Chapter Eleven

Hours later, sunlight filtered through the treetops and fell on her closed eyelids. Carmen adjusted her shoulders’ position on the wide trunk of the tree and drowsily stroked Dax’s golden fur. Her brow creased slightly as she considered the pros and cons of gaining consciousness. Something stirred importantly under the heavy blanket of sleep—something troubling and time-sensitive. A life-or-death matter…

“Brock!” Carmen shouted. Distraught, she sat up and looked about. Dax jumped to his paws and barked with concern. Carmen raced into the woods and resumed her search. Dax, ever loyal, matched her step-for-step throughout the long day. Carmen caught fleeting glimpses of curious, inhuman faces in the shadows as she searched, but she had only one face on her mind. “He may be a self-centered brat,” Carmen muttered, “but he doesn’t deserve this.” She paused only to relieve herself, munch a few apples from an opportune tree and drink fresh water from an overland stream. However, as the sun began to go down, Carmen had still seen neither hide nor hair of Brock. She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Brock! Brock!”

A shrill sound erupted at Carmen’s back. Just two feet away, a minuscule person laughed uproariously. Carmen’s eyes widened when she saw the misshapen creature. Beneath a tattered leather dress, wide hips and the faint curve of a bosom revealed that the strange being was female. A long beak of a nose curled down over a pair of thin lips, and a sharp chin jutted out above a skinny neck. Through the dirt-brown snarls of hair, Carmen saw that the ears—though both enormous—were shaped entirely differently. One was long, with a flabby, pendulous earlobe, and one was squashed and plump like a cauliflower. Like the gnome who’d brought refreshments on the lawn of Castle Speranza, this creature’s hands were twisted and knobby at the end of scrawny wrists. A wide stripe of fur rose on Dax’s back and he took one step backwards.

“She dersen’t worry about the poochie,” the gnome squeaked in a high voice. “Poochie sees but a wee skunk, that he does!” She giggled so hard that she snorted. “Poor tooshie dersen’t know why a skunk can speak like his mistress, though! Poor poochie!”

“Poor poochie, indeed,” Carmen muttered, and resumed her desperate cries. “Brock? Can you hear me?” she screamed. “Where are you?”

“She’s looking for someone, then? Someone in need of her help, yes! Poor somebody, all alone and groany-moaning in the woods!” The gnome fell on her back and rolled from side to side, clutching her stomach in mockery.

“You’ve seen him?” Carmen asked. “Where? Take me to him!”

The gnome rolled her eyes and writhed in faux-pain, then burst into laughter at her own joke.

Carmen squatted beside her. “Take me to him, please!”

“Aye, then.” The gnome quieted. She fixed a bright, clever eye on Carmen. “She’s new to the magic, and new to the ways of the wood, so perhaps she’s not knowing the way of things. The people of the fine castle order us about, yes, and lord over the wood, yes, but perhaps they dersen’t say the thank yous that they might be saying. They dersen’t show kindness to the older folk of the wood.” She knelt and pointed one gnarled finger at Carmen’s chest. “Perhaps she can make the fine castle folk be kinder to the old folk of the wood, yes?”

“Oh, ah,” Carmen stuttered. With effort, she kept her expression steady, although the blast of foul breath from the gnome’s mouth was horrendous. “I—I can certainly try. It’s just… I haven’t known them for long. I don’t know exactly what I can do to help you and I’m not at all sure I can make them listen to me, anyway.”

The gnome woman raised her shaggy eyebrows and stood. “Ah, well. More’s the pity for her, and pity-more-the-greater for yon feller in the wood, growing wrinklier and sicklier by the minute. She can do nothing to help? Well, aye, then, neither can I.” The gnome skipped around the back of the great live oak tree as the last rays of sunlight faded from the woods and were replaced by the glow of a bright, full moon.

“Wait!” Carmen shouted. “I can help! I will help, I promise!”

The gnome leaned around the tree trunk and assessed Carmen. “She promises?”

Carmen nodded with enthusiasm.

“She promises that the fine castle folk will invite us to use their bathing place, since it was first ours anyways?”

Carmen agreed.

