Chapter 15 Temple of the King
Valentina sent Green to his customary chair to read. As she spoke, her visible breath wordlessly made the same point again and again. Time is running out.
“There’s gotta be something I can do to help you.”
“My plan for this afternoon is to research the poultice Clara mentioned, craft it, then cross-reference a dozen journals on the subject of willing closed gaps in reality. Few of the entries are in English. All of them are above your level of experience as a cryptonaturalist. Mr. Green, sit and continue your own studies.”
There was a tremor in her voice and her breath was forming ice crystals in her eyelashes.
His thoughts reached toward Catskill.
Dreamless dark and the weight of mountains.
No help there.
He touched the acorn in his pocket, imagining a mythic bird scolding him from a street sign.
No help there either.
He looked at the floor and felt his own warmth draining away.
“If you think of something I can do to help…”
She dismissed him with a look, then went to gather her research materials.
Green tried to continue reading Clara’s journal, the image of the living person fusing with the image he had conjured from the written word.
It was no good. His teacher’s every breath, every creak of her chair, felt like sand slipping through the hourglass.
He took to wandering the room and pretending to read the spines of books.
He was back in Mr. Reynard’s hospice room, except this time Green’s friend wasn’t resting peacefully, soothed by sedatives. He was fighting for his life against an enemy Green couldn’t see or touch. He was fighting alone.
“Go rest,” Valentina said without looking up from her reading.
Even shivering, even dying, she found it easier to shoo Green out of the way while she engineered stratagems for escaping the deep winter that was stealing her life away.
He didn’t have the heart to argue. He retreated to his shed where his spiraling worries could wear patterns in the walls of his skull without disturbing his teacher.
His phone buzzed against his hip, a rare spark of cell service bringing a text notification. He kept it in his pocket out of pure habit, but he was beginning to forget it was there. When was the last time he’d charged it?
No doubt an exciting new MLM or real estate scam.
He’d check it later.
He sat on his cot watching serpent tongues of flame flickering in the stove as the pallid afternoon lost ground to evening.
The footsteps of coming night were a funeral march.
Night brought the cold, it brought the glass fawn, it brought one of Valentina’s last chances to banish the creature that was killing her.
Is this her last chance?
How many chances did the old cryptonaturalist have already over the last five centuries?
How many do-overs does one person get?
His fingers found the acorn and he jerked his hand away. Just then, he hated the small brown everything that thrummed in his pocket like a second heartbeat.
What is it?
The moment of my death?
A payment for a meal?
A practical joke from an inscrutable crow?
He had spent just over a week as a new immigrant in the mirror world of cryptonature. What did that experience buy him? What plan could he offer to someone who counted lifetimes like seasons of a half-remembered childhood?
A tap on the door.
“Come in.”
Dancer ducked inside like a parent stooping into their child’s blanket fort.
“Well, look at you,” she said. “Snug as a bug in the sort of place a bug would consider snug.”
“Hey, Dancer. Good timing.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I was feeling a little too sorry for myself. Good time for a visitor.”
“Sorry for yourself? Doesn’t seem like the sorta night for that, fella. Beautiful autumn evening in the mountains and all. And heck, if greeting cards were scratch ’n’ sniff, half of them would smell like this room. Pine and woodsmoke. Plus, this.”
She pulled out her customary lumberjack-plaid thermos of sassafras tea and offered Green a cup from her pocket.
“Maybe I could start a scratch ’n’ sniff greeting card company,” she said. “Happy quinceanera. Enjoy some Mountain Smells.”
Green’s traditions were young in this new life, but one of them was that he didn’t refuse Dancer’s tea. He took it and breathed the steam. Not quite root beer. Not quite lemon. Something earthy with notes of oak and autumn.
“You sure you aren’t a cryptid, Dancer? You make life out here seem a little too easy sometimes.”
“Heh. If I was, I wouldn’t tell you, would I? Gotta make you work for it.”
Green glanced around his tiny living space.
“I’d invite you to sit, but I don’t have any chairs. What has you out roaming?”
“No worries. Can’t stay. I just wanted to check on the status of our looming danger. I already chatted with your boss about that. Made my rounds and all the members of our little community here are on high alert.”
“You talked to Valentina? How’d she look?”
“Not great. I suppose you knew that. The whole thing still sounds a touch precarious. And I got the distinct impression she was shooing me, know what I mean?”
“I do. That was part of what I was feeling sorry about.”
