Marrill managed to squeak out “Fin!” as she fell. Razor-sharp thorns loomed up at her, and then… nothing. She plopped hard onto the bare ground.
The brambles and vines had retreated, crying
She stood and took her time wiping the dirt from her knees. Then she frowned at Fin.
“You could have just asked,” she grumbled.
He grinned back. But the moment he stepped toward her, a vine whipped out and circled his foot. He stumbled, off balance, and another vine shot free and began dragging him toward the brambles.
“Urp!” he cried out.
Just as a particularly wicked-looking thorn reared, ready to strike, Marrill jumped forward, and the brambles shrank back once more. She swatted at the vines around his legs, and they, too, beat a hasty retreat.
It was pretty clear that while the vegetation wanted nothing to do with Marrill, Fin was fair game. Marrill bit her lip.
“What do we do now?” she asked. “We can’t get you across. Unless I carry you, of course,” she joked.
“Oh no,” he said, waving his hands. He’d clearly taken the suggestion seriously. He took a step back, and another vine shot out to grab him.
Marrill leaned down and swatted it away. She glanced up. He looked at her nervously.
“I promise I won’t drop you?” she said.
CHAPTER 25
The Gibbering Grove
Fin clutched Marrill’s shoulders in a death grip. “Stop squirming!” she puffed, twisting to adjust his weight. “You’re not made out of feathers, you know.”
On every side, thorns gleamed like cutlasses. As they made their way through the briar lake, the brambles twisted so thick at times that they were all Fin could see. Just thickets of green and shadow all around, with deep blue sky above.
“Sorry,” Fin muttered. He felt like a cat stuck on a shuddering tree branch, with a pack of wild dogs waiting below. “You’re, uh, doing great,” he whispered, his eyes glued on the vines, which swayed like cobras around them.
A little farther, and Marrill was panting hard—they had been going like this for nearly fifteen minutes. “Not… sure…” Fin could feel her shoulders twitching with exhaustion. She really wasn’t cut out for horse duty. “… I can go on… much…”
A stalk of stinging nettle made a grab for Fin’s leg. “Oh, blisterwinds, just run for it!” he shouted, dropping off her back and shoving her forward.
Marrill lurched ahead, suddenly unburdened. The thorns shot closed like a death trap, snapping together at Fin’s heels as he barreled after her.
“AHHHYAAHAAAHAAAAAAAAAA!” he screamed.
“Fin!” Marril’s hands grabbed his arms and jerked him to a stop. “Calm down; we made it!”
Fin blinked and looked around. No thickets surrounded them, just a circle of massive trees. They were bigger than any he’d ever seen, bigger even than the one he’d stood inside not long ago. All the vines crossing the briar lake came together at the base of their trunks, climbing into the branches. The circle between them, where Fin and Marrill now stood, was completely clear. It was like standing in a cathedral.
They’d made it. They’d reached the island. The Gibbering Grove. Relief unfurled inside him.
And now, as the pounding of his heart subsided in his ears, he could hear talking. It was like the chattering hum of the forest, but louder, less rhythmic. Like a conversation, or an argument. Or a hundred of them, all at once. It came from above. They looked up together, and gasped.
Far, far above them, the tree branches reached into each other and twisted together, like a circle of people holding hands. And grasped in those hands, stretched like a dome over the cathedral-clearing, hung a massive expanse of parchment.
“It’s like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Marrill whispered. She tilted her head, looking at it from a different angle. “Or maybe more like a movie screen?”
As Fin watched, painted figures appeared on the parchment, seemingly from nowhere. He saw faces of all kinds, horses running across plains, children laughing, continents and islands and cities. They slid across its surface and disappeared at the ends of it, an unquenchable tide of places and people and things bubbling to life and dancing to oblivion at its edges.
Well, not oblivion, he realized with a shudder. The images weren’t disappearing; they were soaking into the tree branches and moving onward. On to the trunks. And from the trunks to the vines. And from the vines, out, out through the briar lake. To the forest.
