Often their hurts forced them to halt, but soon fear of Twist’s trackers or the memory of the scream would drive them on. As they walked, Brook and Rope often wondered about Foam and Shale. Had they survived that night on Delta? Did they flee with Red Cloak? Or were they locked in some woodlander prison, paying the price for their friends’ escape?
Rope grumbled continuously but would never suggest stopping. Brook would answer for a while, then fall silent. Finally she would ask for a halt, resenting the others for making her ask for the rest, and despising her own weakness.
Just as they were stopping for lunch on their third day’s march, it began to rain. Jo offered to turn her hands to fire to dry out firewood, but Brook and Rope quickly declined. “The less you touch on Sere the better,” Brook said. The haunt shrugged and left to go hunting while the islanders foraged for dry tinder. Even when they got the fire going, it gulped like an old man on his deathbed.
“Ow!” Caught in a billow of black smoke, Rope coughed and scrambled out of the wind’s way. “All this for another filthy rabbit, no doubt.”
“Ugh!”
“What I wouldn’t do for a nice fillet of bass!”
“Rock bass.”
“Caught off the Talon—”
“Sizzling in oil,” Brook said dreamily. “Otter’s way, sprinkled lightly with dill.” They looked at one another, stomachs growling. Rain dripped gloomily from the branches overhead. “This is not a good idea,” Brook said.
Rope nodded. “We must make do with what we have.”
“No use thinking about grilled bass—”
“Or pickled mushrooms—”
“Or Shandy’s plum wine!” Brook sighed.
The fire hawked and shuddered. Hastily Rope flung several more strips of cedar bark on the dull embers and blew them into brightness, covering himself in a cloud of ash.
Brook passed over a handful of soggy tinder. “You—cwuh!—look like a roasted ra—ack!—coon. The grey in your hair—so distinguished! I shall swoon!”
She swooned gracefully on top of him, and opened her eyes to find him worrying her tunic, teeth buried in her collar. “Oh, you beast!”
He held her in his arms and growled, kissing her neck.
“This is nice.” Brook laughed, blinking as raindrops sprinkled on her upturned face.
Rope smiled and kissed her lips.
“Very nice.”
He met her eyes again, still smiling, still silent. He held her with one hand and caressed her with the other. His fingers slid down her arm and up her back, stopping at last to caress the nape of her neck. Dirty and wet and tired, he held her beside the smoking campfire, and his smell mingled with the smell of wood smoke and damp earth and green things in the drizzle.
She kissed him back until she was breathless. “It should rain more often.”
Still smiling, he stroked her arm again and then moved his hand up to touch her breast. He held it firmly through the damp cloth of her tunic, not hiding his face in her neck or coyly closing his eyes. Still looking at her, still smiling. They were far from Clouds End, in a secret place where the rules were different. They were no longer children. They had sailed to Delta and trekked across the mainland like adventurers in a story, like Chart or Swap.
He moved his hand around her breast in a slow, firm circle and she gasped. It was the confidence of that touch; and his pleasure; and the way he looked at her, forcing her to admit that he was touching her breasts, that he wanted her. Brook felt her face flush. “Jo could be here any minute!” she whispered.
His smile broadened and he kissed her again, squeezing her breast, running his hands around it and up to her neck and finally down to stroke between her legs, cupping his hand around her mound, still looking into her eyes, still smiling. Her skin kindled where his hand passed.
A rustle in the bushes made Brook scramble to her feet, flushed and breathless.
“You got it lit!” Jo called, stepping back into the clearing.
“What?”
“The fire.” Rope grinned, throwing on another strip of cedar. “We got the fire lit.”
Jo’s hands were hidden behind her back. “Our lucky day!” she said. “Guess what I caught?”
Rope and Brook looked at her, then looked at one another. “Rabbit,” they chorused.
“How did you know?”
“Just lucky.”
