The Legend Begins

by Isobelle Carmody

  little fur

  The Legend Begins

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1: The Secrets of Trees

  CHAPTER 2: Smoke!

  CHAPTER 3: A Dark Road

  CHAPTER 4: The Feeding of Beasts

  CHAPTER 5: Still Magic

  CHAPTER 6: The Sett Owl

  CHAPTER 7: The Making of Promises

  CHAPTER 8: An Attack!

  CHAPTER 9: The Mysteriousness of Humans

  CHAPTER 10: Underth

  CHAPTER 11: The Dogness of Dogs

  CHAPTER 12: The Wasteland

  CHAPTER 13: The Stone Fairie

  CHAPTER 14: An Ancient Cut in the Earth

  CHAPTER 15: An Awakening

  CHAPTER 16: Seeds

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Isobelle Carmody

  Preview for A Fox Called Sorrow

  Copyright

  For Adelaide, my own little elf girl . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  The Secrets of Trees

  In the middle of a great, sprawling gray city was a place that no human had ever entered.

  It looked like a trackless wilderness humped up at the center and edged in tangled bushes knitted together by a winding creeper. Sometimes people talked of getting rid of the wilderness, but it was almost impossible for humans to think about it long enough to act. The only way they managed it was if two or more of them thought it together. But as soon as they went away from one another, it slipped from their minds.

  The power that protected the wilderness came from seven ancient trees. They were all that remained of a marvelous grove of singing trees, which had once been part of a forest that had covered the land. Then humans came and cut down trees to make room for their black roads and high houses. The forest shrank, but the earth magic that had flowed through the dead trees did not vanish. It was absorbed by the trees that remained until the seven singing trees were so saturated in magic that they were able to sink their roots deep enough into the ground to touch the earth spirit. When the earth spirit heard the song of the trees’ sorrow, it bestowed upon them the power to dim the idea of the wilderness in the minds of humans, and so the chopping ended.

  In time, the small wilderness became home to hundreds of creatures.

  One was an elf troll called Little Fur. As tall as a three-year-old human child, she had slanted green eyes, wild red hair that brambled about her pointed ears and bare, broad, four-toed feet.

  Little Fur loved the seven ancient trees, and tended them carefully. She poured cool water over their exposed roots on hot, dry days, and when snow blanketed the wilderness in winter, she sang to them of summer days to come. The trees did not need her protection, but they loved her as only trees can love. They themselves sang no more, but when she rested her cheek upon their gnarled bark, they whispered to her of the world that lay beyond the wilderness.

  Little Fur was a healer. Within the wilderness she brought water and seeds to bare patches of earth and looked after new plants by pulling the grass aside to give them breathing space. She collected herbs to make poultices, salves and tisanes, and as she treated the wounds of small animals and birds that came seeking her help, she would sing to them, knowing that a wound to the body was only part of what was hurt. The spirit also needed healing.

  Most of the creatures who came to her from outside the wilderness blamed their hurts on humans or upon their devices and machines, so that Little Fur sometimes wondered if the damaging of small things was their sole purpose and delight. It troubled her very much that one of her best friends, a shaggy pony called Brownie, belonged to a human and spoke kindly of it. But it was the same with many of the beasts and birds who had been born as the slaves and companions of humans.

  Brownie’s human had brought him and his brothers from a city by the sea to live in a park where they gave rides to small humans. He pulled them to and fro in a cart, but the other two ponies, being bigger, wore saddles and carried older children on their backs.

  The pony field almost touched fingertips with the westernmost point of the park, and it was the smell of wildness that lured Brownie to jump his low fence one night and gallop over the black road to see what had caused it.

  Little Fur was sitting quietly on one of the small hill meadows, waiting for the exact moment some yellow evening primroses opened, when Brownie came thundering down the moonlit slope, kicking his heels up and neighing and tossing his mane until steam rose like mist from his hot coat. Only when he stopped to tear at a mouthful of grass did he catch the scent of Little Fur. She did not smell of badness, but his nose told him that she was some sort of troll and he had always thought the smell of badness was the smell of troll.

  “What are you?” Brownie asked warily.

  “I am an elf troll,” Little Fur said, smelling on him the same salty, sour odor that came from the cats and birds who lived with humans.

  “I have never heard of an elf troll,” Brownie said.

  “My father was an elf,” Little Fur explained.

  “An elf!” exclaimed Brownie. “A sea sprite told me they built boats shaped like swans and sailed away when humans came.”

  “What is a sea sprite?” Little Fur asked.

  “One of those things left over from the age before humans came. Like you and mermaids and pixies. There are not many of you left. I wish I could meet your father.”

  “He and my mother went away when I was very small,” Little Fur said.

  “I suppose he went over the sea with the other elves,” said Brownie. “But your mother could not have gone if she was a troll.”

  “What about you?” Little Fur interrupted. The pony’s talk about her parents made her feel strange. “Did you escape from the humans?”

