by Jane Yolen
Annar showed Snail the leather handholds hanging from the carapace ceiling and sides. “Grab on,” he said. “Else you’ll get flung about. Unless it’s a fling you’re wanting.”
“No fling,” she said, and grabbed on.
He pushed a button, and the lurch turned into a trot. Snail suddenly remembered Goodspeed with great fondness.
However, with those long iron spider legs, they made good time, leaving Snap and Snaggle on their winded horses far behind.
At the edge of the encampment, Annar wrenched a lever Snail hadn’t even noticed, and the spider stopped mid-step.
“You’ll be put down here,” he told her. “I have to return to guard the path.”
“Where do I go?” she asked, straining to see out the windows of the carapace. The place was aboil with people.
Annar pointed toward the north, and Snail saw the main body of the encampment lying in the shadow of the big mountain. Odds’s wagons huddled together there, slightly off center.
“Himself will be in his room, plotting,” Annar said, then grinned. “And spotting. Plotting and spotting. He’ll know something’s up, ’cause I’m here. He’s got magic eyes.”
“Magic eyes?” She’d never noticed that.
“Magic eyes that spies,” Annar said. He put a finger to the side of his bulgy nose. “He holds them up in his hands and looks through and can see more than you and I can.”
Now she was thoroughly confused.
He laughed. “So out you go!” He unlatched the door in the spider’s belly and threw down the rope ladder. The top was tightly wound on two hooks.
For a moment, Snail thought about staying safe in the big spider, then she thought better of it and sat down beside the open belly door. Then she swung her legs through and turned over before descending one shaky rung at a time.
“Watch out for Border Lords,” she said to Annar. “They were following us. We’re not sure we got them all.”
“Oh, we’ve been battling them for days,” he said. “They’re like stinging insects. But we swat them where they stand.”
He seems so certain, Snail thought. Surely the Border Lords aren’t that easily swatted.
Except . . . as she stepped off the rungs, she realized the spider was the perfect swatting machine. Nothing could stand against its might.
She looked up and saluted Annar as he reeled in the ladder.
He grinned and saluted back.
How can he laugh at a time like this? she thought, remembering Snaggle’s voice when he said of Alith, “There’s nothing for you to do.” Remembering the death of Huldra the brave troll. And the deaths and maimings of hundreds of others in those first battles of this Seelie War.
And then she thought: Maybe Annar’s right. Maybe we have to laugh in the face of such brutality. Isn’t that really what being brave is all about?
She shook her head. Scolded herself: Concentrate on what you have to do. “Which,” she said aloud, “might be another way of explaining bravery—going ahead and doing what one has to do despite the odds.” She giggled. “And possibly despite Professor Odds as well!”
She spotted Snaggle and Snap on the side of the ridge, a small horse between them.
“Goodspeed!” she cried joyfully.
The roan shook her mane as if in response.
Snap and Snaggle rode down to Snail, though they stayed close to the edge of the trees so that the spider could pass them by as far away as possible on its way up back up to its station.
When they got close, Snail went up to Goodspeed and patted her on the nose, and the mare made a small chuffing sound, almost as if she was purring like one of the castle cats.
“Where did you find her?”
“She found us,” said Snap. “Trotted out from the trees as if she’d never been lost.”
Snaggle laughed. “And a big mound of grass between her teeth like she’d just scarfed down a huge part of the forest.”
“And my boot?”
“Afraid that’s lost, m’lady,” Snap said. “But as you’ll be aboard herself . . .”
“I’m thinking of . . . after,” Snail said, adding, “though I’m sure there will be boots aplenty down in the valley.” She didn’t have to remind them why. Instead she said, “Turn around, give the lady some clothes-changing room. And if I see either of you peek . . .”
They turned. She took one of the two carefully packed bundles out of the saddlebags, then quickly stripped off her riding clothes, the ones she’d now been in for far too many days. What she put on were the old but laundered doctoring clothes, the skirt and shirt that she’d been wearing when the other changelings had seen her last. And the headscarf that barely covered her orange-red hair.
She stashed the dirty riding clothes against the other bundle, turned, and said, “You can look now.”
They made a fuss of turning toward her, and Snaggle got down off his horse to give her a boost up.
Snap said, “Ladies and their clothing . . .”
Snaggle snarled, “Shut the bolt hole, brother.”
But Snail laughed out loud. “If we want a welcome without a pike at the other end of it, we can’t come to them as warriors or as toffs. They need to recognize me as one of their own, someone they remember as having saved many of their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, which I did in these very clothes.”
Snaggle nodded, and Snap looked down at his hands. Then they rode the rest of the way down the mountainside in silence.
Snail was eager to talk to Professor Odds, rehearsing what she had to say to him in her mind. But Snaggle and Snap and their mounts were even more eager to be away from the iron spider that was once more athwart the upper path.
Guarding our backs, Snail thought, though she was certain she was the only one of them who felt that way. Ahead she could hear a bubble of noise, as a thousand or more campsites flamed into the morning; the cries of children, scolding parents, the whinny of horses and unicorns. For a few moments more she’d be above all that hubbub, but soon enough they would be in the very center of it.
