Dreamwood (14 page)

“Look,” she told him, and somehow she put enough steel in her voice that he raised it to his eye.

The man squinted into the eyepiece.

She knew what he would see.

He frowned, glaring at the driftwood platter. The boy had been careful not to take all the meat. Without the spectrometer the man might never have noticed.

The big man's expression changed. First she could see his wonder, then his anger. When he finally put it down he looked like a man who'd made a decision.

“Pale strangers, you have a boat,” he said.

Pete's jaw dropped. Then he turned to Lucy with the biggest grin she'd ever seen. For a moment she almost thought he was going to hug her.

“Hm,” the big man nodded. “I'll take you now.”

As they walked out, he gave the boy a good kick.

“What was that for?” the boy cried.

“Now
he's
moaning
his
laments,” Pete noted as they passed out of the cavern.

• • •

They were given space in a rocky alcove and told to sleep for a few hours. Even with a pile of sealskins underneath her, Lucy felt the hard-packed sand of the grotto floor, and it seemed like she had barely closed her eyes before they were awakened. It was very late by the time Lucy and Pete followed the Ss'til man out of the grottoes and onto the beach. The surf pounded violently against nearby rocks and the air was freezing. A high, distant moon shone down on them like a cold spotlight.

Ahead of them they could see a black boat pulled onto the sand. A lone boatman in a long black robe was waiting beside it. In one hand he held a tall, hooked pole.

Pete whispered to her, “He looks cheerful.”

She eyed the ominous boatman. “As long as he gets us there.”

“This is Obwe,” said the fat man nervously; he seemed eager to get back to his warm cave. “He will bring you where you want to go.”

The two men exchanged quick words in Ss'til. Obwe nodded.

Then, sensing something Lucy could not, both men tensed.

Without a word, Obwe reached over and picked Lucy up under the armpits, heaving her into the boat. She struggled to get her balance, only to fall to the bottom again when Pete was flung in beside her. They were in a hopeless tangle. Obwe pushed the boat into the water, running and picking up speed. The other man was already loping over the sand, surprisingly fast for someone his size, headed for the protective barriers of driftwood.

Lucy disentangled herself from Pete (who seemed to have many more elbows and knees than a normal person), and raised herself up to sitting. The sea and beach were dark. Her senses firing, she peered into the blackness.

Moving on the beach they had just left was something she'd first thought was a dune. Only, as the dune slid toward them it became the midsection of a gigantic snake, almost as high as a man's waist. The head went gliding smoothly along the sand, searching.

She stared at it transfixed, and only after a moment realized Pete was beside her, staring, too.

“Do you think it's . . . coming for us?” she asked Pete.

“I hope not,” Pete groaned.

The snake had submerged, and they could no longer see it. Lucy watched the surface of the waves with increasing dread. Where was it?

Obwe strained at the oars, struggling to get the boat farther out.

And then the head raised up. Close. Moving closer. Moving
fast.

“That thing is really coming after us,” Pete said in a tight voice as if he didn't want to alarm anyone but he
really
hoped Obwe had noticed.

Lucy watched the dark hump of the snake close in on them.

In one movement, Obwe left his paddles and stood up. He grabbed hold of the long pole he'd stowed in the boat and stood motionless, waiting. Lucy held her breath.

A huge head—easily the size of an orca's—rose beside them, surfacing with a groaning hiss that sounded as if it came from the depths of the ocean. It hovered there like a cobra about to strike. In that moment Lucy didn't care what Pete thought of her; she grasped Pete's arm and clung to him. The head came swooping toward them. Lucy screamed.

Obwe jabbed at the snake with his pole. The serpent hissed and turned its attention to the boatman, seemingly mesmerized by the pole's movement. Obwe shifted his balance—the boat rocked, Lucy was sure they'd be overturned—and then somehow Obwe caught the snake in the gills with the hooked end of his pole. Quickly with his other hand he cast a heavy braided harness over its head, just as if he were bridling a horse. Grappling hooks caught hold of it. The snake shook and thrashed—the sea boiled—but Obwe held the reins with one hand and with the other used his hook to draw the snake into line. In an amazingly short time, the snake settled down and began to pull them through the waves. Soon they were speeding away from the mainland, moving faster than any boat.

And then, for the first time that evening, Lucy allowed herself to relax. She let go her death grip on Pete's arm and looked about, marveling at the unexpected beauty of the night sea. Even the serpent was magnificent, with its shimmering scales and its wonderful speed. She found herself grinning helplessly and turned to Pete.

He was leaning forward, a look of pure joy on his face.

“We're flying!”

She laughed. It was wonderful, and crazy, and it was useless to talk; there weren't words for the exhilaration she felt. The ocean streamed by, and the moon seemed to race across the water to keep up.

