GARDEN
ROPE AND Brook watched Jo walk toward the Palace. “We shouldn’t have let her go,” Rope said.
Drought fevered the midsummer night, and Brook was pierced by a sudden longing for a cool sea breeze, and the feel of a green wave lifting lazily under her as she drifted off the shore of Clouds End.
It would be a long time yet before she was home.
She reached for Rope’s hand. It was hard to breathe in the hot night. Jo was a white shadow dwindling, walking away from them, walking away. And with every step, Brook’s heart cried for her. And with every step, Brook’s heart rejoiced. Her twin was gone.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to get out of here. We don’t have a wizard to save us anymore. If we are not out by daylight, there will be guards at the tunnels back into the Arbor.”
Reluctantly Rope nodded. He squeezed her hand and turned to face the dark Palace grounds. Topiary sculptures loomed over walls of yew. “We came in from about there,” he guessed, pointing. “All we have to do to get back is watch the stars and hold on to a straight line.” They started off down a corridor of yew.
“This is a bad place to bring Net,” Rope muttered. “It’s like wrapping pure fear around your wrist.”
Magic paced within Brook like a caged animal.
“This path is starting to bend,” Rope said after a while.
“Bending quite a bit,” he said some time later. He glanced unhappily at the stars. “We’re veering badly. As soon as we come to a gap, try to strike left.”
There were no gaps to the left. Only a smooth unbroken wall of yew curving into darkness. Brook faltered. “There is a gap on the right over here,” she whispered. “We could try it and see if it leads to more open ground.”
Rope shook his head. “No use starting all that. We could end up blundering around until morning. Let’s just head back the way we came and try again.”
They retraced their steps. The dry grass squeaked and whispered underfoot. Somewhere in the darkness an owl screamed. Brook reached to touch the Witness Knot on her left wrist, trying to calm down.
On they walked. Silence pressed around them, made bigger by the dry scrape of a cricket somewhere in the distance. The hedge had grown very tall; Brook could no longer see the lights of the Arbor in any direction. “We might as well be walking in the forest!” I must keep talking, she told herself. I must think of something besides the fear. “You know what I hated? Those days when we were up before the sun and I would walk through a spider web. I’d be slapping myself in the dark imagining this spider crawling around in my hair.”
Rope did not answer. Yews towered overhead.
Brook wished she hadn’t remembered the spiders.
Something fluttered by in the darkness and Brook gasped, heart hammering. A bat, she told herself. Only a bat. “Haven’t we been walking a long time?”
Rope grunted.
“Shouldn’t we have been back by now?”
“Yes.”
The magic was crawling through Brook’s blood. She felt it beating at her wrists and behind her eyes, as if her flesh could rupture at any moment and let the world pour through. In the darkness the dry cricket scraped, scraped. “We’ve been going around in circles.”
“I can’t tell!” Rope snapped. “The trees are too tall. I can’t keep track of any stars.”
They stopped. The darkness pooled around them. Walls of yew towered far overhead. The cricket fell silent. Brook felt the faintest breath of wind on the back of her neck. An instant later an owl’s scream drilled into her heart.
She ran. Pelting down an endless tunnel of gloom, plunging into the heart of the garden with her own ragged breathing roaring in her ears and Rope’s footsteps pounding behind her.
Suddenly the corridor ended. They burst out into a small clearing and saw two monstrous figures running at them from out of a silver globe. Brook screamed and staggered to a halt. The strangers halted too.
“Reflections!” Rope gasped. “Just reflections, Brook.”
Brook tried to catch her breath. “It’s . . . It’s a h-house!”
The silver globe was actually a cottage the size of Stone’s house on Clouds End. As they watched, its walls rippled, shot through with sparks of color. “Fathom!” Rope breathed. “The whole thing is made of water!”
While their heartbeats slowed, they stood staring at the little house that sat like a drop of dew on the grass before them. Its mysterious interior was riotous with flowers. Gelid light oozed from their blossoms—orange, crimson, ocher, and magenta. Beside the cottage stood a shed; a collection of hoes, rakes, shears, trowels, and spades leaned against (or floated on) the liquid walls. “I think we’ve found the Emperor’s gardener,” Brook said.
