Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6) (13 page)

“No,” said Sun Eagle. “It was your first fight. You are brave.”

Daylily wiped her mouth, shuddering with sickness, with fear, and even, she realized (and this was most strange), with pleasure. A sickening, sensational pleasure such as she had never before known. She looked up at Sun Eagle. “Why did that man try to kill me?” she asked.

“He did not want to pay the tithe,” said Sun Eagle. “But he will. Following the Circle Ceremony, they will all pay their due.”

F
OXBRUSH
STOOD
ON
THE
EDGE
of the gorge, exhausted, panting, seeing nothing familiar around him and yet—he rubbed his eyes so hard that sparks burst behind his eyelids—and yet he knew where he was. Only it was impossible, so he could
not
know it.

He swayed a dizzying moment as his eyes cleared of sparks. The jungle was still there, thick and moist and full of dreadful sounds. Enormous trees, trunks too broad for him to put his arms around, branches as thick as his waist, draped with starflower vines so dense that he could scarcely see a half dozen paces into the shadows . . . it was all too vivid. But none of it could be true.

“I’m still dreaming,” Foxbrush told himself. “I’m lying at the bottom of that gorge and I’m dreaming, and I’ll wake up in a minute with a splitting headache and . . . and by all the stars of the heavenly host, I’m going to
pound
that Leo when I see him!”

This last vow, accompanied by a string of curses, sapped Foxbrush of
whatever energy remained to him. His knees buckled and he sat down beneath the spreading fig tree growing on the edge of the gorge. With a groan he bent forward until his forehead pressed into the ground, and sat in this broken attitude, unwilling to move ever again.

Something tickled his face. On reflex Foxbrush smacked, hitting himself but missing the tiny wasp, which flew out of his range and disappeared. Dropping his hand and blinking several times, Foxbrush tried to breathe.

Something tickled his neck. Once more he smacked, once more he missed, and another wasp flitted away.

Foxbrush closed his eyes, wondering if he could make himself sleep and perhaps wake up in the gorge where he should be, escaped from this nightmare. He drew three long breaths, hoping to calm his racing heart.

Something fist-sized and spherical landed hard on the back of his head, exploded, and filled the world with the fury of a hundred and more tiny wasps.

With a yelp, Foxbrush was on his feet and running from the tree, covering his ears, closing his eyes as the wasps followed him in a cloud. They stung his neck, his ears, his shielding hands; they stung any exposed skin they could find, and he screamed as pain like fire flowed under his skin.

He ran into a tree, fell in an agonized bundle, and lay at the feet of a tall stranger.

“Great hopping giants, you fool!” a rumbling voice bellowed. “Have you no sense?”

Foxbrush, however, did not understand the words, for they were not in a language he knew. He yelped and rolled, desperate to escape the wasps. The tall stranger, whom he had not yet seen—for the wasps were diving at his eyelids for all they were worth—leapt over Foxbrush’s prone form and strode toward the fig tree, shouting as he went:

“Call them off, Twisted Man! Leave the dragon-kissed fool alone!”

A voice (that was in no measure human and spoke without words but that, somehow, Foxbrush understood as he did not understand the stranger) replied:

“He disobeyed! He violated! He lay upon my roots!”

“And it hasn’t hurt you, has it?” the stranger replied.

“He violated! He broke treaty!”

“Well, he’s sorry enough for it now. Call off your wasps!”

“Then pay his tribute!”

With a sigh, the stranger plunged a hand into a leather pouch at his side and withdrew a fistful of dried petals—water lily petals, had Foxbrush been capable of noticing. These he tossed at the roots of the tree under which Foxbrush had lain, shouting in a tuneless chant:

“Oh, Twisted Man, whose bark is thick,

Who plunges rocks for wells to find,

Here is tribute! Here is tribute!

Take it, Twisted Man, and quick!”

Completing this odd ritual with a clap of hands and a turn in place, the stranger ended with a bow in the tree’s direction. The next moment, the branches stirred without a breeze and thick leaves rustled and buzzed as though a million wasps sang at once in reply. The wasps surrounding poor Foxbrush suddenly lifted as a single unit and flowed through the air in a swift stream, past the stranger and back into the shivering leaves of their tree home.

