The Water and the Wild (30 page)

“There have been rumors, though,” said Roote. “Rumors rumbling though these forests about the Heir of Fiske. But that's impossible.”

“Heir of Fiske, my tooth,” grunted Crag. “Younger Northerlies, they're as optimistic as schoolchildren, thinking that some new ruler's gonna pop out of the earth itself like a stinkweed. 'Course there aren't gonna be any more Heirs of Fiske. Those younger ones don't remember the Plague like we do. All those Fiskes are dead.”

“But,” said Adelaide, “Lottie's a—OW!”

Fife had given Adelaide's shin a good kick and shook his head once, decisively.

“I
mean,
” Adelaide picked up again, “Lottie's already heard all this, haven't you, Lottie dear?”

Lottie nodded.

“Impossible, like I said,” concluded Roote. “Though there are some fine ballads about the Fiskes. Best in the
Northerly repertoire in my opinion. Crag here knows them by heart.”

Crag blushed and waved Roote off. “Nothing worth shouting 'bout,” he muttered, though he was already pulling out a small wooden flute from his vest, “just some tales the Old Sprite taught me. Though if you'd
really
like to 'ear some . . .”

Without waiting for a response, Crag raised the flute to his lips and began to play. The melody was sad and discordant, like rain on a birthday or sun on a graveyard.

“He sure can play,” Fife murmured to Lottie and the others. “I think it's one of the better keens, an ear for music.”

“Bid the strain be wild and deep,” Oliver said, chin propped on his knees, eyes closed, “nor let thy notes of joy be first.”

Only Adelaide remained unmoved. “I still think the one in black was going to cut my arm off.”

“But he didn't,” Lottie said.

“No,” said Adelaide. She added in a hush that Lottie barely heard, “Thanks to you.”

Lottie looked up, startled. It was the first time that Adelaide had spoken to her since Sweetwater.

Adelaide went on in a small voice. “I don't admit I'm wrong, you know, because to be wrong is the height of unsophistication. But I think being ungrateful is even worse.”

“Oh?” Lottie felt that what Adelaide was telling her just now was something fragile. She didn't dare say anything else for fear of shattering it.

Adelaide let out a sigh. “It's been terribly unrefined of me to not thank you for what you did in the swamp. If you hadn't come after me, I'd be the one who fell in the oblivion. So—thank you.”

Lottie ventured only two more words. “You're welcome.”

“Thanks,” said Adelaide, who seemed very ready to now put an end to the conversation. “I—I'm glad we've settled that.”

Crag had finished his flute solo, and a taut pause fell on the ruins. After wiping his hand across his mouth, Crag puckered again and blew a single note from the flute. Then he cleared his throat and began to sing at the same pitch. His voice was hoarse and shallow, but solemn, too, and something in the timbre of it made Lottie's blood warm. But the words, more than anything, kept her fixated:

“Good Queen Mab, in spritely grace,
Was seated on her throne.
Downtrodden sprites from every place
Sought out her aid alone.
Thieves returned their pilfered goods,
The sad produced a smile.
They traveled back into the woods,
And kindness replaced guile.
Dark years passed, and Vik the Fiske
Took up the royal crown
His keen was weak, his throne at risk,
He gathered no renown.
Then one night he fled the court.
No Fiske would rule again!
And chaos poured from every port,
As sprites slayed and were slain.”

The last word of the song hung in the air until a breeze slinked through the ruins, shivered up the vines, and dragged the note away.

“That,” said Fife, “was the most depressing thing I've ever heard.”

“There aren't many chipper ditties up north,” said Roote.

“I wonder why that is,” said Fife. “It's such a warm and fuzzy place up there in the caves and wilders.”

“Speaking of which,” said Oliver, “if you two are Northerlies, what are you doing this far south?”

“Eh,” said Crag, “there's always been Northerly lookouts at 'ingecatch, ever since the vines drove the Southerlies out. It's 'ard work, so new sprites volunteer each year.”

“Lookouts for what?” said Lottie.

“For the Southerly Court, of course,” said Roote. “To monitor the movements of the Southerly King and his Guard, should they ever choose to invade our northern lands. You don't think we'd wait until they were snapping at our gates, do you?”

“No,” said Lottie. “I guess you can't be too careful.”

“You can't,” agreed Crag. “Especially not with that King Starkling squatted on the throne. 'e's been the worst of them all.”

“Which is why if I were you, little mites,” said Roote, “I wouldn't be going anywhere near there.”

“And yet we are,” said Fife, who had disentangled himself from his vine chair and now stood at the ready. “Aren't we, everyone? Wouldn't you say it's time to go?”

Lottie looked to the sun. It hung almost straight overhead through the open roof of the ruins. Nearly noon. Lottie had been too lost in Crag's ballad to realize that Fife was right: it was past time to go.

