Three days later, in the oldest part of the forest.
The wind arrived before Hibari did. It came whistling through the clearing, flattened the ferns, snatched the lid off Kaede's teapot, and set it spinning down the path like a hubcap. Then a young woman dropped out of the sky, landed on one foot on the stump beside the kettle, windmilled her arms, and said, "Hello! I'm not late!"
"You're a day early," said Kaede.
"That's not late." Hibari hopped down. She was a wiry thing with wind-snarled hair and a coat of gray feathers that looked as though it had been through several storms, and she had the restless, bright-eyed air of someone who had never sat still for a whole sentence in her life. "I've got news. I've got so much news. Do you want it in order, or in the order I think of it?"
"I'd prefer neither."
"Kagari challenged Hyouka to a duel. Hyouka froze her sleeve to a tree. Kagari took it as a compliment." Hibari dropped onto a log and began to unlace her boots. "Ibara sent everyone a basket of pastries, with a note. Tsubaki had one of her skeletons taste-test them."
"And?"
"They were delicious. They are always delicious. That's what's so terrifying." She shook out a boot. "Shizuku has written a song about all of us, and none of it is flattering. Ranka's made another homunculus and won't tell anyone what it's for. And Mayoi slept for three weeks, and when she woke up she said, very clearly, 'Somebody is going to need a lot of thread.' Then she went back to sleep."
"Mayoi says a great many things."
"Mm. That's what I said." Hibari looked around. "Where's the goblin who ate my hat? I want to forgive him in person."
"He's been reassigned."
"Where to?"
Kaede did not answer.
And that was the moment, Kaede would reflect later, when she should have changed the subject.
A goblin was crossing the far edge of the clearing with a tray of cups. A small, solemn one, in his best apron, trained to carry things the way one trains a very clever dog. Around his neck hung a tiny wooden fox on a string, carved so finely that the little tail curled up at the tip, and he was holding himself very straight, the way one does when wearing a medal.
Hibari stopped lacing her boot.
"That," she said, "is not goblin work."
"Drink your tea."
"Kaede, goblins can't carve. They can barely count to seven. That is a carved fox, with a tail, and somebody has sanded it." She leaned forward until she was nearly off the log. "Where did he get it?"
"Hibari."
"There are three more with acorns. I saw them in the tree line, they were hiding. Acorns with faces. And the roots, I passed three of them on the way in, they're all lying across things, they're tidy, Kaede. Your forest is never tidy. It's the loveliest mess in the world. Who are you tidying for?"
Kaede set down her cup.
She was, by some distance, the most patient of the ten, and she had been keeping this for a year and two months. It had been a small, warm, private thing, and she had been very careful with it. She looked at Hibari's open, shining, hungry face, and she understood that it was over.
"A man," she said.
There was a long silence, in which a very small wind went around the clearing and came back.
"A man."
"He fell out of nowhere, into my ferns, with a doll and a spool of wire. A boy, nearly. A grown one. Forty-odd. He was a clerk." Kaede rubbed her forehead. "Tsubaki's skeleton was about to step on him. I turned it aside."
"You turned it aside."
"I tidied up after him. A little. The goblins came to kill him, and I called them off. They're only children, they were curious. Then he started leaving them carved things, and they started bringing him buttons, and I..." She gestured. "I told them to leave him be. They understand about eleven words, and that is one of them."
Hibari was staring at her with the awed, appalled, delighted expression of a woman who has just been handed a diamond. "You made the goblins his pen pals."
"I made them stop trying to kill him."
"For a year." She seized Kaede's hands. "Show me."
"No."
"Show me now."
Kaede sighed the sigh of the very old, and put her hand flat on the earth.
The pool of rainwater in the hollow of the stump rippled and cleared. It showed a clearing, a house of logs and clay with a thin line of smoke, and on the step of it a man sitting with a small wooden marionette on his knee and a smear of red clay on his thumb. He was thin, bearded, lined about the eyes. He was painting the marionette's cheek with great care, and he was talking, in a low, tired, cheerful voice, to a large doll propped against the wall behind him.
