The Tree of Story

by Thomas Wharton

  “Maybe if I just let the thread out, it will unwind and lead us back to where Grandmother is. Or back to Fable.”

  “Do you think that’ll work?” Will said.

  Rowen didn’t answer right away. Finally she looked up at Will and shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think that’s what it’s meant for—as a way to go back. Grandmother didn’t want me to search for Grandfather. She wanted me to stay in Fable and defend it. I think that’s what the thread is for—to help Fable in some way. I need to save it for that. But we have to find Grandfather first, before we go back home. If we can find the way back.”

  Rowen gazed at the golden ball a moment longer, then slipped it back into her cloak and wrapped her arms around herself as if cold, even though it was warm under the bright sun.

  “I’m lost, Will,” she said in a hollow voice. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Will turned in a circle, searching the hills although he had no idea what he was looking for. Watching Rowen with the thread, he had made up his mind. They would go on and he would say nothing about what he’d seen and heard in the Weaving. For all he knew his encounter there had been only an illusion. He would wait until he had more proof that binding Shade was the right thing to do. Or until he had no other choice.

  One thing was certain: he wasn’t ready to give up yet. He had been warned not to leave Rowen, no matter what. That much he was determined on.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said at last, though he hardly believed it himself. “Do you remember what you told me? You said you needed me to come with you, to find a way into the Shadow Realm. You said it had to be. So you did that much right. And I’m still here.”

  Rowen faced him. “You’re right,” she said, trying to smile. “I saw you in the story. I saw you coming with me.”

  “So maybe it’s up to me now,” he said. He had been half joking before, in the hope of cheering her up, but he was serious now. “Maybe that’s why you saw me in the story. Because I have to find the way from now on. Who knows, there could be a knot-path around here, one that the Fair Folk took to wherever it is they went. Did the Lady of the Shee say anything to you about that before they left?”

  “All she told me was that they were going to meet their enemy and either defeat him or perish. She didn’t say where they were going.”

  “Well, what about this place, then? I mean, why did they bring you here instead of somewhere else? Maybe they had a reason.”

  “I don’t know. The Lady of the Shee talked about the hill where they met the Stewards at midsummer, under the great Tree of Story. The Lady said few such places like that were left in the Realm, places where time stops, but this was one of them. That’s all I remember.”

  Will turned slowly in a circle. At the top of the grassy slope they were standing on rose a thicket of small flowering trees. The other way, the slope fell gently to the lakeshore and the shimmering water.

  “I’m going to have a look around,” he said. “Maybe I can find something that will help us. Shade, stay with Rowen, please.”

  “We should all stay together, Will Lightfoot,” the wolf said.

  Will glanced at Rowen, who still appeared as though she might drop again from exhaustion at any moment.

  “I won’t go far,” he said. “Just wait here.”

  He set off down the grassy slope to the lake. At the bottom he passed the moss-cloaked remains of a low wall. Beyond a gap in the wall was a flight of worn stone steps, half sunk in the earth, that led him down to the shore, where a narrow stone pier jutted out a short distance into the water. The Shee must have been coming here for a very long time, he thought. The stonework seemed very old, but at the same time he had the strange feeling that none of this—the mossy wall or the sunken stones or even the lake itself—had existed more than a few moments before he set foot here. He remembered Moth and his sister, Morrigan, how they both looked so young and so ancient at the same time.

  Will paused, listening to the water lapping softly against the stone, then stepped onto the pier and walked slowly to the end. The pier was low in the water, or had sunk over the years like the wall and the steps. If the waves rose just a little, he thought, they would wash over the top of the stone. Will stopped at the edge and stood looking out across the lake, shielding his eyes against the brilliant dazzle of sunlight on the water. He closed his eyes and listened to the rush of the wind. The lonely sound reminded him how far they were from where they were supposed to be, but he listened to it as if this wind had travelled a vast distance with a message meant only for him. He listened, but if the wind had anything to tell him, he could not understand it.

  Then he realized something was missing. There was no sound of water.

  7

  HE OPENED HIS EYES.

  The surface of the lake had gone completely still. No waves lapped against the pier. The perfectly calm, still water reflected the distant hills and the blue sky like a mirror.

  With a start Will thought of the shard of silver glass that the Lady of the Shee had given him to help him find the way home. He took the shard out of his pocket and held it up, peered into it. The piece he carried was only half of the shard. Rowen had the other half, because Will had broken the shard in two before he left her to search for Shade. The Lady had told him the shard would protect him from harm, and he had wanted to keep Rowen safe, too.

  Will searched for his reflection in the shard, but no matter which way he tilted or turned it, the silvered glass showed him nothing except blue sky and wisps of cloud. This had happened the first time he had peered into the shard. Not seeing his own reflection had startled him into an understanding of how his pathfinding gift worked: he had to stop trying to make it work. He had to get out of his own way and the path would be clear. But what did it mean that his reflection was missing now? He neither saw nor sensed any path before him. Only the water, and he could not walk on that. Like the sound of the wind, the empty sky in the shard was a message he could not read. The glass in his hand and the water at his feet were the same.

