A Tangle of Secrets

by R. G. Thomas

  “Where in all the dragon’s lands did he pick up one of those cursed things?” Rudyard asked.

  “No telling. But whatever dark spell he’s under, this infection is making it even stronger. Hold him fast, we’ll need more help with this.”

  Thaddeus tried to wriggle out from under Rudyard but was stuck fast. Although he was short, Rudyard’s body was broad and tightly muscled. The pain from the cyst, the energy he’d expended on the Thunderclap, and the efforts he’d already gone through to escape had worn Thaddeus down. He gave up and lay still, panting quietly with the side of his face pressed against the cool, soft grass. The voice inside continued to shout in frustration, but Thaddeus had no energy to try and comply with its commands.

  With his head turned, he watched Miriam move away and kneel beside Teofil and Astrid. She wore necklaces fashioned from long, fragile-looking vines on which bloomed large flowers in a variety of bright colors. The necklaces swayed as she bent over Astrid and waved her hand back and forth over the vines, humming quietly.

  The sound of Miriam’s humming reminded Thaddeus of when he’d first moved to Superstition. Before he and Teofil had spoken, Thaddeus used to sit by his bedroom window and listen to Teofil hum in a similar manner as he tended Leopold’s garden. It felt to Thaddeus as if that had been years and not months ago, and the sweet excitement of the memory helped dampen the voice in his head and stirred something warm and reassuring within him.

  Miriam stopped humming and looked over her shoulder at Rudyard. “The ravisse blume isn’t helping on these vines. I can’t make them release. Something stronger than the nacht macabre must be at work here.”

  “Use my knife, and cut them free,” Rudyard instructed.

  Miriam took the knife from Rudyard’s belt and, after whispering an apology to the plants, she slowly and carefully cut the vines from first Astrid, then Teofil, and finally Dulindir. Astrid and Dulindir jumped into immediate action and rushed to join the battles across the clearing, but Teofil remained behind. He knelt alongside Thaddeus and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  Teofil’s touch shattered the peaceful memory brought on by Miriam’s humming, leaving Thaddeus instantly enraged.

  “Leave me alone!” he shouted. He had never felt so angry and betrayed before. A powerful rage engulfed him and he tried to cast spells against all of them, but something seemed to be blocking his ability. That, along with his pinned position and a veritable tornado of dark thoughts that clogged his mind, prevented him from using his magic.

  Off behind Miriam, Thaddeus saw the short man with the long hair and beard pop out from where he had been hiding behind a nacht macabre bush. He gestured toward their group, and vines and tendrils from other climbing plants shot out from the bush to snake toward them along the ground.

  “Mum, behind you!” Teofil shouted.

  Miriam turned and acted fast with Rudyard’s knife. She cut off the vines before they could reach any of them. The short man let out a grunt of surprise and turned to flee. But Miriam jumped to her feet and ran surprisingly fast after the bearded man. She caught up to him in short order and pulled him down to the ground. His shouts of fear sounded like the worst noises Thaddeus had ever heard, and he squeezed his eyes shut and screamed in anger and frustration to drown out the sound as he writhed beneath Rudyard.

  “Now, you quit sending those vines to wrap us up, do you hear…. Oh.”

  Through slitted eyes, Thaddeus saw Miriam look around from where she sat on the man’s back, pinning him to the ground. “Rudyard. Oh…. Rudyard.”

  “In a minute, Ma,” Rudyard said as he continued to hold Thaddeus down. “I’m going to try to lance this Bitter Burr boil.”

  Rudyard’s statement sent a strong wave of terror through Thaddeus, and his inner voice practically shrieked in terror. “Leave me alone!” he screamed and increased his struggles to get free.

  “For the love of Flora, help me, Teofil,” Rudyard said.

  At that moment, Claire dropped to her knees by Thaddeus’s head and asked between panting breaths, “What’s wrong? What have they done to him?”

  “He’s been pricked by a Bitter Burr,” Miriam called from her place atop the bearded man. “Look at the boil on the back of his neck.”

  “Oh my God,” Claire said, then asked in a sharp tone, “what are you doing with that blade, Rudyard?”

  “I’m going to lance the foul thing.”