She looked at Obwe, standing upright at the prow. His head shone hairless in the moonlight, shadowed here and there by a net of tattoos. His gloomy vestments flapped about him like sails. Her heart swelled as she thought of his bravery and skill.

Obwe caught Lucy's stare, and unexpectedly, he smiled, showing his inky teeth. “First time traveling by snake?”

She nodded. Then laughed again.

The boatman leaned into the reins. “The Ss'til know it is the best way to travel.”

“The only way to travel!” Pete whooped with glee. And to her surprise Obwe echoed him. She wouldn't be left out, she let out her own fierce whoop of joy. Their voices flew into the sky, for a moment hovering over them, like powerful ocean birds keeping pace with a boat.

Far too soon they reached the other side of the bay, where the Thumb loomed black and craggy against the lightening sky. Its forbidding outline bristled with spiky treetops, and its walls were sheer cliffs.

“Where can we land?” Lucy asked. From their small boat the Thumb seemed like an impregnable fortress.

“I know a place.” Obwe released the harness and the serpent dove into the depths. Rowing, Obwe followed the contour of the Thumb.

The island's rocky sides were littered with broken trees. Bats flew above their heads, flapping and dipping home to their caves. Ominous birds croaked to the coming dawn. There was a long, chilling shriek that sounded like a large cat's. Lucy shivered and Pete stared nervously into the shadows.

At last they reached a cut in those grim cliffs, a bowl-shaped gash in the Thumb's side where Obwe could come ashore. The land was covered with a shiny gray stuff, and as they came closer, Lucy realized it was smashed timber, a giant river of deadfall emptying into the sea. There was something unspeakably eerie about the silvery dead wood, as if they'd come upon a vast graveyard.

Obwe pulled the black boat up onto the beach among the enormous logs. It was not quite dawn; the only sound was the quiet rolling of the waves.

Pete turned to her, his expression somber. “Well, this is it.” He clambered out of the boat and held out his hands to help Lucy.

She jumped onto the sand, wincing at the crunch that sounded. Every noise was too loud, and she wished she had Niwa's gift of moving soundlessly. Never had she been in a place that felt so watchful.

Obwe stood with his pole, glancing up at the cliffs around the beach. “You should be careful here,” he said, tilting his head as if he could hear a warning in the waves' soft murmur.

The trees on the surrounding cliffs loomed down like silent watchers. In the gray light before dawn all was still. Everything about their being there felt wrong.

Obwe started back to his boat. Then he stopped, standing with the pale gray surf around his ankles, and looked back at them one last time.

“Here,” he told them, reaching into the boat and unwrapping a bundle. He handed them a length of wood with a pitchy bulb at one end. “A torch,” he explained. His black eyes measured them. “You light it when you need a boat to come home.”

Home.
Lucy vowed to herself they'd make that return trip.

“Thank you.” She pressed her lips together, took a deep breath, and raised a hand in farewell.

Obwe nodded and stepped into his black boat.

They stood on the beach and watched him go.

L
ucy shivered while Obwe's boat faded into a distant speck. The dawn brought a chill ocean wind that seemed to blow right through her.

She turned to Pete and looked up the slope of fallen trees.

“So I guess we've got to climb this thing,” Pete said, sniffing. His nose was pink from the chill.

The deadfall would be a challenge even if Lucy were feeling her best. But she'd barely slept in the Ss'til sea caves the night before, and cold and fear made her stiff and clumsy.

They couldn't stay on the beach, however. She'd noticed the slick black head of a serpent lurking just offshore, and she did not want to be its breakfast.

From somewhere above them came an ominous groan.

“What was that?” Pete ducked down. “That sure sounds like the devil's voice.”

Lucy shook her head dismissively. Pete couldn't let himself get spooked so easily. “It's the log pile shifting,” she said, pointing up at the deadfall. The whole mass was slowly moving toward the beach, like a glacier of wood grinding down everything in its path. She found a place where she could stand on a broken branch and clamber onto a nearby log. With a grunt she hoisted herself up and stood unsteadily. Its bark skinned away, the tree was slick; it was like standing on ice. She had to pull herself up to get to the next log. The cold made her hands weak and clumsy.
I'm not going to fall.

But before she got very far, she slipped on the smooth wood and tumbled onto the freezing sand. She got up, wincing, and braced her hands against the log, searching for a handhold.

“Need some help?” Pete asked, before hoisting himself up onto the log. He squatted down to watch her, balancing on his toes the way the boys in Wickham used to crouch over their dice games.

“No . . .
hmpf
 . . . I've got it . . .” Lucy jumped up and flung her arms forward, only to slide slowly to the ground again, her fingernails scraping uselessly against the wood; she felt like a cat trying to climb a curtain.

