Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6) (32 page)

F
ROM
THE
BASE
OF
THE
HILL
, Foxbrush watched the enormous bonfire built near the Eldest’s House, a beacon into the night. Many men and women worked to gather fuel, driving the flames higher and hotter, a defense against the darkness and a light to those who had ventured into that darkness.

The warriors had gone. Led by Redman and Sight-of-Day, men and women alike, they had marched from the village and into the jungle, spreading out in all directions, searching. Surely the Bronze Warriors would have left some sign. Surely they could not have gone far.

“Please!” Foxbrush had begged, catching Redman by the arm. “Please let me come with you!”

“No,” Redman had replied, shaking him off. “You must follow your Path, and it does not lead with me.”

“I can help!” Foxbrush had tried to insist, catching up a weapon and holding it awkwardly. “I know I can!”

But Redman had been adamant. “You must remain here, Foxbrush. Follow your Path.”

Then he had gone, leading the village warriors in desperate hunt, calling Lark’s name as he went. And Foxbrush remained, watching the jungles into which everyone disappeared.

Useless. Shrugged off. Despised.

The story of his life.

The sun traveled swiftly across the sky and plummeted beyond the horizon. Those who’d stayed behind built up the fire, glad for some task at which to busy themselves. But they shook their heads and motioned Foxbrush away when he offered to help. So he stood now alone, his arms crossed against a cold that seeped from the inside out.

It was his fault. But how could he have helped it? He should never have shot the monkey. But how could he have known it was Crookjaw?

It didn’t matter. Lark would suffer for his mistake.

To Foxbrush’s horror, he found tears on his face, running through his beard. He cursed and dashed them away, turning from the bonfire back to the jungle. Hours ago he’d ceased to watch for any sign of return. The warriors would stay out searching for days. Then, like all those who had lost their firstborn over the last many months, they would return, heartbroken, spirit broken.

“Your
red lady is stealing the blood of the South Land
.”

He started walking. He hardly knew why or where he thought to go. He merely started walking, away from the light, into the darkness. Perhaps some path opened at his feet and compelled him to follow. He could not say and really didn’t care. That was Redman’s way of thinking, not his own. So he simply walked, and as he walked, he whispered:

“Just at the mirk and midnight hour

Of thirteen nights but one,

The warriors bear their bronzen stones

Where crooked stands the Mound alone.

There you must win your Fiery One

Or see her then devoured.”

Since coming to this place, his eyes had grown more used to seeing in the dark, and he was familiar enough with the trail he now sought to follow even in the night. He walked close to the jungle but did not enter, making for the orchard. Things shifted in the heavy foliage. He turned and thought he glimpsed eyes . . . many eyes, red and gold and silver and green, that gleamed in the blackness, then flickered out, only to gleam again briefly, like fireflies.

He knew them for what they were. But for some reason he did not fear them. “Have you come for tribute?” he asked.

One pair of eyes blinked. Then, for a moment, he thought he saw a face that was nearly human, save for the long, sharp beak. It vanished after only a brief glimpse, but then a voice came.

“We will fight.”

It was not a human voice, nor did it speak in any language Foxbrush knew. But he understood it deep in his mind.

“We will fight. We will help.”

“Who?” Foxbrush asked. “Whom will you fight? Who is our enemy?”

The response came in another voice, hoarse and rasping as a water bird’s. It said, “The Mound! The evil Mound.”

More creatures, Faerie beasts all, gathered in the shadows beyond his vision; small and unthreatening, large and intimidating, and everything in between. They gathered, and their eyes blinked and stared at Foxbrush. He knew he should be frightened. Somehow, he couldn’t work up the energy for it.

“Well, good,” he said, shrugging at the jungle and moving on his way toward the orchard. “I’m glad to hear it. Fight away, and let us know how it goes, won’t you?”

“You must lead us.”

Foxbrush snorted and did not deign to answer. The skittering, flapping, shuffling, stomping, slithering of many unseen creatures followed him, and the jungle on his right writhed with the movements. But they did not step beyond its fringes, and he did not go near enough to see or touch.

“You
must lead us!”
they all called in their bizarre tongues.
“Lead us into battle!”