“She promises that the fine castle folk will speak to us gently, by our names, and never more a rough hand laid on us?” The gnome leant forwards and raised one horny-nailed finger. “She promises that the fine castle folk will give us some of them fine chicken edges we’ve been smelling?”

Carmen bit her lip to keep from smiling—who’d have guessed what lifesavers Scarlett, Suellen and the rest of the flock had turned out to be?—and agreed wholeheartedly.

“She understands that breaking her promise to me means an end to her? A very ugly, bad business of an end, too, that I’d not wish on the foulest troll.” The gnome shuddered.

“Yes, yes, I promise!” Carmen said.

“She comes, then,” the gnome whispered. She darted away into the woods. Carmen, with Dax at her heels, scrambled to chase her through the dark, dense growth of trees.

* * * *

Twenty minutes later the gnome stopped and pointed down into a shallow ravine. “Yonder he rests,” she whispered.

Carmen’s heart fell when she saw the withered, thin form of a man on the ground. His hollowed chest rose and fell unevenly. She worked her way down into the vine-covered ravine and took his hand delicately.

“Brock?” she whispered. “Is that you?” The man looked like a corpse. His thin skin draped over his bones like wet tissue paper so that the contours of his skull stood in sharp relief. Wisps of white hair dotted his bare scalp, and the knobby ball of his Adam’s apple worked in his throat.

The man’s lips moved, but no sound came from his mouth. He licked his lips with a pale, gummy tongue and tried again. “Carmen,” he rasped. “Too late. So sorry.” A wet gurgle rose from his throat.

“Ach, he’s in a bad place, this one.” The gnome tsk-tsked at Carmen’s shoulder. “He’s needing those Healing Waters and that Living Earth, yes, indeed.”

Carmen’s eyes stung. She turned to the gnome and begged, “Is there anything you can do?”

“Ah, then, she needs more help from us?” the gnome sighed. “She knows she can’t get this one to the spring at the fine castle, and she wants us to show her where we old folk of the wood find the Healing Waters and the Living Earth, does she?”

Carmen fought the urge to throttle the gnome and forced a gentle smile on her face. “Yes, please,” she answered. “Please show me where you use the Healing Waters and the Living Earth.”

The gnome woman gave a melodramatic sigh. “She wants us to believe that she will be kind to we old ones of the wood, and she hasn’t even asked our name! How can she properly say thank you to us when she doesn’t know our name?”

Brock stared silently upward through milky eyes as his breath rattled in his chest.

Carmen felt that she would chomp her tongue in two if she bit it any harder. “I am so sorry,” she said. “How rude of me to skip our introduction. My name is Carmen. What is your name?”

The gnome beamed with delight and exposed all six of her long, yellowed teeth. “I’m Mephita,” she said with pride. “It means ‘skunk’.”

“What a lovely name,” Carmen answered, thinking that it was perfectly fitting as well. She suppressed a wince of disgust as Mephita exhaled another noxious puff of breath.

“Come on, then, you,” ordered Mephita. “Bring on that bag of bones feller before he turns into dust. No time to waste.”

Carmen lifted Brock’s limp body, which now weighed less than Dax’s. It was shocking and heartbreaking, but she was grateful that she was easily able to carry him and trail Mephita. Brock moaned in her arms as she followed Mephita down to the bottom of the ravine. Like wind-blown dandelion puffs, the last white wisps of hair floated away from his head and left his bald scalp bare and vulnerable.

Mephita disappeared around a bend. Carmen hurried to catch her. She jostled Brock with her jogging steps and murmured apologies when he cringed in pain. Carmen found Mephita standing over three loaf-sized rocks placed in the shape of a triangle. The gnome looked like a strange statue herself, outlined in the moon’s glow. Mephita knelt and leaned over the rocks with her eyes closed. She murmured guttural, indecipherable words and bent to kiss the ground in the middle of the triangle.

At once, a sparkling fountain of water bubbled up from the centre of the three rocks. At each corner, where the three rocks met, wet mud oozed from the ground and spread slowly onto the dry earth.

Mephita rocked back on her heels and smiled in triumph. “There you have it, Carmen. Healing Water and Living Earth. It’s only good for a few minutes, so best get the feller into it right away. He’s near the end, that one.”

