Chapter the Sixteenth,
The Last Night,
In which a handful of flowers are not what they seem.
I. Callous
A cold tide of darkness washed over the pink boat as it emerged on the far side of the stone wall. An empire of thorns rose over both sides of the river, a thicket of petrified wood so unchecked in its propagation that it rivaled the mountains for size. Converging fifty fins over the river at its lowest point, forming a vaulted corridor for the boat to pass under, the tangled thorns blocked out the light of sun and comet alike.
“Where are we?” Ceder asked the Dangler.
“This can only be one place,” said the fisherman. “We are in the Soridwood.”
“Hey,” said Jai, “I thought you didn’t remember anything from your old life.”
The Dangler regarded the thorns pensively as the river carried them under the deadly thicket. “I remember it no more than I recall the name of the sea. It is only a word to me.”
“Why is it called the Soridwood?” asked Jai.
“It was said, long ago, the Magician had a hand in its making.”
Jai waited for him to elaborate, but it was Ceder who spoke first. “Look at the thorns,” she said. “Do they remind you of anything?”
Jai gazed at the snarled thicket. Every sprig of nettles grew in sets of three, every set bent like knuckled claws. As the twilight faded to dusk, he peered beyond the thorns to the stems that supported them—it was difficult to be certain, but it appeared as though every branch and limb was itself part of a triplicate, repeating infinitely to points so thin his eye could not detect their tips.
“They all look like hands,” said Jai, aghast, “with three claws.” He put a hand to his forehead, dreading another flash of pain where Sorid’s curse marked him.
Ceder studied his tormented expression. “We’ll be safe if we stay in the boat.”
“Unless your master knows we are here,” said the Dangler, “and decides to close his hand, once and for all.”
Jai shuddered at the callous imagery. “You have a real knack for knowing what to say, sometimes.”
In tetchy silence they sailed through the corridor of overreaching thorns until at last, in a smooth, quiet transition, the boat grinded to a slow stop in a bed of wet silt. The Dangler plumbed the depth of the river with his fishing pole and found it no more than a fin to the bottom.
“Should we turn back?” asked Ceder.
Astray answered with a firm roar, denouncing her.
“I agree,” echoed the Dangler. “Backtracking to the forest is not a choice.”
“Why not?” asked Jai.
“Did you not see? The door closed its mouth again.”
“But we can’t sail forward,” said Jai.
“Correct,” said the fisherman. With one high step he climbed out of the boat and stood shin-deep in the water. He took the compass out and held it before his face in silence for a long moment, then sighed and put it away.
“What are you doing?” asked Ceder.
“The river is the only road,” the Dangler said resignedly. “If we cannot sail, we walk. Come now, one foot at a time.”
The children shared a skeptical look, but they joined the fisherman outside the boat. The Dangler secured his line and hook under the foremost bench, locked the reel, then strode forward until the line drew taut. He stiffened, leaned like he was walking against a strong wind, and trudged forward with the pole slung over his shoulder.
The silt at the bottom of the riverbed bunched up in front of the hull like snow before a shovel as the Dangler pulled. “I could use a hand,” he grunted irritably—the children were wading casually by either side of the boat, assuming the fisherman would do all the work. “This is harder than it looks.”
Jai and Ceder mumbled a lame apology and grabbed a hold of the boat, adding their trifling strength to the haul. They slogged along in silence, their progress hard-earned and painfully slow. Jai’s blisters from the wishing well tore open and he had to fight not to cry in frustration. Ceder kept her chin down as she labored, doubting whether her tired effort helped at all.
They took breaks one at a time to sip water from the river. It was full of silt but it did the trick. Ceder watched Jai intently as he drank. “Your tattoo hasn’t flared since the desert,” she said to him, “and you haven’t been spitting water out, lately.”
Jai felt a quickening thrill that she had been paying such close attention to him. He suppressed the wide grin that his face tried to make. “Our first night, the seawater tasted like sugar. The next morning it tasted like ash; I guess because we were sailing away from the Circle of the Sun. But it’s been getting better ever since we left the wishing well.”
