The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  “What have we done, coming here?” she shouted, leaping to her feet and kicking at sticks, at the trunk of an old tree. Tears flooded down her face. “Oh, Tin, we’ve lost them! The poor leverets, we’ve lost them for good! That terrible old woman is probably building up the fire for the soup already! And us! We’ll never get to the Elk of Milk and Gold in time. Everything will be lost.” She collapsed against a fir tree and sank to the ground, her arms clenched tight to her body.

  “Comfrey,” Tin said, alarmed to see her so completely undone. “Comfrey, please, don’t cry.” If she gave in to despair now, there would be no hope for either of them. He put his hand on her shoulder, but he’d never tried to soothe a girl before and he wasn’t sure if he should pat, or hold, or shake her. He tried to remember what Amber had done.

  She wrenched away from his hand and refused to meet his eyes. Through her tears, she wanted to say venomous things about the City, and how he didn’t even have a mother or a beloved Country to lose, how he couldn’t possibly understand, but she managed to hold the words in and slow her breathing.

  “Comfrey,” he tried again, in a quieter tone. But still she kept her face turned away. He tucked his hand into his pocket, embarrassed. He was only trying to help. And maybe she was right anyway. The sun was going down. What hope had they, once night fell? Suddenly something bright flashed on the ground between them. “What are these?” Tin said, reaching down to pick up a delicate pair of spectacles.

  Comfrey saw them and flushed. “Don’t you dare touch those!” she snapped, grabbing her Oddness and holding it close.

  Tin backed away, affronted. “What’s so special about them?” he shot back. Comfrey didn’t answer, but when he looked at her he saw that her face had brightened. The spectacles rested in her palm and she was gazing at them with a look of such amazement and relief that her eyes were again full of tears.

  “They are my Oddness,” she murmured, her voice wholly changed. There was a smile in it.

  “Spectacles?” he whispered. He felt as though she had gifted him a great and secret trust, though he wasn’t sure if Oddnesses were really secrets at all. “What can you see with them?”

  “Of course! That’s it!” She threw her arms around his neck in a quick, fierce embrace, which he was too startled to return.

  “That’s…what?” he asked, confused.

  “I can only use them three times,” Comfrey went on, barely hearing him. “Any more, and I’ll go blind. Though that’s hardly important at the moment. What Amber told me is that they make the world light up with its true patterns. They bring out its smallest details and show them as they really are, each thing hitched to the next, all part of big and small designs, as if connected by spider strings.” She held the spectacles up to her nose. The glass sparked with rainbow spots as the last of the sun went down beyond the ocean.

  “Oh,” Tin managed, eyes wide. It sounded extraordinary, and complicated, and she spoke almost feverishly, as if this was something she had seen before. The spectacles were delicate and beautiful, with rims of lustrous gold, and the glass contained a glow all of its own. They suited Comfrey, he thought – practical, yes, but striking, and a bit strange too. What story had she seen in the mirror that had brought them to her? “But – when you put them on,” he reasoned aloud, suddenly worried, “won’t you see a million of these patterns at once? I mean, we’re in a forest! There must be a thousand things going on everywhere every instant. How do you know what pattern you’re going to see? How will you sift out the pearls from all that?”

  Comfrey frowned, thinking. “There must be a trick to it. A kind of focusing, or what would the use be?” She looked around for a moment, studying the lacework of the moss, the darkening fir needles, the flight of a flock of wood pigeons against the dusk. Her nose turned down ever so slightly as she pursed her lips in concentration. “Maybe, if I hold in my mind’s eye the pattern of the pearls, and the fact that they were once a necklace, if I just repeat to myself again and again the image of a pearl necklace, it might reveal itself.” She sighed. “Well, there’s nothing to do but try. We haven’t got another plan.”

  Their eyes met, desperately bright, and Tin nodded. Comfrey swallowed once, stood up, patted at her hair to gather herself, squeezed her eyes shut, and set the spectacles on her nose.

