“Lucy,” he said, dropping his hands to his sides. “What’s wrong?”
Lucy hugged her forearm where the cut she’d made stung terribly. But why had he even been in the dream? Why had he sat on the root throne? Why had he left her? Tears welled in her eyes. She’d been through so much to get here and she thought she would be so happy—and she was—but she was crying, too.
“You weren’t going to send for me,” she blurted out, feeling childish. And yet, she was a child, she was his child. Her place was with him. Niwa’s father seemed to understand that. Why didn’t he?
What was wrong with the way they were before? She remembered the train tickets and he invented the instruments. They cleared ghosts together. They were a team. But then somehow they had diverged. She thought of the strange transformations they’d both narrowly escaped—she’d rescued her father from becoming part of a tree. She’d had to rescue herself from turning into a Miss Bentley’s girl.
“Who told you that?” he asked, bending down to search her face.
“Angus Murrain.”
“Did he tell you why?”
She shook her head: Her conversation with Angus was still too painful to talk about. But then she burst out, “He said you worried it would ruin my reputation. That I was better off without you as a father!”
She could feel her cheeks grow hot, and she dragged the heel of her hand across her eyes. All the hurt she’d carried until this moment came to the surface and now was as painful as a sunburn.
William Darrington sighed like someone facing a moment he’d long feared. “Of course that’s not true,” he said in a soft, sorrowful voice. “Although . . .” He readjusted his glasses. “Sometimes I have wondered if I was giving you the life you deserved.”
“So I deserved being dumped at a school where the girls all made fun of me, and the teachers punished me, and I hated it?” Lucy’s eyes were suddenly full and she felt the corners of her mouth sink.
She could tell she’d hurt him. She’d meant to.
“Lucy,” he said. He pushed the ragged sleeves of his sweater up his arm—His-sey-ak’s marks were all over him. Finally, Lucy thought, it was visible for everyone to see that spirits had sunk their claws into him and laid their claim.
“Lucy,” he said with a sigh, “I’ve made a mess of things. I’m never going to be celebrated for the work I do. I’ll never provide the type of life you should have. And as ghosts become scarcer, spirit work becomes more dangerous. I worried that I was putting you in harm’s way by letting you come along with me. What sort of father puts his child in danger?”
Lucy said nothing, but stared stonily at the ground.
Her father ran a hand through his straw-colored hair and tried again.
“But . . . But now I know I was wrong,” he said.
She looked up, hearing these unfamiliar words from him.
“Miss Bentley’s isn’t the right place for you. I should have seen that.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’ll give up spirit hunting. I can take up a trade. I do have some aptitude with electricity, after all. Perhaps I can find work at a power plant or transmission station. We’ll live a normal life, stay in one place. You can tell people your father is an electrical engineer. That’s a booming field. Electricity is the future. What do you say?” He held out his hand to her. “Onward?”
Lucy’s throat was tight as she considered what her father was offering: a normal life, electricity, an end to being the “ghost girl.” But then she looked at the dreamwood and saw its silver-dollar leaves flashing in the breeze, the shimmering dragonflies buzzing by, even its pale, wormlike roots. And she took a deep breath.
“I think there must be more like him,” she said, raising her eyes to the towering dreamwood. “Maybe other trees or boulders. Maybe rivers or caves. But they’re out there,” she said. “And they’ve got so much power, if they’re hurt or disturbed, who knows what harm they might do.”
She raised her forearm to look at the place where she’d sliced the knife into her skin. It no longer hurt much, but she supposed it would leave a scar. “I don’t think we should stop studying them.”
Her father’s eyes crinkled as he embraced her.
“You’re a remarkable girl, Lucy.”
That’s what she always liked to hear.
They were walking hand in hand back toward the ghost wall. In front of them part of it was already dissipating, making a door for them to walk through.
“Speaking of remarkable,” her father said, “how did you get through the wall?”
