The Wonder Tales

Chapter Five-1

Chapter Five

Clarimond herself awoke with a fresh resolution in her mind. She dressed rapidly and forsook breakfast in favour of an early walk, her steps turned towards Heatherberry Spinney.

She felt unequal to the demands of the decision which had been placed upon her, unable to determine whether she did right or wrong to resist the importunate demands of Pippin Greensleeves. She could not trust the faerie fruit, for it showered curses upon those who tasted it as surely as it showered blessings. By holding herself aloof from its delights, was she protecting Berrie Wynweald, or bringing further misery down upon it? In remaining intact and sound and unchanged, was she preserving her mind and her energy to resist the tricksy piper, and find some way to liberate the town? Or in her stubbornness and fear, was she drawing her home deeper into trial?

She could not tell, and no one could advise her, for Tobias was as befuddled as she. So she turned to the one place she had always felt at peace in troubled times: her favourite tree, in the centre of Heatherberry Wood.

It may seem strange to consult a tree for guidance, particularly since the tree in question had proved to be a peach, and was as complicit in the schemes of Greensleeves as all the rest. But thither Clarimond had always gone, when her heart was troubled and her peace in tatters. She had wandered beneath its boughs when her father died, some twenty years before. She had gone there again as a widow, before Thistledown House had become her home. No other place in Berrie could offer the succour she so urgently needed, and so thither went she.

She trod the familiar roads with some difficulty, for the way was much encumbered. The trees had crept farther forward overnight and had entirely taken over some of the paths; Clarimond was obliged to wend her way through the tangled orchards with the greatest care, ever in danger of tripping over a protruding tree root, or some one or other of the many fallen apples that lay in her way.

When at last she reached the spinney, she found it scarcely recognisable. Choked with ancient apple trees and littered with a rainbow of fallen fruits, its dimensions had lost their beloved familiarity to Clarimond, and it took her longer than it ought to find her way to her beloved tree.

She discovered it at last, reigning over its narrowed grove with breath-taking majesty. It was in full, flourishing leaf, but its foliage had deviated from the traditional green. Clarimond’s tree had garbed itself instead in a heathery purple veined with gold, and for the first time she wondered about the source of the spinney’s name.

So bedecked with fruit were its branches that they hung low, weighed down with a heavy burden of abundant peaches. Blush-pink were these, pink and white and gold, their colours growing more vibrant and more intense as they ripened. The ground beneath the tree was a carpet of fallen peaches and leaves, a glory of colour and life and magic fully fit for a queen.

But behind all this splendour, the tree was still her tree. Clarimond felt the familiar sense of comfort and familiarity steal over her as she approached, and her heart eased a little when she stood once more beneath its boughs. She lingered there awhile, breathing in the air’s sweet fragrance and watching the leaves ripple in the breeze.

At length she sighed, deeply and long, for no burst of inspiration eased her troubled mind.

‘What am I to do?’ she said aloud. ‘Who am I to trust? How can I know?’

An answer came swiftly, for a flower blossomed upon a branch directly before her eyes: a delicate white bloom, tinted pink at the edges of each petal, its heart releasing a faint honeyed scent. It withered as she watched and became a firm, golden little nub, a budding fruit. That fruit grew and ripened until an apple hung there, nestled oddly among the clustered peaches. Its skin was gold-dappled-green, the apple the same in all its features as the very first she had plucked in the gardens of Thistledown House.

Clarimond’s fingers itched to take the perfect fruit, and her mouth watered at the prospect of eating it. But her heart grew afeared. She gathered up her skirts, turned her back upon the glorious tree, and fled.

Twice she almost tumbled, and measured her length among the fallen faerie fruits. But on she ran, and did not slow until she had traversed almost the whole of Hollybriar Way. Some ten feet from the turning into Gradirose she stopped at last, for it occurred to her that something was awry.

Back she went, more slowly and with greater care, until she reached Maud Redthorn’s cottage — or the place where it once stood, for no trace of it remained. No sign of the encroaching orchard could she find, either; all had vanished, and in their place a velvet-green moor had appeared, strewn with quartz-laced boulders and feathered with saffron grasses. A pretty vision it made, but Clarimond gazed upon it in befuddled dismay.

On the other side of the path, what had once been the twin to Maud’s cottage yet remained. Clarimond hammered upon the door until it opened, and Ferdinand Crowther stood blinking in surprise upon the other side.

‘Clarimond?’ said he.

‘What has become of Maud’s cottage?!’ Clarimond gestured wildly at the empty, dreaming dale.

Ferdinand shook his head so hard, his bronzed spectacles almost flew off his nose. ‘I do not know! Early this morning there came a strange mist, all silver and gold, and it shrouded Maud’s cottage so thickly that I could not see through it. When the mist faded, the house was gone and the trees as well, and…’ he gazed at the velvet moor in silent dismay. ‘And it was as you see it.’

Behind him, Clarimond saw signs of disarray about his house, and a large bag stood half-packed in the centre of his kitchen. ‘You are leaving?’

‘I must, for who can say when the mist will return, and take my cottage away with it? I would rather be elsewhere when it comes.’

