Shadow Hand

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  But the wind grew harsher, and it seemed to spiral from the tops of the tree branches down, down, down to the ground, scattering more starflowers as it went. And Daylily saw that wherever it touched, the trees were bare and dark. The valley itself, bereft of their light, fell into ever-deepening gloom.

  A silver voice sang behind her ear. Daylily glanced over her shoulder and thought she saw the white breast of the speckled songbird flash in swift flight across her vision. But she shook her head and gazed once more upon the valley of the starflowers.

  Suddenly a great light, like a shining crown, burst from the center of the darkened trees, and the trees themselves, stripped of their glory, fell before it in ruin. The Bronze stones around the necks of the warriors gleamed in response to the building light, and Daylily found her voice crying out with theirs in a chant she did not know she knew:

  “From blood springs life! From life springs blood!”

  Over and over again they spoke. And as the chant rose into the night, a shudder passed through the ground beneath their feet. The soil moved and shifted, bubbling up in the center of the broken grove. Then, like a terrible boil, something burst through the earth and rose up, eclipsing the shining light. Even the stars in the sky gasped and hid their faces behind clouds at what they saw taking place below.

  Up from the heart of the land rose the Mound. Like a tumor it swelled, a black mass clutching at the soil with hands like roots. All over its rising head sprouted thorns, and green branches grew up, withered, and dropped their leaves at once.

  The warriors ringing it bowed.

  “From blood springs life! From life springs blood!”

  The wolf in Daylily’s mind whimpered. No . . .

  Then Daylily, along with the other warriors, stepped over the broken saplings, their feet crushing the petals of starflowers, grinding their lingering light beneath their heels. The children not carried followed as well, and they too trampled starflowers. The company descended into the very shadow of the Mound, and there Daylily saw a gaping hole in its side from which rose a black, hungry stench.

  No! screamed the wolf.

  Daylily turned to her Advocate, searching his face for some explanation. But she saw only solemn reverence building to awe. And his voice chanted along with the others, “From blood springs life! From life springs blood!”

  He carried a girl child in his arms, and other children followed in his footsteps. He, like the other warriors ahead of him, approached the hole in the side of the Mound. Daylily advanced behind him.

  Mine!

  The voice came now from the Mound itself, bringing with it a waft of stink and decay and old, old blood.

  Mine!

  One at a time the warriors took the children in their arms and threw them into the hole. Daylily, last of all, the boy held tightly, drew up beside her Advocate. She gazed into that darkness and knew it for her own face.

  Then she looked down into the face of the boy. But his eyes were full of the Bronze light, and he could not see her.

  Mine!

  She threw the boy in after the others. And the door of the Mound was shut behind him.

  17

  THE LITTLE ONE STOOD in the open doorway of his mother’s house and solemnly sucked two fingers. He watched mud plaster fall and blinked his large eyes. He watched a hand emerge through what had been a wall and blinked twice more, even paused in his sucking. As the hand groped about blindly, then began peeling mud from the edges of the gap it had created, the child drew a deep breath, then resumed sucking with earnestness.

  A head appeared. The evening was growing heavy as fleece in the sky, so few details of this head were discernible. A great deal of plaster stuck to any available portion of skin, creating a ghoulish aspect only made more terrible by the black hair standing up in wild and wooly tufts. Eyes swollen by wasp stings squinted about in a desperate attempt to find bearings. They fixed upon the child in the doorway. They widened.

  The child went on sucking. With his free hand, he offered a tiny wave.

  The head tried to retreat back through the wall but couldn’t quite fit. The child continued watching, fascinated, as the erstwhile prisoner contorted until he got one shoulder and then an arm outside. More plaster rained down from above until his whole head was white with it. The child took his fingers from his mouth and substituted a still more comforting thumb.

  “Dragons blast it!”

  With this strange cry, the prisoner made a final, crumbling burst. Then, with a last look at the child, he gathered himself up from the wreckage and took to his heels, stumbled, fell, recovered, and ran again down the dark side of the hill upon which the house was built. A curse and a rustle of leaves signaled his disappearance into the jungle.

