Dreamwood

by Heather Mackey

  Pete crouched down, his mouth agape. “That’s a fortune right there,” he said with a gulp.

  “Several times a fortune,” Niwa said matter-of-factly. “And it is just one of many things our people used to have. The shamans of our people would wear this and heal the sick. My father was born with legs too weak to carry him, but he would have been dead without this mask. The wood is magic.”

  “Why don’t you bring that as an offering?” Pete suggested. “That’s got to be the best thing here. You could buy the whole territory with that.” Unable to help himself, he reached out and touched the mask.

  Niwa whisked it out of his reach. “Would you offer someone the body of their own child?” She acted as if she’d never heard of anything so barbaric.

  Pete’s face went bright red. “No, of course not.”

  “That is what I would do if I gave this to His-sey-ak.” Niwa flashed in outrage. “He is the oldest tree, the first tree, and the other dreamwoods were his children.”

  Pete got interested in the floor. “How would I know that?” he protested quietly to Lucy. “Pancake Walapush never said anything about any of this.”

  Niwa put the mask aside impatiently. “This is not what I am showing you, settler. Look!”

  On the tray beneath the mask was a book—a very old book from the looks of it. The cover was of thick tooled leather. Niwa brought it out and sat down cross-legged. Lucy sat beside her, close enough to brush the soft fringe of the Lupine girl’s tunic with her hand. Pete, hesitating a moment, folded his legs underneath him. Niwa held the book on her lap and opened it reverently, revealing parchment pages with finely detailed illustrations and writing in a gothic script Lucy associated with illuminated manuscripts she’d seen in museums. Lucy squinted and puzzled over the words, but couldn’t read them.

  “This is what I want to show,” Niwa said. “This is the Codex Saarthensis—the oldest book in the territories. The sailor who came here made these pictures.”

  “Denis Saarthe drew these?” Lucy stared mesmerized as Niwa turned the pages of the centuries-old book. Fantastic pictures paraded across the yellowed parchment: giant wolves with long curving fangs, trees with faces.

  “And what language is this?” Lucy asked Niwa, creeping closer.

  “A settler language I cannot read.” The Lupine girl turned another page. In the dim lamplight the colors seemed to glow with the intensity of stained glass. “I thought maybe you could.”

  That was certainly a flattering hope. Lucy yearned to read obscure languages. A family friend studied Etruscan inscriptions on sarcophagi thousands of years old. But Lucy was too impatient for such things; as yet, her language abilities were limited to saying it was a fine day in French. She hiked her shoulders, admitting she could make no sense of it.

  And then with a sly look Niwa turned the page—something in her movement suggesting she knew that what she was about to show them would get their attention.

  Pete leaned forward, his mouth open.

  “Wait a minute.” Lucy felt dizzy. The double-face illustration showed a beautiful tree, the bottom half of the spread taken up by its roots. And among its roots were clearly, unmistakably, body parts—legs, hands, feet . . . faces.

  “How do you call things that eat meat?” Niwa asked Lucy coolly, as if the question were of purely academic interest.

  “Carnivorous,” Lucy replied automatically. At least she could give the right answer.

  “Yes.” Niwa nodded, satisfied to have the correct word for the horror they stared at in the shimmering picture. Denis Saarthe had painted the tree’s skin with an ink that made it shine like old gold. “Dreamwood is carnivorous. In older times the people may have sacrificed to His-sey-ak. I think this is what this page says. My father will not tell me. He wants me to be by his side and take on his duties, but then fathers will keep secrets.”

  Or they’ll make sure you’re NOT by their side, and still keep secrets. Lucy tugged so hard at the buttons of her flannel shirt that one popped off and plinked to the floor. Her father might have thought to make a mention of this detail in his notes. Which was worse? That he knew dreamwood was dangerous and kept it hidden? Or that he went to the Thumb in ignorance of dreamwood’s true nature?

  “It ate people,” Pete said weakly. He looked around the room as if hoping to find someone as alarmed by this as he was. “Jumping bullfrogs, it ate people.”

