Rope swallowed. Brook cringed beside him.
Jo had lost all trace of humanity. Her hair was snakes of writhing silver, her talons scored the earth. Vast white wings unfurled from her shoulders and beat the air, driving up a cloud of ash and cinders. “I think you have forgotten what I am,” she said. “I am not like the herbalist, Rope. I am not some guilt-addled human pretending inhumanity.” She lifted her taloned hand. It was good to feel the wind in her blood. “You need not worry that I will fail in my part. Does the Emperor bleed? Then I will cut him. Does he drink? His cup can be poisoned. Does he sleep? Then I will breathe madness into his dreams. I am not of your kind, Rope. I really am a monster.”
She gazed then at the islanders as they cowered before her. She saw them fumble for each other’s hands, and she felt Brook’s fear. Her twin was afraid. Afraid of her.
Jo’s anger dwindled like a fire caught in a cold rain. She had ridden too much of the wind, played too often with the moon. She didn’t want to be a haunt anymore.
“It is our story,” Brook said quietly. “Yours and mine. Yours is the great part, Jo. The hero’s part. And maybe I am only your shadow. But I think we are a sheet bend, you and I, big rope and little. That is a knot not easily untied.”
“A sheet bend. But which is which?” Jo said. You are so much in me I almost cannot hear myself. Who leads and who follows?”
Brook hugged Jo’s shoulder, feeling big enough to fill the hollowness inside the haunt’s heart. “Perhaps it depends on the phase of the moon.”
Jo looked almost normal again.
Rope grunted. “It’s just—that whole thing with Ash. . . . And I believe in Chart, you know? Rope, biscuits, pepper. I like to be prepared.”
“Do you think I do not hear the call of the flame? I am too close now to escape.”
“What about Ivy?” Rope asked. “Won’t the forest people notice how different she is?”
Jo shifted into the form of a woodlander, shorter than Brook and stocky, with curly brown hair and pale cheeks. “As for Ivy, she becomes more human every day she travels with you. You two really are very human, you know, and humanity is catching. Put a good set of clothes on her and wait. Before we reach the Arbor you will swear she was a Shrub or a Willow.”
Brook said, “I have plans for Ivy.”
Jo studied Rope. “Actually, you are more of a problem.”
“Me?”
“Both of you. Too tall! And your faces: too weathered by wind and sun. To the woodlanders you will look older than you are.”
“Old and ugly,” Brook said.
“I didn’t mean . . .” Jo looked at her helplessly. At last she inched around the fire. She reached out to touch Brook’s hair, and now, absurdly, she was the scared one. She fought to smile as Brook flinched under her touch. “We will have to prune you.”
“No.”
Jo ignored Brook, unravelling her braid with nimble fingers. “They don’t wear these here. We will have to tuck this into your clothing, and cut it short as soon as we can find a sharp knife.” Brook’s tense shoulders slowly relaxed, and Jo sighed with relief. Rope grinned and began picking at his knotted hair. Suddenly Jo felt like laughing. “Friends again?”
He nodded. “Always.”
“And it has taken so long to grow back,” Brook said in a plaintive voice.
Swiftly Jo undid the last knot that made Brook an islander. “Some day I will make you another,” she said, gently combing Brook’s hair with her fingers. “I promise.”
When the haunt was done she said, “The Witness Knot as well.”
“What?”
“Anyone could see that’s not a woodlander bracelet. The Witness Knot must go.”
“I will keep it hidden under my sleeve.”
Rope cleared his throat. “It really does look odd. Good, of course. It looks good on you. But—”
“No.”
Rope knew better than to pursue it.
Brook felt the knot like an anchor around her wrist, tying her to Clouds End. She stared with renewed suspicion at Jo. At her twin.
Twelve days later they spent their last night in the forest before reaching the Arbor. This close to the capital, sleeping on the ground was next to vagrancy, so they were forced to bed down in a tree, lying on planks wedged amongst the branches of a big sleeping oak.
Jo was out foraging. Brook settled herself in the corner of their platform. “The end of the road,” she murmured.
“Spit!” Rope growled, peering around their tiny perch. “What if I fall and break my neck?”