Rope gulped. “Hooray.”
Brook touched the Witness Knot and then walked toward the glowing cottage.
“What are you doing!”
“Sooner or later we have to get out of this garden,” Brook said, coming up to the wavering doorway. “Whoever lives here will either help us get out, or turn us over to the Palace. Either way, we might as well settle it now. I am not going back into that maze for all the fish in the sea.”
“Look at those flowers!” Rope said, trailing after Brook. “I want to reach in and eat them, like candy.”
Tiny shapes flicked away from Brook’s peering face. “Fish! Little fish swimming in the walls!” And indeed there were: guppies and goldfish, sprat and smelt, angelfish and striped jerries and tin-fish with leaf-shaped bodies and dull scales. Jiggers with tails like trembling blue cottonweed floated up toward the roof; miniature catfish with mustaches as big as their bodies prowled the floorboards down below. Brook laughed with wonder.
“Net is going crazy!” Rope said. “He’s crawling up and down my arm like a big green spider.”
A lintel of pleached vines framed the doorway. Brook glanced back at Rope and knocked briskly, twice. They heard no sound, but jewelled fish scurried for cover as fat ripples spread from Brook’s knuckles. A slowing swell washed through the whole humped house. Jumbles of flowerlight danced on the encircling yew.
A human form came wavering toward them. Then the cottage door popped open so quickly, a silver bubble bulged from its top pane and went drifting off into the darkness.
A wizened old man with eyes the color of grass stood in the archway. He had a long, weedy mustache which drooped to his waist and mingled with his unkempt hair. His skin was wrinkled, but his hands were supple and unspotted. His fingers were twice as long as they ought to be, and trailed off into long, soft white nails that looked suspiciously like roots. Scarlet bean-pods and cobalt bamboo leaves quarreled around the hem of his green robe. “You are late!” he observed. “Come in!”
The wobbling door stood open to admit them. Water dripped from its frame of vines. Brook stepped in. Rope ducked and followed.
The old man cinched the belt of his robe. “You may call me Garden. I have been expecting you, but I did not know exactly when you would come. That is the difficulty with these things, you know: precision. Nothing flowers exactly when you wish it!”
Plants were everywhere inside Garden’s house. Large leafy plants rested on tables; small potted plants crowded the floor. Banks of flowers were stacked along the walls, blossoming beans clung to the furniture, and a pungent herbary dangled from the ceiling: sage and thyme, comfrey and marigold, chamomile and lemon balm and fennel that smelled like licorice.
Rope stared up in bewilderment. “How can you hang pots from a ceiling made of water?”
“Oh, that!” Garden waved his hand, accidentally slapping Brook with his trailing rootlets. “Once you get the roof to stay up, the rest is easy.”
He led them into a room in which several shrubs had been sculpted into armchairs. “My studio,” he said, gesturing vaguely at dozens of small paintings that bobbed on the water walls. “You will find it easier to sit in here.” The floor was made of dirt, and the whole chamber smelled of fresh vegetables.
A tub of grey stones sat along the back wall. Suddenly Brook bent forward. “They’re budding!” she gasped. And indeed, many of the stones had already burst into crystalline leaf.
“Ah, yes,” Garden remarked, scratching his mustache unhappily. “One of my experiments. Someone told me that the mountain people keep rock gardens, so I thought I would try my hand at it. You don’t have to water them much, but I still had a deuce of a time getting the things to grow.” He shrugged regretfully. “I must not have the knack.”
The islanders were speechless.
From under the biggest, fattest, most-worn chair peered a vivid scarlet flower. “Petal! Don’t be bold! We have guests,” Garden admonished, seating himself with a great creaking and crackling. “Please—make yourselves at home.”
Brook laughed out loud. “I have no idea what you are going to do to us, but I am very tired. I would love to sit down.”
Garden looked at her with ancient eyes. “Do to you? Let me assure you, young lady, I do not do anything. It is a point of particular pride.” He shook his head. “No, it is an error of judgment, a misunderstanding of time, that leads people to think of ‘doing’ things. Things,” he said, “do themselves.”
