Shadow Hand

by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

  Something landed beside Eanrin. He turned, and to his great surprise, he saw Foxbrush lying as though he’d landed from a ten-foot drop, the breath knocked out of him but alive. Foxbrush also put up his hands to cover his ears, his mouth opening in a scream that could not be heard above the shrieking of Cren Cru.

  Then, quite suddenly, the shrieking stopped, replaced by the roar of a great wind. It was enough to set the smaller of the Faerie beasts flying, caught up and hurled like dandelion fluff into the night sky away from the breaking center. The wind rose up from the black hole where the Mound had stood, swirling in a twisted rush.

  Eanrin reached out and grabbed Foxbrush’s arm, and the two of them, straining against the wind, supported each other to their feet. They heard then a new set of screams.

  Turning, they saw the warriors beside their bronze stones. The stones, larger than life, fixed into the turf, were melting. Runnels of liquid bronze ran down into a pool on the ground, steaming there before sinking into the dirt and vanishing.

  And as the stones melted, the warriors themselves faded to wisps of nothing.

  The giantess Kasa howled. Her stone broke at the sound and vanished in an instant. She herself, caught in the twisting wind, dissipated and was gone, never to be seen again. Her brethren, watching her fate, screamed with redoubled terror.

  Foxbrush stared at them. Then he pushed himself from Eanrin’s grasp and turned to the one bronze stone that stood without its warrior.

  “Daylily!” he gasped. Though the wind threatened to fling him off his feet as it had the Faerie beasts, he put his head down and started toward the stone.

  “What are you doing?” Eanrin cried, his voice barely audible.

  “I’ve got to reach her! I’ve got to find her!” Foxbrush replied, but since his face was turned away from the poet-cat, his voice could not be heard. But Eanrin read his purpose in the set of his head and shoulders, and the words of the ballad sprang to his mind.

  No lance, no spear will save the night,

  Nor bloodshed on the ground.

  This alone will be your fight:

  To hold your lady, hold her tight

  When once again she’s found.

  Eanrin leapt forward and caught Foxbrush’s arm. He put his mouth to the mortal’s ear and shouted to be heard.

  “Grab the stone! Hold on to it and don’t let go!”

  Foxbrush nodded and Eanrin released him. Another wail broke suddenly into nothing, and Eanrin turned to see that a second bronze stone had disappeared, taking its warrior with it. Then he saw Sun Eagle standing in stoic silence, staring at his own stone as it melted away. There was little of it left now.

  “Lord, grant me strength,” Eanrin muttered between bared teeth. Then, the wind propelling him from behind, he ran to Sun Eagle and threw himself at the stone. He took it in both hands.

  It burned.

  “Dragon’s teeth!” Eanrin shouted and yanked his hands away.

  Sun Eagle looked down. The wind should have knocked him over, but he braced himself against it, his shoulders back, his chest bare and covered in old bloodstains and scars. He was fading around the edges, losing his form and substance as the Bronze melted away. His long black braid whipped behind him, melting into the night, and his eyes were mere dark slits as he gazed at Eanrin.

  Eanrin reached out to grab the stone again, cursing at the pain but determined. “Hold on!” he shouted, looking up at Sun Eagle. “Help me!”

  Sun Eagle bent down, his face level with Eanrin’s. And the cord around his neck dangled, the bead with the white starflower flashing bright for an instant.

  “Tell her she is always with me,” Sun Eagle said.

  Then he brought his fist down, striking Eanrin in the jaw and knocking him over. Eanrin let go of the stone, and when he did so, it burst.

  With a cry, Sun Eagle vanished, carried away like smoke in the wind.

  Foxbrush was thrown from his feet several times as he struggled toward the stone, his mind a cacophony of sounds and sights he could not understand. But the Bronze gleamed in its melting. And there came to his mind suddenly the woodcut image in Eanrin’s Illustrated Rhymes, the one he had seen long ago as a child.

  King Shadow Hand, bearded and fierce, holding the Fiery Fair as she melted.