“That’s not what you wished for, is it?”
“I can’t tell you,” said Jai.
“Why not?”
“If I say what I didn’t wish for, you could ask me questions until you eventually figured out what I did wish for. It’s the same as telling you, and then it would never come true.”
“Jai!” she laughed, “it would take me forever to ask you that many questions!”
He shrugged. “We have all day, don’t we?”
“Just tell me if you think you’re cured.”
He sighed and shook his head. “I think it’s only getting better because we’re heading back home. I mean, not home,” he stammered. “You know what I mean.”
Ceder nodded. “But why would you have started feeling better at the wishing well? We were still sailing away from the Circle of the Sun, there.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Jai. “All I can guess is that the signpost we circled around—the one with the spinning arrow—somehow brought us a lot farther than we realized. What if—I know this sounds crazy—but what if it actually wound us halfway around the world?”
Ceder frowned.
“Hear me out,” said Jai. “When we were at the castle, looking at the Circle of the Sea, the tiny model of Coral Wing was a lot closer to the eastern coast than to the west, where we came from—Cliff had no idea how you and I got across the whole sea in one night. And as soon as we actually went around that signpost, Sorid’s red searchlight lost us, as if we were suddenly somewhere else, too far away.”
Ceder thought it over. “That actually makes sense. As much as anything around here makes sense. It’s a shame, though—all this time we’ve been so eager to see magic and when it finally happens we don’t realize it until the next day.”
“It’s like the Coralute told us: such is life.”
“Such is life,” said the Dangler, another low echo, “and life is such. Of much do I think. I think too much.”
Jai shuddered but he could not have said why.
II. To Admit Defeat
After an hour of grueling work they had managed to tow the boat through the wet silt no more than half a tail. The Dangler stopped pulling. “The river has run out,” he informed the children. “We cannot continue.”
“So we can’t go forward and we can’t go back,” said Jai. “Where does that leave us?”
“Right here,” said the fisherman. “At least for the night.”
Jai and Ceder lapsed into silence. Spending a night under the Soridwood was an altogether different prospect than sleeping under the stars, as they had at sea and in the Dangler’s lagoon. They climbed inside the boat and sat down in the bottom with their knees hugged in for warmth. Astray tucked into Ceder’s lap.
“Do you have any ideas?” she asked the cub. He lifted his emerald eyes to her. The only sound he made was a content purr as she worked her hands through his fur.
Jai watched them, lost in thought. The Dangler paced back and forth, fore to aft, not willing to admit defeat. “Do you have your knife?” he asked Jai some time later.
“Why? Do you think we can cut our way out of here?”
“No,” said the fisherman, “or someone would have done it before. But it is all the same to me to try.”
/> Jai handed him the knife. The Dangler took the blade, visibly suppressing a shiver as he touched the cursed metal, and immediately set off down the river.
“Jai,” Ceder whispered when he had gone, “we shouldn’t have let him go alone.”
“What? Why not?”
“What if Sorid gets him?”
“Sorid’s not here!” Jai hissed, looking over his shoulder nervously. “He’s probably still a thousand tails away.”
“That didn’t stop the shadows by the hole in the water from trying to grab us! And the Sands of Syn! He wasn’t there, either, but he was in control, wasn’t he? Imagine these thorns turning into another tornado of dragons all around us!”
“Ceder, that has got to be the absolute last thing I want to imagine right now,” said Jai, “or ever,” but his blanched face showed that her fears had already stolen into his mind. “Just because this place is named after him doesn’t mean he’s here.”
The children heard splashing and looked over the side of the boat. Scuttling along the shallow riverbed was the severed black hand with two claws that had fallen into the water earlier that afternoon. A thin stream of liquid fire leaked out of the hand’s stump and trailed behind in its wake. Jai and Ceder ducked out of sight. The black hand crawled alongside the boat, following the river east. It disappeared in the same direction as the fisherman.
“Now you’ve got to go after him,” Ceder said when the dismembered hand was out of sight.
