Summer in Orcus

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Summer in Orcus Page 14

by T. Kingfisher


  The hedgehog stretched and yawned. The light grew brighter.

  The Forester patted a log next to her. “Come and sit, child. Tell me about your journey, and start a little before the beginning, because we are usually wrong about where things begin.”

  Summer sat down. The hedgehog fire was as warm as a real fire, but without smoke. Glorious’s eyes reflected flat green discs back at her.

  “I think it started when Baba Yaga’s house walked into the alley,” she said slowly, “but if I start before that…I was in school, and then I went home. I live with my mom…”

  “Tell me about her.”

  So Summer tried, starting with how tall she was, and what she looked like, and what she did, and how she cried at night.

  The Forester watched her, her eyes in shadow. She was listening. She listened like Glorious did, with her whole body, with her head cocked and her elbows on her knees, and Summer began to feel as if no one had ever listened to her so intently in her entire life.

  Without quite knowing how, Summer began to talk about how her mother worried and that spilled over into how Summer wasn’t allowed to ride horses and—“I know she loves me!” said Summer, and her voice startled her, because it sounded like she was going to cry. “But she won’t let me do things and it’s like they’re all the same thing, like riding a horse and crossing the street and playing with matches, except they aren’t the same at all and I never know what they’re going to be until she won’t let me do them!”

  The Forester nodded. “Now we are starting to learn things,” she said. Summer rubbed her eyes and felt grateful and resentful all at the same time. I won’t cry. I won’t.

  “And into this, Baba Yaga’s house came walking,” said the Forester. “Yes. That would have called her, I think. If you want a mouse, look in mouseholes. And then what happened?”

  Summer told her.

  It was a long story, and the weasel put in a few words about Grub and then Reginald talked about meeting Summer, and Glorious did too. “And she won my license by means of words,” said the wolf, which warmed Summer as much as the hedgehog-fire did.

  “And then we went into the woods here,” said Summer finally, “because Reginald said you could help. And then there were owls, and I guess you know the rest.”

  The Forester nodded.

  The silence stretched out. Summer began to feel uncomfortable, as if there was something more she should have said. “Does that help?” she asked. “I mean, do you know what we should do?”

  “Yes,” said the Forester. “And no. There are, perhaps, things I may tell you, but you will decide what to do with them. But first, Summer, I have a question for you.”

  “Okay,” said Summer, sitting up straighter.

  “You are not a hero,” said the Forester. “That is no insult to you. You might become one, I suppose, but I would not wish it on you.”

  Summer did not quite know how to feel about this statement. It still sounded vaguely like an insult.

  “And yet you are here,” said the Forester. “Why? What is it that you are hoping to do?” She smiled. “You may take time to think, if you like. I believe that your friends are eager to have dinner.”

  The valet-flock was, indeed, twittering around Summer’s ears. They took flight at this, and went to the packs. They kept very low, watching the owls, but they nevertheless laid out meat and cheese and grapes for everyone.

  Summer ate without tasting it, trying to think of the answer to the Forester’s question.

  What did she want? She had wanted an adventure, and her heart’s desire, but then they found the burned inn, and it had no longer been an adventure. Her heart’s desire was nice, but it wasn’t worth having people die.

  So why had she not given up and tried to go home?

  Because it wasn’t just about her heart’s desire.

  Because something else was relying on her.

  “I just wanted to help the Frog Tree,” said Summer. “I mean—you must think it’s stupid—people are dead, and Zultan is awful and maybe it’s stupid to worry about a tree, but it was so—it was trying so hard, and it was doing something wonderful and it wasn’t hurting anything and—and—”

  She dissolved into tears.

  Half of Summer was shocked, because she hadn’t expected to cry—she hadn’t even known how much she cared until right this minute—and the other half of Summer was sobbing her heart out on the Forester’s shoulder.

  I thought I’d cry about my mother, and I didn’t want to, but I didn’t know I’d cry for the Frog Tree!

