Toby and the Secrets of the Tree

  A few paces away, Mrs. Asseldor was watching her eldest son, Milo, who was holding his head in his hands. Of all her children, he was the only one not to have had a stormy time. Or rather, the only one not to have shown it. And the only one to have endured everyone else’s tempestuous emotions. Lola, Mano, Mo, and now Lila . . .

  People said that Milo was a boy with no problems, which meant that sometimes they forgot to take proper care of him.

  Mrs. Asseldor went over to sit next to her son. She stroked Milo’s hair tenderly, the way she used to when he was little, and hugged him close to her.

  Young Lila didn’t waste any time. She had made a promise to herself that she’d catch up with Toby, and she knew the places where she was most likely to find him: the house in the Low Branches and, most of all, the lake. She had as good a knowledge of the region as Toby.

  The insects that saw the little russet-colored slip of a girl flash past, dressed in blue and galloping over the black bark, must have thought they were dreaming. The emotion of it all made her even more beautiful. She would have made a black ant blush.

  By the next day, she was close to Seldor. Lila was fully aware that since their departure from the farm, the Asseldors were not welcome in the region. So she hid for a few hours to get some sleep.

  As she continued her descent at dusk, she thought of her Nils. What did she know about him? Their entire story amounted to an unspoken conversation that had taken place over a few weeks. Silence, trivial words, their clothes touching by accident. Nothing more. And here she was risking her life for him.

  “My Nils . . .”

  All she knew was that he was innocent of his crime. She had heard him talking to Toby about those visits to the Nest.

  Lila stopped and caught her breath for a moment. She put her hands on her hips to get rid of a stitch.

  “I’d given up waiting for you. . . . You’re late for our meeting.”

  The voice came from behind the skeleton of a dead leaf. It was a lugubrious voice, a voice that Lila had heard somewhere before.

  When the man appeared, she didn’t recognize him right away.

  It was Garric, the Garrison Commander of Seldor and the author of those letters. The spurned lover. He had a horrible smile on his face. Lila had humiliated him by running away, and he’d been dreaming of revenge for a long time.

  Lila grasped all this in an instant. She turned around and started running. The stitch had returned, but she kept going as fast as she could. She repeated Nils’s name as if it was a magic charm that would make her disappear, fly away, vanish into thin air.

  “Nils!”

  But Lila could almost smell Garric just behind her. With every step she took, he got closer. Blinded by tears, Lila was calling on the Tree and the sky to help her. It wasn’t her own life she was trying to save — it was Nils’s life. She had a mission. If her life stopped here, then Nils’s life would end too.

  Garric was puffing just behind her.

  When she felt the man’s hands grabbing her dress, she let out a scream that made the lichen creepers all around her tremble. She fell to the ground as Garric’s hand clutched her throat.

  “We could have been happy,” said Garric. “We could have —”

  A hiccup finished off his sentence. His body collapsed on top of Lila.

  A sword had just gone through Garric’s back. A sword made from a hornet’s stinger, and Lila even felt the tip of it brush against her.

  She jerked to shake off the body before collapsing in the snow.

  An elegant man in colorful clothes stood beside her. Lila, who had never seen Arbayan before, was completely breathless on the soaking bark.

  Arbayan pulled off his glove and held out his hand. He had been following Garric since the previous day. On learning that the imbecile had let Elisha get away, Leo had charged Arbayan with punishing him.

  Lila took the man’s hand. It was firm and honest, and he helped her get to her feet.

  “Thank you,” said Lila.

  “I should have acted earlier. I’m sorry, miss.”

  Arbayan was staring at her, and Lila responded with a tired smile.

  She felt safe. He was clearly a kind man; perhaps he could help her find Toby.

  Arbayan retreated respectfully with his customary good manners before turning and heading off.

  And then it happened: Lila said one word too many. A single word that would change the course of history.

  “Wait!”

  Arbayan froze. He came calmly back toward her and looked at her with his blue eyes. Lila drew even closer. Yes, she trusted him.