Lucy was surprised he had to ask. “I had my sweeper, of course.”
The brass egg lay in the grass where it had fallen. Lucy picked it up, but nothing she did could make it move again.
“I’m afraid it’s short-circuited,” her father said, kneeling down to examine it. Her heart swelled with happiness to see him in such a familiar posture—frowning behind his glasses as he turned the egg over to see what was wrong with it.
He put it down and gave her a look that he often used when he suspected there was more to the story than what she’d told. “But I’m surprised this had the power to bring you through the fog. I barely made it myself, and I had a much more powerful sweeping engine. It’s ruined as well.”
“It did break down,” she admitted. She felt bad for her poor egg, and a touch maudlin; after all, she had had it since childhood. “But Pete gave me a ghost stone.” She produced the obsidian nugget.
“Let me see that.” Her father drew back, scrutinizing it over the edge of his glasses.
“You always said the folkways were too dangerous.” Lucy sidled close to him. “But this saved my life.”
“I guess I was wrong,” her father said wryly. He gave the stone a look of grudging respect as he handed it back to her. “What I’ve observed with protection stones is that your intentions matter when you use them. Your own energy interacts with them in ways that can be unpredictable. They’re not mechanized like a sweeper. So, I always think my intentions are good . . . but I thought my intentions were good with Miss Bentley’s and look how that turned out. No, obsidian is too unreliable for me. But I’m glad it served you. Very glad indeed. I need to thank Pete.” He looked around. “I thought he came with you. Where is he?”
Lucy blinked in surprise. “He did come. But how did you know?”
William Darrington sat back on his heels. “Once the roots attached to me, I was part of His-sey-ak. At first it was like being in a wonderful dream. But then I could feel your presence here, and I was terribly worried about you.” He pushed his glasses up and thought. “I had visions of you and a boy traveling through the forest, and I tried so hard to communicate with you. Sometimes I felt I was very close. One time I thought you touched me. Only I wasn’t me—I was in a different body.” He threw his hands down by his sides in frustration. “I can’t really explain.”
But to Lucy it was clear. “You were the wolf,” she exclaimed. Now she knew why she had felt no fear from it, why she had followed it so unquestioningly. “After Silas and Angus stole my vitometer we were lost. But this wolf appeared—oh, Papa, you were beautiful, but very frightening. Pete said we shouldn’t trust you, but I knew—”
“Wait a minute,” he said, “Angus Murrain stole your vitometer? What on earth was he doing here?”
“Oh, I have so much to tell you,” she said happily.
But at that moment there was a loud rumble and the earth shook violently under their feet. Lucy nearly fell over and clung to her father until the rocking stopped. It had lasted only a few seconds, yet it was terrifying.
“What’s happening?” Lucy asked.
“Earthquake,” her father said warily. “I think we should take it as a sign to leave.”
They had started to make their way through the meadow when a thought occurred to her.
“Wait a minute,” she told her father. Lucy grab
bed her ghost sweeper and ran back toward the dreamwood. Carefully she placed it in one of the root grottoes and beside it she put her knife. She wished she had more to leave as an offering, but this would have to do.
The mist made way before them as they walked out of the meadow and closed up behind them again, hiding the dreamwood from view.
They came out near the place where she’d begged Pete to leave. And even though not long ago, it had been her fervent wish he’d taken her advice and left, now Lucy held out a secret hope that Pete was waiting for them. They began to walk north, toward the gap in the cliff side where they could climb down to the beach.
They were nearly there when a shadow sliced across the ground.
Lucy looked up, shading her eyes against the sun to see a giant winged shape wheeling out of the sky.
It was a thunderbird. And in its beak it carried a golden branch.
The creature landed in front of them. The great wings were cumbersome on the ground; folded, they gave the thing the look of a dinosaur having a rather awkward adolescence. Reptilian eyes studied them. The leathery red crest upon its head gleamed like a crown in the sun.
With a squork it dropped the branch on the ground in front of her.
