by Mark Jacobs
Chapter XIII
By the time Pence reached the gate he had a solution to the difficulty of how best to lug around his unwieldy inheritance: a creased blade of grass looped and knotted over one shoulder like a sling with the coin tucked snugly in the crease, then clamped securely under his armpit.
He patted the penny reassuringly as he gazed up at the fence. The immaculately measured, smoothed, and sequenced planks rose above him like a sleek cliff face jutting into the clouds.
A delicate trellis was all that distinguished the gate from the rest of the fence. The trellis, like all the rest of the carpentry in the garden, had been fashioned from the fallout of the White Tree. Arcing over the gate in a precise semicircle, the interwoven strips of wood were pleached with purple ivy and green ferns. Pence stopped well short of the gate.
The splinter the old man had mentioned did not take long to find. It cast a shadow as small as the crack of a peeking eye, but Pence’s perfectly cut gemstones picked it out in a snap. “Now I claim my sword,” he said to the garden, “and leave all childish things to eat my dust.”
The old man had been accurate in his description: the splinter was waist-high up the fence–the waist of a grown man. Pence surveyed his task with dismay. “I didn’t anticipate this. How am I to reach it? Why didn’t that old man tell me how to deal with every problem I’d encounter? What a shortsighted blow-gut.”
The splinter angled out from the fence like an arrow set for the boy’s heart. Pence tried jumping up and down for it, though he was well beyond reach of the fence and could leap no higher than his own knee. He tried throwing clods of dirt to knock the splinter loose, but his aim was hopeless. He tried threats and empty promises. “And I can’t go back and ask for help, of course,” he reasoned with himself manfully. He stroked his chin with one hand and looked up at the sun.
Then he raised his arm, attempting–at a new height of naivety–to physically reach for the splinter. He stretched his hand open as wide as he could, frowned, reaching farther, leaned in, flexed his fingers…
The splinter began to glow. A ghostly green vapor drifted off the bright, white shard. It wiggled once, then snapped free and flew straight toward Pence’s outreaching hand.
“Yeah!” he shouted happily; then, “Gack!” as he dove out of the way at the last moment to avoid being skewered by the blazing, thumb-length sliver of a spear.
Pence stood up, dusted off his knees and belly, and stepped cautiously to where the splinter had landed. He found it plunged half its length into an acorn-shaped rock. The entry cut was as clean as a crevice in ice. The green phantom glow had ceased.
“No way!” Pence reveled, for as he wrapped his fingers around the splinter the glow returned. He pulled it easily from the rock and held it before his eyes. The white wood shone like silver in the sun. The green mist swirled and danced in the air like roots and tendrils growing, intertwining, ever-changing, then fading like old smoke in a breeze.
The heartseed pounded like a cauldron drum inside his chest.
“The old man has got to see this.” Pence looked to the gate, torn for a single moment by the temptation to finally begin his journey into the world without any more interruptions.
“The old man was right,” he said aloud. “The gate can wait. Ha, I rhymed,” he laughed, although he had only been repeating his creator’s words. “I think I must be the first potato who was a poet. Perhaps that old man should have named me Poeto. Poeto, Poeto, Poeto. Now, there’s a name a boy in a cape could be proud of.”
