“In the name of all Haredom, the boy knows nothing of quick escapes!” the leveret muttered to himself, hopping back again. “Who is Sebastian?”
“He’s my best friend. I can’t leave without him. We always said we’d get out together. I have to go back for him or I’m not worth anything.” Tin frowned down at Mallow, lamp cautiously lit again. “I don’t want to get in the habit of abandoning people. That’s what I am, isn’t it, an abandoned person? Well, I’m not going to do that to Seb.” He’d gone down into a crouch, and was looking Mallow in the eye.
The hare understood in that fierce blue glare something of the strength Brother Warren had spoken of. You couldn’t change this boy’s mind about a thing once it was set. And in those blue eyes, Mallow saw his twin sister Myrtle, and a blue sky. He felt an old memory rise up, from when they were only just born, and their mother had left them in a bed of soft grasses with the big dawn sky above them. A coyote had taken her, the Greentwins had told them later. He remembered the warmth of his sister next to him that day, the only familiar being in the whole big green and blue world. His little strong heart thudded, thinking of Myrtle, the terror in her eyes as the barn owl lifted her off into the dusk in dreadful talons, winging her towards her fate, her duty, as Mallow had been taken towards his. Had it only been a few hours ago? It felt like a lifetime. But this was what the Greentwins wanted. The boy and the girl are your charges, they had said. We can see from the Shape of Things that Farallone is in great danger again. That this time, the island herself might die, and that the Elk will not be strong enough to save her Creation as she did at the time of the Collapse. It matters very much that you find these children. All together you, and they, have something to do with wholeness, with the overcoming of Walls and Boundaries and the things that have kept us living in fear of one another – City Folk and Country Folk and Wild Folk – for the last two hundred years. So you must trust us, and go. We cannot see the small details, only the greater patterns: that there is great danger to the whole. Help these children. Follow where they go and help them on their paths. Hopefully this will be enough, before it is too late.
But Myrtle had been taken to a village in the Country. How would he ever find her again, and not lose Tin in the process? The leveret lowered his eyes.
“Okay, Tin, no abandoning. I get it,” Mallow said solemnly. “Your turn to come up with the plan, then.” He sniffed the air, brightening. “Wouldn’t want any rumours spreading that just because hares run fast, they’re cowards.”
Tin grinned again, and his eyes softened.
“A plan? You never told me your plan. Well, my plan is to wake Sebastian up, sneak back down here to the Fiddleback, jump in, and then, you know…vanish?” He laughed, shaking his head.
“That’s hardly a plan!” said Mallow. “That sounds more like No Plan to me.”
A chill passed all down Tin’s spine as he regarded the leveret. He still didn’t quite believe that Mallow was real, much less this talk of escape. His head reeled a little. “Look,” he said, swallowing hard and trying to act calm. “I bet Seb will have a better idea. He has the maps we’ve made. The other week we found this tunnel that went way deeper than the others, on the other side of the Cloister and down and down until it kind of got hard to breathe, but I bet that’s the one, the way out.”
“Burying us alive or vanishing into thin air, that’s all you’ve got?” Mallow said with a small snort. “Brilliant. The Greentwins have sent me into a deathtrap! Well, let’s at least not waste any more time running headlong to our doom! Hop to!” And with that, the leveret bounded off down the passageway, silent and quick.
“And hope they’re not already waiting at the door,” said Tin to himself as he followed after Mallow.
The boy and the hare reached the surface without incident, Mallow expertly guiding Tin through passageways he’d never explored before. Tin had to admit to himself that he would have become completely lost in those dark and twisting catacombs without the leveret ahead, following the smells in the air.
They emerged, to Tin’s surprise, at the bottom of the west bell tower, through a very small wooden door behind a threadbare tapestry woven with fruits Tin had never eaten – pomegranates, apricots, grapes, a handful of almonds in their shells. A narrow staircase made of iron spiralled upwards towards the bronze bell, which was old, cracked and still rung daily at dawn and noon and dusk, but in strange minor tones. Tin had never been in either of the two bell towers, because there was nothing inside except that winding staircase, dizzying and steep. Holding up his little lantern – which by now was almost out of oil – Tin tiptoed across the room and towards the other door, the one that led out towards the dormitories. A heavy key sat in the lock. Mallow kept close to his ankles.
