Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(60)

Redman banked the coals and settled back along the wall near his wife. He did not look at her. “Dead, you say?”

“Dead.” Eldest Sight-of-Day continued to feed her son from her bowl. “When I arrived late this morning, I found the village in uproar.”

“Another Faerie?” Redman asked. “Worse than the Greenteeth?”

But the Eldest shook her head. “So I thought and feared. But they tell me otherwise. They say a maid came out of the jungle, a maid wearing a bronze stone about her neck. She dived into the well after a child who was lost. No one saw what happened, but she disappeared and more than an hour passed before suddenly the well frothed and churned and spat her up again, with the living child in her arms. Later they found Mama Greenteeth’s body, withered and shrunken like dried waterweeds.”

“And this maid,” Redman persisted. “Not Faerie?”

“They claim not. They insist she was mortal. A fiery mortal, they say, with hair as red as yours.”

At this, Foxbrush felt his empty stomach heave and drop. Redman turned to him sharply, as though he’d heard. “A fiery maid?” he said. “Could it be your lost one?”

All eyes in the room turned to Foxbrush, and he writhed under their stare. The Eldest regarded him with interest now, a knot forming on her brow. “Do you know something of this, stranger?”

“I . . . I’m not sure,” Foxbrush admitted, finding it difficult to speak with the dryness of his mouth. Lark, suddenly reminded of his existence, hopped to her feet and filled a bowl for him, which he accepted from her even as he spoke. “I am come seeking my betrothed, Lady Daylily of Middlecrescent, who is not of your . . . of your . . .”

“What our good Foxbrush wishes to say,” Redman interrupted, smiling at his wife, “is that neither he nor the maid he seeks are of our time.”

The Eldest accepted this with far more ease than Foxbrush might have expected. “Sylphs?” she asked.

“Aye. Sylphs,” said her husband. “Though he is a man of our own Land, he wandered into the Wilderlands in search of his missing lady and, as far as I can gather, was caught in a sylph storm. They dragged him far from his own Time. I would be willing to bet my beard his lady was caught by sylphs as well, for it would appear she is the fiery maid of whom the people of Greenwell speak.”

“But sylphs care nothing for mortal time,” the Eldest said. “I’m not surprised if, caught in their dance, this man was dragged away from his time. But I find it hard to believe that he and his lady would both end up in or near the same small slice of their history. The sylphs may have left her anywhere in the Wood, at any time, both past and future.”


Redman acknowledged this with a nod. “You’re right, my love. But perhaps our Foxbrush here is guided by another hand. A hand that could direct even the wild dance of the sylphs.”

In silence, the Eldest and her husband shared an understanding glance, the significance of which entirely escaped poor Foxbrush. Then the Eldest turned to him, and there was sympathy in her eyes. “I pity you, poor man. A sylph dance is a dreadful thing, or so the Silent Lady tells us. But answer me this, if the Fiery One of Greenwell is indeed your lady, do you know if she makes a practice of slaying Faerie beasts?”

“Um. Not . . . not so far as I’m aware,” Foxbrush said hesitantly. After all, if he was honest with himself, there was a great deal about Daylily he did not know, and a great deal more he did not understand. Oddly enough (perhaps it was the presence of young Lark and her sharp resemblance), he found himself remembering the first time he’d met Daylily—Daylily the warrior-king Shadow Hand, fighting monsters and leading armies, even if only in imagination.

He frowned suddenly and put his hand to the pocket of his torn trousers, where he had secreted Leo’s scroll before making his escape. The scroll was gone. He must have lost it during his flight through the jungle.

A dullness settled in his heart at this. One more loss. One more failure. But at this point, what difference did it make?

“Not so far as I am aware,” he repeated softly, looking down at the bowl of onions and fish. “But . . .” He recalled Leo, hooded and shadowy in the Baron of Middlecrescent’s chamber. What was it he had said? “I wouldn’t put anything past Lady Daylily.”

“Was this red lady at Greenwell when you arrived?” Redman asked his wife.

“I’m afraid not,” said the Eldest, accepting a piece of flatbread from Lark and using it to spoon her meal. “They said a strange young man also came from the jungle and took her away again. Another mortal, they insisted, but wild and bloodstained. And he too wore a bronze stone.”

Redman studied his wife. She would not meet his gaze. “What are you not telling me?”

She took a bite, chewed, and swallowed slowly. Then she said, “The night following Mama Greenteeth’s death, all the firstborn children of the village vanished.”

The silence that followed was like darkness. It fell upon the room with sudden, obscuring terror, made more dreadful by the lack of understanding it brought.

“All of them?” Redman repeated at last, his voice scarcely making a dent in the weight of that silence.

The Eldest nodded.

“Light of Lumé,” Redman breathed. It was a prayer for protection. But somehow Foxbrush felt that the shadows drew closer to that small cooking fire and the red-lit faces gathered round it.