“It has to be the Map,” Marrill murmured, her words barely audible over the voices.
Fin shook his head, staring at the canvas stretched like the roof of a building above them. “It’s a bit big for that, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “What else could it be?”
“So how’re we supposed to take that home, then?” Fin asked, throwing up his hands. “How are we even supposed to get up there?”
In response, Marrill jumped upside down and flew into the sky, leaving only a shout behind her.
“Huh,” Fin said. And before he could think about it any more than that, something grabbed him by the ankle and yanked him upside down, too. As the ground raced away, all he could think was how grateful he was that his pockets were buttoned shut.
He flew past the dome of the Map until it was dozens of feet below him, and then whatever held him jerked to a halt. The chattering was so loud this high up he could barely hear his own thoughts. And beyond the lattice of limbs holding the Map, the ground waited far, far below.
He glanced at his feet, where a knotty cord of vine wrapped around his ankle, holding him firmly suspended. He twisted, looking around for Marrill, and found her just across from him, hanging limply. Her hair swayed like a curtain between her dangling arms.
“At last we have the little saboteurs,” a rough serpent-like voice pronounced, louder than the rest of the din.
“I see a little girl without her poison fire!” said another, high and feminine but just as slithery.
“Poison fire, ha!” crowed a third voice. “I told you there was never any such thing, you gullible old beetle-boxes!”
“You lie, Slenefell!” cried a fourth. “You said she’d burn down the island if we didn’t bring her closer!”
A fifth voice tumbled in on top of it. “And you said she was an amazon, Meldonoch. Thirty feet tall!”
The voices toppled into argument, speaking over each other so fast that Fin couldn’t make out any of it. He looked from tree to tree. Each trunk had a face, like the tree he’d met earlier but scarier. Their eyes were dark hollows; their mouths jutted splintery teeth. Warps in the wood’s grain formed the contours of twisted cheeks, and gnarls made noses and chins. Only the comically oversized wooden ears jutting out on either side of their trunks took away some of the intimidating appearance.
“Shanks,” Fin muttered. “Marrill,” he urged. “Marrill! Say something to them! They won’t remember me long enough to pay attention to me!”
Marrill nodded weakly, her face bright red from the blood rushing to it. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called out, “Hey! Hey, trees! Put us down!” The argument going on around them died suddenly. “Please?” she added.
“You are in no position to be making demands, my dear,” said the voice that had been called Slenefell. All the trees erupted into laughter.
“That didn’t work,” Fin whispered. She glared at him.
“Maybe we can make a deal?” Marrill tried. But the Grove only laughed harder, each rumbling shake swinging Fin and Marrill back and forth like pendulums.
“We have everything,” said one of the trees.
“We know everything,” said another.
“The Face shows us everything,” said a third. “All the secrets in all creation come here.”
“And now we have you,” finished the voice called Meldonoch. “What have you to offer?”
“Maybe some plant food, or a nice misting?” Marrill suggested. The background chatter swelled again around
them, nearly reaching deafening levels. Fin twisted around, struggling for freedom, but the vine just held him tighter.
Below him, he watched a fleet of galleons appear on the dome of the Map and slip across its surface onto the tangled branches, and from there off into the jungle to join the never-ending rumor mill. So this was the Face of the Map. He had to admit it was pretty impressive.
“I rather think we should keep them here forever,” said the higher voice, sounding like an imperious court lady. “They make such nice ornaments to hang on our branches.”
The other trees roared with laughter. “Quite so, Leferia,” the serpent voice hissed. “The little girl may grow into mistletoe. The other will fade away to Spanish moss.”
Fin gulped. He didn’t know what a spanish was, but he knew he didn’t want to be one’s moss.
“Fin,” Marrill whispered urgently. “Fin, secrets! Ardent said there was a Council of Whispers that was all about gathering secrets! Do you know any we can trade?”
