned way.”
“How’s that?” Billy asked.
“Just bloody well ask.”
Merl had never seen Frank so down, but looking around the clearing, there seemed no end to the forest. It was like being surrounded by an army of trees. While Desmelda heated the broth, which now had a decidedly fishy taste to it, Merl decided he’d do something about their predicament. More and more, he was feeling their situation was all his fault. If he hadn’t have been able to see the stupid letters over folk’s bonces, or hadn’t talked to Stormsurfer, they might have never found the Staff of Morrison White, and they might have never traveled to the Isle of One and found Quaiyl. If they hadn’t done all that, they could have met the girls in Three Valleys, accepted the land was a bit buggered and gone back to Morgan Mount. That little tale had lived happily ever after written all over it, and that was where you wanted your words.
He studied each tree in turn and sized up the tallest. It was a towering, leafy, deciduous tree, or as Merl called it, a droppin’ tree. It had enough knotholes to get a decent purchase all the way up to the lower branches. Merl had often climbed trees to seek shelter while his dad’s sheep grazed.
Merl gave the tree one last glance and jumped up. He scaled it easily, managing to pull himself onto the first branch before anyone had noticed what he was up to. Quaiyl stood at its base and waited patiently.
“What the hell are you doin’, Merl?” Frank shouted up.
“Lookin’ t’see if there’s a way outta these woods,” Merl shouted down.
Frank stared up, hands on hips. His anger was clearly brewing.
Desmelda appeared decidedly pale. “By Andula that looks high.”
Merl didn’t wait for a telling off. He began scaling the tree like his life depended on it. Merl had two rules when climbing: don’t look down, and don’t stop. He’d already looked down once and had no intention of doing it again. Climbing was all about rhythm, and so he bolted up, near enough reaching the tree’s top before he took a breather. He’d chosen well. Just a little farther and he’d be above the surrounding trees. Gritting his teeth, he continued.
“My mess. Mine to sort out,” he said to himself.
The branches fanned out, and the sun glinted through and spurred him on. As the foliage thinned, so he began to see the surrounding lands. His heart sank. The forest was like a green sea, rolling away in all directions and cloaking every hill and valley. Judging by the way they’d come from, north would see them head toward distant mountains. Merl took a deep breath, resigned to delivering bad news. Then he saw them—small smoky gouts peppered the canopy in several directions. Some were mere wisps, perhaps just one dwelling, but others were much thicker, and Merl decided these were hamlets or villages. Judging by the sun, the closest was north and west. Merl twisted around, trying to get his bearings. He could use Quaiyl to navigate to the hamlet even in the dark, or if they couldn’t see the sun because it was stifled by the forest’s heavy canopy. It was a bit like they had navigated aboard Wave Walker. Merl tried to spy Quaiyl. He leaned farther out, catching sight of the little man-like creation, and shifted around to face the direction of the hamlet. Quaiyl was midway between Merl’s shoulder and nose. So therefore, Merl could navigate to the hamlet by keeping Quaiyl there.
Merl stretched to double-check, but a branch was in his way. He stretched farther. His hand slipped. Merl grabbed out, but his fingers closed around thin air. He reached again, this time catching hold of a branch, but the branch was tiny—little more than a twig—and immediately bent over and snapped, causing Merl to overbalance. His foot slipped, and he dropped, each leg sliding down a different side of the lateral branch he stood on. Merl fell toward it, groin first and he crashed straight down onto the branch.
Merl screamed in pain as his nuts were forced up into his stomach. His eyes rolled into the top of his head. Letting go of his hold on the tree, Merl’s hands instinctively dropped to his groin. Somewhere deep in his mind, underneath the veneer of pure agony that currently had hold of him, Merl realized that he’d made a terrible mistake. He seesawed one way, and then the next.
“Oh no!” Merl shouted, but he put little punch behind it, more a resigned acceptance that his next movement would be the critical one, but he couldn’t stop it happening.
He seesawed back the other way and carried on until he was upside down. Just as his subconscious realized that if he clamped his legs hard around the branch he might be able to stop his inevitable fall, it also realized it was too late. Merl dropped like a stone—a thrashing, screaming, grabbing, stone—that clattered off everything, banged into every branch, somersaulting and lurching from one collision to the next.
Until he ran out of branches.
Merl hurtled toward the forest’s floor. He gave up any hope of stopping and tried to curl up in a ball. He squeezed his eyes shut. He clamped his jaw together, and he waited for the bone-shattering thump of his impact, but slowed, he slowed right down, and he settled on the ground like a leaf during droppin’ season. Merl groaned as his eyes swelled and closed. His last sight was Quaiyl’s blank face looking down at him.
Merl’s whole body jolted in painful surprise. It was like he’d grabbed a river eel and it had unleashed its nerve-shivering evil into his broken body. Except this originated from his nose. He heard Desmelda’s voice, but it was like she was speaking through a puddle. He wiggled his toes, thankful that he still had some. He tried to flex his fingers, but they were still busy cupping his groin. Someone grabbed his nose and stuffed something up it. He held his breath, but then a hand clamped over his mouth. Merl breathed in.
