Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(67)

Lark was quick to wrath but quick also to forgiveness. Her scowls vanished in smiles, and she reached out to take Foxbrush’s hand, smiling even more when he flinched at her touch. She led him on in peaceful silence, leaving him to wonder how much he believed of her strange stories and how much he dared not believe.

They passed another totem like the first two. Here a tall white egret stepped out of the greenery, its head moving in pulsing rhythm with each step. It took the cake Lark offered and walked on without a word; and as far as Foxbrush could guess, it may have just been a bird tamed to expect food from this devoted source.

But Lark said, “He is pleased,” and they continued on their way.

Sooner than Foxbrush expected—though it was difficult to gauge time on this green-grown trail—the jungle thinned and he saw the gorge opening up before them. He also saw the destination of their day trek: the gnarled, rock-grasping black fig tree.

Foxbrush’s footsteps faltered even as Lark continued on her way. His memories of those first moments after he’d climbed from the gorge were convoluted at best. He remembered the wasps well enough, and he remembered the burn of their stings. He also remembered the inhuman voice that had responded to Redman, but he did not want to remember this, so he nearly convinced himself it had been a dream brought on by his terror.

This lie comforted him briefly. Even as he stood on the fringes of the jungle, Lark approached the tree and called out:

“Oh, Twisted Man, whose bark is thick,

Who plunges rocks for wells to find,

Here is tribute! Here is tribute!

Take it, Twisted Man, and quick!”

This time she withdrew from her pouch a handful of dried lily petals, which she threw at the tree just as her father had done days before. Even as she clapped her hands and spun about in place, a wind seemed to rush through the fig tree’s leaves. Its branches spread like grasping fingers, caught the fluttering petals, and drew them up inside.

Then the Twisted Man stepped out.

He was exactly what his name implied, every limb twisted and gnarled like a branch, the skin—if such it could be called—deeply creviced like old bark. From each limb sprouted many branches as twisted as the arms themselves, and at the end of each branch was a twiggy hand. His face, on a trunk-like torso with no sign of a neck, was that of an old, craggy man, and his hair was green leaves.

“I like the tribute well,” he said in an inhuman language that, horribly, Foxbrush understood. Black eyes shot with green looked down on Lark contemplatively. “You are smaller than the mortal who usually pays me.”

“He is my father,” Lark replied without even the slightest tremble in her voice. “I am his sapling, sprung from his seed, grown at his roots. I have come for your benevolent bounty.”

The Twisted Man tilted his whole body as a dog might curiously tilt its head. The many little grasping hands joyfully shook their fists full of petals.

“I like the tribute well,” he said. “You may take of my bounty.”

“Call off your wasps, then, Twisted Man,” Lark said. “Send them sleeping to their nests until it’s time for them to wake.”

“Very well,” said the Twisted Man. Then he stepped back and vanished into his tree. Its great boughs wavered a moment, the big leaves rustling before going still.

Only then did Foxbrush realize he’d stopped breathing.

He collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath, his mind desperately running for any reasonable explanation it might find and coming only to dead ends. If he fainted, he told himself, who could blame him? Would it truly unman him to succumb to the white whirling in his head, the bright lights bursting on the edge of his vision?

Lark turned to him, shaking her head. “Get up,” she said. “Take off your basket and help me. We must gather fruit while he still remembers the tribute is paid. You don’t want to get stung again, do you?”

In a numb wave of determined disbelief swiftly ebbing into an ocean of overwhelming—and completely unwelcome—belief, Foxbrush did as he was told. Both he and Lark took off their baskets; then he lifted the girl into the black fig tree’s branches, where she scrambled about, nimble as a ginger-haired monkey, gathering fruit.

Foxbrush harvested his share as well, filling the baskets quickly. Every fig he plucked buzzed as though it were alive, which startled him so much the first few times that he nearly dropped them. He swiftly realized that the buzzing was caused by the wasps living inside: tiny, delicate, shimmer-green wasps, with lacy wings and enormous stingers for their size. A few crawled out and even perched upon his hand. He broke out in a sweat at this but continued moving methodically.

“They won’t sting you,” Lark told him. “The Twisted Man called them off.”

“Right,” Foxbrush replied breathlessly. He picked until his own basket was nearly half full before he managed to ask, “Is . . . is the Twisted Man, then, as it were, the spirit of the fig tree?”

“What? Oh no!” Lark, perched in the branches above, laughed merrily. “What makes you think such a thing?”

Foxbrush scowled. “I’m trying to make sense of the situation according to the rules of nature that seem to prevail in this world of yours. It struck me as a logical assumption.”

Lark laughed again, probably because she did not understand half of what he said. “The Twisted Man is a Faerie beast. He came up from the Wilderlands, like all the Faerie beasts. The rivers in the gorges kept them out for ages, but when the rivers rose up to drown the Dragonwitch, they left the gorges behind and the Wilderlands grew. Now Faerie beasts of all kinds cross from their world into ours. They like it here,” she said this with a certain pride in her nation. “We have lush forests and rivers and—”