The Tree of Story

by Thomas Wharton

  Eventually Will realized that Rowen was making a path for them to follow. She was bending and shaping this strange world around her, telling it the way she had told the raincabinet into concealing itself.

  The woods melted away into a wide, open plain of grass, and then the plain buckled and heaved itself into rocky hills, and still they hurried on at an impossible pace. From time to time dim shapes of people would loom up out of the shifting shadows and swiftly melt away again. Some of them seemed to notice Will’s presence: they raised their hands as if to hail him, speak to him, but he avoided meeting their gazes and kept moving, not daring to lose sight of Rowen. And like everything else in the Weaving the figures quickly melted and changed, becoming a stone or a tree or simply a trick of light and shadow.

  Then it happened. A house swam up out of the shifting murk. A house tucked in among sleepy-looking trees, with a wooden front porch that needed painting, a peaked green-tiled roof and warm lights in the windows.

  It was the house Will had grown up in.

  He stopped in surprise. He took his eyes off Rowen and Shade only for a moment, but it was enough. When he turned to them again, they were gone.

  Now he was standing in front of his old house, on the street of his childhood. He had grown up here. He had lived here until the day his mother died and then his childhood had ended.

  It was all so real. The world was no longer changing around him. The familiar trees, fences, telephone poles—everything was where it belonged and just as he remembered it. The front walk was solid under his feet. It seemed he really had left the Weaving. He had come home.

  Yet it was the middle of the day and the street was deserted. That was strange. Old Mrs. Morrison wasn’t sitting on the rocker on her front porch. No one was mowing the lawn or washing the car. There were no kids riding their bikes or skateboarding, and there should have been because it was summer. Unless it wasn’t summer here. Time passed differently in the Perilous Realm. He knew that. Maybe he had come home on a day when everyone was at work or at school. Or had he come home at all?

  Will gazed around at the silent street and tried to think. If he had really left the Weaving, he had to get back. He had to find Rowen and Shade again. He couldn’t leave them. But if he was still in the Weaving, what then? Rowen had told him the Weaving was like the world of one’s dreams. If he was in a dream now, could he wake himself up?

  Not knowing what else to do, he climbed the creaking steps of the porch. The front door was open. He went in.

  The house was dark inside and cool.

  “Dad?” he called. “Jess?”

  There was no answer. No one was in the front room.

  He walked down the hallway to the kitchen at the back and was reaching for the light switch when he saw a shadow move on the wall beside him. He whirled with a cry.

  Someone was standing in the dark hall. Someone in a bulky hooded coat. In the dim light Will couldn’t make out a face in the shadows under the hood.

  “Don’t move,” said a man’s voice that was out of breath and strained. Something about the voice was familiar, too, though Will could not place it. All he knew for certain was that this man had been running, hiding from something or someone.

  “I live here,” Will said.

  “Take a step backward,” the man said. “Just one.”

  Will hesitated, then did as he was told. He took a step and his face came out from the shadows into the light from the kitchen window.

  The man gave a grunt as if surprised by what he saw. “It really is you,” he said. “The threads are all tangled. It’s happened before, the stories getting mixed up like this. But I’ve never seen you. You’re still at the beginning and me …”

  He was talking to himself, Will realized.

  The man shook his head slowly. “No telling how long it will last,” he murmured. And then Will felt rather than saw the man’s eyes fix on him. “No time,” he said. “You have to listen. You have to listen to me. Don’t make the same mistake I made.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Will said in as calm a voice as he could manage. The stranger sounded desperate, almost crazed. His unexpected, menacing presence here in Will’s own childhood home already felt like an act of violence, and he braced himself for whatever might follow.

  The man seemed about to say more, then he lifted his head as though listening for something. Will’s eyes had begun to adjust to the dim light and he could make out more of the stranger’s face. He saw a sharp cheekbone, a thin fringe of beard and two sunken, haunted eyes. It was the face of a young man, but one who had lived through great terror or hardship. The eyes were familiar, too, like the voice. Will was sure he had met this young man somewhere or had seen him before, though he could not think when or where.

  Then he heard whatever it was the stranger had heard: a distant roar and rumble, punctuated by metallic groans. Like the noise of great machinery at work somewhere not far off.

  “They’re getting closer,” the young man said. “It won’t be long now. Listen to me. Where you’re going, you must stay with her. No matter what. Do you hear me?”

  Will said nothing. This stranger, whoever he was, seemed to know him, and knew about Rowen. But Will wasn’t going to give anything away. This could be a shape-changing creature, like one of those fetches, sent here to trick him.

  “Do you hear me?” the young man repeated, his voice rising to a shout. “Don’t play stupid. You understand who I’m talking about. Stay with her. Don’t leave her, no matter what.”

  “Who are you?” Will demanded, with a terrifying awareness that he already had the answer.

  “I’m not anyone. Not anymore,” the young man said. “There are no names left. Almost everything’s been swallowed up. First the Perilous Realm and then our world, too. No matter where I ran it was the same. I didn’t expect to find this place still here. But wait … we’re not really here, are we? No. I remember now. You followed her into the raincabinet and then you got lost and came here. Yes, now I see. That’s where we are. This is the Weaving. The end can meet the beginning here. I can warn you. The story doesn’t have to end the same way. It can be changed. You can change it.”