A bunch of tiny swords all tore up his nose and down into his lungs. His chest exploded in pain, and the swords then plunged farther down his body, reaching his wriggling toes, which became rigid with pain. But once the agony relented, the pain of his broken body ebbed away a little. A dull throb emanated from his groin like a pulsing evil threatening to encroach and grab his bladder, his guts, and his stomach and pull them toward it so they could join in.
“One more?”
Merl heard Desmelda clearly that time.
Frank leaned over. “I think so. His bruising is ebbing, and his broken leg seems to have mended. We’ll have to prize his hands away from his stones sooner or later. You’d think he’d have been more worried about his bonce.”
“He’s a man, wha
t do you expect?” Desmelda snapped.
Merl drifted off. The pain was leeching his attention away and focusing it on his broken self. He remembered falling, but he didn’t remember thumping to the ground. He remembered Quaiyl looking down at him but didn’t remember getting there. What he did remember was really strange.
He remembered you had to build a cottage before you could build a farm, but that once you’d built the farm, the cottage would supply the population to work the farm and that was that. Then he remembered that you had to build a lumberyard else you would run out of wood, and that made no sense to him because there were forests everywhere. The fact that you needed a quarry to excavate stone came as no surprise to him. Fred the Quarryman had been doing that for as long as Merl had been alive. He even knew that you’d eventually need stone to build a city wall. He had the feeling that this information was important. That it had something to do with the Power of Construction, and that it led to the Power of Source, almost like a chain. Each Power was a link, and each link was attached to the next.
Merl had already built his first wall, but that had been largely forgotten as the discovery of The Origin, Quaiyl, had superseded all previous events. Mind you, he thought, while in his self-imposed coma, I can’t actually remember telling anyone. Perhaps they thought it was Guardian? He still didn’t understand a number of things about the Power of Construction, most important, what the hell it was. Did he have to find a hill like in his dreams—like on The Isle of One? Frank didn’t need one. He just built his hut wherever he wanted, and that seemed wrong to Merl. Something came before the cottage. Something really important. That was the key, and it was what he had to fathom out.
“He’s awake. He’s just pretending to be asleep,” Desmelda snapped.
“He could be dreaming,” Frank said. “Shall I tug his arms? That might shock him back. I’ll bet every coin I’ve got he went legs-either-side of a branch and crushed his stones.”
“Earghh!” Billy said. “That’s gotta hurt.”
Someone grabbed Merl’s arm, and so Merl tensed, ready for the imminent pain. He was conscious, but he wasn’t awake. He was somewhere in the middle, like a waking coma. It felt a bit like having a dead arm, except it was his whole body. He hoped Frank wouldn’t make him tug his own nuts. They still pulsed like a spider’s poison sack. A low growl rolled over him. Then a bark, a proper bark, and then a yelp—a Frank-sounding yelp.
“It bit me. Bastard dune dog bit me.”
“It’s protecting him,” Desmelda whispered. “First Quaiyl catches him, then Gloomy Joe defends him. I’ve seriously got to get me one each of those. The only thing us witches get are owls and cats, and both are bugger all use for anything apart from preening themselves. Really, how come we witches get the crap pets?”
Merl felt Gloomy Joe jump up onto Desmelda’s bed. He assumed he was in Desmelda’s bed. The dune dog rested its head of Merl’s stomach and growled intermittently.
“Well, I guess we’re gonna get nowhere tonight,” Frank said, and kicked at something Merl couldn’t see. “We’ll rest up here and make a plan at first light, just as long as it doesn’t involve anyone climbing trees.”
Gloomy Joe let out a long, contented splutter.
“Thank you,” Merl said in his mind.
He aimed his thanks at both Gloomy Joe and Quaiyl, but neither replied, and he was quite happy with that. He had enough voices in his head already, and they were all his. He did, however, sense the two of them, and that made him happy. For the rest of the night his mind meandered around the small issue of how to conjure a huge, golden bowl, set it upon a cloud, and then get it to spill water all down a hill that wasn’t there to start with while carving a set of upward steps. He was fairly sure that once he’d mastered that, he’d have the Power of Construction nailed.
Merl finally opened his eyes as dawn broke, and Gloomy Joe gave him a nice, sloppy lick. Nice was a stretch—Gloomy’s breath stank. Billy was looking down at him. Merl yelped, and in doing so pulled his sore nuts in, and that made him yelp all the more.
“Billy Muckspreader! You scared the slop outta me.”
Billy had clearly been asleep with his eyes open. He jumped out of his skin the instant Merl shouted. “Bugger me, Merl. Keep yer hair on!” he screamed as he landed back in his chair. “I thought you was asleep.”
“An’ I thought you was awake. You was sat there all zombay-like with yer eyes open.”
“I was charged with looking out fer you fer the last half of the night. You was like a dead ‘un, all white ‘n all.”
“I fell outta a bloody tree. What d’ya expect?”
“How d’ya feel, like?” Billy stood, looking him up and down.
Gloomy Joe growled.
Merl sat up, and he yawned. “That Desmelda’s some healer. I think I’m all fixed. It’s like magic, ‘cept she’s a witch, so I suppose it is magic.”
