by P B Hughes
“General Octurius, the most valiant of warriors, had a secret…”
Jude’s imagination sparked. The story gripped him as it came alive in his mind: the beasts, the gleaming swords and glorious battles. Suddenly, he wanted to learn to read himself.
Every day he went to her, hearing her stories, until he could bear it no longer.
“Teach me,” he told her.
Her body shook as she chuckled. “I wondered when you might ask. Let us begin.”
And so Jude did: memorizing letters, sounding out words. Reading came to him as naturally as breathing. It wasn’t long until he became as proficient as any squire. He felt thankful toward the old woman, but didn’t know how to tell her. So he brought her food he’d stolen from time to time, which he would mash so that she could swallow. For months the lessons continued, until one cold winter evening, he came to her and she did not look up. She did not laugh. There she lay, curled and white against the wall. Death had finally found her.
Jude stared at her for a long while, thin wisps of white hair swirling about her face, her toothless mouth gaping like an empty well. Not a tear surfaced in his eyes the whole time. He knew he should feel something, but he couldn’t. And then he turned and walked away.
That spring the voices began. He remembered the precise moment, his legs dangling over the rickety bench outside the orphanage, lost within the deep pages of a book. Jude, whispered the voice, as soft and sweet as summer honey. His book fell to the ground with a thump, pages fluttering as a rustling gust of wind passed over the lawn. He looked around, but not a soul stood nearby.
Warily, he picked up the book and dusted it off. It was his present, his first and only book—and it was precious to him. One morning, weeks ago, a strange man draped in black from head to boot gave it to him outside the orphanage gate. Without a word the fellow slipped it to him between the bars, and without a word he left.
The novel told of wicked swamp toads that loved to slurp flies and poison fresh water. The toads invaded a happy stream and killed the frogs that lived there. It was the only thing he owned, and he was desperate to know how it concluded. However, he never got to finish.
Jude—Jude, son, a dozen hushed voices called out to him, sparse and intermittent, one evening as he lay in his bed.
“What?” he said out loud, drawing the looks of surprise from his peers. This time the voices confused him; so many, some angry, some sad. “What?” he cried again, fury welling within him. “What do you want with me?”
One of the children slid out through the door.
“What do you want?” Jude screamed, flailing about in his bed, clutching his head. He didn’t care who saw. He wanted them to go away.
Come, Jude. Come, son! Come to us!
The matrons, two large women with short cropped hair, burst into the room and pinned him to his bed, cursing furiously. But Jude would not cease his fit until hours later when the voices stopped. They left him there on his bed, drenched in sweat, panting like a sick dog.
Come home, a voice trailed off.
The next day the Imperial Guard arrived. They handed the women bags of jingling coins and threw Jude inside the back door of a coal colored carriage. The last thing he saw before the doors snapped shut was the cloaked man standing in the street beyond, his face as black as fog.
“The voices are those of the forest,” Mordecai informed him, sitting in his wingback chair as Jude stood before him, no taller than a pine sapling. “They wish to control you—to murder you if they can. You’re an Emerald Miraclist. You posses the potential to wield the forest as a weapon, and it’s my job to help you tame your abilities.”
“But why would they want to kill me?” Jude asked. “They said they are my friends. I should like very much to go to see them.”
“No,” Mordecai said harshly. “They are not your friends. But they will be your servants. Stay away from the forest until I say the time is right.”
Mordecai was the type of man to not give much of an explanation. He was meant to be obeyed, not questioned. This infuriated Jude. He wanted to know why; he would not follow blindly! And because of Mordecai’s demands, Jude distrusted him. If it weren’t for the forest then he would still be locked inside that orphanage. The trees rescued him—indirectly, of course. But if it hadn’t been for their voices, then his powers would have never been discovered. He had no reason to believe this old man. What if he was lying? What if he was keeping him from the truth? The trees already proved they could be trusted when they saved Jude. He could trust them. They were tantalizing, alluring, and they promised him a new life.