Better this than the screams of the wounded, the sighs of the dying, and the awful weeping after, she thought. Though if she was unsuccessful here with Professor Odds, that, too, would come soon enough.
They were quickly on the flat and moving forward at a slower pace right to the edge of the encampment.
“They don’t look much prepared for fighting,” said Snaggle. “Not for a skirmish, and certainly not for a war, m’lady. There’s no rhyme nor reason for how they’re set up here.”
Snap added, “Just higgledy-piggledy, with toddles and younglings underfoot.”
Snaggle nodded. “No good lines nor the makings for a shield wall. No arms and armament. No command stations. No—”
“And yet they have fought,” Snail said, gesturing with her head to the left where a tall iron gibbet had been set up. A body, or rather the remnants of one, the bits that crows and ravens had left, hung from the crossbar. It looked to have been a large fighting man, a Border Lord by the tangles of beard left on the ragged strips of face. Tatters of a blue-and-green kilt hung precariously from the waist bones.
How could they have left the hanged man where children could gaze at it all day? Snail was appalled. We should be above such things, she thought, meaning changelings, meaning humans.
She looked away.
A small buzz had begun around them. People with weapons—knives and spears, a quarterstaff or two recently cut from the forest from their fresh, fleshy look. One man carried a two-handed sword. Snail guessed the sword belonged to the hanged man, because it was much too large for the man who carried it, even though he stood head and shoulders above the rest of the mob. She wondered how many changelings the Border Lord had slaughtered before being brought down.
Standing in the stirrups as best she could, Snail w
aved her hands and shouted, “Remember me? I’m the doctor, friend of the professor and the dwarfs and Maggie Light. I’ve ridden in an iron spider to get here, and my companions have killed three Border Lords.” She took a deep breath, adding, “We have news for Odds. He’ll want to see me immediately.”
She had no idea how many of the changelings could hear her, or even remember her. Yes, she’d nursed scores of them back to health, and saved the limbs of quite a few more. But whether any of those coming toward her had been in that old battle, or even remembered anything past this morning’s meal, she couldn’t say.
Just as the crowd of angry-looking changelings swirled around them and Snail began to fear more for her life than her mission, she saw Maggie Light in the crowd, behind the big man.
Maggie had opened her mouth wide. That meant she was about to sing.
Snail turned to Snap and Snaggle. “Ask no questions,” she told them sharply. “There’s magic coming. Deep magic. Put your fingers in your ears. Now!”
She was counting on them to act as soldiers. And though they looked surprised, they did as she directed. After all, she was the leader.
Snail was so busy making sure that they obeyed, she barely got her own fingers in her ears in time.
13
ASPEN GOES TO WAR
Aspen led his tiny army through the ripe countryside outside Astaeri Palace. Trees dripped apples, grain grew unasked for in fields. The magic of growing things seemed bursting at its seams.
And at its seems, he thought. The six seasons from Springtide to Berrybreak ran long in Seelie lands, and one never really knew whether what was seen was real, imagined, wished for, or needed. As they passed through a small steading, he again thought about the devastation the Unseelie horde was going to bring. Where we have seeded the ground, they will bring death’s cold plow. He had been the Hostage Prince at the Unseelie Court for half his life. Now for the first time he thought about what he had learned there—anger, heartache, trickery, fear—and wondered if any of those would serve him now.
Even if his plan worked, the Unseelie army would still trample these fields, burn those outbuildings, rip out the fence posts that lined the road.
At the end of the fence, a small, brown face poked out of a cottage door, watching the strange procession pass by.
Aspen reined in his horse and called down to the brownie. “You must leave here,” he said. “Go to the palace.” As if it is any safer there, warned his own traitor heart.
The brownie scrunched her nose up and spit in the dirt. “I’ll stay in my own hame, thank ye verra much, Yer Majesty,” she said, and slammed the door shut.
Aspen heard locks click and bolts being shot into place.
It will not save her, he thought. But then—neither can the castle. Maybe it is better to die amidst your own stuff than on a battlefield. He shook his head. Better not to die at all.
“There’s nothing you can do, sire.”
Aspen looked up to see Mishrath’s wagon passing slowly by him. “I know that, wizard. But I must still try.”
Mishrath stared at him then, as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re not much like your father, either as boy or man.”
“It would be a surprise if I were.” Aspen reined his horse into a slow walk to keep pace with the wagon. “I was away from the palace for nearly as long as I was there.”
“Your blood and bearing are his, but you are definitely . . . different.”
Aspen wondered how old Mishrath actually was, if he’d known his father as a child a thousand years ago. “Different how?”
Mishrath seemed to consider that question carefully. Finally he said, “Your sense of duty is not the same.”
“But my mother said he always did his duty.”
“That he did, sire.” Mishrath curled his lips into a very small smile. “But he never did more.” The wizard coughed weakly, gathering his cloak a little closer around him as if feeling a chill, though it was not cold out.
“Some would say I have done less.” Aspen began ticking points off on his fingers. “It was my duty to stay at Obs’s Keep. My duty to stay in Father’s dungeon and be hanged. My duty to die in battle with my father. Instead, I watched him die from a hilltop nearby.”
