He collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath, his mind desperately running for any reasonable explanation it might find and coming only to dead ends. If he fainted, he told himself, who could blame him? Would it truly unman him to succumb to the white whirling in his head, the bright lights bursting on the edge of his vision?
Lark turned to him, shaking her head. “Get up,” she said. “Take off your basket and help me. We must gather fruit while he still remembers the tribute is paid. You don’t want to get stung again, do you?”
In a numb wave of determined disbelief swiftly ebbing into an ocean of overwhelming—and completely unwelcome—belief, Foxbrush did as he was told. Both he and Lark took off their baskets; then he lifted the girl into the black fig tree’s branches, where she scrambled about, nimble as a ginger-haired monkey, gathering fruit.
Foxbrush harvested his share as well, filling the baskets quickly. Every fig he plucked buzzed as though it were alive, which startled him so much the first few times that he nearly dropped them. He swiftly realized that the buzzing was caused by the wasps living inside: tiny, delicate, shimmer-green wasps, with lacy wings and enormous stingers for their size. A few crawled out and even perched upon his hand. He broke out in a sweat at this but continued moving methodically.
“They won’t sting you,” Lark told him. “The Twisted Man called them off.”
“Right,” Foxbrush replied breathlessly. He picked until his own basket was nearly half full before he managed to ask, “Is . . . is the Twisted Man, then, as it were, the spirit of the fig tree?”
“What? Oh no!” Lark, perched in the branches above, laughed merrily. “What makes you think such a thing?”
Foxbrush scowled. “I’m trying to make sense of the situation according to the rules of nature that seem to prevail in this world of yours. It struck me as a logical assumption.”
Lark laughed again, probably because she did not understand half of what he said. “The Twisted Man is a Faerie beast. He came up from the Wilderlands, like all the Faerie beasts. The rivers in the gorges kept them out for ages, but when the rivers rose up to drown the Dragonwitch, they left the gorges behind and the Wilderlands grew. Now Faerie beasts of all kinds cross from their world into ours. They like it here,” she said this with a certain pride in her nation. “We have lush forests and rivers and—”
“You said the rivers dried up.”
“No, no, the Faerie rivers that were gate guards are gone. We have plenty of normal rivers flowing down from the mountains. The Faerie beasts like those. And the Twisted Man liked this tree, though he had to battle Crookjaw for it when first he came. What a fight that was . . .”
The child rattled on for some time after Foxbrush had given up trying to listen. They finished filling their baskets with the wasp-infested fruit, then shouldered them to make the return journey. The weight of figs in such bulk surprised Foxbrush; he was puffing and panting within a few paces. Lark, by contrast, proved the strength of her scrawny limbs and seemed no more burdened than when they had first set out.
“ . . . so we pay the tribute at the totems as the Silent Lady taught us,” she was saying when next Foxbrush bothered to listen. “This keeps them from pestering us, though most of them are harmless enough, not like Mama Greenteeth.” She stopped here, and her brown little face took on serious lines unusual in one her age.
“Mama Greenteeth?” Foxbrush said. “I heard your parents speak of her. She was killed.”
“Yes,” Lark acknowledged. “By something worse than she. By the red lady who wears the bronze stone.”
“What is the bronze stone? Do you know?”
Lark shook her head. “I’d not heard my parents speak of it, even in Northern tongue, until that night. But whatever it means, it is worse than Mama Greenteeth if it demands firstborn children as tribute. Even she was satisfied by wafers.”
She fell into a silence made all the more dismal by the variety of noises around them. They neared the totem where they had seen the egret, and Lark made as though to pass without stopping. But Foxbrush glanced at the stone. And he gasped.
“What are you doing?” Lark demanded, for Foxbrush leapt to the side of the trail and pushed the leaves back from the totem, revealing what lay upon its flat top.
“My scroll!” He reached out but paused suddenly before touching it. “It’s my scroll, the one my cousin gave me. May I . . . is it . . .”
“If Kolkata put it there for you, you may take it,” Lark said, nodding approval.
So Foxbrush picked up the scroll, which looked a little worse for wear but still whole despite the nights it had spent in the elements. His trousers had no pockets, so he tucked it down the front of his shirt. For some reason, he felt better knowing it was there and he hadn’t lost it. Along with everything else he’d lost.
They continued on in sweaty silence. After they’d passed the second of the totems, Foxbrush said, “I’m curious about one thing. Why are we going so far out of our way to gather wasp-infested black figs? Are they goat feed?”
“No,” said Lark. “They’re for the elder figs.”