  Brownie told her about jumping over the barrier that held him and his brothers, and then he said, “I will go back before morning so that my human does not make it too high to jump. That way I will be able to come again.”

  “Why don’t you stay, now that you have escaped?” Little Fur asked, astonished that he would talk of going back just like the cats and birds who had lived with humans.

  “I like my human and I could not leave my two brothers,” Brownie said.

  Little Fur did not know what to say. The idea of being owned by a human seemed dreadful to her. Her greatest fear was that humans would someday enter the wilderness and lay it to waste.

  Brownie came a step nearer and asked, “You are not bad, then?”

  “Can’t you smell the answer?” Little Fur asked him with pity, knowing that creatures who dwelt with humans lost their proper sense of smell, so that they could only smell things, and not thoughts and ideas and feelings.

  “You don’t smell like the bad trolls that used to live in the city by the sea,” Brownie said. “But there are many more trolls here and they might have learned to hide the smell of their badness.”

  “There are thousands of trolls here,” Little Fur said. “They hide in drains and sewers and cellars in a network of tunnels beneath the city. And deeper down are great caverns unknown to humans, where the trolls have made a city of their own. Yet they cannot hide the smell of their badness. I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to live where there are so many trolls?” Brownie asked, glancing around as if a storm of trolls might come boiling out of the night shadows.

  Little Fur laughed. “Trolls never come here. They hate green and growing things almost as much as they hate the sunlight.”

  “I wonder what they did before there were human cities to hide in,” Brownie murmured.

  “Trolls were here before the earth spirit woke,” Little Fur said. “When green
things began to grow, they hated it. They burrowed deep into places where the earth magic could not reach them, but the ground was wrong and it hurt them and made them sick. They were almost extinct when humans started making cities.”

  “How do you know about such things?” Brownie asked.

  Little Fur led Brownie deeper into the wilderness, which was larger than it looked from the outside, for the land within it was folded like a blanket. They climbed the mounded hill at its center and Brownie saw that there was a deep hollow inside it. At its base grew a dense grove of trees.

  It was not until he had followed Little Fur down a rabbit track winding into the hidden hollow that he discovered there were only seven great trees growing there. The trunk of a single one was bigger than the stable where he slept with his brothers, and the enormous branches sprouting from the trunks were themselves as big as trees. Each branch forked into smaller and smaller branches, all of them heavy with leaves. Each tree wove and braided its branches together with those of neighboring trees to form a dense canopy. When one was standing under it, nothing could be seen of the sky, and the light was as green and heavy as syrup. It made Brownie feel that he wanted to stand still and put down roots, too.

  He rested his muzzle against the velvety green moss pelt of one of the trees, as Little Fur urged, and was stunned to hear the tree whispering, though he could not make out its words.

  “You have to make your mind quiet and sort of let it float into the tree,” she explained, but Brownie was too impatient with excitement to try. He said it was enough for him to know that such trees existed.

  Brownie came often to the wilderness after that, and he and Little Fur talked of the world beyond it. Brownie was very proud of his worldliness. By worldliness, Little Fur came to understand, he meant wisdom, though she was not always sure that knowing a lot about the world was the same as being wise.

  They spoke of humans more than any other subject. Or perhaps it is more fair to say that Little Fur interrogated Brownie on the subject of humans. Sometimes she had nightmares after their talks, but it was better to learn as much as she could, in the hope of being able to protect herself and her beloved wilderness from them. Brownie scoffed at her fears, saying humans were not bad, but whether they were or were not, nothing he said ever made her think of them as anything but dangerous.

  CHAPTER 2

  Smoke!

  Brownie always wanted to talk about Little Fur’s father, for he was enchanted by the idea that she was part elf. He liked to make up stories of how her parents had fallen in love and what terrible fate had befallen them to orphan her. In time his stories ceased to discomfit her, and she even came to enjoy them.

  For her part, Little Fur loved hearing Brownie talk of the sea. He spoke very poetically of waves and wind. He claimed that the wilderness reminded him of the ocean. This was something Little Fur never quite understood, for how could a great, restless body of water such as he described be like the wilderness that was her home?

  “I will take you on my back to a place where you can smell the waves,” Brownie announced one day.

  “It is impossible,” Little Fur answered.

  “It is too far to go to the sea,” Brownie agreed. “But I can carry you to a stream that goes to the sea, and you will smell the waves in it.”

  “I can’t ride on your back,” Little Fur said.

  Brownie protested that he would never let her fall.

  “It’s not that, but if I climbed onto your back, I would lose touch with the flow of earth magic.”

  “It would only be for a little time,” Brownie said.

  “A moment would be too long, for the earth magic would never flow through me again,” Little Fur said.

  Brownie gaped at her. “Do you mean that you have to be touching the ground all the time?”

  “My skin has always been in touch with brown earth where things can grow, or with green or growing things,” she said.

  “Always?”

  “Always,” Little Fur said.

  “How do you know you wouldn’t be able to get back in touch with the flow if you went away from it, then? After all, I feel it now, and yet I go away from it when I go into my stable, or when I walk on the black roads.”

