Two and Twenty Dark Tales (11 page)

“The old man?”

Cyrelle nodded. “Who but a relative would listen to his tales of mad gods?”

“You do not believe in the Dreamland Tree?”

“I believe I have orders to follow. I believe what any good soldier does—I believe my commanding officer. And he said to find you and bring you in.”

“Yet you will let me complete my task first.”

“I will still obey my orders. We are merely taking the long way back.”

“Wait. If you were cast out of the court all those years ago, how are you in the palace’s employ now?”

“Given the right papers, anyone can become anything.”

“Wait,” Marnum said again. “I’m a prince?”

She shrugged. “You are commonly known as the Lost Prince. Your mother stole you and…” her eyes focused on his scar as they never had before, “… made sure you’d be overlooked. Safe. She learned too late what your father was planning in making you.”

“Thy father guards the sheep…”

“Baaaa. What else are citizens of our kingdom but
sheep
?”

“Unreal. This is totally unreal…”

That was when they were attacked by more Huntsmen.

Cyrelle dispatched them neatly, adjusted her helm, and encouraged Marnum forward.

“Those men were sent by—”

“—your father. The king. You are to be sacrificed.”

“What if I’m to
make
a sacrifice of some sort, not
be
sacrificed?” he asked.

“Interesting thought.” She shrugged. “Either way, what’s life without a little father-son tension? Those men were paid for by
our
tax dollars, and I dealt with them so harshly. That was less than fiscally prudent of me.” She clapped her hands together and cleared her throat. “This,” she said, spreading her arms wide, “this is where we will find passage to this tree of yours.”

Below them, the stream dumped and merged with others to create one wide river to the greatest of lakes, a river filled with boats flying the flags of a hundred different places. It was as if the entire world spread wide below them. Marnum, before little more than a slave, then a hunted sacrifice and lost prince, now felt like something so small there was no word tiny enough to fit the thing he’d become, standing before so grand a place.

***

Cyrelle led the way down into the tangle of drifting and tilting docks as the sun shrugged behind a mountain, and the stars crawled into the indigo sky. “Have a care,” she warned, leaping from one wobbling wooden island to another.

“Where are we going?” Marnum asked, trying not to wave his arms to maintain his balance. “Ughh—”

She grabbed his wrist, slipped her hand down to take his, and pulled him across onto the next dock. She dropped his hand and shook her head. “We’re there. Now, choose which river rats we ride with.”

He blinked. Three broad-bellied ships swayed at the edge of the dock, square sails hoisted to reveal their ship’s emblems. One tree, one eagle, and one springing hart. Marnum moved toward the one with the tree’s insignia—until he heard a voice say, “This crew is a
nightmare
! I dream of a better ship, a better crew…”

Nightmare. Dream.

He swung around to find the voice. On the ship decorated with the eagle stood a man with a mop, swabbing as he grumbled. At the same ship’s bow stood a man only a few years Marnum’s senior, a telescope in his hands. He addressed the complainer, saying, “Step to me, Tyrell. See things differently.” He—the captain, according to his clothing—exchanged the telescope for the mop and took over for the other man. “Aim high… there,” the captain said, watching his crewman. “That one not far from the moon—she’s a beauty. Brightest star in the heavens.”

See things differently…

“That one,” Marnum said, remembering the old man’s words.

After a brief discussion regarding the price of passage and the captain’s ignored insistence that Marnum and Cyrelle did not want to accompany them on
their
mission, they were given the right to board.

“And what is this most dangerous mission of yours?” Marnum asked as the boat left the dock.

“We go to destroy the Drowsing Tree. To cut it down and burn out its roots.”

“You mean the Dreamland Tree? You can’t
destroy
it…”

The captain cocked his head, his eyes narrowing to glimmering slits. “That damnable tree endangers our entire world. It must be rooted out.”

“It can be
shaken
…”

Although Marnum couldn’t fathom how the captain’s eyes could narrow more, they did, and his gaze fell on the scar on Marnum’s cheek, and Cyrelle in her wolf’s helm. “Take them!” he shouted, and the crew pounced on them, wrapping them with ropes tied in a half dozen different knots and hitches. To her credit, Cyrelle required four men to drag her down. Marnum rolled his eyes. He had fallen beneath one, but he was large. And quite hairy. That had to count for something.