  “Hold my hand for balance,” she said to Tin, and he obeyed quickly. She opened her eyes. Night had fallen dark blue across the forest, but now, through the spectacles, it was stitched with light. The fir boughs were haloed and criss-crossed with the memories of robin feet and chickadee wings darting over and under them. Through the moss, Comfrey saw the paw prints of a mountain lion who had passed through the night before, and on top of that the path of a newt who’d waded through the moss to get to a creek. Inside the newt’s trail she saw, for an instant, a dizzying map of the winter creeks of his ancestors. The more she looked, the more layers of spider silk-connection she saw around her, each strand holding the story and shape of a different forest creature. Those layers pulsed a little in their glowing and called up a yearning in her, the same one she had felt at the sight of the Fire Hawk’s feather.

  “Oh no,” she groaned, dizzy. Tin had been right. She felt like she was swimming. She could hardly see through all of the glintings and pathways woven around her, dazzling and unbearably beautiful. She tried to take a step anyway, and reeled, falling to her hands and knees.

  “What? What do you see?” Tin was crouched at her side, trying to steady her.

  But Comfrey only shook her head, too dizzy to speak. She was unable to find him with her eyes. She kept looking up at the fir canopy as he said her name, until Tin, as gently as he could manage, so as not to scare her, put his hand to her chin and turned her face to him.

  “A mountain lion, a pregnant one, she walked there…” Comfrey murmured, her voice trailing off.

  “Comfrey, I’m here. Comfrey, remember what you said. Think about the pearls, think really hard. Think about a strand of them all belonging to each other,” Tin whispered in encouragement, trying to keep the despair from his voice. In this state, they were worse off than before!

  Comfrey leaned her chin into his hand, exhausted. “I can’t,” she moaned. “I can hardly move. It’s like seeing when you’ve never seen before, too much all at once. I can’t…”

  “Nobody else can do it for you,” said Tin, putting on his firm, brave tone – the one he’d used when he and Seb were escaping the Cloister, when he was sure a dozen times they wouldn’t make it, but had had to pretend otherwise. Taking a careful breath, he turned his face up to the treetops. Framed between the branches, he saw that tiny constellation of seven stars he’d watched two nights before. It gleamed delicately, that minute soup pot, that drifting leaf. Its small beauty made him sad, and also stronger. He didn’t want the leverets to die. He didn’t want to be fed to a wood stove. Worst of all, he didn’t want this beautiful, wild land and its terrifying but beautiful Wild Folk to fall into the hands of the City. He wanted to look up and find that small constellation every night until he was a very old man. “Close your eyes, Comfrey,” he heard himself saying in a soothing voice. “Hold one of the pearls in your pocket, and try to make your whole mind a pearl.”

  Comfrey reached out a flailing hand and Tin guided it awkwardly to her pocket.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “Okay. Just…Tin? Steady me, will you?”

  He pressed his hand firmly against her shoulder, and she closed her eyes to focus. She imagined a string of pearls, each gathered in the teeth of a seal. She tried to picture the Baba Ithá in love, crooning to the hundreds of pearls strung around her neck. She felt the bead in her pocket and thought of each pearl, rocked by the ocean inside an oyster, the tides rocked by the moon. She kept her eyes closed tight until all of this was so alive in her imagination that she could taste salt in her mouth. Then she opened them, and gasped.

  The moon had risen. A delicate strand of moonlight spiralled and zigzagged through the moss, glowi
ng here and there with a pearl-sized light. Holding Tin’s arm, Comfrey stood with slow, careful movements, then began to walk, keeping only the pearls in her mind. One by one, she gathered them up from along that string of light. Tin turned his jacket into a bowl, and she placed each one gingerly inside.

  It took all night to find those three hundred pearls scattered far and near across the forest floor. More than once, the pull of other threads overwhelmed Comfrey’s sight, and she had to sit among the bracken, her back to a tree and her eyes closed, until she could hold the story of the pearl necklace in her mind without faltering. Tin kept by her side. He counted the pearls aloud, describing each one, until she could see the moon-bright pathway between them once more.

  By dawn, they were both so tired they could barely stand. Comfrey was bone-worn beyond any weariness she had ever known. When she at last took the spectacles off, a streak of dizzy pain split through her temples, and she had to cradle her head to keep from being sick. Tin held the coat full of pearls so tight his hands were numb.

