Puzzle. Puzzle. Puzzle.
At this point, Suri had no idea if she was hearing anything or just losing her mind. She hadn’t been this frightened since that time she’d nearly been buried alive. Thinking would become impossible once terror set in, but she wasn’t there yet. If she heard something behind her, if she felt something, that’s when fear would blindly reign.
Puzzles are problems. String games are puzzles. I usually like puzzles. Not now. Right now I hate them. This one is awful. I like good puzzles, puzzles that are fun like—
With the last fleeting haze of light, Suri saw something just ahead and on the right—the red oak. She called it the Puzzle Tree, Petree for short. Petree was one of her favorite climbs. The tree was huge and had a multitude of branches that made getting to the top a challenge.
I can’t keep running, but I can still climb.
Suri still had the bone in her hand, and she stuffed it into her belt before leaping. She caught the lowest branch, the only one close enough to the ground to get ahold of, and then up she went.
She had climbed Petree more than a dozen times and knew the route.
Flip up, stand, then run across the branch. Climb left, find the knot, plant a foot, and push. Take a big stretch to the broken nub and then swing!
The swing was one of the hardest parts. It had taken her days before she had enough courage to try. The nub was at least twenty feet off the ground, and falling from that height through the lower branches would break bones.
Catch the forked branch. Pull it down. Get a grip. Up, right, left, left, right, and find the nest .
The nest wasn’t an actual roost, just a set of three branches near the top of the tree that formed a triangle and created a perfect seat. Suri planted her butt in the crux, hooked her arms around the branches, and looked down. Everything below her was darkness.
Maybe I lost it.
Suri waited, feeling the deep, slow sway of the tree that had once frightened her so, but at that moment was wonderful. She struggled to listen for any sounds of pursuit over the racket of her own gasps for air.
By the Grand Mother, I’m noisy!
She wasn’t the only one. Around her, Gale was playing in the branches, causing them to clickand clack.
“Not nice of you to run away.” The sound of the voice chilled her. “Why don’t you come down and give me that bone.”
“Take it!” Suri jerked it from her belt and threw. The sound of a handsome man’s arm tripped through the branches.
A long pause followed. Suri waited.
Is that it? Is that all I needed to do?
“Now why don’t you come down.”
Aww, for the love of Fribble-Bibble! “Leave me alone.”
“Alone?” the teeth-on-stone voice said. “But you are alone . . . all alone. Even your dog is gone. It’s just you and me now. Time for us to get better acquainted. Do you know who I am?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.”
“I’m you in a hundred years, or what you might have become, if you hadn’t stolen that bone. Don’t you see? I’m going to do you a favor. You don’t want to be me, do you?”
“There’s no way I could be like you. I don’t even know what you are!”
“I’m what those like you become. Little ones with power grow up to be big ones with desires. You don’t want to die, do you?”
Suri wasn’t certain if the voice was closer or not.
Is it climbing? Can it figure out how? Took me days with daylight.
“Of course you don’t. That’s why you’re in the tree. You’re terrified of dying and you’ve only been alive a few years. Imagine the lust for life after you’ve been living for several decades. And just picture how powerful you’ll be by then—so potent that the rules won’t apply to you. When the day comes to leave your body and move on, you’ll refuse, same as I did. But there’s a problem. Your body, your wonderful home for so long, is weaker than you are. It rots. That’s why everyone else leaves. No one wants to live in a rotting shell. But you’re powerful. You don’t have to. You can keep it—not perfect, but well enough. All you need is a good meal and some beauty sleep. The faces of those you eat keep you pretty and watch out for you, serve you in the hope that one day you will free them. You won’t. You can’t. They make your bed and then you lie in it.”
That’s when Petree began to dance.
Only once before had Suri been so high in a tree during a storm. She never wanted to do that again. This wasn’t that—it was worse. Petree shook so hard that Suri came out of the nest. If not for her two arms hugging the branches, she would have fallen. As it was, she dangled, legs kicking as the oak did a fine impression of Minna shaking off water. Suri finally knew what a droplet on a strand of wolf fur felt like. Then came the scream. Nothing living was capable of making a sound like that. A high pitched, soul-chilling cry ripped through the night.
Suri continued to hug her new friends, the limbs near the nest, whom she had grown to love in mere seconds. When Petree stopped his acrobatics for a while, Suri took a chance and settled herself back in the nest and waited.
“Suri? Suri, are you up there?” Tura called.
Suri didn’t answer.
What if it impersonates people?
“How do I know you’re really Tura?”
“Because if you don’t get down here this instant, Minna and I are going to go home and finish off the last of the strawberries, and you won’t get any.”
The voice sounded like Tura’s, but the brusque tone was unmistakable. Suri climbed down, which was difficult to do in the dark. Occasionally, she stopped to look below, to be sure an old woman and a wolf waited and not some hideous creature. Hitting dirt, she found Tura and Minna digging a hole beside Petree’s roots.
“What are you doing?” Suri asked. “And where’s the . . . thing?”
“Finishing up my errand,” Tura explained.
“Tura.” Suri looked around concerned. “There was a . . . I don’t know, a . . .”
“A raow,” Tura replied. “Yes, it’s gone now.”
“Gone where?”
Tura looked at Petree as if the two shared a secret. “Doesn’t matter, does it? What’s more important is the strawberries. I don’t know about you, but I’m starved.”
Tura had the bone that Suri had thrown. She placed it in the hole and covered it up with dirt. Patting the loose soil down, pressing it firm, she smiled. “There, that’s the last of it.”
“Tura, what’s a raow?”
“Strawberries, dear. Think about the strawberries.”
“Are you bleeding?” Suri asked, seeing dark slashes across Tura’s face that were dripping blood.
Tura’s cloak was shredded into ragged strips. She held her arm clutched to her side as if it was hurt.
“Tura? What’s a raow? What kind of a mystic will I be if I don’t know everything you do?”
Tura sighed. “There are some things we shouldn’t ever know.”
Suri folded her arms in defiance.
Tura frowned. “Fine. A raow is an evil spirit that invades a . . . ah . . . a person . . . a person who is lost. Yes, that’s it. There. Now you know. I sealed this one up in the oak. Not the best choice. An ash would have been better or even our hawthorn, but . . .” She looked up at Petree and patted the trunk. “This old gal ought to do fine.”
“Gal?” Suri said. “I thought Petree was a he.”
“Petree?” Tura smirked. “That’s not right. Her name is Evla Turin.”