Dreamwood (7 page)

Angus was off his stool and standing. “Shame on you, scaring a lady like that,” he said, scolding the Lupine man.

Now the air was tense. And Lucy waited to see what the Lupines would do. But they were silent, making no apology. The staring contest stretched on.

Angus shook his head as if washing his hands of the lot of them. Then he turned and offered Lucy his hand. Oh, the power in his hand! She took it gratefully, feeling somehow unable to move on her own, and he helped her down off the stool.

“Take her home,” he told Pete, speaking in a low voice, man to man. He thrust something into Pete's hand and clapped him once on the shoulder. “And buy yourselves some candy or something.” He glanced once at Lucy. “It'll make her feel better. Scare stories,” he muttered, shaking his head again. Then he turned back to the bar.

I
'm sorry about your pa,” Pete said on the ride back from Pentland.

Lucy sat beside him, sucking on a horehound drop, a bag of hard candies on the seat between them.

“Oh, he's not dead,” she told him in a sticky voice. “No, sir.” Not William Darrington. She looked off to the side of the road: the sickening, stupid endless forest. The giant trees dripped cold drops of condensed mist onto her head (for of course she'd forgotten to bring a hat), making her even more miserable. He wouldn't have come all the way up here and written her a letter saying he didn't know how he would manage
without his trusted assistant
if he was only going to go off and die.

And then she was crumpling: forehead, mouth, eyes, all folding like a bent accordion. But she wasn't going to cry. She rubbed her nose so hard her nostrils stung.

The candy shattered into bittersweet shards, which she crunched angrily before reaching for another.

Life without her father. This was a cliff's edge that she approached full of dread, peering over it for a hasty, sickening glimpse of the abyss beyond. What would she do?

“Well,” Pete said and flicked the reins unhappily. Something was eating him, too. “Guess I got to tell Pa there's Rust on the land next to ours. Billups is our neighbor. What do you bet we'll be next?”

She didn't know what to say. The Knightlys had seemed strained and worried when she'd arrived. She realized they could face disaster.

Lucy rubbed her sticky fingers on her dress. She'd lost a glove somewhere in the wagon. She'd have been punished for such carelessness at Miss Bentley's. Now she rather hoped it never turned up—in the current darkness of her mood, she felt like tossing the other glove, too. “Does it spread that fast?”

Pete looked down at the reins in his hands. “Faster and faster. Like it's speeding up.”

It was strange to think the massive kodok trees were vulnerable. They rose like towers over the fern-filled glens.

“But your father's a lawyer,” she said, remembering what Able Dodd had said about Gordon at the train station. “You don't depend on the forest, do you?”

Pete's cheeks were sucked in as if the air had been let out of him. “Pa made some bad investments.” He looked worriedly over at her. “I think they were counting on selling the land to pay their debts.”

Then the Knightlys were in trouble. Lucy picked awkwardly at the buttons on her blue wool dress. “There's bound to be a way to fix it,” she said. “You heard them back there—my father said he'd found a cure.”

“Uh-huh,” Pete replied. He took a candy from the bag but crunched it without much energy. “Too bad he didn't get a chance to tell anyone what it was.” He gave a heavy sigh.

Whitsun and Snickers made their steady way down the road. Lucy took another candy and hunched her shoulders against the drippy mist. If her father had said there was a cure, then a cure most certainly existed.

• • •

As it turned out, Pete needn't have worried about telling his parents they might have Rust on their land.

In the time they'd been in Pentland, Rust had already been discovered in the Knightlys' trees.

Lucy and Pete walked in the front door to find a scene of chaos. Able Dodd thrust past them carrying a yoke and two large oilskins, which gave off a strong stink of fish.

“Back to snake oil,” he muttered darkly. “Never should have changed to electricity in the first place.”

Lucy and Pete shrank back against the wall, giving him a wide berth.

“What was that about?” Lucy asked. “What's snake oil?”

“For the lamps,” Pete said. “It's cheaper than electric. I guess we're turning off the power.” He was about to say more when Anya came bustling by with a tray of coffee and sandwiches.

