Two and Twenty Dark Tales (9 page)

This is the story I was waiting for all along. This is the story that will change everything.

– The End –

Pieces of Eight

Shannon Delany with Max Scialdone

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Thy papa guards the sheep;

Thy mama shakes the dreamland tree,

And from it fall sweet dreams for thee,

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Our cottage vale is deep;

The little lamb is on the green,

With woolly fleece so soft and clean,

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Down where the woodbines creep;

Be always like the lamb so mild,

A kind and sweet and gentle child,

Sleep, baby, sleep…

– Mother Goose

H
E
jumped at the sound of someone knocking on a nearby door. Outside, a man bellowed, and from his place in the dim room, Marnum could make out the noise of a scuffle before that door slammed shut and another—even closer—was pounded on.

Dust motes spiraled down in the slender light seeping between curtains drawn tight to hide their impromptu rendezvous, and Marnum looked at the woman whom the barracks boys claimed was his mother—the same woman whose jingling belt held a key that matched the shape of the scar on his cheek. The words of the prophecy came back to him, singing through his head like only the last allowable song could:
“Some are born for sacrifice, both catalyst and key
…
”

“It can’t be me,” he whispered. “I can’t be the sacrifice. The prophecy says,” his voice softened, richened, as he sang,
“one unscarred, unmaimed, untrue, the opening shall be
.
”
He shook his head, blond hair tumbling into his mismatched eyes. “I’m maimed,” he said. “Scarred,” he added, his lip curled just enough so she’d know he meant in more than a physical way. “I’m…”

“
Perfect
, except for the searing touch of a misguided mother’s love.” Her hand darted out, fingers brushing the raised, white shape that ran from the corner of his blue eye to the lobe of his left ear.

He slapped her away.

“I kept you alive,” she whispered, “and I’ll manage it one more time. Take this.” She tugged a worn and wrinkled piece of parchment from her belt pouch, and pressed it into his hand. “This is how I’ll shake the Dreamland Tree. Find the Pieces of Eight.
There was an old woman lived under a hill
… Find the woman as old as time. She is a soothsayer—a prophetess. By grace, you’ll be placed on the right path.”

The next door they pounded on was so close it rattled the walls and flexed the cobwebs hanging in the slender beams above.

“Out the back,” the woman said.

He slipped outside and was in an alley.

“Remember the lullaby,” she urged. Then she eased the door shut, and a lock slid into place.

How could he forget the lullaby? Every time he fell into a fever dream, he heard that forbidden string of notes and words—that
song
—calling him back:

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Thy papa guards the sheep;

Thy mama shakes the Dreamland Tree,

And from it fall sweet dreams for thee,

Sleep, baby, sleep.

Sleep, baby, sleep,

Our cottage vale is deep;

The little lamb is on the green,

With woolly fleece so soft and clean,

Sleep, baby, sleep.

Always it was her voice, the strange woman’s voice, that sang the words as if she had no understanding that singing anything but the prophecy was taboo. He sighed, and, hugging the building, crept along, keeping an eye out for movement.

He froze when he saw the guards. Three tall men with bodies like tree trunks, clothed all in black, kicked in the front door of the building he’d just left. The emblem on their backs denoted their rank within the government’s hierarchy. Huntsmen. He heard the startled shout of the woman whom everyone called Abby, but called herself Abbadon.

His mother? If she was shaking the Dreamland Tree… then his father guarded the sheep? He shook his head. He’d never had a mother or a father that he’d known.

Marnum swallowed a deep breath and pushed away from the building, hurling himself behind a wagon stopped across the street. Slipping into the shadows beneath it, he crouched, watching the roadway from a dog’s eye view.

More Huntsmen wearing glossy black boots stomped past.

Somehow, he had to get out of the workhouse commune. The horse hitched to the wagon stomped a hoof, snorting as someone shifted in the seat above him. Tucking Abbadon’s parchment into his shirt, he grabbed the rigging of the wagon and pulled himself into its gut, wrapping his arms and legs around its skeleton as it pulled out.