Brook’s face was burning with embarrassment and her stomach snarled vile things at her as she looked at Jo’s rabbit. Then, suddenly, inspiration struck. She jumped up and scouted around their campsite, glad to have something to do, trying not to think about Rope’s touch. “Shale would kill me for not thinking of this,” she muttered. “Walking by the creek all day.” She scrabbled in the mucky loam. “Come on, come on . . . Aha!” she cried, plucking forth a long, pink, wriggling worm.
“FISH!” Rope shouted.
Brook looked back, grinning ecstatically. “Fish! If we could catch a few fish every day,” she explained to Jo, “we could keep you from shifting so often. It’s no use getting to the Arbor with an owl instead of a haunt.”
“And we could eat decent food for once!” Rope paused, considering. “But worms are not enough. We need rods, hooks, line.”
“We could tickle for them.”
Rope flexed his fingers. “I’d rather not.” He could not help looking at Jo. He had offered to fish this way for her before, back on Shale’s island. And she had offered him something in return. He had been right to refuse her, of course. And yet . . .
And yet, looking at her now, narrow face wound about with silver hair, he felt a stab of guilty desire.
Brook saw the look that passed between Rope and Jo. Jo was beautiful, she realized. Jo could take Rope away from her.
Jo shrugged. “Very well. Lead on. What catches fish, anyway? Eagles? Otters?”
“Um.” Brook glanced at Rope for encouragement. “We are grateful for everything you’ve done for us. We really are. But we don’t want you to shift. We’ d like to try to catch some of the food ourselves.”
Jo looked dubiously at the little stream beside their camp. “Good luck.”
Poles were easily fashioned from available branches. In a stroke of genius Rope thought to use Net for the line. “He’ll hold the hook and grab at any fish that strikes,” Rope boasted. The women watched, bemused, as he trained Net to grip a hook he made from the rabbit’s splintered collarbone.
Brook studied their tackle without much hope. “This is the clumsiest fishing rod in the history of the world. It will never work.”
Rope’s confidence was sublime. “It will work! And do you know why it will work?”
“Rope,” Jo asked, “why will it work?”
“Because fish are very, very stupid.”
They lost the first two worms on nibbles. “Good sign!” Rope muttered. “They’re in there. Net will come through.” He threaded another worm, and cast. “They like a little drizzle, just like this. Makes ’em hungry. Oh, I seen ’em in there. Big, fat, silver-bellied trout. Golden bass. Carp, oozing through the muck below.”
The line bucked suddenly downward.
“Got one!”
“Get him, get him!”
“Is he hooked?”
“It’s a MONSTER!”
Jo rolled her eyes heavenward and licked rabbit juice from her fingers.
Rope stared at the water in a frenzy of concentration, steely-eyed, alert to every twitch and vibration of his slender rod. It was Man against Fish in a sprinkle of rain.
Then the trout took a fatal turn into an eddy, and with one flick of his powerful wrists, Rope sent the doomed fish skipping onto a broad stone by the bank, where Net wrestled it into gasping surrender and then slithered smugly away. Brook ended the trout’s agony with a clanging sword stroke.
“Ooh,” Jo said, wincing at the knot left in the sword’s blade. “They’re not really made to swing at granite,” she suggested.
Rope surveyed his catch. “Well. Brook. The
re’s not much left of it, is there?”
“You meant to eat the head?”
“Head! Your cut went through at the hips.”
“The whole fish wasn’t as long as your hand!”
“Mock not!” Rope warned. “It was a good fish, and a valiant fish.”
“It was a tiny fish,” Brook said. “A teeny tiny eensy little fish.”
Jo sauntered over. “Is honor satisfied? Will you take some real food now?”
Hunger growled savagely in Brook’s stomach. “I’ d say honor was—Ulp!”
“Terribly sorry,” Rope said, removing his elbow from her side.
“Oof! Uh, thanks, Jo,” Brook said glumly, staring at the tiny bisected trout. “If we’re still hungry after we eat all this, we can always catch more.”
It was a hungry afternoon and a weary evening, but that night the sky cleared, and the waning moon drummed down a magic light through the leafscreen, wild and holy and awash in spirits.
