Willow (4 page)

No longer. Now, thickened by death, it flowed brown and sluggish. Banks once verdant were mud-caked and slimy, strewn with deadfalls and unearthly offal. Every day, the Troon bore its burden of bloated corpses to the sea. Every night, trolls crept from their lairs to the shores of that river, lured by the stench of carrion. Some eagerly followed it north, seeking the very evil at its source. The Troon had turned loathsome down its length, a running sore on the land, an infection in the sea.

But the Freen was still pure. In its high tributaries, where the child began her journey, the waters of the Freen sang in their fords and rapids; they swirled like stately dancers in their pools.

Swiftly from the place of Ethna’s death, the currents of the Freen bore away the strange little boat. So exultant were Kael’s troops over the slaying of the midwife that they failed to realize until too late what she had done. By then, the little craft was far to the south, bobbing through the rapids of the first canyons. Eagles swooped down, stretching their talons to snatch the child from danger, but their help was not required. The boat rode high, and the child laughed in the spray. Later, however, other creatures did assist. When the boat snagged in a quiet backwater, a brown bear shouldered through the undergrowth to nudge it free, and an otter dislodged it from a sandbar at the north end of the Lake of Fin Raziel.

The child began her voyage down that lake at night, helped by a northern breeze. She kept silent. Something immense moved around her in those waters, searching back and forth, swelling up the surface over a round back, whipping up whirlpools with an enormous tail. Safely through this turbulence went the little boat, and safely past the island in the center of the lake, where the child turned her head in the darkness to hear sorrowing melodies and the chants of invisible choirs. Safely on—down the length of the lake and over the falls, where the little craft was taken into hundreds of tiny hands and borne down through the spray on a cloud of shimmering wings to the quiet pools below. She laughed as she drifted down, and small voices—very, very small voices—joined her in that laughter.

At dawn, she moved into the quiet meanders of the Middle Plains. All that day fish swam out from overhanging banks to hasten the little craft downstream. Their dorsal fins surrounding it like protecting sails, they brought it to the ford where the Freen crossed the Western Road. The child made this last passage at dusk, escaping by only seconds a troop of cavalry picking their way across the stones. The child heard the clatter of hooves. She heard coarse laughter. She heard the clink of harness and arms. Then she was past; the water deepened and the currents bore her on.

Before midnight she came to the conical Nelwyn Hills, and through the rest of that calm night the boat passed down Nelwyn Valley, through and around villages where small people laughed, and ate, and slept beside their hearths in round houses. It passed the entrances of the copper mines and the flourishing gardens of the marshes. It passed many isolated farmsteads nestled among their hedgerows, until at last it rounded a broad bend and came to the tree-lined bank of Ufgood Reach.

Here, just before sunrise, the boat slowed, turned gently in the current, and slipped in among the reeds under the trees on the north side. The child listened, wide-eyed. She heard reed stalks rubbing on the hull. She heard cattle lowing from the little farm nestled nearby. She heard blackbirds waking and muskrats creeping along the bank to gaze at her, their whiskers quivering.

All of this the child heard, but still she waited. Then, close at hand, she heard the happy voice of a young girl, calling. Raising her arms, the child in the boat laughed in answer.

Sun gathered on the hilltops, flowed down the slopes, filled the long bowl of Nelwyn Valley.

The hawk, having circled all night above the driftwood boat, now rose in the new sun, spiraling slowly up and up until the whole valley lay beneath him, with the silver Freen winding down its center. Far to the north it saw the domes of the fisher-Nelwyns nestled among their marshes and their conical hills. It saw Nelwyn boats with arching prows and sterns winding through the channels to join others already fishing in the Freen. It saw nets cast, silver fish gathered up.

To the south, the cabins of Nelwyn hunters and woodcutters dotted the hillsides and clustered beside streams that tumbled to the Freen. Farther south, where the farms began, the hawk watched cattle rising in their pastures and small sleepy men stretching in the sun. Far to the south, where the river left Nelwyn Valley and deepened and began its long run through the Low Kingdoms to the coast, the hawk saw a doughty little trading ship being loaded for a voyage.

Directly below lay Nelwyn Village, and outside it, the homestead of Ufgood Reach. It was small, even by Nelwyn standards—two thatched and whitewashed domes joined by a short porch. Wattle fences enclosed a few pens. A patchwork of small fields stretched down to weeping willows on the bank.

