Black Forest
Page 30
Eighty pounds of coin was what the farm would bring in with five years of extremely bountiful harvest. Extremely bountiful.
The money for the land, Monty remembered. Mullen put it through before he came to me. And now he’s dead.
He hesitated for only a moment. “Peter, can you hang onto it for just another few minutes?”
“That’s fine. I’ll be here all day. And the next day. And the day after,” Peter muttered, looking up only briefly. Monty gave him a short nod, and he whispered to Terra, who reacted with a gleeful smile and ran from the treasurer’s office.
Monty took a sack of coin with him from the box before he left. Peter weighed it out to be exactly forty-one pounds. There wasn’t a perfect amount for this, but that would be good enough. The gold bulged through the heavy burlap.
Terra was back shortly, breathless but happy.
“It’s still here,” she said, pointing deeper into Irisa. “It’s behind Kettle’s. I don’t know where Iselle is, but she must be leaving soon. The oxes are hitched to it.”
“Oxen,” he said, and she smacked him in the side.
“Shut up,” she panted. “I know. Is half fair?”
“We did all the work,” Monty joked. “Except for tearing up the circle.”
They hurried to Kettle’s, going wide around the neighboring buildings to slip behind the general store where Iselle’s caravan was sitting. A pair of beefy oxen stood before it, snorting puffs of white air from their nostrils.
“She must be inside getting supplies,” Monty said. “Let’s hurry.”
“Shouldn’t we tell her?” Terra asked, then answered her own question. “No, you’re right. She left the scarf. So we leave the gold.”
“She wouldn’t take it if we gave it to her,” Monty said, and he looked around to be sure no one was watching as he placed the tightly-tied bag containing a small fortune in the back of her covered wagon, shifting some rope and small crates so that it was hidden. “And I’m not gonna argue with her about how stories won’t buy her food. So we just have to trick her a little bit.”
“I don’t think she’ll be mad,” Terra said, crackling with laughing energy. “Okay, let’s go!”
They ran from Kettle’s, clearing the area without being seen. On the sack, a small note was pinned.
It read, For your field labor.
With half the weight gone, Monty was fine carrying the lockbox back to the farm. He and Terra hauled it up to the second floor of the barn, to the safe hiding space their mother used to store the season’s earnings. The twelve-and-some pounds from the last sell were still there, piled neatly in the iron box beneath the wood and straw. The rest of Mullen’s gold filled it almost to the top.
It would be nice to have the money, but better to grow the crop and make their own.
That winter, the leaves of the Dromm faded from green to brown, and then to black. They fell off their branches and died in the dirt, dissolving into nothing. This went unnoticed, or at least was not marked as unusual. For once, the trees in the Dromm behaved like all the other trees around them.
When spring peeked its head through the snow, the other forests were in bloom and bud, welcoming the warmth. The breeze rustled their branches.
The black forest did not grow.
THE END
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
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Thank you for reading!
- Shane
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Lee is a lover of all things horror, whether it’s books, movies (good and bad), or awesome Halloween costumes. He is a husband and he knows his way around the kitchen, and a computer. Visit www.ShaneLeeBooks.com for more!