  He could not see Daylily, had caught no sight of her after the wolf tore into the shadow of Cren Cru. The ceiling and floor had broken, and she had vanished, lost in the storm of pain and the whirling fall of the stolen children.

  And now here he was, somehow back in this world. The phantom children were nowhere to be seen, not Lark, not any of them. All he saw was the stone.

  He reached it at last and stood over it, watching helpless as it collapsed on itself. What had Eanrin said? Hold it?

  “This alone will be your fight,” he whispered.

  He put out both hands, one bleeding from bite wounds, the index finger partially torn away. They shuddered with redoubled agony as they neared the stone, which radiated a dreadful heat.

  Then, with a cry, Foxbrush grabbed it.

  Pain coursed through every nerve of his body, up his arms, his shoulders, into his brain, down into his very core. He screamed and wanted to let go, but some drive beyond self-preservation made him tighten his hold instead, even as the Bronze dripped over his fingers, melting his skin and bones along with itself.

  Suddenly Daylily stood beyond him. Daylily, wolf or maid, he could not say. It did not matter; it was she in truth.

  She stared at the Bronze, at his hands. Then she looked at Foxbrush, her eyes, always unnaturally large, enormous in her face.

  “Foxbrush!” she cried. “Let it go!”

  He screamed still, unable to stop for the pain. But he shook his head.

  “Please!” she cried. “You have to let it go!”

  She grabbed his shoulders, forcing him to look into her face.

  The wind and the pain and the howls of the dying warriors.

  The burning, burning, searing heat.

  All of this vanished in the depths of her gaze.

  “It’ll destroy you, Foxbrush,” said Daylily. “Don’t love me. Let me go.”

  Foxbrush shut his mouth against his own cries, closing his eyes. Tears of utmost pain streamed down his face, and he thought his head would explode.

  Then he looked up again. He poured all his soul into Daylily’s eyes, all his heart into his words.

  “I’d give my life for you.”

  Another shriek, and another warrior vanished into the rushing wind. Daylily stood, her bloodstained dress caught up in a cloud, her red hair streaming, her being much faded. She stared down at the young man clutching the Bronze and his own destruction.

  And she saw there the painful truth of his words, and it smote her to the core. He would die for her. This man she’d despised. He would die for her, and he would deem it a worthy death.

  “Foxbrush.” She whispered his name.

  He tried to respond, but the pain was too much and he screamed again, his body convulsing. But his hands never let go.

  Daylily reached out. She put her hands around his.

  She could not feel the burn that he felt, but she could feel the strength of his grasp.

  “Hold on, then,” she said. “Hold on to me.”

  The stone continued to melt. Bronze sizzled and bubbled and pooled away at their feet. One by one, the Twelve Bronze disappeared, and the warriors followed their master into oblivion.

  But when the last stone joined its brethren and became nothing but a sodden mass and then not even that, soaking into the ground . . . when the wind streaked up into the night sky and vanished, leaving behind a breathless hush and many Faerie beasts lying low, their hands over their heads . . .

  When Lumé crested the horizon and gazed into the place of darkness where for so long he had not dared to shine, his great golden eye fell upon two figures kneeling together in the dust. The one strong, clad in rags, held the other, who fell against her in shuddering weakne
ss, his head upon her shoulder, his face buried in her neck as he wept. Her hair cascaded over him in a comforting shield against everything he must soon face.

  And she held his ruined, melted hands in hers.

  15

  LARK HAD NEVER WALKED on clouds before.

  She decided these probably weren’t real clouds. Real clouds held the rain, and that meant they had to be wet, or at least a little soggy. These, however, were more like what storytellers and poets want clouds to be: indescribably soft and springy yet solid enough that a little girl might walk upon them.

  Or perhaps she was simply not solid enough herself anymore to fall through.

  Either way, she didn’t mind. After all the horror of recent memory—horror that her conscious mind had been too numbed to recognize, but that her raging subconscious had experienced in all the vibrancy of dreams-come-true—a stroll in the heavens was quite pleasant.