The hawk’s keen eye saw the child’s boat come safely to rest beneath those trees. It saw a Nelwyn girl pause in her game of hide-and-seek, part the bushes, and discover the child. It heard her call excitedly to her brother.

And then the hawk soared higher and higher still until it vanished, turning north, following the river home.

It was going to be a hot day, an irksome day, a day when nothing good would happen.

Willow Ufgood knew it.

All the signs were bad.

For one thing, he had dreamed of his father, and that was always ominous. This dream was especially foreboding, because in it Willow was exposed as a trickster, a mere magician, and not the grand sorcerer he longed to become. People laughed at his magic, mocked him, threw pulpy, foul-smelling objects at him, while Shnorr Ufgood stood as if alive, shaking his head and saying, “Willow, Willow, more magical it would be if you plowed a field, mended a fence, thatched a roof!” He swept his cane out over the slope toward the river. “Look at the farm! Going to wrack and ruin while you play tricks, talk gibberish!”

In his dream, Willow had shuffled from one foot to the other, as if he were thirteen, saying, “But, Father, maybe someday . . .”

“Dreams! Crazy dreams!” the old man had said, waving his stick and wandering off toward the river. “Can’t eat dreams! Can’t eat thistles, either!”

Willow woke. He sat up and looked through the window. His father was gone. Only the unrepaired fences and unplowed fields of Ufgood Reach sloped down to the banks of the Freen.

The second bad sign was that Kiaya, up before him as usual and already baking bread, had let Mims and Ranon go to the river. Willow fretted constantly about the children. He imagined hundreds of dreadful fates that might befall them, many associated with the river. After all, when you were as small as a Nelwyn, even a pike spelled trouble, even a trout! “What if . . .” Willow would say, rubbing his hands and pacing the kitchen, “but what if . . .” And Kiaya would reply, “Oh for goodness sake, Willow, let them
be
! Let them
live
! If they don’t
try
things, how will they ever learn? Here, stir the soup!” Or perhaps she would just kiss him, and laugh, and hug him until he stopped his fretting.

The third bad sign was that Bets was ornery. The moment he entered the pen and saw the sow’s pink eye fixed on him, the pink ears pointed at him, he knew that plowing was going to be difficult. He was right. Bets balked at the harness, then stomped twice on his toe. And when he bent over to pick up his seed-sling, the sow lifted him with its snout and sent him somersaulting into the haystack. So when at last he got to work in his field and saw Mims and Ranon running toward him from the riverbank, waving their arms excitedly, he knew they were bringing more bad news.

“Dada! Dada!” Ranon called. “We found something in the river!”

“Come see!” little Mims shouted, stumbling along behind her brother. “Oh please, Dada, come quick!”

Willow dropped Bets’s reins and struggled out of the heavy seed-sling. The pig found itself hitched to a plow with no plowman on the handles. It tugged. The plow lurched and toppled, anchoring the pig where it stood. Bets grunted and glared evilly at Willow.

He dropped to his knees and embraced his children as they came running up. “What’s
happened
? Are you all right?”

“We’re fine,” Ranon said.

“But you have to come and
see
!”

They each took a hand and hurried him down across the field and through the trees to the water’s edge. “See?”

There, caught in a tangle of arrowleaf and wild iris, Willow saw the little boat, and inside, the child. She was smiling, reaching toward him.

“A baby! A new baby!” Mims shouted, clasping Willow’s hand with both of hers and jumping up and down.

Ranon had pulled off his boots and was wading out.

“No!” Willow shouted. “Don’t go near!”

“But Father . . .”

“Look at it! Have you ever seen wood like that? Tied with . . .
cloth
! It’s from far away, Ranon. North of the crossroads, even! Who
knows
where it’s been?”

“But a
baby,
Father . . .”

“It could be diseased. Could be in a spell! Could be a disguised sorceress! It could be . . .”

“Silly Dada!” Mims said decisively, shaking Willow’s arm. “It’s not! It’s
none
of those things. It’s just a little baby, and it needs help.”

“Not so little,” Ranon said, edging closer to the boat. “It’s a lot bigger than you, Mims, when you were born.”

“Exactly!” Willow said. “It’s a Daikini. Keep back!”

Mims wrinkled her nose. “What are Daikinis?”

