“Your hair is falling out.”
“It was those sprayers. Your braid isn’t doing so well either.” Rope eased himself over the gunwale, grimacing as cold seawater flooded into his boots. The blue spray must have eaten through them. “We’re alive, aren’t we?” He spied a large gull on the beach, shifting from one grey form to another. A whisper of fear entered him through his shoulder, where Net sat. “Jo’s here.”
Two of Brook’s braids had split. They dangled raggedly about her shoulders. She touched them. “I must be very ugly.”
“You sound like Foam.” Rope cupped cold seawater in his hands and splashed it over his face and beard. Red dribbles rained from his jaw. When he finished washing the blood away, he took Brook’s hands in his. “You look beautiful.”
Brook squeezed his hands, hard. “I hope they’re all right. Foam and Shale.”
She clambered from the boat.
Jo was waiting on the beach. Her smooth white flesh was unmarked, but her silver eyes had dulled almost to grey.
“Grab this.” Brook handed her the painter and turned to Rope. “Should we pull up the boat, or scuttle it to cover our tracks?”
“Scuttle it! How would we find Foam and Shale without a boat?”
Jo said, “How would we find them with one?”
The dread that had been building in Rope since he woke went suddenly hard and painful, like a stone in his chest. “Can’t you turn into a breeze or something?”
Jo was wearing one of Brook’s deep blue tunics. Her white hair floated around her shoulders. “And do what? Look in every house in Delta? What if I cannot find them? What if they are on the Foot or the Sock, or not on Delta at all? They may be in Twist’s prison, or they may have escaped with the cloaked islander.”
Grey waves crawled across the beach. Jo turned a bracelet of blue shells around her wrist. Her long nails clicked and clattered. Rope remembered her on Shale’s island, callous at his father’s death. “I am tired of your excuses. And your orders.”
“Rope—” Brook followed him out of the water.
“If it wasn’t for you, pretending to be Twist,” Rope told the haunt, “we would never have lost Foam and Shale.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you would still be locked up. No, that isn’t right. If it wasn’t for me, you would still be back on your little lump of dirt, going out day after weary day for another hold of smelt or sea bass or oolichan and wearing the smell home at night as the badge of your manhood.”
The stony anger in Rope’s chest was growing, gouging his heart and lungs, making it hard to breathe. His big hands balled into fists.
Jo’s features blurred. Where moments before a white-haired haunt had stood, Rope now faced an islander with broad shoulders and a bloodied beard. Big callused hands. “Try it,” Jo whispered. “Come learn what Brook already knows.”
“Stop this,” Brook said.
“We wouldn’t be fighting if Jo hadn’t—”
Brook slapped Rope, hard. “Shut up! Shut up!”
Rope grabbed her wrist. It seemed thin as a bird’s bone in his strong hand. Her skin turned white around his fingers. “Don’t hit me,” he said.
“Don’t make me.”
They had spent better mornings together than this one.
The sun was well up before they decided what to do with the boat. They had to get rid of the dinghy so none of Twist’s patrols could find it and figure out where they had entered the forest. But the cursed boat was too heavy to drag up the shore and hide in the bushes. They had a sword, but didn’t dare hack at the hull until they holed her, for fear of making too much noise. For a moment Rope had thought Jo could turn to fire and burn the Eel to ashes, but of course that would have made too much smoke.
In the end he ran up the sail and got Jo to turn into a breeze, blowing the boat back onto the sea.
Rope and Brook sat on the boulders behind the beach and watched their empty dinghy head for the middle of the bay.
“There goes our last chance to warn the other islands,” Rope said.
“Other islanders already know about the invasion. Remember the cloaked man.”
Rope nodded. “True. But shouldn’t we rouse our own people, instead of taking up this mad quest into the heart of the forest?”
“Maybe. But that would only spin the war out, not stop it. Besides, there is one other reason for going to the Arbor.”
“Hm?”
Brook looked out into the empty sea. “She wills it. And haunts—”
“—get what they want.”