“Thank you,” said the stranger with a wry smile. He saluted the tree once more, then turned to Foxbrush, who lay gasping where he had fallen, his eyelids red from the poisonous stings, welts covering his hands, his neck, and his face. The stranger grimaced, though Foxbrush could scarcely see it, so thickly were his lids swollen.

“Don’t you know better than to lie beneath a black fig tree?” the stranger said, approaching Foxbrush and crouching beside him. Again, though he heard concern and even kindness in the stranger’s voice, Foxbrush understood none of his words. He sat up, touched his stinging face, and groaned.

The stranger clucked, shaking his head, but he frowned as he looked over Foxbrush’s clothing. “You’re not from these parts, are you?” he said.

“Please, sir,” Foxbrush said thickly, for even his tongue seemed to have been stung and now swelled in his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re saying. But . . . but thank you for . . . for whatever it was you did for me.”

The stranger rose from his crouch and stepped back in surprise, his hands up as if in self-defense. He stared down at the young man before him, and his heart began to ram against his throat. Then he spoke in a different language altogether:

“You speak like a Northerner.”

The accent was a little thick, a little harsh to Foxbrush’s ears, and the cadence was unlike any he had heard before. But the words he knew.

The stranger knelt again, peering eagerly into Foxbrush’s face, studying the complexion and the features, which were scarcely recognizable anymore, and frowning the while. “You’re not a Northerner,” the stranger said, “yet you speak like one. Do you come from the North Country? Did King Florien send you? How did you find the Hidden Land?”

Foxbrush’s head swam with fear and poison. He opened his mouth, intending to introduce himself, to make some explanation, some apology, perhaps. But all that emerged was a sad little gurgle as he toppled to one side in a faint.

There was something sticky on his face.

Foxbrush disliked sticky things, particularly anywhere near his face. He raised a hand to wipe it off only to discover that—dragon’s teeth!—his hand was sticky as well. In fact, as awareness slowly returned to him, bringing with it a monstrous headache, he discovered that stickiness covered the greater portion of his body, accompanied by a sweet smell that might have been pleasant under other circumstances. Under these, it made him gag.

He wanted to open his eyes, but the stickiness sealed his lashes together, and it took some effort to free them. By the time he succeeded, panic had made good headway into his outlook. After all, one does not like to wake up in unknown circumstances coated like a babe who got into the syrup jar.

He succeeded, however, after a certain amount of rubbing and straining (if you’ve never strained a resisting eyelid, you don’t know what straining is) to free his lashes and crack his eyes open for a look at his surroundings. In that moment, he believed he could be surprised by nothing.

Thus he was all the more surprised to find Daylily’s curious face hovering over his.

He did not scream. He might have, had his mouth not been sealed shut with the stickiness, but since it was, he could manage only a pathetic harrumph in the back of his throat. He did sit up rather abruptly and, discovering he wore no clothes, snatched at the skin pelt that had been spread over his nether regions and clutched it like a lifeline.

The face that was Daylily’s backed up a little, still curious, her head tilted to one side, and Foxbrush realized this could not be his betrothed after all. For one thing, this was the face of Daylily as he’d first met her. That fateful day when, obliged to take part in a recreation of King Shadow Hand’s triumph, he’d been dubbed the Damsel in Distress.

These memories were many years old now. But here sat Daylily’s childhood image, complete with the tangle of wild red hair, though this girl’s was held back with leather strings rather than ribbons. And she wore a sack-like garment of rough weave that Daylily would never have permitted near her person. Her doppelganger, however, did not seem to mind.

She inspected Foxbrush solemnly, and he noticed, despite his terror, that her eyes, unlike Daylily’s, were dark brown.

“You’re awake,” she said, though at first he did not understand her. But when his horror receded enough for him to make an attempt at rational thought, he realized that he did know her words. Her accent was simply so strong that it might almost have been another language.

Foxbrush worked his jaw back and forth until he could crack his mouth open and speak through the stickiness. “Where am I?” he demanded hoarsely.