  She was embarrassed for a moment about crying in front of her friends—but they had already seen her cry, over the burned out inn. What was once more?

  The Forester gathered Summer up in her large arms. “There it is,” she said. “There. All may yet be well.”

  “It was only a tree,” whispered Summer, feeling as if she were stabbing herself in the stomach with the words. Only a tree.

  “And you are only a girl,” said the Forester, “and Reginald is only a bird and I am only…what I am. We are all still worth saving.”

  Summer let out her breath in a long sigh. It caught a little at the bottom, but only a little.

  “Now,” said the Forester. “Saving a single wondrous thing is better than saving the world. For one thing, it’s more achievable. The world is never content to stay saved.”

  Summer laughed a little at that. The Forester set her down on the log and she wiped her face on her sleeve.

  “As to the saving…well.” The Forester closed her eyes for a moment, and then—“Look,” she said, turning her face toward the light.

  Summer looked.

  The Forester’s eyes were not human. In the shadows, they had looked normal enough, but when the light struck them, the pupils contracted into slits instead of circles.

  Lizard eyes.

  “What—” said Summer, startling back. “How—”

  The log was not wide enough. She overbalanced and fell over on her back in the leaves.

  The Forester laughed softly and held out her hand.

  Summer took it. “I’m sorry,” she said. It had been very rude to jerk away, she knew that, as if the Forester had something wrong with her. “I’m sorry.”

  The Forester smiled. “It’s all right,” she said, pulling Summer back up to her seat. “The first time I saw myself in a mirror, I did the same—though not, I think, for the same reasons.”

  She tilted her head so the fire caught in her eyes, and they were brilliantly blue, the color of a turquoise stone or a lizard’s tail.

  I couldn’t have missed that. She did something. Or stopped doing something. Her eyes weren’t like that before.

  “Are you human?” asked Summer timidly.

  Wanting to say: It’s not like you have to be, Glorious isn’t and Reginald isn’t and the weasel isn’t and I love them all.

  Wanting to say: I don’t think being human is any better than anything else, really I don’t, only I don’t quite know how to say it without sounding like I’m saying the opposite.

  “The answer to that,” said the Forester, “is not quite no, and not quite yes.” She shook her head and one of the barn owls raised its wings and made a soft, creaking call.

  “I am half a dragon,” said the Forester.

  Summer considered this. “You mean your mom was a dragon, or your dad?”

  The Forester shook her head. “No. Then I would be a dragon or a human. Being a dragon is like being alive or being dead. It is a thing you are or a thing you are not.”

  “Like being a wolf,” rumbled Glorious.

  “Very much like being a wolf,” said the Forester, nodding to him. There was a smile in her voice, if not in her slitted eyes. “Well. I was a dragon. I had a dragon’s body and a dragon’s heart. And then someone got hold of a great and terrible magic, and wished to be a dragon.”

  She shook her head, and there was no smile in her voice now. “You cannot turn your heart into a dragon’
s heart. Hearts can only be changed from within, and there is no magic in the world that can change them from without. But a dragon’s body can be stolen, and I imagine that I was the nearest.”

  “They took your body?” whispered Summer.

  “And left me this one in trade,” said the Forester. She ran her hands over her heavy brown forearms. “Poor thing. It did not know what to do, having a dragon’s soul slammed inside it. Like trying to catch a bonfire with a candlewick. But it was a child’s body, then—yes, this was long ago, longer than you know—and it still had a little give to it, so it wrapped itself around me as best it could.”

  Glorious made a sound that Summer had never heard him make before—a whimper, almost, of sympathy.

  “I woke in the middle of my hoard, in a cavern full of rings and crowns and shadows, and I was freezing cold and smaller than the egg I hatched from.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Summer, who had sometimes dreamed of being a dragon, and could not imagine having it taken away from you.

  “It was long ago,” said the Forester. “And whoever did it—poor stupid fool—found themselves with a human heart in a dragon’s body, and it was likely worse for them.”

