Leo Blue had left the mud of Seldor and the gray atmosphere of the garrison behind him, setting off in search of something he had wanted to learn about for a long time. His desire was so strong that it woke him at night when he was sleeping in the Treetop Nest.
The Low Branches. The region haunted him.
He had only set foot there when rushing through on his way to the Great Border. And yet so many of the strands of his life passed through there.
Deep down, Leo Blue didn’t believe that Toby was dead. The enemy doesn’t die. He sleeps. He might wake up at any moment. Leo knew it was in the Low Branches that Toby would wake up one day. Perhaps he was still fast asleep there.
Leo arrived at Onessa in the middle of the day. He stopped a short distance from the Lolness family home, on the lookout for the slightest movement. So this was where Toby’s family had spent their years of exile and where they had prepared their act of treachery.
He waited.
Strips of bark had been ripped from the roof, and a clump of black mushrooms blocked the door and front steps. Just as it had done everywhere else, the lichen forests had invaded the garden.
Leo didn’t trust appearances. He grabbed a boomerang from his back and sent it spinning in the direction of the house. The weapon sliced through a window and disappeared inside the room for a second, before shattering the shutters and reemerging from another window. The boomerang came back toward Leo. He lowered his shoulder, and it slid back into its sheath without his having touched it.
Nothing had moved. The house was empty.
Leo went in.
There was a smell of old sheets washed in black soap. Leo touched the few objects that remained and lifted the curtain by the small bed near the fireplace. He spent a while in Sim’s office. The drawers had been pillaged long ago, but a small piece of notepaper had fallen between the wooden floor slats. Leo managed to read the faded ink.
To do Monday
Play with Toby
Dance with Maya
A little more
A little less brain
Leo recognized the handwriting. It belonged to Sim Lolness, Toby’s father. He read and reread the words several times. He could hear the deserted house creaking.
Leo Blue crumpled the piece of paper in his hand. He mustn’t show any signs of emotion. He got up and hurled Sim’s chair against a small picture, which fell off the wall.
The round painting shattered on the floor. It was a portrait of Maya Lolness, drawn by Toby.
Leo left the house. His fear of betraying any weakness made him even more violent. He ran in the snow between dead branches and lichen thickets. He banished Sim’s words from his mind. That crazy old professor was dangerous, as was his entire family.
Leo sped up.
An even stronger desire was driving him now: Leo wanted to see the branches where Elisha had grown up. By an extraordinary coincidence, his greatest enemy and his greatest love had lived in the same humid jungle region, a few hours apart.
Leo wondered if they had ever met.
The whereabouts of the Lee household in the Low Branches had been explained to him. But it took him two days to find it because the vegetation was dense and tortuous. Leo was able to move around with astounding agility. He could make it through certain passages by his arms alone, swinging from twig to twig for several minutes without ever touching the ground.
Leo’s heart was pounding as he approached Elisha’s house. Throwing caution to the wind, Leo walked straight in through the round door. Thoughts of his beloved Elisha swirled with thoughts of Sim Lolness’s note, and of his former best friend, Toby. He surveyed the colorful drapes and eventually thrust his head into one of the faded mattresses, but he couldn’t manage to cry. For a long time now, he had been a stranger to tears.
Leo lay on his stomach, listening to the sounds of the wilderness.
He didn’t know that a long time ago Toby had spent his first night in the Low Branches in the home of Elisha and her mother, on that very same mattress. Nor did he know that Elisha had sobbed into it for weeks on end after Toby’s mysterious disappearance.
Leo stood up. Why didn’t Elisha want him? He would give her everything.
He left the colorful home.
If his heart hadn’t been so full of anger and turmoil, he might have noticed a bluish haze rising from the hearth and that the embers in the fireplace were hot.
Someone was still living in the house.
Leo lost his way again before finding a path in a moss wood that snaked along a wide branch.