Carmen settled Brock on the ground next to the fountain and placed his head on one side of the rock-formation. His gaunt skull was held in place by the ropy tendons of his throat, and his opaque eyes continued to stare senselessly up into the tree branches. He no longer looked like he was about to die—he looked like a man who’d been dead for days and days.

Carmen collected some of the icy-cold water in her hands and dribbled it into Brock’s mouth. His chin moved slightly and the liquid gushed down his neck. “Swallow it, Brock,” Carmen urged. She daubed mud onto his withered hands and forearms. The cool drink seemed to revive him a bit, she thought, but he still looked like he had passed death’s doorway and was hanging his coat in death’s foyer. Carmen poured more water between his lips and wept with relief to see him take a deep swallow. She opened his shirt and plastered Living Earth onto the stark cave of his ribcage and over the scrawny pipe of his throat. Color slowly began to return to his pale, papery skin.

Carmen pulled his shoes off and ladled handfuls of Healing Water onto his bony feet, and revisited the bared skin on his chest with fresh applications of wet earth. Brock still looked like a corpse, but at least now he looked like a freshly-deceased one.

“Thank you,” he rasped. “Thank you, Carmen. I was going to die out here.”

“You don’t need to thank me,” Carmen answered, busily splashing and rubbing his hands and chest. “I’m still pissed at you,” she admitted, “but you don’t deserve to be cast out by your own family to die all alone.” She scooped a double-handful of gloppy soil on his bare scalp and applied it to his head.

Brock swallowed and managed a weak grin. “So what do you think of the aged version of me, Carmen? I’m not quite someone you’d invite into your bed right now, am I?”

Carmen cupped water and worked it into the silty crust on his chest, which was beginning to fill out with musculature and regain a tan color. She placed one damp palm on his sunken cheek. “You forget what I am now,” she said. A smile played at the corner of her mouth. “I’m now one of the Fair Folk, am I not? Age means nothing to me.”

Brock chuckled. “Indeed you are, Carmen.”

Thin grey hair spouted over his scalp through a chalky layer of drying mud. Fascinated, Carmen anointed him with another handful of the precious liquid that bubbled from between the rocks. The ash-grey hair grew and thickened before her eyes like a time lapse video of grass growing from seed.

Unsteadily, Brock rose to a sitting position next to the gurgling font. He lowered his face to the six-inch fountain and drank deeply, then turned to Carmen with a mischievous glimmer in his sapphire eyes. “Perhaps it’s not so bad,” he asked softly. “Immortality, enhanced senses, the ability to cast glamours…and close proximity to yours truly?” He rubbed more dampened silt over his cheeks and over the darkening skin of his chest.

“Perhaps not,” Carmen admitted, “but don’t forget the close proximity to your family, either.” Brock bent to take another drink. His hands had lost their skeletal appearance and his shoulders now looked more substantial. “The point is, Brock, that you didn’t ask me first,” she went on. “You don’t get to just make choices about my life for me, especially choices that are irreversible. I have friends, jobs, a house and a community that I love. If I have to say goodbye to them, I want to be the one to do it, even if I get to have immortality and super-senses and glamours.”

Brock took one of her hands in his. “And me,” he added. “You get to have me, too, Carmen.” Goosebumps prickled down Carmen’s arms as Brock pressed his lips to her fingertips. “I’m not so bad, am I?” He traced the tip of his tongue over her palm, and Carmen shuddered with want. She threw a glance back at Mephita, who watched the exchange with a lewd expression, and yanked her hand away.

“The point, Brock,” she insisted, “is that you didn’t ask me for my thoughts. This goes way beyond picking me up for a surprise weekend holiday without running it by me beforehand, and even that would bug me a little bit. You can’t just change my life because you think it’s best. I have to choose it.”

Brock held his hands in the bubbling fountain and studied her face as though he were seeing it for the first time. All traces of his mirth were gone.

“Yes, I think you’re hot,” Carmen told him, “and yes, immortality is cool, but I can’t have any kind of future with a self-centered pleasure-seeker who makes my choices for me. I’ve lived for forty years, Brock, and I’ve learnt that I’m only happy if I can be in charge of my own destiny. After two hundred years of being a kid prince of the woods, I don’t think it’s even possible for you to grow up.”

