The Land of the Silver Apples

earth.

It was her small magic. It wasn’t as impressive as the Bard’s large magic, for he could call up storms and drive people mad, but it might be just as important. Jack hadn’t thought of that before. Pega’s candle, gathered patiently in field and meadow, had its own quiet power. It, too, had drawn fire from the earth.

He blinked his eyes. A pale, blue light hung in the distance. The hair stood up on his arms. He felt for his staff.

“Is it a ghost?” Pega whispered.

The blue light neither advanced nor retreated. It simply waited. Is Brutus dead? Has his spirit come back to haunt us? thought Jack. But, no, if it were Brutus’ ghost, it would be moaning. The boy smiled in spite of himself. The light didn’t move, but it became brighter. All at once Jack understood what he was seeing.

“It’s the moon! I’m such a fool!”

“What?” Pega said drowsily.

“We’re there! That’s the entrance. Come on, Pega. You can make these last few steps.” He pulled her up and half dragged her along the sand. When they got to the light, Jack saw it was falling from a hole at the top of a heap of rocks. That was why he hadn’t seen it before. The moon had to be in exactly the right place to shine down.

“You go. Tell me if it’s nice.” Pega collapsed on the sand.

“I know it’s nice. Come on!”

“Too tired.” She sighed.

Jack knew he couldn’t carry her. “I can’t leave you here for a knucker to find.”

“A knucker?”

“That thing we saw in the cave.”

“That,” said Pega with slightly more energy, “was a giant bedbug.”

“It was a tick,” said Jack, who hated ticks.

“It was a bedbug. A bedbug! I’ve seen thousands of them, only not so… huge.” Pega’s voice was edged with panic.

Jack thought for a moment. “There could be hundreds of them down here.”

Pega grabbed Jack’s arm. “You’re making that up.”

“It makes sense that there’d be more than one of them. Everything comes in pairs, and some creatures have a lot of babies.”

Pega pulled herself up. “You’ll have to help me,” she said tensely. “I don’t know if I can make it, but I’d rather fall and break my neck than…” She didn’t finish, but Jack understood what she meant.

The rock pile wasn’t stable. More than once a boulder shifted and sent a cascade of dirt and pebbles over them. More than once Jack and Pega had to cling to the side while they waited to see whether the whole pile would come down.

But at last they struggled out onto a steep hillside. They lay panting and stunned under a sky strewn with stars. A full moon hung overhead and painted the rocks with a lovely blue light. From below, where giant trees stretched their branches over unseen dark glades and meadows, came the music of a rushing stream.

The air was surprisingly cold, though its freshness made up for it. Jack had been in the fug of bat guano so long, he’d forgotten how good clean air could be. He breathed in long drafts of it, but as delightful as it was, it of course couldn’t take the place of water. “It isn’t much farther,” he whispered to Pega.

Jack saw that they were halfway down a vast rock slide. An entire cliff had collapsed, sending stones and dirt all the way to the edge of a deep forest. The boy and girl slid down on loose gravel, occasionally coming to rest at giant boulders that stuck out like plums in a pudding. But it was far easier going down than up. The moonlight shone all around with a dreamlike radiance, so bright the hillside seemed to glow.

At the bottom they came to a narrow strip of meadowland before the trees.

“Ohhh,” said Pega, sinking her scorched feet into grass. Buttercups, oxeye daisies, and primroses spread out in drifts, though their colors were hidden in the silvery light. Beyond, complete darkness loomed, and in that darkness the water sang.

“Do you think there’re wolves?” whispered Pega, pressing against Jack.

?It doesn?t make any difference. We have to go,? the boy said. They edged through the cool grass, Jack in front with his staff at the ready. He heard nothing except the stream, yet he felt a watchfulness in the air. I wish I had a knife, he thought, but his knife had vanished with the rest of their supplies in the fire.

“It’s so dark,” Pega murmured.

Jack thought about shouting for Brutus—he must have come this way—but the watchfulness made him hesitate.

Only a dim echo of moonlight penetrated beyond the edge of the forest. Roots snaked around humps of moss, and branches twisted awkwardly. They seemed, to Jack’s mind, to have frozen into place and were waiting for him to look away before moving again. He listened for the usual night sounds—frogs, crickets, or even an owl muttering as it glided after prey. There was nothing except the stream. “Well, here goes,” Jack said.

He advanced carefully with Pega clinging to his arm. “We’ll never find each other again if we get separated,” she whispered. Jack thought it unlikely they’d get separated. She was holding him so tightly, he was sure there’d be a bruise in the morning. Once the light faded, they had to feel their way along with only the sound of water to guide them. Jack tripped over a root, and they both blundered into stinging nettles.

“Ah!” Jack cried, pitching forward. Pega’s firm grip saved him. The ground was slippery with mud.

“There’s got to be water,” she moaned. Jack inched ahead on his knees. He saw a glimmer of light and recklessly tore away vines.

“Oh, sweet saints,” Pega said reverently. The trees parted to show a rushing stream, marked here and there by slicks of moonlight. It flowed noisily over rocks and on into a broad channel, a dark presence slicing the forest in two.

Jack and Pega slid down the bank as fast as they could go and landed in the water up to their waists. The current was deeply cold. Jack didn’t care. He drank until his head ached and his stomach cramped, but the water took away the pain in his feet.

Finally, they crawled back up the muddy bank and snuggled together like a pair of foxes in a tree hollowed by age. They were wet, cold, and very, very hungry, but the sound of water sent them to sleep as surely as if they were in the Bard’s house with a fire snapping on the hearth. They slept through the night and the dawn as well. It was mid-morning before they stirred and saw the sun sending narrow beams of light into the forest outside.

“Where are we?” said Pega, shading her eyes.

“Here. Wherever here is,” Jack answered, yawning. The air shivered with tiny midges dancing in the light that penetrated the forest. The stream tumbled nearby, and a carpet of wild strawberries covered the ground around the hollow tree. “Food!” Jack cried.

They picked the tiny fruit as fast as they could. “Mmf! This is good! More! More!!” Juice ran down Pega’s chin and dripped onto her dress.

“You know,” said Jack, sitting back after the first ecstasy of filling his stomach, “it’s awfully early for strawberries.”

“Who cares?” Pega wiped her mouth with her arm.

“It isn’t even May Day. There should only be flowers.”

“Then we’re lucky,” declared Pega. “Brother Aiden would call this a miracle.” She began gathering strawberries again.

Jack was uneasy. Several things bothered him. The fire he’d called up in the tunnel had come too readily—not that he wasn’t grateful. He didn’t want to find out what knuckers ate for dinner when they couldn’t find bats. But in the village fire-making was difficult. You had to clear your mind and call to the life force. You couldn’t just snap your fingers.

The moonlight, too, had been odd. He’d been too tired to care last night, but now it came back to him. Everything seemed to glow. And now the strawberries. Not one of them was green or worm-eaten or overripe. “This place is like Jotunheim,” he said.

“From what you’ve told me, it’s a lot nicer than Jotunheim.”