“There’s a railing. It’s no worse than sleeping on a ship’s deck.”
“If the Pine country is run by the Pines,” Rope said, “and the Cedar lands are held by the Cedars, who controls the Arbor?”
“The Bronze,” Ivy said. “Bronzewoods are the greatest of trees. Their bark is gleaming gold and their leaves are scarlet-green. You will see them tomorrow.”
Brook glanced at Ivy. “You must be looking forward to the Arbor. You will finally be able to cross.”
Ivy shrugged. “I am in no haste. Crossing was Ash’s quest. I am free of my roots and I mean to enjoy it.”
“Tomorrow,” Rope said. Suddenly his feet had never felt so sore. “Ugh! Almost there! It hurts to remember all that wilderness.”
“In that case,” Brook said wryly, “I advise you not to think about the trip back.”
Dangling from the limbs around them, vegetable planters sprouted yellow-flowered squashes or okra or great purple cabbages. A light wind had come up at dusk, and the boughs beneath their platform swayed and creaked. A branch shivered as Ivy crept off to steal their breakfast.
“I don’t like Ivy and Jo being gone at the same time,” Rope said. “What do you suppose our haunt is up to?”
“I think our haunt is up to many things. Listen. Here we are, about to enter the Arbor. What is our job, if we want to save the islands?”
Rope frowned. “To keep Jo human, I guess. Isn’t it?”
“I know, I know. I feel that all the time, like a weight.” Evening was falling, and gloom pooled around the oaks. “But I have been wondering, is that really our desire, or is it simply what Jo wants?”
“Hunh?”
“Think about it. From the first day she landed on Clouds End she has insisted that people go with her, stay with her, be with her, so she can be human. Is it because she wants to get to the Arbor, or because she longs to be human again?”
Slowly Rope nodded. “Or is it because she twinned you? She twinned you, and she . . . asked me for help on Shale’s island.” He colored, suddenly feeling Net like a web of pins and needles curled around his left wrist.
Brook felt her heart catch. What had happened there, between her lover and her twin? If he wouldn’t tell her, she couldn’t ask.
The haunt, the haunt was playing with them. Twisting them. “Why did I stop fighting Jo when I met her on Clouds End? Why did I make us rescue her from Sere on Shale’s island?”
Around them the oaks and elms talked quietly together at the end of the day. Rope frowned. “You think this urge to keep Jo human comes from her?”
Brook shrugged. “I feel it as my own desire, but how can I know? Ivy said that she and Ash were called. She said Jo risked letting me be bound to the forest to draw them to us. Why would Jo do that? To get to the Arbor faster, I suppose. But perhaps there was another reason. With two wood spirits around, we worked even harder to make Jo one of us.”
Rope laughed softly. “Like the time Foam got Shale to sneak up and scare us in the dark so you would let me hold you.”
Brook looked up in surprise. “That was a plan? One of Foam’s plans?”
Rope gulped. “Didn’t I ever—? Ah. Um.”
“Is anything I do ever my own idea?”
Rope changed the subject. “Remember, you can’t believe everything Ivy says. I wouldn’t trust her farther than I could throw her.”
“Mm,” Brook said. Remembering Ivy’s warning abou
t Rope and Jo.
“You said you had a plan for Ivy. Now, whenever I turn around you are fixing her hair, or lending her clothes, or holding her hand. What is all that about?”
“I’m twinning her.”
Rope blinked.
“You saw what she did to Ash. She leached the life out of him. That is her nature. With Ash gone, she is looking for another victim to suck dry. We needed her to guide us and find our food, so I dared not send her away. Instead, I offered myself as the victim. But I am tying her into a sheet bend. Surrounded by humans, walking out of the wildwood and into peopled lands, Ivy loses more and more of herself, and becomes less and less able to work her magic on us.”
Leaves whispered overhead, veiling and revealing the stars. “I don’t know,” Rope said. “I would be afraid to mess about with magic.”
Brook shrugged. She remembered Ivy’s cool touch on her wrist, grinning as she talked of Ash’s decline. In a voice so cold it startled Rope, she said, “I am not too proud to drink the rain.”
