Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6) (23 page)

T
HE
NIGHT
AFTER
F
OXBRUSH
’
S
TREK
to the Twisted Man’s tree, Redman and his children sat around a fire outside their front door, using stone awls to enlarge the tiny eyehole at the bottom of each black fig. Through these holes they threaded strings made of stout grasses, gathering figs into clusters of five or six. The wasps buzzed dully as they pursued this work. Most of the adult wasps, Redman explained to Foxbrush, had fled, leaving only their pupae deep in the heart of each fig. “But they’ll grow soon enough,” he said. “And then you’ll see what they do.”

Foxbrush offered to help, but after his first few unskilled attempts with the awl—during which he very nearly succeeded in puncturing the fleshy part of his palm—Redman took the tools away from him and told him that he’d done enough for one day.

So Foxbrush took himself to the far side of the fire, sitting with his back to the jungle, watching the family at work. And his heart beat with an almost sickening thrill every time he considered what they did.

But I must watch.
I must wait and see how it continues,
he told himself. After all, he didn’t yet know how the process worked. He didn’t want to go running back to his own time with only half an idea in his head; not when a whole idea could save his kingdom!

There was also the difficulty of not knowing how he was supposed to get home again. And of course there was Daylily.

An overwhelming sense of helplessness washed over poor Foxbrush as he sat with the wildness of the jungle behind him and the wildness of the people who lived so near it before him. He did not belong in this world. He never would. He did not belong anywhere save in his own quiet study, with books and ledgers and interesting equations spread before him, his door shut on anything that might disturb or distract him from his work.

He did not belong here. And he did not belong on the throne of Southlands.

His hand went to the front of his shirt, and he drew out the scroll hidden there. Hardly knowing what he did, he unrolled it, then turned himself so that the light of the fire might fall upon the words written so elegantly in, he guessed, a woman’s hand. So much for it being a message from Bard Eanrin! Who was blind anyway, if Foxbrush remembered the stories correctly, and, if he existed, probably couldn’t write at all.

Yet Lionheart had felt the need to deliver this scroll and the message it contained. Why? Some mad joke of his? Leo always was one for jokes.

“What is that?”

Foxbrush looked up and found Lark standing over him, her awl in one hand, a cluster of figs in the other. Glancing beyond her, he saw that Redman had stepped away from the fire, leaving his three daughters and little son alone for the moment.

“It’s a message, I suppose,” Foxbrush said, a little unwillingly. Privacy seemed to be an unknown commodity in this village.

“Who from?” Lark persisted, sitting cross-legged beside him. She began work on the figs she’d brought with her, her head cocked to one side, waiting.

“Bard Eanrin,” Foxbrush replied with a mocking snort.

But Lark did not find this difficult to believe. She indicated the scroll with her awl. “You can understand those marks? You can read?”

Foxbrush nodded. Lark let out a plaintive sigh. “My da used to read, he says. He once showed me letters in the dirt, and he told me about reading. But he can’t remember now, and none of us knows the way. It is a strange and wonderful magic!”

“It’s not really . . .” Foxbrush stopped. What was the purpose of protesting magic of any kind in this new world? “Would you like to hear?” he asked, surprising himself. He’d not intended to make the offer. But he felt her pleading, though she’d said nothing.

Lark’s eyes fairly shot out of her brown little face. She sprang to her feet and called to her siblings in their mother’s tongue. “Come here! Come here! The wasp man is going to
read
!”

The three little sisters—Cattail and the two who were not twins, though they looked very alike and were only a year apart in age—grabbed their work and their brother and hastened over to join Foxbrush and Lark. Without a word they sat, pulling small Wolfsbane down between them and shoving a rag doll into his hands. He paid no attention to this but watched Foxbrush with fascination equal to that of his sisters.

“Um,” said Foxbrush, a little nervous at this sudden, eager audience. “They don’t understand me.”

“I’ll tell them what you say,” said Lark with a grin. “Read to us, wasp man!”

Foxbrush shrugged and tried a smile at the grave, upturned faces. They did not smile in return. “Well, all right. This is a story told in . . . in my country. A famous story. You might know it yourselves. It is
The Ballad of Shadow Hand
.” He raised his eyebrows questioningly at Lark.

She shook her head. “Who’s Shadow Hand?”

Foxbrush frowned at this. Shadow Hand was, after all, one of the oldest and best-known heroes in Southlander history; his tale not quite as beloved as the tale of Maid Starflower and the Wolf Lord, but very nearly so.

“Well,” said he with a shrug, “I suppose that’s what I’m here to tell you. Lumé! Perhaps I’ll be remembered as the first man to tell this story! Take that, why don’t you, Bard Eanrin?”

The children exchanged puzzled glances at this. But Foxbrush, chuckling to himself, unrolled the scroll to its full length, which was long indeed. And
he read as best he could by the firelight (supplying the rest from distant childhood memory). Lark translated as he went.

“Oh, Shadow Hand of Here and There,

Follow where you will

Your fickle, fleeing, Fiery Fair,

O’er woodlands, under hill.

She’ll not be found, save by the stone,

The stern and shining Bronze . . .”

Here, his voice faltered. As a child, he’d paid little heed to the story, certainly not to poetic details. Poetry never had been his area of comfort or even interest. But when he came to the word
Bronze
, his voice cracked, and he scowled at the page. He recalled suddenly what the Eldest had said a few nights previous:

“They say a maid came out
of the jungle, a maid wearing a bronze stone about
her neck. . . .”

Foxbrush felt the blood drain from his face with sudden, dreadful foreboding that he could not understand and was quite certain he did not wish to.

“Is that all?” one of the look-alike sisters demanded. Foxbrush, who did not understand the words, understood the meaning and read on.

