The Tree of Story (30 page)

“I don’t remember a word of it, ma’am,” he replied. “That is to say, I’m sure I deserved every word of it, even though I’ve forgotten what you … what I mean is …” He frowned, clearly desperate for a way out of the tangle he’d gotten himself into. Then he cleared his throat again and squared his shoulders. “What I mean to say is that Nicholas Pendrake is a good friend, and no harm would ever come to Rowen here, not while the name of Plunkett is on that sign above the door.”

“I know that, Mister Plunkett,” Edweth said warmly. “Let us both put all of it behind us for good, shall we? And please, call me Edweth.”

“I will, if you’ll call me Miles.”

They smiled at each other and shook hands. Balor stared slack-jawed from one to the other as if witness to the most unlikely thing he’d ever seen in his life. And now both Edweth and the innkeeper seemed unable to find words, so the wildman came to their rescue.

“You’re a good man, Miles, to do this,” Balor said.

“It’s what anyone would do,” the innkeeper mumbled. “Just watch out for yourself, my friend, and stay alive.” He turned to Edweth. “I have to be leaving now, ma’am, before everything goes to rack and ruin downstairs. But I’ll come see you, I promise, when I have any news.”

“Thank you, Miles.”

With that he made an awkward bow and ducked out the low doorway.

“He’s so kind,” Edweth said to Balor when the innkeeper had gone, and her face glowed with more than its usual colour. “I’m sorry to say I had Miles Plunkett all wrong.”

“He’s one of the best, ma’am,” the wildman said. “But I must leave now, too, before I’m missed. Will you be all right here?”

“Of course, Balor,” she said, and to the wildman’s surprise she rose up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “But what are you going to do? What if they find out you were the one who got me out of Appleyard?”

Balor grinned.

“You let me worry about that, ma’am. I’ve got some other friends to see. Brax may think he’s running things now, but he doesn’t have everyone in his pocket, not yet.”

16

T
HEY HAD LEFT THE
last of the working streetlights long behind.

Rowen, Will, Morrigan and Shade walked in an unending grey half-light through the silent city. Heaps of broken wood and masonry, bent and twisted scraps of metal and shards of glass were scattered everywhere. It was impossible to take more than a few steps without having to climb over or go around some obstacle. Fallen electrical wires lay across their path like dead snakes. They passed mounds of refuse and many abandoned vehicles, including a car that stood in the middle of a pool of oily water, on fire. Black smoke billowed from its burning interior. Apart from that, nothing moved. The air was cold down at the bottom of the city’s canyons, and still and dry as dead bone.

This place had been well named, Rowen thought. It really was like being inside a shadow.

She remembered a trip she had taken with her grandfather a few summers before to visit the old cottage at Blue Hill. They’d reached the farm just as the sun was setting. One moment they had been walking through a warm, buzzing, honey-coloured world, and then the sun had dropped below the brow of the hill and they were inside its shadow. The air was suddenly chilled and damp, as if they had plunged under water, and it was then she’d understood that a shadow wasn’t just a flat patch of darkness stretched over the ground. A shadow was a place itself. It had height and depth. When you passed into the shadow of something, you really were inside it. Except that here, in the Night King’s realm, there was no hill casting the shadow. It was simply everywhere, a part of this dead world that never changed. And it was not a cool, welcome twilight like the one they’d entered that evening at Blue Hill, but an unrelenting ashen greyness, neither day nor night, which seemed to have seeped inside things themselves.

It was seeping into her, as well. She could feel it in the heaviness of her steps and the bleak thoughts she couldn’t help thinking. When they had stopped to rest in the concealment of an underpass, Will had handed her one of the bottles of water he’d brought from the hotel. He’d given her a smile, too, to cheer her, but a voice in her head said,
How much longer will he stay with you before he gives up and runs away? He’s just a weak, scared boy. He can’t help you anyway
.

She’d looked away, ashamed of herself. Where had these hateful thoughts come from? It was the shadow. What was happening to Shade was happening to all of them, she was sure, if more slowly.

Since leaving the hotel they had seen no one, and now
even the distant roar of traffic had faded away, leaving only the sound of their own footsteps as they slowly picked their way through the rubble-choked streets. From time to time they did hear faint rustlings and skitterings that might have been rats or other small creatures scuttling through the debris. And yet Rowen was sure that these were not the only inhabitants of this city. The farther they walked, the more certain she was they were being watched by hidden eyes.

“Do you feel it?” she whispered to Will when her eyes caught his.

He nodded without speaking and she knew he understood what she meant.

If Morrigan sensed the watchers, she, too, gave no sign. Rowen and Will were walking ahead of her, as they had been since leaving the hotel, and it often happened that they were forced to stop when they came to a crossroads and were uncertain which way to proceed. Then Morrigan would quickly indicate with a nod which path to take and they would go on. She kept her face hidden under her hood at all times, so that Rowen could not help but wonder if their friend really was still concealed within the silent white shrowde that covered her.