Somewhere in the darkness a mad owl screamed her kill, and Brook’s heart jumped. She felt the sight shudder through her. The forest made mock of the owl by daylight. The crows shrieked crude comments and the mice mimicked her, turning their furry heads about, holding their little eyes wide open and blinking stupidly while their fellows laughed.
Things were different when darkness fell. Then the owl floated from her branch—soft as snow, as quiet, drifting. Seeking vengeance. Then the mouse who had been so bold by day trembled at every rustle in the leaf mold, scurrying from root to root, dread thumping from his tiny heart. Suddenly a mad scream would explode behind him and turn his blood to ice while talons like nails hammered through his jerking back.
Jo’s silver eyes glittered in the moonlight. Rope had already settled for the night, snoozing inside the split trunk of another great red cedar.
An owl’s shadow fell across Brook’s mood. If a night like this brought the Mist before her eyes and made the world sing huge within her heart, what must it be like for Jo? It was big, too big to contain. Brook fought back, cramping herself down to human size. We are not meant to hear the secret songs, she thought. Our stories are not the stories of wind and sun; we hear those at our peril.
With a shock like an unexpected touch, Brook felt her story waiting for her, out in the Mist.
And she thought about how foolish she had been, holding herself apart from Rope and Clouds End, savoring her sight like her most precious secret. But the magic was deadly to her. The Mist had rolled over them, hunting for Jo. The Mist had taken Rope’s father. It was not kind and it was not human. She feared it.
Magic is like water, Brook thought. We only swim so long before we drown.
Jo stirred by the campfire. “I think I shall watch tonight, and see if our long-toed guests return. And Brook, think about trees!”
Brook blinked. “Trees?”
“Mm. I was dreaming of them two nights ago when the long-toes came. Listen to the wood. Hear what the cedar says.”
Rope snored softly by the fire. Brook shrugged. “If I can stay awake, I’ll try.”
So she lay beside Rope in the cedar’s split trunk, drifting between sleep and waking, staring into the woody darkness. She felt life surging through the cedar’s roots and running like blood into every vein, and knew the tree to be a living power far greater than she.
Fear seeped into her like rain into the ground. What if she were to lose her way and sink into the wood forever?
When finally she slipped into sleep, she dreamt that Jo was crawling through a hedge into a secret room. And it seemed this room was inside a tree, near the topmost branches, and it swayed from side to side in the wind.
At its heart a golden spark cast a host of shadows.
CHAPTER 10
ASH AND IVY
SHOUTS WOKE Brook, and the stench of acid. She twisted away from the cedar’s mouth.
“Bind me, will you!” Jo stood with her arms outspread across the opened trunk. Where her fingertips touched, its bark was black and bubbling; her body writhed rivulets of blue vapor like that which had hissed from the woodlander’s evil weapons.
“Mercy!” called a high, sweet voice from within the great cedar. “Please! The vapor is torment!” A second voice, much deeper, groaned in pain.
The islanders scrambled together and Rope reached to take Brook’s hand. “Good hunting for Jo.”
The haunt’s skin sizzled and spat as she stepped back from the cedar’s mouth, thickening into flesh. “If you lie to me, or turn to flee, I will not be merciful.”
“Anything, but take away the sting!”
Jo retreated, condensing to womanhood.
Two figures crept out into the moonlight, smooth-limbed, deep-eyed, and clad in living leaves. The woman was no taller than Brook, but her huge companion towered over Rope. They smelled like moss.
“Wood spirits,” Rope murmured. Net tingled around his wrist, glowing luminous green.
The wind rustled in the woman’s hair like a breeze through a tangle of vines. “We are grateful for your mercy. My friend is hurt.”
“Do not waste your sympathy,” the man said. He was tall and stiff-backed, but his walk was broken with pain. If the woman’s voice was a flute, his was the wind moaning over a hollow stump.
“I am Ivy.” The woman bowed, body dipping like grass before a breeze. “This is Ash, my companion. Forgive him. The pain makes him ill-tempered.”
