I was brought before the Council of Maestros: Butia, Wollemia, Hamamalis, and Drypetes. Butia wasn’t allowed a vote. They thought her too emotionally involved, though I could have disabused them of that notion if only they’d asked me. Nothing emotional about her, and certainly no emotional involvement on my part. Not anymore.
I was charged, convicted, and sentenced in a single hour. I’d broken two of the three commandments. Wollemia told the council about my alleged hoarding of food during the famine. The severity with which I’d supposedly violated the first commandment—take only what you need—was sufficient on its own to punish me with banishment from the canopy. But combined with the second commandment—all spirits are equal—my sentence was to be much worse. According to the council, I’d broken the second commandment twice: I loosed an arrow upon a forest creature as a non-hunter, and I caused the death of another climber. Mangrove.
The vote was unanimous. I was not to be exiled; that punishment was too lenient for a murderer. It was decided that I must be sacrificed to cleanse the canopy, my actions too offensive for mere banishment. All spirits were not equal after all, especially if the spirit in question belongs to a murderer. The irony was not lost on me: I’d been convicted of feeding Mangrove to the Great Ones and my punishment was to be fed to the Great Ones.
The council house on the north side of Bough Two was the only shanty besides the clinic that had a locked door. I never understood the purpose of the lock before, but now that I’d been sentenced, it made perfect sense. This is where they imprisoned criminals before feeding them to the Great Ones.
We had all heard the story about a mass feeding, a time when a brazen few endangered the survival of the many and paid for their transgression with their lives. Like the story of the cull, this story was handed down from one generation to the next. Like the story of the cull, I assumed it was a myth.
No one had been executed in my lifetime, not in my mother’s lifetime, not in my grandparent’s lifetime. I would be the first punishment feeding in living memory.
It had all happened so fast, Cedrus and his crew hauling me away, the rapid assemblage of the council, the charges against me listed, and my fate announced before I realized what was happening to me. I’d been mourning and confused, sleepwalking. Nothing like a death sentence to wake you right up.
No one had spoken up for me, to tell my side of events. Neither my mother nor my father, not Sorbus or Wingnut. The climbers dragged my mother away yelling and fighting. At least she’d tried. But there was nothing to be done. The council had voted: No more blight in the canopy.
Immediately after uttering my death sentence, Wollemia turned her back on me and exited the council house. As far as she was concerned, I was dead already. Never let a silly detail like a beating heart prove otherwise. Butia shook her head at me and followed Wollemia out of the door without saying a word. My own grandmother. Compared to her cruel silence, having my hands and feet bound by Hamamalis and the door locked by Drypetes was a mercy. My time in the canopy would end at dawn. No way to empty my bladder. No water to drink. The final insults against my body before killing me.
The joke was on them. I was already dead.
My heart had died twice: once with the death of my brother, and again with the death of Mangrove. Tomorrow my heart would die a third and final time, along with the rest of my body.
I listened in the darkness. This was my last night to listen to the nocturnal creatures, the whoosh of the wind through the fir needles, the creaking of branch against branch, the popping and clicking of carpenter ants in the wall. Now that my life was to be stolen from me, I regretted all of the thoughts I’d ever had of jumping and every moment I’d pitied myself.
I regretted all the times I’d avoided Mangrove.
A rustle at the door, some metallic clicks, and the door to my prison opened. A body entered, the flash as a flint was struck, and then a taper burned in the center of the room, lighting up the interior and my father’s face.
“Yew!”
“Shhh. Don’t need any nosy climbers hearing us.”
My father, my good-for-nothing, alcohol-addled, loser of a father, had found a way to see me before I was executed.
“Stop crying, Ostrya. You’re not dying tomorrow.” He untied my hands and feet, muttering to himself. “Lawless savages. Tying up my little girl. Treating her worse than an animal.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Breaking you out, of course.” He crouched down and began picking a lock on a standing metal box. The lockbox was like the medical supply cabinet in the clinic but at least twice the size and made of metal, not wood. I heard a click and Yew chuckled softly.
“Never been a lock made I couldn’t pick.” His gaze flickered over my feet. “These should fit.” He held two heavy leather blocks laced with thin pieces of rope. I watched as he turned them upside down and slapped them on the bottom. “Always check them for spiders or other biting creatures before you put them on your feet. Don’t look so confused. These are boots. The earth dwellers wear them.”
So many questions … I didn’t know where to begin. I started with the boots in my hand. “What … why … how … what’s the point of breaking in to show me these … these … boots?”
“What’s the point? What’s the point! Kid, you’re getting out of here, out of this canopy. If I’d had any guts in my whole rotten life, I would have gotten you out of here years ago. But no way are these hypocrites, this council, killing my daughter. Not when she can climb like you can climb! You’re getting out of here and this is the gear you need to do it.”
I poked my toes tentatively into the holes at the top of the boots and pulled until my foot rested inside. I wiggled my toes, pressing my feet against the heavy leather on all sides. “Why do I need coverings for my feet? They’ll prevent me from feeling the bark.”
“You’ll need them so you can wear the gaffs. Don’t put the boots on yet, though. Carry them until you get where you’re going.”
