by N. D. Wilson
Hyacinth didn’t know. It was easier for her to understand what other people felt and why, easier to be outside looking in, not inside looking out.
Squid had already descended the stairs and vanished by the time Hyacinth slipped back outside. The sun was all the way down now, but the sky and the sea were still glowing. Up the path behind the house, Thor and Hyacinth’s father were attempting to have a private word.
Hyacinth shut her eyes and leaned back against the barn, holding as still as she could, listening through the breeze.
“Of course she’s more than old enough. Even the youngest is old enough. Rupe will be at the camp and he’s just as young. Make me understand, Albert. What will I say to the Order? What will you say?”
“She can’t,” Albert said. “Lawrence would be fine, but not Hyacinth. She would hate it, and it would hate her. I won’t do it. She’s…sensitive.”
“You’ll have to someday,” Thor said. “If she’s so weak, she’ll wash out quick and that will be that, no harm done.”
Albert groaned in frustration. Hyacinth knew the sound well, and she knew what it meant. Her father didn’t want to say something. And he was about to say it anyway.
“Not weak, man,” her father said. “Not at all. She might be the strongest of us. Sensitive, as in, sensitive. Let me put it this way…when Hy was six, we had been reviving a ruined estate in Virginia, a place she especially loved because of an ancient oak alley planted by John Smith himself.”
Memory flooded through Hyacinth as she listened. She was with her sisters, running down a grass track beneath the grandest, greatest canopy of limbs she had ever seen. The light through the leaves dappled the ground like a green and gold pony, and the wind above and around her sounded like the ocean. So many games happened beneath those trees, so many dreams….
But her father was still talking, still explaining her to a stranger. She pushed the memory away and listened.
“Nine months later,” her father was saying, “we were in a place she didn’t enjoy nearly as much—a dry prairie ranch without trees. At the dinner table, Hyacinth announced to the family that it was time for her to use her stick to improve the place, and she pulled a dry oak twig from her pocket that she had been saving to make another oak alley. We all laughed and explained about acorns, and she just looked at us, confused. That night, she went out, and while we watched, she snapped that twig into the tiniest bits she could manage, and she tucked each bit into a little finger-deep hole, humming and chatting to herself all the while, lining the dusty drive on both sides.”
Hyacinth opened her eyes and focused on her father. He was shaking his head in disbelief. The Viking was slowly pulling at his beard while he listened. Albert’s voice was fainter, but she could still make out his every word.
“One week later, that drive was lined with saplings, and my little Hy visited each of them every day. Each week, they laid on growth that would normally take an oak a full year, and each week that drive became more beautiful. Six months later, we left behind oak trees that looked at least thirty years old for some thrilled owners, and I had to lie like a villain to protect my daughter, taking credit for every bit of it, spinning tall tales of impossible transplanting. I’ve been in high demand ever since, and every place we’ve gone she’s worked her magic, even when she doesn’t know it. And every place we’ve gone, I’ve been terrified that someone in the Order will find out and take her from me.”
Albert sagged and ran both hands through his hair.
Hyacinth bit her lip. Hearing the story like that was terrifying. She remembered it so naturally. She could make green things grow and change…quickly. But the way her father had just described her, she sounded—
“Magic,” Thor said simply.
“No,” Albert said. “I mean, in one sense, yes.”
“You, Albert Smith, are telling me that your daughter is a witch.”
Albert snarled so hard that Hyacinth flinched against the barn.
“No. Absolutely not. And if you ever use that word about her again, I will strangle you myself, do you understand me? Witchcraft is charms and spells and manipulations. My daughter has a gift, an ability given to her by the one who knit her together in her mother’s womb.”
“If it is a gift,” Thor said, “then why do you fear the Order? Why must she be hidden?”
Albert laughed. “Because we both know their Burials are full of men and women with gifts. Because people like you will use the word magic. Because she will end up condemned because she is a bird with wings that enable her to soar, and the flightless will put her on trial and call her unnatural. She’s the reason I’ve always remained distant from the Order. And I have worked for years to keep her off all membership rolls. She isn’t completely erased from the records, but most of the official documents list only four Smith children.”