And so the voices continued, begging him to come to them. How he wished he could go! They were the brothers he never knew, brothers who loved him. His mind tortured him day in and day out with constant obsession that slowly turned to madness he could no longer resist. Finally, the day came when Mordecai went off on a short trip. So that night, Jude sneaked away, climbing out his window to avoid his new roommate. If Daniel knew, he would certainly try to stop him.
Jude raced through the campus grounds, stole a staff from the schoolhouse, and climbed the hidden staircase built into the side of the cliff. At the top, he found himself at the edge of the looming and stretching forest. Joy filled his heart at the sight of the woods, and he walked slowly within, spreading energy from his hand into all the plants as he passed. No one to tell him to stop, no one to control his actions. Hours he spent with the trees, flowers, and thorns, bonding and forging alliances with his friends until a whisper caught his ear. Come, Jude. Come, son, it chimed, as alluring and beautiful as a thousand sweet scented roses. And so he went, enchanted by the smell and sound that guided him. Finally he found himself at her side, a massive, sprawling oak tree with roots like tentacles covering the forest floor.
Jude, son, she said to him. Jude, son.
She was his mother. It all made sense now! The reason he didn’t relate to any other children, the reason he felt so different, the reason he felt so alone. He belonged to the forest. He was one of them. And that meant that the plants of the forest were his brothers and sisters. The family he never knew.
“Mother,” he said, spinning as he looked at her branches. “Mother, I’ve come. It’s me Jude, your son!”
Son…Jude, stay, said his mother. He would stay. Stay forever. Feed me. And he would. He obeyed, slowly pouring his energy into her for hours on end. More, she commanded. Jude gave more and more, until finally he felt himself empty.
“I must stop,” he told her as a tinge of panic filled his belly. “I’ll die if I keep this up.”
No! she growled, her voice now as dark and grinding as snapping branches. You must continue. You must feed me!
Days later Mordecai found him dazed and dying, lying against her roots, his skin slowly transforming into bark. The tree was absorbing him, the same way she absorbed the light. Soon he would have become a part of her, no different than one of her roots.
“You aren’t the first Emerald Miraclist to wander off into the woods,” Mordecai said when Jude awoke. His face was hard, eyebrows knit together like two white caterpillars. “You’re fortunate, you know. Most never return.”
Jude stared blankly about the room, confused and bleary eyed. The last thing he remembered was a strange feeling, a feeling of longing that slowly turned to fear. He went home, he thought, but he couldn’t remember where home was.
Jude, he heard faintly. And then his memory returned along with a sense of deepest betrayal.
“But she called me…she called me son,” Jude choked. “She’s my mother.”
The old man let out a heavy sigh and gave the tiny boy a look of deepest pity. “A plant wishes to grow, Jude. They crave energy—from light, from soil…from you. She was not calling you son, but calling to the sun. She said your name because she wanted your energy. Plants are rudimentary creatures. Not evil, not good. They just are. You cannot fault a tree for doing what it was designed to do: grow.”
“No,” said
Jude, tears filling his eyes. “No, you’re lying! I was home.”
“This is your home now,” Mordecai said. “You’re human, Jude, and with humans you belong. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to train this silly notion out of an Emerald Miraclist’s mind.” Mordecai placed a hand on Jude’s bony knee. “But it’s not easy. You’ve got to learn to trust me.”
Suddenly the tears left him. Reality slowly sank in along with a growing sense of foolishness. Jude felt stupid; there was no other word to describe it. Only a child would wish for his mother, and only a child would think she could be a tree. He wanted to disappear, embarrassment pushing in from all sides. Now he would never be taken seriously.
Never again would he let his emotions get the better of him. He didn’t have a mother. He didn’t have a family. He was alone.
“You must learn to control the plants, or they will control you,” Mordecai said. “They do not know any better than to try to steal your energy. But now you do know better. So learn to control them.”