He hung beneath the wagon until his hands and arms were rubbed raw against the wood and metal. Spattered with mud—and worse, since the horse was not far ahead—he hung, the steady rhythm of the horse’s hooves laying down the beat of something that wanted to grow in his head and become more. He pressed one ear against his shoulder, trying to muffle the sound. He was grateful to escape the place he’d grown up and worked in—now, the place he was a wanted man. Wanted for sacrifice because the Elders believed his death could connect the mysterious Pieces of Eight and reunite their people with Infinity itself.

When the wagon stopped at the edge of a small town, he dropped to the ground, knees bruising against stones in the roadbed, pants soaking up mud. He waited until the driver unhitched the horse and walked away. Checking that the road was empty, he slipped out from underneath cover, stood, and stretched. In the light of a nearby lantern, he read the parchment:

Infinite ways to test your fate,

O’er the mountains and hills she waits.

He paused. “
Find the woman as old as time,
she’d said.
An old woman who lived under a hill.
Ridiculous.” He shoved the parchment back into his shirt. He was no sacrifice or savior—he was little more than a slave. He sniffed—and a foul-smelling slave, as well. “There is no Dreamland Tree. Just a children’s fairy tale. Like believing in magic,” he whispered to himself.

Two men stumbled out of a nearby building. Raucous laughter and the smell of ale and urine followed, mixed and strong. Slapping each other’s backs, they suddenly drew up short, focusing on something beyond the road’s edge. “Aye… eerie, is it not?” one asked, pointing a wobbling finger at lights that flickered in the distance.

The other murmured his agreement.

“They say thems will-o-wisps lighting that hill. That there’s an old woman, lives there still.”

“Will-o-wisps? Magic?” His friend snorted. “Next you’ll tell me they sing lullabies.”

“No one sings lullabies no more,” the other lamented. “Music… I miss it.” He opened his mouth to croon some wavering sound, but his friend clapped a hand over his face.

“Don’t you dare. S’enough yer drunk, but if they hear ya singin’…”

“I remember music…”

“Aye, aye. Ye remember the location of yer house? Let’s get ye home. Enough about music and magic. Ridiculous ideas, both of ‘em. Nothin’ good ever came of thinkin’ on either.”

After they ambled away, Marnum crept to the spot they’d stood and peered between two ramshackle houses to the fields beyond, and a strange and sudden hill that rose up to be ringed by bobbing lights. He frowned.

The bobbing lights rearranged themselves, zipping to positions before the hill and lining up—tiny, fluttering, pinpricks of light, marking a path.

He gulped. It was the wind. Nothing more. The wind and the reflection of stars hanging far above. He looked up at a cloud-covered sky that only the moon dared pierce. If not the reflection of stars, then it was surely swamp gas.

He was hunted. Told by his mother he was the one to change everything. He’d always been different, he knew.

He froze at the edge of the road.
Don’t step off the road
, was the warning from many a childhood tale. Strange things lurked in the wild. But the path to the odd hill was marked and clear. And strange things lurked everywhere—strange as that creature that had barreled into the barracks and mauled Jaxson before they could kill it. No wonder the other workers whispered it was like something straight from a nightmare. He swallowed again, but his feet kept him moving forward. If danger was everywhere, on and off the road, why not take the risk?

Still, he sprinted from the road’s edge, running pell-mell between the shifting lights, all the way to the hill’s base and across ground that was not at all swampy.

He bent over to catch his breath. When he straightened, he laughed at his own foolishness. He was nineteen. No need to be scared of things he couldn’t see—especially when what he could see was frightening enough. When the hill tore open, the ground shuddering beneath his feet and hurling him into the hillside’s waiting and rock-lined maw, he reconsidered just what he should be afraid of.

Pitching forward, he landed hard on his knees. His eyes adjusted to the glow oozing up from a brazier in the middle of a strange room. Smoke filled his nostrils and made his eyes tear and blink at its sweet, acrid scent. The place was dark and littered with reflections and shadows in odd shapes and sizes. He felt, more than saw, walls around him—walls that curved up toward a close but vaulted ceiling.

