A Knight of the Word

CHAPTER 3

As Nest pushed through the hedgerow into her backyard, Pick dropped from the branches onto her shoulder with a pronounced grunt.

`That boy is sweet on you. Sweet, sweet, sweet'

Pick's voice was harried and thin, and when he spoke he sounded like one of those fuzzy creatures on Sesame Street. Nest thought he wouldn't be so smug if he could hear himself on tape sometime.

`They're all sweet on me' she said, deflecting his dig, moving toward the picnic table. `Didn't you know?'

`No, I didn't. But if that one were any sweeter, he could be bottled for syrup.' Pick sniffed. 'Classic case of youthful hormonal imbalance.'

She laughed `Since when did you know anything about "youthful hormonal imbalance"? Didn't you tell me once that you were born in a pod?"

`That doesn't mean I don't know about humans. I suppose you don't think I've learned anything in my life, is that it? Since I'm roughly ten times your age, it's probably safe to assume I've learned a great deal more than you have!'

She straddled one of the picnic bench seats, and Pick slid down her arm and jumped onto the table in front of her, hands on hips, eyes defiant. At first glance, he looked like a lot of different things. A quick glimpse suggested he was some sort of weird forest flotsam and jetsam, shed by a big fir or blown off an ageing cedar. A second look suggested he was a poorly designed child's doll made out of tree parts. A thick layer of bark encrusted him from head to foot, and tiny leaves blossomed out of various nooks and crannies where his joints were formed. He was a sylvan, in fact, six inches high and so full of himself Nest was sometimes surprised he didn't just float away on the wind. He never stopped talking and, in the many years she had known him, had seldom stopped moving. He was full of energy and advice, and he had a tendency to overwhelm her with both.

`Where have you been?' he demanded, clearly agitated that he had been forced to wait on her return.

She brushed back her cinnamon–coloured hair and shook her head at him. `We walked over to the cemetery and put flowers on my grandparents' and mother's graves. What is your problem anyway?'

`My problem?' Pick huffed. `Well, since you asked, my problem is that I have this entire park to look after, all two–hundred–odd acres of it, and I have to do it by myself! Now, you might say, `But that's your job, Pick, so what are you complaining about?' Well, that's true enough, isn't it? But time was I had a little help from a certain young lady who lived in this house. Now what was her name again? I forget, it's been so long since I've seen her'

`Oh, please!' Nest moaned.

`Sure, it's easy for you to go off to your big school and your other life, but words like "commitment" and "responsibility" mean something to some of us: He stamped hard on the picnic table. `I thought the least you could do was to spend some time with me this weekend, this one solitary weekend in the whole of this autumn that you've chosen to come home! But no, I haven't seen you for five minutes, have I? And now, today, what do you do? Go off with that Keppler boy instead of looking for me! I could have gone to the graves with you, you know. I would have liked to go, as a matter of fact. Your grandmother was my friend, too, and I don't forget my friends…. He trailed off meaningfully.

`Unlike some people,' she finished for him.

`I wasn't going to say that'

'Oh, not for a minute: She sighed. Robert came by to apologise for his behaviour last spring at the funeral'

`Oh, that. Criminy' Pick knew right away. They might fight like cats and dogs, but they confided in each other anyway.

`So I had to spend a little time with him, and I didn't think it would hurt if we walked over to the cemetery. I was saving the rest of the day to work with you, all right? Now stop complaining'

He held up his twiggy hands. `Too late. Way too late'

`To stop complaining?'

`No! To do any work!'

She hunched down so that her face was close to his. It was a little like facing down a beetle. 'What are you talking about? It isn't even noon. I don't have to go back until tonight. Why is it too late?'

He folded his stick arms across his narrow chest, scrunched up his face, and looked off into the park. She always wondered how he could make his features move like that when they were made out of wood, but since he had a tendency to regard such questions as some sort of invasion of his personal life, she'd never had the courage to ask. She waited patiently as he sighed and fussed and littered about.

`There's someone here to see you,' he announced finally.

`Who?'

`Well, I think you had better see for yourself'

She studied him a moment. He refused to meet her eyes, and a cold feeling seeped through her. *Someone from before?' she asked quietly. `From when my father… ?'

`No, no!' He held up his hands, quickly to calm her fears. `No one you've met before. No one from then. But …' He stopped. `I can't tell you who it is without getting myself in deeper than I care to go. I've thought about it, and it will be better if you just come with me and ask your questions there:

She nodded. Ask my questions where?'

`Down by the bayou below the deep woods. She's waiting there'

She. Nest frowned. `Well, when did she get here?'

