“I make the oath.” And from her proceeded a tiny ripple, barely visible in the twilight, but significant: the splash of truth.
“Then will I tell thee what may please thee not,” Brown said. “It be with relief I tell, for the secret consumes me. Yet, an thou have patience, needs must I tell it mine own way.”
“Then ride me while I graze,” Neysa said. “My patience be endless then.” She assumed her natural form.
Brown mounted her, and began to talk. Neysa listened, and let her mind clothe the narration with the details she knew. It was a tale that should have amazed her, yet somehow did not, for it answered much that would have puzzled her had she thought to ponder it.
Brown was a child of eight when she ran away from home. That was not her name then, but her name didn’t matter. It wasn’t because her mother beat her; all the children of her village were beaten as a matter of policy. It wasn’t that she often went hungry; that too was common, when the goblins raided the village stores. It wasn’t that her father intended to betroth her to a fat merchant’s son; that was a satisfactory placement as such things went. It could have been that the gang of boys was making her take off her clothes and do things with them she neither understood nor enjoyed; but that happened to any girl they caught; and hardly a girl escaped at least one such session before she came of age to marry. Some had been caught many times, because their houses were beyond the lighted fringe of the village, and the boys lurked in ambush. Some even claimed to like it, though Brown suspected they were merely covering the hurt with bravado. Brown made no bones about not liking it, but it didn’t matter; if they caught her, they did it. She had become canny, so had been caught only three times. She often walked home through the woods, because she liked the trees, and the trees liked her. When the boys tried to ambush her there, a tree would arrange to snap a dropped branch under one of their feet, alerting her. Then she would reroute, and avoid them, and if they set out in direct pursuit she would shinny up a tree, knowing how to do it without getting scratched. If they tried to climb after her, they would snag seemingly by accident on the twig stubs and thorns, and the tree-ants would bite them. The trees were her friends, and the trees were not the boys’ friends; that made all the difference.
No, none of these things drove her out. It was when she started making things from the wood of the trees that the trouble came. Because she liked trees, she liked wood, and the trees did not mind if she took their deadwood and worked with it. She made herself a doll from an old curly knot, and it kept her company at night; they told each other stories. She fashioned a pretend dog from a twisted fragment of a stump whose roots projected like legs and a tail. She had always wanted a dog, but never had one. So she adjusted the legs, and used charcoal to paint fur, and affixed old buttons for eyes, and wooden pegs for ears, and splinters for teeth, and she had her pet. She named it Woodruff.
It was when she started taking Woodruff for walks that the trouble began. The boys ambushed her, and Woodruff growled them off. When that got around, her father got nervous. He tried to throw the dog out, but it hid under the bed and growled. He used a broom to push it out, and kicked the dog, and Woodruff bit him on the leg. So he smashed it to pieces with the axe. Brown came home from lessons and found the sundered pieces. That was when she ran away, blinded by tears, taking only her doll.
But it was evening when she left, and night in the forest. The trees did not seem nearly as friendly at night, and it was cold. Her strait, as Neysa was later to put it, was dire. She had either to return home and take her punishment, which would be horrendous, or continue on, and perhaps perish in the wilderness. She could hear big animals prowling, and was terrified.
The animals were wolves, who ranged these parts and did not get along with the villagers. But they were werewolves, and Brown was obviously a child in distress. A bitch changed to human form and took her in. When they learned that Brown had run away and would die rather than go back to the village, because her brute father had killed her pet dog, the other wolves became more friendly. But though they could succor her for a night or two, they could not keep her. She was not a were, and would not be able to hunt with the Pack. Their leader, Kurrelgyre, was in exile because he had refused to slay his aging sire in the werewolf way, and things were in disarray already.
But there was someone who might be able to take her in. He was the Brown Adept, who lived in a wooden castle not far off. “Adept!” she cried, terrified anew. Everyone knew how terrible the Adepts were.
The wolves assured her that this one was kind to animals, as was the Blue Adept. He would not hurt her, and if she did not want to stay, he might help her go to the Blue Adept, who they understood had a beautiful and kind wife, the Lady Blue.
The huge golems were a forbidding sight, but they let the bitch and girl pass. The Brown Adept was a gnarled old man, his long brown beard turning white. “But I don’t know the first thing about taking care of a child!” he protested.
Brown, catching on that he was a woodworker, turned positive. “I can feed myself, if there be food,” she said. “I will be not much bother, honest, if thou dost mind not my playing with thy wood dolls.”
Wood dolls? The golems were huge and ugly, a sight to frighten any normal child. The Brown Adept reconsidered. Perhaps he could let her stay for a few days.
That was the start of a friendship that quickly became an apprenticeship. The Brown Adept recognized in the child the talent to work magically with wood. He had no family and there was no one to take his place. He had thought that his Demesnes would simply fade away after his death; now he saw that they could continue. He showed the girl how to fashion the wooden golems, the way their bodies were pegged together so that they could move without falling apart. He showed her how to supervise the existing golems in their foraging for the proper kinds of wood. No live tree was ever taken, but a freshly dead one was harvested as soon as possible, so that the wood would not rot.
Soon she made another wooden dog—only instead of adapting this one from a gnarled stump, she made it from solid wood, with strong and jointed pegs. He showed her how to make the dog heel at her command, so that it would not bite anyone unless she told it to. As for her doll—that had been his first clue that she had the necessary talent, because it had taken him years to make his golems talk, yet she had done it with her first one.
It was a great time, for a year. But the Adept was old and growing older. He had been hanging on to his health with the help of amulets he had traded from the Red Adept, but even these could not keep him going forever. “I am going to die,” he told her. “Thou must be the Brown Adept. Do not let others know I be gone, until thou hast grown into thy full strength, else they may try to destroy these Demesnes in thy weakness.”
“But I be not ready!” she protested tearfully. “Thou must live longer, Grandpa Brown!” For so she called him now, having adopted him in lieu of the family she had thrown away.
“Alas, I can not,” he told her. “But this I needs must say: thou has made my last year a delight, and banished my loneliness. For that I thank thee, lovely child.”
“Thou has been good to me too!” she said. “Ne’er didst thou beat me or starve me or do to me what the village louts did.”
“An I had known o’ those things, I would have sent my golems into the village to slay those evil folk,” he said, grimacing.
“Grandpa Brown, I beg thee, leave me not!”
He squeezed her firm little hand in his worn brown hand. “It were not my choice, O sweet girl.” Then he died.
She wept. Then she told a big golem to take him out and bury him under the garden. It was the onset of her Adept status—and her awful loneliness, which he had unwittingly bequeathed to her.