  “She just told us she doesn’t know if that’s what it actually says.” Fear made Lucy irritable.

  “Well, that’s sure what it looks like.” Pete stood up and paced with his hands on his hips. “Whoo boy.”

  “This is why we need offerings.” Niwa raised an eyebrow. “In case.”

  “Whoo boy,” Pete repeated. He stood in front of one of the display cabinets and looked bleakly at the treasures inside. “That’s all I’ll say.”

  “Good,” Niwa concluded, studying him as if she found him an intriguing but ultimately unsatisfactory specimen. “I do not wish you to say more.” She shut the book and carefully returned it to its tray.

  Lucy put her face in her hands. Dreamwood was wonderful, she told herself. It could never be like the tree in the picture. That was a monster. Her tree—the tree her father had gone to find—was going to heal the forests and save everyone.

  There were noises outside the passageway. They heard voices and the creak of a wicker wheelchair. With her eyes wide, Niwa hurriedly replaced the mask, shut the safe, and locked the cabinet. She darted soundlessly to her father’s desk and retrieved her bag. There was an exit on the other side of the room. She motioned for them to follow her and they had just enough time to slip out before the governor returned.

  • • •

  Niwa led Lucy and Pete through the bewildering skin passageways of the governor’s lodge. The three of them were silent, and Lucy was sunk deep in thought, the brilliant, monstrous pictures never far out of mind. Governor Arekwoy’s words echoed in her head: You should call it nightmare.

  But you always knew going to the Thumb would be dangerous, she told herself. Why does some picture in an old book make it worse? Except that it did. She wondered if the pictures made Pete nervous, too.

  She didn’t even notice that Niwa had stopped. They were in a dark, narrow corridor away from the bustling center of the lodge. “Here,” Niwa said, her hand on a gap in the leather.

  They passed through a flap in the wall and into a small room. A bed piled high with furs and blankets was in one corner; in another was a bookshelf with a handful of leather-bound volumes along with scrolls of thin bark. A bow and quiver were propped against the bed. Lucy assumed this was Niwa’s room. At another time, she would have explored it eagerly. Now she felt too demoralized to do more than stand in the center and await her next instruction.

  “You may sit.” The Lupine girl indicated the furs.

  Pete sat down warily as if expecting a trap; Lucy flopped down, not caring how she appeared. She was exhausted.

  Niwa crossed her arms over her huntress’s tunic. For the first time she appeared uncertain. Maybe she realized now how much she had shocked and unsettled them with her revelations. Her proud features softened and an expression that was almost apologetic came over her face. “I will get you some food,” she said after a moment and left them, bowing her head ever so slightly.

  “I really wish I hadn’t seen that,” Pete confessed. He looked hollowed out.

  Lucy took a deep breath and turned on her elbow among the furs. She had to know at once how Pete felt. “You’re not thinking of turning back, are you?”

  “What?” he gave her a look that said are you crazy? “Of course not. What about you?”

  Lucy was more relieved than she’d expected. She tugged her hair back into a braid and sat up. “Well, I’m going on. I’ve dealt with nature spirits before. If His-sey-ak is the spirit in the last dreamwood, he’s no differe
nt from the Maran Boulder.” She thrust her nose into the air, trying to disguise her unease with bravado.

  “Wasn’t that the rock that almost swallowed you?” Pete asked with narrow eyes.

  “No. I slipped and got stuck. I was never in any danger.”

  Pete pressed his mouth into a line. Lucy didn’t think he was convinced.

  “You can’t go putting stock in legends,” Lucy said, trying to dismiss Saarthe’s book as nothing more than folklore.

  “Who knows if it’s even true.” Pete hit his knee a couple of times as if to bang away his doubts.

  “Exactly.” Lucy leaned back on the furs.

  “And Denis Saarthe had to be crazy anyway,” Pete said. “The story they always tell about him is how he fell off his ship because he was drunk. Course he was pretty good at painting. I sure didn’t expect that much, er, detail.”

  His shoulders sank and he stared at his feet.

