Clouds End

  “Why must you always . . .” A grimace of pain tightened Ash’s face. “Very well,” he whispered. He returned, but for the rest of the day he did not speak.

  Each night Ivy sped about the camp, bringing in rosemary and fennel, or scavenging for mushrooms. She cooked, she cleaned, she told stories—always touching someone’s hand or shoulder with her cool, clinging fingers. Ash became ever sicker and more morose, sitting and staring into the fire as if a great secret lay hidden behind its flames.

  One evening as they foraged for raspberries, Brook asked Ivy about Ash’s injury.

  “The scars, you mean? We met a woodlander the first time we approached your camp. He fired his sprayer before we could get away. I was behind Ash, but the cloud caught him in the face.”

  “The scream,” Brook murmured.

  “Ash killed him,” Ivy said. “Ash is very strong, you know. Very strong.”

  “Perhaps,” Brook said. “But something in him is broken. He hangs from the forest like a broken branch.” She looked curiously at Ivy. “But you seem very well.”

  Ivy glanced sideways. Brook was shocked by the look of cunning on her pleasant face. “I am not too proud to drink the rain, nor too meek to fight for sunshine,” Ivy said. “Like your haunt.”

  Brook picked raspberries. “What do you mean by that?”

  Ivy laughed. “Have you not seen the smiles she gives him? The way he thirsts for her tales of magic as dry roots thirst for water?”

  “Who, Rope?” Brook remembered the desire that had hung between Rope and Jo the morning they caught the tiny trout. “I don’t believe you,” she said, finding that she did.

  (And another, more secret jealousy stabbed Brook’s heart. Jo was hers. Her twin, her secret. Rope had no right to her.)

  Brook stood, hands still, tangled in a web of emotions, while Ivy chatted on. “Oh, I don’t say they have betrayed you yet. But your man longs to journey and your haunt longs for a home. Each has what the other wants. ‘Fire creeps to wood; wood warms to flame,’ the woodlanders say.”

  Greedily Ivy gulped down a handful of berries. “There is another thing about your haunt. Why do you think we came the night she caught us?” She squeezed Brook’s hand. “We did not come that night on a whim, Brook. We came because she drew us there.”

  At first it was all they could do to keep up with their guides, but as they approached midsummer, Ash grew weaker. He walked beside them, dour and silent, while Ivy flashed ahead and behind and off to either side.

  “You don’t seem worried about the wood spirits anymore,” Rope murmured to Jo one day as they walked behind the others.

  Jo shrugged. “Ash lacks the will to bind me, and Ivy the desire. Every day they stay with us they become more human. As do I,” she added thoughtfully. “As do I.”

  They had two encounters with bears, one (much worse) with a skunk, and one with deserters from Twist’s army. When Ash grabbed their leader’s sword and broke it in half with his bare hands, the bandits ran yelling back into the woods.

  “We must be getting close to civilization,” Brook said dryly.

  Ivy nodded. “We are not yet at the outskirts, but we are nearing them.” She looked sympathetically at Ash, who dropped the sword fragments wearily to the ground. “Poor fellow. If only we could go a little faster!”

  As the days passed, Ash grew ever grimmer and more morose. Ivy became ever more human. She made herself a shirt after the woodlander style, and then wistfully asked to borrow Brook’s belt. Brook smiled and knotted it around her waist. They all began to bathe more regularly, and Ivy scrubbed their clothes to rid them of wood smoke. She washed herself carefully as well; each day her skin grew lighter, and a few more leaves washed away. Of the spirit they had trapped in a cedar’s heart, soon only Ivy’s long, twining hair remained.

  Brook smiled and put her arm around Ivy’s slender shoulders. “Soon we shall have you looking like a proper woodlander.”

  Rope knew Brook too well to miss the falseness in her voice.

  They began meeting woodlanders, and the paths multiplied. (“Not that any of them are straight,” Rope grumbled.)

  It got very dry as they entered the outskirts of the forest people’s territory. As summer waxed in the forest they walked on through weeks of drought, passing tattoo artists, tanners, nutters, wicker-workers (dangling clever birdcages from poles yoked across their shoulders), carpenters, trappers, spider-wranglers, fruit-sellers, moss-gatherers, apothecaries, dentists, potters, candle-makers, beekeepers (whom they gave a wide berth), falconers, grafters, perfumers, fruit-pickers, and topiaries.

