It was time to raid their nests.
Dustfinger kneeled down on one of the damp stones. Something rustled behind him, and for a moment he caught himself looking for Farid’s dark hair and Gwin’s head with its little horns, but it was only a lizard pushing its way out of the leaves and crawling up onto one of the stones to bask in the autumn sunlight. “Idiot!” he muttered, leaning forward. “Forget the boy – and as for the marten, he won’t miss you. Anyway, you had good reasons for leaving him behind. The best of reasons.” His reflection trembled on the dark water. His face was the same as ever. The scars were still there, of course, but at least he had suffered no further injuries, his nose hadn’t been smashed in, he didn’t have a stiff leg like Cockerell in the other story, everything was in the right place. He even still had his voice so the man Orpheus obviously knew his trade.
Dustfinger bent lower over the water. Where were they? Had they forgotten him? The blue fairies forget every face, often just minutes after seeing it, but what about these others? Ten years is a long time, but did they count years?
The water moved, and his reflection mingled with other features. Toadlike eyes were looking up at him from an almost human face, with long hair drifting in the water like grass, and equally green and fine. Dustfinger took his hand out of the cool water, and another hand stretched up – a slender, delicate hand almost like a child’s, covered with scales so tiny that you could scarcely see them. A damp finger, cool as the water from which it had risen, touched his face and traced the scars on it.
“Yes, it’s not easy to forget my face, is it?” Dustfinger spoke so quietly that his voice was scarcely more than a whisper. Loud voices frighten water-nymphs. “So you remember the scars. And do you remember what I asked you and your sisters to do for me, when I was here before?”
The toadlike eyes looked at him, black and gold, and then the water-nymph sank and vanished as if she had been a mere illusion. But a few moments later, three of them appeared together in the dark water. Shoulders white as lily petals shimmered beneath the surface, fishtails with rainbow scales like the belly of a perch flicked, barely visible, in the water below. The tiny gnats dancing above the water stung Dustfinger’s face and arms, as if they had been waiting just for him, but he hardly felt it. The nymphs hadn’t forgotten him – neither his face nor what he needed from them to help him summon fire.
They reached their hands up out of the water. Tiny air bubbles rose to the surface, the sign of their laughter, as silent as everything else about them. They took his hands between their own, stroked his arms, his face, his bare throat, until his skin was almost as cool as theirs and covered with the same fine, slimy deposit that protected their scales. Then, as suddenly as they had come, they disappeared again. Their faces sank down into the dark pool, and Dustfinger might have thought, as always, that he had only dreamed them, but for the cool sensation on his skin, the shimmering of his hands and arms.
“Thank you!” he whispered, although only his own reflection now quivered on the water. Then he straightened up, made his way through the oleander bushes on the bank, and moved toward the fire-tree as silently as possible. If Farid had been here, he’d have been prancing through the wet grass like a foal in his excitement.
Cobwebs wet with dew clung to Dustfinger’s clothes as he stood under the plane tree. The lowest nests hung so far down that he could easily reach into one of the entrance holes. The first elves came swarming angrily out when he put in the fingers that the water-nymphs had covered with moist slime, but he calmed them by humming quietly. If he could hit the right note, their agitated swirling soon turned to a tumbling flight, their own humming and buzzing becoming drowsy, until their tiny, hot bodies settled on his arms, burning his skin and leaving a tiny deposit of soot. However much it hurt he must not flinch, mustn’t scare them away, must reach even farther into the nest until he found what he was looking for: their fiery honey. Bees stung, but fire-elves burned holes in your skin if the water-nymphs hadn’t touched it first. And even with their protection, it was prudent not to be too greedy when you stole the elves’ honey. If a robber took too much they would fly in his face, burn his skin and hair, and wouldn’t let him go until he was writhing in pain at the foot of their tree.
But Dustfinger was never greedy enough to annoy them. He took only a tiny piece of honeycomb from the nest, scarcely larger than his thumbnail. That was all he needed for now. He went on humming quietly as he wrapped the honey in some leaves.
The fire-elves woke as soon as he stopped humming. They whirred around him faster and faster, while their voices rose to a sound like bumblebees buzzing angrily. However, they did not attack him. You had to ignore them, act as if you hadn’t even seen them as you turned and walked away at your leisure, slowly, very slowly. They went on whirling in the air around Dustfinger for some time, but in the end they fell behind him, and he followed the small stream that flowed out of the water-nymphs’ pool and wound slowly away through willows, reeds, and alders.
He knew where the stream would take him: out of the Wayless Wood, where you hardly ever met another soul of your own kind, and then on northward, to places where the forest belonged to human beings, and its timber fell to their axes so fast that most trees died before their canopies could offer shelter to so much as a single horseman. The stream would lead him through the valley as it slowly opened out, past hills where no man had ever set foot because they were full of giants and bears and creatures that had never been given a name. At some point the first charcoal-burners’ huts would appear on the slopes, Dustfinger would see the first patch of bare earth among the dense green, and then he would be reunited not just with fairies and water-nymphs but, he hoped, with some of those human beings he had missed for so long.
He moved into cover when a sleepy wolf appeared between two trees in the distance and waited, motionless, until its gray muzzle had disappeared. Yes, bears and wolves – he must learn to listen for their steps again, to sense their presence nearby before they saw him – not forgetting the big wildcats, dappled like tree trunks in the sunlight, and the snakes as green as the foliage where they liked to hide. They would let themselves down from the branches with less sound than his hand would make brushing a leaf off his shoulder. Luckily, the giants generally stayed in their hills, where not even he dared go. Only in winter did they sometimes come down. But there were other creatures, too, beings less gentle than the water-nymphs, and they couldn’t be lulled by humming as the fire-elves could. They were usually invisible, well hidden among timber and green leaves, but they were no less dangerous for that: Tree-Men, Trows, Black Bogles, NightMares .. some of them even ventured as far as the charcoal-burners’
huts.
“Take a little more care!” Dustfinger whispered to himself. “You don’t want your first day home to be your last.” The sheer intoxication of being back gradually died down, allowing him to think more clearly again. But the happiness remained in his heart, soft and warm like a young bird’s downy plumage.
He took off his clothes beside a stream and washed the water-nymphs’ slimy deposit off his body, together with the fire-elves’ soot and the grime of the other world. Then he put on the clothes he hadn’t worn for ten years. He had looked after them carefully, but there were a few moth holes in the black fabric all the same, and the sleeves had already been threadbare when he first took them off in that other world. These garments were all red and black, the colors worn by fire-eaters, just as tightrope-walkers clothed themselves in the blue of the sky. He stroked the rough material, put on the full-sleeved doublet, and threw the dark cloak over his shoulders. Luckily, everything still fitted; getting new clothes made was an expensive business, even if you just took your old clothes to the tailor to be patched up again, as the strolling players usually did.