  How she had come here, she couldn’t decide. She had vague recollections of the shadow’s scream, followed by a long, long fall. Then she’d opened her eyes and found herself lying upon this cloud that was softer than lamb’s wool. All was gray-blue around her with the promise of dawn nearing. She got to her feet, unsteady at first, then started walking, stepping from cloud to cloud.

  There were other children. None of them were near enough to call out to, but she could see hundreds of them all round her. Dark children of the South Land, clad in garments very like her own. Her brothers and her sisters through the binding of the nation.

  They had all passed through the black door of the Mound.

  Lark shivered at this almost memory. It couldn’t be a real memory since she had been unconscious, lost at the time in the light of the Bronze. But somewhere deep inside, she came so close to remembering, it was frightening. She would spend the rest of her life trying to forget what she had never truly known.

  Lumé began to rise. The clouds, dark purple beneath her feet, came alive with red, with saffron, with gold, rippling like swiftly moving water as the light spread farther and farther. Lark heard gasps of delight from the great crowd of children surrounding her, but then those gasps were swallowed up in the sound that followed.

  The sound of Lumé’s Song.

  He appeared on the edge of the horizon, lordly and powerful, a vision-filling giant even at this vast distance. He was young and he was old, and his hair streamed like flames, and his body flamed as well, a vibrant flame full of life. From his mouth poured the Melody, and it was the Melody itself that exploded with light, and shot the colors across the clouds, across the waking world.

  As Lumé rose, he danced, and Lark found she longed to dance as well. She raised her hands above her head, and her feet moved in a rhythm hitherto unknown. All the children danced, each a different dance, unique in its pattern, hundreds of inimitable patterns that moved together with the Song of Lord Lumé and scattered tufts of light-infused clouds beneath their feet.

  They raised their sweet, childish voices and sang. Theirs was not the language of the Sun, but language did not matter here, high above the worlds.

  “I bless your name, oh you who sit

  Enthroned beyond the Highlands!

  I bless your name and sing in answer

  To the Song you give!

  “My words in boundless gladness overflow,

  In song, more than words.

  Joy and fear and hope and trembling,

  Bursting all restraint!

  “Who can help but sing?”

  So the sun rose and danced across the sky. And his Song became milder, more distant as he climbed those high blue vaults, and the clouds gave up their brilliant colors to become a softer, gentler white. Lark, exhausted and happy, sat down suddenly, closing her eyes, feeling the warmth of Lumé’s blaze upon her skin. The darkness of Cren Cru’s Mound was all but forgotten now.

  When she opened her eyes, she found herself gazing into the face of a friend she had not known she knew.

  “Hullo,” she said.

  “Hullo,” said the Prince of Farthestshore. He crouched down before her, and his smile was more beautiful than Lumé himself. He wasn’t a man, exactly, but he wasn’t a Faerie either. Lark didn’t know what he was, but she didn’t think such questions mattered now.

  “Thank you for the Song,” she said.

  “Thank you for the singing,” he replied, and this she thought strange. With Lumé, Hymlumé, and all the hosts of gleaming stars to sing for him, why should he care about her one, feeble voice? Yet the delight was evident in his eyes.

  Lark blushed, so pleased at the Prince’s pleasure, she hardly knew which way to look.

  The Prince said, “Are you ready to go home now?”

  “Go home with you?” she asked hopefully.

  But the Prince of Farthestshore shook his head. “Not yet, Meadowlark,” he said, and she liked how her full name sounded when he spoke it. “I need you to sing in your own world a little longer. Are you ready to do that for me?”

  She sighed and shrugged. “I’d rather go with you.”

  “What about your ma and da? Your sisters and your brother? Don’t you think they need you?”

  The words weren’t spoken as a reprimand, but Lark felt shamed even so. She’d forgotten about her family. “Ma needs me to watch Wolfsbane,” she said. “My sisters aren’t big enough yet.”