They had gathered a small pile of clams and mussels. Rope eyed them without enthusiasm. A deep bruise made his thigh throb and tremble. His back and wrist ached badly. “We shouldn’t leave Foam and Shale.”
“We have a job to do. We have our duty. If they are dead, there’s nothing we can do to help them. If they are well, we’ll meet again on Clouds End—if we stop the woodlanders. And to stop the woodlanders, we have to stop the Emperor.”
Rope tapped the Witness Knot around Brook’s wrist. “Those are your duties. Mine are to my ship and crew. My ship’s banging against some dock on Delta, in the hands of idiots who don’t know a sheet from a halyard. And my crew—” With a wet crunch Rope splintered a blueback shell with the butt of Gall’s sword and scraped up the clam within. “What did they do to deserve this?”
Softly, Brook said, “They were my friends.”
He wondered if Foam and Shale had eaten yet that morning. One day, Jo had said, life will slit you open like an oyster.
Brook fingered a clam. “Three moons to the Arbor, Jo said.”
“You really think Twist will send trackers after us?”
“We are more than escaped prisoners. We are islanders in league with a haunt. He has to know more about us.”
“I’d like to know how much she says is true. About needing humans near her to stay human.”
“That’s true, I think.” Across the bay, Jo was blowing their dinghy ever farther from land, out into the heart of the great wild sea. “Sometimes the world rushes over you and it seems so big, so big. And you are only a character in someone else’s story. A rag of Mist blown into shape by the wind. And then it’s time to put the kettle on the fire, or sew a button on, and that’s no story but your own,” Brook said. “But Jo—Jo has no need for buttons. She left the kettle behind, and chose the steam instead.”
Rope sighed. “Then I guess it’s up to us to hold her purpose steady until she has dealt with the Emperor.”
“If driving this haunt to the Arbor is what it takes to save Clouds End, then by Fathom, drive her I will.” Brook laughed without smiling. “Isn’t it funny? We used to think she was using us.”
Jo returned well before noon, and they started walking west along the shoreline, making for a creek she had spotted from the air.
“So how will you find the Arbor?” Rope asked.
“Twist marched an army through these forests. The birds saw them pass, the deer ran from them and the grass was trampled under their feet. The trees will be talking about it for months, if not years.”
Brook and Rope, laboring behind the haunt, glanced at one another. Rope shook his head. “Shale will kill us for stealing her adventure.”
They drank long and deep when they came to the creek’s mouth, and ate another meal of shellfish. Rope looked up the stream. “Not bad. I was afraid it would be too choked to follow. You can barely move for the undergrowth on some of the islands around Clouds End.”
“Those islands are but newly out of the Mist. Their woods are young.” Jo led them along the stream and into the forest. Little grew on the ground save moss and ferns. “Here the trees are older, and greater.”
“Soft ground for aching feet!”
“And tonight soft ground for aching everything,” Brook added. “My whole body is one big bruise. I hope it doesn’t get too cold.”
“We will survive,” Jo said. “We won’t be warm, but spring here is giving way to summer.”
/> “The oolichan will be running at home,” Rope said.
“And Sparrow’s baby will be coming any day.”
With every step the stream’s sounds changed. Echoes splashed off a rock in its midst, or widened with the current, or were swallowed up by a bank of tall, silent ferns.
Rope said, “How quiet it is.”
Instantly his voice died, as if the forest did not care for the speech of men.
“Secrets,” Brook said. “There could be anything, back a few steps from the path, and you would never know it. A deer, a house. A corpse.”
“Or a spy.”
Jo laughed. “What seems quiet to you is full of a thousand noises. Believe me, everything in the forest knows we are coming: you two shamble like deformed bears. Now try to be quiet! I must listen.”
A long . . . warm . . . day, the cedars sighed. Both warm and long.
Lovely, the maples replied. The sunshine made their veins stand out, vivid green in leaves like golden glass.
The wind yawned.
Up above, muffled by the canopy of leaves, the sky was addressing some long, abstract thought to the philosophical clouds. The trees murmured on about the likelihood of sun and rain. Ferns bowed as the travellers passed, offering to tell Jo the dew’s strange secrets.