I pulled my foot out of the boot, tied the laces of both boots together, and hung the heavy leather boots around my neck. Yew gave me two strange looking pieces of equipment made of a heavy fiber tube connected to metal spikes. “These are your gaffs. Only use them when you’re on the trunk. You put the boots on first before buckling these over the top, like this.” He held one over my foot and said, “The brace goes against your inside calf like this, the spike on the inside. This is called a buckle. You slide one end through the other, like so.”
“But these are sharp. They’ll stab the Great Ones!”
“Don’t worry, you won’t hurt them. Their bark is plenty thick. These gaffs were used by the First Climbers to ascend. The spikes never penetrate the cambium; the outer layer is far too thick. You’ll need them so you can descend. You’ll never get down thousands of feet of trunk without them.”
“Down? You want me to go down?”
“Of course. Why do you think I gave you the boots? What do you think I’m doing here? Don’t you want to see what’s down there, on the forest floor? Haven’t you always wondered?”
How did my father, so long absent from my life, know this about me? I was sure I’d never told him, and I knew Mangrove never would have said anything—
Mangrove.
I couldn’t allow my mind to go there. Not now. Later, after I’d escaped. His crooked smile, warm brown eyes, curly head, soft lips—I swallowed all of the images, buried them deep in the acid of my churning stomach.
I focused on my unlikely rescuer. Yew. Too many unanswered questions, too much information to unpack, and no time. “All of this belonged to the First Climbers?”
“Yes. This entire cabinet is full of their original climbing gear. You’ll need this, too—a saddle.” He handed me another leather and fiber garment with metal rings on the side. “I’d like you to put it on now. One leg through each side, yes, like that. Tighten it around your hips. Comfortable? Good. Your safety line goes up top through these rings.” He pointed to the front rings. “Your flip line attaches to these side ones. You wrap the lines around the trunk like a lasso and hook yourself to the tree with the safety line. You thrust your body up and down with the flip line, adjusting your safety line as you go down. Got it?”
I nodded, amazed that this gear had been hidden away in the council house all this time and stunned that Yew knew how to use it. He poked deeper through the cabinet before pulling out a stiff, heavy rope. “That’s your flip line. No safety lines here as far as I can tell. Probably used them for bridges early on.”
He rested on his heels and looked at me. “Pseudotsuga’s balls. I forgot rope. I don’t know who we’ll steal it from—”
My rope in the gingko tree. “Don’t worry about that. I have a secret stash.”
“That’s my girl.” He grinned.
“How did you know all of this was here? Or how to use it?”
“They haven’t told you yet?”
“Who? Told me what?”
“You’re in Pseudotsuga’s line. You and your mom and your grandfather. The council passes it down to all of the descendants of the First Council of Maestros.”
“You mean Mom knows about this stuff?”
“Back in the day, I wasn’t the only one who liked the cannabis. Got your mom baked one time and she let a few things slip. I figured out the rest on my own.”
“How? By breaking in? Picking locks?”
He smirked. “What can I say? It’s a gift. But this isn’t the only thing I discovered.”
“Yeah? What else?”
He bit his lip and looked at me a moment. He shook his head and said, “Naw. There’s no point. You’ll be out of here before morning. It won’t matter.”
“Tell me! What else don’t I know?”
He bent close and whispered, two conspirators in the middle of a dark night. “They’ve got books in here. Everything you ever wanted to know about the before times. About the earthwalkers. About the climbing gear. And The Book of Silvanus—”
“So? Who cares about The Book of Silvanus? They teach all of us that duff, those lies. The end of the world. Cannibals. Snow.”
He quirked his lips. “What’s this, Ostrya? You doubt the almighty book? Perhaps you are like your old man after all.”
“Wait—you don’t think it’s true either?”
“I don’t know a thing about the world down there. Don’t know if earthwalkers are still alive or ate each other long ago. What I do know is this—there are pages we’ve never seen locked up in here. Pages written by the First Climbers. Books written before the First Climbers. So much to read, so much we don’t know.”
“So that’s curious because?”
“Why does the council keep all of this knowledge to themselves? What do Butia, Hamamalis, Drypetes, and Wollemia know that we don’t? They teach us about oxygen saturation levels, the lifecycle of an orb weaver, the protein content of a squirrel. What aren’t they teaching us?”
“I don’t know. The truth? They’ve been lying to us for years.”
The laces of the heavy boots cut into my neck. I moved the string to a fresh spot. I didn’t care about any of this. I hadn’t believed The Book of Silvanus for years. To find out now that we didn’t know something, or that some of us didn’t know, only confirmed my disbelief. Butia’s involvement didn’t even surprise me. Nothing surprised me. I was ready to be gone.
“You’re right. They don’t share the books precisely because they don’t want us to know the truth. Ever since the First Climbers, the council has handed down secrets from one generation to the next. These books are just the tip of the conspiracy.”
Yew’s eyes gleamed, pupils huge in his gray face, and I realized he was drunk. I’d briefly glimpsed the father I once had. For the first time in years, he’d helped me as a father should. He’d taught me a few things and we shared a moment, but abuse of drugs and booze had addled his brain. He was paranoid and suspicious. And my time was limited.
“I need to go.”
He looked away and when he turned back to face me, the candlelight glinted off his wet eyes. For the first time in eight years, I reached out and hugged my father.
“I love you, baby girl. My fierce climber. You’ll never know how much.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” I grabbed the climbing gear and didn’t look back.