When he reached the top, he discovered the kind of landscape he had least expected to find at the heart of the Tree. It was extraordinary: a huge frozen lake surrounded by smooth bark beaches, overlooked by a snow-covered cliff.
A waterfall hadn’t yet been caught by the ice and cascaded into a little pool of clear water. The rest of the lake was covered by a fine white carpet.
Leo made his way down. He wondered how the sun penetrated this far. He walked on the frozen lake, turning around to admire the beauty of his surroundings. One day, when it was all over, he would bring Elisha here. And that was a promise.
One day, when this is all over, I will come back here with Elisha.
Hidden two paces away, Toby Lolness was promising himself the same thing, when, all of a sudden, he saw Leo Blue standing on the frozen lake.
Toby recognized him right away, and a shudder ran through his body. He hid in the snow.
Leo Blue. There. Walking on Elisha’s lake. How had he gotten there?
Elisha had fallen for him. She must be with him. Leo had won. These were Toby’s immediate thoughts.
Toby was crouching on the cliff overhanging the lake. For several hours, he had been digging to force his way into the secret cave. There must only be a few fistfuls of snow left to clear now. It was the beginning of winter, and the sunny weather had softened the fine layer of snow that had formed. Toby knew that the answer lay in this cave. For the next few minutes, his life would hang in the balance.
Following an attack of vertigo, he had turned around to breathe deeply, and that was when he’d noticed the figure on the lake.
Now, half buried in the snow, he was watching.
Leo Blue was on his own and looked as if he was taking in the landscape for the first time.
Toby started to get his hopes up again. . . .
Leo didn’t have the face of somebody who lived with Elisha. He didn’t look like somebody who saw Elisha every morning, who watched her drink her milk from a bowl and saw the tip of her nose get covered in cream, or who saw her braiding her hair with one hand, faster than a spider spinning its web. He didn’t look like somebody who could touch the butterfly powder that her green skirt left on his knees or who listened to Elisha’s slightly husky voice, her tinkling laughter, her rustling footsteps, and everything else.
Leo didn’t look like somebody who enjoyed all that, each day and for always.
If he was really that lucky, he would jump, he would dance, he would fly. He would make the ice melt, thought Toby.
For fun, Leo threw his boomerang. It brushed against the snow on the lake before heading toward the cliff, spinning very close to Toby. It followed the shore all the way around. Leo started to head back to the path again. The boomerang slid into the sheath on his back.
For a moment, Toby thought about throwing himself on top of Leo before he disappeared. He wanted to fight. But he realized he didn’t know anything. “Forewarned is forearmed,” his horrible grandmother, Radegonde Alnorell, used to say. Toby knew nothing, or very little, about the recent history of the Tree, so he needed to bide his time before acting.
Leo Blue vanished.
Toby let a few minutes go by before starting to excavate the snow again. Very quickly, the final layer gave way.
Toby entered the cave, covered in sweat.
All those months he had spent in this cave suddenly came back to him as a cruel memory. Fear, loneliness, silence. He stopped i
n the darkness, unable to go any farther. He closed his eyes and waited for his rising panic to subside.
Once he was sitting down, he grabbed his peashooter and put the tip on some wood shavings that he had scrabbled around for. He held the peashooter between his palms and feet, rolling it very quickly in the style of the Grass people. Flames appeared and he threw on other bits of wood gathered from around the cave.
When his eyes were warmed by the firelight, he looked up at the cave walls. The drawings were still there, as red as ever, just as he had painted them years before. Toby went over to the place on the wall where he had depicted Elisha, all that time ago. He was about to find out . . .
There she was, drawn in red ink, sitting on her heels. During his years in the Grass, whenever his memory failed him, Toby pictured this portrait in order to recall his friend’s features.
He ran his hand over the painted face, then rested it on her eye.
The Tree Stone was there. It hadn’t moved. Toby felt as if a ray of sunlight had entered the cave: Elisha hadn’t betrayed him. He took a long deep breath.