  The child, thumb in place, took a step out the door, craning his neck for a better view.

  “Wolfsbane!”

  That sharp voice could only belong to an elder sister. The child turned to the girl who was a source of equal parts awe and comfort in his young life. She pounced on him like a rabbit on clover, catching him up in her arms.

  “You know better than to go outside on your own!” Lark chided, “oofing” to get her brother up on her skinny hip, which was really more bone than hip. She was just ten years of age and slightly built like her mother before her. But her twig-thin arms disguised wiry muscle. After all, she was the successful watchwoman over a brood of siblings, which required strength as well as cunning.

  The aforementioned Wolfsbane took his thumb from his mouth and grabbed his sister’s ear for stability in his newly elevated position. “Bake,” he said, then added appropriate crashing noises with his lips.

  “Break?” Lark said, using the gift of translation common in the ranks of big sisters. “What did you break, Wolfie?”

  “Nuah!” Wolfsbane protested, the picture of affronted innocence. He pointed.

  Lark stepped out the front door of her mother’s house for a better look. The main house was built of stone and mortar, strong and sturdy after the practice of her father’s people. But many of the attached wings were assembled according to the building standards of her mother’s less architecturally inclined tribe, easy enough for a determined man to break through if need pressed.

  “Da!” Lark called, clutching young Wolfsbane by a dimpled leg as she swung about to call into the house. “Da, the prisoner’s escaped!”

  “What prisoner?” her father’s voice bellowed from inside.

  “The wasp man!”

  “I told you”—Redman appeared from down a short stone passage, a knife in one hand, an onion in the other—“he’s not a prisoner. He’s a guest who isn’t allowed to leave, and what do you mean, he’s escaped?”

  Lark and Wolfsbane pointed as their red-bearded father joined them in the doorway. His good eye, used to the cooking fire over which he had been crouched, took a moment to adjust to the evening’s blue gloom. Then he muttered, “Well, Flame at Night . . .” and trotted out for a closer look at the breakage. Lark, with Wolfsbane in her arms, trailed after, and the two children watched their father as he peered inside and inspected the hole. “Flame at Night,” he said again, speaking in the tongue of his people when he swore, which always made his children giggle. “He certainly has escaped, and left a trail of plaster a blind man could follow. It’ll take me all day to fix this mess.”

  “What about the wasp man?” Lark asked.

  “I suppose we’ll let the totems have him,” Redman said.

  “Da!”

  “All right. Since you’ve taken such a fancy to him, I’ll fetch him back to you. Pesty girl.”

  Lark sniffed with great dignity at this, and Redman addressed himself to his son. “Guard this until I return,” he said, placing the onion in Wolfsbane’s wet hand. “Should I perish, you’ll know what to do with it.”

  Wolfsbane stuck the onion into his mouth.

  “Let me go with you, Da?” Lark asked, catching the onion before her brother violently discarded it as unfit for consumpt
ion. “I can help.”

  “Me! Me!” Wolfsbane added with equal fervor.

  “No,” Redman replied, sheathing his knife as he started down the hill toward the jungle. “Go wash up young Wolfish there, then you and your sisters finish supper. I’ll be back hungry, so be sure you make plenty!”

  With these words, Redman vanished into the shadows, following the trail of plaster. Lark set her brother on his feet and stood a moment holding his hand. The lights of the village cooking fires shone like beacons in the deepening night, surrounding her mother’s stone house on all sides, save the one leading down to the jungle. Down there, all was dark. Dark and dreadful.

  “Poor wasp man,” Lark whispered. She hoped her da would find him. Before the totems did.

  One never fully appreciates the blessing that is a pair of shoes until one is suddenly without them in a deepening jungle twilight, fleeing, one presumes, for one’s life.

  The jungle teemed with insects, and with creatures that ate the insects, and with creatures that ate the creatures that ate the insects. Foxbrush could have safely bet there were creatures that ate those as well, but he wouldn’t let himself consider that far up the hierarchy.