“See?” Mishrath shrugged. “Different.”
Aspen snorted, unsure whether to be irate or amused.
“Tell me, sire,” Mishrath went on, “do you feel you did wrong to escape the Unseelie? Or escape your Father’s gibbet?”
Aspen had to shake his head. He had been tricked into leaving the Unseelie Court. And letting my own father hang me? It had seemed like his duty at the time. He had even felt a bit disappointed in his mother for helping him escape. But now, the more he thought about that misbegotten sense of duty, the more insane it seemed.
Mishrath nodded at him. “And if you had ridden down into that valley to be slaughtered with the rest of your father’s troops, what good could you do the kingdom now?” Mishrath fixed him with eyes that suddenly didn’t seem so nearsighted as before. “The land has chosen you. Do not doubt that you are the right one for the job.”
Aspen stared at the wizard for so long, it was lucky the horse knew to stay on the road without direction from its rider.
“I am certain,” he finally said, sighing, “that the land could have found a more suitable choice.”
Mishrath gave a barking laugh—which quickly turned into a coughing fit. When he could speak again, he said, “Perhaps doubting your own abilities is exactly what this kingdom needs. A cocksure monarch might not have come up with whatever mad plan you have to slow down Old Jack Daw’s approach.” He leaned toward Aspen conspiratorially. “A plan I’m hoping you will share sometime soon. Sooner the better.”
Aspen nodded. “Tell me, wizard, how much magic do you have left?”
“Not enough to keep me alive much longer.” Mishrath raised an eyebrow. “But perhaps enough to go out in a glorious conflagration. One that will be remembered as long as tales are told.”
“I hope that will not be necessary.” Aspen looked away, suddenly unable to look at Mishrath. “But would you be willing?”
There was a long pause. Aspen thought Mishrath was holding back another coughing fit, but when he spoke, his voice was clear. “Sire, I am going to give you a piece of advice, though you did not ask for it, and most likely do not want to hear it.” He waited until Aspen turned back before continuing. “When you ask someone to die for you,” he said slowly, “look them in the eye.”
Aspen gulped. The rest of the world faded and blurred until all he could see were Mishrath’s eyes, still white but clear now, staring at him unblinkingly.
To his credit, Aspen did not look away.
“Mishrath,” he said, trying to match the wizard’s tone. “I do have a plan. It might not work. And even if it does, it will only buy us a day or two. That might not be enough for Snail to bring us an army. And even if she does, that might not be enough. And . . .” He realized he was rambling to avoid the true question. Taking a deep breath, he looked right in Mishrath’s eyes and said, “If it comes to it, will you sacrifice yourself to possibly save us all?”
Mishrath’s face cracked open into a wide grin, and he once again looked like an old, kindly, and exceptionally wrinkled tortoise-creature. “Of course!” he shouted, startling Aspen’s horse.
A couple of strong pulls on the reins got the beast back under control, and after a throat-clearing hough, Mishrath went on. “I’ve lived so long I don’t even remember when I was born. And for the last few hundred years, I’ve felt positively useless. It would be a pleasure to finally do something worth putting into the histories.”
Histories! Aspen thought. “Speaking of history,” he said, “I need to ask you about what happened in the tower.”
They rode on for some time, Aspen relating his trip to the tower and meeting t
he Welcomer and the Archivist, and his long fall back in time.
Mishrath didn’t interrupt until Aspen described the watcher behind the rocks. “This one you call the skulker,” he said, “tell me again what he looked like?”
Aspen did and then told the rest of it: the spell, the staff, the murder of the three old women, the river coming to bear the boatman away.
After the whole story was told, Mishrath grinned and said, “It seems your three questions have been answered.”
“What?” Aspen exploded. “I have no idea who the Sticksman is or how he came to be other than that he was ensorcelled somehow. And I have no idea how . . .” He stopped. “The staff.”
“Indeed,” Mishrath said.
“The old women said there must always be a Sticksman and he always holds the staff. So if he releases the staff, he will no longer be the Sticksman.” It was half a statement and half a question.
“There is your third question answered.”
“But you said all three questions are answered.” Aspen tried not to sound petulant.
“And indeed they are.” Then Mishrath added, almost apologetically, “In a way.”
Wizards! Aspen thought. They never say anything straight.
“First question,” Mishrath said. “What is the Sticksman? Well, he is something eternal—‘There must always be a Sticksman.’ And unless I miss my guess, he has something to do with death.”
Aspen chuckled. “I would not wager on you missing your guesses most times, Mishrath.”
“Indeed.” Mishrath’s brow had furrowed, giving his face even more wrinkles. “The skulker said the women would need passage soon, and they were dead moments later. Therefore, the passage they needed must be after death.”
“I am not following . . .”
“No matter, sire.” Mishrath waved his hand dismissively. “Second question: ‘How does one become the Sticksman?’”
“Through fell magic?”
“Obviously.” Mishrath coughed hard after that word, and it took a while for him to catch his breath.
“Mishrath,” Aspen said, holding up a hand. “Let us talk later at camp. Rest now.”