The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Then they slept, so exhausted that they did not dream.

  Amber woke the children with a song about dawn and mothers and golden bells. Tin sat up with tears in his eyes, almost remembering his own mother’s voice, though he had been only three months old when the Brothers took him into their Cloister. Comfrey woke teary-eyed too, thinking of Maxine. Amber touched each of their foreheads with rosemary oil. Both children kept their eyes closed for an extra minute just to listen to her voice – liquid, smoky amber, like her name – and to smell that rosemary smell, which pricked their noses and their lungs awake. She left a bundle of fresh clothing at the base of each bed and told them to come to the garden for breakfast. There was a long-sleeved, patchwork dress for Comfrey, made with sturdy red and yellow linen scraps, and a thick green wool vest. A beautifully knitted blue sweater with leather elbow patches sat at the base of Tin’s bed, and stiff brown trousers. Myrtle and Mallow were gone, but Comfrey spied them through the window, grazing at the vegetable patch, their ears flicking back and forth with pleasure as they ate.

  When the children came downstairs, they stopped in their tracks in the main room, bewildered and awed by the way the midwinter sun coming in through the windows of the inn glinted – off the glass panes, off the marbles left by the little trumpet boy beside the hearth, off hanging crystals, off tiny shards of mirror stuck to the walls, as if somebody had placed them just so, just where the morning sun hit. Amber found them thus, mouths agape, and herded them outside under the apple trees to a breakfast of fresh eggs and seedy dense toast covered in blackberry jam. Huge cups of a dark and bitter tea full of goat’s milk steamed on the table. Their heat wafted up into the cold morning towards the branches of the apple trees, which were bare yet, with only the faintest hint of buds. A fire crackled in a pit in the earth, warming them, and the russet-coloured girl roasted apples in the embers. Nearby, the skin-tents where the Fools slept gleamed in the morning sun, and a man beat at a coloured rug with a stick, sending dust into the air.

  “My mother,” said Comfrey, staring at her breakfast, but feeling suddenly unable to eat. “Tell me, is she in danger this very minute? Was the vision in the feather of now, or of what is to come?”

  “The Brothers,” Tin was saying at the same time, to Comfrey and to Amber and to the girl by the fire, to anyone who would listen. “Are they here, already? Do they know how to get to Wild Folk land? Will they find out…?” He paused, wondering at the danger of his own words, spoken aloud, wondering what these Fools knew. “That the last gold of Farallone runs through their veins?”

  “By all the Fools, not if we can help it,” replied Amber in a voice much fiercer than she had ever used before. “Now eat up, my chits. You must be hearty and strong to make it all the way to the end of Olima to bring that feather to the Elk of Milk and Gold. Your feet are already on the path most needed. Now you just know a bit more than you did before, and it’ll speed your way.”

  “But what about my Fiddleback?” said Tin. “Why did the Coyote-folk take it? Do they know about the Brothers? Will they know how dangerous it would be for them to get their hands on it?”

  Just then, a little skunk ambled up to the table and tugged at the boy’s trouser-leg with her teeth. Tin almost yelped in surprise.

  “Run along now to the Cabinet, Tin. Oro is waiting for you!” Amber said. “What you will see there, and what he will give you – these are all the answer and all the help we can provide.”

  In the Cabinet of Wonders, that room full of strange treasures that he had glimpsed last night when they arrived, Oro sat Tin down at a mirror-topped table and bade him look into it.

  “What do you see, young Tin?” said Oro. The mirror reflected their leaning arms and the early morning sun that was coming through the window. It reflected Oro’s pale, long head and Tin’s tight curls still sticking out from sleep. A blue porcelain pot of tea left a ring of steam round itself on the table’s mirrored surface. Tin looked a moment longer at himself, eyes a little puffy with sleep, then sighed, tired and confused.

  “Nothing. Just us,” he replied, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice. “I thought we were going to talk more about the Brothers, and the Fiddleback, and what we can do to stop them from coming any further!”