  The insects themselves were bad enough. Everything with wings and far more legs than should be permitted swarmed to the sticky mess smeared over Foxbrush’s skin. They weren’t wasps at least, but many of them were biters. More welts swelled on his arms, his neck, his hands, and his poor bare feet.

  Foxbrush was out of breath before he’d gone far. Lack of exercise and terror made it so that he could scarcely keep himself upright as he plunged through the tangle of vines. By necessity he found the beaten trail. There was no break in the foliage anywhere else, so he ran down the trail with all the speed he could muster. He did not know where he was going or what he hoped to achieve by this foolish dash. Perhaps he had gone a little mad.

  This was when he started hearing things.

  “Danger! Danger!”

  “Stranger!”

  The voices relayed this rumor as fast as he could run, faster even. He heard it whispering through the treetops, darting on ahead of him, then looping round and coming back. They did not speak in a language he knew, but he understood the words even so.

  “Danger! Stranger!”

  It must be the figs. He must have eaten too many bad figs, and this, all this, must be the result of one spoiled-fig-induced nightmare!

  Something landed on his shoulders.

  Foxbrush screamed as he was knocked flat, and he felt strong fingers grabbing first his ears and then his hair and then his chin, twisting his head as though to wrench it off. He scrambled for balance, and something coiled and serpentine slithered over his bare hand. He screamed, and the thing on his back screamed as well, and the thing that had crawled over his hand screamed louder still, and then something struck his heel.

  It was like having a nail driven swiftly into his foot, then yanked out with equal swiftness. Foxbrush’s screams intensified, but his voice was drowned out by all the other voices shouting: “Danger! Stranger! Danger!”

  Monkeys and birds and who knows what else erupted in eerie chorus on all sides. The whole world came alive in screeches and caws and bellows and shrieks and even a sound like a great wooden drum being thumped by enormous fists.

  Foxbrush curled up into a ball, his hands over his head, his knees hiding his face, and felt fists and beaks and claws pummeling him from all sides. He waited to die.

  It was in this position that Redman found him.

  The light was mostly gone from the forest by that time, but Redman’s one good eye was comfortable in the dark, and he feared none of those living near the village. So he stood, his arms crossed, and looked down on the crumpled form of the stranger. “Well,” said he, “we’re not all born to be heroes.”

  With that he knelt and took hold of Foxbrush’s shoulder. Foxbrush only curled tighter, like an overlarge hedgehog. Redman snorted. “Come,” he said, valiantly disguising any hint of disgust. “Let’s get you back to my wife’s house and clean you up again.”

  Foxbrush, hearing a mortal voice, dared peek between his fingers. “Where . . . where are the monsters?” he gasped.

  “No monsters, lad,” said Redman.

  “They were attacking me!”

  “They’re all gone now. I paid totem-tribute, and they’ve backed down.”

  Though he understood none of this, Foxbrush did not resist as Redman hauled him to his feet, though he winced at the pain in his wounded heel. Redman, noticing, put Foxbrush’s arm over his broad shoulders. There was no use in fighting. Foxbrush submitted like a docile sheep to Redman’s prodding, and together they hobbled back the way they had just come. Lemurs watched with solemn moon eyes, and night birds laughed from their perches. It was as though the whole of nature was amused at Foxbrush’s expense, and he, feeling the shame, hung his head and thought he’d never lift it again.

  Then the wind spoke his name.

  It howled down from the sky above the trees, touching only the topmost branches, but these with such wild force that all the creatures dwelling above hastened to climb down. As it blew, the wind called in a voice Foxbrush thought he recognized.

  Foxbrush! Foxbrush, I have come for you!

  It moved on, passing quickly like a shudder. Foxbrush, frozen in Redman’s support, heard the echoes calling. Foxbrush! Foxbrush!

  Redman stood quite still, his eyes upturned. “A sylph,” he said.

