6.7 - Remara and the Twixt

It is easier than he thought to let the story spill off his tongue. In some ways, it is like dreamwalking his way through the forest. The memories that every rest drags him through rise sharply to mind—nearly to his waking vision—as he speaks them to Remara.

In the pre-dawn hours, most children of Carvenhold were asleep. Most adults were, too. But not Nail’s father, whose even-rhythmed carpentry strokes woke Nail well before light that morning. Once awake, there was no going back to sleep. It was a matter of minutes for Nail to dress, grab his toys and a small lamp, and slip out to the streets to see if any of his friends were awake.

It was still too early. Not a soul stirred in the darkened streets. Nail rolled his wooden hoop down the street with a very soft whoop. For just a little while, the whole town was his very own bag of marbles.

He loped down the street alongside a large wooden hoop, lightly striking it at an angle along the top to keep it rolling next to him. A nudge here kept it out of a wagon-wheel rut. A swift lift with the stick let it skip over a pile of horse dung.

He kept an eye on the hoop, but let his attention drift just enough to scan the streets for anything odd. He found all sorts of things this way: coin, nails, odd ends of wood, leather scraps, and sometimes cracked marbles.

All this was treasure. Cracked marbles could be filled and smoothed over with glue. Leather scraps and wood could swiftly become little slings to fling nails or pebbles at the wall.

And coin, of course, went into a small wood box with a slot in the top. Nail’s father had shown him how to carve the pieces of the box and join them, but hadn’t touched it himself. It was Nail’s first complete creation.

Something caught the corner of his eye, but it wasn’t on the ground. Lifting his head, he spotted a small figure as it flashed through the air. It landed on the edge of a roof three houses ahead and paused there, its wings raised high.

Nail’s eyes widened. He’d never seen a bird move like that. Grabbing his hoop, he slung it over his shoulder and slid up against the nearest house. After a minute, the tiny figure leapt back into the air, flew another four houses down the street, and repeated its pause.

Nail kept pace with it, moving as it moved and ducking up against houses when it paused. He wondered if this was a skyte. He had heard some about them in the murmurs around town, but he had never seen one. Everyone said they were beautiful.

Maybe they were fun, too. Maybe it would play with him, diving through his rolling hoop or flying it up and dropping it for him to catch if he asked. But first, he ought to prove himself at shadowing.

He squinted. Approaching dawn lightened the dark gray sky, but he still couldn’t tell if that was a human-ish body or a bird’s body between those raised wings. Still, he’d never seen a bird keep its wings up like that whenever it landed. His excitement grew.

After ten minutes of this, the creature landed on the edge of a house that sapped all of Nail’s excitement. He wasn’t to go near this house, nor speak to any of the thugs that lived there, nor stare too long at it. If his father knew he’d been within a block of it, there’d be a whipping to drive the lesson home.

He flattened against the wall of the nearest house, his heart pounding, and began to slide back in the opposite direction.

And then a second creature, same as the first, landed on the roof, and Nail halted his retreat. A moment later, a third landed. Then a fourth. One flew toward the back of the house, one went to the left side, and one to the right. The last one dropped down to the front of the house and scratched at the ground near the door for a few minutes.

Then, as if at a signal, all four rose into the air and flew off. Nail squinted after them.

He gave up watching after a moment, dropping his eyes back to the base of the house.

What had they done here?

The thugs should still be in bed. Everyone was still in bed. Everyone but Nail and his father, and father didn’t have to know.

Plucking up his courage, Nail stowed his stick and hoop under the stairs of the house he’d sheltered behind, then slid through the shadowed street toward the bad house. Across its barren yard. Right up to the door.

Near the door, half-buried in the ground, lay a beautiful ebony marble. A curved mirror fragment was propped between it and the house wall, but he barely looked at that. The surface of the marble was black as a shadow. When he brushed a fingertip across it, the black gave just a little bit under his touch. It felt like relief from heat on a blistering summer day.

It was perfect. It was uncracked. The thugs didn’t care about treasures like these, it would be wasted on them.

In that moment, he—

Naeed’s throat closes on the words. The scene blurs in his mind. The part of his heart that has never stopped crying is so loud he can hardly think, but he beats it back into the depths.

“It was skytes,” he says, his voice hollow. “Whatever those marbles were, when the sun rose, the thug’s house vanished. So did the workshop in our house, and my father inside it. Pieces of the house flew and killed my mother. The skytes… they’re murderers.”

The captain of the guard was a good man. A kind man. He and his wife hadn’t any children yet and they treated Nail as if he were their own. They told him to take his time, that perhaps in a year or two he’d be ready to decide if he wanted a new name to reflect a life change or if he would keep his name and apprentice with another carpenter.

He didn’t want to remember their names. They weren’t his parents.

The wife was kind and spoke softly to him and served him good food. The captain listened solemnly to Nail’s explanation of what he saw the morning the house vanished, and a scribe wrote it all down. The captain was out often in the first week after the event, talking to different people in Carvenhold. Whenever he learned a bit more, he brought Nail in and explained what he knew.

