 
### Pence

FIRST eDITION

by

J. Evans

Copyright & Cover Art 2011 J. Evans

Published by Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return toSmashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

### Table of Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Part Two

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Part Three

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Epilogue

The End
Prologue

Her father is a roving herder of half-tamed pigs and a man of few words. Whether he chooses to live apart or is forced to do so, she can never put her finger on. He is made of stone regarding that.

They have traveled the world a thousand times over, by her reckoning, and she explored what little there was of interest long ago. Once a season they pass a bustling village on the horizon but she has never been allowed to visit there. Her father says she must be more woman than girl, though he will not say how much more or why, nor how such proportions are to be fairly judged in the first place. She asks him if all fathers are so informative. When he does not relent, she says she hates him and that a tree would make a better parent.

She is plenty old enough to take her leave and go befriend the woods, he tells her, if that's what she prefers. And when she returns, he says, the pigs are sure to be glad of her company. She takes him by his word for spite, thinking he shall promptly come to miss her.

Hurrying ahead while her father ambles slowly with the herd creates an awkward distancing that she fast falls to dislike. When she looks back he waves and smiles, and she finds herself pretending–though she knows it is not true–that this is her father's ruse to defuse her resolution. Still she hastens on and is soon farther ahead of him than she might otherwise dare.

Surrounded in deep rolling hills, swathed in a colorless fog, father and pigs far behind, her imagination alone advises her footfalls. All around there is silence, not even a bird.

Happening upon a crumbling, mossy well, she mutters a curse that no little girl ought to know. "Is one _darn_ purple-pockmarked penny too much to ask for?" She does not know what a penny is, for her father is extravagantly poor, but that is what all the stories call for when a hapless vagrant–which is precisely the light she applies to herself–chances across a well: toss a penny, make a wish. The rest is foregone.

She raises a cloth purse to her freckled nose. Woven with thread finer than silver hair, the purse is the only thing she owns of true color–all purples and burnt yellows, with green corners and rings of white in the middle. It holds what seeds she has garnered from all the whereabouts of the world as she knows it. She lingers over which to throw.

She can find everything again, eventually: rose... dandelion... moondaisy... apple... onion... checkered pumpkin... parsley... potato...

Decisively, she upturns the purse and sprinkles all the seeds down the well. As her eyes follow their spiraling disappearance into the depths of the abyss, she casts her wish.

After a pause of deep reflection she stands up and strides purposefully away from the well, opposite the direction of her father and the pigs, whistling quietly to herself as she goes.

### Part One

### Chapter I

The boy was named Pence because he was made from a potato grown close to the fence, or so he gathered.

"Pence," he would say to himself, "a small boy from a quiet garden," and he would nod his approval of this good and simple lot in life. "Pence," he would say to himself, frequently, "Pence, Pence, Pence. Yes sir, as good a name as any."

When he called himself a small boy this was not an understatement. The aforementioned fence, rough-hewn and root-white, circled the garden and it was from here that one none-in-particular potato was pulled, the last of the back row, and cut from its root. Indeed, Pence was a superlatively small boy, as you would have to be to come from a potato, unless it was the grotesquely large fare that your garden-variety giant or troll will grow, but Pence's was not. It was ordinary-sized and had been hollowed out as if someone hungry for all but the skin had scooped the innards out with a blunt spoon.

He was not exceptionally well-sculpted. His feet and his fingers were blocky and his middle was lumpy and his head a mite out of scale on the fat side. But then, the old man who crafted him was a gardener, not a whittler, and he had done the best he could.

The gardener had only the use of his right hand; his left was awvish and indisposed, paralyzed in a tight fist since he himself was a boy. Of course, being one hand shy does not make life as a gardener or a now-and-then whittler any easier, but the old man was as patient as a stump awaiting a bird and there had never been a task in the garden that he shied from on account of his handicap.

His hand aside, the garden all but tended itself. There grew no unwanted weeds, there came no pests, nor vermin, nor cotton-tailed thieves. The flowers, fruit-blossoms, and vegetable patches never overgrew to clamor for trimming back. The soil was richer than an old king, yet never lost its fertility.

All the plants had ever begged of the old man was water, for rain was each season come scarcer, the heavens above staid as the earth below. Occasional tides of wet fog swept over the land but this did little for the deep roots. It was not lost on the old man how fortunate it was that his garden contained a well of clean water tucked away among the flowers. Neither was it lost on him how strange a thing it was that the sparkling water in the deep abyss should never dry out, and never mind the endless arid spell that taxed the rest of the kingdom dry.

In the dawn of his days in the garden, the old man had braided stalks and wiry roots into rope and constructed a bucket from the white wood of a felled tree, the stump of which–as wide across as a man stands tall–designated the center of the garden and so the axis of the old man's plot in life. Each morning he drew water from the well and catered to the thirst of every growing thing in his reach, and with the flow of seasons he reaped in return what little sustenance he preferred.