Brock’s bearing visibly cooled, even as his body regained its usual heated virility. He knelt and gulped deep mouthfuls of Healing Water from the spring then washed the traces of Living Earth from his face, scalp, chest and arms. He stood. “You should have something to drink, too, Carmen,” he told her. “Just to be on the safe side.”

Carmen knelt and drank from the fountain, which was now noticeably shorter in height. The liquid had a sweet, faintly lemony taste. She felt it move down her throat to her stomach, where it seemed to radiate energy throughout her entire body. She took another swallow. Energy from the water sent shivers down her spine that pooled between her legs.

She rocked back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Brock looked good enough to eat. His skin glowed a rich caramel color and his silky ash-grey hair once more stood lushly on end. Her eyes made their way down his wet shirt, now plastered over his rippled abdomen, and over the unmistakable bulge in his trousers. Carmen’s cunt melted in luxurious anticipation. She knew that nothing would be more delicious than to send Mephita on her way, open up the fly of Brock’s pants, and take that thick cock between her lips. She salivated, remembering the sweet, rich tang of his cum in her mouth.

But no, she thought. Perhaps his choices brought me to this place, but I’m going to assert myself. Otherwise I’ll end up under his control, just as he and his siblings are bossed around by Gavin. Fuck that, she decided. She heard a sputter from the fountain and saw that it was only barely visible above ground. The flow of oozing silt from between the rocks had stopped and begun to crackle and dry. If I’m going to live forever in these woods, I’m going to make my own choices and control my own destiny. The fountain’s flow stopped and the last of the Healing Water seeped into the ground. Or die trying.

Mephita bounced on the balls of her feet. “All better then?” she chirped.

“Beat it, gnome,” he mumbled. “Carmen and I have things to do. We’ll call you if we need you again, so listen close.”

“O-ho, you! I think not!” Mephita retorted. “This one, Carmen, made a promise to me on pain of death. You and the fine folk of your castle will be treating the gnomes different now, feller.” Mephita stood and braced her gnarled hands on her bony hips. “That’s me, and my kin, and all the old ones in the wood.”

Brock scowled and looked to Carmen for explanation.

“It’s really not fair for your family to be rude to them,” she told him. “Mephita wants you to allow the gnomes to bathe at the bathing cavern near the castle, and she wants you to address them by name, with no physical roughness, and to say please and thank you when they work.”

Brock ran one hand through his hair and nodded. “Okay, okay,” he agreed. “I suppose that’s only fair. Anything else?”

Mephita leant forwards. “Eggsies!” she hissed. “Don’t be forgetting the eggsies, Carmen!”

“You promised her chicken eggs?” Brock asked. “Seriously?”

“What’s the problem?” Carmen asked. “The girls are good layers! Although,” she conceded, “I may need to let the flock increase a little bit to keep up with egg demand.”

Mephita chortled with glee.

“Right, then.” Brock nodded. “Thank you, Mephita, for your help in saving me. I really appreciate it. Please call me Brock.”

“You’re welcome, Brock!” hooted Mephita.

Brock winced and leaned away from the gnome. “The way I see it, Carmen and Mephita,” he continued, “is that we need to save the woods immediately, both in order to keep the peace and to restore our place at Castle Speranza.”

Carmen nodded and gestured for him to go on. Mephita sat on a rock and listened intently, her bulbous head cocked to one side.

“We need to convince Old Man Prescott that selling the land is a bad idea. If we can’t remind him of his family’s obligation to protect the woods, then we need to make him believe it’s a bad idea for some other reason. Otherwise, we’ll end up relying on Mephita here for our Healing Waters and our Living Mud, and my family will resort to violence.”

Mephita tapped one thickened, yellow fingernail on her chin. “You and you should take me along,” she leaned in front of Brock’s face and stated matter-of-factly. “You dersen’t want to risk another day with none of the Healing Waters for yourself, then, do you, Brock?” Brock’s nostrils flared. He squinted and nodded in agreement.

“Yes, Mephita, we would appreciate your help very much. Summoning the Healing Waters and the Living Earth from the earth are skills that I lack, and they are skills that we need very much right now. I would be grateful if you accompanied us to Prescott Manor.”

Mephita scampered over the crest of the ridge. “Best we’re going, then!” she urged. “Best we go!”