She frowned and stood up, backing away a little. “Da!” she called over her shoulder, never taking her eyes off Foxbrush. “The wasp man is awake!”

“Don’t bother him!” rumbled a voice from without.

Foxbrush, however, could not understand any of his words and heard only the growl. He began to tremble anew and cried out, “I’m not hurting her, I swear! I’m merely lying here all . . . sticky. And I would like my clothes, if you please!”

“Stop talking,” the girl said, making a disapproving face at him. “You chatter like a bird.”

“Are you bothering the man, Meadowlark?” the voice rumbled again. There were footsteps, a curtain of woven reeds was pushed rustling aside, and Foxbrush had his first real glimpse of the man who had met him by the black fig tree.

He was a terrible sight.

Like the girl, he was crowned with a mass of red hair, which had crept down over time to give him a full, curly beard as well. But between forehead and mouth there was nothing to disguise the disfigurement of his face. One of his eyes looked as though it had been nearly torn out long ago, and the scarring and puckering of his skin had closed over it so that he was partially blind. The other eye too was surrounded by scars, and a large chunk was gone from his nose. The skin was tight and white in places, as though it had healed without the aid of stitches.

And when he grinned hugely, as he did at the sight of Foxbrush sitting upright on his pallet, clutching the skin pelt and dripping oozy medicine, he was by far the ugliest man Foxbrush had ever seen.

“Ah! You are awake indeed,” the stranger said, ducking his head to step into the chamber, which was quite small and lit by only one window and the light that made its way through many chinks in the walls. Stooping so as not to knock his head on the ceiling, he put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and looked Foxbrush over. “And much improved already, by the look of you.”

He addressed Foxbrush in the same language as the child’s, though with an accent nearer to Foxbrush’s own. Still, it was an accent far more clipped than Foxbrush was used to hearing, though Foxbrush recognized most of the words.

“Please, sir,” Foxbrush said, his head light and throbbing at the temples. “Who are you? Where am I?”

“I am Redman, and you are in the Eldest’s House,” the stranger replied and crouched, bringing his head nearly level with the girl’s. “You had a nasty encounter with the Twisted Man and were all over wasp welts when I found you. My oldest girl here, Meadowlark”—he hugged the child to him—“has tended you with silver-branch sap, which is a great cure for wasp stings, if a little hard to wash off.”

The girl did not shift her solemn dark eyes from Foxbrush’s face. Her gaze made him more nervous. He tried to blink and found his lashes heavy. “Sap?” he managed to croak.

“Sap.” Redman nodded. “And a few herbs and bits and pieces Meadowlark mixed with it. Nothing too foul, I promise you.”

As the man spoke, Foxbrush’s gaze began slowly to rove about, taking in his strange surroundings. He saw the walls made of stones, sticks, and mud. He saw the thatched roof and heard the birds roosting and the mice scurrying above. He saw the dirt floor covered with fresh rushes, the doorway hung with reeds, the pile of skins on which he lay, the pelt across his lap.

“Where are my clothes?” he asked, his voice a whimper.

“We had to cut them off you,” said Redman. “Hymlumé’s scepter! So many buckles and buttons! I never saw the like, certainly not around here. You see what’s left of them there.” He indicated a pile of fabric neatly folded in a corner of the tiny room. Foxbrush, turning sad eyes that way, saw that most of the buttons had, in fact, been removed, leaving gaping holes in his shirt and trousers.

The remains of his shoes, he realized, were adorning Meadowlark’s small feet. He could see the toes of her right foot peeking out through a hole in the seam.

Foxbrush looked down at his nakedness and the ooze that covered his torso and arms. “What am I to wear?” he asked, a little desperate.

“Why, those of course, if you want them. They’re still quite good enough for wearing, if not so fine as they were,” Redman said. “Or we’ll provide you with something more comfortable if you like. But look here . . .”

He reached out to the pile and took something from its depths. It was the scroll, a little battered but still in one piece. Redman unrolled it, scanning up and down the page. Surely such a wild beast of a man would not understand the content therein! But Redman’s eyes—or at least the good one that Foxbrush could see—were intent, and his mouth moved a little as he struggled with the words.