Willow Read online

  Directly below lay Nelwyn Village, and outside it, the homestead of Ufgood Reach. It was small, even by Nelwyn standards—two thatched and whitewashed domes joined by a short porch. Wattle fences enclosed a few pens. A patchwork of small fields stretched down to weeping willows on the bank.

  The hawk’s keen eye saw the child’s boat come safely to rest beneath those trees. It saw a Nelwyn girl pause in her game of hide-and-seek, part the bushes, and discover the child. It heard her call excitedly to her brother.

  And then the hawk soared higher and higher still until it vanished, turning north, following the river home.

  It was going to be a hot day, an irksome day, a day when nothing good would happen.

  Willow Ufgood knew it.

  All the signs were bad.

  For one thing, he had dreamed of his father, and that was always ominous. This dream was especially foreboding, because in it Willow was exposed as a trickster, a mere magician, and not the grand sorcerer he longed to become. People laughed at his magic, mocked him, threw pulpy, foul-smelling objects at him, while Shnorr Ufgood stood as if alive, shaking his head and saying, “Willow, Willow, more magical it would be if you plowed a field, mended a fence, thatched a roof!” He swept his cane out over the slope toward the river. “Look at the farm! Going to wrack and ruin while you play tricks, talk gibberish!”

  In his dream, Willow had shuffled from one foot to the other, as if he were thirteen, saying, “But, Father, maybe someday . . .”

  “Dreams! Crazy dreams!” the old man had said, waving his stick and wandering off toward the river. “Can’t eat dreams! Can’t eat thistles, either!”

  Willow woke. He sat up and looked through the window. His father was gone. Only the unrepaired fences and unplowed fields of Ufgood Reach sloped down to the banks of the Freen.

  The second bad sign was that Kiaya, up before him as usual and already baking bread, had let Mims and Ranon go to the river. Willow fretted constantly about the children. He imagined hundreds of dreadful fates that might befall them, many associated with the river. After all, when you were as small as a Nelwyn, even a pike spelled trouble, even a trout! “What if . . .” Willow would say, rubbing his hands and pacing the kitchen, “but what if . . .” And Kiaya would reply, “Oh for goodness sake, Willow, let them be! Let them live! If they don’t try things, how will they ever learn? Here, stir the soup!” Or perhaps she would just kiss him, and laugh, and hug him until he stopped his fretting.

  The third bad sign was that Bets was ornery. The moment he entered the pen and saw the sow’s pink eye fixed on him, the pink ears pointed at him, he knew that plowing was going to be difficult. He was right. Bets balked at the harness, then stomped twice on his toe. And when he bent over to pick up his seed-sling, the sow lifted him with its snout and sent him somersaulting into the haystack. So when at last he got to work in his field and saw Mims and Ranon running toward him from the riverbank, waving their arms excitedly, he knew they were bringing more bad news.

  “Dada! Dada!” Ranon called. “We found something in the river!”

  “Come see!” little Mims shouted, stumbling along behind her brother. “Oh please, Dada, come quick!”

  Willow dropped Bets’s reins and struggled out of the heavy seed-sling. The pig found itself hitched to a plow with no plowman on the handles. It tugged. The plow lurched and toppled, anchoring the pig where it stood. Bets grunted and glared evilly at Willow.

  He dropped to his knees and embraced his children as they came running up. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine,” Ranon said.

  “But you have to come and see!”

  They each took a hand and hurried him down across the field and through the trees to the water’s edge. “See?”

  There, caught in a tangle of arrowleaf and wild iris, Willow saw the little boat, and inside, the child. She was smiling, reaching toward him.

  “A baby! A new baby!” Mims shouted, clasping Willow’s hand with both of hers and jumping up and down.

  Ranon had pulled off his boots and was wading out.

  “No!” Willow shouted. “Don’t go near!”

  “But Father . . .”

  “Look at it! Have you ever seen wood like that? Tied with . . . cloth! It’s from far away, Ranon. North of the crossroads, even! Who knows where it’s been?”

  “But a baby, Father . . .”

  “It could be diseased. Could be in a spell! Could be a disguised sorceress! It could be . . .”