  “I’m looking for somebody,” she explained. “Can you help me?”

  “I don’t know,” said Arbayan.

  Lila folded her arms and in doing so closed her coat. Her wet hair fell over her eyes.

  “I’m looking for Toby Lolness.”

  Arbayan didn’t move. It had been a long time since he’d heard that name. And it was a name that would interest Leo Blue.

  “Toby Lolness?” he whispered very softly.

  “He’s got to be somewhere around here, in the Low Branches.”

  “Perhaps,” said Minos Arbayan.

  Lila needed to talk. This man had saved her life.

  “He’s trying to meet up again with the girl he loves. . . . He told me about a lake in the Low Branches.”

  Arbayan might have looked calm and distant, but his heart was beating fast.

  “The girl he loves? Is that you by any chance, miss?”

  “No . . .” She smiled. “Her name is Elisha Lee.”

  Lila had just handed all the keys over to the enemy.

  “I don’t know your Toby Lolness,” said Arbayan without batting an eyelid. “And I’m not sure about any lake in our Tree. Good luck to you, miss.”

  He headed off, with a strange bitter taste in his mouth.

  Leo Blue was waiting for him an hour away from there, wrapped in a black shawl and sitting near a carpet of glowing embers. He didn’t even look up at his adviser when he returned.

  “It’s done,” said Arbayan.

  Leo’s eyes were lost in the fire.

  “Garric is dead,” Arbayan went on. He crouched down on the other side of the fire, hesitating.

  “I’ve got something to tell you, Leo Blue.”

  This time, Leo could hear the emotion in Arbayan’s voice. He turned to him and said, “Speak.”

  But Arbayan no longer had any desire to speak. He no longer knew on whose side the truth really lay.

  “Speak,” Leo said again.

  And Minos Arbayan spoke. Once again, he felt as if each word was distancing him from the person he really was.

  On the other side of the fire, the poison of hatred and fury welled up in Leo Blue’s veins.

  Elisha and Toby.

  Toby and Elisha.

  They loved each other.

  An icy gust ran across Leo’s body.

  The freezing wind made Arbayan shiver and almost extinguished the flames as it passed by.

  Alone in the night, Leo set off in the direction of the lake, to meet Toby.

  Mo Asseldor held out a bowl to Elisha.

  Warm rays of light spread across the floor in the house of colors.

  Spring!

  On these first fine days, the cacophony in the branches sounded like an orchestra tuning up. Intoxicated by the honey smell of the buds, swallows whistled and the flowing sap sounded a deep note. The bark was cracking in the sunshine. Melted snow ran in rivulets around the house.

  Elisha took the bowl in her hands. A silvery powder floated on its surface. Isha had prescribed her own remedy, and in just a few days, the fine fern powder was beginning to save her.

  Elisha pressed the rim delicately to her mother’s lips. Isha sipped at the infusion, keeping her eyes on her daughter. She sensed that Elisha had changed, that she was both kinder and stronger.

  “It’s over,” Elisha repeated. “We’re heading for the good weather now.”
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  Every now and then, Isha turned toward Mo Asseldor.

  “He’s doing better, the little one.”

  Beautiful Isha’s words made them laugh, because she was the one visibly coming back to life, hour by hour.

  Mo was playing at being the man of the house. He blocked up the holes that recent winters had nibbled out of the old door, and he washed the squares of cloth. Mo returned from these epic laundry sessions with weary, multicolored arms.

  Sometimes Isha worried about the arrival of spring. She always received a visit from a regiment of soldiers at this time of year. They came down to the Low Branches, when the snows melted, to inspect the ruined homes.

  The year before, they had ended up staying the whole night. The hours had gone by slowly for Isha, who was hiding in the wood store. With each log the soldiers took, the pile had gotten lower, and she was frightened of being found out. Luckily, they had left just before the last layer of wood.