  They saw a young woman treated for a fit by a man who gave her an infusion of skullcap and mint. He carried a white bag at his waist and had three berries tattooed upon his forehead, one red, one gold-green, and one black. They learned to be careful when passing sawyers; these always travelled in pairs, each carrying one end of a gap-toothed saw twice as long as Rope was tall. They were exceedingly superstitious, and Rope barely managed to avoid a fight after he brushed by accident against the back of a sawyer’s blade.

  And then there were the many grim young men, each bearing an ironwood shovel on his back and a red-flame tattoo upon his forehead. “Warders,” Ivy explained. “When the forest burns they man the front lines. Many die every year. Summer is their least favorite season.”

  Each evening they passed at least one stall by the side of the path where puppeteers put on strange shadow plays of the forest people’s mythic past. Only the storytellers were allowed to see the sacred puppets, but a lamp threw their shadows on a paper screen for the audience to watch, while one of the troupe’s jongleurs hammered eerie, chiming accompaniments on his gleaming stel and the other pounded out fierce, unsteady rhythms on hooting hand-drums.

  As they approached the capital, the drought showed in the woodlanders’ faces, which became pinched, tense, and suspicious. Even Ivy seemed nervy, and they filled their waterskins to the brim every time they got a chance.

  Now that they had reached civilized lands, food was scarce. Animals were few and wily; berries had been picked by countless fingers before them. As a result, they went hungrier than they had since the first days out of Delta. Ivy grew ever less interested in foraging. Chunks of edible white lichen were all she bothered to bring to their meals. Rope eyed these with disgust. “Oh, wonderful. Trees. After months of sleeping on their roots, now we have to eat their boils.”

  Ivy shrugged. “If you want better, I must take more time.”

  She looked at Brook, who grimly shook her head. “We’ve already taken too long. Every hour we waste, Twist gets closer to Clouds End. Perhaps Foam and Shale spend another hour in prison.”

  Rope groaned, but he could not disagree.

  They met the herbalist in a cedar wood only a fortnight from the Arbor. It was early in the morning and Ivy was foraging far up the path. They heard snatches of her song winding between the trees. Suddenly her trills turned to shrieks. For an instant the travellers froze, and then Rope was racing down the path with the others behind him.

  They came upon her suddenly, cringing between two cedars. A bramble cord was tied around her arm; where it touched, her leaves were withered and black. A round-faced hairless man held the other end of the cord. “Mind the creature,” he said politely.

  Hunger had cut deep folds in the stranger’s fleshy face. A gold-green berry was tattooed upon his forehead. On his feet were sandals made of cedar bark. His leggings were of birch, and came in two pieces, one for the shins, the second for the thighs; each was fastened behind the leg with wooden pins. Around his waist and privates he wore a girdle of leaves. His stomach and chest were bare; rings of loose skin spoke of recent starvation. On his head he wore a sloped hat: sides of cedar bark set in a brim of ivy. The fourth finger on his right hand was disfigured by a bramble ring, its thorns bedded in scabs.

  Ivy whined like an animal in pain.

  “Let go of her!” Rope demanded.

  “Terribly sorry! Is
it yours?”

  “What do you m—”

  “Yes it is,” Jo said, striding up to join them.

  The stranger blushed. “How embarrassing,” he gasped. “I saw it running loose . . . It never occurred to me.” He fumbled with his bramble leash and slipped it off Ivy’s arm. “There: unbound. I assure you, I would not have bothered, only I am in desperate need of a sprig of Maid’s Ease.” He looked at them with sudden hope. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could find some, would you? I wouldn’t trouble you, only every moment I search is time away from my suffering wife, Rowan Berry.”

  Rope looked at Ash. “Can you find the Maid’s Ease he needs?” Ash nodded and stepped into the forest. “We will help you,” Rope said. “Follow me.”

  “Two of them!” the pudgy man exclaimed, eyeing Ash. “I can see from your control of two such formidable spirits that you are people of discernment, of education. Of experience.”