“Wait,” said the hare, and turned his ears to the door. Tin’s hand paused mid-air, just above the key. “Okay, quiet, turn it slowly. I can’t wait to get out of this place. Creepy, hulking cavern. Whoever got the idea to live in such an awful warren of stone and shadow and cold?” Mallow continued, mostly to himself. “It’s hideous.”
The lock clicked low, and Tin swung the door open, trying to keep it from creaking. They were in the Main Assembly Hall now, on the side near his dormitory.
“Good,” he sighed, ignoring Mallow’s mutterings, and slid along the shadows of the outer wall. He was in familiar territory again – he and Sebastian had shimmied countless times along this big dark wall, whispering plans.
Outside the rosette window all spattered in raindrops, the storm had broken for a moment. A scrap of crescent moon shone through the clouds, making a long soft beam across the middle of the floor. Mallow stopped and stared up at the rosette glittering with raindrops and coloured glass and moonlight, having never seen such a thing before.
“Psst, come on,” whispered Tin, holding the door open to the West Dormitory wing. He took his tattered shoes off – old canvas and rubber sneakers worn to a nondescript grey – and padded silent as the hare three flights up the stone stairs. The halls were that particular sort of quiet that only reaches its fullness at around three in the morning. The grey shadows themselves felt muffled.
Tin picked at the keyhole with his lock-pick. It scratched, clicked, and gave way. They were in. Tin closed the door softly. The familiar smells of crisped sheets washed religiously on Sundays, sweat, and the musty dampness of the walls, hit Tin as he entered the room. For better or worse, the smells comforted him; this crowded chamber was the closest place to a home he had ever known.
The dormitory consisted of a series of slim metal cots lined up in rows of eight across, with an aisle down the middle from door to bathroom. There were four rows in all. Each bed had a small wooden crate at the end for clothes, and another wooden crate on its side as a bedside table where a candle and a cup of water might be perched.
Tin spotted his own bed, quilt rumpled and mounded round his pillow, and Sebastian’s directly behind it in the farthest row near the windows. His friend’s thick black hair shifted softly over his eyes as he rustled in his sleep. Tin slipped silently over to his own bed, Mallow, just as quiet, at his ankles. The leveret stared and sniffed, trying not to tremble at the sight of so many human beings all in one room.
“Seb.” Tin shook his friend gently. “Seb, wake up. This is it, Seb, wake up!” Mallow put his paws up on the bed and sniffed Seb’s head, then sprang back as the boy jolted upright with a gasp, eyes bleary until they focused on Tin.
“What is it? What’s going on?” Seb rubbed his dark eyelashes.
“This is it, Seb! We’re escaping, this second!” Tin leaned close, tired and scared and excited all at once. He suddenly felt the weight of it as he said it out loud, leaning against the hard mattress pad in this hard stone room with the rain starting up again on the roof. Mallow hopped onto the bed and Seb gaped.
“What is that, Tin?” he whispered hoarsely. “What are you talking about?” He looked between the hare and his friend twice, rapidly.
“I’m a
black-tailed hare,” said Mallow. “Not a ‘that’. My name is Mallow, and really there’s no time to explain. Tin insisted we come back for you. Otherwise we’d be out and away through the hare-forsaken streets of this gloomy City and heading straight for the secret door in the Wall.”
“The secret door in the Wall?” both boys whispered in unison. Tin’s thoughts hadn’t reached much beyond the walls of the Cloister, and Sebastian was trying hard just to assimilate so many miracles all at once.
The hare looked at them in astonishment. “What? Don’t you want to leave the City?”
“But…isn’t it dangerous on the other side of the Wall? And aren’t the people in the Country very sick with poisons and disease? Wouldn’t we…die?” stammered Seb, thinking of all the things they’d been told.
