And love opens wide eyes.”
“He kissed her?” Lark said, making a face. Her sisters and little brother, not understanding her, giggled at her expression and hid their faces in their hands.
“Well, yes,” said Foxbrush slowly.
“To wake her up?” Lark’s laughter redoubled the giggles of her siblings. “That’s silly!”
Foxbrush looked at the verse again. He had to admit, it was a bit silly when one stopped to think about it. But then, what Faerie tale wasn’t? It was all nonsense in the end, packaged up in frills and pretty verses. “It’s a classic theme,” he explained to the incredulous Lark. “An enchanted sleep can always be broken by the kiss of a prince or a princess.”
“Prince or princess?” Lark repeated, and her laughter subsided into a more thoughtful expression.
“Yes. Like an Eldest’s son,” Foxbrush said.
“Or daughter.”
“Or daughter, yes.” Foxbrush eyed the girl, surprised to find her considering this information so intently where but a moment before she’d been a small mountain of scorn. “Would you like me to finish?” he asked.
She nodded, and he read through the last few verses to the end, there declaring along with the original poet, “Recall you now my ancient story!”
With that, as Lark finished her translation, he let the scroll close up on itself. When he raised his gaze, he saw Redman standing on the other side of the fire, watching him intently out of his one good eye. What the scar-faced man thought was anyone’s guess. And Foxbrush did not care for guessing games.
Suddenly a wind rose up in the distance, moving swiftly among the topmost branches of the jungle trees. With it came a voice calling, Foxbrush! Where are you, Foxbrush?
“Quick. Get inside,” said Redman. “Stop up your ears so you can’t hear it calling.”
And Foxbrush, scrambling to his feet, hastened to obey.
Early the next morning, before the heat became too oppressive, Foxbrush was roused from his bed and made to march with the children to the orchard growing just outside the Eldest’s village. It was an impressive orchard (considering the work required to keep back the ever encroaching jungle) of stately elder figs just beginning to fruit.
The children carried bunches of black figs slung over their shoulders and held more clumps in each hand. Foxbrush, similarly laden, followed them into the murmuring shade of the trees and watched how they tossed their black figs up into the elder fig branches. Tied by the stout grass strings, the black figs caught and looped around each branch, hanging like holiday decorations in the boughs above.
“When the baby wasps grow,” Lark explained to Foxbrush as she showed him a better way to toss his figs, “they crawl out of these figs and climb into the growing elder figs, thinking they are black figs. They lay their eggs in the black figs, you see. But the elder figs, though similar, are different from black figs; there is no place for the wasp to lay her eggs!”
“I see.” Foxbrush gazed up into the branches, studying the clumps above. “So the wasp pollinates the elder fig, but she cannot lay her eggs, which would render it inedible like black figs.”
It was so beautiful and so strange. Foxbrush moved up and down the orchard after the children as the morning lengthened. Soon the orchard was full of hanging black figs, though Lark told him they would need to make many more trips to the Twisted Man’s tree to gather of his bounty. “These black figs will shrivel up in a few days, and we have to make certain there are enough for all the elder figs to grow,” she said.
But the elder figs would grow. And they would ripen and plump up and be as golden and delectable as those Foxbrush had read about. Not merely lifeless little lumps fit only for birds and monkeys. Real, abundant, marketable explosions of juice and flavor and . . .
Once more he whispered to himself, “I can save Southlands.”
As soon as they’d finished the task, Foxbrush hurried to find Redman, who was hard at work repairing one of the goat sheds down the hill from the Eldest’s House. “Something tried to get in during the night,” he said when Foxbrush inquired. “One of the fey folk; a newcomer, I fear. Broke partway through and caught one of the kids. Couldn’t get it out of the pen, thank the Lights Above, but broke its leg.”
Foxbrush looked at the poor little kid huddled up among the frightened goats at the other end of the pen. Someone had already splinted and wrapped its leg, but it bleated in pain. Redman cursed at the sound even as he worked.
“We’ll have to set up a new totem to appease this one. I can only hope the tribute won’t be too high. The Faerie beasts get more violent and more prevalent every day! It’s an invasion, my lad. That’s what it is. An invasion of the South Land.”
Foxbrush nodded sympathetically, but his heart was still soaring at what he had learned that morning.