"What do you think?" he said. Then he stopped. "No. I think. It needs a second coat."
"He talks to the doll," she whispered.
"Yes."
"And he answers for her. Or he used to. And now he's stopped. Oh. Oh, Kaede. That's the saddest thing I've ever seen. I love him so much." She turned. "What level?"
"Fourteen."
"In a year?"
"He's careful." Kaede's mouth twitched, very slightly. "He killed a stonehide bear at Level 9. With poison."
"With poison! He's a clerk! You said he's a clerk!"
"I said he was, he was, he's, umm, uh, a Puppet Maker now..."
Hibari opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again.
Then she sat back on the log, breathing hard, and watched the man in the pool for a long time, as he lifted the little puppet and tipped its head to the light, and the red paint shone on its cheek. Something in her restless face went quiet and bright.
"Has he got any wire?"
"Eleven feet. He won't touch it." Kaede shook her head. "He counts it every morning."
"I could drop a spool on his roof..."
"You will do no such thing."
"A small one!"
"Hibari. You will tell no one. Not Kagari, not Yoruka, not Ibara, especially not Ibara. Not a word. He is a boy in the woods with a doll. He is not a story."
Hibari put a hand on her heart. "On my honor."
"You told Kagari about my casserole."
"That was different. That was funny." She was already pulling on her boot. "I never tell anyone anything. You know that. I'm the soul of discretion. I'm a gentle breeze."
"You are a hurricane."
"Same thing." She stood, and stretched, and gave a great, cracking, happy yawn. "I'm going to go and be discreet somewhere very far away. Thank you for the tea. Tell the goblin with the fox I said the tail's perfect."
And she was gone, in a gust that took the teapot lid and half a bush with it, spiraling up through the canopy into a sky that was already, in the north, going gray and swollen.
Kaede sat very still. She watched the tiny wind go. She had known Hibari for five hundred years.
"She'll have told everyone before dinner," she said, to nobody at all, and put her face in her hands.
I painted the marionette's cheek on the first dry morning, with red ochre and a little pine resin for a binder, and it took three coats.
The scratches vanished. In their place there was a round pink spot like a blush, which gave the marionette an expression of faint, permanent embarrassment. I thought it was an improvement. His face had always looked surprised. Now it looked surprised and slightly mortified, like a man who has just realized he's been waving at a stranger.
"What do you think?" I said to Clara, and stopped. "No. I think. It needs a second coat."
I gave it a second coat. I think I was a little pleased with myself.
She came back at dawn, three days after the play.
I had been half expecting her, and half not, and when I opened the door and found her sitting on the step with her back to me, a small hunched shape in the gray light, I felt something in my chest loosen that I had not known was tight.
"Good morning," I said.
She turned. She had the little carved goblin tied to her belt on a bit of string, and when she saw me she made a quick, rising purr and bounced once on the step, the way a dog does when you come home.
I should be honest about what I had come to understand in the days since the play.
She was not a person. Not the way I am. I do not say it to be unkind. I say it because I spent the first few days talking to her as if she were, in long, earnest speeches, and I watched her face while I did it. She watched my mouth. She followed my tone. She liked it when I was gentle and flinched when I was loud. She did not understand one word of what I said. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping . com.
The Registry had given me a number for my own head, and I had spent a year and a half wondering what it meant. I think I finally had my answer. I was a nine. She was, I would guess, a one. She was something between a very clever dog and a very small child, and she loved me the way both do: wholeheartedly, and for the quality of my snacks.
I thought about the comb, and the apology I had made on that step. She had not understood a word of it. She had taken the acorn man because it was shiny, and she had nodded because I had nodded. I had apologized, sincerely, to someone who could not be apologized to.
I thought about that for a long time. Then I decided to go on apologizing anyway. It had been for me, and I think it still is.