  “Dear boy,” Oro said with a sigh. “Sometimes talking isn’t the best plan of action. What we are about to do will help you far more than anything I might conjecture. Now, let’s have a cup of tea and look again. You will not truly see into a mirror like this one if your eyes are full of other things.” Oro pulled the teapot close. It left a steamed streak on the glass. Then he turned to the bottom shelf behind them and balanced two chipped and un-matching teacups in one hand.

  Tin saw that they left two circles on the wooden shelf, light and dustless, where they’d been standing beside the bronze orrery, the indigo glass bottles, a chess piece, a broom handle, a pincushion filled with marvellous shiny needles, and a battery chipped to the colour of silver. Oro poured a steaming spout of deep green tea into each cup. Tin drank, trying to clear his mind like Mallow had taught him on their first evening together, when they were hiding in the shadows of the Cloister’s catacombs. That felt like another lifetime, now. He swallowed more tea.

  Oro watched him. For a moment his eyes seemed to brighten, gold-flecked, like a cat’s. Tin took a breath, and another sip. The taste of nettles and rosemary made his chest ease. The tea heated up his whole body. When he exhaled his breath steamed up the mirrored table too, just like the teapot.

  “Well, now I can’t see anything at all,” he muttered, glancing up at Oro. The man only gave him a crooked smile. Then he gestured for Tin to look again.

  Instead of foggy glass, Tin saw himself down in the catacombs of the Fifth Cloister of Grace and Progress. He gasped, and leaned closer. It was strange to see his own body from afar, there in that dark, stone-walled room where he had spent so many evenings working on his Fiddleback. He looked skinny and pale, his hair a light tangle in the darkness. It gave him a sad feeling in his belly to see himself from this distance. He looked so lonely and so solemn as he coaxed his creation together. And he was talking to himself! Had he talked to himself out loud the whole time he worked? How strange not to remember! There was a small half-smile on his face as he tinkered, his lips moving faintly all the while. Then he remembered – a story! He’d been telling a story aloud, one of the stories that were always running through his mind.

  In the Alchemics Workshop the Brothers overseeing the boys’ work forbade him from his “ceaseless infernal chattering”. When he forgot himself once, he received three lashes across his tongue with a sharp metal cord that cut his cheek as well. He did not forget again. Instead, he told himself stories in his head as he heated the mercury by precise and careful degrees, as he stirred and stirred at a vat that might explode if ever the boys stopped stirring, and did his best not to breathe in the fumes. It calmed his mind to tell himself tales this way, it kept him from the panic or deadened exhaustion that many of the other boys suffered through the long and dangerous hours. What stories had he been telling aloud as he made his Fiddleback? As he watched himself, it almost looked like he was whispering a spell, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t remember what he had said, only the feeling of intense focus and happiness that came over him whenever he was making something.

  He peered so close his nose almost touched the mirror, craning to hear. It was then that he saw something extraordinary. He saw light extending from his own fingers and from his mouth, golden light that shimmered, coursing from his own body and into each part of the Fiddleback that he touched. The light unfurled from him like the tendrilled stalks of plants, and spread through the Fiddleback’s wires and leather and engine. Without realizing he did so, Tin reached to touch his own gold-rimmed fingers in the mirror.

  “Ah!” warned Oro, but it was too late. The vision had gone. “Well, well,” the man murmured, resting his own hand on Tin’s back. “Now I begin to understand…”
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br />   “You saw it too?” Tin breathed.

  “Indeed, my lad, indeed. What a thing you made, and lost! With your hands and your words, you brought your Fiddleback to life. You have much creative power in you, dear boy. That is the golden light you saw. That is the true power of stargold. Oh it is quite splendid. It is a wondrous and rare gift!”

  “Thornton, a man we met who is part of a group of rebels in the City – I never did get to tell you that part last night – he told me that the reason I could make the Fiddleback the way I did was because I have a little stargold in my blood. Not like the Wild Folk do, only a very little bit. That lots of people have a little. Maybe – maybe you do too? But, what does it mean? The mirror only showed me something I already knew…just, more beautifully than I knew it.” The boy sighed and looked at his hands, wishing that he could see that golden light now, that he could control it in some way.