  “Hey,” Lucy said, peering closely at Pete’s cheek. His rosy skin was dappled with golden-brown freckles. “Is this the side where you got hit?”

  He looked startled to have her so close, but didn’t move away. Instead he brought up one brown hand and stroked his cheek wonderingly. “Yes,” he said slowly, “but now it’s like it didn’t even happen.”

  A look passed between them, both of them slightly awed. “It was that mask,” Lucy said with certainty. “It healed you.”

  “Do you think?” Pete kneaded his cheek, harder this time just to make sure. “All I did was touch it once.”

  “Absolutely.” Lucy sat back watching Pete—he was going to hurt his cheek all over again if he didn’t look out. Her fears about the pictures in the Codex Saarthensis retreated. If dreamwood could heal Pete like that, surely it wouldn’t harm them.

  At that moment, Niwa returned carrying bowls of a thin charbroiled meat, berries mashed into a paste with nuts, and bunches of leafy greens.

  “We eat,” she told them.

  Here was one order they were both happy to follow.

  Lucy didn’t realize how famished she was until she licked the last bit of berry paste from her fingers. She put down her bowl, feeling steadier now that she’d eaten, only to find Niwa eyeing her critically.

  “I must find you traveling clothes,” the Lupine girl concluded. “Our way will be difficult and what you wear is not sufficient.”

  Lucy could not agree more. Although she rarely got to indulge in them, she loved clothes, and she especially admired Niwa’s, which were beautifully made but also functional and comfortable looking. Here at least was one benefit of having been captured by Lupines.

  Niwa went to a handsome kodok wood trunk at the foot of her bed. She opened it and began a violent rummage through its contents, tossing out bits of rope, some leather pouches, and several small weapons.

  “We cannot go by the sea bridge,” Niwa said, continuing her search. “It is guarded. Doubly guarded after what you told my father. Many people fear the place, fear what lives there. They keep watch on it always.”

  Lucy did not want to encounter the raven men again. “So how do we get there?”

  “We go by boat,” Niwa said simply. This seemed reasonable to Lucy, so she was surprised when Pete dropped his bowl on the floor.

  Pete had gone very still. “No,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He turned to Lucy. “Five years ago a Russian schooner got lost in the fog and sailed too close to shore. Now there’s a place they call Bone Beach because of all the bits of those poor fellows that washed up.”

  Niwa shrugged as if to say those Russian sailors merely got what they deserved. “That was in the month you call September. The spith are hungry then.”

  “Oh, they’re always hungry,” Pete said. He got up from the furs, shaking his head. “Snakes,” he clarified for Lucy. “Sea serpents. They use the beaches for their spawning grounds. That’s why we need the railroad. You can’t do anything by sea.” He turned to Niwa. “Going by boat’s a good way to get us killed.”

  Sea serpents? Really? But then Lucy remembered Ulfric’s story about Denis Saarthe, the only one to have survived the wreck of his ship by sea serpents.

  “There are strange, backward people who live on the coast,” Niwa explained, pausing from her search of the trunk. “The Ss’til. Cheaters, thieves, gamblers. Lupines let them have their territory, but they have no gratitude and no manners. They do not like us.”

  “Can’t imagine why not,” said Pete under his breath.

  “They make a little business selling oil from the snakes. We use it for light,” Niwa continued, pretending not to have heard him. She pointed out the lamp that cast a genie’s glow over the room. “But there are no better sailors. If you can find them—and if you can persuade them to take you—they will bring you across the bay.”

  “And they can really do this?” Lucy asked, lying on her stomach with her elbows plunged deep into furs.

  “Of course,” Niwa said as if it wasn’t worth a second thought. She’d finally found what she was looking for in the trunk. “Here.” She tossed Lucy a pale chamois tunic, leggings, and soft-soled chestnut-colored moccasins. “These are mine from many seasons ago. They are yours now.”

  Her own Lupine clothes. Here was something she much preferred to hearing Pete gripe about sea serpents. Lucy took them gratefully and slipped behind a leather curtain to change. There was no mirror, but the tunic was beautiful. She loved its soft fringed edges, and she was thrilled to be out of the ill-fitting clothes she’d bought in Pentland. Niwa even gave her a deerskin pouch for her vitometer, so she could wear it around her neck like a pendant.