  With the first streak of sunrise, the Baba Ithá appeared. The children were huddled against a tree, trying to keep one another awake. Tin, seeing the old woman, carried the pearls to her at once and placed the heavy coat in her arms. The tiny beads sighed against one another, iridescent. The Baba Ithá bent over them and breathed in. Her eyes filled with tears, and though she hissed just as an owl does, she was pleased.

  “Oh my lovelies,” she said to the pearls. “It has been so long.” She ran her gnarled fingers through them, crooning. Then she tipped them all into the pockets of her skirt. They made a sound like water as she poured.

  “You better not have eaten the leverets,” Tin said, seeing through a kind of daze that he and Comfrey had won another day for their friends He had no energy for pleasantries.

  The Baba Ithá made a snapping noise, the threatening click of a beak. “Do you doubt me?”

  “No, ma’am, no indeed.” Tin bowed his head and avoided her eyes, regretting his words.

  “They are alive. That is all you need know,” the old woman snarled. “Is the girl ill?” She gestured towards Comfrey, who had not raised her head.

  “Only tired,” Comfrey managed in a hoarse voice.

  Tin rushed back to her side, understanding without words that Comfrey did not want to tell the Baba Ithá about her spectacles, nor let on how weak they had made her. He lifted her up by the forearms, and she leaned heavily against him.

  With a sharp grunt of assent, and no further questions, the Baba Ithá gestured them onwards, beyond the mossy part of the forest to a place where the trees grew further apart, and a wide trail passed through, opening into a sunny patch shaded on the far side by a madrone tree. To the left of the trail where it opened into sunlight was a small grassy knoll ringed with brush and an outcrop of granite.

  “Those two tasks, they were child’s play, horse fodder, compared to the final one,” said the Baba Ithá, ruffling at her skirts and her braid as an owl does its feathers. “The whole ridge of the Vision Mountains is made of ancient granite, a hard and formidable stone. I want you to fashion two walking shoes – clogs, boots, whatever you fancy – from this stone. Granite walking shoes, for human feet, are a delicate and precise affair. Nearly impossible to make, I daresay. Now, hop to!” The old woman let out a deep, wheezing giggle at the pun she’d made. She pulled a yerba santa leaf from a patch growing in the shade, chewed it thoughtfully for a moment, and was gone, her skirts swinging, heavy with all the clicking pearls in her pockets.

  “Shoes?” said Tin, incredulous. He slid to the ground with his back to the rock.

  Comfrey was already leaning there. She groaned, then sank onto all fours. The world was still reeling round her, and her head split with pain. Each movement ripped through her in a tide of aching nausea. “I-I’m useless…” she managed in a small voice. “I can’t move any more.” She slumped onto her side and curled up on the ground.

  “Comfrey!” Tin grabbed at her wrist to feel her pulse. He had seen the Cloister physician do such a thing before, when a boy had collapsed in the Alchemics Workshop from the effects of mercury fumes. Her heartbeat was quick and fluttering. He rummaged in their packs for water and tried to pour some between her lips, but it only dribbled out of the sides of her mouth again. Frantic, he wet part of his coat and laid the cool cloth over her forehead.

  “Oh, Mallow, oh, Myrtle!” he whispered to himself. “What will I do without your help? You would know something to give her now, some bit of plant for her to chew.” He looked around the knoll and the forest edge but the plants were all unfamiliar to him. He hadn’t been paying attention before, when Myrtle ran off for a sprig of yerba buena, or Mallow came back chomping at hedgenettle.

  Comfrey stirred a little under the damp cloth, and Tin managed to coax a few drops of water into her mouth. He leaned back against the stone. This time, his despair was complete. Without the leverets or Comfrey, he was utterly at sea in this place. He was a City boy. The granite stones, the clearing full of grass, the forest edges; they made him feel small now, small and useless, without the words or the wits or the knowledge of anything that might orient him.

  “Oh, Mallow,” he whispered again. “If only you were here.” He missed the leveret’s plucky courage, his quick mind.