  “No!” Thaddeus bucked even harder beneath him.

  “Not with him struggling like that,” Claire said. “Here, let me. Heat can be used to pull infection from a wound.”

  A hand pressed against the back of Thaddeus’s neck, directly over the cyst, and his mother leaned down to whisper in his ear, “Thaddeus, my love, I’m sorry.”

  Her warm touch swiftly heated until Thaddeus felt as though he was being branded. He screamed into the ground, his inner voice echoing his anguish, as the pain quickly built into something like torture. It doubled, and then tripled in intensity. Tears flooded Thaddeus’s eyes as the pain centered on the spot beneath his mother’s hand. White spots floated before his vision even though he’d squeezed his eyes shut. Every muscle went taut, and he arched his back in a last-ditch effort to escape.

  The cyst erupted with a wet, slick popping sound, and a white-hot shooting star of pain that ran down his spine and up around his skull. Thaddeus’s scream cut off, and his sweaty and tear-streaked face dropped back into the soft grass. Warm, thick pus gushed out of the open wound, startling shouts of disgust from his mother, Rudyard, and Teofil. Thaddeus felt the discharge run down either side of his neck and slip beneath the collar of his shirt. Exhausted and barely conscious, he lay loose limbed beneath Rudyard as a terrible stench permeated the air, making all of them gag.

  “I need to push the poison out,” his mother said. “I’m sorry, son. It’s going to hurt.”

  Thaddeus had no energy to respond. But when his mother pressed on either side of the open wound, he moaned, and that quickly escalated to a loud scream. The inner voice was screaming as well, but more quietly than before, as if the source of it had moved a good distance away. The pain intensified, expanding inside him until it seemed to fill every corner and infect every cell of his body. Then, with an awful sensation of eruption, something hard was pushed out of him.

  “That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever seen or smelled,” Rudyard said, his voice low and rumbling against Thaddeus’s back as he continued to hold him down.

  “What was that?” Teofil asked.

  The soft press of Teofil’s hand against the sweat-drenched back of Thaddeus’s head sent a rush of relief and calm through him. An ache still burned at the spot where his mother had squeezed out the infection, but the other pain had left, along with that inner voice filled with such dark and hateful thoughts. A sense of well-being rushed in to fill the void left by the departure of the darkness inside him, and he felt light but exhausted.

  “It was a Bitter Burr,” Miriam explained. “When it sticks a person, it infects them and changes their personality. It makes them focus on their darker emotions and deny the lighter and happier ones.”

  “He’s had it awhile, then,” Teofil said. “I knew there was something different about him. And Leopold’s spirit tried to warn me, but he didn’t know what was going on with him either.”

  Thaddeus winced as his mother pressed damp leaves against the open sore on the back of his neck. She pushed out some more of the pus, then instructed Rudyard to get off of him. Thaddeus took a deep, grateful breath as Rudyard’s weight was lifted, and he accepted help from his mother and Teofil to sit upright. He stared numbly around at their concerned expressions. Off in the distance, he could hear the sounds of individual battles as his father, Astrid, Dulindir, and Vivienne fought against Lucian, the Bearagon, Andy, and Azzo. He knew they all needed to get up and help out, but Thaddeus didn’t think his legs would work. And besides, with all the nacht macabre around, how would he be able to perform magic anyway?

&nb
sp; “The battle calls,” Rudyard said, and jumped to his feet.

  “Rudyard,” Miriam said, “wait.”

  Thaddeus looked around. Miriam had gotten off of the strange bearded man and now sat at his side as he lay on his stomach, arms spread out to the sides. He appeared to be unconscious, and Thaddeus wondered if that had been Miriam’s doing, or if all of the excitement had made him simply pass out. The man’s shirt had rucked up in back, exposing a couple of inches of skin above the waistband of his trousers.

  “Miriam, they need our help,” Rudyard said in a gruff tone. “What can be more important?”

  “Just look. Please.” Miriam gestured to the man’s exposed skin.

  Rudyard stepped closer and crouched down to squint where Miriam directed. In a moment he snapped his head up to look at her across the man’s form. “Is that his birthmark?”

  Tears streamed down Miriam’s face. “It is. It’s Fetter. This is our son, Rudyard. It’s him, at last.”