Lucy swallowed. The wood gleamed like gold, the bark as smooth as skin. For a moment she simply stared at it.
“Go on, Lucy, take it,” her father said quietly. “It’s a gift.”
She picked up the dreamwood branch in wonder, feeling again the strength and hope that had marked her first encounter with the golden wood in Ulfric’s cottage.
The thunderbird nodded at her—apparently it had discharged its mission—and took to the air, climbing with great thrusts of its powerful wings.
The ground rocked again.
“We really must go,” her father said, running a hand almost apologetically through his straw-colored hair.
They hurried to the cliff side and stumbled down a steep slope to a narrow beach beset by waves. Pete was crouched on a rocky promontory, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. He still had not lit the flare, and Lucy could see that he wasn’t going to anytime soon. He was waiting. Silly tears welled up as she thought of Pete waiting for her, believing that she would come back.
“Pete!” she cried. “What are you doing? Hurry up. Get that flare lit.”
“Lucy!” He hobbled to his feet, grinning wildly. “Mr. Darrington.” He nearly lost his balance in his enthusiasm and winced as he came down on his sprained ankle. “You made it.”
“We did,” her father said as if he, too, couldn’t quite believe it. “But now I think we must depart posthaste.”
“Why? What’s happening?” Pete asked. “I’ve felt the quakes.”
They’d reached him by now and Lucy rushed to his side. He put his arm around Lucy’s shoulders. Well, she supposed he needed help standing up, but she leaned close to him anyway.
William Darrington looked up the cliff, back the way they’d come. “I still see a little into his mind,” he said thoughtfully. “He’s leaving.”
“Leaving? To go where?” Lucy asked.
Her father shook his head. “I don’t know. But I feel he is done with humankind, at least for a while. Now that new dreamwood is growing, I think he will go someplace where he won’t be found again.”
They were silent for a moment, imagining Saarthe without its Thumb. Then her father clapped his hands and said, “Now let’s get that flare lit.”
Pete, for he was best at all things to do with fire, got it blazing quickly. The torch burned with a white hot light that was blinding even in the daylight. Her father took it from him and climbed halfway up the cliff, waving it in the direction of the mainland. With any luck one of the Ss’til boatmen would see it.
And yet Lucy felt it was an awfully slim chance. She tried not to think about what would happen to them if they could not get off the Thumb. All three of them were so weak, and Pete could hardly walk. She sat next to Pete and, as if he knew all her anxieties, he reached out his hand. They sat like that, hands entwined, silent, until sometime later when Pete craned his neck and got to his knees.
“Boat!” he cried. “A boat’s coming.”
There was a black speck on the water, driving steadily toward them.
They watched its approach together. As it got closer they could see a familiar boatman. It was Obwe, dressed in his snakeskin cerements and bones, and such a welcome sight her heart swelled as if he were an old friend.
If Obwe was surprised to see them again it was a shock he revealed only in the raising of one eyebrow. Lucy could see him try not to stare at the dreamwood branch she held.
“You need passage across the bay?” he asked. A small avalanche of rocks fell down and the waves surged dangerously.
“Yes,” William Darrington said, clasping Lucy and Pete about the shoulders protectively. “We do indeed. You’ve come in the nick of time, my friend.”
Another quake followed on his words like an exclamation point.
They scrambled into the boat as the rocks from the cliff side above them shook and fell. Obwe pushed them into the water and began to row. The waves grew stronger, wilder as the Thumb’s shaking churned up the bay.
It was terrifying work getting them away from the Thumb. The sea was the worst Lucy had ever seen, and soon she was concentrating with all her might on not being sick or getting washed over the railing. Even the serpents seemed to have fled from His-sey-ak. But at last Obwe found a snake, harnessed it quickly, and then they were off, flying along the water, parallel to the Thumb, only this time heading back to shore.
