Darkwood (11 page)

“Gregor!”

Something heavy and salt-smelling closed around her throat. “Too fresh,” said a voice in her ear.

“Don't,” she gasped.

He eased up, just a bit. “Don't what?” “Don't let them toss him over. Don't.”

Hauler stilled. “We'll see.”

Then he flexed the arm around her throat, and a darkness fell that she could not see through.

She woke in the pit on Chopper's farm. Her throat hurt. Her feet were cold. No boots. No Gregor. No cats.

She remembered certain things, like remembering a dream: jostling cart wheels, raised voices, the brightness of sunlight, a man's voice, “Kill her … Gibbet … wait … unusual,” then a hand pinching her jaw and an awful sweetness filling her mouth. She could taste it still, the same sweetness that flavored everything here—the fruit she had stolen, the water Chopper had given her—but much stronger. The stiffness in her limbs told her she had been unconscious for many hours.

It took a moment to register that she was not alone in the pit. There was a rat. Her first thought was food. But then, as she watched, the rat sallied past her with a bit of old melon rind in its teeth, reached the side of pit, and disappeared.

Before, the pit had been shaped something like a teardrop: round on the sides and narrowed at the top, where the door was. Standing in the middle with her arms stretched out, her fingers had not quite reached any of the walls. Now she could
flatten her palm against the side where the rat had disappeared. She crouched down. Bits of straw edged the rat hole. This was a wall, a mud wall. Someone had built this wall, and recently. Annie wiggled her fingers into the hole and tugged. A clump of dirt fell away.

Annie kicked the wall.
Smirch
. Kicked it again.
Chopper
. Kick.
Pip
. Kick.
Rube
. A very hard couple of kicks.
Gibbet. Uncle Jock
. She hesitated, foot raised. Should she kick Hauler?

Past the rubble of wall a room appeared, the mirror image of the pit. Except this room was full of ringstone: stone banked like snow against the walls, stone laid inches thick along the ground. Annie dropped to her knees. There were coins, too, some in the lesser currency of Howland, some she did not recognize. Big reddish coins stamped with the image of a bird. Heavy gray coins covered in strange symbols. Smooth, milky green coins that looked like buttons. She put one of each kind of foreign coin in her pocket, along with a handful of ringstone. A handful of white stone. It made her feel sick.

But now: a trail of rat droppings led her from the room into a low tunnel. She crawled a few yards and then dropped to her belly. The dirt around her smelled damp and alive, as though freshly turned over. Roots tickled her scalp. Then, as quickly as it had narrowed, the tunnel broadened, high and wide enough that a grown man could walk upright. From time to time she'd pass a burnt match or drops of hardened wax. After a mile or so the tunnel began to slope downward, so steeply in places she had to scoot on her backside. She'd come two miles at least. How long had it taken them to dig such a
tunnel? Maybe not so very long, if you had arms like Hauler's.

Gradually she became aware of a strange sound, a sort of muted roar. The tunnel turned a sharp corner and she felt cold, delicious wind in her face. She had reached the river.

The air was still, tasting of night. A wooden dock led from the mouth of the tunnel to a muddy beach. A pair of rowboats had been tied to the dock. One held shovels and buckets, the other a few cooking utensils and a bag of oat flour.

For superior oatcakes use a very hot pan spread liberally with pork fat
. Annie wondered what
The Book of Household Virtues
would make of her wet gobs of raw oats, washed down with moss-flavored river water.

At the highest part of the bank, stacked in a shallow dugout, were dozens of wooden crates. They were all the same, three feet long by two feet deep, with metal fastenings. They were all locked.

She walked a short ways south to where the river split itself on a grouping of boulders, spreading into a formation called Witch's Hand before drawing together again between the sheer rock cliffs of Dour Gorge. Gregor's father had fished Witch's Hand and made a small living. Then the notices went up.

W
EST
R
IVER
S
OUTH
B
ORDER
D
OUR
C
OUNTY
T
O
B
AY
T
O
B
E
H
EREBY
I
NCORPORATED
W
ITH
D
OUR
G
ORGE
A
S
P
ERTAINS
T
O
A
LL
R
GHTS
A
ND
A
CCESSES
B
Y
R
OYAL
D
ECREE

Annie remembered reading the black lettering over and over with Gregor, uncertain what the words meant, certain they meant something important. With fishing off-limits, Gregor's father had tried farming, but then the farms had failed, all at once. Uncle Jock had come stamping into the house one afternoon, his hands and boots covered in sticky black dirt.

“Like poison, Primrose. Like planting in a bed of poison.”

Aunt Prim had fetched him a whisky and said nothing about the dirt on the floor. The next summer, Gregor's parents sold him to the Dropmen.

Annie returned to the dock, stepping from rock to rock so as not to leave footprints. The tunnel connected to the smallest stream in the Witch's Hand, the pinkie finger. Though now a sluggish trickle, in spring the water would run high and fast.

“And cold. That whitewater will freeze you quicker than drown you. Keep to the bay, you pair.” Gregor's father had looked at them sternly, then mussed their hair. Whatever Gibbet wanted to do with those crates and that ringstone, she thought he'd better finish before the river rose.

And then, just like that, Annie knew what to do. Knowing felt so much better than not knowing that even though her feet had frozen into icy lumps and a much worse lump of uncooked oats had balled in her stomach and she was alone, completely alone in the whole world, she smiled.

It was early yet for a traveler to be on the roads. That the woman was a giant, at least as big as Hauler and considerably
rounder, might have explained her boldness. And the yelling—perhaps the yelling was intended to scare off the kinderstalk?

“HEY! Lo non-NEY! A lit-tle boy so bon-NEY! Came to me a courtin', at the sum-mer FAIR!”