  Foxbrush could not deny it, not even in his head. He’d tried hard enough while wandering the Between. But this was not the Between. This was the mortal world, the world of clay and death and of cold, hard reality. He really was here. He really had just heard a sylph calling his name in this real world where such things should not exist.

  He hated his life more in that moment than he ever had before.

  “That’s no good,” Redman said, readjusting his grip on Foxbrush’s arm. “They start calling your name in the night, and you begin to think you need to go after them. Don’t follow a sylph’s voice, lad! You’ll never be seen again.”

  Foxbrush tried to speak, but the pain in his foot with each step cut him off. At last he managed to gasp, “Are there . . . are there many of them? In Southlands?”

  “What? Sylphs?”

  Foxbrush nodded.

  “Enough, that’s for sure. They and others of their kind. Faerie beasts, as the Silent Lady called them. The rivers used to hold them back, but now that the rivers are gone many venture up from the Wood.”

  Foxbrush felt he should understand this. His brain hurt when he tried, however, so he stopped trying. They took several more painful steps.

  Redman said, “Why would a sylph be calling for you?”

  “I don’t know,” Foxbrush replied honestly enough. Another two hobbling steps, then, “I think I met sylphs earlier today. In the Wilderlands.”

  “Today?” Redman made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “If it was sylphs you met, my boy, it was likely a hundred years ago. Or a hundred years from now, perhaps.” He gave Foxbrush a sideways glance. “Or more than that.”

  “Is that . . . so?”

  It was difficult to discern any detail in the evening gloom, and Foxbrush was such a mess by now that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. But it wasn’t his appearance that gave him away. It was his voice. And Redman was no fool.

  “You’re not from this time,” he said.

  Foxbrush drew a long breath. “I don’t believe so. No.”

  “But you are a man of the South Land?”

  Foxbrush said, “Yes.” He hesitated. Then, “I’m soon to be Eldest.”

  Redman was not a man to be easily surprised. He had seen a number of strange sights in his day, met a number of strange folk. He had walked dark roads in dark lands unknown to other men and faced monsters in that darkness. But the idea of Foxbrush being Eldest of anywhere or any time very nearly undid him. “I think,” Redman said, his mouth twitching
against a laugh, choosing his words carefully as he spoke, “that you should tell me everything.”

  So Foxbrush did. In a haphazard, backward, and circular manner, he told Redman all that he could, from Daylily’s flight, to Lionheart’s disgrace, back to a certain childhood summer holiday when Leo befriended a goat girl and left Foxbrush behind with algebraic equations. He spoke of the Dragon, the poison, the dying Eldest Hawkeye, Nidawi and the Lioness, the Baron of Middlecrescent, the sylphs . . . even the figs! Everything spilled out, and Redman listened and asked no questions, and it was a wonder if he made any sense of it.

  They were still in the jungle when Foxbrush ran out of air. Redman paused and leaned Foxbrush up against a tree, giving both of them a much needed reprieve. Foxbrush couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked so much in so short a span of minutes, and he was quite gasping from the effort. He wiped sweat from his brow, which wrinkled with a sudden thought.

  “What distresses me most,” he said, not speaking so much to Redman as to himself in that moment, “is that all it took was my letter. I’ve never seen Daylily falter. Not when the Dragon came, not when the kingdom was poisoned, not when Leo was banished . . . not once did I see her flinch! I thought she was—” He shook his head ruefully. “I thought she was invincible. But all it took was one letter. One stupid letter. And she broke.”

  He sagged against the tree trunk then, and the pain in his feet disappeared as the worms in his belly once more resumed their wretched gnawing.

  Redman watched him. The scars of his ugly face throbbed with a flood of memories all his own. He had listened to Foxbrush’s rambling tale with interest and not a little disbelief. But now it was at its end, he regarded the young man who claimed to be prince, and could not decide what he felt. Pity? Disgust?

  Hope?

  “The funny thing about stories,” Redman said after a silence (which wasn’t really a silence with the night so alive around them), “is their way of happening again. And again.”