“We can’t,” said Jai. “We can’t follow the fisherman! That’s what the Coralute told us, straight from the King and Queen.”
“You’d be following Sorid’s hand,” said Ceder, “not the Dangler.”
“How many ways around this warning can you possibly find, Ceder? Wait, what do you mean ‘you’? You mean me? What about you?”
The Dangler returned while the children were still debating whether to go help him or not. He whipped Jai’s knife down disgustedly into the ground, sinking the blade fully in the silt.
“Did you see—” Ceder tried to ask, but the Dangler flashed an angry look at her.
“I saw it! Oh, yes! But how can anyone cast a line in this tangled mess?”
“So… no luck with the knife, either?” asked Jai.
The Dangler grunted miserably. “It would take a year to cut through ten fins of this insidious atrocity.”
“There must be something we can do,” said Ceder. “We could tunnel…”
“Roots,” said the Dangler.
“…or could climb over, carefully…”
“The thorns are sharp enough to cut glass.”
“If you’ve got any more candles,” said Jai, “we could just burn this whole freaking place to the ground.”
“And where would you flee with a thousand flaming thorns raining down on your head?” The Dangler shook his head fatally, then reached into his bag and withdrew two white apples. He tossed them to the children and returned his silent musing to the river.
Jai and Ceder ate their meager meal in small bites, keeping their thoughts to themselves. And when children are quiet, their stomachs are full, and the lights are out, it is never long before they drift to sleep. The Dangler took off his cape and laid it over them to ward off the cold.
The fisherman sat astern with crossed legs, reclined against the rearmost bench, his droopy hat pulled low over his face. He betrayed no hint whether he slept or sat awake in statuesque meditation throughout the night. The songbird nestled down atop his hat and tucked her wings tightly to her body.
When everyone else was still, Astray crept out from underneath the Dangler’s cape and leapt to the riverbank, walking beside the water until his way was barred by a wall of thorns. He bit a white petal off his necklace. For all it sparkled it might have been a snowflake.
III. All Angles
Ceder woke up in the middle of the night to an uncomfortable sensation that felt like her face was being rubbed with moist sandpaper. When she realized it was the cub licking her cheek, she lifted him away. She smelled the flowers even before she opened her eyes, an aroma so overwhelming she knew at once it could not be coming from Astray’s necklace, upon which only a handful of petals remained. As soon as she looked around, she pinched Jai’s arm. “Jai, get up, get up! Look!”
In place of every thorn there grew a frail white lily, turning darkness into day like a bright snowfall in the middle of the night. Jai and Ceder could barely see one another amid the pervasive sheen emitted by the newborn blossoms.
Astray nuzzled his nose into Ceder’s neck, then looked into her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered to the cub. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Ceder, look at his back,” said Jai, nodding to Astray. The glowing patch on the cub’s neck had spread up to his ears and down his spine, curling around to the tip of his tail. The white fur gave off the same soft radiance as the lilies that had transformed the Soridwood.
The children sat in one another’s silent company savoring the beauty of the night until it dawned on Ceder that they should tell the Dangler what had happened. She tapped his shoulder to wake him up.
The fisherman lifted his head at once. He had not been sleeping at all. A golden flash of color appeared for an instant behind the dark bays of his eyes.
“We’re not stuck anymore,” said Jai, smiling.
“Why do you say that?” asked the Dangler.
“Well,” Jai began, realizing at once that he had not thought things through very far, “the thorns are gone, so…”
The fisherman wore a sober expression. “The thorns are gone, but their intractable roots remain. I still see no passage forward.”
Astray jumped out of Ceder’s arms over the side of the boat. He cantered along the riverbank to the spot where the Dangler had flung Jai’s knife into the ground, then turned back to the children and gave an inquisitive growl.
“He wants you to follow him, Jai,” said Ceder.
Jai thought about leaving his cozy spot next to Ceder for the frosty night air and the icy water in the riverbed, mixed with the outside chance of Sorid’s severed hand sneaking up and grabbing his ankle. He also knew if he got up, he would not have the nerve to sit down so close to Ceder again. “No thanks. I’m good here.”