“What are you?” Jo asked.
Ivy’s laugh was like a trill of birdsong. It made Brook shudder. “We are the forest. Just as you, of the exiled air, may take a tree’s shape to better understand its speech, so the wood may take the form of men.” Ivy gestured to herself and Ash with a hand as graceful as a willow wand. “Such are we.”
“The forest wished to bind me? I find that hard to believe.”
“We are trapped,” Ash said. He lowered himself painfully to the ground. “We cannot return to the wood. Men and trees have grown too far apart. The forest people burn with disease. As I now burn.” He thrust a long hand toward them, turning it to catch the firelight. The exposed flesh was pitted and blackening. “The forest and its people have sundered and the crossing is barred to us. We are dropped leaves, broken branches.”
“They meant to use me as a bridge,” Jo said. “Tie me to the trees so they could return from being human.”
Around them the forest sighed and muttered in its sleep. Brook’s bracelet clicked in the long silence. “We are people of the sea, Rope and I. We know what it is to be far from home.”
Clinging gently to Ash, Ivy shook her head as he tried to back into the cedar. “You left a fire, and Ash stopped by it.”
“I was cold.” His voice was like the wind passing through a bed of reeds on a cloudy day. Sprinkles of rain, sadness in the air. He drew his arms in around his body with a creaking, rustling sound, and inched a little closer to the fire. “Cold . . .”
Ivy shrugged. “I believe we can still cross back if we can reach the Arbor, the heart of the wood. But that journey is long and Ash is hurt.”
“I am getting better.”
“Of course you are!” Ivy said, loudly and with great cheer. “But you must not tax yourself.” She turned back to Jo. “May we travel with you for a time? The company would do him good.” She looked at Brook. “Empty stomachs make weak legs. We can find you food. We could show you swifter ways. Will you have us?”
“A strange proposal, after what you tried to do to me,” Jo said.
Brook laid her hand on Jo’s arm. “I’d rather have them where we can see them.”
Brook’s mind was racing. If they took Ash and Ivy on as guides they could travel far faster, and Jo would need to hunt less often. The less time she spent as hawk or wolf or otter, the more chance there was she would stay human, and remember her woman’s purpose in the Arbor.
Rope held silent, seeing that Brook had some reason for wanting Ash and Ivy along.
Brook said, “I am tired of suspicion.” She squeez
ed Jo’s hand, cool once more and soft as flower petals. “Let us try. We will part at the first sign of trouble, I swear to you.”
Jo hesitated. “Very well,” she said to the wood spirits, “but our joining can be easily sundered. Take no liberties.”
Ivy bowed, reaching out to wind her supple fingers around Brook’s wrist. “Our gratitude will be no less than your compassion.”
Ivy’s complexion was a rich, warm brown, with berry-red cheeks. Her leaves were dark green and glossy. Ash’s were paler, like paper; they whispered as he walked, striding with a stiff, proud gait.
Ivy was fluid and lively, always darting off the path for berries. “Ugh!” Rope said, watching her shin up a seemingly unclimbable tree. “Like Shale when we were little. It makes you tired just to watch.”
Ash made a queer sound almost like laughter. He was a massive man, two heads taller than Rope, with muscles like knotted roots. But the black pits in his head and hands grew deeper every day.
The wood spirits were excellent guides. They left the little stream the islanders had followed from the coast and made more directly for the Arbor. Two days later, they crossed a track just wide enough for three men to walk abreast. “Twist’s road north,” Jo said.
Rope blinked. “Why would anyone choose this as their road? It meanders all over the place.”
“You are too blind to see the bog on our left?” Ash said. “Too deaf to hear the stream to our right?”
“Forgive Ash!” Ivy said, stroking his shoulder. “It is the pain.”
“I will be rude if I wish. I do not need your apologies.”
Jo said, “Then perhaps you do not need our company.”
After a moment, Ash took one giant stride into the forest.
“It will be cold tonight,” Ivy called to him.