The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Comfrey opened her mouth to say that this didn’t explain anything at all, but then shut it again as Amber gathered up not one but two identical pairs of spectacles, pulling the second pair right out of the reflection, as if from the bottom of a pond. She handed the first set to Comfrey.

  “Once, people used these if their eyesight was bad, or blurry, often when reading books. These are a little bit more special even than that, only to be donned when you absolutely need them. They don’t make things bigger or smaller, they only help you see the threads between everything, and the language those threads speak, the words they make together. How one thing is bound to the next: the heartbeats of snakes to the life cycles of crickets, the downy seeds of a thistle to the nest of a goldfinch. These spectacles will help you to see the threads that bind things into one whole, and to read their meaning. But you can only wear them three times, three times ever, or your own dear eyes will go blind, as if you had stared too long into the sun.”

  “Oh, my,” whispered Comfrey, touching the glass of the gold-rimmed spectacles very carefully. “How will I know? When to use them, I mean?”

  “You just will. That’s the trick. You just will. And that Myrtle, she may be of help, being a hare, and therefore in the centre of many threads of connection.” Amber chuckled.

  Late morning sun fell through the glass windows, and the skunk, who had been curled up asleep in that patch of warmth since she’d fetched Tin in to the Cabinet several hours ago, stretched at last and rose slowly on her four short legs. She wriggled the black and white plume of her tail. Comfrey lurched back automatically, not keen on the stink of a startled skunk.

  “Ah, not to worry, not to worry. Our Rosie has no stink glands. That’s why she’s here. Can’t manage out there in the wild world without them. Rather like us, I’d say. She’s lacking the thing that would protect her against others. Confidence in numbers, you see? She’s a marvellous wasper, as they say, eating the wasps from their ground nests so they don’t disturb our bees. Wasps, to a skunk, are a great delicacy.” Amber bent to give Rosie a pat on the head as she stood. Comfrey smiled despite herself, thinking of wasps as delicacies.

  “Come along, dear girl. Let’s show Comfrey about the humming of bees, and how in it you can hear the heartbeats of the flowers. We could listen to such a thing all day long, Rosie and I.”

  “Could we look into the mirror to see about my mother?” Comfrey ventured.

  “Oh no, my lovely, no indeed. It is no scrying mirror but only a mirror of Oddness. We will go into the garden now and see what Oro thinks of all this. Then we will send you on your way with your new gifts in tow.”

  The skunk looked up at Comfrey with glinting black eyes and sniffed. Her nose was dark, with pink blotches. For a moment, Comfrey’s hand grazed the spectacles where she’d placed them gingerly inside her dress pocket. She wondered, like a thirst in her chest, what the skunk would look like through them, what Amber would look like, the whole Inn, the sky outside… She wondered what the word was which she had almost understood when she’d looked into the mirrored table and seen it forming out of the threads strung between herself, the Bobcat-girl, the little snake, the autumn grass. She heard the Bobcat-girl’s voice in her head, saying her name.

  Amber sensed the girl’s hand tightening on the spectacles and anticipated her thoughts. “Best to train your own eyes to all the details, big and little, first. You can see so much more than you think you can, with practice.” Amber tapped the mirrored table, then headed for the door. She left a piece of cheese from her pocket on the top of the door frame, near an opening in the wall. The woodrat skittered out and gathered it up in his hungry paws.

  They found Oro, Tin, and the humpbacked girl named Pieta sprawled in a patch of grass near the beehives, drinking cold cups of fresh-pressed apple cider. Their arms were all covered up to the elbows in dirt. Comfrey saw that Pieta had a smile that made her whole face sweet and bright as honey, a smile she was currently directing at Tin. Her patchwork robes were hitched up to her knees to reveal pale, shapely ankles and small bare feet entirely covered in mud.

  “Turned the old tomato bed in record time with these two strapping young people!” exclaimed Oro, raising his mug of apple juice. “Comfrey, meet Pieta, Pieta, Comfrey.”

  The girl leaned forward, pushing her red hair from her eyes. “Tin’s been telling me all about your adventures,” she said, then sighed, holding her hands tight in her lap and glancing back at Tin with that sweet smile. The boy grinned back amiably, enjoying the attention.