  Lucy emerged from behind the curtain, feeling that she’d become someone the world had to reckon with. Not a schoolgirl any longer.

  “How do I look?” she asked Pete.

  “Hm.” Pete shrugged indifferently.

  “What?” Lucy asked, running her hand over the smooth leather. “They fit perfectly.”

  “No, it’s just . . .” Pete shifted. His eyes flicked up and down. “You look like you’re trying to be someone else.”

  Lucy sagged. Just who did Pete think she was? Did he suppose she looked more like herself in boys’ clothes two sizes too big for her? “Don’t be jealous because I get to dress up and you don’t.”

  Niwa frowned as if realizing she’d been a poor hostess. “I can find something for you, too,” she told Pete.

  “No, no,” Pete said quickly. “I’m all right as I am. I like my settler clothes.” He put his hands on his chest, protecting his ratty old cotton shirt. He could suit himself, Lucy thought, still feeling strangely let down.

  • • •

  They slept little that night and left Governor Arekwoy’s lodge when it was still dark.

  Lucy tried not to feel awkward beside Niwa, who moved through the forest with a cat’s silent, slinky grace. But at least she didn’t make as much racket as Pete, who went crashing along the trail, walking as if he might still be half asleep.

  It wasn’t until they had crossed the wolf bridge over the river that Lucy began to relax.

  They stopped briefly for lunch: smoked salmon Niwa had brought with her from her father’s lodge. But it was late in the day when they reached a small cup-shaped grove, protected on several sides by steep rock faces, off which plunged hundreds of waterfalls as delicate as lace.

  A secretive mist veiled the trees, giants even by the standards of Saarthe.

  The grove was still and quiet, yet not at all sleepy. There was something intensely alive about the place. Lucy looked up into the dizzying heights.

  “This is Gunasho shaleh,” Niwa said, coming to stand next to her. “The grove of the wolf woman.”

  So this was where Niwa had been coming from the day they’d met on the train. “It’s even more beautiful than I imagined,” Lucy said.

  “Yes, and this is where I wo
uld stay,” Niwa said with a sigh. The wind stirred her black hair and made the charms woven into it shine like bright jewels. She pointed to a rock with a large crooked crack in it. “In our stories this is where Gunasho the wolf woman first emerged into this world. But I am afraid the red sickness is here, even in this sacred place.”

  Lucy would not have noticed it if Niwa hadn’t mentioned it, but there was a faint smell of decay in the air: the rotten scent of Rust.

  “They will cut this place away with all the rest,” Niwa said. Her beautiful face looked older as she turned to face the towering kodoks.

  Lucy thought of her first glimpse of Niwa: She’d been so proud and wild, with her bow and arrows, her hunter’s tunic, and her dislike for school. If a place could ever be a part of a person, the forest was part of Niwa.

  “I thought the Lupines didn’t have Rust,” Pete admitted. His mouth gave a sideways lurch of embarrassment. “Sorry.”

  Niwa faced Pete. The fierceness in her eyes softened. “We are suffering just like you. I’ve told my father before we should ask His-sey-ak for help,” she continued in her raspy Lupine voice. “His-sey-ak is the reason we survived the settler diseases while the other peoples of the coast sickened and died. The golden wood healed us. We traded his wood with other nations and became rich. He gave us power so our warriors turned into wolves that no bullets could hit. Always he has protected us. So now when the red sickness is in our forests, His-sey-ak will stop it.”

  Pete had been listening with an uncomfortable expression on his face. But at that moment he looked up. “Is that a raven?”

  A black bird flew across the sky.

  Please keep flying, Lucy thought. The three of them were absolutely still, waiting for it to pass.

  And then it turned around, heading back for them.

  Silently they watched it come closer.

  When it was overhead, Niwa grimaced and let out a strange, croaking cry. The bird circled around, cawing to her in reply. And then it flew east, hurrying back to its master.