  “All that you say is true, my lad – of us, of Wild Folk, and of yourself,” Oro replied. “Stargold is the life force of Farallone. Those who carry it in their blood have a duty to this land – that is how I understand these matters. But we are not finished. Look here.” And as he pointed with his six-fingered hand, a woodrat scrambled up the leg of the table and trotted right to the centre beside the cooling teapot. He held a strange red object the length of a thumb in his jaws, and swayed his tail proudly. Tin started back.

  “He has found your Oddness!” Oro exclaimed, gesturing towards the rat. Tin stared, confused. “He and his sisters and brothers build their stick nests in these walls. They gather treasures left over from the human world, from Before. And they listen to our stories. They always seem to know which small trifle belongs to which person, so to speak, or represents them in some way. In exchange, we give them bits of cheese and berries and apple twigs. It’s a good deal, all in all.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Tin, staring still, feeling shaken by what he had seen in the glass mirror, and now by the woodrat who peered at him with very intelligent black eyes.

  “You’ve just looked into the Mirror of Oddness, and seen the nature of your own,” replied Oro. “Of course, you were born with it, your Oddness. That’s what makes you you, and not me. But sometimes in life we have moments that show it to us very clearly, encapsulated, if you will. Source-points of our Oddness. It is also your strength, your gift.”

  The woodrat moved his whiskers and set the treasure down with his white-edged paws. It made a click against the glass. It was in fact longer than a thumb, but not by much, and about as wide. The red exterior was chipped. Inside it was layered and made of metal.

  “What is my Oddness, then?” said Tin, peering nervously at the object on the glass before him.

  Oro smiled. “Well, this thing here is called a penknife. Long ago every lad had one of these. As your Oddness, it carries the power of making and unmaking. Powerful and dangerous, both.” He pushed the tool closer to Tin.

  “I thought it was for the Cabinet,” said Tin, not quite ready to pick up the compact little tool.

  “It is. There are always two, like you and your shadow, you and your memory-you as you remember him.” Oro reached for the reflection of the penknife next to Tin’s hand, and with a sound like parting water, he picked up a second one out of the reflection of the real one. “For the Cabinet,” he said to the woodrat, who took the little red object in his teeth and scampered it up a shelf on the wall, placing it beside a knight chess piece.

  “I’ll show you,” Oro said, watching Tin turn the penknife over and over in his hands. He demonstrated to the boy how to use a fingernail to lift up the separate, nested tools: knife blade, tiny scissors, corkscrew, can opener, screwdriver, tweezers, wire cutters, pin. This last item was not like the rest. It was wooden, with a tiny thorn tip.

  “Fiddleback spider venom in that,” said Oro softly, and Tin felt a chill. “Don’t prick yourself. It can only be used once, so use it wisely. As for the rest of these, they have two uses each: their literal use, like the knife for cutting, or the can opener for opening cans, or the screwdriver for unscrewing a screw, which I daresay you won’t need, and then a metaphoric use too.”

  “Metaphoric?” said Tin, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yes, yes. The can opener for opening those things which are sealed. The screwdriver for securing one thing to the next – hope to courage, for example. Or loosening them, detaching worry from joy, or what have you. Tweezers for removing something almost invisible that is hurting you.” Oro smiled, as if it were all very obvious. Tin’s mouth hung open.

  “How—?”

  “You’ll figure it out, I assure you. It’s all very intuitive. Remember, a penknife can carve a story too. At least, this penknife can. For that’s what you do, my boy, isn’t it? Tell stories with what you make?”

  Tin couldn’t think of what to say.

  “My lad, keeping your eyebrows halfway up your head like that is going to give you a dreadful headache, and I could use your help out in the vegetable patch while Comfrey takes her turn. Enough of this intellectualizing, let’s get our hands dirty!” With that, Oro rose abruptly, leaving a piece of cheese on the table for the woodrat.

  Tin, dazed, followed without another word.