  They were the same.

  He turned and shouted to Rowen and Shade. They came hurrying down the slope and joined him at the end of the pier. He gestured to the lake’s surface without speaking. Rowen leaned over the edge and looked down.

  “What’s happened to the lake?” she asked. “The water’s not moving.”

  “That’s because it’s not water anymore. Or maybe it never was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was a reason the Fair Folk brought you here,” Will said eagerly. “I think the Lady of the Shee wanted you to learn about this place, so that if you were looking for her people you would come back here. She must have foreseen that we would be searching for a way into the Shadow Realm.”

  “I don’t understand. Why here? How can this place help us find them?”

  “This lake—it’s the mirror.”

  “The mirror?”

  “The Mirror of Truth, the one that was shattered in the first war with the Night King. Remember what the Lady told us? Over the ages her people have been gathering the pieces of the mirror together again. This is where they kept them. I’m sure of it. When Moth destroyed the Angel, they finally recovered the last few shards they had been searching for, and they gave me one. Maybe the very last one. It came from here. It belongs here.”

  Rowen still looked incredulous. Will decided he would have to show her, and prove to himself, too, he was right. And there was only one way to do that.

  Rowen gasped as he turned away and stepped off the end of the pier. As he had guessed, he didn’t plunge into icy cold water but found himself standing on the smooth, still surface. The lake, or the mirror, was solid under his feet. He lifted one foot and stamped, saw the surface bow slightly under the sudden pressure, then go smooth and still again.

  “Will?” Rowen said.

  He realized he was holding his breath, and let it out. He turned back to Rowen and Shade. “Come on,” he said.
“I think we’re meant to cross it.”

  Shade took the first careful step off the pier, and came slowly to Will’s side, staring down at the glassy surface underneath him, his back arched and his paws splayed wide as if he expected at any moment to fall through. When he realized that the mirror would hold him up, he relaxed and took a few more exploratory steps from the pier.

  “It looks like ice, but it’s not cold or slippery,” the wolf said. “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know what it’s made of. I don’t think it’s glass, either.”

  Rowen joined them a few seconds later. Slowly they stepped farther away from the pier, glancing back often, still unwilling to leave the safety of the shore too far behind. But soon it became clear to them all that Will had guessed right. What they were walking on wasn’t water, or if it was, it had changed somehow into whatever strange substance the mirror was made from. They were able to walk across confidently, without any sense that they might lose their footing. Even so, they couldn’t help looking down often as they walked, not yet fully believing that they were really doing this impossible thing.

  Their own reflections looked back up at them in wide-eyed amazement.

  Before long they had walked far enough that the pier had almost vanished in the glare. They could still see the grassy slope and the darkly treed hills all around, but everything appeared more distant than they would have expected after such a short time. The shore had receded to a dark line on the horizon, as if the lake, or the mirror, was growing larger as they crossed it.

  After they had walked on a little farther still, the shore was nothing more than a dim green line on the horizon. To find themselves surrounded both above and below by an immense blue dome dotted with a few small clouds was dizzying. They seemed to be suspended in an infinite sky.

  “What do you think’s on the other side?” Rowen said.

  “I’m not sure we’re supposed to reach the other side,” Will said. Rowen was going to ask him what he meant, but his gaze was fixed on the mirror’s surface a short distance ahead of them. He was clearly looking for something. Just when she was about to ask him what it was, he gave an excited cry.

  “There!” he shouted, and broke into a run.

  Shade and Rowen hurried after him. Rowen searched the mirror for whatever it was Will had seen, and then she saw it: a tiny spot of blackness in the shining blue of the reflected sky.

  Will reached the black spot and went down on one knee. Rowen and Shade joined him a moment later.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is where our piece of the mirror fits in.”

  Rowen crouched beside him and saw more clearly what he had found. It was a roughly triangular patch of absolute darkness, as if a hole had been punched through the fabric of the world into a lightless void beyond. She shivered.

  “This is where they came from,” she breathed. “The broken pieces. You were right.”

  “The lake …” Will murmured. “It’s the way the Fair Folk do things. The way they’ve stayed hidden all these years. By hiding in plain sight.” He held out his hand. “Give me your half.”

  Rowen slipped the chain from around her neck, undid the tiny clasp and slid the chain out of the hole in the shard. Will took the shard from her, then held her half next to his in his palm. As she watched in wonder, the hole that had held the shard on the chain shrank and vanished and the two halves came together seamlessly.

  “It’s one piece again,” Rowen said.

  She waited for Will to put the shard in its place in the mirror. She wanted him to. She wanted that hole into darkness covered up, but Will didn’t move. He was staring at the shard in his hand.

  “Will?” Rowen said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just that the Lady gave this to me to protect me. It was one thing to break it in half. I only did that because I wanted you to be safe, too. I didn’t think twice about it. But to just give it up like this, when we need it more than ever … I don’t know if I should.”

  Rowen dared another glance into the dark place in the mirror. She thought of the clever wooden puzzles her grandfather made at the toyshop. How hard it was to fit the pieces together in the right places, and how pleased she felt when she got to the last piece and there was only one place it could fit.