“Thank goodness you're back,” she said breathlessly. “They're in a state.”

“Anya!” called Gordon from his study.

“Coming!” the cook replied and hurried off.

Lucy and Pete followed after her.

The door to the study was open, and Lucy could hear Dot's agitated voice as well as Gordon's defeated replies. They were standing in a small room decorated rather severely with gloomy landscape paintings and dark wood furnishings.

“He was growing it, Gordon. Right here. On our land!” Dot was standing over a desk, rifling through an explosion of papers. Two livid spots stood out on her thin cheeks.

“Let's be calm,” Gordon said, pacing behind her. “I'm sure he wouldn't do any such thing.”

Dot's voice got high and shrill as she bent down to read. “It's all here. Written down. Pages and pages of notes about how it grows. Look, it says here,
Rust is a fungus. I've managed to grow it and study it in a controlled environment.
”

Lucy stepped closer. Pages and pages of notes—that had to be her father's research.

Gordon coughed. “He does say
controlled.
”

“It doesn't matter!” Dot, her head down, hadn't noticed Lucy's approach. “He brought this on us,” she said despairingly. “We should never have let him anywhere near us. And to think—we took in his
child.
”

Lucy's stomach churned as she realized Dot was talking about her.

Dot looked up and at that moment saw Lucy. But she didn't apologize. Instead the sight of Lucy seemed to push her past some final barrier of rage. “Your father has ruined us!”

It was as though she'd been slapped. For a moment Lucy was numb, unable to speak. She put a hand on one of the room's high-backed chairs. “What do you mean?”

“His experiments.” Dot thrust out a notebook in front of her.

Gordon looked at Lucy unhappily. “I was searching for some papers relating to our land deeds and I happened to look through your father's notebooks. He grew Rust on our land and now it's spread to our neighbors' as well.”

Lucy felt as if a block of ice had settled in her chest. Her father never would have done anything to hurt someone. And people were always grateful for his work. Sometimes they might pooh-pooh his ideas or methods. But he'd never been accused of anything like this.

“Those notes are his research for a cure,” Lucy said. She looked at Pete—who'd come to stand beside her—hoping for corroboration. But he was stock-still, a look of anguish on his face.

“We're lucky he's disappeared then,” Dot said in fury. “Any more of his cure and the whole forest would be gone.”

“Dorothea,” Gordon said, reaching for his wife. “She's just a child. She had nothing to do with this.”

But Lucy had heard enough. Anything said against her father was as good as said against her.

“He was trying to help!” she cried. She knocked into Pete as she turned, storming from the room. She slammed the front door behind her and had the satisfaction of hearing the windows rattle.

And then she was running, running with such fury she didn't know where she was going, just away.

• • •

For some time Lucy simply crashed and ran, pell-mell, into the woods. There'd been a path, of sorts, and she'd followed it—or thought she had. Eventually, exhaustion overtook her and she stopped to catch her breath. Her side ached. Sweat soaked the heavy fabric of her dress. Her lungs felt raked with fire.

So . . . the path.

She put her hands on her hips and walked a circle, gasping for breath. It had to be here somewhere. But then even the starting point of her circle had disappeared, swallowed up in ferns. The trees all looked the same. The filtered light gave no hint of the location of the sun.

Lucy tried to quiet the pounding of her heart. She had an excellent sense of direction, she reminded herself. The path was just over to her right. It had to be. She plunged ahead, the moments going by in hot, sweaty distress.

Or maybe it was to her left?

She stopped, knowing it was no use. She was lost.

Lost in the woods of Saarthe!

As soon as she thought this she felt the immensity of the forest, its wild and hidden life. Somewhere above her a bird gave a sinister croaking call. Ahead, the underbrush rustled, waving as some invisible animal slunk through it . . . toward her.

Wolves. In her adventure novels, the forests were always full of wolves.

She ran again, panic racing along her nerves. But before she had gone very far her foot snagged on a root and she went sprawling on the soft humus of the ground. She lay there, heart pounding, and spat dirt out of her mouth. Then she sniffed the air.