It was a relief. It was also, in a way I could not put a name to, very sad.
I named her the way one names a dog.
I touched her necklace, the beads and buttons and the scrap of blue glass strung in loops, and I said, "Bead." I said it again. I said it every time I gave her something good. By the third day, she turned her head when I said it. By the fifth, she came running.
She had no name for herself. I do not think goblins have names. If she had one, it was probably a smell. My own name she never learned. The best she could do was a sound I made when I was happy, a sort of "Ken," which she took to mean the man with the food, and which she used with great enthusiasm and no apparent understanding.
I taught her to sit, which she already did when she wanted something. I taught her to come, which she did when I whistled. I tried to teach her to shake an open hand, and she bit my thumb, very gently, and brought me a beetle. We are still working on that one.
I kept a catalog in the back of the ledger. It was not a dictionary. By the second week I had stopped pretending it was. It was a list of calls and what they seemed to mean. A short, warm purr: content. A rising click: where are you? A sharp krr: alarm, or no, or stop that. A long, chuckling wheeze: delight. And kee, kee: a quick, bright, breathless sound, which I took to mean look, shiny.
There were eleven in all.
The goblins came every evening now, the eight of them, sometimes more. They did not come to talk. They came for the show, and for me, in about equal parts.
They brought me presents the way cats bring birds: raw, unasked, and with enormous pride. A clutch of eggs. A fistful of mushrooms. Something with too many legs, still moving. I cooked what I could, and ate it, and my Vitality, I believe, saved my life at least twice that month. I thanked them anyway, in a low, steady voice, the way you thank a dog for the stick.
The marionette gave a show every night. It was never the same show, But it was always the same joke: a small wooden man trips over his own feet. They laughed until they wheezed. I carved them foxes and acorn men, and a bear when Bead put her hand on a bear-shaped lump of wood and looked at me for an hour.
I put a cord into her hand once. She yanked it, and the marionette flew across the clearing, and she shrieked with joy and did it again until the string snapped.
I had not killed anything in sixty days. My XP column had never looked so sad.
I had never been so well. I knew precisely what I was doing. I was a lonely man who had found a very small, very devoted audience that could not tell me I was mad. I decided there were worse things.
She brought me the wire on the forty-fourth day.
I assumed it was another button. She came across the clearing with something wrapped in a bit of cloth, and she set it in my lap with the air of a cat presenting a mouse. I unwrapped it, and I did not understand what I was looking at.
Then I did.
It was a coil of copper wire, tarnished green with age, about as thick as a pencil lead. I held the end between my fingers. It bent. It held its bend. It was soft and strong and wonderful, and there was a great deal of it, forty feet at least, wound into a neat, tight spiral as if somebody had meant to use it once and had lost interest.
I sat down in the dirt.
I am not ashamed to say that I wept a little. I had not touched new wire in a year and a half. I had looked at my little coil every morning, and counted it, and put it away. And she had trotted across the clearing and dropped forty feet of it in my lap, because it was shiny, and I had spent so long staring at my own that she had decided I must like them.
She did not know what it was. She knew only that it was kee, and that I was happy.
"Bead," I said, when I could. "Where did you get this?"
I did not expect an answer. She did not give one. But she gave the quick, bright, breathless call, kee, kee, kee, and she trotted to the edge of the clearing, to the dark mouth of the path that led north, and she stopped, and looked back at me.
She took three steps. She looked back. She whined.
It is the oldest gesture in the world. Any dog owner would have known it. Come.
I looked at the coil in my hands. I looked at the north. And above me, a very small, very fast cloud went over the clearing, no bigger than a house, and seemed to stop for a moment, as if it were listening.
Then it moved on, and I forgot all about it.
Day 502.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Skill: puppet craft Lv. 10.
Wire: eleven feet, plus about forty-two feet of copper. New!
Goblins: eight. Calls catalogued: eleven. Tricks taught: three.
I have not spoken for Clara in ninety-five days.
Question?: where does Bead want to take me?