  Now Mo kept an eye out for what was happening in the distance. He knew they might come looking for them, even in the most remote part of the Low Branches. When he noticed a figure below the house climbing the hill with some difficulty, he flung himself to the ground and crawled as far as Elisha.

  “They’re here!”

  The pair of them helped drag Isha Lee behind the last blue cloth screen. They huddled there, between the cloth and the wooden wall.

  “Leave me,” whispered Isha. “You can still make your getaway. . . .”

  Neither Elisha nor Mo moved.

  The door creaked: dragging, unstable footsteps. Isha thought she recognized the limping man from the Great Border, a soldier who sometimes came to get drunk in the house he believed to be deserted.

  The footsteps came to a halt. And a dull note rang out. Elisha thought it was a song, a sad tune she’d heard somewhere before. But her mother was the first to recognize the refrain as the music that everybody shares, whatever branch or era you’re born into. The only song you hum on the first day of your life through until the last. A sob. A stifled sob.

  Elisha appeared gingerly from behind her cloth screen. Finding someone sitting in the middle of the room, sobbing into his sleeve, she went up to him.

  “It’s you, Plok Tornett. . . . It’s you. . . .”

  Plok didn’t seem startled. But his tears flowed twice as freely when he heard Elisha’s voice, and he hugged her tight.

  Just then, Isha appeared on Mo’s arm. None of them knew where Plok Tornett had come from or how he had survived, but they gave him a king’s welcome.

  For days on end, Plok had fed on the milk of wild grubs. He had chewed on bark and sucked on snow. He didn’t seem too weakened by the experience, but he looked more distraught than ever. He had found himself alone, in the middle of the night, at the exit to the tunnel, when all the others had been prevented from going any farther by the roof caving in. He’d careened down the branches without knowing where he was going. His legs had instinctively led him to the Low Branches.

  He had looked for the house he used to share with his uncle and found it burned down, with the charred remains of grubs on the ground. Both Joe Mitch’s and Leo Blue’s men had destroyed everything in their path.

  That was when Plok had remembered young Elisha. She had always been kind to him, and he was grateful for that. Perhaps there was some hope for him with Elisha and her mother. So he limped as far as their house. But when he found their home abandoned, he crumpled to the ground.

  Which is why it came as such a relief to see Elisha, Isha, and Mo.

  “You can stay with us,” Elisha told him.

  She had always suspected there was a wound at the heart of Plok Tornett’s life. Vigo Tornett, his uncle, always insisted that Plok had been cheerful and talkative, both as a child and later as a young man. Plok’s loss of the power of speech had been sudden and brutal. In an instant, he had been struck dumb and stalked by fear.

  Plok accepted the pancakes Mo Asseldor gave him. He gulped them down, as if worried someone might start eating them from the other end.

  That evening, Isha contemplated the three young people in front of the fire. Proud Elisha had repainted the blue lines on the soles of her feet in caterpillar ink. She was staring dreamily into the flames. Mo and Plok were asleep, propped up against each other. There had never been so many people living in this house.

  And then Isha thought back to the day when she had arrived on this branch, sixteen years earlier, alone in the world. At the time, she couldn’t believe there would ever be any light in her life again. She no longer had anybody. She had left the Grass full of hope and love, and on the arm of her Butterfly, but she had lost everything along the way. Misfortune had swooped down on her.

  She had sought refuge in a hole in the bark that would become the house of colors, situated where the path forked, just above the Great Border. With her energy failing, she had tucked herself away. Everything frightened her: the way the wind twisted the branches, even the night sounds, which were different from those in the Prairie.

  It was one week before the birth: seven days and seven nights before Elisha. Isha stayed in the hole, listening to the creaking of the Tree and saying her lover’s name over and over again.

  Sensing the hour of the birth approaching, she had felt terribly abandoned. She had so often dreamed of Butterfly holding her hand when the moment came. There are some kinds of loneliness that make you want to disappear altogether.

  But just holding their baby in her arms was all it took to understand that she’d been wrong. She realized that she hadn’t been alone for the last nine months after all. When she had found the strength to leave the Grass with her love, and above all when she had seen Butterfly dying in front of her, Elisha was already there and would never leave her.

