Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(68)

“You said the rivers dried up.”

“No, no, the Faerie rivers that were gate guards are gone. We have plenty of normal rivers flowing down from the mountains. The Faerie beasts like those. And the Twisted Man liked this tree, though he had to battle Crookjaw for it when first he came. What a fight that was . . .”

The child rattled on for some time after Foxbrush had given up trying to listen. They finished filling their baskets with the wasp-infested fruit, then shouldered them to make the return journey. The weight of figs in such bulk surprised Foxbrush; he was puffing and panting within a few paces. Lark, by contrast, proved the strength of her scrawny limbs and seemed no more burdened than when they had first set out.

“ . . . so we pay the tribute at the totems as the Silent Lady taught us,” she was saying when next Foxbrush bothered to listen. “This keeps them from pestering us, though most of them are harmless enough, not like Mama Greenteeth.” She stopped here, and her brown little face took on serious lines unusual in one her age.

“Mama Greenteeth?” Foxbrush said. “I heard your parents speak of her. She was killed.”

“Yes,” Lark acknowledged. “By something worse than she. By the red lady who wears the bronze stone.”

“What is the bronze stone? Do you know?”

Lark shook her head. “I’d not heard my parents speak of it, even in Northern tongue, until that night. But whatever it means, it is worse than Mama Greenteeth if it demands firstborn children as tribute. Even she was satisfied by wafers.”

She fell into a silence made all the more dismal by the variety of noises around them. They neared the totem where they had seen the egret, and Lark made as though to pass without stopping. But Foxbrush glanced at the stone. And he gasped.

“What are you doing?” Lark demanded, for Foxbrush leapt to the side of the trail and pushed the leaves back from the totem, revealing what lay upon its flat top.

“My scroll!” He reached out but paused suddenly before touching it. “It’s my scroll, the one my cousin gave me. May I . . . is it . . .”

“If Kolkata put it there for you, you may take it,” Lark said, nodding approval.

So Foxbrush picked up the scroll, which looked a little worse for wear but still whole despite the nights it had spent in the elements. His trousers had no pockets, so he tucked it down the front of his shirt. For some reason, he felt better knowing it was there and he hadn’t lost it. Along with everything else he’d lost.

They continued on in sweaty silence. After they’d passed the second of the totems, Foxbrush said, “I’m curious about one thing. Why are we going so far out of our way to gather wasp-infested black figs? Are they goat feed?”

“No,” said Lark. “They’re for the elder figs.”

“The what?”


“The elder figs. We need black figs to . . . to . . . I don’t know how you say it. To make them fruit. To give them life, to . . .”

“To cross-pollinate?”

Foxbrush stopped in his tracks. His heart froze, then leapt to his throat and thundered there to escape. Not even when he’d fled the sylphs and the wasps had it pounded so vehemently. “You cross-pollinate black figs with elder figs?”

Lark shrugged. “Without black figs, elder figs can’t be eaten. Hurry up!” She was nearly out of sight within a few paces, so thick was the growth over that trail. Still it was several moments before Foxbrush could find the breath to leap after her.

He could not believe it! Of all the unbelievabilities he’d faced in recent life, this was by far the most outrageous!

“I can save Southlands,” he whispered. Then he laughed a choking, gasping, desperate sort of laugh, and tears sprang to his eyes. “I can save Southlands!”





23


LIONHEART WOKE from violent, unruly dreams to discover that the baron had mostly cut through his bindings.

It took him a moment to realize what was happening. After sitting for so many hours, his body felt like a bundle of knotted cord. He’d not intended to drift off, and he shook himself now, desperate to regain consciousness. His brain was full of red wolf and barren landscape, and he sat in a haze, trying to clear these images from his mind.

With a start like a kick in the stomach, he saw what the baron was doing and was on his feet and surging across the room before his legs were quite ready to move. Thus he fell headlong into the baron but succeeded in knocking the little knife from his hands and sending it clattering across the floor.

“Dragons eat you,” said the baron in a voice that would freeze bonfires. He said nothing more but sat watching with a calculating gaze as Lionheart retied his bonds, now with a much shorter length from the iron ring.

Exhausted and bleary, Lionheart backed away from the baron, studying him. Where had that knife come from? The man was barefoot and bereft of his outer garments. But his undershirt was billowy and dark and might conceal many things.

Lionheart plucked his own knife from his belt and stepped forward. He saw the baron flinch, but only just; after all, he’d expected murder all along.

“If I were going to kill you, I wouldn’t have gone through all this bother,” Lionheart said as he cut away the baron’s shirt and pulled it off his body in rags. There were two more knives attached to his elbows and one tiny penknife at his wrist. Lionheart appropriated these and, after a moment’s hesitation, tossed them out one of the windows to break upon the courtyard stones below. “Even I’m not such a fool.”