Shadow Hand

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  “Yes.” Lark graced Foxbrush with possibly the smuggest expression he had ever seen. “She is my great-great aunt. She lived with us until I was five years old. Then she left. But she taught us how to appease the Faerie beasts so that they don’t harm us.”

  These claims fit nowhere in Foxbrush’s view of reality—dragons, sylphs, totems, and Faerie queens aside. He smiled. “If you say so.”

  Once more, Lark rounded on him. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “You don’t believe me!” She brandished her fists at him. “Do not speak to me like I’m a child! I know what I know, and I know more than you do! You don’t even know about the totems! If my father hadn’t found you in the jungle, the Faerie beasts would have eaten you alive, and then where would you be?”

  “Easy, easy.” Foxbrush, quite alarmed by now, raised both his hands. The jungle, interested by the goings-on below, gathered in many feathery, furry, winged forms in the branches above and called down encouragement in all manner of animal voices, urging a fight. Its hopes were disappointed, for Foxbrush, in a tone far humbler than he had perhaps ever used in his life, said, “Forgive me, Eldest’s daughter. I am out of my time and equally out of my depth. I do not know your land or your laws, and the things you say to me seem like nursery tales. It is difficult for me to understand, and I beg your patience.”

  Lark was quick to wrath but quick also to forgiveness. Her scowls vanished in smiles, and she reached out to take Foxbrush’s hand, smiling even more when he flinched at her touch. She led him on in peaceful silence, leaving him to wonder how much he believed of her strange stories and how much he dared not believe.

  They passed another totem like the first two. Here a tall white egret stepped out of the greenery, its head moving in pulsing rhythm with each step. It took the cake Lark offered and walked on without a word; and as far as Foxbrush could guess, it may have just been a bird tamed to expect food from this devoted source.

  But Lark said, “He is pleased,” and they continued on their way.

  Sooner than Foxbrush expected—though it was difficult to gauge time on this green-grown trail—the jungle thinned and he saw the gorge opening up before them. He also saw the destination of their day trek: the gnarled, rock-grasping black fig tree.

  Foxbrush’s footsteps faltered even as Lark continued on her way. His memories of those first moments after he’d climbed from the gorge were convoluted at best. He remembered the wasps well enough, and he remembered the burn of their stings. He also remembered the inhuman voice that had responded to Redman, but he did not want to remember this, so he nearly convinced himself it had been a dream brought on by his terror.

  This lie comforted him briefly. Even as he stood on the fringes of the jungle, Lark approached the tree and called out:

  “Oh, Twisted Man, whose bark is thick,

  Who plunges rocks for wells to find,

  Here is tribute! Here is tribute!

  Take it, Twisted Man, and quick!”

  This time she withdrew from her pouch a handful of dried lily petals, which she threw at the tree just as her father had done days before. Even as she clapped her hands and spun about in place, a wind seemed to rush through the fig tree’s leaves. Its branches spread like grasping fingers, caught the fluttering petals, and drew them up inside.

  Then the Twisted Man stepped out.

  He was exactly what his name implied, every limb twisted and gnarled like a branch, the skin—if such it could be called—deeply creviced like old bark. From each limb sprouted many branches as twisted as the arms themselves, and at the end of each branch was a twiggy hand. His face, on a trunk-like torso with no sign of a neck, was that of an old, craggy man, and his hair was green leaves.

  “I like the tribute well,” he said in an inhuman language that, horribly, Foxbrush understood. Black eyes shot with green looked down on Lark contemplatively. “You are smaller than the mortal who usually pays me.”

  “He is my father,” Lark replied without even the slightest tremble in her voice. “I am his sapling, sprung from his seed, grown at his roots. I have come for your benevolent bounty.”

  The Twisted Man tilted his whole body as a dog might curiously tilt its head. The many little grasping hands joyfully shook their fists full of petals.

  “I like the tribute well,” he said. “You may take of my bounty.”

  “Call off your wasps, then, Twisted Man,” Lark said. “Send them sleeping to their nests until it’s time for them to wake.”