The haunt let herself flow into the whispering woods, spinning out her senses in ever-thinner spider strands, tacking herself to leaf and tip, blossom and bole.
It was only as they walked through a dusty copse of pines that she realized the whole forest spoke of death. Beneath every friendly greeting, beneath every guess hazarded about the chance of rain, lay a deadly struggle for light and water and earth.
And below that was something else, something wrong in the wood. She could feel the strain of it, cracking within the forest core. Somewhere a splinter of fire burned and would not heal. Fear flowed from it. Fear not of death, but of madness.
Very far away. Very faint. A fear of madness, blooming like poppies on a fresh grave.
“Jo? Jo?”
“Wh—?”
“Come back!”
“Wh . . .” Jo opened her eyes. Blinked.
Startled, Brook and Rope saw that the haunt’s face had taken on a greenish tinge. Her eyes were the color of an oak leaf held up to the sun.
“Is something wrong?”
“I’ll . . . I’m fine. I got lost,” Jo said. “Easy to do, you know—get lost, walking in the woods.”
“Don’t wander now,” Brook said, shaking the haunt lightly by the shoulder. “It’s a long way to the Emperor yet.”
In the early evening, sore and weary, they made their camp at the base of a great cedar tree.
Rope stared up at it in awe. “This must be taller than all of Clouds End!” The cedar’s riven trunk opened like the mouth of a cave into a great hollow space with charred walls. “Has it been hit by lightning?”
Jo shook her head. “All red cedars have split trunks. Someone has made camp here before us. See the ash pit in this corner?”
“I wonder if any forest soldiers will be heading here as night comes on.”
“Oh, thanks, Brook.”
The islanders gathered firewood while Jo went to hunt for dinner. The light was failing by the time she returned. At first Brook mistook her for a wisp of fog, coiling between the cedars. Net reared in greeting.
Jo tossed a bundle at Rope’s feet; it landed with a soft thud on the hard-packed dirt, seeping blood from a line of punctures on its side. “Rabbit,” Jo said, flexing her fingers as if to ease a cramp.
The meat was a long time cooking and hardly worth the wait. Rope chewed grimly. “I was hoping hunger would make it delicious.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” Brook ventured.
Rope spat out a piece of gristle and wiped his greasy fingers on a fern. “Fish is so much cleaner.”
“It bleeds less, anyway.” Jo poked the fire with a green switch; a shower of red sparks whirled up into the blackness. “You should be grateful the dinner was drained before you got it.” The islanders winced and she grinned at them. “So then, what shall we do?”
“I could tell a story,” Rope said, clearing his throat. “A very simple one.”
“I have ears,” Brook said.
“And I,” Jo put in.
“Well, all right.” Rope glanced at Brook. “This is a story of strange journeys, and stout companions, and the advantages of being prepared.”
The moon was not yet up. Darkness lapped like black water around their campfire. Insects creaked in the night and leaves whispered. Reflected flames danced in their eyes. The sound of wood burning was like the sound of the sea.
Rope settled himself, took a deep breath, and began:
“This is a story of the Mist-time, where everything is real, and nothing is what it seems to be. It is a Figure of Eight story.”
Brook leaned over to Jo. “Looks like it sounds. A figure of eight knot keeps a rope from pulling through a block.”
Jo nodded.
* * *
Bottom Loop
Eh, yes. Well, nineteen or maybe eighteen generations ago, there was a famous explorer named Chart.
(Brook grinned, leaning against the rough-barked cedar.)
He had sailed far to the west, into the upper reaches of the Vein, where he befriended the people of the grasslands and met the Su-Tan, the spirit hawks that drift over the endless plains. He had sailed far to the north, where the sea threw up floating mountains of ice and snow-weirds tried to trick his ship into foundering. He had sailed south to the dense, hot, violent country that Lianna calls her own. And he had even travelled east, skirting the edge of the Mist, which in those days was much closer to the mainland than Clouds End is now.