The scarlet flower peeped from beneath Garden’s chair. A neck like a rose stem skulked into view. Rope suddenly realized that Net was no longer wrapped around his forearm.
“Let me make one thing clear: I am not eccentric.” Garden held up his left hand, looking ruefully at the long, trailing nails. “I fingerpaint. I took it up as a way of taking up fingers, if you see what I mean. If I don’t keep them busy, the rascals go to root.” He waggled his hand at them, making his long white fingers shiver. “I was afraid I might have to learn to paint with my toes as well, or perhaps play the tambra, but in the end I decided slippers were more convenient.” And he propped up his feet on a stooping shrub, displaying a truly splendid pair of black velvet slippers, embroidered with living flowers that oozed candy-colored light.
Petal had now crept entirely into the open. At the base of her stem scuttled five fleshy roots, like the fingers of a pale hand. She slunk behind the trunk of Garden’s chair, and then disappeared amongst the flowerpots against the far wall.
Rope wondered if Net could possibly be lurking around his leg.
“I should explain myself.” Garden hastily pulled up his fingers, which had begun to burrow into the earthen floor. He chuckled, making his mustache shiver. “I am an arbormancer. In my groves mute Nature and I meet on an almost equal footing. I grow things here as my intuition prompts and look to see the world’s patterns reflected in their branchings. Is the world changing more, or less, or staying the same? Are the seasons in balance? Is this world coming closer to the Smoke, or are the two drifting apart?”
Garden brooded upon them until Rope squirmed. “Well, which is it?”
Garden laughed. “You are direct, you islanders. When daunted, the people of the forest become only more polite and attentive and oblique. They search for hidden motives.” He snorted. “Well, young man, the world is changing more, the seasons are not in balance, and the Smoke shows it.”
Brook frowned. “Surely you have that the wrong way round. What happens here reflects what is happening in the Mist.”
Garden shrugged. “I see no reason to give the Heroes priority. The world is a One Twist Ring: we affect the Mist, the Mist affects the real world. Stories from one get told in the other.”
A wave skittered suddenly up the wall beside Brook, sending a school of flower-colored fish shooting to the ceiling. There was a hissing, spitting noise, followed by several thumps and a protracted scrabble. A slim bean-planter bucked twice and then toppled heavily on its side, spilling out a pile of dirt and a tangle of struggling vines. Net had a squeeze on Petal; she scraped his fibers with her thorns.
“Net! Quit that!”
“Petal—don’t be bold!”
Rope and Garden dove in and broke up the fight, but not before Petal had given Rope a couple of good scratches.
Shaking his head, Garden brought out a pretty enamelled jar. Petal cowered, laying her abject blossom on the old man’s arm and folding her thorns flat. “No no no!” the ancient wizard said. “You were warned! A few hours of potting will teach you a lesson!”
Petal squirmed wildly, lashing her scarlet head in desperation.
Rope cleared his throat. “It was as much Net’s fault—”
“Nonsense!” Garden cried, shaking his old head so his long mustaches swept the ground. “Don’t you go making apologies for her, the little weed! I was there when she frightened the fish yesterday, wasn’t I? I warned her then what the consequence of further boldness would be!” With a practiced hand he popped her into her pot and scooped in handfuls of dirt from the overturned bean-planter. “No: she must learn, and this will teach her!”
Petal stiflened, then swooned dramatically over the edge of her blue-and-yellow prison. Garden looked at her affectionately. “Little fraud,” he whispered.
She quivered with a moment’s indignation, then remembered to lie still.
“Too late! You have been unmasked. Now do your penance like a good plant, with no sulking, and perhaps I will let you out early.” Petal squirmed with dejection, and then dangled listlessly over the side of her pot.
Net, meanwhile, retreated up Rope’s forearm.
“Interesting creature. You made it from the Mist, did you not? There is a nice little One Twist Ring: a piece of Mist hardened by a real-world person’s story.” Garden righted his planter and tramped the remaining dirt into the earthen floor. “Pardon me! I have been remiss. You must be hungry as well as tired.”
He fed them cherry pie and green-onion cakes, washed down with glass after glass of celery water.