Astray roared at him impatiently.
“Okay, okay,” said Jai, rising from his seat, “I’m coming.” He climbed overboard into the water, clenching his teeth at the freezing jolt. When he reached Astray he leaned down to inspect his knife. “This better be worth it,” he said under his breath to the cub.
Jai’s sluggishness fell away in a heartbeat as he wrapped his fingers around the cold handle of the blade and pulled it out of the ground. Whatever miracle had caused the Soridwood to beget flower blossoms in place of thorns had worked its magic on the rusty knife, as well. What had been a short piece of metal was now as long as Jai’s arm; the scrap-iron had grown into a larger version of the smaller weapon. Where before the handle of the knife had been a twisted corkscrew, those same twists had expanded so that a hand could fit comfortably inside without spilling one’s own blood. The formerly jagged blade was now the serrated edge of a deadly sword.
“Great,” said Ceder, crossing her arms, “just what he needs—a bigger knife.”
Jai held the wondrous object before him, speechless, examining it from all angles like a boy inspecting his best gift on a holiday. He had dreamt of owning a sword all his life; now he was paralyzed with the realization of that dream. “My hand tingles,” he mumbled.
The Dangler said, “Go ahead,” and Jai knew what to do.
He swung the blade in a wide arc. He twirled, halted, pirouetted; he slashed, parried, thrust. A bead of sweat formed on his brow, cool in the night. Following the rhythm of the sword, Jai leapt forward and whirled the blade into a cluster of white flowers. The petrified stems fell apart, broken glass, while the fragile lilies lingered in the air. Jai stopped and stared.
He dashed back to the boat. “Come on!” he cried. “We’
re free! We can get out of here, now!”
“Before you go rushing off,” said the Dangler, “allow me to inspect the blade.”
“What? Why?” asked Jai, eager to go put his new plaything to use, at the same time dreading that the Dangler might take the sword away, saying it was too dangerous for a boy.
The fisherman held out his hands and Jai complied—he sullenly handed the weapon over without argument. The Dangler held the sword hanging vertically by the handle between thumb and forefinger as though it was a recently caught fish that he intended to measure. He sniffed it suspiciously. He wiggled it about. He muttered indecipherable observations under his breath. Finally, apparently satisfied, he relinquished the sword back to Jai. “The curse is gone,” the fisherman announced at last. Then he stood up, climbed out of the boat, and marched east through the shallow water. After several strides, he turned around and gave the children a sly wink. “Well, are you coming, or not?”
IV. Down Sharply
Jai and Ceder ran after the fisherman with Astray and the songbird close at their heels. When they caught up with him he was standing before a wall of lilies that barred the river like an overgrown garden gate. He stepped aside to allow Jai to take the lead.
The sword danced among the flowers alive, the iron flashing brightly, and it was all Jai could do to keep up. A flurry of lilies filled the air, a winter storm. Black stems, thick and thin, crashed into the shallow river as Jai cleared a path of twenty fins through the formerly impassable brambles. He might never have stopped, so caught up in the pulse of his movements, if the Dangler had not put a hand on his shoulder, recalling him to his senses.
Jai looked down. He had almost stepped into a hole in the water—the fisherman had pulled him back just in time.
The children stared at the hole. It was identical to the one they had encountered in the cavern that morning and it had an equally arresting effect on the river. Water drained into the abyss and vanished from sight. Ceder leaned over the hole and peered down; weak-kneed and nauseous, she threw a hand to her forehead and Jai had to pull her back before she fell over, too.
“How can there be a hole in water, anyway?” she asked defensively, steadying herself. “How come it doesn’t just fill up?”
The Dangler fixed her with a penetrating stare until Ceder felt that the fisherman’s gaze was boring a hole of its own into her mind. She turned her eyes away.