For his part Shade stayed close to Morrigan, but sometimes, at a word from her, he would trot on ahead to scout beyond some obstacle or around a corner and then report back to her whether the way was clear. He kept his distance from Rowen and Will, not even glancing at them when he passed them on the way back to Morrigan from his scouting forays. Since he was playing the part of the Angel’s servant, it made sense for him to ignore them like this, but Rowen had the troubling feeling that Shade’s avoidance was more than an act. Ever since they set foot in the Shadow Realm, the wolf had grown increasingly agitated and withdrawn. His hackles
were up all the time now. Rowen’s heart went out to the wolf as he struggled. She wanted to speak to Shade, find some comforting words if she could, but she dared not drop her own role as a prisoner even for a moment.

Both Rowen and Will had lost any sense for how long they had been walking. The dead sky showed no familiar signs, no lengthening shadows or changing light to mark the passing hours. The fact that they did not speak to each other only added to the feeling that they were wandering in a timeless dream. If anything changed at all, it was the buildings themselves, which looked more shattered and desolate the farther they walked, until they could hardly be distinguished from the heaps of rubble that filled the streets. The pavement under their feet also grew increasingly broken and heaved up, so that eventually they were doing as much scrambling up and down as walking. This slowed them considerably when they had to take a meandering path around some crevasse in the roadway or carefully pick their way over ridges of loose, fallen stone or brick. Morrigan and the shrowde moved easily over the rougher terrain, but Rowen and Will were soon breathing hard and stumbling from weariness. Even Shade seemed to be having difficulty.

At last, when Rowen felt she could barely take another step, Morrigan called a halt. She told them that back in the world they knew it was now night. They had been walking for many hours and it was time to rest.

Shade nosed around and found a shelter that would offer some concealment. It was a small dome-roofed structure that jutted out from the front of a blackened, burned-out building.

“What sort of place was this before?” Rowen wondered.

“It looks like a ticket booth for a theatre,” Will said.

She wasn’t sure what that meant, but there was enough room inside the booth for both Will and her to lie down on
the paper-strewn floor with their heads on their packs. Rowen and Will shared some of the food and water they had brought from the hotel, while Shade hunkered down outside the door and Morrigan stood at the building’s entrance. Neither she nor the wolf appeared to need sleep, but Rowen was exhausted and she soon found herself nodding off.

She was jolted awake several times out of frightening dreams to find Will asleep beside her, breathing softly, and Shade in the doorway, his eyes open and observant. Each time, she wondered whether she was really awake or still dreaming. Maybe in this place, she thought, they were the same thing.

She awoke once to find Shade watching her.

“You cannot sleep, Rowen of Blue Hill?”

“Not very well, Shade. I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you.”

“You are not. It is this place, as you warned me.”

To her shock she saw that he was shivering, as if cold or feverish. It was the sickness in him. It was worse than she had thought.

“Shade, you don’t have to stay here,” Rowen said, her heart breaking as she understood how much the wolf was suffering. “You could go back. To someplace with sunlight and trees. We have Morrigan and the shrowde with us now. You don’t have to protect us any longer. I’m sure Will would say the same.”

“It is too late for that. I have come too far already.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you how the Stewards found me dying in the forest and gave me life and speech. They made of me something that no wild creature had ever been. I think now that they should not have done this.”

“You can’t believe that, Shade. What would have happened to Will if he hadn’t met you? He would never have made it home. Probably none of us would have.”

“I am glad that Will Lightfoot found his home again. And I have lived much longer and travelled farther than any of my kind. That is good. But those years are all here. They’ve gathered in my bones and I feel them now. The wolf in me is dying, Rowen of Blue Hill. When he is gone, what remains will be only what belongs here, in this place.”

“If you went back to Fable,” Rowen said, struggling to hold back her tears, “maybe you could sleep again, like you did before Will found you. Then you could restore yourself.”

The wolf lowered his great head.

“What I wish,” he said, “is to be only
wolf
again. To run and hunt with the pack. To live the swift seasons of my kind and then die as a wolf dies, returning my flesh to the earth. But the First Ones are gone. They cannot take back the gift they gave me.”

For the first time since she had known Shade, Rowen heard pain and even despair in the wolf’s voice.

“We’ll find my grandfather soon, I’m sure of it,” she said desperately. “Then we can get back home and he can help you. He’ll know how to heal you. He must know. Then maybe someday you can go back to where you came from and—”

“I will not be going back. You know this. You warned me of it. And now I know it, too.”

“I saw what would happen if you stayed with us, Shade. That doesn’t mean it
will
happen. It doesn’t have to. You can get away from here. You can change what I saw. No path has to be the only one.”

“Look at me, Rowen of Blue Hill. Speak the truth. Will the one you know as Shade ever leave here?”

Rowen gazed into the wolf’s eyes and he into hers. Tears slid down her cheeks.

“No, Shade,” she whispered. “You won’t.”

“I see what you see,” the wolf said. “The other wolf, the one that belongs here, is running toward me faster than I can flee him. Even if I turned back now, he would be here before I could reach the border of this realm. Soon I will give in and he will walk in this flesh. To kill him you must kill me. And I would let you.”

“Shade, no,” Rowen gasped, “we could never—”

“I understand that I cannot force such a choice on you or Will Lightfoot. So I will leave. Soon, before that other one arrives. But I will not try to return to where I came from. Instead I will find some way to die here. Then I can be sure you will be safe from me. I only ask you, Rowen of Blue Hill, not to speak of this to Will Lightfoot.”