Lucy watched its gray-green bulk go by with a strange lump in her throat. She felt as if she were watching a battleship go past—something mighty and terrible, a thing to fear and dread. At the same time she felt strangely proud of it, as if some part of it were hers, or she belonged to it.
When they were nearly to shore they felt one last quake. The water tipped up and then plunged them down again, so wildly her stomach flew weightlessly inside her. Lucy grasped the railing. If I’m sick, she thought, please don’t let it be all over Pete.
“Look! The sea bridge is broken,” Obwe said, his wonder audible even over the waves’ roar.
The final tether holding His-sey-ak to the mainland had snapped. The water surged, pushing the Thumb out to sea.
Obwe released the snake from its harness and began to row. In a few minutes they would be on land.
“There goes one of the world’s great nature spirits,” her father said, staring after the Thumb. “I don’t know if we shall ever see his like again.”
She looked over at Pete, the wind yanking at his chestnut hair; he smiled at her briefly. A lump settled into Lucy’s throat and she thought about how far they had come together.
Obwe’s boat scraped against the sand and she felt the shock of being on solid ground again.
Then Pete was there, helping her stand up in the unsteady boat. During their journey, the dreamwood seemed to have helped his ankle, for he jumped out without any apparent pain.
“Come on, Lucy,” he said, “we’re back.”
So why would a toymaker live way out in the woods?” Pete asked. “He can’t get any business if no one can find him.”
They were tired and sweaty from walking—like the Thumb all over again, Lucy thought—but they still couldn’t find Ulfric’s cottage. It was not for lack of trying. In the few weeks that they’d been back, she and Pete had gone into the forest several times to try to find the path she’d taken the day she had run away from the Knightlys’ and ended up at the toymaker’s.
“He did say he was retired.” Lucy rubbed the back of her neck wearily. As she did whenever she and Pete went into the woods now, she wore the tunic and leggings Niwa had given her. For although they’d been back a couple times to visit Niwa in her father’s lodge, Lucy had ne
glected to mention the clothes she had left there.
“I’ll say. He’s retired so much he doesn’t exist.” Pete had given up looking for different paths and was now throwing sticks into the ferns.
Lucy was terribly disappointed. She’d wanted so much to find Ulfric and tell him that she’d been to the Thumb and returned. And she wanted to make a gift of dreamwood to him, for she would always remember his marvelous tea. Without it she doubted she would have had the courage to do any of what she had done.
Perhaps Ulfric was someone who could be found only when he was needed, she thought. And at the moment, Lucy had surprisingly little need of anything.
Her father was healthy and strong and newly energized after his ordeal on the Thumb. After a few days of Anya’s cooking, William Darrington had regained most of the strength he’d lost in His-sey-ak’s forest. He’d charmed and fascinated the Knightlys with stories of his adventures, to the point where Lucy heard Dot offering to let him store his papers with them however long he wanted. He’d introduced Gordon to contacts at the Climbing Rose who could help the lawyer untangle Angus Murrain’s estate; for now that the timber baron had been lost on Devil’s Thumb there was the question of who would manage the sawmill and who should be contacted about the sale of his properties. As he’d told Lucy, Angus was an orphan. Gordon searched, but he could find no relatives, even distant ones; Lucy even came to feel sorry for him.
Rust was disappearing from the forests. Niwa, who’d gone back to her father’s lodge and argued that they should wait before cutting their forests, was hailed as a visionary leader; she had a seat on the Lupines’ council now. And though when Lucy and Pete visited her she complained of paperwork, Lucy thought her friend seemed . . . well, content. Still, Niwa would always be happiest in the woods. She brought Lucy and Pete back to the grove of the wolf woman to see for themselves that the trees were regaining health. Lucy had been startled when a raven appeared overhead, but then watched in amazement as Niwa called it down. The raven men were hers now. And the bird was simply reporting to her on what it had seen in the forest that day: in this case nothing more exciting than two bull elk fighting near the wolf bridge.
Dreamwood Page 25