“Understandable. Funny thing about empathy, huh? Part wings, part iron anchor. The duality of all worthwhile things, am I right?”
“Uh, hard to say.”
“Heh. Well, I’ll ask you the same thing I asked ol’ Val. Any way I can pitch in?”
He raised his cup.
“You already helped.”
He took a long sip. Dancer smirked a crooked smirk.
“Medicinal. Don’t I know it,” she said.
“Honestly, I just wish there was more I could do for Valentina. I’m not much help.”
Dancer shrugged away the comment.
“Nah. Hogwash. That lady is weird as rain when the sun shines, but she’s also as practical as a door hinge.
You wouldn’t be staying at her camp if she didn’t think you were helpful.
Just be on hand. Sometimes that’s the most helpful thing of all.
Being nearby. I’m sure she’s up there in the Perch concocting a genius plan as we speak. ”
“The Perch?”
“Her tree house. I like to think of it as the Perch. On account of all the crows up there. That’s my little nickname for it.”
“The crows?”
“Yeah, the crows. There’s always crows up on the roof of that place.
I think they roost up there. Geez, man, I know you haven’t lived in the woods long but crows ain’t exactly migrating warblers.
I don’t know how you overlook crows. Personally, I love those birds.
Whip-smart and elegant as evening wear.”
Gears clicked inside Green’s skull.
He drained his cup and handed it back to Dancer.
“I gotta go. You’ve given me an idea.”
“Makes sense. I’ve often thought of myself as a classic muse type.”
She sat the empty cup back down on his little side table and grinned.
“Don’t forget to come by and return that cup. Safe travels, Green.”
Tradition.
She ducked out the door and took long strides into the dusk.
Crows.
He hadn’t seen a single crow in Valentina’s camp. Not once. Dancer was seeing a piece of nature he wasn’t. Not a rag moth. Not a horned wolf. Not something teetering on the line between real and imagined.
Plain old crows.
Unless they weren’t plain old crows.
Unless something was actively preventing him from seeing them.
It was obvious, like the moment you realized the sunglasses you misplaced were still up on top of your head.
The memory replayed, Catskill at his side, the impossible bird perched on the No Parking sign. It croaked deep and dark as the small hours of the night.
If you must call upon our court at this early date, find us in the wilds. Unlikely. In plain sight. At the temple tree, above the place of memories. Yet, we would rather you did not. We have fulfilled our part.
Those words had seemed like gibberish. Then, they hadn’t seemed relevant as the spore-log rattled his bones. They seemed like a riddle for another time, especially as Valentina spoke frozen words about time running short.
At the temple tree, above the place of memories.
Why was I drawn to this mountain? To this camp?
He thought of Valentina’s few rules, the only prohibitions she mentioned when offering an apprenticeship.
You will not open locked doors. You will not enter my living quarters uninvited. You will not fiddle with any equipment you don’t understand. You will not visit the roof of the library.
Green set his jaw.
He entered the hatch and earned an I thought I dismissed you look from his teacher.
“Just passing through,” he said.
He climbed the rope ladder and opened the narrow hatch to the roof. Bits of twig and dry leaves rained down and itched in his collar as he pulled himself up onto the ridged metal roofing.
“Mr. Green! Stop! Get down from there!”
He ignored her.
The roof was grimed with lichens and littered with debris. High above, the silhouettes of several crows perched on the upper branches like outriders of full dark. He hadn’t seen them from the ground.
The Crow King’s words echoed in his mind.
Yet, we would rather you did not. We have fulfilled our part. And dealings with you are always rather complicated.
He slammed the hatch and stood on it, clinging to a branch for balance on the slick pitched roof. Below him, he felt the vibration of Valentina pounding on the hatchway. Her muffled words drifted up, but he couldn’t understand them.
“Okay. I know you’re here,” he said. “Show yourself.”
For a long moment, the words hung in the air.
Nothing happened.
He was a man in a tree scolding the sky.
Then, it all changed.
A falling oak leaf froze in place near Green’s cheek and déjà vu hit him like the first fat drops of a downpour. All around him, the world was locked in sudden stillness.
The Crow King spoke.
“Not the most polite request for an audience we have ever received. We were not expecting you yet.”
The bird was cawing, a deep, hoarse sound that pounded the air like a hammer, but there were words in the sound, words translated by something that slept beneath the mountains, beneath Green’s own psyche.