“Now,” Garden said, dabbing at his mustache. “Where was I?” His fingers had begun to burrow into the ground; he grimaced with annoyance and pulled them up. “A great Fire rages perpetually on the southern borders of this country, sending up a Smoke that veils the Heroes’ world. While your Mist has been moving away for as long as men can remember, our Fire is moving in.
“Over this long summer of drought, it has marched north as fast as a conquering army. The Palm lands are now only ash and memories. Parts of the Rubber and Teak holdings are gone as well, and still the flames speed north. The wind has aided them, and many have died fighting the blaze.”
“I heard a story once,” Brook said. “There was a Spark in it. The forest people made a bargain with Sere, I think, but the Spark stayed on behind . . .”
“Exactly!” Garden stroked his long, trailing mustache with his long, trailing fingers. “The Emperor believes that those who counsel moderation are wasting southern lives. He has flung his armies northward, to find a new home for his people. Fear drives him on, fear that the Fire will be too fast for him, fear that Bronze Cut and the moderates who have befriended his son will seize power and take the easy ways out, trying half-measures while the Fire marches on the capital.”
“Is he right?”
“Who are you asking? Me? I can barely fingerpaint!” Garden shrugged. “Certainly the Fire is coming in. Will it overrun the Empire? Would it do so if the army were sent south, to fight it, instead of north, to flee from it? Can the people of the forest ever live apart from the trees? I do not know the answers to these questions. The Emperor thinks he does.”
“So you think he’s wrong,” Rope ventured.
Garden shook his head. “No, no. I just don’t care for the world he is making, right or not.”
“We saw a play,” Brook said slowly. “Earlier today. It was about a father and a son, and the son was drawn to a wolf who was like the Enchanter, and then they set the screen on fire. It seemed to be put on for the sake of this one Bronze.”
Garden’s trailing eyebrows rose. “Was he dressed all in gold silk, this Bronze, with a scarlet slash across the chest?”
“Yes! He seemed . . . He was like a storm-cloud that you know is full of lightning.”
Garden nodded. “Bronze Cut! Young Hilt never could resist him.” The old arbomancer gazed sadly out his silver walls toward the palace. “Like the people of the air, Bronzes are not born; they make themselves. Hilt is only a plain Rowan, but he is thought to be a key to his father’s heart. Bronze Cut is the leader of a moderate faction within the Arbor. He has wooed Hilt with friendship and flattery, aiming to take the throne for himself when the Emperor can no longer hold it.” Garden’s face was grim. “I think this play was meant by the Emperor to send Bronze Cut his strongest rebuke, his deepest threat. He will kill the boy, to make it clear that none are safe who stand against him.”
“Kill his own son!” Brook cried. “Then what we heard in Delta is true. The Emperor is mad.”
“Mad? That I cannot judge. Certainly he is caught in a story bigger than himself—which may be all that madness is.” Garden gazed shrewdly at Brook from under his dangling eyebrows. “Unless I miss my guess, you too are part of a larger story. Am I not right?”
As he spoke he reached out with his long white fingers and flipped up the cuff of Brook’s shirt to reveal the blue Witness Knot coiled around her wrist.
“Oh, this,” Brook said. “This is nothing! Just a—”
“A message!” Garden beamed. “Oh my. I do love messages. It has been so long since anyone bothered to send me one!”
“Are you a Witness?” Rope asked dubiously.
“Of a sort, of a sort!” Garden leaned forward, clasping his hands so that his long nails twined around themselves like sloppy wickerwork. “Clearly your Witness must have sent you to me in the hope that I could help you with some problem. I do not make any promises, of course. In fact, I can almost guarantee failure, because as I remarked before, I do not do anything. But I am pleased to be asked!”
“Er, we really appreciate that,” Rope said, “but I think the message was meant for the Witness of Delta, actually. We were supposed to tell her about the woodlanders invading, but it was too late by the time we got there. Now we are here and we have done everything we can do, so—”
“I have been twinned,” Brook said.
Garden sank slowly back into his chair. “Mm. Oh, dear.” He reached out and patted her gently on the knee. “Yes, I expect that was it.”