'Early this morning: Pick sighed. `I just wish these things wouldn't happen so suddenly, that's all. I just wish I'd be given a little notice beforehand. It's hard enough doing my job without these constant interruptions:

`Well, maybe it won't take long,' she offered, trying to ease his obvious distress. `If it doesn't, we can still get some work done in the park before I have to go back:

He didn't even argue the point. His anger was deflated, his fire burned to ash. He just stared off at nothing and nodded.

Nest straightened. `Pick, it's a beautiful October morning, filled with sunshine. The park has never looked better. I haven't seen a single feeder, so the magic is in some sort of balance. You've done your job well, even without my help. Enjoy yourself for five minutes:

She reached over, plucked him off the tabletop, and set him on her shoulder. `Come on, let's take a walk over to the deep woods'

Without waiting for an answer, she rose and headed for the hedgerow pushing through the thin branches into the park. Sunshine streamed down out of a cloudless sky, filling the morning air with the pale, washed–out light peculiar to late autumn. There was a nip in the air, a hint of winter on the rise, but there was also the scent of dried leaves and cut grass mingling with the pungent smells of cooking that wafted out of barbecue grills and kitchen vents from the houses bordering the park. Cars dotted the parking lots and turnoffs beneath the trees, and families were setting out picnic lunches and running with dogs and throwing Frisbees across the grassy play areas ahead.

On such days, she thought to herself with a smile, she could almost imagine she would never leave.

`Pick, if we don't get back to it today, I'll come home again next weekend,' she announced impulsively. `I know I haven't been as good about working with you as I should. I've let other things get in the way, and I shouldn't do that. This is more important:

He rode her shoulder in silence, apparently not ready to be mollified. She glanced down at him covertly. He didn't seem angry.

He just seemed distant, as if he were looking beyond her words to something else.

She traversed the central open space to the parking lot serving the ball diamonds and play areas at the far end of the park, crossed the road, and entered the woods. The toboggan slide stood waiting for winter, the last sections of the wooden chute and the ladder that allowed access to the loading platform still in storage, removed and locked away as a safeguard against kids' climbing on and falling off before the snows came‑It never seemed to help much, of course. Kids climbed anything that had footholds whether it was intended for that purpose or not, and the absence of stairs just made the challenge that much more attractive. Nest smiled faintly. She had done it herself more times than she could count. But she supposed that one day some kid would fall off and the parents would sue and that would be the end of it; the slide would come down.

She walked through the hilly woods that marked the beginning of the eastern end of the park, alone now with Pick, wrapped in the silence of the big hardwoods. The trees rose barelimbed and skeletal against the autumn sky, stripped of their leaves, waiting for winters approach. Their colours not yet completely faded, the fallen leaves formed a thick carpet on the ground, still damp and soft with morning dew. She peered ahead into the tangled clutter of limbs and scrub and shadow. The forest had a bristling, hostile appearance. Everything looked as if it were wrapped in barbed wire.

Her long strides covered the ground rapidly as she descended to the creek that wound out of the woods and emptied into the bayou. How much bigger the park had seemed when she was a child growing up in it. Sometimes her home felt the same way too small for her now. She supposed it was true of her child's world entirely, that she had outgrown it, that she needed more room.

`How much farther?' she asked as she crossed the wooden bridge that spanned the creek bed, and started up the slope toward the deep woods.

`Bear right,' he grunted.

She angled toward the bayou, following the tree line. She glanced involuntarily toward the deep woods, just as she always did, any time she came here, remembering what had taken place there five years earlier. Sometimes she could see it all quite clearly, could see her father and John Ross and the maentwrog. Sometimes she could even see Wraith.

`Has there been any sign of him?' she asked suddenly, the words escaping from her mouth before she could think better of them.

Pick understood what she was talking about. `Nothing. Not since. .

Not since she turned eighteen two summers ago, she finished as he trailed off. That was the last time either of them had seen Wraith. After so many years of having him around, it seemed impossible that he could be gone. Her father had created the giant ghost wolf out of his dark magic to serve as a protector for the daughter he intended one day to return for. Wraith was to keep her safe while she grew. All the time she had worked with Pick to keep the magic in balance and the feeders from luring children into the park, Wraith had warded her. But Gran had discerned Wraith's true purpose and altered his makeup with her own magic in such a way that when Nest's father returned to claim her, Wraith destroyed him.

She could see it happening all over again through the dark huddle of the trees. Night cloaked the deep woods, and on the slopes of the park, over by the toboggan slide, Fourth of July fireworks were exploding in a shower of bright colours and deep booms. The white oak that had imprisoned the maentwrog was in shreds, and the maentwrog itself was turned to ash. John Ross lay motionless upon the charred earth, damaged and exhausted. Nest faced her father, who approached with hand outstretched and

soothing, persuasive words. You belong to me. You are my blood. You are my life.