But he stopped up his ears to their pleas. In the orchard, their voices died away into whispers and then to nothing. Real fireflies glinted now, like small pixies themselves. Night birds and nimble-fingered lemurs had their way with the fig trees’ bounty, for no one had been posted to chase them away.

And somewhere among the trees, someone was crying.

Foxbrush made his way through the orchard, slipping between twisted trunks and stepping over gnarled, grasping roots. He parted the curtains of heavy leaves until at last he found the one who wept.

“Nidawi?”

He had not seen her in months, not since that dreadful night when Daylily had come upon them in this very orchard, before the elder figs ripened. But here sat the Everblooming, surrounded by fireflies whose gentle glow illuminated her tear-stained face and the white body of Lioness cradled in her arms. She wore the form of an old woman, a woman who is the last of all her friends, alone in a strange world where people no longer recall the life she knew, the family she loved, the places she held dear. Her tears were the awful tears of memories slowly slipping, and they gleamed as they fell like little fireflies themselves and caught and sparkled in Lioness’s fur.

She did not look up as Foxbrush approached, but cried on. All wild sobbing had faded, withering her into the form she now wore. Her wrinkled hands clung to the mighty carcass, however, as though they would never let go.

Foxbrush knelt, gazing upon the dead Lioness, the red wound in her breast. Once more he felt tears on his face. He put out a hand and smoothed the noble muzzle of the great cat. Then he let his hand trail down and rest upon Nidawi’s.

She looked up then, transforming in an instant to the form of a tiny child, bewildered with loss, looking for comfort, for understanding.

“She’s dead!” she said.

“Yes,” said Foxbrush. He took hold of her hand and she, reluctantly, let go of Lioness enough to let him wrap his fingers about hers. “What happened, Nidawi?”

“Cren Cru,” she said, gnashing the name through her teeth. “Cren Cru
killed her. The Parasite! As he kills all of mine. He wore a body armed with stone, and he drove it into her heart!”

She let Lioness slip from her arms then and flung herself suddenly at Foxbrush, wrapping her scrawny limbs about his neck and weeping into his shoulder. He held her, frightened but making soothing noises and murmuring things he could not later recall. When at last her quivering body began to still, he said, “Who is Cren Cru, Nidawi?”

She straightened into the form of a woman again. A mature, hardened woman with the face of a bereft mother. “Come,” she said, taking Foxbrush’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Come and I will show you.”

She stepped onto a Faerie Path as lightly as though stepping through an open door, and led Foxbrush onto it as well. The night was already so strange, what with the beasts in the jungle, the warriors with their bronze stones, and the hollow-eyed faces he’d witnessed around the bonfire, that Foxbrush had not the strength to be surprised at this. Indeed, he felt he would never be surprised again! So he followed Nidawi, and his peripheral vision caught brief glimpses of wood and tree and rock and hill sliding past him, all within a few strides. And he realized, without knowing what it was he realized, that Southlands was riddled with Faerie Paths lingering just beyond the range of his senses and understanding, but as real as the air he breathed.

They passed gorges and villages and great stretches of jungle. Within a minute, or possibly two (though even so brief a time meant nothing), they came to the center of the Land Behind the Mountains.

Nidawi stepped off the Path, pulling Foxbrush behind her. “Look,” she said, pointing.

There it stood. Somehow, Foxbrush felt he’d already known, though he never could have said as much if asked. It was like the knowledge of a sickness deep inside, as yet showing no symptoms but already working terrible carnage upon the body and the spirit.

The Mound of Cren Cru grew up from the soil of Southlands like a tumor grown on a heart. It was a mound of black earth, three times the height of a man but no taller; and sprouting from that earth, so thick as to be a sort of coat, were twisted branches, sharp, thorn-covered, bristling,
and dead. They looked like antlers or horns, a thousand horns jutting up from the dirt, which was like a bulbous head.

Foxbrush, from where he stood holding Nidawi’s hand, saw with a clarity he could not have known had he looked through his unaided mortal eyes. By Nidawi’s power he saw all the Faerie Paths of Southlands crisscrossing the land, rising up from the gorges, and flowing down from the mountains. All of them streamed to this one central point like the veins of a body, pulsing.