  “No, this is right,” she said. “You were right. This is where the shard belongs.”

  Will frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we have to do something.”

  Slowly and carefully he placed the two halves of the shard in the triangular black space. They fit exactly, and as soon as they were in place, the hair-thin line between them and along the edges of the hole began to melt away. Moments later the mirror was whole and there was no longer any trace of their shards, so that she could not even say for sure just where Will had placed them. All Rowen knew was that she was glad to see that terrible window into nothing sealed up.

  At first it seemed that nothing else had changed. And then as they continued to gaze at the mirror, they saw its bright surface dim and darken. Their own reflections began to fade and waver.

  “What’s happening?” Rowen whispered.

  “The mirror is becoming water again,” Shade said, dabbing at it with a paw.

  It was true. With each movement of their feet, the surface shivered and ripples spread outward. But the three of them didn’t plunge through, and after a moment, Rowen saw why. The water was nothing more than a thin film over a stony surface. As if the lake had suddenly begun to drain away.

  They looked up then from their dimming reflections to see that the wooded hills were gone. They were standing in the middle of a paved road lined with spindly shrubs and thin trees. The pavement was cracked and uneven, and sunken in places, so that parts of it were covered in water. They were standing in one of these shallow pools. The sky above them was no longer bright but sealed over with swiftly moving grey cloud.

  “Where are we now?” Will asked, gazing around.

  “We’ve gone where the Fair Folk went,” Rowen said.

  “Where is that?”

  Rowen didn’t answer.

  Will glanced up at the sky. The low, dark clouds were churning, shredding apart and fusing again, as if a storm was brewing within them. Here on the ground the air was still and quiet.

  He turned to Rowen. “Do you recognize this place?”

  “No, but I think we’re on one of the paths the Fair Folk take when they conceal themselves. One of their hidden ways.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I can’t,” she said, and then peered down at the thin film of water at their feet. “But I don’t think we can go back.”

  “This place we have come to,” Shade said. “It is no longer my world.”

  “What do you mean, Shade?” Will asked. “This isn’t the Realm?”

  “It is … hard for me to find the words,” the wolf said. “Where I come from, everything has a voice. The sunlight, the rain, the wind in the leaves. They are all part of a great speaking, and so am I. Here, that voice is very hard to hear. We are in the Realm, but we are not.”

  Will looked up and down the road. In both directions it ran straight until it vanished in the haze. Then he glimpsed a small green structure by the roadside and half hidden in the trees. “Let’s find out what that is,” he said. He set off, and Rowen and Shade followed.

  The little building, whatever it was, turned out to have a roof and three walls, but was open on the side facing the road. The green paint was chipped and flaking. There was a bench inside the structure, also green, and a few scraps of paper and other things littering the dirt floor.

  Shade sniffed at the bench and the walls. “Someone has been here. Not long ago,” he said.

  “What happened to the other wall?” Rowen said, glancing around inside. “Who would build a house like this and why?”

  “It’s not a house,” Will said. “It’s a bus shelter.”

  “A what?”


  Will didn’t answer. He toed the trash on the floor of the shelter, recognized a cigarette butt, a bottle cap, broken bits of amber glass that had probably come from a beer bottle. Rowen bent and picked up something from under the bench. It looked like a crumpled ball of paper, but it crinkled noisily as she unfolded it. The paper was transparent.

  Rowen’s brow furrowed. “See-through paper,” she murmured wonderingly. “But there’s nothing written on it. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  Will nodded. Rowen was holding an ordinary piece of plastic wrapping.

  “This isn’t some hidden path,” he said. “The mirror didn’t bring us to the Fair Folk—it took us back to my world. This is the Untold.”

  Rowen gaped at him. “Are you sure?”

  Will gestured to the scrap of plastic Rowen was still holding.

  “There’s a lot of that kind of thing in my world. I don’t recognize this place, but that doesn’t mean anything. We could be somewhere far from where I live.”

  “But if we’ve crossed over into the Untold, why would the mirror … why would the Fair Folk bring us here?”

  Will had no answer.

  They left the shelter and kept on along the road, which rose slightly and then began to bend around a curve. The haze in the air had thinned somewhat and now they could see tall, bluish rectangular shapes rising in the distance beyond the road and the trees.

  “Are those towers?” Rowen asked. “They’re so tall.”

  Will nodded. “That’s what a city looks like in my world,” he said.

  “Should we stay on the road, then, Will Lightfoot?” Shade asked. “You told me once there were few wolves where you come from, and most people had never seen one. If this road takes us to a city of your world, is that a place we want to be?”

  “I don’t know,” Will said. “There’s something strange about all this. We should’ve seen more people by now. More buildings. Cars. Road signs. I think we should just keep going until we know more about where we are.”

  Not long afterward the road plunged into a cutting between two high stone walls overarched by a wooden bridge. The cutting was filled with deep shadow and at its edge they halted instinctively. If some threat came at them in that narrow space, they would be trapped.