Clarimond could hardly oppose such a sensible resolve, though her heart smote her at the sight of such sorry preparations. She went on her way, alert now for further signs of disorder, and swiftly she found them. Two of the houses along Gradirose were gone, naught left behind to show that ever a building had stood upon the site. The moor stretched away to the horizon, as serene and lovely as though it had always been there.

Was that a silvered tint to the air, and a wisp of mist forming at the end of the street?

Clarimond turned her back upon it all and hurried home, a flurry of fear hastening her steps. Once safely through the doorway of her own house, however, she did not pause, but went at once out into the garden. She pushed and fought her way through the thicket, heedless of the raking branches which caught at her clothes and her hair, and stopped at last beneath the same tree from which she had drawn her mother’s apple not long before. Its boughs were laden with apples, all green and gold-dappled, and before she could change her mind or lose her resolve, Clarimond seized the nearest and clutched it tightly in her fist.

‘So be it, then,’ she said, breathless with fear, and took a bite.

Clarimond’s teeth sank into the crisp flesh with a delightful crunch. Her senses were instantly flooded with myriad impressions all at once: intense, summery sweetness; a taste like honeyed nectar and wine; and a fresh, enchanting fragrance, like honeysuckle and jasmine and chocolate and everything good that Clarimond had ever encountered. She ate and ate, no sooner finishing one apple than she was reaching for another. She ate until she could hold no more and emerged at last from her enchanted daze, her chin and hands sticky with juice.

She drifted back into the house, leaving her hat behind in the orchard and her shoes abandoned in the grass. Low-hanging boughs ran twiggy fingers through her hair, tearing it from its pins, and swept the shawl from her shoulders. The hems of her skirts were stained as far as her knees with the juice of fallen fruits, and the fabric was torn here and there. Never had she made a more disreputable figure, but this she did not regard as she wandered the rooms of her house, taking cakes from the pantry and a taste of a fresh cream tart from her kitchen.

Clarimond went back out into the street, and soon filled her hands with damsons and peaches and plums. These she rapidly devoured and sought for more, her loosened hair whipping in the high summer winds. She was bursting with vitality, a restless energy animating her limbs and quickening her steps until she all but danced her way through Berrie South, evading with ease the knotted trees which had so impeded her progress before. And she could not stop her reaching hands from plucking fruit after fruit, feasting with a joyous gluttony she had never before felt — or perhaps never indulged.

She was halfway to the Wynspan when the mist came up behind her, its chill coils sending a shiver over her skin and weakening her knees. With it came the faint, eerie melody of Greensleeves’s silver pipes, half-heard upon the breeze.

Clarimond whirled about and watched, forgetting to breathe, as a great bank of glittering fog engulfed a white-stuccoed house, leaving the velvet-green moss of the dale in its wake. The cloud exhaled in a flurry of hazy wisps, and Dunstan Goldwyne’s bakery vanished into the wind.

Clarimond caught a glimpse of something else secreted within the mist: a flash of colour, a hint of something that resembled neither the neat, familiar buildings of Southtown nor the deep green expanse of the quartz-scattered moor behind. She darted towards the fog even as those around her streamed away from it, and paused at the very mouth of the inexorable cloud. A cool breeze tugged at her clothes, fresh and welcome in the heat of the day, and Clarimond shivered.

Silvered fog bedazed her eyes and she saw nothing at all, save for streamers of winding gold reaching to draw her inside…

Then — there — the blue-painted walls of Goldwyne’s Bakery, but no longer did that familiar establishment stand within the winding, cobbled roadway she knew. The path that lay before it was of gold-dappled earth, thickly grown with blue grasses on either side. A heady scent teased at her senses, blown upon a gust of fragrant air, and she heard the distant, haunting sound of bells.

And Clarimond shivered anew, for she could not doubt that she had received a fleeting glimpse of Faerie.

No more did she, for the mist swirled in a great spiralling gust and dissipated, leaving the remaining buildings untouched — for the present. But Clarimond could have no doubt that it would soon return.

She lifted her stained skirts away from her bare feet and ran, away from the rambling dale that crept ever closer. Clarimond ran for the Wynspan arching over the clear waters of the river, for the Moss and Mist that lay some way beyond, and for Tobias Dwerryhouse.

Tobias sat atop the bar in the common room, deep in thought. Theo Penderglass had taken a table not far away and sat with a tankard before him, though it was early in the afternoon. He was not much absorbed by it, for his dreaming gaze was fixed upon some distant point far beyond the walls of the Moss and Mist, and he rarely remembered to drink. All his cheerful, diligent industry had deserted him since he had succumbed to the arts of Pippin Greensleeves, and he had become an incurable dreamer.

This seemed a cautionary tale to Tobias. If he ate, would he, too, cease to care about the things that mattered deeply to him now? Would he drift away into a reverie, like Penderglass, and wander aimless through the rest of his days? What would become of the Mist, if it were so? What would become of Clarimond?

But his efforts to hit upon some other way to reverse the turmoil that had swept across Berrie had met with no success. Too well he recognised the guile and the power of one such as Greensleeves, and too aware was he of how little he had with which to oppose, or even circumvent, any expressed wish of the piper’s.