  “Your ma needs you to love and to hold, and your da needs your singing,” said the Prince of Farthestshore. He stood then and put out a hand to her. She took it eagerly and let him help her to her feet. Somehow she knew that all the children walked with the Prince of Farthestshore, that he led them each by the hand. But she was alone with him still. How this could be was too much to ponder, so she didn’t. She merely enjoyed herself and the walk across the sky, and the now-distant Song of Lumé falling down from above. They passed through unknown portals, across clouds, across starscapes, across distant oceans and green sweeps of valleys, and it took her breath away. She pointed and exclaimed, and the Prince of Farthestshore joined in her merriment, laughing delightedly at her enthusiasm, and answered questions as she asked them, though she’d not be able to remember what he’d said later on, down in the thin air of the Near World.

  But she would never forget the sound of his voice, nor the joy she experienced during that walk. She never told anyone—mere words failed to describe something so sweet, so dear, so magnificent—but she thought of it often, even to her dying day.

  Suddenly she saw her home, the Eldest’s House upon the hill above the jungle village. She stopped then, tugging on the Prince’s hand. “Wait,” she said.

  “What is it, Meadowlark?” he asked her gently.

  “Foxbrush.” She frowned and one of those dark recollections she wished to ignore came back to mind. She saw Foxbrush down in the darkness, battling the shadow that had imprisoned her. Battling to save her and all the children of the South Land. A fight he could not hope to win. “What about Foxbrush?”

  “I will take care of him,” said the Prince. “You may trust me.”

  “I know.” But Lark’s frown did not dissipate. “I would like to go to him first, if I may. I’d like to find him and see for myself. Please.”

  The Prince smiled yet again. “Gentle child, brave child,” he said. “Yes, you may see your friend and thank him for what he sacrificed. He has bravely fought the fight I placed before him, and he has earned your gratitude and love.”

  With that, the Prince turned and led Lark in a new direction. She saw trees, forests, gorges pass beneath her feet in a few strides. Then she saw the center of the Land, the deep valley where the Mound had latched hold and the starflower trees were uprooted. Now there was nothing but a blackened hole in that place, a scar to mark Cren Cru’s coming and passing. Lark shivered at the sight.

  But she saw too that starflower vines already crept across the ground, covering the scar with their soft leaves and bright faces. “All will be well again,” Lark whispered.

  “All will be well,�
�� the Prince of Farthestshore assured her.

  Deep in the jungle, Redman and Eldest Sight-of-Day, leading the warriors of their village, felt a tremor through the ground at their feet. A shadow that had kept their hearts captive for long months lifted suddenly, leaving all of them breathless. They did not understand why. But the Eldest turned to her husband, her dark eyes seeking his.

  “Lark?” she said.

  But he shook his head. “We should return to the village,” he said. So they turned and hastened back through the winding jungle trails. As they went, they heard the voices of hundreds of Faerie beasts singing out in all their chattering, braying, cawing, roaring tongues:

  “He’s dead! He’s dead! The Mound is brought low! The Parasite is plucked from its hold! Cren Cru is dead!”

  Then, as though in answer, other voices sang back:

  “All hail the King of Here and There! All hail the Fiery Fair!”

  The villagers understood nothing of this, and many were afraid. But Redman took his wife’s hand, and he found strength there to hurry on and discover what they might.

  When they reached the village, it was alive with shouts and joyful cries. The warriors around the Eldest dropped their weapons and ran, arms extended. For the firstborn were come home. Mothers pressed children to their breasts, and fathers wrapped strong arms around families once more made whole. And all wept and talked and trembled with gladness in the growing light of that morning sun.

  The Eldest and Redman, however, stood quietly looking on. For they saw no sign of Lark.

  The orange cat sat a little to one side, grooming his paws, but his ears were back, listening. He didn’t feel up to joining the mayhem but maintained a rhythmic and focused lick-lick-lick, concentrating on one sorely blistered toe at a time.

  Nidawi, however, was dancing.

  “He’s dead! He’s dead! Cren Cru is dead! My enemy! At last he’s dead!”