Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

The leaves were green, green as glass bottles, small and blunt with hardly any stem at all. It was obvious even as they fell that they would be frogs.

  Little green frogs, thought Summer, like little emeralds.

  But they did not change. They touched the ground and they were only leaves.

  The tree rustled its branches, harder, and more leaves showered down. She heard the trunk groan, the way trees groan and mutter in a storm.

  These leaves hopped. Some of them changed, but there was something wrong with the frogs. They had no legs or too many legs or they plowed forward on their bellies. In a very few seconds they were all leaves again, and Summer was glad, because there was something horrible and piteous about the frogs. They had looked as if they were dying.

  The white tree thrashed. Its limbs swayed in a gale that only it could feel. Behind them, the other two white trees moaned and swayed in sympathy.

  Every leaf on the tree fell down, leaving the branches as bare as winter.

  Many people have heard of a rain of frogs, but very few—far fewer than say they have—have ever seen one. Summer became one of those few. For a moment the air was full of tiny green frogs, transforming before they even hit the ground, all of them croaking like fingernails dragged over a comb.

  They rushed into the leaves, hopping and dancing, croaking and cavorting, and Summer let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. She had been terribly afraid that the tree would not be able to do it.

  Indeed, the tree looked exhausted. Its branches drooped and it shivered. Summer took a step forward and put a hand on its bark.

  “You did it,” she said to the tree. “They’re beautiful.”

  The tree muttered something in the language of trees and let out a long wooden sigh.

  “It did,” said a woman’s voice behind her, “but it cost the tree dearly.”

  Summer spun around. The weasel squeaked and dove into her pocket.

  A bear stood behind her—or not a bear. For a moment Summer could have sworn she saw the flash of teeth, the heavy jaw and small black eyes—and then the woman pushed back her hood, and it was only the skin of a bear. Her face bore the haggard remains of great beauty, and her voice was hoarse with disuse.

  “What’s wrong with the tree?” asked Summer, who felt sorry for it and proud of it for making the frogs, all at once.

  “The same thing that is wrong with all of us,” said the woman in the bear skin. She looked proud and angry and tired, and her eyes did not soften as they rested on Summer’s face. “There is a cancer at the heart of the world.”

  In movies, when someone has just made a very dramatic statement, everyone gasps or recoils in horror, so you might think that when Summer heard the bear woman say, "There is a cancer at the heart of the world," she would have done something similar. In real life, though, a very dramatic statement is usually met with awkward silence, and then somebody makes a joke to try to break the silence, and somebody else decides they need a cup of tea.

  Summer would have liked a cup of tea, but there didn't seem to be much chance of getting one in the middle of the forest, and she still wasn't entirely sure that the woman in the bearskin hadn't been an actual bear a minute ago. Jokes might not be a good idea.

  She said, "Um."

  The woman in the bearskin frowned, and another woman popped up next to her, wearing a bristly skin with a great tusked boar's head on top. "Are you on about that again, then?" she asked, and turned to Summer. "Never mind her."

  "No one minds me," said the bear woman, a good deal less dramatically. She sniffed.

  “I’m Boarskin,” said the woman wearing the boar’s head on top of her own. “This is Bearskin. Our sister Donkeyskin is around somewhere, but she has a hard time with strangers.”

  “I’m Summer,” said Summer shyly. She wondered if she should introduce the weasel, but he didn’t say anything, so she decided not to. She kept one hand on the bark of the Frog Tree. “Please—if you know—can you tell me what’s wrong with the tree? Can we help it?”

  Bearskin opened her mouth to say something, and Boarskin thumped her in the ribs with her elbow. They didn’t look very much like sisters. Bearskin had long blonde hair streaked with gray, and Boarskin’s hair was short and black and bristly.

  “There’s a great many things wrong,” said Boarskin. “But one thing in particular, you understand, and not something I want to talk about in the open, where anybody might be listening.” She nodded to the tree. “As for whether you can help it—well, I suppose you might. If you had great courage and great good luck.”