  Oro took him straight to the beehives, to listen to their humming – Good for the nerves after a round in the Cabinet, he said – and then had the boy lend a hand turning a vegetable bed with a large rusty shovel to prepare it for the planting of winter greens. Tin glimpsed Comfrey through the apple trees, being led by Amber towards the Inn. Digging, turning, shaking the roots of weeds out of those shovel-loads of dirt, with Oro hollering for him to save the dandelion roots – For heaven’s sake, boy, they’re precious medicine! – Tin wondered what her Oddness would be, what little object the woodrat would bring forth from the walls and place before her. Mallow, spotting Tin from amidst the patch of nasturtiums he was presently munching, bounded over and nipped at the boy’s trousers, impatient to hear about the Cabinet of Wonders.

  When Comfrey peered down into the mirrored table with Amber’s mottled hand on her shoulder and the woodrat watching intently from the top of the shelf, she saw her own memory immediately, without any sips of the rosemary and nettle tea that Oro had given Tin. There in the mirrored glass was the Bobcat-girl in the scrubbrush hillside, looking back at Comfrey with green eyes, uttering her name: Hello, Comfrey.

  But watching in the mirrored glass was much more vivid than remembering, and so Comfrey saw something she hadn’t remembered, and also something that she could not have seen at all with human eyes. She watched herself lag behind her cousins, eyes roving, hands creasing at the fabric of her skirt. Then she bent over a little ditch along the side of the path where a seep of water made the nettles flourish late into the autumn. A red-striped garter snake flicked through the water and into the grass with one curving, shimmying motion. Instinctively she reached a finger to touch his scales, but he was already gone. Then her mother called and she stood quickly, realizing her family was far ahead.

  That’s when she saw the Bobcat-girl. From a distance, watching through the mirror, Comfrey could see the expression on her own face, an expression of utter shock and delight. Then, in the glass, the world wriggled and changed. Delicate threads became visible in the air around her. A long, thin one reached from her chest to the chest of the Bobcat-girl. Smaller threads reached from her fingers to the snake in the seep of water, from the snake back across the path to the place where he’d eaten a cricket only a few minutes before, from the cricket to all the blades of dry autumn grass. There were thin threads of connection between everything. The whole living world gleamed with them. All together, the threads seemed to be saying something to her, like the Bobcat-girl had; they seemed to form a word, or a series of words, that the girl could almost, for an instant, read. What did it say? She reached out to touch that word, to hold onto it, but it was gone.

  “Your Oddness,” said Amber after a moment’s silence. Comfrey’s hands and shins and chest an
d head tingled.

  “My…Oddness?” said Comfrey, struggling to swallow.

  Amber smiled, and explained to Comfrey what Oro had explained to Tin about Oddnesses, about Strengths. “Your Oddness is in seeing clearly, seeing the interconnections between all things,” she said. “Seeing what others do not, what others have forgotten or are afraid to see. If you were one of us,” Amber added, “wearing your Oddness on your skin, you might look like this.”

  She placed her cream-and-chestnut-splotched hand where Comfrey’s reflection floated, and the girl saw herself with eyes as big as a doe’s and a strange lump in the centre of her forehead like a third eye, only closed and sealed by a great woven net of eyelashes. Comfrey raised a hand to that place on her face, moaning a little in horror. In the reflection her hands looked webbed because there were threads connecting each finger. Her real forehead remained smooth, her real fingers free. She gasped and closed her eyes.

  A small clicking sound made her open them again, and she saw the woodrat pushing a pair of delicate gold-rimmed spectacles across the table with pale paws. Comfrey drew in her breath.

  “Such eyes want to know about everything,” Amber murmured, raising a thick brow at the radiant, embered feather that appeared in the mirror, held in the hand that Comfrey still had half-raised to her forehead.

  “How…?” the girl stammered, lowering her hand at once to find no feather there at all. “Who are you people, anyway? And what is that?” She leaned towards the spectacles.

  “Your gift, for our Cabinet. The encapsulation of your Oddness, procured from the stacks of the Wild Woodrat Library, where they have collected old gadgets and doodahs from that lost human world of Before.”