The Dangler held his fishing pole in front of him, preparing to bait his hook. Before taking a worm from his bag of bait, he looked to Astray. The cub had already bitten another cobalt petal off his necklace—the last of its color—and was offering it to the fisherman. “I would like to try my luck again,” the Dangler explained to the children as he accepted the cub’s gift, “if you can tolerate a short wait.”
Jai figured the Dangler was going to take his time over the hole whether they minded the delay or not, and that it was unlikely to be ‘short,’ so he nodded dumbly in acquiescence and sat down on the riverbank beside Ceder.
In near-total darkness the Dangler pierced his hook through the luminescent blue petal and dipped the line into the hole. Working the reel with expert patience he lowered the unusual bait little by little.
While the children watched and waited, quickly growing bored, Ceder picked the petals off several fallen lilies and ran them through a plucked-free strand of her hair. She tied a knot in the loop and lowered the necklace over Jai’s head. His cheeks flushed and he pretended to busy himself picking loose chips of black wood from the edge of his sword. Astray watched the scene unfold with dry amusement.
The Dangler jerked like he had received an electric shock. “Ah ha!” he exhaled in triumph, reeling in his line as fast as possible, racing against some frantic clock.
All the flowers began to fall. For a moment the world was serene, quiet and perfect, and then a great din of breaking branches, snapping stems, and rupturing roots conquered the quietude as the Soridwood crumbled apart like a house of cards. A chunk of wood larger than the boat crashed into the ground next to the children, sending an explosion of silt and smashed lilies everywhere.
“Back to the boat!” the Dangler bellowed. “Now!”
Ceder pulled Jai to his feet and they took off at once. Astray and the songbird zipped ahead of them, but the Dangler remained behind, leaning over the hole, unwilling to quit until he had caught what he came for. “Not again!” Jai wailed when he saw the fisherman was still prioritizing his pastime over their present safety.
The distance to the boat was not far, but the run back seemed to last forever. Fragments of the thicket fell all around, creating a chaotic contrast to the thousands of slowly falling flowers. Jai and Ceder dodged left and right, back and forth, mice in a maze asunder. The river reawakened and buffeted them back one step for every two they took until at last, hand in hand, they arrived at the boat—or the boat arrived at them—and dove inside. They hid under the Dangler’s cape as if shielding their eyes would protect them from the raining destruction. The river rocked back and forth in shockwaves from the wreckage. While yet cowering under the fisherman’s cape, they heard his wavering voice call out, “The egg! Where is the second egg?”
The Dangler landed in the boat like a meteorite. Ceder flung the satchel to him and watched as he deposited another silver speck of light into one of the enchanted eggs. He shoved the satchel back into Ceder’s hands—both eggs were as tranquil as sleeping babies—then he grabbed up his pole, preparing to cast at a moment’s notice.
“What is it with this guy?” Jai groaned. “Can’t he ever stop?”
The Dangler cast his line high into the air and hooked a black branch that was on a collision course for Jai and Ceder. He whipped his pole back like he was cracking a whip, jerking the falling fragment off its trajectory to one side of the river. Jai nearly swallowed his tongue in astonishment.
The Dangler spared no time to check on the children—his every drop of concentration was vigilantly fixed on the sky, scanning the hailstorm of falling brambles to determine which posed the deadliest risk. Over and over he cast his hook high and far to rip plummeting shards of wood out of harm’s way before they smashed onto the boat. The songbird joined the fray without hesitation, her courage a rock, darting in and out among the raining ruins and whistling to the fisherman whenever his back was turned to an imminent threat.
The children clenched their eyes shut, expecting to be pulverized at any second. The Dangler’s mad vigil seemed to last all night, but finally he dropped into the bottom of the boat and said, “I only missed one.”
Jai and Ceder could hear nothing but the gurgling of the river. They lifted off the cape. Staggering heaps of solid debris lined both sides of the river, but these were quickly carpeted with lilies. Within minutes the landscape looked like flowering hillsides in full bloom, not the ruinous cemetery of a far-reaching empire of bracken and nettles.
With a long, winding whistle, the songbird fell from the sky, spiraling down crookedly with a broken wing. The Dangler caught her in his open palm, then lowered her to a gentle perch on the tip of his fishing pole, held low so the children could see better.