Fin bit his lip. Secrets. What secrets did he know? He was the master thief, the king of con artists. He had to know something.
Then again, he thought as he started to grow light-headed, it wasn’t like anyone confided in him. No one even knew him at all, let alone enough to trust him with something they wanted to keep secret. And what was a secret, other than something you didn’t want someone else to know?
That was when it came to him.
He sucked in a deep breath. In a voice as loud and clear as he could manage, he said, “I know a secret you don’t know.”
At first, the Grove gibbered on, as if he’d said nothing. Fin held his breath. He’d been in stickier situations than this one, and he’d always managed to find a way out.
Then he heard it: A background whisper caught Fin’s words.
“What?” one of the trees said.
Then another.
Then another, spreading it like a fire—a poison fire, Fin thought. It was a rumor without a source, the best kind. Like everything else he said around here.
A rumor that had to be true.
Now all the voices sang it, dropping the other chattering until it was just the one refrain, in unison.
“It’s not possible!” cried Slenefell.
“How can it be?” asked Leferia.
“It’s a lie!” cried Meldonoch.
Fin shook his head. “It’s no lie.” Suddenly, all the trees were paying attention to him. He wasn’t so forgettable when he had something they couldn’t ignore.
It was hard to keep the swagger from his voice. “I know a secret you don’t know. A secret you will never, ever get through your Map.”
“We will,” croaked the serpentine voice. “The Face will show us!”
“Oh, really?” Fin asked. “What has your Face shown you about me, then?”
The trees fell into a hushed but frantic chatter among themselves. “It’s true,” one of them cried, “I don’t remember seeing a thing about him before!”
“Shhhhhh!” said the others. The chattering continued.
Fin rolled his eyes. “The answer is ‘nothing’!” he called. “It hasn’t shown you anything about me!” The trees groaned in grudging acceptance. “Which means…” he prompted.
“Which means he really must have a secret we don’t know!” Slenefell announced.
The whole Grove let forth an anguished wail. “We must know!” they cried. “Tell us!”
Fin stroked his chin, pretending he had a beard there. It was his contemplating look, and he had used it effectively many times. Hopefully, it came off just as well upside down. “So you’re saying we have something to trade after all.”
The serpent voice hissed, but the female one, Leferia, cut him off. “The offer is a fair one, Tartrigian. Their freedom for the secret. Let it be done!”
Carefully, the vines holding them lowered them to a thick branch, level with the Map. They were still a long way from the ground, but it was a start.
“You are free,” said Leferia. From here, Fin could make out an old owl’s nest perched on her ear. “Now tell us the secret!”
Marrill pushed herself up onto her hands beside him. “Um, Fin?” she asked. “How do we get down from here?”
“You climb,” scowled the bulbous, knotted face of Slenefell. A hundred woodpecker holes dotted his visage, looking like zits on a teenage boy.
“I was afraid of that,” she grumbled, trying unsuccessfully to tuck her hair behind her ears. Fin flashed her an assured smile as she searched her pockets, pulled out a scrap of cloth, and wrapped it around her head like a bandanna to keep her hair out of her eyes.
“And now for the secret. A deal’s a deal,” he announced, practically rubbing his hands together in anticipation. These were the times Fin lived for—fresh rubes on the line begging to be reeled in.
The trees leaned closer. The air, for the first time, was completely still. A vine darted toward Fin, rising up to chest height and blossoming into an ear-shaped flower.
“Speak the secret into the ear,” Slenefell told him. “So it may join with our forest.”
Fin grabbed the sides of the ear carefully. Holding back his smile, he put his face down until his lips nearly touched the petals.
He waited, drawing out the tension like a true showman. Savoring the anticipation. When even Marrill squirmed beside him, he finally divulged his secret, whispering it quietly.
