Forest of Wonders

  “Was she inside the fence, Echo?”

  No reply. The fence being no barrier to Echo, inside and outside seemed at the moment to have no meaning to him.

  Raffa kept hearing things—the rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig—but although he strained his eyes against the darkness, he saw no one. Ordinary noises could seem scarier in the dark, he thought, trying to reassure himself.

  He took off the rucksack and set it carefully against the fence. The twins seemed to sense his tension and stayed quiet. A knothole, he thought. If he could find a knothole in one of the boards, he might be able to see what was inside the fence.

  At Raffa’s request, Echo left the perch necklace and alit on the fence above the rucksack to keep watch over the twins. Raffa had to walk nearly two-thirds the length of the fence again, but it was worth it. Better than a knothole: a crack between two boards.

  Luck was with him: A breeze coaxed the clouds past the moon, and it was suddenly a little brighter. Raffa put his eye to the crack and peered into the enclosure.

  People!

  Not five paces away, on the other side of the fence!

  He stifled a gasp and spun away in alarm, flattening himself against the boards. Had they heard him? Or maybe even seen the slight movement through the crack? He held his breath, which made his heart beat even faster. He listened as hard as he could through the pounding in his ears, and heard—

  Nothing.

  Utter silence, except for the rattle of leaves.

  Raffa waited for what felt like three lifetimes. The silence held. He let out his breath an inch at a time, relief weakening his knees.

  Then he closed his eyes tightly and counted to ten. It was a trick he often used when he wanted to see better in darkness, and this time it served to steady his nerves a little as well.

  He opened his eyes and, moving as slowly as he could, turned and peeped through the crack again. Now he could see what he hadn’t seen before.

  Not people.

  Scarecrows!

  Nervous laughter bubbled up inside him, though he was quick to swallow it. What a fool he was, frightened out of his wits by a bunch of scarecrows.

  Or something very like scarecrows, anyway. At least a half dozen that he could see, probably more, staked randomly throughout an open space. Each had a head and torso made from sacking stuffed with straw and mounted on posts.

  The heads had crude faces: eyes and mouths that gaped black against the paler sacking. The breeze stirred the sacking, the clouds and moon cast formless moving shadows, and the scarecrows looked almost alive. . . .

  Stop it, he told himself fiercely. It was bad enough being out here in the dark by himself without his imagination making things worse.

  Why would anyone put up so many scarecrows where there was no grain or garden? Raffa stared at the scarecrow nearest him, searching for clues, but there didn’t seem to be anything—

  WHACK!

  Something hard and flat walloped his upper back and neck. Raffa fell to his knees as little flecks of light swam in his vision.

  He tried to get to his feet.

  WHACK! Another blow, this time to the back of his legs. It hurt so much that he cried out in pain as he collapsed to his stomach on the ground.

  Hardly knowing what he was doing, he covered his head with his arms. “Stop! Stop it!” he gasped.

  To his amazement, he sensed the figure behind him go completely still. He rolled over onto his back and saw his attacker’s silhouette against the veiled moonlight.

  Not towering over him, as he had expected, but someone about his own size, holding what was apparently a wooden board.

  He blinked.

  “Kuma?” he said.

  “Don’t move or I’ll hit you again,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  KUMA took a step toward him and raised the board over her shoulder, ready for another strike.

  “I won’t move, I swear!” Raffa said. “Kuma, what are you doing?”

  “No, what are you doing?” Her voice was cold and hard. “Are you the one who did this?”

  “Did what?” Raffa said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I came here to find you!”

  “Your pother training,” she said. “You could have done it. Or at least helped.”

  “Kuma, listen to me. I don’t know what any of that means, but if I was the one who did . . . whatever it is you think I did, why would I be sneaking around in the middle of the night? And trying to look through the boards?”

  Kuma made no move, and Raffa sensed her hesitation. He began to speak quickly. “Echo said ‘Kuma no good,’ so I was worried, and I asked him to show me the last place he’d seen you. He’s over there”—Raffa pointed down the length of the fence—“you can ask him yourself.”

