“Easy now.” Odar opened his backpack and took out a small flask. “You shouldn’t be down here alone, Idun. You need someone to help you shoulder the burden. An apprentice.”
“Perhaps.” Idun accepted the flask with a nod. “Yet it is no small responsibility to bring an apprentice down here. It can get a bit . . .” She made a small gesture.
Niklas peered around at the giant roots and snaking vines. They made him feel like an insect, tiny and squashable. “Dangerous,” he suggested.
“I was going to say overwhelming, but you are right. This is not a place for the weak of mind.” The Greenhood took a swig. “Real starmead! I’ve not tasted that in years.” She wiped her mouth. “Now tell me. How and why did you find your way here, young man?”
“Through a crack in the mountain,” Niklas said. “It was a coincidence more than anything. I didn’t know it led here.”
“We discovered him in Sebastifer’s canyon two nights ago,” Odar said. “Alone with his Wilder here. They say they came together.”
Idun’s eyes never left Niklas. “Where is your key?”
“That’s one of the reasons I brought him here. He says he doesn’t have one.” Odar stepped close to Idun and murmured into her ear. Her eyes grew wide, then narrow.
Niklas glanced at Secret, who kept her face carefully blank.
Idun hobbled over, put her bony hands under Niklas’s chin, and lifted his face. “What is your name?”
“Niklas,” Niklas said, and when the Greenhood waited for more, he added, “Rosenquist. Niklas Rosenquist.”
Idun nodded to herself. “Odar, my friend,” she said, handing him the flask. “It may be my ears playing tricks on me, but I think I hear someone outside. Would you please make sure you were not followed here?”
Looking none too pleased, Odar disappeared back through the curtain.
“Come.” The old gerbil led Niklas and Secret into a smaller alcove of arched branches around a massive stem. A square of the stem had been cleared of bark, like a window. Along the frame there were intricate runes carved, the swirly kind Too had used to heal Kepler. The bare wood within looked soft and alive, pulsing with golden light. Niklas wanted very much to put his hand against it.
“Do not touch it,” Idun said sharply. “This is a speakwood. A place to commune with the Rosa Torquata. It can only be used by a Greenhood.”
“All right,” Niklas said, putting his hand in his pocket.
Idun’s fingertips danced across the speakwood, and the air shimmered between her black claws and the white wood. “When a Twistrose plea comes, this is where I feed it the key,” she said. “I press it against the speakwood and ask for help on behalf of the Realm who made the request. The Rosa Torquata absorbs the key and sends it through to your world.”
She opened a small casket that sat next to the speakwood. It was full of crumpled gold. “These are keys I tried to send through this spring. The Rosa Torquata crushed and spat out each and every one.”
“It wouldn’t help?” Secret’s good ear had turned out, and her mangled one hung low.
“Wouldn’t or couldn’t, I don’t know which.”
“Maybe the Rosa didn’t like whoever asked,” Niklas said.
“I hope that is not the case,” Idun said. “Because I did the asking. For the first time in Greenhood history, I saw no other solution.”
She turned her black eyes to Niklas. “Only those with a key in their possession can pass through a gate from Earth to the Realms. Whoever tries it without a key, will burn. So tell me the truth this time. Where is yours?”
Niklas suddenly remembered something the old voice inside the mountain tunnel had said right before it let him pass. He is just a boy with a dead key . . . He opened his satchel and brought out Uncle Anders’s handkerchief. “The only thing I can think of that I carry is this.”
He unfolded the fabric. A whiff of aging wood tickled his nose as he opened it, revealing the thorny twig he had found inside his mother’s statue.
Idun let out a faint hiss. “May I?”
Suddenly Niklas didn’t want to give it up, this briar his mother had hidden in her heart for all those years. But Idun didn’t wait for his reply. She snatched it and held it up against the light. “Decades old.” She gave him an appraising look. “Where did you get this? Was it delivered to you?”
“I found it,” Niklas said.
“This is a Twistrose Key. Or it was, before it withered.” She smelled the shriveled twig, then put the key back into the handkerchief. “But apparently it still works for you. You had better hold on to it, Niklas Summerhill.”
Niklas held his breath, thoughts racing. How did she know?
“No need to be scared,” Idun said. “Your secret is still yours. Why do you think I sent Odar away? But I know who owned this key.”
The gerbil limped over to a bookcase and picked out a heavy ledger. “This is the Book of Twistrose. We keep records of all who have been called.” She let the pages flow past her fingers, and Niklas saw hundreds of entries sift by, names and years and places.
“Here.” Idun let the pages come to rest, laying her knuckled hand next to an entry. “Erika Summerhill. She was called October third twenty-five years ago, by the realm of Jewelgard. But she never came.”
Niklas stared at the page.
Twenty-five years ago, his mother would have been his age. Like the statue. Like the Erika of his latest dreams. He felt woozy as the pieces clicked into place. His mother’s twig was a key. The key was a call for help, a call to become a Twistrose. But . . .
“But the Breaking happened twenty-five years ago,” he said.
“It did,” Idun replied. “That is why she was called. To stop the troll invasion.” She moved her hand and revealed the last part of Erika’s entry.