  Comfrey felt a very small twinge in her stomach, and raised an eyebrow at Tin, then replied to Pieta in a brisk tone, “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but it certainly isn’t like picking roses or digging vegetable beds for that matter. Seems like a nice spot here. I wouldn’t want to leave it, if I were you. As it happens, things are really quite bad in the world at the moment.”

  “Yes, well,” interjected Tin, “some people just have a roving spirit by nature, that’s all.”

  “Oh, quite so, quite so. Maybe I have one of those…” murmured a wistful Pieta, nodding. Comfrey flushed, feeling angry at Tin, wanting to take back what she had said. Instead she turned to Oro, impatient to learn more about the fate of Farallone, and her mother.

  “I would like to get a message to my mother,” Comfrey said, casting a sidelong glare at Tin. “Is that possible from here? Can somebody be sent? Shouldn’t the village people be warned about the Brothers? Maybe Tin could go—?”

  “But we have to find my Fiddleback and get it from the Coyote-folk, to make sure it’s safe!”

  “The Fiddleback might after all be safer among Coyote-folk than among us,” interjected Myrtle hastily. “If they’re expecting it to be with a boy named Tin, they certainly won’t think to look among Coyote-folk. Nor would any self-respecting Coyote let them near. And besides, Coyote-folk come and go from the First Bobcat’s underworld. The Brothers would never know how to get there.”

  “Coyote-folk may be tricksters,” added Mallow with a small hare-sigh, “but they are rarely traitors. No one is better at sneaking and hiding in plain sight.”

  “Safer? In the underworld?” Tin nearly shouted, thinking again of the sight of the Fiddleback jerking between the teeth of the Coyote-folk. “That doesn’t sound very safe! And it didn’t look like they were trying to be helpful to me! It’s probably half-ruined by now!” But he could hear the childishness of his words even as they came out.

  “Is that really all you can think about?” Comfrey snapped. “We have to get this feather to the Elk as fast as we can, if the Brothers are already here on Country soil. Myrtle, could you go to my mother, would you?”

  “I have a feeling you will need me more to help you across the land of the Wild Folk,” the leveret said, wrinkling up her furred nose with thought. “Mallow and I are the only reason you haven’t been eaten or killed or kidnapped already. Wild Folk have seen us from the trees and fields and shadows, and let us be because we are wild hares, and wild hares don’t travel with human children unless there is something unusual about those human children.”

  “But we abandoned my mother, and now we know trouble is heading for her and we have to warn her—”

  “Now, now,” soothed Oro. “One step at a time. I slept on what I saw in that fiery feather, I mused and mulled and worried it to pieces, and at last I found a clue. Praise earth! I found a clue, a hint, to ease your young minds. In that vision there were wild irises blooming purple by the roadsides where the Brothers walked. The wild irises have yet to bloom this year, though it has been warm, with early rains, so they are likely to open soon. In the next fortnight, I daresay. But this means, dear Comfrey, that your mother is safe for now. So you must hurry across the land of Olima to the Elk with your sacred feather. She is the only one who can protect the heart of Farallone. She will know what to do to protect us all, including your mother.”

  “May it be so, may it be so,” murmured Amber in a voice like a prayer. �
��For if she does not, they will come for us too. We Strangelings have never been accepted by Country Folk, let alone City Brothers.”

  “Why not?” Tin asked, though even as he asked it he thought he knew the answer, and turned pink.

  For a moment, both Amber and Oro were silent. Sorrow moved over their faces. The sound of children playing with a ball and sticks felt suddenly very loud, coming from beyond the tents and apple trees.

  “Of course you’ve been wondering what our own story is, us Fools,” said Oro. The words rang with a sad resonance through the silence. Tin and Comfrey looked from Oro’s face to Amber’s, then at each other, both feeling a chill at once.

  “We are not too keen on regular human folk in general,” said Amber, shredding a long golden grass blade between her fingernails. “That is, we are wary to trust them.”

  “What do you mean?” Tin said slowly, his stomach cold.