  The four dwellers in the house of colors stayed together all night long. They were huddled against each other, on one side of the flames.

  Mo was thinking about his family.

  Plok was chasing his perpetual demons as he swayed his head slowly backward and forward.

  Elisha was meditating on her plans. She knew she would set out the next day in search of Toby, but she wasn’t ready to tell her mother yet. Toby was hiding somewhere in the branches. She had to find him. She would start with the lake.

  As for Isha, she still held the miniature portrait of Butterfly in her closed fist.

  When he had given her this round frame, Butterfly had explained to Isha that it was the work of a great painter. A man called Alamala. Isha was eternally grateful to the man whose paintbrushes had fixed the face of love forever.

  Today Isha had made the decision that it was time to tell the whole story to Elisha. She was going to talk about her daughter’s father. During the night, she rehearsed what she would say in the morning. Words that would stick the pieces of the past back together again and put faces to shadows.

  When the others dropped off to sleep, she was still watching over them.

  Not far from there, a young man with boards strapped to his feet was heading down the snow-covered branches. Despite the way barely being lit by the moon, he was sliding down at an incredible pace, before he side-slipped at the bottom of the branches and then set off again over bark slopes.

  Toby was heading toward Elisha. His boards left two parallel tracks that cut out every now and then as he jumped over an obstacle or a patch of bare wood. The snow was thin on the ground, but there was still a sufficient covering in the lichen forests of the Low Branches. He had to stay in the shadows, between the blades of moss, reemerging in a chance beam of moonlight.

  Sometimes a snowy bud appeared in his path before he’d had a chance to spot it. He used it as a springboard and felt as if he was flying. Each time, he landed firmly back on his boards, with no loss of speed. His bluish figure disappeared in a veil of snow.

  When he finally came to a stop, day was breaking. He was exhausted and his breath looked purple in the morning light.

  Toby wasn’t far from the lake.
He was sure that Elisha would be there. His eyes were stinging, and already the smell of dawn was familiar. He recalled their first meeting. That strong little girl, brown as the wood of the Tree, who had watched him swimming. He could still hear his first words to her: “It’s beautiful,” he had said, staring at the lake.

  Elisha had taught him how to look at the world.

  He kicked off the remaining snow from his boards. He still had to head down for another few minutes, and then he’d see their lake.

  Toby was about to set out when he heard a beating wing whipping up the air behind him. He turned around and threw himself into the snow to avoid the object. But a second boomerang followed at ground level, and Toby rolled to the side. The cruelly sharp blade brushed against the back of his head. Toby suddenly stood up.

  Leo was standing in the moonlight, fifty paces higher up. He grabbed his two weapons as they came back to him and stared at Toby. Any closer and he’d have sliced his enemy’s head open.

  Toby ran his hand over the small cut on his head. He was bleeding. He jumped back onto the slope and started sliding down again. He had only his bare hands to fight with. He couldn’t tackle Leo out in the open.

  The two boomerangs, hurled simultaneously from both hands, followed him at top speed. Toby could see that they were about to cross. Their blades gleamed. He side-slipped and stopped dead as the boomerangs passed by, just in front of him, brushing against each other.

  Toby continued on with his downward journey. He had listened for the sound of the weapons going back into their sheath. But Leo was chasing him now. As he turned around, Toby spotted his enemy running through a riverbed that followed the snowy slope. Toby bent forward to pick up speed. Leo looked like he was flying over the stream of water. They were both approaching the cliff overhanging the lake.

  The snow was becoming patchier. Toby’s snowboards were scraping against the damp bark.

  He stopped on the edge of the precipice.

  Leo hadn’t let Toby out of his sight as he followed behind. Toby kicked off his boards and started running down a sheer path between some moss bushes. He could see the purple lake with huge patches of ice floating on it. On the other side, the waterfall was like a great torrent because of the melting snow.