  “Very well,” said the Twisted Man. Then he stepped back and vanished into his tree. Its great boughs wavered a moment, the big leaves rustling before going still.

  Only then did Foxbrush realize he’d stopped breathing.

  He collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath, his mind desperately running for any reasonable explanation it might find and coming only to dead ends. If he fainted, he told himself, who could blame him? Would it truly unman him to succumb to the white whirling in his head, the bright lights bursting on the edge of his vision?

  Lark turned to him, shaking her head. “Get up,” she said. “Take off your basket and help me. We must gather fruit while he still remembers the tribute is paid. You don’t want to get stung again, do you?”

  In a numb wave of determined disbelief swiftly ebbing into an ocean of overwhelming—and completely unwelcome—belief, Foxbrush did as he was told. Both he and Lark took off their baskets; then he lifted the girl into the black fig tree’s branches, where she scrambled about, nimble as a ginger-haired monkey, gathering fruit.

  Foxbrush harvested his share as well, filling the baskets quickly. Every fig he plucked buzzed as though it were alive, which startled him so much the first few times that he nearly dropped them. He swiftly realized that the buzzing was caused by the wasps living inside: tiny, delicate, shimmer-green wasps, with lacy wings and enormous stingers for their size. A few crawled out and even perched upon his hand. He broke out in a sweat at this but continued moving methodically.

  “They won’t sting you,” Lark told him. “The Twisted Man called them off.”

  “Right,” Foxbrush replied breathlessly. He picked until his own basket was nearly half full before he managed to ask, “Is . . . is the Twisted Man, then, as it were, the spirit of the fig tree?”

  “What? Oh no!” Lark, perched in the branches above, laughed merrily. “What makes you think such a thing?”

  Foxbrush scowled. “I’m trying to make sense of the situation according to the rules of nature that seem to prevail in this world of yours. It struck me as a logical assumption.”

  Lark laughed again, probably because she did not understand half of what he said. “The Twisted Man is a Faerie beast. He came up from the Wilderlands, like all the Faerie beasts. The rivers in the gorges kept them out for ages, but when the rivers rose up to drown the Dragonwitch, they left the gorges behind and the Wilderlands grew. Now Faerie beasts of all kinds cross from their world into ours. They like it here,” she said this with a certain pride in her nation. “We have lush forests and rivers and—”

  “You said the rivers dried up.”

  “No, no, the Faerie rivers that were gate guards are gone. We have plenty of normal rivers flowing down from the mountains. The Faerie beasts like those. And the Twisted Man liked this tree, though he had to battle Crookjaw for it when first he came. What a fight that was . . .”

  The child rattled on for some time after Foxbrush had given up trying to listen. They finished filling their baskets with the wasp-infested fruit, then shouldered them to make the return journey. The weight of figs in such bulk surprised Foxbrush; he was puffing and panting within a few paces. Lark, by contrast, proved the strength of her scrawny limbs and seemed no more burdened than when they had first set out.

  “ . . . so we pay the tribute at the totems as the Silent Lady taught us,” she was saying when next Foxbrush bothered to listen. “This keeps them from pestering us, though most of them are harml
ess enough, not like Mama Greenteeth.” She stopped here, and her brown little face took on serious lines unusual in one her age.

  “Mama Greenteeth?” Foxbrush said. “I heard your parents speak of her. She was killed.”

  “Yes,” Lark acknowledged. “By something worse than she. By the red lady who wears the bronze stone.”

  “What is the bronze stone? Do you know?”

  Lark shook her head. “I’d not heard my parents speak of it, even in Northern tongue, until that night. But whatever it means, it is worse than Mama Greenteeth if it demands firstborn children as tribute. Even she was satisfied by wafers.”

  She fell into a silence made all the more dismal by the variety of noises around them. They neared the totem where they had seen the egret, and Lark made as though to pass without stopping. But Foxbrush glanced at the stone. And he gasped.

  “What are you doing?” Lark demanded, for Foxbrush leapt to the side of the trail and pushed the leaves back from the totem, revealing what lay upon its flat top.