  Slowly Kuma lowered the board to the ground. Raffa waited a moment to make sure she wouldn’t raise it again. Then he got to his feet, and began walking back toward the rucksack. After a few steps, he heard her following.

  Echo flew to meet him, circled Kuma once, and alit on his perch. “Echo go, Raffa come, Kuma friend,” he chirped.

  “Thank you, Echo,” Kuma said. She turned to Raffa. “I wasn’t in any kind of trouble, but I’ve been . . . really upset. And sad. That must be why he said ‘No good’ about me.”

  The twins were hidden from view at first, but when they heard Raffa’s footfalls, they popped their heads out, startling Kuma. “Oh!” she said softly, and dropped to her knees. She clucked at them, and they chirruped back at her.

  Raffa told her about them—how they had been brought to the laboratory badly injured, and how he was treating them the same way he had treated Echo. After a pause, he said, “They can talk now, too.”

  With uncanny timing, Bando said, “Twig?”

  Twig answered, “Bando?” Then in ragged chorus, they both said, “Mamma? Mamma? Mamma?”

  Echo settled over them again and soothed them before they grew too agitated.

  A long silence. Then Kuma stood and said, “I need to show you something. On the other side of the fence.”

  Raffa frowned. He didn’t see how such an imposing fence could be scaled, and wasn’t sure he wanted to even if it could. Nail points and broken glass—the place was unquestionably forbidden.

  “Can’t you just tell me?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “You might not believe me. It’s the kind of thing you have to see for yourself.”

  He hoped she would take his silence as a very firm no.

  “I swear it’s important,” Kuma said. “The second you see it, you’ll understand.”

  “But how—”

  “This way.” She started walking back along the fence.

  Hastily Raffa picked up the rucksack and joined her. When they turned the corner, he saw a tree whose branches extended toward the fence but did not quite reach it.

  “We have to wait until the guard passes on his rounds,” Kuma whispered. “It should be soon enough.”

  “I’ll leave the twins here,” Raffa said, indicating the base of the tree. “Echo, will you stay and watch over them?”

  “Bando Twig,” Echo chirped.

  It wasn’t long before Kuma beckoned him. “I’ll go first, so you can see how to do it,” she said, and then she shinned up the tree. She went high, then higher still, until she was well above the level of the fence. Then she edged her way out onto a limb, which began to bend under her weight.

  Watching from below, Raffa understood why she had climbed so high: The farther out she went on the limb, the more it sagged. At the point where he feared it would surely break underneath her, she leapt into the air and cleared the fence easily. Almost immediately, he heard a thump on the other side, so he guessed that she had landed on a roof rather than on the ground.

  His turn now. He remembered scaling the rock wall in the underground passage with Trixin and, before that, climbing the querco tree in the Forest to get the red vine. Why did there always have to be something to clim
b?

  Trying to copy Kuma’s exact movements, he held on to a branch overhead as he slid his feet along the limb, which shook and bounced alarmingly. In what seemed to be an act of concern, Echo left his perch over the twins and began circling nearby.

  “Raffa fly?” he squeaked. Raffa would have laughed if he hadn’t been so frightened.

  He could now see over the fence, where Kuma awaited him on a roof that—mercifully—had only a slight pitch. He did not allow himself time to think; if he did, he knew he would never let go of the limb.

  He launched himself into the air.

  The roof hit him much sooner than he expected. His breath was jarred from his lungs as he landed half on his feet, half on his side. Before he could stop himself, he was rolling off the edge of the roof. Frantically he scrabbled for the eaves; they slipped from his grasp, but he managed to hold on long enough to slow his fall.

  “Huff!” he grunted as he landed on the ground. Still breathless, he looked around in a panic. Had the guard heard him? He couldn’t seem to quiet his breath; it sounded as loud as thunder to him.

  Kuma dropped down beside him, silent as a cat.