And so he did. The voices continued, but never again did Jude give in to the song of the trees. He disciplined himself until he mastered seedlings—growing and maturing them, until finally he learned to manipulate their very movements. All the while, thousands of whispers grew into screams inside his mind.
“No!” he finally told them one night as the voices pulled him from his sleep. “I am your master. I control you.”
And then they were silent.
“I control you,” he whispered to himself, taking the map in hand. He unfastened the buckle on his pack and stuffed it inside.
Chapter 6
Gregory reached down and snapped the gold buckle of his boot, giving the floor a stomp for good measure. His pack felt heavy as he slung it across his shoulders, laden with a day’s worth of supplies. He slid his training staff through the loopholes and made for the door.
A glint from the corner of the window gave him pause; there was a crack in the glass across its surface from the upper left corner to the bottom right. He frowned. That was the window he and the other Ruby Miraclists helped Mordecai make several years ago, holding a blaze upon the crystalline sands until they became a red hot soup. Mordecai did the rest, using his powers to mold perfect squares of clear glass. Gregory walked over to the window and traced his finger over the crack, wondering how many windows—and who knew what else—needed repairing since the wyvern had landed on their home.
A shudder passed through him as images of the beast’s red eyes and immense black wings flashed across his vision. Monsters like that only existed in the stories he’d heard…or in his nightmares as a child. Someone should kill it, he decided. But not him. That would be far too dangerous. If that thing had wanted to, a slash of its tail could have brought the whole building to its knees.
Utter madness, Gregory thought. The wyvern had flown right over the top of the forest—the very place they were going. It could be anywhere, lurking in the shadows, waiting to consume them. No, he wouldn’t go up there. Not when it could mean his life. Let the others risk their necks; he wanted no part of it.
Outside the window, Gregory spotted Jude and Daniel waiting for him by the back gate at the foot of the cliff. Suddenly, his fear bloomed into guilt. In less than a month he would compete for one of the most perilous jobs in Orsidia, and yet he was frightened by the prospect of danger? If he stayed behind while his friends were put in harm’s way then what did that make him?
Nothing more than a chicken-hearted coward, that’s what.
Daniel wasn’t afraid of the wyvern, of that Gregory felt certain. In fact, Daniel seemed excited to travel into the woods. That boy wasn’t afraid of anything, charging ahead to help after the thing split Mordecai’s leg. Even Jude seemed eager to go.
Both of them were meant to be Miraclists, Gregory believed, the best students to ever have passed through Littleton. Daniel the Lion Heart! Jude the Huge Brained! Those would be their names before long—or something close.
Then who am I?
“Gregory the Chicken-Heart,” he said under his breath, turning away from the window and making his way toward the door.
“It’s about time,” Jude said when Gregory finally showed up at the gate. “With the speed at which you travel you’ll be lucky if you make it through the first round of the Investiture.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Gregory sighed, adjusting his pack. He stole a glance to the top of the cliff, its looming shadow sheltering them from the sun.
“Let’s,” Jude replied as he lifted the latch. “Keep pace with me or I’ll leave you both behind.” The gate creaked dissonantly on rusted iron hinges, revealing a narrow tunnel of stairs angling upward toward the top of the cliff.
The three of them climbed higher and higher until they reached a hatch lying flat above their heads. Jude pushed it open and they climbed out into a wooded area, right at the edge of the forest. When Daniel shut the hatch, it all but disappeared, camouflaged by twigs, leaves, and brush that Mordecai fastened to it with a net.
There they stood, surrounded by towering trees—straight-trunked sentinels clothed in dark green moss and ivy. Their branches stretched high above, groping toward the sky to catch a taste of sunlight. Some had collapsed from age or bad weather, and lay defeated on the forest floor. Where their branches used to shade, a display of hopeful new plants—grass, white flowers, saplings—competed for a chance at life in spotty patches of light. The earth was rich and the undergrowth thick, and there was no road in sight.