Was that wood smoke?

Cautiously she got to her feet, brushing off kodok needles and dirt from her dress. Ahead of her she saw a small peaked-roof cottage, so decorated it might have been made of gingerbread. Every surface was covered with wooden cutouts of animals, flowers, hearts, and stars—everything whimsical and charming.

Lucy went toward it, pulling kodok needles out of her hair. The smoke she'd scented was streaming merrily out the house's chimney. Someone was at home.

Slowly she climbed the cottage's wooden steps and stood before its door. An ingenious design of different colored woods made a scene on it as fine as any painting: a river valley cutting through forested hillsides.

For just one moment she hesitated. In fairy tales, this was exactly the sort of place where witches lived, hiding their wickedness behind an enchanting exterior. But she was not the sort of girl to put stock in fairy tales.

She swung the knocker three times and waited.

The door opened, revealing a short, round little man about her own size. He had bandy legs, a full beard, and long white hair tied in braids on either side of his head. Slung around his waist was a leather belt bristling with tools. He had wire-rimmed glasses and on top of his head was a jaunty striped stocking cap.

“My goodness!” he exclaimed. “A child.” He peered up at her with bright blue eyes under bushy eyebrows. “And you've been crying.”

Behind him, coming from the interior of the cabin, Lucy heard a strange click and clack; she had the strongest impression of something moving within.

“No,” she said, though perhaps a few tears had fallen during her flight. She wiped her eyes to get rid of them. “I'm lost.”

“Oh no,” the little man said, his eyes widening. “But come in, come in. I'll make us some tea.”

There was that odd noise again, almost like hundreds of dominoes softly falling against one another.

Lucy hesitated. “Please, could you just point me in the direction of the road . . . ?”

“Certainly. But have some tea first.” He waved her inside. “Come in, come in . . .”

He was so small—and jolly as an elf—that Lucy gave in to his insistence and stepped over the threshold. When her eyes adjusted she found herself in a room filled to bursting with carved wooden toys: animals of all kinds real and unreal, dolls that had such lifelike faces they might have been real people, an army of wooden soldiers. They hung from the carved rafters or sat on shelves or nested in the branches of the great carved wooden tree that took up the far corner of the room.

“What you need is some tea,” the little man said, bustling in his kitchen.

“I guess I am a little thirsty.” She tugged her hair back into a semblance of a braid and smoothed her skirt nervously. Something felt strange about the place, but she couldn't say what, exactly. It wasn't the toys, although they were remarkable. She stopped to run her fingers over a lion's polished wooden mane.

They were beautiful—pity she was far too old for them. She put the lion back down and turned to join the little man in the kitchen.

That's when it happened. She had just turned her back when out of the corner of her eye . . . the toys
moved.

She drew in a sharp breath and whirled around.

Everything was still. Her eyes darted about suspiciously. But under her scrutiny, one tiny hedgehog curled into a prickled wooden ball.

“Aha!” she exclaimed, running over to it. “I wasn't imagining it. They did move.” And then they all did.

With a soft clatter of wood on wood, a miniature toy horse cantered around the room, an alligator snapped its jaws. An angry rhino came charging out and bowled over a squadron of soldiers who fell down like ninepins. At once the other toys began to march and dance and run and scurry.

Lucy turned to see the little man standing in the doorway, a pleased look on his merry face.

“They're alive,” she said in wonder.

He shook his head. “No, my dear, it is merely the appearance of life. But I'm forgetting my manners. My name is Ulfric Amadeus Svendegard. And this”—he gestured round at his creations—“is my workshop. I am a toymaker. Retired, mostly.”

As he spoke, a tiny brown monkey, no bigger than a parakeet, clambered out of his shirtfront pocket and begun to swing from braid to braid.

“Ooh, stop that,” Ulfric said. “He is the naughtiest of all.” As Lucy watched, Ulfric made a futile attempt to catch the monkey, slapping himself like a man beset by mosquitoes. The monkey was always too fast, however, and Lucy found herself hugging her knees with laughter.