Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
He’s cold and he doesn’t know where he is, and he feels a bit sick because his body’s moving too fast for his feet in the dark, and he keeps stumbling over tree roots he can’t see properly and the others won’t slow down, and more than anything now he just wants to go home.
He knows better by now than to show any of that.
“Come on,” snaps Drasvinad, shoving him in the back, and so of course he stumbles and falls. “Fucking foot-drag tree-thief little bitch! Oh, now look! Isnorvi, he’s fallen over again!”
Face in the leaf-mold dirt, Duncan feels a fresh stab of fear.
Drasvinad’s horrible to him most of the time, unless she’s just ignoring him; he’s a tree-thief child after all.
But it’s Isnorvi he goes in real fear of—Isnorvi of the quick hands and feet and fists, the sudden shifts from amiable contempt to violent fury, like the rains the Forest gets in autumn, from nothing to ominous leaf patter to sudden, drenching downpour in a matter of seconds.
Isnorvi, who’ll tell Duncan he’s his friend, honest, he really likes him, well, as much as you can like a tree thief—and in the beginning Duncan used to feel pathetically grateful for that—and then, out of nowhere, Isnorvi will punch him in the stomach, watch him collapse trying to breathe, and laugh in the high, musical tones of the Bright Folk that Duncan tries as hard as he can to copy but somehow never gets right…
In the beginning, he cried bitterly each time it happened.
But his tears just seemed to open some kind of door inside Isnorvi to even deeper cruelties, and the rain of blows and kicks would intensify until he was left sobbing and curled around himself at the base of some protective tree until Isnorvi lost interest and wandered off laughing with the others.
And that, truth to tell, hurt even more than the blows.
In the end, he learned not to cry.
“Did you push him, Dras?” Isnorvi has been a good few paces ahead. Duncan hears him coming back. He tenses—it’s hard to tell sometimes what’s in Isnorvi’s voice. “I told you not to do that. You know he can’t see in the dark like us.”
“Course he can’t!” Festinal, joining in with a cackle. He’s tagged along, Duncan knows, in hopes of just this kind of pile-on. “He’s a fucking tree thief, isn’t he? They can’t see for shit once they get out of the sun. Don’t know why you bother.”
That’s not true, Duncan wants to shout. It’s just nighttime when it’s hard. It’s not his fault.
But he stays down, dirt on his face, earthen scent of tree mulch in his nose, palms stinging where he skinned them as he fell.
“Shut up, Festi. You’re being unkind.” Isnorvi crouches at Duncan’s side. “You all right, Dunc? Did Dras push you?”
The softness in his voice almost achieves what the blows no longer can. Duncan feels tears welling up. He sniffs them back, sits up, tries to swipe the dirt off his face.
“I tripped,” he says stoically.
Back a long while ago, so faded now in memory he doesn’t often think about it anymore, he sought protection and comfort among the adult Huldu.
But he got short shrift. The Fae are a dreamy folk, distant in their own schemes, brooding and scary and almost as quick to anger as their offspring when provoked, disinterested anyway, partial always to their own children and not much bothered what happens to a child of tree thieves, however well behaved and desperately eager to please.
Even Svalenkari, the one Duncan has been taught he must call Father, turns away his pleas for help.
Without us, you would not have lived, he has told Duncan, often and sternly.
I rescued you as a baby, I gave you all this—gesturing around at the trees, the rainbow-colored spiderwebbing his people conjured amid branches for shelter—but you are no baby now.
The Forest is your home and you must earn your place in it.
You must belong. That means you must atone for your ancestors, for what the tree thieves have done, to our Forest and to us.
I know that, Father. So desperate for approval it ached in him at some root too deeply buried for him to fully understand. And I will carry the iron for you, like the thralls do, just ask me. I am not afraid. But the others—
Svalenkari cut him off with an impatient gesture. The others do as they must. And so must you. Now go. Enough of these endless childish wants and whines, do you think I have nothing else to concern myself with?
Turning away, leaving, and Duncan stood there with trembling lip and tear-fringed eyes and limbs that felt like wood.
Then—
Listen, Duncan—the sudden, hot upsurge of hope in Duncan’s tiny chest as Svalenkari paused, looked back at him, not unkindly. Here’s something. A path you might take. Be grateful. Be thankful the Bright Folk took you in when we did. And think every day how you can pay us back.
He’s been trying ever since.