He had seen many fabulous sights on these voyages, and acquired great wealth, and people began to call Chart of Delta the Greatest Explorer of All Time. He was improbably tall and absurdly thin. Whenever anyone asked him about his exploits, he said, “You need three things to be successful. Extra rope. Lots of biscuits. Plenty of pepper.”
Was that it? people wondered. Was that all there was to being the Greatest Explorer of All Time?
At last Chart’s fame caught Fathom’s ear. Now Fathom is as rash as any Hero, and more jealous than most. “Hah!” he said. “Greatest of All Time? I’d like to see him prove it!” And faster than a fish can strike a fly, he was off to test Chart’s mettle.
He blew in to Delta that very night, spurring gouts of hail from a storm-cloud and arriving between a stroke of lightning and its peal of thunder.
He knocked four times on Chart’s door, or maybe three, and each knock was like the sound of a whale leaping onto a longboat. The door opened after the fourth, or possibly third, knock, and Chart looked out into the wild night. He was improbably tall. He was incongruously thin. He had long mustaches that drooped like wet string and he’d caught a bit of a sniffle. He examined Fathom without enthusiasm. “Gud ebening,” he said.
Fathom strode in with a breeze at his back, blowing maps through Chart’s house like dried leaves. “I’ll get right to the point,” he said. “Are you the Greatest Explorer of All Time?”
Chart shrugged. “Hard to say. Peeble say I’mb de Greates’—snffff!—but dere may be udders I habn’t herb uv.”
“What about the Navigator, who pilots his celestial ship between the stars?”
Chart shrugged. “Oh, I dink I’m probably bedder dan himb, anyway.”
“Really!” The Navigator was Fathom’s son-in-law whom he’ d hurled into the sky so hard the midship lamp broke, which is why the Ship only has stars forward and aft. “And why do you say that?”
“He sails de same course ebery year, and he nebber got back home. No boyage is wort’ spit unless you can dell udder peeble about it.”
“Really!” Fathom said, seething inside. “How interesting! And tell me, what is your secret, O most potent of adventurers?”
“Egstra rope. Lots ub biscuits. Plenty ub pepper.”
“I’ll give you all the rope and pepper and biscuits you can possibly imagine if you agree to go exploring for me.”
Chart grunted. “Where?”
“The Mist!” Fathom says. “Explore the Mist, and your fame is assured.”
“And if I don’t want to go?”
Fathom just grinned in that dangerous way only Heroes can grin.
“Thot so,” Chart sighed. He stroked his weedy mustache. “Gonna take a lot ub rope,” he warned.
“As much as you can imagine.”
“Gonna take a load ub biscuits . . .”
“As many as you like.”
“Gonna take a deal ub pepper . . .”
“All the pepper you could desire.”
“All right,” says Chart. “I’ll do it.”
(The darkness washed a little closer to the islanders as their fire dimmed to embers. Everybody felt better for having had something hot to eat, though Brook wished she could get the taste of rabbit out of her mouth. “I need a drink of water,” she said, creeping over to the stream.
It tasted of leaves and quiet earth. She followed the red glow of the firepit back.)
Top Loop
Famous as he was, even Chart had trouble getting a crew together to go into the Mist. He had to promise four or maybe three thousand times that there would be more rope, biscuits, and pepper than anyone could possibly imagine.
At last the big day came. Chart had a brand new boat to make the trip, and he named it Figure of Eight. “This here boat won’t get carried away by the Mist,” he said. “I don’t aim to get flung about like a loose jib sheet.” All of which sounded pretty good.
But before Chart was even out of the harbor, the Deltan crowds were shaking their heads in dismay: he had forgotten to take up his anchor! For every length the ship covered, another few loops of rope dribbled over the transom and into the sea. Everybody felt embarrassed on Chart’s behalf, and they quickly left the port so he wouldn’t feel ashamed when he had to come back.
Oddly enough, when the Deltans went to work the next morning, the anchor was still there. A length of rope—the lightest, thinnest, strongest rope Chart could find—led far away into the east.