  “I am part troll,” Little Fur said.

  Brownie asked in a low voice, “What would happen if you . . . did lose touch with the flow of earth magic?”

  “I should have to leave the wilderness. The Old Ones will abide nothing here that cannot accept the flow of earth magic,” Little Fur said.

  Brownie was appalled. “But . . . Little Fur, what if you forget yourself and jump up in the air?”

  “Why would I want to?” Little Fur responded simply.

  “For joy!” Brownie cried, and pranced and reared and capered to show her what she was missing out on. But Little Fur only laughed and clapped her hands, saying that it made her heart leap and gallop to see him prancing and jumping, just as it made her heart fly to see Crow take to his wings.

  Crow was Little Fur’s other great friend. She had found him at the foot of a tree after a storm, and nursed him until he stopped seeing three of everything. Crow was loud, boastful, conceited and opinionated. Yet, like Brownie, he was occupied, if somewhat giddily, with more than food and mates. He, too, and mates. He, too, dwelt among humans, but he regarded the city as a roost for birds, and saw humans as stupid, dangerously clumsy creatures who were of no consequence except as a source of bread crusts and scraps. But because of Little Fur’s interest in humans, Crow had taken to describing their activities to her.

  And so it was Crow who brought the first news of the tree burners.

  “A pack of humans burning trees?” Little Fur echoed, refusing to react too much. Crow liked to present news in the most dramatic way in order to make sure everyone was listening to him.

  “Craaak! They creeping out at night and burning trees up!” Crow screamed.

  Beginning to be alarmed, Little Fur questioned the bird closely and learned that he had gotten his information from a possum who lived in the roof of an old human. She had heard the news from the human’s talking picture box, which was very loud. Never exactly sure what a picture box was, Little Fur had learned enough to know that this was one of the ways humans communicated news.

  “Are you sure the possum heard it right?” she asked. Humans’ speech was very difficult to understand, even for those animals who lived with them.

  “Maybe not,” Crow said unhelpfully. “Possums being almost as stupid as humans.”

  “Did the talking picture box say why the human pack burns trees?” Little Fur asked.

  Crow rolled his eyes. “They liking to burn! That being reason enough for humans. But Old Ones not letting tree killers coming here.”

  Little Fur shook her head. “A pack of humans all thinking about finding trees to burn might be able to see the wilderness even if the Old Ones tried to stop them.”

  Crow flapped his wings and began to preen in a nervous way, finally muttering, “Nevermore,” and falling stubbornly mute.

  Little Fur waited anxiously for Brownie’s next visit, hoping the pony would snort in scorn as he often did when she reported some wild tale of Crow’s. Indeed, she counted on his laughing and explaining how Crow had gotten it wrong. But Brownie only said, “I am sure that the other humans will catch the tree burners before long.”

  “Catch them?” Little Fur asked, confused.

  “The tree burners are rogue humans,” said Brownie. “The other humans are angry at them because every time they light a fire, the wind carries seeds of flame to human houses and they burn down as well as the trees. Last night fire jumped into one of the high houses. If you sniff you will smell the smoke from it still, for the other humans have not managed to put it out yet.”

  “Why are the tree burners doing it?” Little Fur wondered.

  “No one knows. They wear masks and keep themselves secret,” Brownie said. “Lots of humans are worried about the trees and are slee
ping in parks to protect them.”

  “Humans want to protect trees?” Little Fur asked, wondering if she had heard rightly.

  “I told you all humans are not bad.”

  “All humans stupid,” Crow muttered.

  “Even if the tree burners do come this far, the Old Ones won’t let them come here,” Brownie assured her.

  “If a fire is lit in the pony park, the flames will come here.”

  There was a grim silence, and then Crow fluttered down. “Crow knowing what to do. Must asking advice of Sett Owl. Many animals asking Herness to thinking for them.”

  Little Fur clapped her hands. “Crow, you must fly at once and ask her what we should do.”

  Crow ruffled his feathers evasively. “Herness not answering Crow.”

  “But you said she is used to being asked for advice by creatures other than owls.”

  “Answering all creatures but crows,” said Crow. “Sett Owl hating crows because flock attacking her when she being fledgling. Maybe you can asking some other bird to talking her.”

  Little Fur shook her head. “Most wild birds can’t remember anything for more than a few seconds unless it has to do with nesting or food. If only there was someone else I could ask, but all of the animals here are . . .”

  “Too stupid,” Crow concluded.

  “Too small. I wonder if I could ask one of the other birds to invite the Sett Owl here,” Little Fur murmured. “One of them might manage that.”

  “She not coming,” Crow warned. “She flying bad because of wing injured in attacking long ago. All wanting answers must coming to Herness in beaked house.”

  Brownie broke in to announce that he had to go home. Crow fluttered into a tree and tried to look as if he were thinking deeply, but he was bird enough for it to be hard for him to keep his mind on the problem. After all, his wings would lift him above any danger. He preened himself surreptitiously and soon fell asleep.