The ear quivered, then furled its petals in on itself. It shrank smaller and smaller, and then with a final tremor, the petals fell off. Before him, perfectly formed, sat the largest acorn he’d ever seen.
It wobbled on the vine and then broke off, tumbling through the air toward the ground. The shell shattered on impact.
“That’s our cue,” Fin murmured to Marrill. He started toward the nearby trunk and began making his way down. The thick bark made for excellent hand- and toeholds.
He hadn’t gotten very far when the first whispers drifted up to his ears. Where his secret acorn had landed, vines had already sprung up and raced across the ground. It wouldn’t be long before the trees found out what his secret was.
Fin was sure it would be quite the distraction. Enough that they’d forget all about the Quay boy who’d told it to them. He chuckled, already thinking about how he and Marrill would recount the story later.
He froze, an awful thought twisting in his gut. Marrill.
The trees might forget him, but they wouldn’t forget her. He’d never had to plan for anyone else before.
The rumor vines twisted around the tree trunks, repeating his secret over and over again, until it became a wash of words rolling over him. The trees erupted into a furious rabble. Vines snatched Marrill, wrapping around her ankles and hauling her back up into the air. She shrieked in alarm, the sound of her cry mixing with the echo of Fin’s own voice:
“My secret is that I don’t have a secret.”
CHAPTER 26
An Unexpected Victory
For the second time in as many minutes, Marrill found herself dangling upside down. Her hair flew in a tangle over her head, the bandanna she’d used to tie it back jolting free and falling across her face.
“Let me go!” she shouted, trying to shove the tail of her shirt into her shorts to keep it in place.
The vines around her ankles unraveled. She started slipping. Her stomach lodged somewhere in her throat. The ground seemed very, very far away.
“No! Don’t let me go!” she cried, her protest muffled by the bandanna.
The vines tightened, halting her fall. She dangled upside down, gasping as her heart roared in her ears.
“She’s a bit flighty, wouldn’t you say?” Slenefell remarked.
“Seemed the opposite to me,” one of the trees said. “If she were flighty, she wouldn’t have needed us to stop her fall.”
Meldonoch’s leaves rustled. “Honestly, Bleblehad. He meant she’s not good at making up her mind. Which she’s not—one minute down, the other up. What’s next
?”
Marrill squirmed, pushing the bandanna out of her eyes to look for Fin. He’d climbed back up to the branch and was edging his way out toward her, hands raised to catch her if she fell again.
“Maybe you could just set me down by my friend?” Marrill offered.
There followed a brief and grumbling debate about who this “friend” was and, at one point, whether she had any at all. “There’s a boy right there, and he’s my friend!” she shouted, pointing. “Just, you know, there. Put me down there.”
A moment later, her fingers touched bark. Marrill threw her arms around the branch, thankful to be back on something solid. Even if the ground was still dozens of stories below.
Fin crouched next to her. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’d be better if they’d give us the Face,” she mumbled.
“You want the Face?” Slenefell asked. “Hmm… well… I suppose we could give you the Face… what do you say, Meldonoch?”
The largest tree in the clearing shifted its branches. “Well, I, well… we’ve been fighting over it for a while, and I’d really rather not. But, if she really wants it…”
“Wait, what?” Leferia demanded, her voice a little shriller than before.
Marrill pushed herself up until she was sitting and shoved the bandanna over her forehead to get it out of her face. “What’s going on?” she whispered to Fin. He shrugged, apparently just as surprised and confused as she was.
“I mean, I hadn’t thought of that, but if all the rest of you think so…” Leferia said after a pause.
“All we had to do to get the Face was to ask for it?” Marrill asked the trees. Surely, she was missing something. “You’ll just… give it to us?”
Above her, the canopy rustled menacingly, startling several birds from their nests.
“Wait,” Slenefell said, “no, why would we give you the Face? I was, um… joking about that. Joking is what I did.”
“Me too!” Meldonoch concurred.
Bleblehad raised a questioning limb. “But a minute ago—”