Secret went rigid beside him. “Your heart! Cub, say something. What is wrong?”
But Niklas couldn’t speak for the thunder in his ears.
A word was written behind his mother’s name.
Thornghost.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
He could almost hear her voice, bound to the memory by white tubes and taped needles. Keep him away from me. I’m dangerous. I’m a Thornghost.
“But if she didn’t come, then . . . the Breaking was my mother’s fault?”
“The Rosa Torquata presents you with a key,” Idun said. “It can’t make you use it. You must choose to come. Some don’t.”
“That’s why they hate her.” Niklas had been convinced it was because his mother had created Rafsa. But it was because she failed to save them.
She didn’t come.
“We call them Thornghosts because they remain shadows of what could have been. It is a kindness that they never know the destruction they cause. For them it is merely a road not taken. An invitation passed up. But for us it means disaster.”
Erika knew, of that Niklas was certain. He remembered Anne Rosenquist’s scratchy tape and the awkward conversation before the lullaby.
Every legend starts somewhere. Why not with you?
Because it didn’t.
What he didn’t know was why she hadn’t come.
The pages had begun to shift, slipping into a more familiar place in the book. Niklas lifted his hand to stop them, but Idun gave a little gasp as if she remembered something. She locked her fingers around his wrist with surprising strength for one so frail-looking.
Secret growled at her.
Niklas felt a pang of relief that she still wanted to protect him.
“I apologize,” Idun said quickly. She let go of Niklas’s hand, but closed the book. “Odar?” Her brittle voice suddenly carried, amplified by echoes and whispers. “Come back inside. We must go to the map room. There is something you all should know.”
• • •
No daylight could ever reach so
deep into the ground, but glossy, serrated leaves grew in the map room anyway, covering the walls in dense layers. At first Niklas didn’t understand how the chamber had earned its name, because the only feature that reminded him of maps was a silver star in the stone floor that showed north, south, east, and west. But when Idun brushed her hand over the leaves, she woke up a pattern of twinkles that spread around the chamber, some linked with flashing lines.
It looked like a star chart.
“Are they constellations?”
“Not quite,” Idun said, “though the light is related, all taken from the sun. This is a map of the Rosa Torquata. Each node of light represents a place where the Rosa’s power is active. Palisades and guard posts. Speakwoods and maps. Every possible gate that links our world to yours.”
“Like the one in Sebastifer’s canyon?”
“Yes. We call them scargates.” Idun walked over to the northern reach of the map and traced a line to a node that glowed steady. “You are right. This gate is open. Do you see how the light is too bright? Feverish, almost?” She cupped the glowing leaf in her hand and lifted it.
A chill trickled down Niklas’s spine.
The wood beneath was riddled with withered vine. Idun was right. It did look infected.
Or tainted.
“Dark vine,” he whispered.
At the sound of Niklas’s voice, a small tendril of the dark vine broke free from the wall. Its thorns creaked softly as they slid out.
Niklas backed into Secret.
The vine hovered in the air, swaying like a snake.
For a moment, they all held their breath. Then the branches of the map room shuddered, and the tendril slithered back behind the leaf. Niklas felt as if he had just escaped a hunter.
“You have seen it before.” Idun did not sound surprised.
“It catches raiders in the garden,” Secret said. “Tangles them until the skullbeaks come.”
“Skullbeaks?” Idun said. “It helps the skullbeaks?”
“It sure looked that way. It also grows in the tunnel where we came through the mountain,” Niklas added.
Idun’s whiskers trembled. “And what happened in the tunnel?”
“It got a little heated,” Niklas said. “There were two voices, two creatures arguing with each other. Old voice and nasty voice, I called them. One wanted to help us, but the other wanted us dead.”
“Two voices? That might perhaps be the dark vine and the Rosa Torquata, but only rarely does the Rosa speak to someone other than a Greenhood. But of course it could not watch someone try to kill a human boy.” Idun stroked the leaf gently. “No more than it could watch the dark vine attack its guardian in her sleep.”
Odar startled. “That’s what happened to your arm?”
“The vine did it,” Idun said. She lifted leaf after leaf. The dark vine lurked under all of them. “It is vile, and it is spreading everywhere in the world.”
“Even in the Nickwood?” Odar said.
“Even in the Nickwood, even as we speak.”
“But I’ve never seen such a plant,” the raccoon said. “Where does it come from?”
“I’ve been pondering that question for a long time. It began as one blackened creeper coiled around a root where the Rosa comes near the garden’s edge. I cut it off and closed the wound from the thorns. But the dark vine returned, smothering the sunbursts of the Rosa Torquata. One creeper became many, and more, until I couldn’t keep up.” She tugged at her cowl. “A few months ago, it gained the upper hand. So I tried to call a Twistrose.”
Niklas stared up at the flickering nodes. The infected canyon gate was a single star in a sky of leaves. “These lights are places all over your world. If the Rosa is taken over, would they be in trouble, too? Not just everyone in Broken?”
Idun shook her head. “If the Rosa Torquata loses to this enemy, everyone is in danger. Not just everyone in this world. Do not forget, it was in the tunnel. It is probably the reason the gate is open and infected.”