“I noticed,” Thor said. “I would have corrected the oversight on my return.”
“Don’t,” said Albert. “The Order isn’t for her. That’s why she will not be attending any camps. That’s why she will not be going to Ashtown with her sisters in the fall. I would appreciate it if you would remember this conversation, and I would appreciate it even more if you would immediately forget.”
“Albert?” The voice was Trudie’s. She was leaning out the kitchen door. “If we’re leaving tonight, there’s much to be done. Most important, find your daughter. Talk to her. Take her for a walk.”
The kitchen door banged shut, and Albert refocused on the big man pulling his beard.
“I will remember,” Thor said. “And I will try to forget.”
“Thank you,” said Albert. “And I hope you know that I can’t be in Ashtown long. Gifted or not, my daughter can’t stay with this woman indefinitely. Give me your word, that after forty-eight hours, you will fly me home no matter what the concerned committee might want.”
“She will have her brother,” the big man said. “I can make no promises.”
For a few minutes after the two men left, Hyacinth stayed exactly where she was, with a cold plate of chicken and potatoes in her hand. The picnic tables were carried back around the house. She heard the clinking of dishes, and her mother singing a song as she washed them, the song that she had always sung to calm her children when she was actually the one in need of calming.
And then, while the darkness deepened, Hyacinth saw something moving out in the lightning trees. Squid appeared from behind a tree, looked her way, and then disappeared again. He reappeared, looked her way, and then redisappeared.
Hyacinth took a long breath and finally stepped away from the barn, but not toward the house. She was walking out into the lightning trees.
She didn’t feel gifted. She just…noticed things other people missed. So she had noticed life in an oak twig when everyone else had missed it. So what? She hadn’t put that life in there. She could never do a thing like that. No one could. She had just…invited it out.
Like right now, as she moved between the lightning-scorch-carved trunks, she wasn’t putting all the roaring power inside them. She wasn’t binding the rootless trees all up with storm rage until they were ready to explode.
Someone else had done that.
Hyacinth only noticed.
SQUID WAS HOPPING AROUND a pile of sandy dirt beside a massive sinewy cedar. He wasn’t barking, but his tail wasn’t wagging either. As Hyacinth wove her way toward him, she could see that the tree had been struck with rot long before it had been struck by lightning. Deep inside the coiled lightning scar that striped the trunk, the wood was dark and as soft as soil.
A stick spun through the air over Squid’s head and tumbled to a stop a dozen yards away. Squid dashed after it, scooped it up in his teeth, and returned with his head high and rear end wagging.
Hyacinth froze in place, watching. The dog dropped the stick and a hand stretched out of the shadows and picked it up. Squid bounced eagerly and turned in a quick circle. Once again, the stick flew.
“Good dog.” The voice was youn
g—a boy’s—but already it was low and somehow, to Hyacinth, it sounded serious enough to belong to someone very old.
After a moment, she moved forward, and slowly the boy came into view. His hair was black, unwashed, and matted. His jaw was hard, his brow and nose were sharp, and his skin was pale where it wasn’t coated with dirt. He was shirtless, seated with his back against the cedar trunk beside a huge hollow in the wood the size of a small cave. With one hand, he was pressing an orange dishrag from Granlea’s kitchen against a mess of blood and dirt high up on his shoulder, and with the other, he was playing fetch with Squid.
“You were in the barn,” the boy said, and Hyacinth flinched. She had made no noise. She was downwind. She was out of his peripheral vision. Squid hadn’t even acknowledged her approach.
The boy turned his head and looked straight at her. In the day’s last light, the sharpness in his eyes tore right through her. He might have been younger than she was, but that didn’t matter. She knew, in the first instant of that single look, that this boy saw even more than she did. Always. In everything. Everywhere.
