“Then pay his tribute!”
With a sigh, the stranger plunged a hand into a leather pouch at his side and withdrew a fistful of dried petals—water lily petals, had Foxbrush been capable of noticing. These he tossed at the roots of the tree under which Foxbrush had lain, shouting in a tuneless chant:
“Oh, Twisted Man, whose bark is thick,
Who plunges rocks for wells to find,
Here is tribute! Here is tribute!
Take it, Twisted Man, and quick!”
Completing this odd ritual with a clap of hands and a turn in place, the stranger ended with a bow in the tree’s direction. The next moment, the branches stirred without a breeze and thick leaves rustled and buzzed as though a million wasps sang at once in reply. The wasps surrounding poor Foxbrush suddenly lifted as a single unit and flowed through the air in a swift stream, past the stranger and back into the shivering leaves of their tree home.
“Thank you,” said the stranger with a wry smile. He saluted the tree once more, then turned to Foxbrush, who lay gasping where he had fallen, his eyelids red from the poisonous stings, welts covering his hands, his neck, and his face. The stranger grimaced, though Foxbrush could scarcely see it, so thickly were his lids swollen.
“Don’t you know better than to lie beneath a black fig tree?” the stranger said, approaching Foxbrush and crouching beside him. Again, though he heard concern and even kindness in the stranger’s voice, Foxbrush understood none of his words. He sat up, touched his stinging face, and groaned.
The stranger clucked, shaking his head, but he frowned as he looked over Foxbrush’s clothing. “You’re not from these parts, are you?” he said.
“Please, sir,” Foxbrush said thickly, for even his tongue seemed to have been stung and now swelled in his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re saying. But . . . but thank you for . . . for whatever it was you did for me.”
The stranger rose from his crouch and stepped back in surprise, his hands up as if in self-defense. He stared down at the young man before him, and his heart began to ram against his throat. Then he spoke in a different language altogether:
“You speak like a Northerner.”
The accent was a little thick, a little harsh to Foxbrush’s ears, and the cadence was unlike any he had heard before. But the words he knew.
The stranger knelt again, peering eagerly into Foxbrush’s face, studying the complexion and the features, which were scarcely recognizable anymore, and frowning the while. “You’re not a Northerner,” the stranger said, “yet you speak like one. Do you come from the North Country? Did King Florien send you? How did you find the Hidden Land?”
Foxbrush’s head swam with fear and poison. He opened his mouth, intending to introduce himself, to make some explanation, some apology, perhaps. But all that emerged was a sad little gurgle as he toppled to one side in a faint.
There was something sticky on his face.
Foxbrush disliked sticky things, particularly anywhere near his face. He raised a hand to wipe it off only to discover that—dragon’s teeth!—his hand was sticky as well. In fact, as awareness slowly returned to him, bringing with it a monstrous headache, he discovered that stickiness covered the greater portion of his body, accompanied by a sweet smell that might have been pleasant under other circumstances. Under these, it made him gag.
He wanted to open his eyes, but the stickiness sealed his lashes together, and it took some effort to free them. By the time he succeeded, panic had made good headway into his outlook. After all, one does not like to wake up in unknown circumstances coated like a babe who got into the syrup jar.
He succeeded, however, after a certain amount of rubbing and straining (if you’ve never strained a resisting eyelid, you don’t know what straining is) to free his lashes and crack his eyes open for a look at his surroundings. In that moment, he believed he could be surprised by nothing.
Thus he was all the more surprised to find Daylily’s curious face hovering over his.
He did not scream. He might have, had his mouth not been sealed shut with the stickiness, but since it was, he could manage only a pathetic harrumph in the back of his throat. He did sit up rather abruptly and, discovering he wore no clothes, snatched at the skin pelt that had been spread over his nether regions and clutched it like a lifeline.