  The distant rumbling was louder now. The metallic groans rose to a piercing shriek before falling away again.

  “They’re so close,” the young man said. “Listen to me. She still has the thread, right? The ball of golden thread her grandmother gave her.”

  Will hesitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do. And she has it. You of all people can’t lie to me. She must use the thread on the wolf. Do you understand?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She has to bind the wolf with the thread. That’s what it’s for. The wolf will agree to be bound, but she won’t want to go through with it. She’ll give in to her love for him. You must convince her. The wolf must be bound, or all is lost.”

  Will shook his head. “You’re talking about Shade,” he said angrily. “No. I couldn’t do that to him. I won’t.”

  “He’s already started to change, hasn’t he? Of course he has. I remember now. It happened at Corr Madoc’s fortress. They gave him the fever iron. If she waits too long, he won’t submit to either of you. He’ll turn against you. She’s seen it, and you know it’s true.”

  Will said nothing.

  “We had no choice,” the young man went on, his voice choked with rage and despair. “I didn’t want to harm my friend, but he would have killed us. We had to do it. We had to bind him.”

  From the street came a bang, followed immediately by a high-pitched crackling whine. The young man turned and ran to the front door but did not open it. Will followed. Beside the door was a small window draped with a thin lace curtain. The young man stood at the window and drew the curtain aside slightly. Will could make out little from where he stood, but the world outside had gone utterly dark save for a cold, white light that seemed to be falling out of the sky. The gho
stly shadows of the lace curtain slid across the young man’s face.

  A flare, Will realized. A search light.

  “She’s found me,” the young man said, and his voice had gone hollow and utterly hopeless. “She’s coming.”

  “Who’s coming?” Will asked desperately.

  The young man didn’t answer. The flare must have landed somewhere nearby. Its stark white light had stopped moving. And now Will noticed that the walls and the floor of the house were shaking. The glass hummed in the window frames and dust drifted down from the ceiling.

  “It’s over,” the young man said. He turned, and in the cold light Will saw his haggard face clearly for the first time.

  “You must get back to where you came from,” the young man said. “Find her. Get back to her—stay with her. Don’t leave her … like I did. I failed her, and because of me, she failed. It’s too late now for me to change it, but not for you.”

  Will hesitated.

  “Go,” the young man shouted at him. “Run!”

  Will stumbled back. The walls of the house were cracking and splitting, the floorboards buckling under him. He turned and ran down the hall to the kitchen, burst through the back door and down the crumbling steps. This was the way he had gone the first time he returned to the Perilous Realm. Maybe it was the right way to go now. He couldn’t tell, but the street, the other houses, had vanished. He was surrounded once more by a rushing blur of vague, rippling shapes and shadows. There was a roaring in his ears, as if he had plunged under the surface of a swift, churning river. He didn’t know if it was the sound of the Weaving or the unseen machines behind him.

  Then he heard a voice calling his name.

  Rowen.

  He shouted back, and out of the rush of shadows she appeared. Solid and real. She took his hand, gripped it.

  “I found you,” she said through her tears. “I found you.”

  The next thing he knew he was blinking up into bright sunlight.

  Rowen’s hand was still gripping his. Shade stood nearby. No one spoke. It was as if they had been woken suddenly from a dream and were still too dazed to speak.

  They were standing on a grassy slope that ran down to an expanse of water rimmed with dark forested hills. The water’s surface gleamed like gold in the sunlight. Above the hills the immense dome of the sky was a brilliant azure, across which a few wispy white clouds drifted. Will could hear the wind sighing in the grass and waves lapping softly on the shore.

  “Are you all right, Will Lightfoot?”

  It was Shade speaking to him. Will nodded, still struggling to clear his head.

  “And you?”

  “I am better,” the wolf said, “now that we have left that place. It was … strange. I saw things that made no sense to me.”

  “Have we really left the Weaving?”

  “We have,” Rowen said. “We’re back in the Realm.”

  “I am sorry I lost sight of you, Will Lightfoot,” Shade said. “Where did you go?”

  Will didn’t answer right away. He saw with anguish that the wolf’s condition appeared worse than before they had gone into the Weaving. Shade was outwardly calm, as always, but Will could see in the wolf’s eyes that he was suffering, and struggling to conceal it.

  The young man’s feverish warning that Shade must be bound came back to Will and he felt sick inside. He couldn’t deny who that young man had been. Or would become. The thought terrified him, even as he struggled to understand how the two of them could possibly have met.

  “I was back home,” he said. “In the Untold.”

  He couldn’t share with Rowen or Shade what he’d seen and heard. Not yet. It had happened in the Weaving, after all. Rowen had said you could get trapped there by things that weren’t real. Maybe what he’d seen was something like a bad dream. Not the future, not the truth of what was going to happen. Only a dream. And maybe that’s what the Dreamwalker’s vision of Rowen had been, too. Only a dream. Something that could happen, not something that would happen. He hadn’t told Rowen about that yet, either.