* * *
The Arbor was a living city, carved into the flesh of vast bronzewood trees. For hundreds of years they had grown, twining into each other, tended by squads of topiaries and legions of gardeners. Now they formed one great living mountain, pierced by slanting shafts of light, twisted into a gigantic maze of tunnels and ramps and archways. Overhead a red cloud hung, dust scuffed from the drought-stricken earth by countless feet treading the cracking paths around the capital.
Disguised as poor bumpkins from the Pine province, the islanders came at last into the Arbor, and wandered up through its labyrinth of branches. This is what it was for the children of the sea to step into the forest’s beating heart: a wall of shifting copper, a sea of scarlet-green leaves, a throb and buzz, a heat; people like jewelled insects crawling through a jungle of their own making.
Except for the ground level, the city was a gloomy honeycomb of narrow passages with ceilings so low Rope had to walk permanently stooped. Occasionally they would turn a sudden corner and be dazzled by a shaft of sunlight falling through a light-well marked by a waist-high wall of shrubbery. These shafts of light angled through to the ground; far below, citizens of the Arbor with lacquered hair and enamelled jewelry passed gleaming through the light and then disappeared into the gloom beyond.
Branch after branch, tier after tier, and on each one, more people stopping or staring or talking or selling or simply bustling on. “All these people!” Brook said. “You can feel them behind the walls and under our feet. There could be anything; there could be murder on the other side of this wall, but we would never know.” She fingered one of the glossy scarlet bronzewood leaves. “We could never understand.”
“Come,” Jo called. “I want to savor what the city has to offer. We draw ever closer to the Emperor, and tonight I must flutter to his flame!”
Anticipation burned in Jo like a fever, making her fey and giddy. Rope and Brook stuck together and said little, overawed by the vast, humming hive at the center of the forest. Ivy scampered everywhere, gawking at trinkets and exclaiming over the woodlanders’ lacquered helmets and stylish clothes.
In a large clearing lit with many light-wells they mingled with the crowds. Ivy dashed over to peer greedily at a jeweller’s table. Stomach growling, Rope loitered in front of the next stall, which sold cherries and blueberries, lettuce and yams, okra and green onions and carrots by the bundle. Not far from Brook a group of puppeteers lounged in front of a shop selling mulled drinks, talking to one another in tense, hushed voices, each carrying a leather puppet bag. One of them was tying up curtains of black cloth to make a hidden area in which they could prepare for their performance.
Jo turned her head. “Hear that?”
“Bells,” Brook said. “Little bells, coming closer.”
The jingling sound approached steadily from a side corridor from which people began to spill like flotsam pushed ahead of a wave. Finally a litter hove into view, carried on the backs of eight servants and garlanded with tiny brass cymbals that chinged and chimed at every step. The litter’s open curtains and canopy were of gold silk, and its poles were scarlet. Behind it came a retinue of expensively coiffed men with purses and counting beads and parchments. Lastly came four swordsmen with shields and arm-plates. The servants all wore pants and shirts of golden silk with a scarlet slash cutting across the chest.
It was clear at once that they served no ordinary man. He did not recline in his litter, but sat cross-legged and straight-backed, glancing over the crowd with sharp, golden eyes. His face was lean. Everything about him suggested fierce drive and energy barely held in check.
“A Bronze,” Jo whispered.
One of the puppeteers stepped before the litter and bowed until the back of his hand touched the ground. “Most worthy! Will you suffer to be entertained?”
“There is a performance you wish me to observe?” The Bronze examined the puppeteers impassively, but quick glances flew between the members of his retinue. Those carrying the litter shifted in place.
The puppeteer glanced up. “Not if you feel our little play would cause you discomfort.”
The Bronze ignored another flutter from his retinue. “Of course not. Pray, proceed.”
“How justly does the Arbor ring with the praise of your generosity!”
A little breeze of whispers gusted around the clearing.
As the puppeteers prepared, setting up their candles and their paper screens, Rope rejoined Brook and Jo. They could all feel tension building in the crowd. The marketplace babble had died away; conversations went on in whispers, and the speakers looked not at one another but at the clear space before the litter where the performance was to be.