In bits and pieces, Nail was told about the house that had exploded so hard there was nothing left. There was a hole in the ground, and houses in all directions had broken windows. A few people had cuts, but none were serious.

The captain told him that there had been terrible things happening in the house before it had vanished, though he wouldn’t tell Nail what sorts of things. The captain just told him that all the adults knew about it, but the thugs’ leaders had everyone in Carvenhold frightened. Guards who tried to stop it packed up and left quickly, or were found dead. People who didn’t give the thugs what they wanted were beaten.

Nail listened whenever the captain had more to tell him, but never said a word back. He thought of the order his father had been filling on that last day. How he had gotten up early to finish it, despite his exhaustion, because it was for the thugs. They had needed it.

And because his father had helped them, now he was dead. That was what skytes did. Nail knew the skytes would come for him very soon.

“Nail, m’boy,” the captain called one day, jerking Nail out of a daze. He’d been staring out at the street through the front door for an hour. The captain watched him from the bottom of the steps with a pained expression. “Nail, come a moment.”

Nail shuffled out to the top of the steps, but no further. He rarely left the house at all. The skytes were still out there.

“Lad, listen. A skyte came to talk.”

Nail stood like a statue. He stared at the captain’s mouth as it moved words around about the skyte that came to tell him that, yes, the attack on the thug’s house was their doing, but…

He can’t breathe. His eyes are wide and fixed. He feels more like stone than wood, same as that day. His mouth is frozen, half-open, and it’s all he can do to contain the wail that keeps breaking free from the depths.

A small muzzle thrusts up against his arm. He recoils, throwing himself off the steps and away from Na’Stra.

Picking himself up, he reaches for his anger. Hatred gives him strength to speak and continue the story with a steady voice. He keeps his back toward his listeners. “He talked to them. He believed the skyte’s story. He was sorry for them. He said Carvenhold was better for what they did. He… it wasn’t safe there anymore. I left that night, as soon as they went to sleep.”

He packed no food and no clothes. The only thing he took was a lantern.

He took the wide road out of Carvenhold and followed it for an hour until trees lined both sides of the well-traveled road. Then he turned and plunged right, diving between the trunks.

In no time, he was fighting through waist-high bushes and unpredictable tangles of brambles. From time to time, howls split the night air, but Nail had no fear of them. There was only a terrible, screaming emptiness in him that nearly howled back to welcome the wolf.

Nearly.

Long after the lantern sputtered out, he crashed through thickets and trampled a half-crazed path into the forest. In the dark, he felt his way forward, stumbling through moldy leaves and mud from the recent rains. His skin stung and his feet hurt so much he was glad to crawl on his hands and knees to give his feet a rest.

He fell asleep on the ground, shivering and miserable, pressed up against a tree with some dry earth around it.

As sunlight hit him, he peeled his eyelids open to the sight of a gigantic, wooden face hanging an arm’s length in front of him. The face was tilted sideways and its eyes were two huge hollows with green lights in them. Those green lights were fixed on him.

He didn’t move. Neither did the face. They stayed like that for a few minutes. When the face did nothing, Nail inched away.

The face moved, then. A huge branch seemed to unfold from the side, and then he could see that this was not just a face by itself. It was a whole tree-like creature with arms and legs too.

This giant creature said to Nail, “I think that you are a sapling, but not of a tree. Are you a sapling?”

Nail’s father had taken him to the edges of the forest where some trees were felled and others were planted, so he knew what a sapling was. Terrified, he squeaked, “Yes. A human sapling.”

“Human sapling.” The head tilted until it was chin-down, but the eyes stayed focused on him. “There are no humans here with you, but there are humans nearby looking for something. I think they are looking for you. Why have you come here?”

The hollowness inside Nail screamed.

“I want to stay,” he begged. “Let me stay here. You don’t have to take care of me. Just hide me! I don’t want to go!”

The creature considered him without blinking. It lifted its hands, resting them on the trunks of two different trees. “You do not wish to be planted with humans. You wish to be planted with the trees?”

"Yes!” Nail dragged himself to his feet. “Yes, I want to be planted with the trees. Will you let me?”

The great head gave one nod. A hand larger than his whole body wrapped around him, lifting him off the ground. He shut his eyes as the wind whistled past his face.

Naeed pauses for a moment. An uneasy thought forms at the edge of his mind. He sets it aside but doesn’t banish it.

“Her name was Yettle and she gave me some of her own lifesap. It changed everything. After that, I didn’t have to eat like a human all the time. She told me if I stood very still and didn’t move, I’d be planted just as I’d asked. Well, I tried that for several seasons, but one day a tiny Remara crashed into my chest.”

He finally turns back to the forge. Remara hasn’t moved from her position, pressed-up against the farthest wall. Na’Stra is coiled up among the live coals, watching him with flattened earfins.

He tries to smile at Remara, but he can feel it is a tight, thin expression. Ill-fitted for reassurance.

“I’m okay. Yettle healed me. I wasn’t very kind to you—to her—as I said this morning. I’d apologize to her if I could, but I can’t. I’m…”

His voice softens as remorse sneaks in. “I’m so sorry I didn’t welcome her or help her. I understand more now. She must have been so confused.”