  “Oh,” said Summer glumly. She knew that she didn’t have great courage, but she did feel badly for the poor tree. “Maybe—maybe some fertilizer?”

  “I’m afraid it’s not that kind of tree,” said Boarskin kindly.

  “There used to be others,” said Bearskin, in her angry, prophetic voice. “One with leaves like a weeping willow, that fell down and became snakes with cut glass eyes. One with striped brown nuts that turned into quail chicks. You can see their trunks rotting in the woods if you walk far enough.”

  “Oh no,” said Summer, feeling her eyes prickle with tears. Were they saying that the poor Frog Tree was doomed? What about the Mouse Tree and the Tree of Horned Toads?

  “Leave off,” said Boarskin to her sister. “You’ve said quite enough. It might not happen, or it might not happen just that way.”

  Bearskin folded her arms and turned her back on her sister.

  “Come on,” said Boarskin to Summer. “You don’t look to have been here long, but traveling between worlds takes it out of a body. Come have some tea and we’ll talk.”

  “Okay,” said Summer. She looked up at the Frog Tree, at the bare branches. She could hear the rustling of the frogs hopping about in the leaves, and her heart clenched in her chest. It was one thing not to know that a tree with leaves that turned into frogs existed—quite another to know that it had existed once and now was dying.

  She laid her cheek against the tree’s beautiful spotted bark and whispered: “Your frogs were wonderful. Please don’t die.”

  The tree sighed.

  The bark did a strange thing under her cheek. She stepped back in a hurry, and saw it ripple like water, and then a hand came out and a shoulder and a head.

  It was a person, although Summer couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl or neither or both. Its skin and its hair and its eyes were the same white-mottled color as the bark, and it had an enormous number of rooty fingers.

  It smiled at Summer, and held out its hand. When Summer held hers out in response, the bark-person dropped something into her palm. Then it stepped back into the tree, like a swimmer stepping in the water, and was gone.

  “Dryad,” said Boarskin. “Hmm.” For a moment her gaze was as sharp as her sister’s. “They don’t come out often. Whatever it gave you, keep it safe. It might just be a souvenir, but…well.”

  Summer looked down at the object in her hand.

  It was an acorn carved—or seeing where it had come from, perhaps not carved after all—into the shape of a tadpole. The stem was a thick paddle of tail, and the shell of the acorn had goggling eyes and tiny, tight-folded webbed feet.

  She put it in her pocket next to the friendly padlock. The weasel moved against her fingers, the brush of his tail like a kiss on her knuckles.

  “Come on, then,” said Boarskin. Summer followed her, with several backward glances, into the desert forest.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The skin-wearing sisters had a little campsite by a little pond at the bottom of a little valley. Boarskin called out, “Donkeyskin! A visitor!” as they approached.

  Donkeyskin was taller than either of the other sisters, and her face had a sweeping scar that ran from the corner of her left eye down to her chin. It pulled the corner of her mouth down into a permanent frown, and her eyes were like a dog that has been kicked too many times to be hopeful.

  She started up when Boarskin and Bearskin arrived, and
Boarskin said, “Easy, easy, dear heart. It’s only a girl with a weasel in her pocket.”

  Donkeyskin settled back down onto her rock, watching Summer with her ravaged eyes.

  There was a fire. Summer was glad for the heat, for the forest seemed to be getting colder, and the sky was definitely changing from bright hard blue to a softer, velvety color. Red light began to creep up from the western horizon.

  It occurred to her that she was definitely going to be out after dark, and her mother had most certainly noticed that she was gone by now. The thought gave Summer a pang, because her mother would be very angry and very frightened. But she remembered what it had said in the saint’s book, and she rubbed the acorn in her pocket and decided not to worry about it. Either time would pass differently or it wouldn’t, and there was precious little she could do about it right now.

  “Would you like tea?” asked Boarskin. “It’s made with white sage and the hips of the desert rose. The tea leaves themselves are imported, of course.”

  Donkeyskin silently poured out cups of tea and handed them around. Summer’s cup was made of bone china, with a lizard painted on the side. There was a white spiral through the center of its body, and another on the bottom of the bone china saucer.