Mallow let out a little hare-snort. “Sick? Dangerous! Compared to this place? Oh, my poor humans, what have they been telling you here? The Country is the most beautiful place in the world. The hills in spring are full of delicious flowers – have you ever seen a flower? I suppose you haven’t… Oh my stars, what sorry creatures you are! There hasn’t been any serious sickness in a hundred and fifty years, and the streams are clean as rain!” Mallow trailed off at the memory of wild clover; at the memory of his sister; of home.
The boys looked at each other with their hearts in their throats. Tin, pretending he had known this all along, grinned at Seb.
“See? It’s for real,” he said to his friend. “Now c’mon, I can’t explain here. We’re going to the tunnels, fast.”
With a trusting, big-eyed look, Seb quietly climbed out of bed, pulled on his grey trousers and a sweater with holes in both elbows, then tucked his own tattered shoes under his arm. Out of the dormitory windows, the distant City Wall threw white electrical currents in the rain.
“We’re not coming back,” Tin said, his face illuminated by the storm’s light, trying to sound certain both for Seb’s sake and his own. “So take any special stuff, but hurry. They’re coming for me at dawn and they’re going to take my Fiddleback.”
“Your what?” Seb stopped midway through stuffing a knapsack with socks, his toothbrush, a little necklace made out of bright copper pennies given to him wrapped up in a blue bandana from the kitchen-girl named Sophie. He eyed Tin, wondering if his friend had finally snapped.
“Shh, never mind. I’ll tell you on the way.”
Mallow nipped at Seb’s calves to hurry him along, and the boy could think of nothing to do but trust his friend, and follow.
They managed to make it to the door without causing more than a few boys to stir in their sleep. This was an old routine for Tin and Seb, and they were used to whispering and walking with almost no sound, cued in to each other’s hand movements and almost able to lip-read. But the excitement of the evening was starting to wear on Tin. He’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours. After the adrenaline of the chase, of meeting Mallow, and of the Fiddleback itself, Tin’s hands shook with fatigue as he went to open the self-locking door with his little pick. He dropped it, a clattering of metal on the cold stone floor. Seb winced. Mallow stopped, still and quivering, as somebody stirred, springs creaking, and sat upright in his bed.
“You again, Tin?” came a voice. Thomas, a hulking shape in the semi-dark, his hair sticking up like feathers.
“I swear to God, Thomas, you shut your mouth or I’ll fill your bed with hot mercury,” hissed Tin after a moment’s tense silence.
“Oh, will you?” snarled Thomas, waking the boys around him.
“Out, out,” whispered Mallow urgently, leaping to Tin’s arms and nearly winding the boy.
“What on earth is that?” said Thomas. “Oh, man, have I got the dirt on you, Tin, an animal?”
“An animal?” another voice said softly. More covers rustled and springs creaked as half the dormitory woke and craned to see.
“Hurry up!” urged Mallow, pressings his paws to Tin’s chest. Tin looked at Mallow and Seb with desperate, bright eyes, then jiggled the door open. The boys ran in their socks, shoes thumping against their knapsacks where they were tied by their laces. Mallow leaped out of Tin’s arms and bounded ahead. They made it all the way down to the trapdoor under the red velvet carpet in the meeting room where earlier in the night Father Ralstein and Brother Warren had sat in wait. Now the room was empty and the boys dashed in the dark down the earth-packed stairs. The door slammed above them.
They ran all the way to the kitchen cellars before stopping for breath.
“The Hall Brothers will be awake by now, and Thomas will’ve told,” said Seb, panting. “You’d better have a darn good plan, Tin. What are you thinking? I mean, I know we’ve talked about this a lot but we’re already in a mess and we’ve barely left the dorms!”
“Finally, a wise child!” sighed Mallow. “I’ve been trying to say this to him but the boy is headstrong and reckless and thinks No Plan and a lot of dashing about is the way to go.”
The boy smiled crookedly at the hare. Seb was shorter than Tin, but broader, with wiry dark arms and thick eyebrows, which he raised now as he smiled.
“Yeah, that’s Tin for you. But he can probably talk his way out of a hole in the ground, so maybe we’ll be okay, as it looks like we’re going to need just that. To be talked out of a hole in the ground.” He looked up ruefully at the tunnelled walls around them. “Tin, you better start telling me now what in the world you’re up to. First, the Fiddleback.”