Watching the land pass by and the men scramble about their duties as they passed into deeper and wider waters, Marnum wondered how he could shake the tree with only four lines of an eight-line song.

“It will never work,” Marnum muttered.

“Of course not. One dare not destroy the Dreamland Tree.” Cyrelle snorted through her helm. “I might yet believe the tree—all of it—is real…”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

The Wolf’s head faced him, and although he couldn’t see her eyebrows, he got the distinct impression one of them was raised. “Is that not the doubter calling the cynic skeptical,” she mused. “It sounds a bit crazy,” she said, “and you know it.”

“You can be quite critical, I think,” he pouted. “And for all that, here I am, trying to figure out how to serenade a tree. I don’t have all the words. I’m missing lines. No one has given me any new ones.”

She blinked at him. “You may be a prince quite removed, but that is most certainly something a prince would say.
No one has given me any new ones.
What if you are only given the beginning and the rest is built from
you
? What if the missing lines are verses you know somehow—words carved into your soul?”

“Your uncle said it’s like an ancient love song. I do not have any words of love carved into my soul.”

“Perhaps to the left of your soul?”

He knew from her tone she was smirking beneath that helm of hers.

“Try your heart,” she said.

He turned away from her. But she had made him think. And see things differently. He whipped back toward her. “What if it’s part of
your
heart? What if you know some of these words better than I?”

“If we’re speaking of love, I am mute,” she assured him.

He groaned, stretched as much as the ropes allowed, and faced forward once more.

“There is a reason
you
must connect the Pieces of Eight. Otherwise, anyone might do it. But a boy born when you were… in the region you were… this must come from
you
.”

The boat slowed and men shouted as an island came into view. On that island, a huge tree sat atop a strangely bulbous hill.

Cyrelle motioned with her snout. “The time has come, Garendell.”

“Marnum,” he corrected. “I never knew myself as Garendell. I’m just Marnum, a simple man.”

He had two couplets—four lines, but a song needed a rhythm and tune. He thought of the rhythms he’d encountered on his journey, the beat of the horse’s hooves as he had clung to the belly of the wagon, the spurt of the beast’s blood as it had died, the pace of his own feet on the road. His fingers tapped against his thigh, and he began to hum.

Cyrelle looked away, torn.

The crew was divided, some lighting two cannons chained to the deck and aiming for the tree, some scurrying into the shallow water to attack the huge and twisted thing on foot.

If it was what the legends claimed—the source of both dream and nightmare—destroying it completely would cause irrevocable harm. But if Marnum could shake it, free it of the poison… He sifted words and tunes and rhythms in his head, testing each on his tongue. He thought of love and he thought of the people he’d met along his way.
“Bridge the distance and heed her call, magic once more will beckon all.”

Cyrelle looked at him, and the Wolf’s head bobbed up and down in a nod. “Keep going. You’re onto something. I can feel it.”

When the sailors began to scream, Marnum focused on the giant tree once more. Broad branches as nimble as arms swept out, stretching and lengthening impossibly, a hundred twiggy fingers grabbing men and hurling them against the shore or into the depths of the lake to drown.

On the hill a fire was lit, flames licking at the tree’s thick trunk.

The tree reached down and smothered the blaze with its leafy branches, and the hill at its base writhed, beasts bursting from between its roots and wanting nothing more than to rend and destroy the river rats, to protect the poisoned tree that wished murder and mayhem beneath a stoically peaceful sky.

“Hurry,” Cyrelle urged. “You need another couplet.” She called to the few remaining men on board. “Set us free—arm us! We will fight beside you!”

She earned only a quick glance before a branch swept out and tossed a man overboard. She tried once more. “Set us loose on it!”

And Marnum found his missing lines at her side.

“A nightmare inside of a dream, Wicked and lovely, though, it seems.”

“String it together,” Cyrelle urged.

“Infinite ways to test your fate,

O’er the mountains and hills, she waits.

Wise is he, so clever and strong,

He fell from grace, all for a song.