  “What?” Teofil tried to stand, but his legs failed him, and he sat back down again. He left Thaddeus’s side to crawl across the grass and kneel beside his mother. “It’s him? It’s Fetter?”

  “He had this same birthmark,” Miriam managed to explain before a sob stole her voice.

  “Oh, Miriam.” Thaddeus’s mother knelt on the opposite side of Miriam from Teofil and put an arm around her shoulders.

  “But…. Why’s he so old?” Teofil asked. “What did they do to him?”

  Thaddeus wanted to go to Teofil and comfort him like his mother was comforting Miriam, but he did not yet have the energy to move. Tears filled his eyes as he watched the group sitting around Fetter.

  “I don’t quite know,” Thaddeus’s mother said. “But he’s safe here, Miriam. Let’s leave him with Thaddeus for now and go help the others. Thaddeus will keep him safe, won’t you son?”

  Thaddeus nodded, feeling more alert with each passing moment. He slowly shifted position to his hands and knees and crawled to Fetter’s side. On the exposed skin of Fetter’s back, Thaddeus saw a birthmark that looked like three leaves grouped together.

  “I’ll watch him,” he said. “And I can help you fight. I just need to get my breath back.”

  “Here.” Rudyard handed Thaddeus a short sword. “Use it if you have to.”

  Thaddeus took the sword with both hands. “I’ll protect him. Go on. They have to be stopped.”

  Thaddeus sat beside Fetter with the sword held up and ready, watching them all hurry across the moonlit clearing toward the figures battling near the opposite edge of the Tangle. He would not let any harm come to Fetter. He owed Teofil, Astrid, Miriam, and Rudyard at least that much.

  Chapter TWENTY-THREE

  THADDEUS COULD only watch as his family and friends fought across the clearing. Astrid wrestled with Andy, occasionally getting enough space from him to use her slingshot to great effect. Dulindir held the Bearagon at bay with his sword, his long hair gleaming with starlight. A short distance away, Vivienne dodged spells cast by Azzo Eberhard and aimed return shots back at him. Thaddeus’s father fought Lucian a bit farther away, also blocking and casting spells. He noticed that his father and Vivienne both wore necklaces made from flowered vines, similar to the one Miriam wore. And then he saw that his mother and Rudyard also wore the necklaces, and he wondered if those necklaces allowed them to use their magic around such a strong presence of nacht macabre. Thaddeus tried to think of a way to help, but exhaustion and low energy prevented him from moving, let alone performing another Thunderclap.

  Before Thaddeus could come up with an idea to provide help, his mother ran up behind Lucian and tackled him to the ground. His father rushed to assist her in restraining Lucian as Thaddeus’s heart pounded, and he got up on his knees to see better. It appeared as if his parents had succeeded in subduing Lucian, and Thaddeus shifted his attention in time to watch Rudyard swing his axe as he charged the Bearagon, his battle cry distracting the monster enough to allow Dulindir to jab it with his sword. The Bearagon let out a roar of pain and collapsed. Not far from them, Thaddeus saw Miriam send vines crawling up Azzo’s legs, and she and Vivienne quickly vanquished the big man. That left Andy still fighting against Astrid, and as Thaddeus watched, Teofil stole up behind Andy and grabbed him in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his sides. Astrid hurried over and helped Teofil wrestle Andy to the ground where they used vines to bind his hands behind him.

  Thaddeus’s strength continued to return little by little, and by the time the others dragged or marched their captives back to where he waited alongside Fetter, Thaddeus stood waiting. He felt guilty and useless as he watched their approach. He had made all of this so much worse. If he’d only talked with Teofil more, been honest about his feelings and not said such mean and hurtful things, it might not have come to this. And if he’d told his parents when he’d been stuck by the Bitter Burr, they might have been able to keep him from falling under its control.

  The Bearagon had shifted back into its human form of Logan Augustine, Thaddeus’s one-time coworker at Superstition Sporting Goods. Naked and with a hand pressed over the stab wound in his side, Logan stumbled through the soft grass, clearly exhausted and suffering. Andy, Lucian, and Azzo all had their hands bound tight with vines, and one by one they were forced to sit on the ground, several feet apart.