The songbird shuddered and twitched involuntarily. Jai and Ceder were unsure what to say, whether to say anything at all.
Astray leapt up and deftly snuck a purple petal into the bird’s beak, then latched onto the fishing pole and bent it down sharply, releasing the pole and the little bird like a slingshot. She disappeared into the dark sky in the blink of an eye. The glowing petal in her beak left an indigo rainbow in the night before the wind came to sweep it away.
When the last lily had fallen to the ground, the Dangler turned his stony gaze heavenward. “The stars are bright tonight,” he said to the children. “Look there, to the west, the constellation of the Flying Fish.” Like chalk on a black slate, he traced the outline of a cluster of stars with the end of his fishing pole. “Look, above us, the Holy Tree. And to the east, dimly, the Great Fountain. Look still, farther eas
t—as bright as can be, the Riverlilly.” With his pole he drew the shape of a ship without sails. “Do you see it? These two stars—” he tapped them both, “—are its passengers.” But when he looked for an answer from the children he saw that they were sound asleep.
The Year Three Hundred & Thirty-Three,
The forlorn fisherman wandered the forest for a time without account, walking in circles, crossing bridges. After leaving the wishing well he made his way to the river, but his beloved was not there. The forest was closed. The world was walled away, locked outside the loop.
When he encountered the fat, green frogs in the forest they jeered at him and disappeared. He tried to find the tower again to wish away his fate, but with the woodwind tree unmade the shortcut to the tower was forever concealed. There were not even any fish in the river so that he might ply his sport to pass the years. Utterly alone, his madness grew with every step he took.
For a mind that marches in circles, there is no flow of time, and a mind without time cannot be trapped by hours that run in a ring. When the last enduring sparks of selfhood and sanity, memory and motivation flickered out of the fisherman’s mind, he stepped out of the trap, a starving prisoner sliding between the bars of his cage.
The fisherman walked out of the fog into the light of day. He was free of the forest but his mind was lost. As though summoned by magnetic force he made his way west, drawn inexorably to the distant sea. When he reached the desert of red dunes he found he could not pass on foot. The sands burned hot enough to vaporize his entire body.
He found a fallen log in the mountains nearby and set it upon the river. This would be his boat. He required nothing more. When he reached open water the sea itself bent over backwards to see him safely to Coral Wing.
He was taken at once to the King and Queen, who welcomed him as an old friend. The fisherman stared blankly ahead and gave no sign that he had ever seen two unicorns in his life, or that he was any more impressed than if they had been a pair of shrimp. Nevertheless, they were determined to show him every comfort the castle had to offer. They gave him the highest room in Wingtip Tower. From his window the view of the sea encompassed all the world.
The fisherman ate only apples and drank only water. To guests he seldom spoke and what he did say was abstruse and esoteric. He talked of the past and the future, of the sun and the moon, of life, of death, of magic, and of love. Yet these are not issues that sensible fish adhere to and it was not long before he had no guests at all but for the King and Queen and the devoted jesterfish who brought his apples to him.
There was a fountain of clear water in his room. When he was alone the fisherman often stared into the fountain as a man stares into a flame, removing his mind to a bygone time. He would press his lips to the water as if in so doing he might steal one more kiss from the sea. When he pulled his face back the water in the fountain froze in perfect stillness, mirroring whatever image he held in his mind, whether of fish or flowers or the King and Queen themselves.
Castle servants carried the frozen statues away, hundreds by the day and more. If they complained of the tedious chore to the King and Queen, they were rebuked and ordered to accommodate the fisherman’s every wish.
In gratitude for all their patience the fisherman made the King and Queen a special gift from his fountain—a small compass with a unique attribute: it would only point to water. He told them the idea came to him while looking out his window. The King and Queen received this gift with haunted recognition, and stowed it away out of sight until the day should come that they could make a gift of it to someone else.
As the years rolled on, a rumor spread over sea and land claiming the return of the Man in the Moon.