  The teacups and saucers seemed terribly out of place in the middle of the desert, and she looked from them, up to Boarskin, and back again.

  “No need to look so surprised,” said Boarskin, smiling.

  “We do have some nice things,” said Bearskin. “It’s important to have beautiful things in exile.”

  Donkeyskin said nothing.

  “Are you in exile?” asked Summer. She had always assumed that people in exile had to live in prisons or on distant islands.

  “Most assuredly,” said Boarskin. “We’re princesses. Well, more or less.”

  “I was a chieftain’s daughter,” said Bearskin, as if announcing that she had some terrible disease.

  “Close enough, close enough,” said Boarskin. “Our fathers went quite mad, I’m afraid. Long and sordid tales all, and I won’t trouble you with them, not on your first night in the world. But it’s a hard thing when your father goes mad, particularly when he’s the king. The only thing left to do then is to put on an animal skin and go out and try your fortune. So we did. Some of us, admittedly, with more difficulty than others.”

  Donkeyskin shifted restlessly on her rock. Her teacup clattered in its saucer.

  Summer’s father had died a long time ago, so long ago that Summer never remembered him. Occasionally grown-ups told her how sad it must be, to grow up without a father, and Summer always nodded politely, because you had to be polite, even to grown-ups who had no idea what they were talking about. It was entirely possible that some children who had lost their fathers felt very sad about it, but Summer was not among them.

  She had tried, once or twice, to work up tears about it, when she was in the mood to feel small and sad and ill-used, but she couldn’t really manage it. Her mother had made it abundantly clear that they were better off without him, and since there were other children at her school who had fathers that yelled and screamed, or vanished for years at a time, Summer thought it was not so bad. It could have been better, but it could have been worse, too.

  Apparently it could have been a great deal worse, if these women had to put on animal skins and flee into the desert.

  “You’re leaving out a great deal,” said Bearskin grimly.

  “Yes I am,” said Boarskin. “It’s my story to tell or not tell if I choose, and I choose not to tell it tonight. If you want to tell yours, go ahead.”

  Bearskin said, “Hmmph!” but nothing more.

  Donkeyskin got up from her rock and wandered a little way away. There were tumbled red rocks through the valley, and ferns grew in cracks near the pond. Farther away there were no ferns, only tough little scrubby bushes with a wild, clean smell. She stood beside one of the bushes, breaking off little bits of leaves with her fingers. The tail of the donkey skin hung down behind her.

  “Now then, Summer,” said Boarskin, pouring more tea into Summer’s cup. “How did you get here? Did you ride in by fern-fish or step through a door in the hedge? Did you walk into a dragon’s shadow?”

  “She doesn’t smell of dragon,” said Bearskin.

  “Well…” said Summer, wrapping her fingers around her teacup to keep them warm. “Baba Yaga told me she was giving me my heart’s desire, and then I went out of her house and I was in the hallway with the stained glass windows.”

  “Baba Yaga sent you?” asked Boarskin and Bearskin at once, and drew together on their rock.

  Donkeyskin drew the hood of her cloak up over her head. Its long donkey ears were tattered and it had white stones sewn into the eyes.

  “Um,” said Summer. “Yes?”

  They looked at each other, then back at her.

  “Baba Yaga, the cannibal?”

  “Baba Yaga, the crone?”

  “Baba Yaga, the witch, the wonder-worker, the teeth-that-bite-the-ground—” Boarskin pressed a hand to her lips. “That Baba Yaga?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Bearskin sharply. “Do you think anyone else would dare claim that name? She’d feed them into her cauldron and take them out as a hundred spiny salamanders. She’d turn them into a drift of wildflowers and plant them in a sheep meadow. She’d make their bones into the root of a fig tree and sink them into their own children’s graves.”

  Summer gulped.

  “She—she didn’t do any of that. She said she’d eat me if she was in a bad mood, but I didn’t think she meant it. Well, she had a chair made of bones, so I wondered, but…” Summer twisted her fingers together. “Um. She gave me a weasel.”