“WHATEVER BUSINESS
you have with the Southerly Court,” Roote told the quartet as they readied to leave, “it isn't worth the journey. Why not forget the whole thing, hm?”

Crag handed Fife a small bundle of food wrapped in dirty cheesecloth that smelled of raw meat. “What they've got, Northerlies share,” he said.

“If you see old Wensley Ingle again,” Roote said by way of final words, “remember Roote and Crag to him.”

As the sun reached its highest point in the sky, they left the ruins and set out into Hingecatch Forest. It was
difficult work, navigating the vines underfoot, but Roote and Crag had directed them to a narrow pathway where the vines were less dense than usual. Lottie only tripped twice before she remastered the art of walking.

The chance to rest seemed to have done a world of good for everyone, and Fife went on for half an hour about how all chairs should be made from vines and how selfish it was of Northerlies to keep the secret to perfect seating all to themselves.

“But the vines are Northerly,” Oliver said, “so it's not like they'd bend to the will of Southerlies or wisps.”

Fife asked Oliver to stop being so practical and let him rail a little while longer against the injustice of what he was now calling the Northerly Vine Monopoly.

They tromped on until they passed under trees dangling down purple fruits that Fife identified as edible. Oliver opened the cheesecloth bundle that Crag had given them and that contained, true to its smell, the carcass of a small animal that no one was willing to eat. Crag had also packed up some mushrooms and chestnuts, however, and when Fife and Oliver had carefully wiped them free of the carcass's blood, they added them to their stock of
picked fruit for a makeshift meal. It was enough to settle the growl in Lottie's stomach, but she missed more than ever the filling bread and cheese that they had lost to the swamp.

When they set out again, Fife and Adelaide took the lead, arguing about the Battle of Hingecatch and whether the victory of the Southerlies had been due entirely to sheer tactical skill and bravery (argued Adelaide) or to the conniving betrayal of Southerly politicians (argued Fife). Lottie and Oliver walked behind them, and for a while the two of them shared a quiet giggle whenever Adelaide called Fife “unrefined,” which was, on their timed average, every one and a half minutes. After a while longer, though, the arguing was just unpleasant, and Lottie winced every time Adelaide's voice broke into an extra-shrill octave.

“Are you all right?” Oliver asked.

“Oh, I'm fine,” said Lottie. “It's just that Adelaide knows how to hit a high note, doesn't she?”

“No,” said Oliver, “I mean, are you
all right
. You went through a lot back there. First the Barghest, then Sweetwater, and then the Northerlies. If I were you, I'd be ready to go home.”

“I do want to go home,” Lottie admitted, “but not because it's home. I mean, I don't want to go back to Mrs. Yates or Thirsby Square. I really just want to go back because it's the place where Eliot is.”

They came to a long rut of mud, and Lottie jumped over it with an ease that she hadn't possessed two days ago, when they had first set out in Wandlebury Wood.

“I think,” said Oliver, “that you'd make a good poet.”

“What?”
Lottie laughed. “Some of that oblivion must've gotten to
your
brain, Ollie.”

Lottie turned a swift red. She had never called Oliver by that nickname before; it had just slipped out. Oliver, however, didn't seem to notice.

“I'm serious,” he said. “Separation and longing, that's the stuff I like best about human poetry. Sighing the lack of many a thing one's sought, moaning the expense of many a vanished sight, and so on and so forth.”

“What about Southerly poetry?”

“Southerly poetry isn't about things like that,” said Oliver. “It's not allowed to be personal. It's only for recording big, important things, like history. But your human poetry, it's about life. It's the terrific and the terrible all mashed into one big mess. The things more important than the important things.”

“The things that make life worth it,” said Lottie, recalling what Oliver had said by the campfire.

Oliver smiled, his eyes shifting to a gentle blue. “You remembered.”

“I think you and Eliot would get along,” said Lottie. “He's an artist, too. But me? I don't think I've really got that sort of art in me.”

“Sure, you have,” said Oliver.

“You think I'm refined, then?” Lottie grinned. “Thanks.”

“I think you're Lottie,” Oliver said with a shrug. After a silent minute he added, “And you can call me Ollie, you know. I don't mind. It's what all of my friends call me.”

Lottie swallowed hard. His friends? Did Oliver think of her as his friend? She hadn't thought of herself as Oliver's friend, really, or Fife's or Adelaide's; there hadn't been time to. Now that she thought on it, though, Lottie felt good, more than good, about the idea.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling.

The forest grew sparser. As the sun sunk overhead into late afternoon, its rays shone between chinks of foliage. The plum-tinted light was just turning into a gloomier shade when Oliver motioned them to a stop.

“Look through the trees,” he said.

They crowded around where Oliver had stopped and peered through the branches of a birch tree into a wide expanse of green grass. They had come to the forest's edge. On the distant horizon loomed the outline of something thick and white.

“The walls of the Southerly Court,” said Fife. “Told you. Don't they look just like bleached bones?”