  “Rope!” Brook grabbed his arm. “We shouldn’t be wasting time.”

  “Do you think Shandy would ignore someone in need?”

  Ivy snickered.

  “Generous, exceedingly generous of you!” the stranger said as they began to follow Ash into the wood. “Have you ever done something you knew was wrong?”

  “I suppose if I really thought something wrong, I would try not to do it,” Rope said, wondering what he was getting into.

  “Would you? Would you? It is not an easy matter. Not a trifle. If she had an understanding of alchemy, then perhaps the scheme would have more merit; she would have a chance to detect the drug. But how could she?

  “Some will say, Is it fair? Is it honorable? A herbalist of the stature of Pine Quill, using his—for I do have some stature, you know. I was once well-known. I worked in the Arboratory; Garden’s certificate hangs on my wall at home. They said I would do great things! Great things . . .”

  The cruel dawn showed his wasting muscles, his sagging skin. “I have since learned I am not destined for greatness . . . But I forget myself! Pine Quill, at your command! Pardon me for not taking your hands. The search for Maid’s Ease is not easy. It is a tender plant. A wild plant. It must be approached with caution. With deference. It feels the suffering of all flesh—hence its curative powers! But it cannot abide the animal touch. At the scent of meat it slips its roots and floats away; it is found only in bodies of water, and through a secretive device always floats along the bottom. To track it, you must eat nothing but soil. No part of your flesh can come in contact with the ground; its roots will taste your sweat.” He pointed at his garments of bark and grass. “You see I have taken the proper precautions. I keep upon my person a wad of mint to flavor my breath. Ah!” Reminded, he extracted several leaves of mint from a small grass pouch at his waist and chewed them with great deliberation. “I have observed the proprieties. Though my end is ignoble, I come in humility.

  “It is five days since I have seen my wife and children. They depend on me for their food, for their livelihood. For their protection.” His round face was grim. “The woods are full of desperate men from the vanished southern provinces, now turned to banditry. Twice already they have assailed our cottage. Only a combustion of foul smokes hurled through the window kept them at bay. Are you married?”

  Rope shook his head.

  “An enviable state. I recommend it. My wife is an admirable woman. A saint! She is full of spirit, of ambition! She is impatient, it is true, and beats me some days, but it is I who drive her to it, with my penury and my faithlessness! She was invited to a dance at the Palace on one occasion, and was remarked on by Bronze Cut as a very gallant and spirited woman. And this paragon, this superb spirit, lowered herself to my level! Think of it! I revere her condescension. She was widowed when we met; her husband was a captain in the army, I believe, who gave way to drugs and gambling. He was court-martialled for negligence and died a broken man. He beat her near the end, but he was handsome. She reproaches me with him, but I am glad she does. Glad! I want her to believe she was happy once.”

  Pine Quill paused. Two spots of scarlet burned in his sagging cheeks, and each breath rattled in his chest. “Look at me, friend. Can you look me in the eye and honestly say that I am not a filthy beast?”

  Dawn’s first golden finger slid through the woods and rested on the herbalist’s face like an accusation. “Believe me, I do not seek forgiveness. I am beyond it. But I need an audience of some understanding, with some ability to make moral distinctions, to whom I can communicate the depth of my calumny.”

  He paced on before them, following Ash. Caught in his bark sandals, bits of grass and twigs left a confused trail on the ground. “Rowan Berry is at home, a woman I prize more than life itself. She is there this very minute, perhaps facing bandits, perhaps faint with hunger, perhaps in terrible pain. She was in terrible pain when I left her.

  “Aha! You think you understand why I need the Maid’s Ease, to soothe her pain. But you are wrong—there’s the wonder of it! I will use the Maid’s Ease, when I find it, in a philtre I will give another woman, half my wife’s age and possessed of not one quarter of her intellect. What will the philtre be? A love potion! And why? Because I desire her! Is it not astonishing!” Quill shook his head. “Here am I, pursuing the daughter of my nearest neighbors, a worthless slip with no opinion on any topic greater than the weather. And why?” His shoulders sagged, his head sank. He whispered: “I do not know. A spark burns in me that casts a host of shadows.

