Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(20)

“No,” he muttered and set out at a run, but the air was far too hot and he was very soon drenched in sweat. “I’ll save her. It’s my duty! I’ll find her in the Wilderlands, and I’ll bring her safely home.”

Then she would forgive him. Then Southlands would forgive him. Then he could vanish and never return but leave behind at least one good deed in the memory of his kingdom.

He saw the broken stump where the Grandfather Fig had once stood. That tree, so ancient, so gnarled, so stately in its ugliness, had become a familiar landmark to all those who dwelled in the Eldest’s House. Famous artists of past generations had done their best to capture it in paint and pottery, and more than one prince or princess of Lionheart’s line had been depicted on canvas standing in the shade of those twisted, flower-laden branches.

Now it was gone. Ripped up, torn out, roots exposed. Yet another scar left in the Dragon’s wake.

Lionheart approached the stump and looked down the gorge into the Wilderlands below. He heard the shushing of branches not moved by wind as the trees whispered to themselves and pointed at him. They mocked him, he knew. But what had he to fear from their mockery? Let the Wood do its worst. A Path would be given him, and he would walk unscathed through that darkness. He would—

“Aaaaaaaarggh!”

The bone-rattling scream carried up from the side of the gorge, accompanied by the sound of slipping rocks. Lionheart gasped, “Dragon’s teeth!” and stared over the edge, willing his eyes to see in the dark, hoping against hope that his ears had deceived him.

For the first time that night, the moon peered through the film of clouds overhead. And Lionheart saw.

“Foxbrush!” he shouted. “What are you doing down there?”

At his feet lay a narrow path down the wall of the gorge, nearly invisible on that dark night. Only a fool or a hero (sometimes synonymous) would dare make such a descent.

And there, his back pressed to the wall, his feet braced, his hands gripping stones and dirt and tufts of hardy grass, was Foxbrush. He turned a face saucer eyed with terror up to Lionheart. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, but that scream seemed to have knocked the words out of him. When at last he managed to garble something, his voice was too weak for Lionheart to understand.

“You idiot son of a stubborn mule-jenny!” Lionheart cried. “Get your dragon-eaten hide back up here where it belongs! What are you thinking, climbing down the gorge at night?”

Foxbrush, from his precarious position, tried a tentative movement. He’d stepped on something that had suddenly scuttled with rather too many legs for comfort, startling the scream out of him. One misstep more and he would plunge into the rocks and trees below and probably never move again. He tried to swallow his beating heart back down to his chest.

A string of curses overhead and a quick scramble of rocks alerted him to Lionheart’s swift descent. Foxbrush set his teeth and, still pressed to the rock wall, began sidling down the trail once more, feeling out each step as he went. “Stop!” Lionheart called to him, but Foxbrush wasn’t about to obey.

“You’re not the prince anymore, Leo!” he growled, grinding the words through his teeth to keep them from chattering. “You don’t give the orders!”

Another explosion of angry curses rained down, along with an avalanche of pebbles. Lionheart, in his fury, lost his footing and slid several feet, clinging to stones and tearing his hands and shirt as he went. In this manner, Foxbrush and Lionheart raced each other down the rock wall, and they could not have been in greater danger of their lives when the Dragon first fell in fire from the sky.

The Wood watched. And the Wood laughed. And the Wood put up shadowy arms to receive them.

Foxbrush managed to reach the gorge bed with his limbs intact. He was only a few yards ahead of Lionheart by this time, and he needed every advantage. His legs rubbery with terror and physical exertion far beyond any he’d made in he could not remember how long, he stumbled toward the Wood and all but fell into the fringes of the first trees.

Immediately he wished he’d done practically anything else.

The light changed. This was often the first sign to those who stepped into the Between that they had left their world behind them. Foxbrush stepped from darkness into what might be midafternoon. It was difficult to say for certain. What little light penetrated the canopy of branches overhead fell in bright pools upon lush green growth and splashed against dark trunks and heavy-laden boughs. Where that light (which may or may not have been sunlight, for no sun or sky could be seen) fell, the greens turned to emerald, the browns to gold. The sound of night insects vanished into a perfect, watching stillness.

Foxbrush began to tremble. He opened his mouth, perhaps to pray, perhaps to curse. But he had opportunity for neither, for he was grabbed by collar and shoulder, swung around, and slammed up against the nearest tree trunk.

Lionheart glared down at his cousin. There were so many things to despise about Foxbrush aside from the hair oil plastering his head, though that had collected such a thick layer of dirt and dust that the hair’s original color was indeterminable. His features were so soft, so well tended, so freshly scrubbed. His eyes were too squinty. He was babyish and weak and everything most loathsome in a man.

Perhaps the thing Lionheart disliked most, however, was how dreadfully similar Foxbrush’s face was to his own.

“You have to go back,” Lionheart said.