  At Summer’s expression, she laughed a little. “Think, child! There was too much dragon heart to fit in a human body—there must have been too little human heart to fit into my body. To be alone, inside a great mansion of dragonflesh, listening to the echoes in the empty places where more of you should be…” She shook her head. “I hated her at first. Now I think, perhaps, she has done more to punish herself than I ever could. The best a dragon can do is burn you alive, and while that is a very short eternity while it is happening, it ends. She has trapped herself in a prison that will never grow old.”

  “She?” asked Summer. “Her?”

  “Her. For this must have been her body, so it must have been a human girl. One like you, perhaps.” The Forester bared her teeth, not quite a smile, and Summer caught a hint of dragon fangs in her expression.

  Summer sat up very straight. Her cheeks felt hot. She felt ashamed, even knowing that someone like her had done such a thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “It is all right,” said the woman who was only half a dragon. “It is an old story. This body has lived for a long time, for its takes its cues from the heart inside it. And it has done its best.” She patted her own arm affectionately, like a rider with a good-natured horse.

  “Is there any way to put you back?” asked Summer.

  The Forester shook her head. “That’s a task for someone else,” she said kindly. “A god, perhaps, or the ghost of a bird, or a hero born of moonbeams. Not a human task. Yours is large enough already, and will lead you far and fell.”

  “It is? Then—then you know what’s wrong with the Frog Tree?”

  The Forester nodded. “You’ve encountered others, haven’t you? Other things dead or dying. Great creatures struck down.”

  Summer nodded. Glorious growled softly.

  “They are being poisoned,” said the Forester. “By the wasps of the Queen-in-Chains.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Summer was never quite certain, afterwards, how they left the Forester. She thought that they talked for some time, but she could not remember what was said. She had been gazing into the hedgehog flames, hadn’t she? And the Forester said something to her—something that might have been courage or perhaps Mother.

  All that she knew was that she came to herself sitting on Glorious’s back, and the wolf was walking through the mist of early morning. She did not feel tired or hungry, although she could not remember having slept.

  Summer tried to remember having mounted, or having said goodbye to the Forester, but she could not. The weasel was asleep in her pocket.

  “Is…is anyone else having trouble remembering?” she asked carefully.

  “Comes of talking to dragons,” said Reginald. “Though I didn’t know the old girl was a dragon! What a facer!” He did a little sarabande in midair. “And me making free with her forest, too, and strolling in like she was my old maiden aunt. Ha!”

  He seemed to be pleased as much as abashed.

  Glorious flicked an ear back at her. “It is not entirely clear,” he admitted. “Though like a dream, not like magic.”

  “Dragons aren’t magic,” said Reginald. “Dragons are dragons.”

  “I thought they were magic,” said Summer.

  “Magic is like rain,” said Glorious. “Dragons are like mountains. Or wolves. Magic may happen to a dragon, but mountains are not made of rain.”

  Summer digested this. It sounded very simple, but it would probably have made more sense if she knew more about dragons.

  Or about magic, for that matter. She sighed.

  “Never fear,” said Reginald. “She’s given us a direction, hasn’t she?”

  “Certainly,” said Glorious dryly. “Find the Queen-in-Chains, whom no one has seen since the fall of the Tower of Dogs. That will be no easy task, hoopoe.”

  “I don’t know why not,” said the weasel, waking up with a yawn. “She’s sending out wasps, isn’t she? Why don’t we just find a wasp, then?”

  There was a thoughtful silence.

  “If we could find one of these wasps,” said Summer, feeling a slow excitement building in her stomach, “then we could follow it back to the Queen!”

  “Thought they died when they stung a chap,” said Reginald doubtfully.

  “That’s bees,” said Summer confidently. She had done a report on honeybees for school last year. “Bees sting you and the stinger pulls their guts out. It’s kind of awful. But wasps can sting you over and over again and it doesn’t hurt them.”