  “We started out, well…” said Amber, looking at Comfrey, “like you, dear. Born in the villages of the Country.”

  “What?” It came out a gasp. Comfrey reached up and held the ends of her braids, as if this might steady her. “Why haven’t I ever heard of you or of your inn?”

  “Listen, child,” said Oro in a steady voice. “You’ve never seen or heard of anyone like us in the villages, because we are all here.”

  “I don’t understand, if you were born—”

  “When a child is born Odd in the villages, you know, with a hump like Pieta’s, or a head like Oro’s, or skin like mine, they are taken away immediately by the midwife, to be exposed on a hill. Left out to die, in other words.” Amber looked down as she spoke, and her voice was soft.

  “Exposed?” said Tin, his skin crawling at the word though he wasn’t sure what it meant. It sounded like being orphaned, like being left for the Brothers, only worse.

  “Well, that’s what everyone believes. That we die. The child is left out to be taken by wild animals, or by the Wild Folk, whichever get there first. The ultimate sort of Offering. Strangelings, we call ourselves. Poisoned Ones, we are called.” Oro grimaced.

  Comfrey let out a little gasp, thinking of her mother, wondering with horror if she’d had an Odd sibling before her that she’d never known about. What if Comfrey herself had been born with that lump of a third eye on her forehead?

  “It’s an ancient decree, from the time of the Collapse,” said Amber, her voice stronger again. “During that time there was so much sickness and poison everywhere in the water and the air, and people were born strange from those poisons. Of course, a child shaped oddly, no matter the cause, is of no harm to anyone, but it was a dark time, a frightened time. It was believed that by leaving the Poisoned Ones out for the wild beasts or the Wild Folk to take, it would somehow protect the rest of the hamlet from a similar fate. Except that the midwives, they’ve always had a secret.

  “The story goes that after the Collapse, at the beginning of the villages, a pair of twins was born conjoined at the hand and with green hair like buckeye leaves. But the midwife, when told by the leader of the hamlet to take the babies up and leave them for the wild animals, she couldn’t leave them alone. She refused. She stayed up the hill under an oak tree all night, praying to the three Creatrixes. At dawn, a strange being emerged from the far edge of the oak forest. It was one of the Hill Folk. It looked like a very broad woman with a skirt of thick dirt and grass, with the big dark eyes of a vole. Her arms were twined with so many tiny rootlets they looked like they were covered in lace. She took the little twins in her arms and nursed them, not with milk, but with the sweet nectar that all hills have inside their veins.

  “The next time another such child was among the villages, seventeen years had passed. The midwife of its village brought the baby up to the edge of Wild Folk terrain as she was told. She knew, from the stories passed between midwives, to call upon the Hill-woman. But the Hill-woman didn’t come. Instead of her, the twins conjoined at the hand emerged from the shadows at dusk and took the baby in their three hands. They were only seventeen years old, but those twins had been nursed by a Hill-woman and so became part Wild Folk themselves. They knew all the languages of all the animals and plants and stones. For a while, they took up residence here in the inn, which was then very ramshackle. One by one, they took in little Strangelings. Eventually, after a few of them grew old enough to take over the running of this creaking inn, teenagers only, but that was old enough, and the twins had taught them about living, about tending bees and plants and birds, about playing, and never giving up on joy, the twins built a green cart. They charmed a small herd of Elk and set off to rove, to roam, to heal any and all who needed healing, to learn all the land of Farallone and its many stories, heedless of the boundaries and the walls that had been made. That was two hundred years ago. Now, they are called the Greentwins, and while they look like us Holy Fools, they are also Wild Folk, because they were nursed by one. They are mostly wild, and a little bit angel.”

  Myrtle and Mallow were sitting nose to nose, their ears and whiskers moving furiously, speaking together in their own hare-speech.

  “Our Greentwins!” Myrtle exclaimed, turning back to the others. “They told us every tale except their own. All the spokes of the wheel except the middle.”

  “But I could smell something of them here all along,” said Mallow. “They seem to be in the centre of so many different webs. Even the City’s Mycelium. Remember what Thornton said, Tin? How he’d met them before he entered the City, how they said they’d come there when he called them, when the time was right?”

