It howled down from the sky above the trees, touching only the topmost branches, but these with such wild force that all the creatures dwelling above hastened to climb down. As it blew, the wind called in a voice Foxbrush thought he recognized.
Foxbrush! Foxbrush, I have come for you!
It moved on, passing quickly like a shudder. Foxbrush, frozen in Redman’s support, heard the echoes calling. Foxbrush! Foxbrush!
Redman stood quite still, his eyes upturned. “A sylph,” he said.
Foxbrush could not deny it, not even in his head. He’d tried hard enough while wandering the Between. But this was not the Between. This was the mortal world, the world of clay and death and of cold, hard reality. He really was here. He really had just heard a sylph calling his name in this real world where such things should not exist.
He hated his life more in that moment than he ever had before.
“That’s no good,” Redman said, readjusting his grip on Foxbrush’s arm. “They start calling your name in the night, and you begin to think you need to go after them. Don’t follow a sylph’s voice, lad! You’ll never be seen again.”
Foxbrush tried to speak, but the pain in his foot with each step cut him off. At last he managed to gasp, “Are there . . . are there many of them? In Southlands?”
“What? Sylphs?”
Foxbrush nodded.
“Enough, that’s for sure. They and others of their kind. Faerie beasts, as the Silent Lady called them. The rivers used to hold them back, but now that the rivers are gone many venture up from the Wood.”
Foxbrush felt he should understand this. His brain hurt when he tried, however, so he stopped trying. They took several more painful steps.
Redman said, “Why would a sylph be calling for you?”
“I don’t know,” Foxbrush replied honestly enough. Another two hobbling steps, then, “I think I met sylphs earlier today. In the Wilderlands.”
“Today?” Redman made a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “If it was sylphs you met, my boy, it was likely a hundred years ago. Or a hundred years from now, perhaps.” He gave Foxbrush a sideways glance. “Or more than that.”
“Is that . . . so?”
It was difficult to discern any detail in the evening gloom, and Foxbrush was such a mess by now that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. But it wasn’t his appearance that gave him away. It was his voice. And Redman was no fool.
“You’re not from this time,” he said.
Foxbrush drew a long breath. “I don’t believe so. No.”
“But you are a man of the South Land?”
Foxbrush said, “Yes.” He hesitated. Then, “I’m soon to be Eldest.”
Redman was not a man to be easily surprised. He had seen a number of strange sights in his day, met a number of strange folk. He had walked dark roads in dark lands unknown to other men and faced monsters in that darkness. But the idea of Foxbrush being Eldest of anywhere or any time very nearly undid him. “I think,” Redman said, his mouth twitching against a laugh, choosing his words carefully as he spoke, “that you should tell me everything.”
So Foxbrush did. In a haphazard, backward, and circular manner, he told Redman all that he could, from Daylily’s flight, to Lionheart’s disgrace, back to a certain childhood summer holiday when Leo befriended a goat girl and left Foxbrush behind with algebraic equations. He spoke of the Dragon, the poison, the dying Eldest Hawkeye, Nidawi and the Lioness, the Baron of Middlecrescent, the sylphs . . . even the figs! Everything spilled out, and Redman listened and asked no questions, and it was a wonder if he made any sense of it.
They were still in the jungle when Foxbrush ran out of air. Redman paused and leaned Foxbrush up against a tree, giving both of them a much needed reprieve. Foxbrush couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked so much in so short a span of minutes, and he was quite gasping from the effort. He wiped sweat from his brow, which wrinkled with a sudden thought.
“What distresses me most,” he said, not speaking so much to Redman as to himself in that moment, “is that all it took was my letter. I’ve never seen Daylily falter. Not when the Dragon came, not when the kingdom was poisoned, not when Leo was banished . . . not once did I see her flinch! I thought she was—” He shook his head ruefully. “I thought she was invincible. But all it took was one letter. One stupid letter. And she broke.”
He sagged against the tree trunk then, and the pain in his feet disappeared as the worms in his belly once more resumed their wretched gnawing.
Redman watched him. The scars of his ugly face throbbed with a flood of memories all his own. He had listened to Foxbrush’s rambling tale with interest and not a little disbelief. But now it was at its end, he regarded the young man who claimed to be prince, and could not decide what he felt. Pity? Disgust?
Hope?
“The funny thing about stories,” Redman said after a silence (which wasn’t really a silence with the night so alive around them), “is their way of happening again. And again.”