Hyacinth swallowed, holding the plate in front of her with two hands, like a useless bumper that would never keep her safe in a collision. She shouldn’t be here. She should run, find her father immediately.
But she didn’t want to. Not until she learned more.
“These trees,” she said. “They’re strange.” It’s all she could manage.
The boy stared at her. After a moment, he nodded.
Hyacinth moved forward while he watched her. “I brought some food, but you weren’t in the barn. Where’s the other one?”
“The other one?” the boy asked. “You mean my brother?” He looked at the plate in Hyacinth’s hands. “He will return.”
Squid settled down in the dirt beside the boy, staring hopefully at the stick.
Hyacinth chewed on her lip and then quickly made herself stop. “My name is Hyacinth, by the way. Hyacinth Smith.”
“I am called Westmore,” the boy said. “Mordecai Westmore.”
“I’ve never met a Mordecai,” Hyacinth said. “Or a Westmore.” She smiled and then immediately regretted it. It was the kind of thing Circe would have done.
“And I’ve never met a Hyacinth.”
Hyacinth considered different possible responses to this. But none of them seemed intelligent. She almost described the flower she was named after, but decided against it. That’s what Harriet would have done.
“Are you hungry?” she finally asked.
“My brother will be,” said Mordecai. “He gave me everything he stole.”
Hyacinth set the plate down beside him, and as she did, she couldn’t help but smell the burned sourness of his wound—even beneath the rag—mixing with the rot that rose up out of the hollow in the tree. She wondered how Squid could stand it.
“What happened to you?” Hyacinth asked. “And how did you get here? There’s only one road, and apparently at least one meadow flat enough for an airstrip not far from here. That’s how Thor arrived, but you don’t look like you have your own plane. A boat? Were you shipwrecked in the storm?”
For a moment the boy simply looked confused. Then he shook his head. “That is not your worry.”
Hyacinth felt her confidence growing. The strange boy was making no effort to satisfy her curiosity.
“Well, you’re on my family’s land, and you obviously don’t talk like you’re from here, and you look like you’re dying in our weird lightning tree forest, so yeah, it is my worry. What happened?”
Mordecai Westmore shut his eyes.
“We were hunted,” he said. “We fled. I was wounded. And we lost ourselves here.” He opened his eyes, looking up into Hyacinth’s. “We are still hunted. My brother is lying in watch and wait. When more hunters arrive, he is hoping their path will show us how to return.”
“That sounds complicated. And dangerous,” Hyacinth said. “Where are you from? We have maps. My dad practically knows the entire globe. He could get you home.”
Mordecai shut his eyes again and leaned his head back against the cedar trunk. He said nothing.
“At least show me your shoulder,” Hyacinth said. “I can help. My mother could help.”
“Tell no one of us,” Mordecai said, his eyes still shut. “No one. Not your mother and not your father. Please.”
Hyacinth didn’t answer. Maybe she would keep a secret for this boy and maybe she wouldn’t. It all depended on what else she might learn about who he was and what he was doing.
Slowly, wincing in pain, Mordecai peeled the rag up off his shoulder.
The boy had been bitten. Badly. The upper and lower jaw marks were obvious, even as they were surrounded by blood and blisters and oozing burns. But instead of punctures where the teeth had torn into him, large new teeth were protruding out of him.
Hyacinth knelt beside him and leaned forward. Not teeth. The protrusions rising up from the bite were something completely different. Two curved rows of hard fungus were growing out of the boy’s shoulder, the kind that Hyacinth had only ever seen clinging to tree trunks. She let her fingertips touch them ever so slightly, and she immediately knew their urgent strength. They would not be easily removed.
Fungus. Growing out of a bite. In a boy. Her mind turned slowly as she tried to believe what she was seeing and incorporate it into the other strange things she had seen.
“You were in the barn,” Mordecai said. “Did you see the hunter and his mouths?”
Hyacinth swallowed hard. She nodded. Now she was learning what those mouths could do.