“We don’t have time,” said Tin, pulling Seb by the arm. “Now they’ll be after us, and they’ll confiscate the Fiddleback before we have a chance to save it! Come on, I’ll explain once we are in.”
“In? In what?” cried Seb, but Tin and Mallow were off at a sprint again.
The rains began not long after Comfrey returned home from the Offering altar, and did not let up all night. They were lashing and wild. Thunder boomed. All the candles lit on all the altars along the borderlands hissed out. Comfrey didn’t tell her mother about the Basket-witches. She faked some measure of normality, then escaped to her room. She pulled aside the piece of felt at her bedroom window that kept the wet out, and let the rain pelt in sideways and spatter her face as she stared out into the storm.
Her thoughts were back in the clearing, remembering the dark eyes and deep yellow skirts of the woman who had spoken to her. Why had she smiled that way, so warm and fierce at once? And the baskets the women had been weaving – Comfrey had never seen anything so delicate, so finely wrought, so beautiful.
“The basket of my own fate. The shaping of my own destiny,” she whispered to herself, sticking her hands out of the window to feel the downpour. What did that mean? Did it have anything to do with the Bobcat-girl who had known her name? Her eyes took in the blur of rain without focusing. Was your destiny really something you could shape, like a basket?
Suddenly a white shape came winging straight for her window sill. She snatched her hands back in shock but didn’t have time even to cry out before a wet barn owl veered so close its wing touched her hair. It set a squealing and squirming leveret on the sill and flew off, shaking its wings in disgust.
“This better be worth it, so help me all Hare-gods!” Eyes white with terror, the young hare leaped onto Comfrey’s floor, creating a shower of raindrops from her fur. A fine mist smelling of damp wool and grass covered Comfrey’s face. She wiped her eyes and stared at the hare, who began delicately to groom at the white patch of fur on her nose.
Comfrey couldn’t keep back her excitement. Was this yet a third encounter? “I’m sorry to be rude, but – are you a Wild Folk?”
The hare laid her ears back and looked up.
“Oh for goodness’ sake, me? What on earth makes you say so? Did I grow an odd human limb from that hideous owl-flight?” She looked down again at herself in horror.
“No, no, it’s only…you’re talking, and you’re a hare. And that’s not meant to happen. Only Wild Folk look like animals but talk too, like people, and normally they look like peop
le also, but they rarely come here and we never go there so I wasn’t sure,” Comfrey said, breathless, the words stumbling out. “Did those Basket-witches send you?” She found her head was spinning, and sat down hard on her bedroll. “Am – am I in trouble?” The leveret hopped over and joined her.
“Basket-witches? Trouble? It seems I’ve come just in time,” she said cheerfully, wriggling her whiskers. “I’m Myrtle. And actually I’m just a bit hungry, after all that owl business. Might I have a snack? Hard to talk in your human way on an empty stomach.” She pawed about for a moment at the wool covers, then settled comfortably onto her haunches, eyeing Comfrey expectantly.
The girl dashed into the kitchen on quiet, slippered feet, hardly breathing in her excitement. She tucked a small acorn cake from the ceramic crock by the window into a nettle-fibre napkin, and a garden carrot for good measure, then tiptoed back, snack-bundle in hand. But she misjudged the corner of her own door frame and stubbed her toe with a thud and an outward hiss of breath. Her mother shifted in the room next door.
“Frey?” Maxine called, her voice mossy with sleep.
Comfrey froze. Her heart thumped. She breathed out.
“Just getting water, Mama. Sorry to wake you,” she whispered loudly at her mother’s door. Maxine made a small noise in reply and turned over. Comfrey waited until her breathing went regular. Then she slipped back into her room, closing the door very slowly, and laid the bundle out before the leveret. Myrtle tucked in at once.
“Much better,” said the hare after a silence broken only by voracious nibbling. She ate the whole acorn cake and part of the carrot before turning back to Comfrey, who was sitting straight up in bed, watching her closely. “Brilliant, whatever you’ve done with the acorns,” continued the leveret between bites, white whiskers moving. “Much better than they usually taste, yes indeed.”
The Wild Folk Page 5