Jude set his pack on a stump and produced a tattered map. “We are here,” he informed them, pointing to an area near the perimeter of the forest. “The road is just northeast of our location. Follow me.” Without looking up, he tramped ahead into the brush.
Gregory followed alongside Daniel, ducking beneath branches and dodging thorn bushes that stabbed at his legs with needles the length of his finger. The air was stuffy and humid, and the insides of his legs chaffed raw as he walked.
The last time he’d been in these woods, he came alone. Without permission, of course. The forest was off limits. But something Mrs. Doppledodger told him in class one morning piqued his curiosity.
“Popping-plants are quite dangerous,” the old woman educated the students. “Yellow, pulsating mushrooms. If one ever popped on you then you’d swell up fatter than a toad in a stink pond and be twice as ugly. Stay away from them if you know what’s good for you.”
Gregory smirked at the thought. Naturally, he’d gone searching for popping-plants that afternoon after lessons, and much to his delight, he’d found a patch of them growing at the foot of a rotting tree. Perfect for any number of pranks, he mused.
“Will your father come to the games, Gregory?” Daniel asked, jerking Gregory from his thoughts.
Gregory was caught off guard. “My father?” he said.
“No—Mordecai’s father,” Daniel replied dryly. “Yes, yours. He’ll be coming, won’t he?”
Heat rushed into Gregory’s face. The very thought of his father coming to the Investiture filled him with bitter resentment, and with it came a sense of longing. He didn’t wish for his father to come; he wished for a father who would care enough to come. And nothing would bring him. The only bond that held Gregory to Brandon McPherson was the jagged scar of memories he tried his best to forget.
“No,” Gregory replied, his voice laced with quiet anger. “He won’t be there.”
“That’s too bad,” Daniel said carefully. “Now that you won’t be able to go home for the summers, I bet he’ll miss you.”
Gregory tensed, his gaze drifting to the ground. “I’m sure he will.”
“Watch where you’re going, stupid boy!” the voice of his father echoed in his mind. Gregory remembered stumbling over a bucket of ashes when he was just a child. He could still see his father’s raging, bloodshot eyes, and smell the bitter scent of alcohol on his breath when he boxed his ears and threw him into a pile of botched steel. “I ought to toss you ou
t in the gutter with the rest of the garbage!”
Out of the corner of his eye Gregory saw Daniel giving him that same queer look—eyes narrowed, brow raised—that always made Gregory feel as if he were trying to read him like some sort of novel. Very quickly, Gregory relaxed; he threw his arms behind his head and leaned back.
“It’s not like I’ll have time to go home to visit if I become a Guardian, right?” He let out a laugh. “Just think: if the ladies love me now, I’ll have to beat them off with a stick after all is said and done. That’ll be a full-time job by itself.”
“Right,” Daniel replied, rolling his eyes. “You’ll have to hire your own personal escort.”
When the conversation took a turn toward Gregory’s fantasies, Daniel lost interest.
If there was one thing in this world Gregory hated, it was talking about it was his father. Because that discussion that discussion would inevitably lead to another one far more painful.
His mother.
Gregory kicked at a rock and sent it tumbling into the underbrush.
It was bad enough that his nights were haunted by memories of her, but to have to actually talk about her would be agonizing.
“You killed her, you killed her!” the voices in his dreams would scream at him like a flock of furious crows. Night after night they would invade his mind, accusing him with such vehemence that eventually he began to believe their words. He tried to resist, telling himself it wasn’t his fault—that he was just too young; he couldn’t save her. But deep down he knew—he knew that if he had been strong enough she would still be alive.
But then there were the nights when she’d come to him as a figure of angelic light, dispelling the voices, kissing his forehead and whispering that everything would be okay. In those dreams he was a child again, and she would send her gentle fingers running through his golden curls, her locks of satin hair skimming his cheeks as she knelt to wrap him in her embrace. And then she would smile, her shimmering blue eyes narrowing with affection, filling him with warmth. No one had ever loved him like that, and he doubted anyone ever would again.