And Wraith, come out of the night like an express train exploding free of a mountain tunnel …

She was fourteen when she learned the truth about her father. And her family. And herself. Wraith had stayed as her protector afterward, a shadowy presence in the park, showing himself only occasionally as the next few years passed, but always when the feeders came too close. Now and then she would think that he seemed less substantive than she remembered, less solid when he loomed out of the darkness. But that seemed silly.

However, as she neared her eighteenth birthday, Wraith turned pale and then ethereal and finally disappeared completely. It happened quickly. One day he was just as he had always been, his thick body massive and bristling, his grey and black tiger–stripe facial markings wicked and menacing. and the next he was fading away. Like the ghost he had always seemed, but finally become.

The last time she saw him, she was walking the park at sunset, and he had appeared unexpectedly from the shadows. He was already so insubstantial she could see right through him. She stopped, and he walked right up to her, passing so cease that she felt his rough coat brush against her. She blinked in surprise at the unexpected contact, and when she turned to follow him, he was already gone,

She hadn't seen him since. Neither had Pick. That was almost a year and a half ago.

`Where do you think he's gone:' she asked quietly.

Pick, riding her shoulder in silence, shrugged. `Can't say'

`He was disappearing though, there at the- end, wasn't he?'

`It looked that way, sure enough:

`So maybe he was all used up:

'Maybe'

`Except you told me magic never gets used up. You told me it works like energy; it becomes transformed. So if Wraith was transformed, what was he transformed into?'

`Criminy, Nest!'

`Have you noticed anything different about the park?'

The sylvan tugged at his beard, `No, nothing:

`So where did he go then?'

Pick wheeled on her. '`you know what? It you spent a little more time helping me out around here, maybe you could answer the question far yourself instead of pestering me! Now turn down here and head for the riverbank and stop asking me stuff!'

She did as he asked, still pondering the mystery of Wraith, thinking that maybe because she was grown up and Wraith had served his purpose, he had reverted to whatever form he had occupied before he was created to be her protector. Yes, maybe that was it.

But her doubts lingered.

She reached the riverbank and stopped. The bayou spread out before her, a body of water dammed up behind the levy on which the railroad tracks had been built to carry the freight trains west out of Chicago. Reeds and cattails grew in thick clumps along the edges of the water, and shallow inlets that eroded the riverbank were filmed with stagnation and debris. There was little movement in the water, the swift current of the Rock River absent here.

She looked down at Pick. `Now what?'

He gestured to her right without speaking.

She turned and found herself staring right at the tatterdemalion. She had seen only a handful in her life, and then just for a few seconds each time, but she knew this one for what it was right away. It stood less than a dozen yards away, slight and ephemeral in the pale autumn light. Diaphanous clothing and silky hair trailed from its body and limbs in wispy strands, as if on the verge of being carried off by the wind. The tatterdemalion's features were childlike and haunted. This one was a girl. Her eyes were depthless in dark–ringed sockets and her rosebud mouth pinched against her sunken face. Her skin was the colour and texture of parchment. She might have been a runaway who had not eaten in days and was still terrified of what she had left behind. She had that look. But tatterdemalions were nothing of the sort. They weren't really children at all, let alone runaways. They weren't even human.

Are you Nest Freemark?' this one asked in her soft, lilting childlike voice.

`I am; Nest answered, risking a quick glance down at Pick. The sylvan was mired in the deepest frown she had ever seen on him and was hunched forward on her shoulder in a combative stance. She had a sudden, inescapable premonition he was trying to protect her.

`My name is Ariel; said the tatterdemalion. `I have a message for you from the Lady'

Nest's throat went dry. She knew who the Lady was. The Lady was the Voice of the Word.

'I have been sent to tell you of John Ross,' Ariel said.

Of course. John Ross. She had thought of him earlier that morning for the first rime in weeks. She pictured him anew, enigmatic and resourceful, a mix of light and dark, gone from Hopewell five years earlier in the wake of her father's destruction, gone out of her life. Maybe she had inadvertently wished him back into it. Maybe that was why the mention of him seemed somehow inevitable.

`John Ross,' she repeated, as if the words would make of his memory something more substantial.

Ariel stood motionless in a mix of shadow and sunlight, as if pinned like a butterfly to a board. When she spoke, her voice was reed–thin and faintly musical, filled with the sound of the wind rising off trees heavy with new leaves.

`He has fallen from grace; she said to Nest Freemark, and the dark ayes bore into her. `Listen, and I will tell you what has become of him.'