Since the first days of snow, he had known that he would head straight for the lake. Miraculously, he had had a narrow escape from his collapsing trap on the Ring Road. The avalanche had carried him off, but the snow wasn’t too deep at the start of the season. It was thick enough to soften his fall, but not enough to suffocate him.
Toby had groggily gotten to his feet. He had followed the convoy of hunters all the way to the gates of the Low Branches. He had dodged the terrifying Border Guards and found his country overrun by lichen forests.
The world had changed. The wood of the Tree was crumbling under moss, ferns, and snaking snow-covered ivy. The Tree was tired, and its lack of summer leaves meant that an abundance of weeds was able to spring up in full daylight. A hanging garden had sprung up in the branches.
Toby traveled through the landscape with his eyes wide open.
He hadn’t gone by his house at Onessa, or by Elisha’s, but had come straight to the cave before the snow blocked its entrance.
The Tree Stone was Elisha and Toby’s secret. If it was still there, it meant there was still a chance that Elisha . . .
Toby’s hand went instinctively toward the other eye in the painting. There was a small object pressed into the wood, just as the Stone had been on the other side. He removed it with his nail and walked over to the fire.
It was a translucent red shell. This time, Toby started crying. Three words echoed in his memory: I’m coming back.
Toby had given the tiny shell to Elisha when they were separated for the first time. He had let it drift to the surface of the lake, and she had bent down to scoop it up before drying it on her dress.
Elisha had given it back to Toby on his return, weeks later.
“I kept it with me all the time,” she had said, blushing a bit. “I even called it ‘I’m coming back.’”
She had shown Toby how she liked to look at the sun through the translucent red shell.
“I’d hold it in front of my eyes and say to myself, over and over again, ‘I’m coming back.’”
Toby clutched the shell.
When Elisha had had to leave her home, long after Toby had disappeared, she had come up to the cave one last time and had pressed the shell into the painted eye. For all these years, her portrait above the lake had never stopped saying, “I’m coming back.”
This hope continued to sparkle in Elisha’s eyes.
Toby took the Stone and put it with the shell at the bottom of his peashooter quiver. He looked at the picture on the cave wall for the last time. It had just made him a promise.
Toby clambered down the cliff below the cave and skirted the lake to avoid leaving any tracks. He knew he shouldn’t linger in the Low Branches. He needed to be quick, especially with Leo Blue in the region. Toby needed to find out where Elisha, Sim, and Maya were, and what fate awaited the captive Grass people.
He knew of only one free man who might be able to help him. Still free? He hoped so. Three years earlier, this boy had saved his life, as Toby had learned from Elisha’s lips during his last winter in the Tree.
He was a woodcutter’s son.
His name was Nils Amen.
Toby pushed his fur hat down on his head and set out.
What he hadn’t noticed, not even for a moment, were two wild eyes staring at him from under the waterfall. Two eyes surrounded by long eyelashes and a strange face.
A woman was bathing in the cold water. Her loose hair floated around her. Her shoulders appeared and disappeared again under the surface. Her cheeks were slightly flat.
After Toby disappeared, she had quickly gotten out of the water and run toward her clothes, which were laid out on a twig. She’d only seen Toby from behind and hadn’t recognized him in his hunter’s hat. Those kind of men often roamed the region. She had to hide. Once her daughter had left, she had gone back to live in her old house and had stayed there in secret, without a single person knowing about it.
Her name was Isha Lee.
“Parasites! Don’t talk to me about parasites!”
“I just wanted to say —”
Sim Lolness stood up solemnly and said, “There’s no such thing as a parasite.”
The professor was addressing about thirty students sitting solemnly in front of him. Most of them were over eighty. They were all dressed in brown pajamas and didn’t exactly look like school children.
Some of the most influential characters from the Tree Council were gathered there: scholars and thinkers, in short, all the brains still alive between the Treetop and the Low Branches. They were prisoners of Joe Mitch, and they worked in the Crater.