  “Silly Dada!” Mims said decisively, shaking Willow’s arm. “It’s not! It’s none of those things. It’s just a little baby, and it needs help.”

  “Not so little,” Ranon said, edging closer to the boat. “It’s a lot bigger than you, Mims, when you were born.”

  “Exactly!” Willow said. “It’s a Daikini. Keep back!”

  Mims wrinkled her nose. “What are Daikinis?”

  “Giants,” Willow said. “From up north. They’re terrible! Greedy! Vicious! You can’t trust them, Mims.” Willow hurried along the bank as he spoke and returned with a long driftwood pole, which he pushed out toward the boat.

  “What are you doing, Dada?”

  “We’ll send it downstream. There’re people who’ll look after it. We can’t afford . . .”

  “No,” the child said quietly. “You won’t, Dada. You won’t.”

  And she was right. Even while he intended to push the little boat back out into the current, Willow was drawing it closer, through the waterplants.

  Mims smiled.

  “That’s what you tell us to do, isn’t it, Dada?” Ranon said.

  “What?”

  “Trust your feelings.”

  “Well,” Willow said, gathering the child into his arms, “perhaps we should get her dry. Perhaps we ought to feed her.”

  The child gurgled and grasped his finger.

  Willow smiled.

  At that moment a shout came from the fields above the bank. “Ufgood! Where are you, man! Get up here!” It was a coarse voice, as if Bets the sow were calling him in her grunty way.

  Willow’s eyes widened. “Burglekutt!” he whispered. “Oh no!” He passed the child to Ranon. “Keep her quiet, for goodness sake! If Burglekutt finds out we’ve got a Daikini here we’ll really be in trouble! Do something. Play with her!”

  He scrambled up the bank and through the screen of trees to the field. Kiaya was bustling down from the house with her skirts hiked up and her long hair flowing. “My husband hasn’t stolen anything!” she was shouting. “Get away from those seeds!”

  Bending over beside Bets, with his fat hand plunged into Willow’s seed-sling, was Burglekutt. Burglekutt the Prefect. Burglekutt the Beadle and Bailiff. Burglekutt the stingiest, meanest moneylender in all of Nelwyn Valley. He was short, even for a Nelwyn, but he was enormously broad. When he wore any of his robes of office with pointed hats, he looked like a small pyramid. High-living had turned his thick jowls warty, and years of greedy cunning had beaded his eyes so that, beside Bets the sow, he looked like a pig himself, a pig rearing up on his hind legs and grunting, “Ufgood, where’d you get these seeds?”

  The likeness was so striking that Willow laughed.

  “Funny, is it?”

  “No, Mr. Burglekutt, the question isn’t funny. It’s just that . . .”

  “Maybe you’ll be amused when you miss another mortgage payment and I own this land!”

  “No, sir. Oh no.”

  “Well then, answer civilly, Ufgood. Where did you get seeds to sow this year?”

  Kiaya stood with her fists on her hips, feet planted firmly apart, breathing heavily.

  “Speak up! Where’d you get ’em?”

  Willow hesitated. The truth was that, knowing his need, his neighbors had given him seed from their own granaries. But lest Burglekutt might take revenge on them, Willow did not dare to tell the truth. Instead, he lifted his chin defiantly. “Maybe I used my magic.”

  “Magic! Ha!”
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br />   Willow winced.

  “You’re no sorcerer, Ufgood! Everyone knows that! You’re an imposter, a charlatan, a clown! Now tell the truth! I sell the seeds around here and I didn’t sell any to you. You stole them from my granary!”

  “He did not!” Kiaya stamped her foot. “We may be poor but we’re honest, and it’s none of your business where we got them! Maybe Willow did conjure them. Maybe he has more magic than you know. Or maybe we gathered them from the roadsides. Or maybe they just drifted down the river—a gift! Aha! We’ll never tell, will we Willow?”

  Willow shook his head.

  “But I’ll tell you this!” Kiaya took a fist off her hip and pointed at Burglekutt’s pudgy nose. “These are not your seeds, and this is not your land.”

  “It will be.” Burglekutt flung his arm over Ufgood Reach. “One more bad year and it’s mine. There’ll be a great barn! An inn! A countinghouse!”