“Giants,” Willow said. “From up north. They’re terrible! Greedy! Vicious! You can’t trust them, Mims.” Willow hurried along the bank as he spoke and returned with a long driftwood pole, which he pushed out toward the boat.

“What are you
doing,
Dada?”

“We’ll send it downstream. There’re people who’ll look after it. We can’t afford . . .”

“No,” the child said quietly. “You won’t, Dada. You won’t.”

And she was right. Even while he intended to push the little boat back out into the current, Willow was drawing it closer, through the waterplants.

Mims smiled.

“That’s what you tell
us
to do, isn’t it, Dada?” Ranon said.

“What?”

“Trust your feelings.”

“Well,” Willow said, gathering the child into his arms, “perhaps we should get her dry. Perhaps we ought to feed her.”

The child gurgled and grasped his finger.

Willow smiled.

At that moment a shout came from the fields above the bank. “Ufgood! Where are you, man! Get up here!” It was a coarse voice, as if Bets the sow were calling him in her grunty way.

Willow’s eyes widened. “Burglekutt!” he whispered. “Oh no!” He passed the child to Ranon. “Keep her quiet, for goodness sake! If Burglekutt finds out we’ve got a Daikini here we’ll
really
be in trouble! Do something.
Play
with her!”

He scrambled up the bank and through the screen of trees to the field. Kiaya was bustling down from the house with her skirts hiked up and her long hair flowing. “My husband hasn’t stolen
anything
!” she was shouting. “Get away from those seeds!”

Bending over beside Bets, with his fat hand plunged into Willow’s seed-sling, was Burglekutt. Burglekutt the Prefect. Burglekutt the Beadle and Bailiff. Burglekutt the stingiest, meanest moneylender in all of Nelwyn Valley. He was short, even for a Nelwyn, but he was enormously broad. When he wore any of his robes of office with pointed hats, he looked like a small pyramid. High-living had turned his thick jowls warty, and years of greedy cunning had beaded his eyes so that, beside Bets the sow, he looked like a pig himself, a pig rearing up on his hind legs and grunting, “Ufgood, where’d you get these seeds?”

The likeness was so striking that Willow laughed.

“Funny, is it?”

“No, Mr. Burglekutt, the question isn’t funny. It’s just that . . .”

“Maybe you’ll be amused when you miss another mortgage payment and I
own
this land!”

“No, sir. Oh no.”

“Well then, answer civilly, Ufgood. Where did you get seeds to sow this year?”

Kiaya stood with her fists on her hips, feet planted firmly apart, breathing heavily.

“Speak up! Where’d you get ’em?”

Willow hesitated. The truth was that, knowing his need, his neighbors had given him seed from their own granaries. But lest Burglekutt might take revenge on them, Willow did not dare to tell the truth. Instead, he lifted his chin defiantly. “Maybe I used my magic.”

“Magic! Ha!”

Willow winced.

“You’re no sorcerer, Ufgood! Everyone knows that! You’re an imposter, a charlatan, a clown! Now tell the truth!
I
sell the seeds around here and I didn’t sell any to
you.
You stole them from my granary!”

“He did
not
!” Kiaya stamped her foot. “We may be poor but we’re honest, and it’s none of your business
where
we got them! Maybe Willow
did
conjure them. Maybe he has more magic than you know. Or maybe we gathered them from the roadsides. Or maybe they just drifted down the river—a gift! Aha! We’ll never tell, will we Willow?”

Willow shook his head.

“But I’ll tell you
this
!” Kiaya took a fist off her hip and pointed at Burglekutt’s pudgy nose. “These are not
your
seeds, and this is not your land.”

“It will be.” Burglekutt flung his arm over Ufgood Reach. “One more bad year and it’s mine. There’ll be a great barn! An inn! A countinghouse!”

“Well not
yet!
It’s still ours, and we’ll thank you to get off it, won’t we, Willow?”

Willow nodded.

Burglekutt gulped in outrage. He held his breath so long he began to turn purple. His eyes bulged. “Magic, eh? So that’s what he has! Well, it’ll take more than magic to keep this land if you miss another payment.
One more!
I’ll have you off in no time! Off! Off!” Flinging his arm out again, Burglekutt whirled around with his nose in the air, tripped over Bets, and fell flat on his face in hog dung.