  Too late, Raffa wondered how they would get out; they couldn’t go back the way they came. “How do we get out of here?” he panted.

  “You’ll see,” Kuma whispered. “It’s a bit trickier.”

  Trickier than what they’d just done? Lovely.

  Kuma led him around the back of the shed to an identical building. Keeping close to the wall, she edged her way to the door, which was latched but not locked. She unhooked the latch and held the door open for him.

  Raffa stepped inside. It was so dark that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. But he could smell and hear—and feel, even though he wasn’t touching anything.

  Animals. He smelled them: breath and fur and waste. The space was filled with animals, all completely, eerily silent. How was that possible? They should have woken, at least some of them, when Kuma opened the door.

  Moving slowly, carefully, Raffa stepped with his hands out in front of him. Then stripes of moonlight entered the shed through slats in the ceiling, and for a few moments, he could see.

  Shelves lined three of the four walls, from floor to ceiling, with more rows of shelves filling the shed’s interior. Each shelf held dozens of small cages, and each cage held an animal. Their limbs were splayed or twitching in a deep but unnatural sleep, which meant that they had been dosed with a sedative.

  And every single one of them was a baby.

  Raffa saw foxes and badgers. Others were small balls of fur that he couldn’t distinguish in the dim light.

  Clouds masked the moon again. Raffa stood in the darkness, stunned at what he had just seen. The animals were weeks old, at most—too young to be taken from their mothers. Where were all the mothers?

  Kuma tugged on his sleeve. “There are eleven more sheds just like this,” she whispered.

  Twelve sheds. Hundreds of animals altogether. Who had captured them? And how had they managed to amass so many?

  Then Raffa remembered the clearing that he and Garith had seen in the Forest. No, not a clearing—a camp. Whoever it was, they could have been there for weeks, hunting down every baby animal or pregnant mother within miles. It was only a guess, but he was shaken by how well it fitted.

  He tried to remember what the Chancellor had said at dinner about the project. Training animals to do the work of humans . . . What sort of human work could foxes and badgers do that would call for so many of them?

  As he and Kuma left the shed, Raffa looked around quickly. “Did you see the scarecrows?” he asked tensely.

  “Yes,” Kuma said. “I’ll tell you later. Stick close now. We’re going out through the gate. It’s bolted from the inside. We have to watch for the guard to leave on his next round, then make a run for it.”

  It sounded simple enough. Staying close to the fence, they passed the scarecrows in a large space between two sheds. Then they walked nearly the whole length of the compound. Kuma stopped at the second to last shed. “This is the only one with adult animals,” she said. “And the last one is empty.”

  They slipped behind the last shed. Kuma gestured for Raffa to peep around its wall. From there he could see the gate, and a small hut with the guard seated inside.

  To Raffa’s dismay, there was nothing but open ground between them and the gate. A lantern shone brightly from the hut. Even after the guard began his rounds, all he would have to do was turn his head and he would see them.

  “I did it before,” Kuma breathed. “We just have to be really quick. When you get out, go to the right, beyond the end of the fence, and duck down in the brush.”

  It seemed like half the night before the guard finally rose and left the hut, holding another lantern. Kuma waited until he had walked a few dozen paces away. “Ready?” she said.

  Raffa was about to nod in response when he heard Echo chirp overhead. What was he doing here? Raffa saw the bat fly straight toward the guard and land on the ground, at the edge of the circle of lantern light.

  Quick as a blink, Kuma clapped her hand over Raffa’s mouth, stifling his cry. He yanked her hand away.

  “We can’t leave now!” he said in an anguished whisper. “I won’t go without him!”

  Kuma hissed at him for silence. Raffa shouldered her out of the way and watched in dismay as Echo flap-staggered out of the light.

  “A bat?” the guard said, his voice carrying through the still air. “Dirty thing. What are you doing down there? Must be hurt, are you?”

  He moved toward Echo. With each step he took, Echo flapped and hopped a bit farther away, staying in sight but out of reach.