Niklas and Secret shared a glance. At last they knew the source of the taint that threatened Summerhill. No garden shears in this world, or any world, were big enough to cut it. “Do you know how to get rid of it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Idun said. “But I am convinced it is not natural. Someone is behind this.”
“Someone is growing the dark vine on purpose?” Odar’s voice was small.
“Yes. And with your news of the canyon and the skullbeaks, I have an idea who it is. The Rosa is very powerful, very capable of defending itself. To get close enough to hurt it in any way, I think you would need to use a speakwood.”
She found two bright nodes, neither very far from Sebastifer’s canyon. “This easternmost node is the speakwood I guard, and this . . .”
She tried touching the other, but snatched her hand away as if stung. “Is its twin. Jewelgard was special among the Realms. It had not only one, but two speakwoods within its borders. One a secret, nestled deep among the Rosa’s roots. The other placed on a magnificent rose tree that sent its rays of sunlight into the night. A beacon, to show the way for travelers.”
Odar gawked at her. “Surely you’re not serious? There is a speakwood in the Nighthouse?”
“I’m afraid so. An old one inside the tower itself.”
“And you’ve left it to the Sparrow King all these years?” Niklas rubbed his forehead. “Isn’t that a bit stupid?”
“The beacon was extinguished a while after the Breaking, so I assumed he had destroyed it. Only the Rosa’s chosen guardians could use a speakwood. If the Sparrow King tried, the Rosa would kill him. It does not tolerate Nightmares. Or so I believed.” Idun bowed her head. “It seems we must all pay the price for my carelessness.”
“The Sparrow King is no ordinary Nightmare,” Odar said. “He may look the part, but his actions are far more deliberate. He conducts experiments. He rules, and he is clever.”
And he has a new and better plan, thought Niklas.
Idun nodded. “The Sparrow King is behind this, though I do not know how he does it, or why. I wonder if he knows the magnitude of ruin he is about to cause.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
They had begun the slow and meticulous trip back to the Second Ruby when Secret said, “You want to go to the Nighthouse, don’t you.”
She kept her voice hushed, the words calm. If Niklas hadn’t known her, he might have believed she asked so quietly to keep Odar from hearing. But he did know her. She might as well have snarled at him.
“I think that my mother . . .” He hesitated, not sure what to call the creature that had appeared on the Oldmeadow trail. “I don’t think the Erika we saw before we left Summerhill was an ordinary Nightmare, either. I don’t know why my mother failed these people. She’s a Thornghost, so maybe she deserves their hate. But she pointed up toward the gate. I think she wanted me to come here. To fix her mess.”
Secret didn’t reply. Niklas pressed on.
“You heard what Idun said. The Nighthouse is the source of the dark vine, which means it’s the source of the taint. We have to—”
Secret cut him off. “I also heard what Odar said. The Nighthouse was considered impossible to take, even before the trolls and the skullbeak nests. Sheer drops and slick rock and runes that guard the skies.”
“The Sparrow King took it.”
“He had an army.” Secret sighed. “When we went after Kepler, you said we would do the impossible, crazy thing just this once. I agreed. Once. Niklas, you can’t sneak, you can’t fight, and you can’t defeat an army of Nightmares.”
“Then you won’t come with me?” Niklas fought hard to keep his voice level.
“That depends,” Secret said. “I’ll come if you stop lying. If you stop trying to trick me into doing things, or pretending you don’t hear me when I say things you don’t like. If you trust
me as much as I trust you.”
Niklas swallowed. “That sounds fair. I’ve thought about your question. Why I prefer crazy over coward.”
As they climbed through the thickets and thorns, Niklas told Secret what happened the day his mother died. He told her why the word Thornghost made his heart pound, and what he had promised himself in Oldmeadow that evening. “I decided that I’d rather be the rascal prince than the pitiful orphan.”
“Oh my stupid, stupid cub,” Secret said. “Whoever said you had only two choices?”
Niklas had to think on that one, too. And when the lights of the inn appeared behind the branches, winking them home through the softness of purpledusk, he thought he might have an answer.
He just hoped it wouldn’t cost him his head.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
They sat gathered in the common room, foxes, badgers, rabbits and mice, and the Second Ruby regulars. All forty-one souls in Broken plus their two guests, crammed in between looted art and memories. Their faces glowed with firelight as Odar told them of the dark vine, and the Sparrow King, and the speakwood that was hidden in the very heart of his nest.
“That’s how it is, my friends,” Odar finished. “We have to find a way to go to the Nighthouse and stop the Sparrow King from doing whatever it is he’s doing to the Rosa Torquata. And we have to do it now.”
A map of Broken lay spread out on the long table, held down by splintered magnifying stones rescued from the city hall. The seven rings of the garden twinkled with gilded legends drawn in a time when pavilions and gazebos were more than burnt-out husks, and the Nighthouse’s beacon still cast its ray onto the Kolfjord. The Brokeners stared at all of it, as if a spark of hope would somehow present itself if they looked hard enough.
But the silence stretched, and from his stool by the bar, Niklas watched as tails lowered, ears drooped, heads sank.
Thornghost Page 16