I looked. It was what it was, a silvery fragment with no ... Wait. The twiggy finger touched it. The forest touched it. Touched it and it swam with light. A pattern. A circle of black. Inside that, a circle of light. Upon that, a design of such brilliance it made my eyes hurt. A cross—not a regular one, more like a letter “Y” with a center post through it. No, flatter than that. The top branch was forked at the edge. The brilliance ran through the dark circle. Outside the dark circle was a gray mixture, grains of dark and light mixed, swimming together.
It pointed to the brilliant design with its very pointed finger, then reached down to touch my foot. The voice came like a tiny wind. “Same. Uncover it, Star-eye. Fix it.”
And then it was gone. Oh, I don’t mean it left. There were tumbled branches and fragments of moss upon the floor, still shivering from the suddenness of their collapse. Outside something huge and ominous gathered, listening with all its attention, but there was no longer anything for it to listen to. I put the fragment back around my neck, then slowly, slowly fed the leafy branches to the fire. Even this, my teachers would have told me, has meaning. When you think an event is ended, look past it. The things that happen immediately following—or sometimes, just before—have great meaning. Fire, I mused. Branches to the fire.
I went to the window, pulled the makeshift curtain to one side, only a crack, drawing back as though stung. Something cold had lashed at me. I replaced the stones and crept to the fire, first humming, then singing to drown out that feeling of terrible disquiet. The song wasn’t much. A love song. Come to my fireside and shelter, my love, and so forth and so on. Gradually the silence turned to evening sound: birdsong, small animals calling, the rush of a quick rain. When only the sound of the forest was there, I took the rain cape down from the window, wrapped myself in it, and went to sleep. Just before doing so, however, I took one of the charred branches and drew on the stone hearth the design the forest had showed me in my fragment. I wanted to remember it in the morning, to look at it again in the light.
When I woke, bunwit and tree rat were there with breakfast, both of them stepping quietly aside from the design I had drawn, bringing my attention to it with their feet. Well, I had remembered it correctly. A radiant three-branched tree, the top branch forked, set on a circle of light, surrounded by a circle of dark. Outside of which was the mixture of light and dark. I marked it in with the charred stick and stood looking at it, chewing on a stalk of rootcane. It was sweet and crisp, gnawed only slightly with bunwit teeth marks. Which was still far better than having to dig my own.
The design meant something. What it meant, I didn’t know. But the forest had said. “Fix it.”
Uncover it?
Well, so much was clear. The gray slime that Bloster had sprayed at the edge of the forest was obviously part of what had to be fixed. In so doing, we would uncover the forest and fix it, in a sense. If the gray circle were broken ... Wait. I looked at the design again. If the dark circle represented the slimy circle around the forest, then the light circle represented the forest itself. And by breaking the gray circle, the forest would not be cut off any longer. The rest of the design could be deciphered later.
“A way out, ninny,” I said to myself. “This forest is shut in, disconnected, and it needs a way out. All right, then. Try to figure a way to get rid of that filthy gray slush they’ve sprayed all over.”
Bunwit stiffened and whimpered. Off in the trees I heard a snorting whomp, whomp. Centipig was tearing up the shrubbery again. “And at the same time,” I promised myself with determination but no idea at all how to begin. “No. First we deal with that pig.”
15
We spent five days following the centipig, trying to find out where it went, what it ate, when it drank. The results were very discouraging. It went everywhere, ate everything, and drank every time it crossed a stream. In the five days, it crossed its own trail a hundred times but did not establish any habits whatsoever. Trapping a thing that size without any habits one can count on would be impossible. This caused me some tears of frustration and a sleepless night or two until I thought of Dedrina-Lucir. They had trapped the Basilisk by digging a pit for it to fall into as it chased something else. So if we could get the pig to run after something, we could perhaps put a pit in its way.
Next day we tried to get centipig to chase the bunwit, or tree rat, or even me. I had the most luck, but even that couldn’t be called successful. It would come after me, eyes burning, tusks flashing, but the minute something else moved, bird or beast, it would forget me and take off after the other thing. I tried standing in front of it, waving my arms and shouting insults, but it merely stared at me, unable to decide whether I or the bird flitting across the clearing made the most appetizing target. Whatever monster shop they had made it in, they had forgotten to put in any brains.
I learned when it did chase me that one way to escape was to run downhill. Going downhill, its legs got tangled and it would sometimes fall over. None of this helped, however. The thing was too big to tie up. There may be ropes strong enough somewhere, but they were not where I could get them in