  “Huh!” said the hoopoe. “Well. Never too late to get an education. So we find a wasp and follow it back. But how do we find a wasp?”

  “That should be easy,” said Glorious, in his deep, somber voice. “We need only look for a great and wondrous thing. Before long, as things are going, a wasp will come to poison it.”

  “Where will we find one, though?” asked Summer.

  The wolf laughed, but kindly. “The great joy of the world, Summer-cub, is that it is full of wondrous things.”

  He shook himself and his muscles tensed. It was the only warning Summer had before he broke into a run.

  “We’re only two days out from Almondgrove,” said Reginald, when Glorious finally slowed. “Had a notion we’d stop and get some provender. Introduce you to the old pater and all. M’father’ll know where to find something wondrous.” He laughed. “He’s nearly a wondrous thing himself, come to that.”

  “Great,” muttered the weasel. “A whole house full of twittering twits.”

  Reginald heard this, but he didn’t look particularly upset. “Oh, quite! But there’s no need to rustle up the whole clan. We’ll stock up on supplies, though, and the valet-flock will be wanting to pick up a few more members.”

  The flock chirped agreement. Summer wondered if they missed the dead valet-bird.

  Is he really gone, though? They’re a sort of mind all together, like a beehive. Was there something that was specific to that bird that’s gone, or do they just move the same mind around between them?

  It was mid-afternoon on the second day when the road began to change. It was still narrow, but it turned to cobblestones instead of dirt. The trees became taller and more widely spaced.

  Side roads branched off the main thoroughfare, reminding Summer of driveways, but the sort of driveways you got in an expensive neighborhood where the houses were not in sight of the street. The branching roads were framed with lantern posts, but each post had a dozen perches sticking off it and the ground beneath the posts was white with droppings.

  The first bird they saw was some kind of partridge, sitting low on a perch with her eyes closed. She had a little leather helmet on, and a collar with a badge.

  “Heyo, copper!” said Reginald cheerfully.

  “Eh? Eh!” The partridg
e shook herself away, fluffing up all her feathers. “Eh? Oh, it’s you, young Almondgrove. You’d best not be up to any tricks.” She looked over Glorious and Summer and her round eyes went even rounder. “Friends of yours?”

  “They’re all with me,” said Reginald. “Best friends a chap could have, wot? Companions in adversity, one and all.”

  The partridge snorted and settled back down on her perch. “Shouldn’t think you know a thing about adversity, you young jackanapes. But go on, and give your father my best.”

  “Will do,” said Reginald.

  They went on. More and more birds appeared, flying overhead, filling the trees, chatting to one another. Ripples of silence spread as the wolf walked by, and then conversation rushed in to fill the void—“Did you see? A wolf!” “A wolf and a human on it!” “It’s a small human…” “Yes, but it’s a quite a large wolf!” “And was that Reginald?”

  Reginald did not seem bothered at all. He called out greetings to birds as he passed, and did little aerial jigs and bounces of delight.

  “I suspect that we are no longer travelling in secret,” said Glorious wryly.

  “They’ll have word from here to the far ends of Orcus,” grumped the weasel.

  Summer said nothing. Surely Zultan and Grub wouldn’t do anything with all these birds watching, would they? They had burned an isolated inn, but there were hundreds of birds here, and they could all fly away.

  Reginald isn’t worried. She sat up straight and remembered the saint’s book again—Don’t worry about things that you cannot fix. And overhead, the birds chirped and chattered and sang to each other about the wolf and the human girl on his back, and Summer felt as if she were in a parade.

  They reached the branching road of Almondsgrove Manor just as the sky was beginning to show traces of pink. Two brick pillars framed the road, hung with lanterns, and in front of the lanterns stood two geese.

  The geese were as tall as Summer. They had white heads and black throats and their bodies were sooty gray. Their orange legs were as thick around as Summer’s calves.

  “Heyo!” said Reginald happily. “It’s me.”

 

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