The puppeteers had finished hanging black cloths in front of the drink shop so they could crouch behind them and perform without the sacred puppets being exposed to the eyes of the curious. They had chosen an area far from the nearest light-wells; when they lit their candles the paper screens were white panels glowing in the murk.
At last all was in readiness. “Behold!” one cried, and a shadow jumped upon the panel. At first the islanders took it for a stylized tree. Slowly the trunk split and the limbs dropped until the shadow took the shape of a man. From behind the black cloth a chiming stel intoned, deep, stately, ringing notes. “The father,” a voice chanted. “When the wind blows, he lends his strength to stand against it. When the sun burns, he gifts his family with shade.”
A second shadow jumped to the screen, much smaller this time and less certain in form, shifting and moving like a wind-blown bush. There was a sharp hiss of indrawn breath from the crowd around the islanders.
“The son.” A snapping hand-drum skittered around the stel’s steady rhythm. “Most precious and beloved of the father, he is yet young. He has the virtues of youth: passion and courage and high ideals. It is true he has not yet reached his mature growth and may still be swayed by the wind, but left alone he will grow into his greatness.”
The retinue of gold-clad servants murmured angrily among themselves. One strode up to the palanquin and whispered urgently in his master’s ear. For a moment the Bronze said nothing, examining the crowd. Woodlander eyes fled him like doves scattering at the hawk’s approach. He dismissed his servant with a tiny shake of his head and let his gaze return to the puppet show.
A tambra now joined the hand-drum and the stel, playing a sweet melody that held a darkness in it, like the wind playing through the ashes of a cold fire. Bodies shifted in the crowd, rocking forward with excitement, as the shadow of a wolf padded onto the screen.
The hand-drum swirled and the tambra played as the son began to dance, ever so slowly, toward the wolf waiting on the panel’s edge. The son’s features blurred and shook; he staggered forward and then threw himself back under the father’s arms, only to creep forth again, and always the tambra played its sweet, dark song.
The son’s shadow became more wild, pulled in both directions, flying back and forth, swelling suddenly
or shrinking to the size of a beetle. Suddenly the hand-drum surged and the panels rocked as the son leapt across the screen to crouch at the wolf’s feet. But somehow, in the process, a fire had caught—perhaps a candle had fallen over—and a lick of flame began to creep up the paper screen where the son now stood, swollen so large that his outline had become badly blurred.
A gasp of shock went round the clearing. Even the Bronze started, thin lips tightening.
“Alas!” the puppeteer cried. “The son has caught a spark! He burns and the wolf burns with him! Alas! What can be done?”
Rope glanced around, waiting for someone to move. To his amazement nobody did. The line of flame was now licking hungrily up the side of the paper screen, searing the son and the wolf as well. Everywhere he looked, woodlanders stood as if paralyzed.
“Aren’t these a useful lot?” he muttered to Brook. Striding into the cleared area, he lifted his waterskin and squirted the contents over the burning screen, soaking it down with the same methodical patience he would have used to wet a smoldering sail.
The tambra and hand-drum and stel faltered and fell silent.
The crowd watched in shocked silence. Rope began to blush, desperately wishing he wasn’t the center of attention. He suddenly realized just how big he was, surrounded by this crowd of staring woodlanders, most of whom didn’t come up past his shoulders.
The black cloth rustled and the head puppeteer crawled out from beneath it. He walked around to the front area and stared at his dripping screen like a man in a daze. Then he looked at the bearded stranger who towered over him. “You poured water on my screen!”
“Well, it was burning, wasn’t it?”
The puppeteer gazed at him, dumbfounded.
Somewhere in the crowd someone giggled. A second person snickered across the clearing. Then a real chuckle broke out, and then another, and soon the whole crowd was helpless with laughter. They laughed until their faces turned red and they could not speak; they laughed until they wept. Secretaries in gold livery smirked and covered their faces with their hands. The litter shook on the shoulders of its porters. And above it all, even the Bronze’s thin lips twitched, and his golden eyes gleamed.