  “Well not yet! It’s still ours, and we’ll thank you to get off it, won’t we, Willow?”

  Willow nodded.

  Burglekutt gulped in outrage. He held his breath so long he began to turn purple. His eyes bulged. “Magic, eh? So that’s what he has! Well, it’ll take more than magic to keep this land if you miss another payment. One more! I’ll have you off in no time! Off! Off!” Flinging his arm out again, Burglekutt whirled around with his nose in the air, tripped over Bets, and fell flat on his face in hog dung.

  Squealing wickedly, Bets lunged to her feet and rooted him in the rear end as he struggled to get up.

  Kiaya laughed. “Serves you right! You want our land so much, go ahead! Eat it up!”

  Spluttering and gagging, Burglekutt heaved himself to his feet. “You’ll pay!” he croaked. “Mark my words!” And he lumbered off to the road.

  “You shouldn’t be mean to him,” Willow said when he had gone.

  “Oh, I can’t help it!” Kiaya stamped her foot again. “The man is such a toad!” She leaned over and patted Bets, who was grunting happily. “Good Bets! Good pig!”

  Mims and Ranon appeared then at the top of the riverbank. They had managed to drag the little boat all the way up to the edge of the field. “Mama! Come see!”

  “What’s that, Willow? What do they have?”

  “A baby.”

  “A what?”

  “A baby, Kiaya. A girl. She came drifting down the river in that little boat, and it landed here. We’re going to send her on. We’re not going to keep her. Kiaya. Kiaya, did you hear what I . . .”

  But she was already running across the field toward Ranon and Mims and the small object on the ground between them. Willow hurried after her. “Don’t fall in love with her! Nobody fall in love with her!”

  But it was too late. Mims and Ranon were already laughing with the child, and when Kiaya saw her she clasped her hands and gasped. “Oh, poor thing,” she said, bending down and gathering the child to her breast. “Poor little thing! She’s cold and wet, Willow. And hungry, too. But look how good she is! Not crying at all!”

  “Kiaya, please put her back. Do you know what’ll happen if Burglekutt finds out?”

  “Oh poof! Burglekutt!”

  “Well he is the Prefect. And you know what’s happened whenever Daikinis . . .”

  “Babies don’t count.”

  “Of course they count!”

  “No they don’t! Babies don’t make wars. They don’t have enemies. Come on, children. We’ll feed her and give her a nice bath. Send the boat on, Willow. She won’t be needing it.”

  “Come up soon, Dada.” Mims smiled. “You can help, too.”

  Willow watched his family head toward the house, the children dancing beside their mother, jumping up to peek at the infant. He carried the little boat back down to the river’s edge and was about to launch it when he noticed a curious thing. None of the strips of cloth binding it together was tied. They looked as if they had been wrapped up in haste, and left loose. But they were not loose now. Willow tugged at one and found it stiff as iron. The same was true of all the other lashings; no knots, yet they could not be freed. Some power that Willow could not see had secured them there. Magic!

  Willow glanced around. No one else was on the river or the bank. He rolled up his sleeves. He spit on his hands. If magic had fixed those strips of cloth in place, then magic—his magic—could loosen them. He closed his eyes. He spread his hands over the boat. He prepared the only spell he knew for the loosening of things—the spell that might be used to hasten a late spring, or to free a pig’s leg if it got jammed between large stones: “Yawn tamath efforcut frume!”

  It was a dangerous venture, sorcery! Sometimes, if charms didn’t work, they recoiled. Sometimes the reaction was like laying your hands on a hot stove, and sometimes like being struck by lightning. You never knew. Still, if you wanted to be good, you had to take the risk. You had to practice.

  “Yawn tamath efforcut frume!” Willow declared again.

  No lightning, no explosion hurled him back against the bank. Had it worked? Cautiously, he opened one eye.

  Yes! But not quite as he had intended. The cloth lashings were still firmly in place; it was not they that had been loosened, but the boat itself. The little craft was moving across the mudbank and through the weeds toward the middle of the river where the swift currents flowed.