In the back row, Zef Clarac and Vigo Tornett rubbed shoulders with Councillor Rolden, who was close to one hundred and three years old.
For several months now, at nightfall, after infernal days spent digging in the Crater, this brilliant group attended night school.
Joe Mitch had accepted Sim’s proposal, despite having no idea what a school was. Of late, Mitch had been trying to go easy on his prisoner, because Sim had made him a promise. Namely, that Sim would surrender the keys to his famous discovery before winter was out. He knew that Mitch would take it out on Maya if he didn’t keep his word.
Just the thought of knowing Balina’s Secret at last was enough to make the Friendly Neighbor squeal with pleasure every evening.
As for the night school, Mitch had only imposed two conditions: no writing and no Grass people. The first condition didn’t surprise Sim. Writing had been forbidden in the Tree for some time. Luckily, the spoken word and drawing can convey even the most complicated ideas.
But Mitch’s second condition had given the professor a few sleepless nights. Dozens of Grass people were digging in another part of the Crater, which was separated by fencing and stakes. Sim was deeply interested in their fate. To his mind, the night school should include them too.
The professor ended up giving in to these two demands. It would have been as difficult to change Joe Mitch’s mind as it would to swap the cigarette butt in his mouth for a piece of straw to chew on.
Sim found the building where he wanted to set up the school. It was the former Weevil Keepers’ hut. The Crater had expanded so much that this hut was now right above the precipice. High up and deserted, it towered over the depths of the mine.
It took only a few days for the school to open. There were twenty subjects. Sim taught seventeen of them, and the rest were divided between a few aging specialists.
On this particular evening, Sim Lolness was giving a lecture entitled “Ladybugs Don’t Have Trash Cans.”
He was standing behind a large upturned wooden crate that served as his desk. Next to him, brave Plok Tornett, the grubber from the Low Branches, was improvising as the professor’s assistant. He took his tasks seriously, wiping the big blackboard that Sim was drawing on, helping Sim with his experiments. Plok, who was mute, was the youngest member of the group. He h
adn’t spoken a word for at least sixteen years.
“Ladybugs Don’t Have Trash Cans.” Sim Lolness wanted to prove to his public that nature doesn’t produce garbage. His presentation was brilliantly clear. Zef Clarac, who had forgotten how much of a dunce he’d been in his youth, was listening attentively. He thought it would be a good idea to raise his hand and offer a summary: “So basically, if I’ve understood this right, the parasites act as trash cans.”
Hearing the word “parasite” threw Sim Lolness into a rage.
“Parasites! Vermin! I don’t want to hear those words here, Mr. Clarac! Everybody is useful, and everybody depends on others.”
He had concluded with his famous phrase “There’s no such thing as a parasite.”
Everybody was familiar with Sim Lolness’s theory. He had revealed it for the first time when defending Nino and Tess Alamala in one of the greatest trials of the century.
The elderly night school audience had recognized Sim’s allusion to the moving story of the Alamalas, who had frequently been accused of living like parasites. Nino was a painter. His wife was a dancer and a tightrope walker. So how could they be useful to society?
Theirs had been a tragic end. Deep down, the professor was convinced that they had died of these accusations.
For personal reasons, the Alamala story had affected Sim deeply. He cast a watery eye to his right.
Maya.
Sitting on a stool in a corner of the classroom, Maya Lolness was knitting. She had a scarf on her head and was wearing the same brown pajamas as everyone else. She sat bolt upright, her sleeves, which were too wide for her, falling like wings. The convicts’ uniform looked more like haute couture on her.
For most of the time, Maya listened distractedly.
She knew all of these subjects by heart and mainly looked forward to old Rolden’s history lessons. Sometimes she stopped knitting to watch these impressive characters reduced to slavery by a few imbeciles. The worst part was seeing them digging from dawn till dusk in order to destroy the Tree, which they had always served.