“No, it wasn’t all mine,” Desmelda poked her head up from a heap by his feet. She stretched and groaned. “I’d forgotten how uncomfortable sleeping on the ground was.” She stood, which seemed to take her an age and resembled a crooked flower growing. Merl swore he heard all her joints click into place as she straightened. “Right, let’s get this straight. I didn’t heal you at all, well, hardly at all. Quaiyl caught you. It then… and I hesitate to say this… It caught you, and then it vanished inside you for a moment, before reappearing and carrying you across to the mud hut and placing you gently on my bed. I merely helped along the healing that it, that thing, The Origin, Quaiyl, had already started. By Andula I need a wash. I don’t suppose you caught sight of a river, perchance? You know, before you decided you could fly.”
“A river, no, but I saw a village somewhere over between my nose and shoulder from here.”
Desmelda scratched her head, then shrugged her shoulders. She said, “I’ll take that,” and darted out of the mud hut. “Merl found a river!”
Merl furrowed his brow heavily. “Did I just say that?” He wondered if he had banged his mouth, and now it wasn’t working properly.
Billy got up. “Yup and no at the same time, like, but where there’s a village there’s always a river close by.”
Merl swung his legs off Desmelda’s bed. Apart from his stones, the rest of him seemed fine and dandy. He wondered why they still hurt, but decided they’d been savaged by the branch, so what should he expect? “Have you gone all ‘telligent on me, Billy Muckspreader?”
Billy grinned, and Merl returned it.
“I’m glad you didn’t die, Merl.”
“Me too.”
“We’d ‘ave never known there was a village without you.” Billy burst out laughing and ran out.
Merl stroked Gloomy Joe. “We’ll get to the bottom it, Gloomy. If only we can find a place that makes fluffy clouds and them golden bowls. Then we can stop all this creepin’ around and set up a nice, warm home.”
He skulked outside, waiting for Frank to start shouting at him. Frank hated Merl getting himself in trouble. For instance, the wizard had sulked most of the day after they’d been to The Isle of One, and all because Merl had rushed back to Baldrock and put himself in the thick of the danger. Merl cringed as Frank turned and faced him.
“Village, eh?” the wizard said.
Frank didn’t look annoyed. He looked odd, like he was wearing his mood wrong.
“Yeah, I worked out that if I keep Quaiyl between my right shoulder and me nose, I’ll be able to take us there.”
“And is that what you were doing when you climbed up the tree? Is that what you were doing? Finding our way?”
“I… I’m sorry, Frank.” Merl swept his gaze to the floor. “Sorry.”
Frank grabbed Merl’s hands. He knelt, looking up. “Merl, don’t you get it? It matters a lot that you don’t die. It might be that you are the only hope this land has. Why? We just don’t know. You might just mess it all up. I might just mess it all up—Desmelda, Billy, any of us. We’re in this together, Merl. In it together. Y
ou climbed the tree and you found a way out of this god damn forest. You put yourself in danger, Merl. It shouldn’t have come to that.”
“So, you’re not mad?” Merl said.
“I’m mad you had to do it. I’m mad at me because I didn’t do it—didn’t even think about it. Most of all, I’m mad at the bastard that did all this to us. I’m mad at him, and one day I’m gonna gut that son of a bitch and say, ‘That’s fer Merl and Billy,’ coz the thing I’m most mad at is that you aren’t up in those hills tending your sheep and then going home to your dad.”
Merl stared at him. At first, he felt sad for making Frank mad. But then he realized that he didn’t want his olf life back. He wanted to be right where he was, right at that moment. Well, not quite. He’d have rather been closer to the village. “I’m not sorry, Frank,” he eventually said. “That’s the blinkin’ trouble with it. I don’t want to be herdin’ sheep, and worse, I don’t want t’be going home to me dad—not that he was there, he was always with Walinda Alepuller—I want t’be here, Frank. I want t’be here with you, with witchy witch, and with Billy. I want to save the world, Frank. I want to save the world with the Wizard of Quintz.”
Frank stood, and as he did, he lifted Merl up and swirled him around.
“Well, why don’t we do that then!”
18
After a small discussion, the party had solved the problem that revolved around Quaiyl and not being able to walk The Origin into a village. In the end, it had been an easy fix, and that was why Merl was still in the woods. If he stayed put, so did Quaiyl.
The tiny hamlet was situated by a wooden bridge that spanned a wide river. None of the inhabitants appeared to be zombayfied, although one seemed to like wandering around aimlessly. Frank, Desmelda, and Billy entered the small settlement. Their reception was one of confusion, then suspicion, and then finally welcome. From his distant vantage point, Merl assumed it was rare for the inhabitants to see travelers enter on foot, or more likely, rare to see travelers at all. From his vantage point, all the hamlet had to offer was game that could be hunted anywhere in the forest. It did have an inn, but it looked more like a shop, and was the only stone dwelling in the hamlet. It probably doubled as a store as well, which was common in smaller settlements. Merl bet the inn was warm and cozy and so much comfier than the dank, dark forest he crouched in. He imagined the smell of its homey cooking.