There fell upon Foxbrush’s heart a shadow of horror such as he had never known, not even when the Dragon dropped in fire from the sky and covered his world in smoke and poison. That, at least, was a dread he understood, a dread of teeth and scales and flames and fumes.

This was something he could not understand, and in his ignorance he trembled and despaired even at that one swift glance.

He turned away, looking at Nidawi instead, who stood facing the Mound with an expression of intense hatred, hatred that could not be bound into one age, so she was all ages in that moment: old, young, beautiful, childish, frail, strong, awful.

“What is it, Nidawi? What is that thing?” Foxbrush asked.

“Once upon a time,” she said, and her voice was that of a little girl speaking from the thin, lined mouth of a crone, “there was a Faerie queen, Meadhbh by name, who ruled the land of Cren Cru. She wore a bronze crown set with twelve bright prongs, and she drank a wine as red as blood, which some said was blood indeed. She fed it to her consorts, and when they died, one by one, it was said she killed them. For she did not desire consorts. She was queen, and she was beautiful, and she was a great power. She needed only her demesne, the Faerie realm Cren Cru.

“But rumor of her murderous games did fly across the Between and fall upon the ears of that queen my people called Bebo Moonsong. Bebo left her own demesne and traveled to Cren Cru, to find Meadhbh and question her as to her doings. But Meadhbh took offense and thought to prove her innocence in a battle. She fought to kill Queen Bebo Moonsong, and when she could not, she took her own life.

“She was a Faerie queen, however, so she had two more lives to live. But she had taken one of her lives of her own free will, and this was a sin,
a curse, a blight upon existence such as none but a Faerie lord or lady may understand! The remaining two lives were too evil to her, too unbearable. Thus she took them as well, denying the gift of Faerie queenship and severing the ties with her demesne. She left no heir, for she had loved no man, be he Faerie or mortal.

“And so the demesne of Cren Cru fell silent as death. But a demesne cannot die, not with the blood of its Faerie queen spilled upon its ground. It drank up the blood, and it felt something like life, the lives Queen Meadhbh had forgone.

“So Cren Cru rose up, alive and not alive, disembodied and wandering. It had no queen and it had no bindings, for the land itself was devastated by Meadhbh’s evil. And it traveled, a being without spirit, without heart, without blood, without knowing of itself or understanding. Only a shadow of awareness. Neither alive nor unalive, but a force of instinct driven to find . . . to find a . . .”

Here Nidawi stopped and wrapped her arms about herself, unable to continue for a long while. Her teeth tore at her lips as she struggled to get the words out. Then she said:

“A home.”

Foxbrush tried once more to look at the Mound. But he could not bear it and hid his face in his hands.

“It took bodies,” Nidawi said. “Lost folk wandering the Between, immortals and mortals. It found them and it took them, and so it became aware of being, of life, of the need to belong. Twelve in all it took, and it melted down Meadhbh’s twelve-pronged crown to give each of them a piece, a binding. Twelve made one by the strength that was Cren Cru. Then it set about to lay claim to a world.”

Her voice became a whispering shudder, little more than a breath. “Many worlds it took. Each time, it latched hold and the Mound appeared out of nowhere. And the twelve warriors moved at the will of Cren Cru, believing still that they were their own. Every time it took hold, the warriors passed through the land demanding the firstborn children. They formed blood debts and demanded tithes, and if any refused to give of their firstborn, the warriors took what they wanted by force. Twelve days and twelve nights
they would gather the tribute and pay it, driving the children, one by one, into the door of the Mound.”

Nidawi looked up at Foxbrush, and though he still hid his face, he could feel her gaze.

“The blood of the firstborn was not enough. So the remaining warriors would go out again. They would make more of their kind, and spread through the land, taking the second born, and after that, the third. And eventually, whole worlds were eaten up. Mighty kings and queens fell as the Parasite drank up their lives, ate up their people! And when it was through, and even the warriors themselves had killed one another, spilling their own blood in tribute, there would be nothing left. And Cren Cru would wander on. And he would gather new warriors and start all over.