Despite the way that hot leap of hope turned instantly cold and leaden in his chest as Svalenkari spoke. Still, he clings to the way the Huldu noble looked back at him just that once, and he tries to earn that returning regard every day.
“You tripped?” Drasvinad repeats scornfully.
“About all he’s good for. Tripping and blundering and breaking things.
It’s no wonder your people burned the Forest. It was probably an accident the first time they did it!
Probably burned themselves as well, they were so clumsy and stupid.
Running around on fire screaming, Oh no, oh no, the flames, they hurt! ”
The others—Festinal and Corri and Stam—fall about laughing, tinkling chimes amid the trees that still, after all these years, raise the hairs on the back of Duncan’s neck.
But not Isnorvi. He’s not laughing at all.
“That’s enough,” he snaps, and offers Duncan his hand. “Come on, Dunc. Get up. Not far now. It’s your birthday. You’re seven today! I promised you a birthday surprise, and I’m not going to let these idiots spoil it.”
Looks slip and slither among these idiots. Duncan thinks, as he takes Isnorvi’s offered hand and is pulled effortlessly back to his feet, that there’s still the old Fae cruelty in those looks. But it’s mixed with something else, something he can’t work out.
And they’re not laughing anymore.
“We go on,” Isnorvi says crisply. “We have ground to cover. And no more pushing Duncan, or you’ll answer to me.”
They pick up the trail again, perhaps a little slower now, but still faster than Duncan likes.
He hurries along as best he can on his clumsy tree-thief legs.
He doesn’t want to fall again and risk spoiling Isnorvi’s mood.
Behind him, muttering and sniggering between the Huldu children, but none of them shove him again.
And soon the moon starts to break through the trees overhead, making it easier to see where he’s going. He starts to feel a little better.
The moonlight strengthens, from patchy to an almost uninterrupted silvery glow across the ground. Duncan looks around him and realizes the trees are thinning out. They’re coming to the fringes of the Forest, and he feels suddenly nervous again.
The Forest is your home. And he’s been warned enough times to stay in it, to never risk exposure to whatever lies outside.
They come to a halt on a small knoll with a view down into open meadows below. Beyond the open ground, set against a steep, jagged hill, a big stone house. Duncan looks at it and a sudden, unexplained lump forms in his throat. His nervousness washes back through him, doubled.
“Down there?” he whispers. “We’re going down there?”
“You’ll be fine.” Isnorvi stands at his side. He claps him on the shoulder. “Promise. Just follow me.”
They thread their way single file down into the glen, clinging to the copses and short runs of woodland that still stand, crossing open ground in a quivering ecstasy of thrill and terror, crouching low, sprinting flat out.
They come on a small herd of dozing cattle with long matted auburn coats of hair and broad-forking, dangerous-looking horns.
Isnorvi throws out an arm, makes a ward, and the cattle seem not to notice them as they pass.
Only with Duncan’s footfalls—he’s slipped to the rear again in one of the meadow sprints—one of the larger animals turns its head to face him.
The long matted hair falls across its face, makes it seem blind and monstrous, but—
A spasm of memory goes through him like a thorn. Startling, warming. Someone holding him up near the cow’s head. He sees his own chubby fist, reaching to grasp the matted hair, he feels—
Happy?
Safe?
Warm sensations he has no reference for, except—
He knows the cows will not harm him.
As if he’s rubbed something out of his eyes and sees them clearly now for the first time. The blank fall of shaggy hair across the face no longer monstrous, just comical, patient and kind…
He makes a soft, surprised noise in his throat. He chuckles. Surprises himself with the unfamiliar sound.
“Tree thief!” Someone hissing at him.
He blinks, sees Drasvinad gesturing impatiently.
“Move, Duncan! Don’t get left behind!”
On through the damp grass, to the next stand of trees, where the others are already waiting.
They huddle there in the shadows together, all five of them pressed close under the shelter of the canopies, and for just a moment Duncan has that fleeting sense of belonging Svalenkari has told him to seek.
Then, Isnorvi grabs him by the arm.
“Come on, birthday boy. Let’s go!”
He pulls Duncan out onto the meadow, leads him toward a low stone wall.
Beyond the wall, the big stone house they saw from the hillside looms like a crag.
Isnorvi vaults onto the top of the wall, helps Duncan up after him.
Between the house and the wall, there’s a broad expanse of the shortest grass Duncan has ever seen in his—
not ever…