A shadow shifted right in front of him, and he stumbled back.
“Woman as old as time…”
he mumbled.

A candle stuttered to life, lit from the brazier, and he gasped when it illuminated the face and slender form of a young woman seated cross-legged on the floor. She could have been as much as twelve years his senior or two years his junior, but old as time? Hardly. Yet there was such a slow and steady gravity to her voice, such depth to her dark eyes, that he wondered if the hill had existed before her or had grown up over centuries
around
her.

“Speak of what it is you seek,” she said, her gaze slowly taking him in.

“The Pieces of Eight.” Even as the words came out, he felt fire rise in his face. Ridiculous.

Her eyes burned with sudden intensity. “Why now?”

“The Dreamland Tree…” He sighed. “Weird things are happening. Strange creatures coming into the towns and cities, diseases we’ve never suffered before. Things out of nightmares. It’s said this Dreamland Tree needs to be… shaken?”

Her lips turned up at their ends.

“It sounds crazy.”

“Not to one such as I. To shake the Dreamland Tree, you must connect the Pieces of Eight and find the arrangement to reorder your world.”

Marnum blinked at her.
Ridiculous.
“You speak as if the tree is tangible—
real
.”

“I have slept in the shade of that tree. It is as real as I am,” the soothsayer said.

He glanced around the room, little more than an odd hole in the hill, lit only by flame and whatever cooked and spit scent from the glowing brazier, and pulled out the parchment. “I have this.”

“Ah,” she said, reading the script. “But are these the words that begin a journey, or end it? It seems so familiar—like the ghost of a long-forgotten song.”

“It’s a song?” Marnum shook his head.

She nodded, and her hands swept some things off the floor before her, and she shook them like the barracks boys shook dice. She threw the rattling pieces down, and Marnum stooped to see.

With a slender finger, she prodded a set of tiny bird bones.

Marnum swallowed hard.

“
Wise is he, so clever and strong,
fell from grace, all for a song.
He will give you more of what you seek. But do not stray from your duty, Marnum. Time is slipping away.”

A breeze blew in and the lights guttered out, leaving the room silent, dark, and oddly empty.

“The tree is as real as I am.”

Marnum turned and raced back to the road.

***

The road felt even wilder walking it at night, and Marnum kept his arms wrapped tight around him, his gaze sharp and wary. Dawn set fire to the sky at his back and still he walked, searching for his next turn. It was midmorning when he heard men on the road behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and felt the sun light his scar. Three men dressed in black pressed forward in a run, laughing as they recognized their quarry. Fast as a spooked buck, he vaulted away, racing down the road, until the only noise he heard was his own breath pounding out of his body in gasps, and the thrumming of his own blood in his ears as his heart raced to keep up with his flying feet. He no longer heard them—there was no sound of feet pounding the packed dirt, no shouts.

He spun to look, to see how far behind…

Someone joined them—a flash of a royal guard’s crimson-colored suit and… a wolf mask?

He jerked backward, seeing a third man emerge from his blind spot, his hand nearly on Marnum as he closed the last bit of distance between predator and prey, just a moment before the one in the wolf mask pummeled the first Huntsman, taking him to the ground with an efficiency that made Marnum’s eyes widen. The Wolf took down a second Huntsman with a few quick moves.

At the road’s edge, Marnum’s arms flailed, spinning like blades on a windmill. For a split second, balanced precariously, his world slowed as he reached for the remaining Huntsman to stop his fall. The Huntsman chuckled, nodding to him encouragingly as he stretched forward to take Marnum’s hand.

But Marnum pulled his arms in, committing to the fall. Gravity pulled him downhill into briars and underbrush that snagged his clothing, but couldn’t hold him.

Curses followed him as he plunged down a steep embankment, hitting rocks and the lumpy roots of trees. Bruised and panting, he lay at the bottom of the slope, waiting for the blood in his veins to stop throbbing, and letting the normal sounds of the world seep into his battered consciousness. He heard the grunts and shouts of another fight on the road above, and… a body hitting the ground?

“Not so jovial now, are you?” he heard the victor ask.