  The weasel stuck his head out of her pocket and gave her a dirty look.

  “Very useful animals, weasels,” said Boarskin. This appeared to mollify the weasel. He gave Boarskin a tiny nod and then went back into Summer’s pocket without giving any sign that he could talk.

  “It was a student of Baba Yaga’s that gave me my skin,” said Donkeyskin.

  Her voice was as hoarse as a grackle’s call. The other two sisters looked at her.

  “Well,” said Boarskin. “Well. I did not know that. I thought—” She stopped and became very interested in her teacup.

  “There’s a debt owed, then,” said Bearskin.

  “You don’t owe me,” said Summer hurriedly. The notion of these three women—who were sort of interesting, but sort of frightening—owing her anything was a little scary. She wouldn’t mind help, but she didn’t want them to get resentful, the way that her mother did about the credit card companies.

  “No, we don’t,” said Boarskin. “But our sister owes Baba Yaga, and that is another matter entirely.” She sat up straighter. “Well. Where are you going, then, Summer-who-Baba-Yaga-sent, in search of your heart’s desire?”

  Summer took a swallow of tea, trying to buy time for an answer. She still couldn’t think of one. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “She didn’t tell me. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or which way I’m supposed to go. If I’m even supposed to go somewhere.”

  In the stories that she had read, when you went to another world, you usually knew what you were doing, didn’t you? You were met by fauns who told you about prophecies, or you landed in the middle of a war and it was immediately obvious whose side you were supposed to be on.

  “I don’t suppose you know any prophecies?” she asked, without much hope.

  “Dozens,” said Boarskin. “Hundreds. They’re not much use.”

  “There’s a beach at Nag-of-Head that has slips of paper instead of sand, with a prophecy written on each one,” said Bearskin, “and the tide brings new ones in each day.”

  Well, it had been a long shot anyway.

  So far she’d seen a stained glass saint and three odd sisters who might be princesses and a very strange forest…

  Summer slipped her hand in her pocket, past the weasel, and ran her th
umb over the carved acorn. “Is there—can you tell me—is there any way to help the poor Frog Tree?”

  “Why do you care what happens to a tree?” asked Bearskin.

  Summer gulped.

  “It—well—” What could she say? That maybe if she hadn’t been there, encouraging it, the tree wouldn’t have tried so hard and lost all its leaves in the process? That the dryad had looked sad and weary and hopeful all at once?

  Were those good enough reasons for someone like Bearskin?

  She tried to think of reasons that the sisters might understand.

  “When Baba Yaga spoke to me,” she said finally, “she had me pick a candle. And I picked one shaped like a frog. And then I saw the tree, and it needed help…”

  The sisters exchanged glances.

  “We’ll send you to the Waystation,” said Boarskin firmly. “Finding ways is what they do best. If you’ve lost your way—or if you’re not sure of your way to begin with—you can’t go wrong with the Waystation.”

  “Okay,” said Summer. “Is it very far?”

  “A half-day’s hike,” said Boarskin. “It’ll come out to meet you if you get lost, so you needn’t worry too much.”

  She was glad to have a direction, even if she didn’t know anything about it. It was better to have somewhere that you were trying to get to—even if it was very far away—than to simply wander around lost. “Do I have to go now?” It was full dark in the desert now.

  “You’ll need to set out when the sand-stars come out,” said Bearskin. “Beginning a journey by their light brings luck, and you should never turn down an offer of luck.”

  “You have an hour or two,” said Boarskin. “Try to take a nap, if you can. You may use my bedroll.”

  So Summer laid down on Boarskin’s bedroll, which was a thick sheaf of blankets that smelled like Boarskin’s hair. The weasel crept out of her pocket and curled up against her neck.

  For a little while, she thought she wouldn’t sleep. She was very tired and her legs were sore, but she was also wide awake and excited. The three sisters were moving around the campsite quietly, murmuring to each other and scrubbing up the dinner plates with sand. But then Donkeyskin sat down by the fire and began to sing a wordless, crooning song, and Summer’s eyes closed and she slept.