  Suddenly Raffa recalled the partridge he had seen years before, which had feigned injury to draw him away from her nest. He turned to Kuma, his eyes shining with excitement. “He’s distracting the guard for us!”

  Kuma was already moving. When they reached the gate, she slid back the bolt. Raffa gave the gate a push—and pushed too hard. It swung fully open and banged against the fence.

  They were outside the gate in a flash, both running as fast as they could. The guard shouted and began chasing them. When Raffa reached the stretch of scrubland, he plunged on blindly until he crashed into a thicket of shrubs and flipped heels skyward over it. He landed on his back, rolled over, and froze. A moment later, Kuma threw herself down beside him.

  The guard pursued them as far as the end of the fence. Raffa heard his heavy footfalls stop. The guard held his lantern high and moved it in a semicircle; its beam of light swept so close that Raffa could have touched it.

  The light swung by again, more slowly, and Raffa would have sworn it was even closer this time. It took every fiber of his nerve not to flee.

  Finally the guard muttered angrily and stomped back to the gate. Still they waited—to hear the gate close and the bolt being shot home again. Then Kuma got to her hands and knees. She crawled for several yards before rising to a cautious crouch, and Raffa followed her lead.

  They tiptoed back to the tree to fetch the twins, then made their way to the track that led to the stable yard, where Echo rejoined them with his usual “Ouch” on landing. Raffa gave him a quick stroke of silent thanks.

  Slipping past the still-sleeping stable guard felt like a toddler’s game after what they had been through. Raffa was so exhausted that he had to concentrate just to keep his feet moving. It seemed like the walk would never end.

  When at last they reached the laboratory, he led Kuma to the tiny bedchamber and shuttered the window. Only then did he light a lantern.

  He left the twins in the rucksack; they had fallen asleep again on the long walk back to the laboratory. He hung Echo’s perch on a wall peg. Then he drew out his waterskin, drank thirstily, and handed it to Kuma.

  By the time she finished drinking, his pulse was almost back to normal. “Tell me everything there is to tell,” he said.

  Kuma leaned back against the wall and s
tarted talking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “THEY used a wagon when they took her. Roo, I mean.”

  “Your bear,” Raffa said.

  Kuma glared at him. “She’s not mine. Any more than Echo is yours.”

  Her words brought Raffa up short. He realized that in his fondness for Echo, the bat had come to feel almost like a pet. But like Roo, Echo wasn’t tame; he could leave whenever he chose. As much as that thought pained him, it also served to deepen his wonder that a wild creature was spending time with him.

  He nodded slowly, and she went on. “So, because of the wagon, I thought that the horses might have ended up back at the stables. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to look. I left last night, while you were at dinner.”

  “You took Echo.” Now Raffa’s voice was cold. He could not forget his panic when he found that Echo was missing—nor forgive her for being the cause of it. She of all people should have understood how upset he would be.

  “It was dark, and . . . I didn’t want to go alone,” she confessed. “I swear I kept him in sight the whole time. I made sure nothing happened to him. Later, around sunpeak, he insisted on leaving. ‘Raffa perch,’ he kept saying, so I let him go. I’m sorry, I couldn’t think of any way to let you know.”

  Raffa said nothing, but it made him feel better to know that Echo had been thinking of him. He looked at the bat, who was busy grooming himself.

  Kuma waited for a moment, then continued. “I found that place. And figured out a way to get in. It wasn’t hard—in the Forest I climb a lot.

  “I stayed inside the fence most of the day. Servients are working there. I saw them go in and out of the sheds. But it’s a big place, it was easy to stay hidden. And they left the doors unlatched while they were working. So I peeked into all the sheds and saw . . . well, you know.”

  Then her shoulders slumped. “Roo’s not there. None of the cages are anywhere near big enough to hold her.”

  “If they’re the ones who took her, then she’s alive,” Raffa said, “I’m sure of it. They don’t want to kill these animals—they want to train them.”