  “My scroll!” He reached out but paused suddenly before touching it. “It’s my scroll, the one my cousin gave me. May I . . . is it . . .”

  “If Kolkata put it there for you, you may take it,” Lark said, nodding approval.

  So Foxbrush picked up the scroll, which looked a little worse for wear but still whole despite the nights it had spent in the elements. His trousers had no pockets, so he tucked it down the front of his shirt. For some reason, he felt better knowing it was there and he hadn’t lost it. Along with everything else he’d lost.

  They continued on in sweaty silence. After they’d passed the second of the totems, Foxbrush said, “I’m curious about one thing. Why are we going so far out of our way to gather wasp-infested black figs? Are they goat feed?”

  “No,” said Lark. “They’re for the elder figs.”

  “The what?”

  “The elder figs. We need black figs to . . . to . . . I don’t know how you say it. To make them fruit. To give them life, to . . .”

  “To cross-pollinate?”

  Foxbrush stopped in his tracks. His heart froze, then leapt to his throat and thundered there to escape. Not even when he’d fled the sylphs and the wasps had it pounded so vehemently. “You cross-pollinate black figs with elder figs?”

  Lark shrugged. “Without black figs, elder figs can’t be eaten. Hurry up!” She was nearly out of sight within a few paces, so thick was the growth over that trail. Still it was several moments before Foxbrush could find the breath to leap after her.

  He could not believe it! Of all the unbelievabilities he’d faced in recent life, this was by far the most outrageous!

  “I can save Southlands,” he whispered. Then he laughed a choking, gasping, desperate sort of laugh, and tears sprang to his eyes. “I can save Southlands!”

  23

  LIONHEART WOKE from violent, unruly dreams to discover that the baron had mostly cut through his bindings.

  It took him a moment to realize what was happening. After sitting for so many hours, his body felt like a bundle of knotted cord. He’d not intended to drift off, and he shook himself now, desperate to regain consciousness. His brain was full of red wolf and barren landscape, and he sat in a haze, trying to clear these images from his mind.

  With a start like a kick in the stomach, he saw what the baron was doing and was on his feet and surging across the room before his legs were quite ready to move. Thus he fell headlong into the baron but succeeded in knocking the little knife from his hands and sending it clattering across the floor.

  “Dragons eat you,” said the baron in a voice that would freeze bonfires. He said nothing more but sat watching with a calculating gaze as Lionheart retied his bonds, now with a much shorter length from the iron ring.

  Exhausted and bleary, Lionheart backed away from the baron, studying him. Where had that knife come from? The man was barefoot and bereft of his outer garments. But his undershirt was billowy and dark and might conceal many things.

  Lionheart plucked his own knife from his belt and stepped forward. He saw the baron flinch, but only just; after all, he’d expected murder all along.

  “If I were going to kill you, I wouldn’t have gone through all this bother,” Lionheart said as he cut away the baron’s shirt and pulled it off his body in rags. There were two more knives attached to his elbows and one tiny penknife at his wrist. Lionheart appropriated these and, after a moment’s hesitation, tossed them out one of the windows to break upon the courtyard stones below. “Even I’m not such a fool.”

  “Fool enough,” the baron said. He looked strangely . . . small. Stripped of his majestic trimmings, not to mention the hidden weapons, he was almost a pathetic sight.

  Yet his eyes were like knives themselves.

  “Do you hear that sound, Eldest’s son?” he asked even as Lionheart returned to lean his back against the great, heavy door.

  Listening despite himself, Lionheart heard nothing; nothing save a faint murmur far below, the clatter of hooves in the courtyard, and occasional gruff shouts. North Tower stood too high above it all for him to make out any words.

  It took him a moment to realize what the baron meant. No one was knocking at the chamber door.

  “That is the sound of your doom brewing,” said the baron softly. “First they flung themselves against the breakers, useless and weak. Now they mass for a tidal wave that will sweep you away.”

  “Right.” Lionheart offered the baron a grim half smile. “But only if they can get through the door.”