  “I saw a house,” Will said at last. “The house I grew up in. I wasn’t sure if it was real or not. I looked away just for a moment, and when I looked back, you were gone. Both of you. It’s exactly what you told me not to do, Rowen. I’m sorry.”

  She shook her head, and he was troubled to see how pale and exhausted she appeared.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It’s the Weaving. That’s what makes it so dangerous. I was the one who should’ve been more careful. But we’re safe here—for now.”

  “Where is here?”

  “I think this is the place where Grandfather and I left the Shee, the Fair Folk, on our way home to Fable. It was south of the Forest of Eldark. There was a lake there, like this one. With hills like those on the far side. When we—”

  To Will’s alarm Rowen dropped the Loremaster’s staff and staggered as if about to fall. He caught her and eased her to the ground, where she sat with her head sagging forward. Shade joined Will at her side.

  “What’s the matter?” Will said.

  “I’m just tired,” Rowen said, looking up at them with a weak attempt at a smile. “I’ll be fine. I didn’t think going into the Weaving again would be so hard. I thought I could find the thread of the Fair Folk easily, but there were so many stories, so many threads. I couldn’t shut them out. It’s as if every time I go into the Weaving there’s more of it—or less of me. I tried, but I couldn’t keep the three of us together and search for the Fair Folk at the same time.”

  Will brought out his water flask, uncorked it and handed it to her. She took a drink and wiped her mouth.

  “I had it, just for a moment,” she said. “I could see the path, the way we had to go.” Her voice was trembling. “But then I saw …”

  The expression in her eyes now was one of awe and terror.

  “Who did you see?” he asked.

  “The Fair Folk,” Rowen said. “The Tain Shee. But they had changed, Will. They didn’t look the way they did when we first met them, after Moth died.”

  With a pang Will remembered the Shee archer. He had saved Will and Rowen from Lotan, the terrible Angel of Malabron, and died destroying him.

  “I knew it was them, though,” Rowen went on. “I think I was seeing them as they really are. They were on horseback and they were wearing bright armour and carrying long swords. And their faces, Will. They looked the way Moth did when he fought the Angel. Their faces were pale, but their eyes were like fire.”

  “Where did you see them?” Will asked. “Are they near here?”

  “No, it was somewhere else. Not the Shadow Realm, but …” She shook her head wearily. “I don’t know where it was. They were riding over a place of broken stones. There were buildings, but they were strange to me, and there were things I didn’t recognize. Creatures I’ve never seen before. The Shee were riding into this darkness that the creatures were coming out of, a darkness that was … screaming. Then I couldn’t see them anymore. They were gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I was frightened and I looked away. Then there were too many threads between us and I couldn’t find them again.”

  Rowen made as if to climb to her feet, and Will helped her up. She brushed the hair from her eyes and gazed out over the lake.

  “The Weaving is all torn and tangled now. So much of it is already dark. So much has been swallowed up. I tried to find the Shee again, but I went too far. Too far, too fast, and I left you and Shade behind. It wasn’t you who lost me—it was me who nearly got us all lost. After I found you and Shade again I took us out of the Weaving while I still could. I brought us here, to the last place I spoke to the Lady of the Shee. And now we’re here and the Fair Folk are not.”

  She was distraught, shaking.

  “You did what was right,” Will said firmly. “It’s better to be here than lost in there.” He gestured vaguely behind him and then realized he had no i
dea where the Weaving was. There was no doorway, as there had been in the toyshop. “You just need to rest for a while,” he went on. “Once you’re feeling stronger we can go back into the Weaving and search again.”

  Rowen looked at him with tears in her eyes.

  “You don’t understand,” she said desperately. “We can’t get back into the Weaving from here. I don’t know how. The only way in I know about is the raincabinet in the toyshop. Maybe there isn’t another doorway. And Fable is miles from here, on the other side of the forest. If we can’t go through the Weaving, it’ll take us days to walk there. Don’t you see? I’ve failed. I’ll never find Grandfather now, and Fable has no loremaster to protect it. I’ve failed everyone.” She buried her face in her hands.

  Will put a hand on her shoulder. Her despair had shaken his own resolve and he didn’t know how to comfort her.

  After some time Rowen stirred. She slipped a hand into her cloak pocket, pulled out a tiny golden ball and held it in her palm. It was the golden thread that Rowen’s grandmother had spun for her in the Weaving and given to her before they parted.

  Will glanced furtively at the wolf, then back at Rowen. She was gazing at the ball of thread.

  “Grandmother said it was the strongest thread there is,” she murmured. “She said I could weave with it, and what I wove could never be unwoven. But she didn’t say what or how.”

  Will leaned closer, his own eyes caught and held by the tiny ball’s golden shimmer. The thread was so fine that one could easily mistake its tight coil for a solid sphere of gold. How could something this frail and insubstantial, almost not there at all, bind a powerful creature like Shade?

  Will asked quietly, “Are you going to use it now?”

  “I wonder …” Rowen said hesitantly. “Maybe I was supposed to use it if we got lost. There’s an old story about that. Grandfather told it to me once. A story about someone using a golden thread to find the way out of a labyrinth.”

  “I’ve heard that story, too,” Will said.