Phaze Doubt

“Aye.” They walked to the front storage chamber of the castle, where assorted wooden golems stood idle. “Franken,” Brown said.

A huge and spectacularly ugly golem stirred. It was in the likeness of an ancient Earth monster said to have been crafted in a laboratory. The name was a misnomer, because it was the doctor, not the monster, who had been called Frankenstein, but for this offhand use it sufficed.

Franken picked Brown up. Neysa assumed her firefly form and flew up to perch on the golem’s head. Franken tramped out of the castle, faced the setting sun, and proceeded at cruising velocity. That was faster than a unicorn could run, because the golem was big and indefatigable. The landscape passed at a horrendous rate. To Neysa, perched on the head and hunching down to avoid the rush of wind, it seemed most like an image in Agnes’ mind: that of an airplane flying low over the terrain, coming in for a landing at a dome. Such machines were fewer now, because of concern about pollution; less wasteful means were employed to travel. But Agnes had been in Proton during the old days, and ridden such machines many times. She remembered.

At dusk they reached the spot where the Herd was grazing. Clip charged up, but recognized the golem and relaxed. Neysa flew down, assumed her nature form, and conferred with her brother in horn talk.

“Brown and I needs must converse in private for a time.”

“Graze in the center; none will hear.”

“Our thanks to thee, sibling.”

“There be an ill wind coming.”

“Aye.”

She trotted back to the golem, now waiting like the wooden statue it was. She assumed human form. “Walk with me within the Herd,” she told Brown. “Magic penetrates not there, an we will it not.”

Brown dismounted. They walked among the unicorns, who ignored them, each grazing a particular section. In the center was a broad area, already grazed.

“Thou dost be pensive, and the prisoners be flip,” Neysa said. “Be the geis slipping?”

“Nay, it be tight,” Brown said. “They can harm me not.”

“But there be aught. I felt it as we arrived, and when I saw them, I knew. Thy strait be dire. Willst tell me?”

“Mayhap I will harm myself.”

Neysa shook her head, unpleasantly perplexed. “At their behest? How can that be?”

“Willst make oath o’ silence?”

“Be it that bad?”

“Not to thee, mayhap.”

“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.