A small ripple passes over Remara’s face.

He swallows, returning to his story. “By the time I left, I didn’t have any more human skin. When I found the next Remara on the roads—”

“Skipped,” Na’Stra interrupts. “Go back.”

He flexes his fingers, wishing for a moment that he had Na’Stra in his hands and… and for the first time the depths of his anger frightens him. In a threadbare voice, he asks, “What do you want from me?”

“Truth. Whole story. You skipped important bit. You knows the bit. It’s where you runs away again and why.”

The uneasy thought at the edge of his mind resonates with Na’Stra’s accusation. He clenches his teeth. “Almost nobody knows about that and you said you never met Yettle.”

Na’Stra doesn’t blink. She just lifts her head up from the coals and says, “Tell story. All. Or get no answer.”

He stares at her. She meets his gaze, flicking her tongue out from time to time.

If she was told by them, this trust will never be rebuilt. He has to know for sure. He fixes his focus on her and hurls the words like knives. “I trusted Yettle to keep me safe for a very long time. Then, one day, Yettle betrayed me.”

Once, Yettle asked him why he had come, and he refused to answer. She realized he was angry with skytes and asked him why, and he grew cold to her. So, she stopped asking and only walked with him, though her tread was heavier than before.

Slowly, his anger went to sleep again and he followed Yettle with a light step and a curious eye.

There was always something happening in the forest. Night and day, spring and winter, the wonders never ceased. There was never a moment of being alone, for he only had to brush a branch or touch a tree trunk to skim the surface of the network.

Everything was perfect.

“Naeed?”

Yettle’s gentle rumble broke through his dreamwalking. He lifted his face, ready to engage with whatever new thought she had for the next several weeks.

He froze. She crouched in the middle of a clearing. Sitting on her shoulders and up in the great crown of branches growing from her head were skytes. Dozens of skytes. They perched like hideous ornaments on her, gaudy-colored and hateful. Staring at him.

“This is a Keep. A place where skytes live,” Yettle said. “These are not the ones who woke me, but they know of you. They asked to meet with you so you might speak together.”

There’s only one reason they would know him.

Naeed took a step backward. Then another. A bush caught him at the back of the knees and he tumbled into it, thrashing to find his feet.

Yettle pleaded, “Naeed, little sapling, watching you rot weighs me to the ground. Please. Speak with them, give them a few moments of your forever.”

“No!” he screamed. He found his feet and thrust a finger at them—at her as well—and railed, “They took everything! And they keep taking more! Now they even have you! They don’t get anything more from me!”

He turned and ran. He felt Yettle reach through the network a moment before he closed himself off from the entire forest.

He ran as far as he could—from one sunset to the next—before the horror overtook him for the first time.

He was Naeed, alone within his own skin, the only one who knew his thoughts and feelings and the rush of wind stealing tears from his face as he ran. His legs gave out under the loneliness, sending him crashing headlong into the underbrush.

There he lay and fought with himself. Every second he clung to the decision to remain alone. To refuse contact with the forest. To keep Yettle from leading the skytes to him.

From one second to the next, he had to begin again.

And again.

And again.

When he was finally able to uncurl and sit up, he had no sense of how long it had been. There were furrows in the ground all around him. Any living branch in reach was shredded or snapped; he had cleared a space all around.

He picked himself up, unsteady and sickened. It was time to leave. He knew roughly where the nearest end of this forest was, only a few days’ journey away.

He resolved to leave this forest and travel as far as he could. He would seek a different forest, one that was too far away to be part of this network. He would find the very center of that new forest and plant himself there. Then he would dream for the rest of his life and never move again.

He did not sleep. He did not eat. He only stopped once a day for a few mouthfuls of water.

Half a day’s run from the edge of the forest, a voidflyer burst out of a shadow on his chest.

“What this?” it muttered in a creaky voice. “Ah, found it. Is walking tree. No, is running tree. Hello running tree, heard you has headflowers? Oooh!”

In a flash it was perched on his left shoulder, resting its forequarters on top of his head. “Is tiny yellow starflowers! Smelling like the good climby flowers. Very good. All these mine now. Stop squirming!”

“Yes.” Na’Stra tumbles a hot coal back and forth between her claws. “Found you running.”

Running again.

He’d run from new parents. He’d run from a different kind of life as a tree. He’d run from Yettle herself. There were always reasons, but now the uneasy thought unfolds itself to him in detail. He sees himself fleeing from each new start.

What would have happened if I’d ever stayed?

He can’t know. To this day, he isn’t alone only because a dragon once refused to leave. The next part of the story is no different. Slowly, he returns to the stone steps and sits on the lowest one, unable to look at Na’Stra or Remara. His anger dwindles in the face of growing shame.

“I couldn’t get her to leave me alone,” he mumbles. “But she stopped being scary pretty quickly.”

“Was never scary. You was just coward,” Na’Stra mutters.

Ignoring her, Naeed continues. “Later that day, we reached a main road that cut through the forest. I was trying to outrun Na’Stra and nearly tripped into another Remara. She was… very different than the first one.”