  “You may ask why I need the Maid’s Ease. The answer is simple. I brewed my potion according to my best recipes, making adjustments for elevation, quality of water, unavailable ingredients, and so on. I did my best. But there were, after all, adjustments to make; I could not afford to try it on Lily, you see.” His voice broke; he fought to control it before he could go on. “Here is the final perfidy. I gave the mixture to my wife! It was brewed incorrectly, it contains an unknown additive—I do not know. I left her, that high-spirited woman, convulsed upon our cot while our children cried in fear. I cannot give the philtre to Lily as it is.”

  “Fathom,” Brook whispered.

  “Exactly! It is monstrous. Inconceivable. And yet I did it, am doing it even at this moment, knowing it to be wrong.”

  He sat down abruptly, so that his grass and bark clothing squeaked and whispered. “Is there some deficiency in my moral makeup? I have lain awake these last five nights, watching the moon die and praying that I am a monster. I know I am. But to think that I am not alone, that others can also do what they know to be wrong—that is more than I could bear.”

  He shivered with horror. When he looked up, the strain of a ghastly obsession was carved in his face. “But what about our soldiers, who kill for pay? What about the bandits who want to ravish, who may be raping my wife even as we speak? Surely they know what they do . . . Or have they too discovered that we are evil?”

  He stopped, staring at the ground. Slowly he pulled out another mint leaf and began to chew.

  “Rope, this is far enough. I will not help this thing. His heart has spoiled.” Brook turned back for the path they had left.

  Pine Quill nodded. “Absolutely. Consider the philtre itself. Who could rejoice in the love I hope to gain? Brutal, enforced, springing neither from Lily’s natural affections nor toward my better qualities. I had some once, you know. Rowan Berry spotted them. She was the guardian of my secret worthiness. Unhappy sentinel, struck down by treachery! Can there be a crueler irony to the farce than this: racked with pain, my estimable wife cannot help but love me utterly, helplessly, in spite of what I did to her! Evil spreads out from me like a disease. Perhaps you will be the next infected. Who can say?” He turned to Rope. “So you see, your answer is terribly important. Could you do something you knew was wrong?”

  Quill knelt on the ground, looking up as if to challenge the scourge. His breath rattled in his chest. There were black stains around his mouth.

  “You are a man,” Jo said. “Nothing more. You seek to excuse the
flame of your desire by making it cast a great shadow of guilt, but you are only a man. Every day the Singer tells a thousand such stories about your kind.”

  A cold breeze swirled by the herbalist; he grabbed for his hat.

  “The conceit of it!” Jo said. “You are ugly, yes. But you are no monster.”

  For the first time the herbalist was speechless, clutching his hat. The fire dimmed in his eyes.

  Rope shook his head. “We will find your Maid’s Ease,” he said, grabbing Pine Quill by the shoulder.

  “What!” Brook said. “Haven’t you been listening? Why would you mend such a rotted net?”

  Rope ignored her. “I’ll meet you back on the path. Ash, please help me.”

  The great grey spirit nodded. He turned to gaze at Quill, who staggered weakly to his feet, grabbing at a fern and scrubbing violently where Rope had touched his skin. “Follow me,” Ash said.

  The men struck deeper into the forest, leaving Ivy and Jo and Brook behind. “What madmen these woodlanders are,” Brook whispered. She tried not to imagine what wickedness the forest’s kindred might have cut into Shale and Foam over the long summer.

  Ivy smirked. “Is Rope really going to help the herbalist? I thought him too straight to twist to such a tangle.”

  “Rope will not help Pine Quill woo his maiden,” Jo said softly. “He will try to put things right, the best way he can.”

  Ivy’s laugh was cold and bright as a jay’s. “Now, that I believe. How funny you sea people are, scurrying around as if it did some good to give water to the weak and protect the brittle from the wind!”

  Brook said, “I think the people of the forest must have less mercy than the people of the merciless sea.”

  It was past noon when Rope and the wood spirit returned. Rope was grim; Ash’s step was slow and labored.

  “Incredible!” Ivy railed. “Sick as you are, you took it upon yourself to help the mad human. You are too kind for your own good, Ash. Look how it has weakened you!”

  “Are you happy now?” Brook said bitterly. “Having wasted half a day?”