Bridge the distance and heed her call,

Magic once more, will beckon all.

A nightmare inside of a dream,

Wicked and lovely, though, it seems.”

The tree shivered, recognizing the song’s strain, but in a moment, recovered, and struck out even more cruelly.

“Set us free to fight—there is no honor dying like a pig trussed for dinner!” Cyrelle shouted.

A man raced forward, his cheeks red with exertion, and he looked at them both between frightened glances over his shoulder. “You,” he said of Cyrelle. “I will set you free to fight—you look able to brandish a weapon.” He slid a doubtful glance at Marnum as he cut through Cyrelle’s ropes.

Marnum sang still, twisting the tune.

The sailor handed Cyrelle a blade and swung back around to rejoin the fight.

Shedding her ropes like a snakeskin, Cyrelle grabbed the knot at Marnum’s hands and slipped her blade beneath.

“You said you’d fight beside them…”

“I will—as soon as I free
you
.”

A branch whipped out and swept the front of the deck clear of men.

Cyrelle sawed at the knot faster, the last threads of rope snapping apart as the branch returned and grabbed her, pulling her into the air.

Singing, Marnum shook free of his ropes.

The tree trembled at the song and the power of his newly found voice.

It held Cyrelle high, preparing to fling her into the shimmering depths, and Marnum’s voice cracked.

“It’s wrong!” Cyrelle shouted. “Not the words—the words are true. Not the tune—the tune is sound.” She wrapped her arms around the tree’s branch, determined not to be flung into the deep blue. “What said the soothsayer?” she screamed as the tree’s branch toyed with her, swinging her from side to side.

“Find the arrangement to reorder your world…”
he whispered. “The order of the lines…”

The branch pulled back, as if weighing Cyrelle, and Marnum reworked the song and sang it with all that his voice and heart and soul could muster:

“Infinite ways to test your fate,

O’er the mountains and hills, she waits.

Wise is he, so clever and strong,

Fell from grace, all for a song.

A nightmare inside of a dream,

Wicked and lovely, though, it seems.

Bridge the distance and heed her call,

And magic once more, will beckon all.”

The tree screamed, shivered, and shook—wood tearing with a sound like thunder cracking as the branches pulled back toward the Dreamland Tree’s base, taking Cyrelle to the hill with them. The rioting beasts fell silent and faded to nothing but sand and dust, scattering. The waters around the little island bubbled, and there was a
boom
far louder than thunder, and then the waters settled, leaving nothing but a silence so heavy it rang in Marnum’s ears.

Marnum’s song ended in a scream when the tree dropped her, and then he was running—across the deck, leaping over the rail and into the water, and bolting up the brief beach to the foot of the hill.

Where Cyrelle lay.

Unmoving.

He stopped beside her, sand and dirt spraying up from his boots as he carefully undid the buckles and snaps at the base of her helm, his fingers fumbling. He tugged the wolf mask free and pushed the stray strands of hair away from her eyes.

She winced and blinked up at him. “Look,” she whispered, her eyes focusing on the tree. “It’s happening…”

The gnarled and twisted branches had shrunk into healthy looking shapes—nearly normal except for their gigantic scale. Something quivered in the tree’s trunk, the bark pulsing and undulating. And then, it opened like a knothole had been there all along, and had chosen now to unroll. Something emerged, glittering in the rising moon’s light.

“The stone…”

The bark split, tugged back, and revealed the more tender part of the tree. A noise like fabric ripping sounded, and wood peeled from the trunk, twisting and turning and becoming something new and strange and separate. Something hollow and sleek, with a long, straight neck and a curving body. Vines snaked out of the hill’s base to line the instrument’s neck, and the thing slid down the hill to stop at Marnum’s feet.

Cyrelle sat up. “You’re being granted a gift. It seems you have a new mission, Marnum. Go. Pick it up. It’s…”

“A guitar?” Marnum asked, taking it into his hands. The god’s discarded worry stone shimmered in its head, like a singular eye. Marnum’s fingers found their place with an equal sense of wonder and something like instinct, and he ran his fingers down the strings, marveling at the natural tone, until—