  Delighted not to have been struck by yet another failed charm, Willow laughed and followed it, running along the shore and then up the bank where he could see it better. Gracefully it swept along until it had reached the exact center of Ufgood Reach, the spot where Willow and his family would sometimes come to watch bluebirds play on summer evenings.

  There, the boat vanished.

  One instant it was sailing on; the next, gone. Perhaps, Willow thought, walking back to Bets, perhaps it had just sunk, sucked down in some freak vortex. Or perhaps his charm had worked belatedly and the bindings had loosened after all, allowing the little craft to fall into its parts—driftwood and reeds—parts too small to be noticed in the swirling currents.

  Dumping Burglekutt into the mud seemed to have restored Bets’s good humor. For the rest of that morning the sow contentedly hauled the plow, often uttering explosive little strings of grunts, like laughter, and by noon Willow had plowed and seeded more than half the field. They took a break together, sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree, watching the flowing river. “A long way,” Willow said, nodding.

  Bets turned an eye on him, and cocked a pink ear.

  “She didn’t come just from the ford at the crossroads. She came from farther than that.” Willow nodded again. “Much farther.”

  Bets grunted and turned back to gaze at the current.

  “And you know what? I think she must have had a lot of help to make that trip. That’s what I think, Bets. This baby has friends.” Willow stared at the current, too, chewing reflectively on a sweet stalk of grass. The river coursed on, seaming and smoothing its surface in an ever-changing enigma. Think what you like, it seemed to say. Then do what you must.

  All afternoon Willow thought and worried. What should he do? The child certainly did not look evil, but he well knew that Evil had many faces. What if he and Kiaya and the children had been fooled by a disguise? What if they had taken in something that would destroy their little family? Destroy the village? Destroy, perhaps, even all of Nelwyn Valley? Willow shivered. He glanced anxiously at his small house sitting on its rise at the highest point of Ufgood Reach. Whenever his plowing took him close, he could hear laughter there, the laughter of his family and the wonderful, contagious laughter of the child given by the river.

  No, no. It was impossible that she could be an instrument of Evil. No disguise could be that complete. But—Willow looked behind—what if she were the target of Evil? What if she were hunted? What if her pursuers raged into Nelwyn Valley, burning and killing and destroying? Willow shuddered. How awful to be so small, to be so torn by fears and premonitions! How awful to know deep down that you were a sorcerer, yet to be powerless t
o ward off Evil! Still—Willow smiled—he had loosed the boat with his spell. He had done that.

  Late that afternoon, when Willow and Bets had finished their plowing and come in from the fields, Willow found his little house full of color and happiness, as usual. No matter how tired he was, or how worried, his heart always lifted as he reached the porch and raised the door latch. Some of the color in the house came from costumes and props—part of his magician’s paraphernalia. Part of it came from Kiaya’s bright rugs and beaded tapestries, but most of it radiated from the wonderful paintings that Mims and Ranon made each day. They gathered and ground their own dyes, smoothed their own wooden panels with river sand, trimmed their own little brushes from dried stalks and, talking quietly as they worked, painted vivid depictions of imaginary worlds and monsters, sometimes funny, sometimes frightening. Sometimes it seemed to Willow that they were peopling another world. Once, when he interrupted her to ask what she was doing, Mims had laughed and answered, “We’re doing our magic, Dada.”

  “But what’s that?” Willow had asked, indicating a sinuous, two-headed creature near the top of her painting.

  “Mmmm . . . a dragon! An Eborsisk dragon!”

  “Good heavens! What’s it doing?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Not for me, I hope!”

  The little girl reached for Willow’s hand. “Oh, Dada, I hope not too!”

  Every day there were new paintings, new creatures. Every day as he came up the path, Willow would pretend not to see Mims’ small face in the kitchen window or to hear her shouting, “Here he comes!” But he never had to pretend when he opened the door. Always, his surprise and delight were real.

  So it was that afternoon. “Surprise! Surprise!” they shouted as the door swung back.

  His family had given their whole day to the child. Ranon had fashioned a cradle for her, and Mims had decorated it with strings of beads. Kiaya had knitted a little woolen blanket to lay inside. They had all gathered flowers from the woods and fields and spread them around the child, like tributes. Mims and Kiaya even wore some in their hair.