The best she could do was to hang on to a nubbin of a branch and try to swing her legs up. Each time, she scraped her moccasins against the bark before her feet crashed down. It was humiliating.

Pete looked down at her. He had to be thinking how strong and tall he was, with his sleeves rolled up and his skin tanned from the sun.

She could see in his eyes he was enjoying this.

“Would you like some help now?” he asked innocently.

Much as she'd like to refuse, she couldn't see a way around it.

“Yes . . . please.”

Pete bent down and extended his hand. She grasped his strong wrist and he pulled her up. She stood beside him, the salt breeze pilfering pale strands of hair from her untidy braid. She brushed them away from her face and took a deep breath.

“Thanks,” she said lightly, shrugging a little so he wouldn't think she was
too
grateful. For the first time she wondered how she would have managed without Pete along.

“Well, then.” Pete tugged on his bandanna as he looked up at the silvery jumble of logs above them. A soft mist shrouded the upper reaches of the deadfall. “Only about a million more of these to go.”

• • •

The climb took ages. The timber was slippery—most of the bark was skinned off—and there were few branches to hold on to. And the wood was always shifting and rolling. Lucy had to jump to throw her arms over the top of the logs, then scrabble her feet sideways until she could pull herself up. After climbing a few logs like this she gave up and let Pete go first, then grasped his hand so he could help her. Silently she thanked Niwa for her Lupine clothes. She couldn't imagine doing any of this in her stiff dungarees and slick-soled boots. And when they returned, would it be so extraordinary if Niwa gave her more Lupine things? If out of gratitude for saving the forests Niwa treated her like a sister? Niwa might take her to the wolf woman grove again and teach her to talk to birds while the governor let her examine his rare books. And if she protested that they did too much for her, they might say, “But you saved us, Lucy.”

These hazy fantasies occupied Lucy through the tedious climb. Though of course Pete
would
keep interrupting.

“So we can't even pick berries?” Pete quizzed her. Now that they were on the Thumb, Pete took new interest in Ulfric's rules.

“That's what the toymaker told me.”
Governor Arekwoy would hold a dinner in her honor. She'd ask the raven men to fetch her things. They might grumble, but they'd have to—

“What if a berry is lying on the ground? Nobody's actually picking it then.” Pete stood still while a branch nearby cracked from the pressure of the log pile. It gave out a horrible groan as it splintered.

“You're welcome to test it out,” she said in annoyance. Most of the morning fog had burned off, making their climb hot and sweaty. Lucy's hair, by now entirely escaped from her braid, clung in damp curls around her head.

Pete scrunched his face. There was a pink line of sunburn across his snub nose that made him look particularly boyish. “You don't need to bite my head off. I'm just asking.”

At last they were at the top. Lucy slid off the final log and landed on a springy carpet of rotting bark and kodok needles. Trees stretched as far as she could see, between them ghostly strings of moss and jags of broken limbs were hung like rotted curtains.

The forest was as dense as a jungle. The pleasant visions of triumph disappeared. Now her heart sank. Her father was somewhere in here, but where?

Pete, however, was concerned with more practical matters. “I'm starving,” he announced, plopping down on the ground. “Somehow we went clear past breakfast.”

Now that he'd mentioned food Lucy realized she hadn't eaten since lunch the previous day, when they'd stopped with Niwa in the wolf woman's grove. “And we skipped supper last night. Unless you managed to sneak some food from the Ss'til when I wasn't looking.”

Pete held out his hands in protest. “What? No, if I had, I'd have shared. And I'm pretty sure what they were eating was snake. I, er, wasn't hungry.”

“The first time I've heard that.” Pete could be relied upon to eat under any circumstances.

Pete shrugged, conceding. “I admit, it's unusual.”

Now that they were away from the beach, the air felt stifling and close: humid, as if they were inside a giant lung. The uncomfortable feeling of being watched—scrutinized, in fact—was even more intense than it had been on the beach. It was as if the trees themselves were staring at them.

Lucy rubbed her forearm over her eyes, wiping away perspiration. She was letting her imagination run wild. This was no different from any of the other hundreds of spooky places she'd been to.

“I'll get the food,” she told Pete.

She delved into her pack without thinking. Something golden flashed and promptly kicked her hand.

“Ow.”

Lucy put her stinging fingers in her mouth. She'd forgotten about her ghost sweeper. Its legs thrashed wildly.

“Do you have a stocking?” she asked.

“What for?”

“So I won't get my hand smashed by my ghost sweeper!”

All she wanted to do was tie up the sweeper and eat. But Pete—his eyes wide with alarm—crouched down and gingerly investigated her bulging pack.