  Before anyone said a word, Thaddeus’s father approached him. Blood streamed from several cuts on his face and arms, and he walked with a limp, but he held Thaddeus’s gaze as he approached and opened his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Thaddeus said, surprised when a sob made his voice crack.

  His father gathered him close in a strong, tight hug. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

  “I should have told you guys what happened,” Thaddeus said. “I should have showed you the thing on my neck. But I thought it was just a really bad pimple. And I was feeling so angry and alone.”

  “It’s all right, Thaddeus.” His father squeezed him once more, then stepped back to smile at him. “We’re all right.”

  “And no one is a threat any longer,” his mother said.

  “Is it true?” Astrid’s softly spoken question drew their attention to where she knelt at Fetter’s side. She looked up with tears in her eyes. “Is this him? Is it Fetter?”

  “Oh, so dramatic,” Andy said with an eye roll.

  Dulindir smacked Andy hard on the back of the head. “No more comments from you, Changeling.”

  “Changeling?” Thaddeus repeated. “What do you mean?”

  “This one is not human,” Dulindir said. “He is a wicked creature, a deformity from the line of elves. Changelings are most often swapped out with newborns to be raised by families and cause mayhem in polite society. But this one, if I am correct, was swapped out much later.”

  “You don’t know everything, elf,” Lucian said with a sneer. “But you do seem to understand a lot of what we accomplished.”

  “I wouldn’t call what you did accomplishments,” Rudyard said. He pointed to Fetter who still lay sprawled on the ground. “What did you do to my boy?”

  “It’s an effect of Isadora’s extremely long duplication,” Lucian replied. “The longer she disguised herself as Fetter, the faster he aged.”

  “You took his life!” Astrid shouted, still on her knees beside Fetter. “You may as well have killed him!”

  “Killed him?” Lucian shook his head. “That would have ruined Isadora’s spell. We had to keep him alive. So we brought him here, and look at what he’s done with all the time he’s had.”

  “The Tangle,” Thaddeus said. “He made it.”

  “That’s right. It was only deep woods when we first placed him here. Once he started growing things, we saw how it would help conceal him.” Lucian looked to Teofil. “His skills seem a bit more advanced than keeping a simple garden in bloom.”

  Miriam approached and stood before Lucian. She clasped her hands tight in front of her, and Thaddeus wondered if she were physically restra
ining herself from striking him. Miriam stared Lucian in the eye as she spoke in a strong, unwavering voice.

  “He was only three years old when you took him from us. And this is the place you brought him? Out in the middle of nowhere, with no one to tend to him, no one to speak to him? You left him here, with no shelter or food or love, and you can sit there with a straight face and claim you kept him alive? This was not a life. His time inside these woods may as well have been spent inside prison walls. You and your sister have no thought for anyone but yourselves. If something does not benefit you or your twisted cause, you don’t act on it. And now you’ve created an entirely new reality for yourself, in which you took Thaddeus into your circle and tried to turn him against his parents and those of us who have come to love him like family.”

  Tears blurred Thaddeus’s vision at the emotion he heard in Miriam’s words. Teofil took his hand and gave it a squeeze, but Thaddeus could not look away from Miriam as she leaned down and narrowed her eyes at Lucian.

  “You’ve lost, Lucian. Not simply your foul sister or your horrible followers, but everything. You have no family left that will claim you, and there is no light of love to chase away the shadows around your cold, shriveled heart. Where you’re going, you will have a long, long time to think about that.”

  Lucian sneered, but Thaddeus could see a nervous fear flickering beneath his bravado.

  “Your big talk isn’t going to make a bit of difference,” Lucian said. “No matter how much spin you put on the truth, even a common gnome such as yourself must know that everything you’ve come to believe is built on a lie.”

  “What lie is that?” Miriam asked.

  “All of it,” Lucian said. “Love and light and good thoughts and energy make the world turn.” He looked at Thaddeus, the hate evident in his stare. “You could have been a very powerful wizard. If only the timing had been better. If only I’d found you that day so long ago.”

  “But you didn’t,” Thaddeus said with a lift of his chin. “My father found me, and he raised me better than you ever could.”