  Well, Mr No Plan, we’ve managed the impossible before, he could imagine the leveret saying. This made him smile. Then, almost absently, he felt the warm weight of the penknife against his thigh. His own Oddness. It wasn’t quite as mystical as Comfrey’s spectacles, just a little folding tool. He took it out of his pocket to admire its metal lines, its neat little blade and strange unfolding parts. Each tool had a metaphoric use as well as a literal one, Oro had said. The screwdriver, for screwing hope to courage. Why hadn’t he thought of that last night, with Comfrey? He shook his head. Oro had also said something about a penknife being able to carve a story too. What had he meant? Tin thought hard. Obviously, cutting stone with that tiny knife blade was not metaphoric – it was just impossible. The blade would break in a matter of seconds. But how could his Oddness, that granite rock, and his knack for stories ever produce a pair of shoes? It was preposterous.

  He turned to face the rock where he leaned and thought for a moment. Comfrey was breathing more evenly but had her cape pulled up over her head now, to block out the light. She knew so much more about these matters than he did, but he couldn’t bring himself to disturb her. She had pushed herself beyond the edge of her strength last night, braving her Oddness. He didn’t want her to risk anything worse. It was his turn to be daring, to try something that seemed impossible.

  “I can at least start by experimenting,” he told himself, pulling out the knife. He cleared his throat and tried brandishing the blade, looking at the rock, imagining shoes. But the spark inside of him that always energized his creativity when he was making something was nowhere to be found. All he felt was silly, and afraid. What was he supposed to do now? A raven croaked conversationally in a nearby tree, and a jay cackled.

  An Offering. First, you have to give it an Offering. Was that Mallow’s voice inside his head, or Comfrey’s?

  Of course! He looked round, afraid that some creature would walk forward from the forest to berate or punish him. But only the raven remained, croaking now and then. An Offering, that was somewhere to start. Only he’d never left an Offering before. He’d watched Comfrey do it when they stopped to camp, placing a little bit of their dinner at the edge of the wood. But they were almost out of food, and besides, he didn’t think a stone would be interested in a piece of stale bread. Perhaps a story would make a good Offering? Perhaps with a story he could coax a pair of shoes from granite? He clutched the penknife, and tried not to laugh at himself. He sighed and shook his head.

  “Ridiculous,” he murmured. “What a stupid idea, telling a stone a story to turn it into a shoe!” Still, talking to the rock was better than doing nothing. It was a start.

  “Ahem. Ah, hello. I’m Tin an
d, well, I, along with my companions – two of whom are hares, and in very great danger – need your help.” He stopped abruptly. Offerings first. Don’t just demand what you want. Offer, the voice said again. This time it sounded rather like the Baba Ithá. He shuddered. “I have a story for you, old lord granite stone,” he went on. “I’m not sure if you like stories, but I do, and since you’ve probably been here a million years or even more, I thought, you know, it might be nice to hear one…”

  Tin wasn’t used to telling a story to a rock, so he couldn’t think of anything to say at first except to start with their own story – him and Mallow, and then how they’d met Comfrey and Myrtle, all the way up to the Baba Ithá herself. That took the better part of the morning, but the rock appeared no different than before – no hint of a change of shape, no small door opening, revealing shoes inside. So he kept going. He was getting hoarse by this time, but he had warmed up into that familiar storytelling trance. He had stopped worrying that he was wasting his time. He had decided that he’d rather die telling a story than weeping with despair. If he just kept talking, he could keep the fear away.

  At one point, Comfrey murmured something, but her words were impossible to understand. She managed to reach a weak hand out from under her coat, and took hold of his ankle. Perhaps to anchor herself, perhaps to encourage him. He put his free hand over hers, and was glad she couldn’t see his sudden blush. Her fingers were cold under his. Stammering, he launched headlong into a proper tale, a magical one, a story and not just a recounting of the days’ events. This was his Offering, he thought as he began, but he told it as much to Comfrey as he did to the stone, though he didn’t know how much she understood, being fevered and half-asleep. Even so, he told the story for her. Tomorrow, they might be kindling for the Baba Ithá’s stove, or turned into robins, like she had threatened. Today he would weave the most wondrous tale he could imagine.