  “How long do you think you can hide in here?” the baron persisted, twisting in the attempt to find a more comfortable position. With the rope shortened, his wrists bound together at chin level, comfort became an elusive friend at best. “How long do you hope to prevent me from taking my rightful place as master of this kingdom?”

  “At least as long as the supplies hold out,” Lionheart said with a shrug.

  “What supplies?”

  All along Lionheart had known this was a foolish plan, though, if asked, he would have preferred the word daring. Kidnapping the most powerful man in the nation on his coronation day was perhaps not the wisest notion ever to take a young rebel’s fancy.

  But it might have worked. The baroness, after all, had proven a willing and even reasonably cunning ally. Had she not made certain the door to this chamber was open and ready? Had she not sent servants discreetly bearing rope in readiness for her husband’s binding?

  Had she not promised to supply abundant food and water for the probability of a long siege?

  Trying to appear calm, Lionheart got back up to search the room. The cupboards and the great wardrobe were empty; the sumptuous canopied bed hid nothing beneath but a chamber pot.

  “Overlook a little detail, Prince Lionheart?” said the baron, watching as Lionheart climbed up to check the top of the wardrobe, just in case. “I noticed while you slept, and I wondered.”

  Lionheart clenched his teeth to hold back the tirade of furious words bubbling up inside. He could not suppress an angry whisper of: “Dragons take that woman.”

  The baron’s chin lifted a little, and his great eyes narrowed. “What woman?”

  Lionheart dropped down from the wardrobe and stood with his back to his prisoner. How long could he hope to keep this up? He was confident—or mostly so—that no one would break through that door short of setting it ablaze. But how long would it take Foxbrush to return?

  How much could one count on a sylph’s word?

  “You are going to die, Prince Lionheart,” said the baron. “Either quickly by the hangman’s noose or slowly through starvation. One way or the other, you will die.”

  Lionheart turned and regarded the baron. Oddly enough, he felt peaceful despite the looming truth of his captive’s words. “I’ve already died, Baron. I’m not afraid.”

  With this, he returned to his place by the door, listening carefully. He knew they were there. They may have given up their pounding ass
ault, but they wouldn’t leave their intended king alone. No, they would be waiting just outside the door, swords drawn.

  He closed his eyes, this time not in sleep or even exhaustion. He simply sat there, letting his mind clear. And he listened. He listened more intently than ever before, with more earnest, striving energy than he had ever put into anything. He sat, head bowed, and his heart pounded with the need to hear, the need to know.

  What would you have me do, my Lord?

  And the voice in his memory, which seemed so long ago now, repeated: “I ask that you return to Southlands and the House of your father.”

  He had obeyed, had he not? He had hastened back to King Hawkeye’s side, and they had been reconciled. But there was more.

  Frowning, Lionheart now recalled his journey home through the Wood Between. Scarcely had he begun his lonely trek down the still-unfamiliar Path when he saw a familiar face beneath a tall oak tree.

  The Lady of the Haven had smiled at his approach.

  “Childe of Farthestshore,” she called in greeting, and he gasped in relief at the sight of her.

  “Dame Imraldera!” he said, hurrying to her. “Did you not stay awhile at the coronation feast?”

  “I did, Childe Lionheart,” she said. “But I left three days ago to ensure that I should meet you here.”

  “Three . . . three days?” Lionheart frowned at this. “I just . . . I just took leave of Queen Varvare minutes ago.”

  “To be sure,” Dame Imraldera replied. “And soon after you did so, I followed suit, and that is three days gone. And now we are both here.” She laughed. “Time is a funny and a dangerous thing here in the Between. Don’t be afraid. You’ll soon accustom yourself to ways beyond the Near World. Sooner than you think.”

  He gave her a shrewd look. “Did you?”

  She opened her mouth to reply but paused. Then, with another smile, smaller and more enigmatic than the first, she said, “I am not yet so accustomed as I wish to be. Even now, I scarcely understand the flowing to and fro of Time. What we do now, what we do then, and all the ripples throughout history.”