  “Thornton?” said Comfrey. “Who is Thornton?” A sickening sadness had been swelling in her chest, how all along in her idyllic Alder village this terrible thing had been happening. She thought of her Offering bundle, and wondered if her mother knew about the babies left out just the same way. But now, the name of one of Tin’s Mycelium friends, a man who had entered the City like her father had wanted to do, cut through her. She’d never heard him speak that name before, and it sounded terrifyingly, perilously close to her father’s. Thorne, her mother called him. My Thorne. Papa, always Papa, to Comfrey. A dangerous kind of elation began to eclipse the girl’s sorrow. Was it possible? Was it truly? A sob came out instead of any more words.

  Myrtle leaped up into Comfrey’s arms. Even in a short time she had learned that this, to a human person, was a comfort, like when she and Mallow groomed at each other’s fur. Myrtle sniffed at Comfrey’s chin, whiskers moving. She wondered not for the first time at the intensity of human emotions, how tangled they could become. It was like smelling the air before a thunderstorm. Tin, too, was confused by Comfrey’s sudden outburst. But then, they’d heard so many frightening revelations in the last day, he could understand if she was just overwhelmed.

  “He’s – he’s the best man I’ve ever met,” the boy said, surprising himself a little with the fervour in his voice. “He’s the leader of the Mycelium, the underground rebels who are working to free the wildness that lives underneath the City still. But he came from the Country, years ago, he said. He came because he had terrible visions of the City destroying the Country that he couldn’t ignore. He crossed the Great Salvian Desert and met the Greentwins there, who showed him the secret way in—” But Comfrey’s heaving sobs stopped him. And he began to remember Thornton’s own sorrow. The way every time he spoke of the Country, it looked like he was holding back tears. It wouldn’t be my feet that couldn’t get me back here, child. It would be my heart.

  “What – what is it, Comfrey?” he asked, feeling his own throat tighten. An unexpected tenderness seared right through him. He wanted to comfort her, to hug her even, but didn’t dare. He wasn’t sure he’d even know how.

  “The man you describe,” Comfrey said between shuddering breaths, “the leader of the Mycelium, your Thornton. I think I know him as – as Thorne. It sounds too much like him to be a mistake! Could there be two men who left the Country for the City because of visions they had, with names so similar? It
must be him, it must be my father!” And yet the words felt distant from her as they came out, only half-real. Could such a thing really be true?

  Amber rushed to take the girl in her arms. She held Comfrey close and eight years of sorrow came pouring from her. Amber patted at her cheeks with a threadbare handkerchief, and crooned, and stroked her tangled hair. Tin watched and thought that it would take some practice to learn how to soothe a person like Amber could. In all his twelve years at the Cloister, nobody had ever taken a child up in their arms like that, to tell them they would be all right.

  “My goodness,” whispered Mallow to Myrtle. “I didn’t know humans could create their own weather systems. It is quite extraordinary.” He peered at Comfrey solemnly, twitching his nose.

  “Well, wouldn’t you feel just the same as a rain cloud opening, if someone came along and told you our own mother hare was alive and well, and waiting for us in the meadowgrass of our birth?” replied Myrtle. And for the first time in all her life, she felt the beginning of tears. But they did not come. Instead, she swallowed a few times and hastily ate a dandelion bud, to ease the strange discomfort in her chest.

  “Your father…” breathed Tin, realizing now why Comfrey’s face had looked so familiar to him the very first time he saw her. The unruly black braids, the pale green eyes and strong chin and otter-like grace. Only Comfrey was dark of skin too, which made her even more like an otter, dark from a life in the sun and dark from her mother, so that her pale green eyes were even more unnerving than Thornton’s when they fixed you straight on. “Of course he is your father,” Tin said to himself. “How did I not see it before?” There was such admiration in his voice that he blushed, embarrassed when he realized that Comfrey had heard him. But she smiled a wet smile at him, an upward tilt of her lips, and he felt in that moment that he’d never done such a good thing in all his life as bring Comfrey this news, and make her smile that way at him.