“It's really moving,” he warned her, immediately looking from side to side as if expecting ghosts to pop out at them from behind the fallen logs.

Lucy wiped her hands on her leggings. “I know. I think there are ghosts here
somewhere.
” Hadn't Pete and Ulfric both mentioned something about a town disappearing? “But this whole place probably has residues of supernatural activity. I'll bet that's what it's reacting to.” She squinted into the forest's green mist: It was certainly eerie, but she didn't think they were in any danger at the moment. “Now, would you please lend me a sock so we can eat?”

Rather grudgingly Pete pulled out a thin grayish sock.

“One of my last clean ones,” he told her, holding on to it a bit longer than necessary. “And I'm giving you one without holes.”

“I'll take good care of it,” she promised, rolling her eyes.

After a struggle she managed to stuff the indignant egg headfirst into Pete's sock and tie the end.

“There. That should stop the pummeling a bit,” she said cheerfully. This small achievement had already restored some of her confidence. “Now for some food.”

She brought out biscuits and jerky, which they ate slowly, watching her pack bulge and wriggle as the ghost sweeper tried to escape.

After she'd eaten, Lucy leaned her head against the log and closed her eyes. The warmth of the day, along with the exhaustion of the climb, made her sleepy. What she'd like most right now was a good long nap.

But Pete was bustling about. The bit of dried meat they'd eaten seemed to have revived him. “I have an idea,” Pete said. “Let's switch the food to my pack. I don't think your sweeper is going to calm down anytime soon.”

“Are you sure it won't be too heavy?”

Pete snorted and then demonstrated how easily he could lift his pack. In case she missed it, he did it again. “I could carry both our packs and it wouldn't bother me a bit.”

Lucy rather doubted that, but she helped him move the food anyway.

Pete bent over her, compulsively rearranging the way that she'd put things in. Flecks of perspiration shone on his face, and he smelled (not unpleasantly, she noticed) of kodok needles and sweat.

When that was done, they could no longer put off the question of where they would go.

“My father would use his vitometer to find the dreamwood,” Lucy said. She did not add “if he made it this far.”
Of course he made it here.

She fished the soft leather pouch out from inside her tunic. The vitometer had been vibrating softly against her chest, almost like a purring cat.

Pete watched solemnly while she undid the clasp and lifted the lid. The needle shivered across the face of the instrument, ticking off points on its compass. Lucy held her breath as she watched it spin round. Numerals in the Odic force counter clicked steadily upward at the top of the disc. That had to mean dreamwood was still here. The idea of a tree that possessed such a quantity of life energy was interesting, in an abstract sort of way, as she had explained the concept in Governor Arekwoy's office. But now that they were on the Thumb, surrounded by a brooding forest, it struck her as threatening.

After a moment, fluttering like a moth toward the light, the needle stopped and pointed to a spot that would have corresponded to two o'clock on a watch.

“There it is.” Lucy tried to sound pleased. But her mouth was dry and her hand quivered as she shut the vitometer's case. She did not tell Pete, but the reading had been so high she had to look at it several times before accepting it. Even at a distance, dreamwood was now showing fifteen times the amount of Odic force that could be measured from a full-grown man.

• • •

They walked for hours, stopping only to consult the vitometer. Pete tried to find their direction from his compass, but the needle just spun around crazily. After a few attempts he put it away and announced he could tell which way they were going from some combination of the angle of the sun, the moss on the trees, and his own innate orienteering genius. However, every time Lucy checked the vitometer, Pete was wrong—sometimes wildly so. The third time this happened he got upset before declaring the forest “unnatural,” and he sulked until they stopped to eat again.

It was slow going. There were no paths, no tracks to follow, just an endless, painstaking struggle over fallen logs, through thickets of lichen-encrusted branches, under the spiraling fronds of mammoth ferns. Lucy got used to the dull thuds of her ghost sweeper, beating like a metronome against her back.

The jagged skeletons of dead trees poked through the green mist. They gave an uncomfortable impression of
lurching,
as if the minute she turned her back they'd move again.

Soon her knees were black and blue from falling. The roots were awful for shifting position under her feet, but it was hard to say if they were worse than the vines that were always tangling up her legs or the tree branches that had a way of whacking her on the head as she passed.

After one vine wrapped around her ankle she'd had enough. She took out her knife (the knife Pete had made her buy) and was about to saw through it.

Instantly the sense of being watched intensified. The sound of her own heartbeat pounded in her ears.

“Lucy, what are you doing?” The tense expression on Pete's face made her even more nervous. “Why'd everything get so quiet?”

“I was going to cut it.” Slowly she put the knife away, realizing how close she'd come to making a stupid mistake. She bent down and wrestled with the vine until she could pull her foot free. Raucous bird chatter sounded from the trees above her.