“I don’t think so,” Rope said. “Jo has done everything we ever asked of her. Rescued us in Delta—risked her life to face the Emperor! If she was going to do something bad to you, she could have done so long ago. I think she has earned our trust.”
Brook’s eyes never left Garden. “Can you help me?”
The old enchanter sighed and looked at Rope. “Of course it does no good always to believe the worst of people; that merely brings the worst to pass. But a twinning, now . . . A twinning is a serious thing. A knot not easily untied, as your people say.”
Garden closed his green eyes and pondered. The ends of his long mustaches swayed gently with his breath, and the tips of his long white fingers twined amongst themselves as he thought.
At last he opened his eyes. “There are two kinds of story and two kinds of time. Think of a tree,” he said. “Each year happens in Mist-time. The rain comes, the bud forms, leaves blossom and flower and fruit! Then autumn arrives, the leaves dry, and wither, and drop away. The story is done.
“But underground the tree’s story goes on and on, year after year, following each new twisting root. Things of the Mist-time are stories of the leaf; things of the real world are stories of the root.”
He reached out and tapped the Witness Knot. “Your Witness has made the heart of this design a one twist ring. That knot always has both a Mist-time story and a real-world story in it: the rise and fall of a leaf, for instance, and the root’s slow, tangled, difficult tale.
“Now, as for your twin! There are two ways to untie a knot, even a one twist ring. One way is to follow it out, slowly unravelling every line to its end. The other way”—and here Garden looked gravely at Brook—“is to cut it.”
“Cut it!” Rope cried. “You mean kill Jo? After all she has done for us?”
Garden shrugged. “I do not advise one way or the other—but yes. This is the way twin stories usually end. One survives—and one twin is killed, or thrown into the Mist.”
Rope stared angrily from Garden to Brook.
Brook was afraid. She knew, as Rope could not, how great a risk she would take by letting Jo live. But something was flowing in her, something serene and strong and brave as Sage Creek when it made its jump over the bluff and ran past the houses of Clouds End.
“Jo did not kill me,” Brook said at last. “She did not throw me into the Mist. She let me live, that first day.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to kill her.” She smiled at Rope. “After all, that would be the story ending, and I have never believed in stories.”
Rope sighed, relieved.
“Are you sure now?” Garden asked. “You will be taking a great risk if you choose to follow this knot out to its end.”
“No, I am not sure,” Brook admitted. “I am terrified. But I cannot kill her in cold blood. If that is the only way, I will not do it. If ours becomes a, a root story, I think I can be the stronger twin. I have Rope, and Shale, and Shandy and Clouds End to hold me.”
Garden nodded. “Good. You must be grounded! Those of us the magic touches must put our roots down where we can. I took to trees; their crowns converse ever with the wind, but leaf, blossom, and bole are anchored firmly to the ground.”
“Aren’t you afraid of becoming too . . . treelike?”
The old man looked fretfully at his drooping fingers. “I am not hurrying the event! No, I relish my humanity. But as the years go by, and spring leads to autumn, and autumn to spring again, I shape the trees to my will. And year after year, I suppose, they shape me also to theirs. We grow alike as the years go by, as old husbands grow like their old wives. There is so much shared history, you understand. You make so many choices in your youth and they seem so free—but by the time you get to be older, each thing you do has the weight of your whole life behind it.”
He looked up and smiled sleepily at them. “And so I sit here, weeding my little garden even while the Fire sweeps down on us. But you! You are young! You should be going now. Back to the Arbor, back to your island! It is time for you to leave leaf stories behind; yours is a root story now. A story of real life.”
“So soon?” Rope said. “I was just getting used to all these marvels and adventures!”
Garden stood and shooed them through the house and out to his silver door. “Oh, I think you will find that real life has every bit as many marvels and adventures,” he said. “But they are so big they can be easily overlooked.”
He pressed an onion cake into Brook’s hand and a poppy-seed biscuit into Rope’s, and then pointed to the yew tunnel that had brought them to his house. “You will find that little path will lead you to the Arbor, and your home at last. Back to your roots.”
As they walked away he waved, and his trailing white fingertips splashed gently on the surface of his silver house, sending ripples through the walls, and scattering the jumbled fish.