“My brother tried cutting these out of my skin, but they grew back even larger. He cut them out and then burned the wounds with a hot knife. But they grew back again and now I am branded and blistered as well.” The boy smiled slightly. “See? There is nothing you can do. There is nothing we can do but hope for another hunter to come for us, revealing another way home. If I can get home, my mother will be able to help me.”
“Why another way?” Hyacinth asked. “Why can’t you go back the same way? You haven’t even told me how you got here in the first place.”
The boy studied her face, hesitant. “Do you really not know?” he asked.
“How would I know something like that?” Hyacinth asked. “It has to be a boat, if I’m guessing. And the storm must have been awful. Was it smashed on the cliffs?”
Mordecai scraped his heel through gravel and looked at the looming grove around him. Even in the dusky light, Hyacinth saw the pain on his face, but there was so much more than that. She saw sight. And grief. The wounded, filthy, shirtless boy with the black hair and the sharp brows had lost more than she could measure—in addition to being lost himself. But on top of everything and below everything and all around everything else, Mordecai Westmore was frustrated. He was angry. Because he was not just lost; he was still losing. He was losing something more important to him than his own life. He was losing a fight, a fight he would die to win.
“You can see more than I can,” Hyacinth said. “I can tell.” She wanted to speak boldly like her sisters, but the words came too slowly for her to feel bold. She pressed on. “But I can see more than most people too. Should I tell you what I see when I look at you?”
The boy grimaced, adjusting the rag on his shoulder.
“Go back to your house.” He grunted in pain. “If hunters come, it will be in darkness. And I don’t want my brother to shoot you.”
Hyacinth didn’t move. She was seeing, letting herself focus completely on the boy in front of her. And what she saw was…extreme, yes, but so surprisingly normal it annoyed her.
Mordecai saw her annoyance and flinched in surprise.
“All right,” he said. “What do you think you see?”
Hyacinth cleared her throat. “I see a boy who thinks it’s time to die. A boy who would rather die than live and lose any more than he already has. You are confused. You are stupid—all boys are—but you think you’re being so brave when
you only want to quit. I have a brother who makes that same face whenever I’m finally beating him at Monopoly, and he suddenly decides he’d rather play something else so that he won’t have to finish losing. You’re hurt and you’re lost and a girl wants to know where you’re from and it’s all so hard. You don’t want my help. You don’t want my mom’s help or my dad’s help. You say you want more of those monsters to come so that you can find your way home? I think you want them to come so that you can quit this game. After all, when you’re dead, you won’t know you lost.”
Hyacinth was breathing hard when she stopped. She should feel sorry for the boy, but he made her angry, sitting there with his awful shoulder, acting too important to answer her questions.
The boy looked away. For a moment his jaw throbbed, clenching. “I don’t know what Monopoly is, but something tells me that it’s not like the game I’m playing.” Anger burned on every word. “I would carry my fight into the grave and beyond if I could. I will not quit. I will not surrender. Ever. Not unless God Himself makes me.” Scooping up a handful of dirt, the boy spat into it and then dragged the mud across his forehead. “I am Mordecai Westmore, seventh son of Amram Iothric, in the line long faithful to the Old King, and I swear it is true.”
Hyacinth was silent, stunned. The way he spoke, and what he had just done…it was all so old-fashioned. Otherworldly, even. Her eyes focused on the mud on the boy’s forehead, and for a moment it seemed to flicker with purple and green fire, dancing with life. And then the fire was gone and all that was left was the mess on his head and the rot on his shoulder and the anger in his eyes.
Hyacinth shook her head. “You are very lost. And you need help. I should call my dad and bring him down here. He would know what to do.”
“You’re right, you know.” Another boy stepped out from behind the wide cedar trunk. He looked identical to Mordecai in almost every way, but he was wearing a shirt and carried a bow over his shoulder and a quiver full of arrows on his hip. And where Mordecai’s eyes were hard and his face serious, this boy’s eyes spilled laughter, and his mouth seemed like it was barely containing a smile. “My brother is a quitter,” he said. “It’s because of his terrible burden.”