“She’ll not be found, save by the stone,

The stern and shining Bronze

Where crooked stands the Mound alone

Thorn clad and sharp with awns.

“How pleasant are the Faerie folk

Who dwell beyond your time.

How pleasant are your aged kinfolk

Of olden, swelt’ry clime.

“But dark the tithe they pay, my son,

To safely dwell beneath that sun!”

There was a great deal more written close upon the parchment. Foxbrush read to the end but scarcely heard himself. The story was familiar: the old, comfortable familiarity of nursery tales known since before real memory begins, associated ever in his mind with a certain smell of leather binding and the soap-roughened hands of his nursemaid holding him in her lap and turning pages.

But as he read it out on that darkening night with children gathered round—their laps full of figs, their nimble fingers working awls—the familiar phrases took on new meaning. Darker meaning that comes when childhood fantasy slips into reality and is not quite what one expects it to be.

Here and There.

The Bronze.

These words rang in the forefront of his mind so that he scarcely heard his own reading. Thus he was surprised when Lark interrupted with a noisy,
“What?”

“What?” Foxbrush echoed, looking at her over the scroll. “Is something amiss?”

Lark, her hands on her hips, the awl still gripped in one fist, wrinkled her nose at him. “Read that verse again.”

“Which verse?”

“The one you just read!”

Foxbrush looked down at words that swam before him in the shadows, trying to recall where he’d been. Then he read:

“In broken sleep upon the ground

The dear one lost now lies.

Yet a kiss in faithful friendship found,

And love opens wide eyes.”

“He
kissed
her?” Lark said, making a face. Her sisters and little brother, not understanding her, giggled at her expression and hid their faces in their hands.

“Well, yes,” said Foxbrush slowly.

“To wake her up?” Lark’s laughter redoubled the giggles of her siblings. “That’s silly!”

Foxbrush looked at the verse again. He had to admit, it was a bit silly when one stopped to think about it. But then, what Faerie tale wasn’t? It was all nonsense in the end, packaged up in frills and pretty verses. “It’s a classic theme,” he explained to the incredulous Lark. “An enchanted sleep can always be broken by the kiss of a prince or a princess.”

“Prince or princess?” Lark repeated, and her laughter subsided into a more thoughtful expression.

“Yes. Like an Eldest’s son,” Foxbrush said.

“Or daughter.”

“Or daughter, yes.” Foxbrush eyed the girl, surprised to find her considering this information so intently where but a moment before she’d been a small mountain of scorn. “Would you like me to finish?” he asked.

She nodded, and he read through the last few verses to the end, there declaring along with the original poet,
“Recall you
now my ancient story!”

With that, as Lark finished her translation, he let the scroll close up on itself. When he raised his gaze, he saw Redman standing on the other side of the fire, watching him intently out of his one good eye. What the scar-faced man thought was anyone’s guess. And Foxbrush did not care for guessing games.

Suddenly a wind rose up in the distance, moving swiftly among the topmost branches of the jungle trees. With it came a voice calling,
Foxbrush! Where are you
, Foxbrush?

“Quick. Get inside,” said Redman. “Stop up your ears so you can’t hear it calling.”

And Foxbrush, scrambling to his feet, hastened to obey.

Early the next morning, before the heat became too oppressive, Foxbrush was roused from his bed and made to march with the children to the orchard growing just outside the Eldest’s village. It was an impressive
orchard (considering the work required to keep back the ever encroaching jungle) of stately elder figs just beginning to fruit.

The children carried bunches of black figs slung over their shoulders and held more clumps in each hand. Foxbrush, similarly laden, followed them into the murmuring shade of the trees and watched how they tossed their black figs up into the elder fig branches. Tied by the stout grass strings, the black figs caught and looped around each branch, hanging like holiday decorations in the boughs above.

“When the baby wasps grow,” Lark explained to Foxbrush as she showed him a better way to toss his figs, “they crawl out of these figs and climb into the growing elder figs, thinking they are black figs. They lay their eggs in the black figs, you see. But the elder figs, though similar, are different from black figs; there is no place for the wasp to lay her eggs!”

“I see.” Foxbrush gazed up into the branches, studying the clumps above. “So the wasp pollinates the elder fig, but she cannot lay her eggs, which would render it inedible like black figs.”

It was so beautiful and so strange. Foxbrush moved up and down the orchard after the children as the morning lengthened. Soon the orchard was full of hanging black figs, though Lark told him they would need to make many more trips to the Twisted Man’s tree to gather of his bounty. “These black figs will shrivel up in a few days, and we have to make certain there are enough for all the elder figs to grow,” she said.

But the elder figs
would
grow. And they would ripen and plump up and be as golden and delectable as those Foxbrush had read about. Not merely lifeless little lumps fit only for birds and monkeys. Real, abundant, marketable explosions of juice and flavor and . . .

Once more he whispered to himself, “I can save Southlands.”

As soon as they’d finished the task, Foxbrush hurried to find Redman, who was hard at work repairing one of the goat sheds down the hill from the Eldest’s House. “Something tried to get in during the night,” he said when Foxbrush inquired. “One of the fey folk; a newcomer, I fear. Broke partway through and caught one of the kids. Couldn’t get it out of the pen, thank the Lights Above, but broke its leg.”

Foxbrush looked at the poor little kid huddled up among the frightened
goats at the other end of the pen. Someone had already splinted and wrapped its leg, but it bleated in pain. Redman cursed at the sound even as he worked.

“We’ll have to set up a new totem to appease this one. I can only hope the tribute won’t be too high. The Faerie beasts get more violent and more prevalent every day! It’s an invasion, my lad. That’s what it is. An invasion of the South Land.”