Not yelling, Annie realized. Singing.

“He WORE a vest of sa-tin green, and britches vel-vet BROWN, a ring upon his finger, and flowers in his HAIR! And flow-ers in his HA-IR!”

Annie covered her ears on the final note. From her hiding place, she watched the wagon slow as it reached the crossroads. A weathered wooden marker like a leafless tree pointed the four directions: west to the sea, north to the forest, south to the swamp, east to the city. The woman yawned, stretched, flexed her hands, had a drink of water, said something to the horse.
Go east
, Annie willed her.
East, east, east
.

“HEY! Lo non-NEY!”

East it was. With the road so full of rocks and ruts, the woman didn't seem to notice the slight lurch as Annie climbed aboard.

The wagon bed was full of junk: dirty straw, a couple of wilted cabbages, a crate filled with a jumble of metal parts: nails, screws, springs, a coil of delicate copper wire, a sheaf of silver beaten flat as paper. There was also, thankfully, an old blanket wrapped around some eggs. It was flecked with straw and none too clean, but Annie curled up under it, careful not to squash the eggs, and made herself as comfortable as she could.

The landscape changed as they traveled east. The bare
fields of Dour County gave way to fields of wheat, barley, and clover. Frilly curtains showed at the windows of houses. Wild primrose grew along the roadside. After a time they turned south and the houses clustered together into towns. They passed a school where children milled around the front gate. They passed a haberdashery, a print shop, a bakery with yellow cakes cooling on trays by the open window. When they stopped for the night at a public house, Annie lay still as a corpse until the driver had locked horse and wagon into the barn and her heavy footsteps had carried her to the inn. The barn was quiet and warm and full of animal smells. Unable to help herself, Annie ate a couple of eggs. They tasted of nothing but wetness.

Then she slept, a deep, dreamless sleep, waking only briefly when the barn doors opened at dawn. She slept through miles of road. She slept even after the wagon had jolted to a stop, even after the driver had climbed down and made her way to the back.

“By my mother's best silk stockings! Who are you?”

Annie woke and looked up into a face with cheeks the color of cooked beets. Standing over her was the tallest, broadest, bosomiest person she had ever seen. The woman held an egg in each hand, ready to pelt her if she turned out to be dangerous.

“I'm sorry,” Annie croaked. “I was going east, and I thought if you were, too … I can pay my way if you like. I have plenty of money.”

The woman's face fell out of its astonished expression into a warm, wrinkly smile.

“Now, now, you can ride in my wagon any time you want, only you'll have to sit up front and keep me company next time. Poor thing.” She reached to pick a piece of straw from Annie's hair. Annie flinched, and the woman's face became wrinklier than ever.

“Oh, you poor little gal. Come along and meet Bea—that's my sister—and oh, where are my manners? My name is Serena. Serena Verbena, if you can believe it. Anyhow, we'll get settled and fry some eggs and then have a snooze. Day after tomorrow I'm on to Magnifica, if you're going that far, but tonight, thank goodness, I can sleep in my own bed.”

Dazed, Annie followed the enormous woman through a tiny gate into a tiny yard bordering a tiny cottage. Serena bent over almost double to fit through the door. Inside, the ginger-colored bun on the top of her head was flattened against the ceiling. Everything was painted light blue or cherry red or lemon yellow, from the rafters in the low ceiling to the rungs of the miniature chairs. One of the chairs, a bright red rocker, looked at least three times as big as the others.

“Beatrice! I have arrived!”

A woman appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding out her arms and smiling. “Serena, back at last.”

Beatrice was a perfect replica of her sister; only where Serena was very large, Beatrice was exceptionally small, down to the tiny ginger bun perched on top of her head. Serena stepped forward to embrace her sister and for a moment Annie thought she would take the roof of the cottage with her. There was not the slightest speck of dirt anywhere in the cottage, but in every
corner of every rafter was a spiderweb, and in every web, a fat spider. Some of the spiders were gold and brown, some were black and red, others were beige with green and rose bellies.

“Welcome to our home. I see you've noticed the ladies.” Beatrice spoke gently, but Annie blushed, ashamed to have been caught staring.

“That's perfectly all right, dear. Most people think it's a bit odd. I'm a weaver, you see.” She gestured toward a diminutive loom in one corner of the room. “Once or twice a day, I stand up on a chair and have a good close look at one of the webs. Each has her own style, and they aren't afraid to experiment. Besides, they eat mosquitoes, and if there's one thing I hate in this world it's the whine of a mosquito.” She paused and looked at Annie more closely.

“What on earth am I going on about? This child is dead on her feet. Serena, get the tub. Young lady, sit down. Now what would you like for dinner? We've got eggs and cheese and some decent bread—a
bit
hard, but only at the heel, and that's all right if you want to make frogs-in-a-hole …” Her voice trailed off. Both sisters looked at Annie expectantly. To her horror, Annie began to cry—not just trickles, but huge sobs, as if she would actually heave her heart out of her chest and onto the floor.

The next thing she knew, she was in Serena's lap in the rocking chair. By the time Annie's sobs had subsided to hiccups, the front of Serena's dress was soaked through. Beatrice had been out and back to tend to the horse, and night had fallen, swift as ever, outside the windows. Annie peeked up at
Serena. The woman returned her gaze without a hint of embarrassment. Then she stood, as indifferent to Annie's weight as if she really were a baby, and gently placed Annie back down in the chair.

“Bea, we'd better make some tea. There can't be a drop of water left in this child's body.”

The women disappeared into the kitchen. Soon Annie heard the clatter of pots, then the delicious smell of eggs frying. Snatches of their conversation drifted out to her.