The old man spent his hours pacing to and fro the meandering dirt paths, talking to the plants as his mind absconded to the remote past, to the day when there was shade in the garden and he was not the only one there to feel it. His days and nights, his years and years he spent in this manner, acting at the behest of the time-at-hand only to draw water from the well.

Needless to say, it was the gardener to preside over the growth of this none-in-particular potato and he who hollowed it out in turn to whittle away the whitish-yellow chunks that were not fated to become a small boy. On this day, unlike all the rest gone by, the old man's thoughts were not on what he had lost or what he had let go, but on what he now held in his hands: his last hope, the small boy. He grimaced as he worked, envisioning what the future held in store. He grinned too, time to time, until at last the whittling was finished.

Still, the boy was far from complete. He was a boy in form alone, as anyone would predict–simply a doll or a puppet, no more or less animate than the potato had been. The old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, what lessons of long-forgotten history, no one can say. Such is the mystery of old men.

When the gardener finally opened his eyes he glared down at the atrophy of his paralyzed left hand. His brow shifted and contorted as if burrowing worms slept restlessly underneath his skin. Slowly, wretchedly slowly, his balled-up fingers uncurled, trembling uncontrollably. Where the back of his hand had turned brown after long years in the sun, the skin inside was root-white. The old man studied his palm, where he bore a viridescent scar shaped in the outline of a heart. The scar tissue was not red or any human hue–it was grass-green and still as bright as it had been the first morning he awoke to find it emblazoned on his flesh, now a lifetime ago. Sunk into his sallow skin in the middle of the green heart was a smooth white seed, smaller than the pupil of his eye.

The seed pulsed rhythmically, a walking tempo. Unable to break away, the gardener stared at his hand with glazed eyes and might never have looked away but for the furtive quickening of the seed's rhythm; already it was struggling in the open air, desperate to be buried again in folds of earth or flesh.

The old man snarled. He plucked the seed up with his right thumb and forefinger and then brusquely pressed it into Pence's chest. He betrayed no doubt in this unorthodox transplantation and uttered no prayer. He but held his breath as he molded the boy's opulent flesh back over the newly buried heartseed.

Immediately Pence's chest began throbbing. It swelled and depressed, swelled and depressed, each beat up and down no more than the depth of a penny.

In the same instant, a chill seized the gardener. With the seed clutched in his fist he had witnessed time beyond score fall away like brittle leaves, but he had never felt the rust of those years in his bones. Now his left hand recoiled into a fist. He drew his arms in as from a cold wind.

Shaky with sudden fatigue, he took a staggered step forward to keep from losing his balance but collapsed to one knee, planting his right hand firmly in the dirt and clay as a pillar of support. His eyes watered as he stared at the earth, puzzled to be pulled down so abruptly.

"By the White Tree, Pence, I feel _alive_ ," he sputtered, eyes brimming. "Finally, death has found a path to our garden."

### Chapter II

Humbled low to the skin of the earth, the old man slid his right hand into the sleeve of his tunic and withdrew a sharp, plum purple jewel shaped like a pumpkin seed. He began to push it into the back of Pence's head, but he stopped halfway. He pulled the jewel out, set it aside, and looked down to the dirt. Perhaps he worried that if anyone abroad were to discover that the boy's brain was worth more than a small kingdom, Pence would probably be divested of his crown. Or perhaps the old man felt that it was prudent to keep a young lad's thoughts better grounded. After a short search, he pressed a scuffed-up pebble into the hole in Pence's head left by the jewel.

Shivering, the old man took a moment to muster his energy against the deathly chill that gripped him. When he had composed himself, he began rubbing his fingertips together, slowly at first but then more and more fervently until he suddenly brought them to the sides of the boy's head, let the heat sink into the potato flesh, and molded Pence's scalp shut around the pebble like so much warm clay. Finally, he snapped his fingers, punctuating the intangible.

He set the boy down in a sitting position atop the stump, which was where he did his infrequent whittling, and leaned back to better look over his handiwork.

Pence's head flopped forward, bounced back, nodded forward again and no sooner than that but his nodding fell into rhythm with the pulse of the heartseed, its tempo once more a leisurely walking count.

The boy shrugged his shoulders. He wiggled his crudely notched fingers, swiveled his feet inward and outward, then lifted his hands onto his thighs; all his motions were a ghost-slow pantomime. He slid his hands up his chest unswerving to the burial site of his beating heart, his own dim pulse his first impression of the world, beat by beat, one by one, each deep as a penny. All this yet before the gardener had given him eyes or ears or a mouth.

There was an expression like ancient concern written into the structure of Pence's countenance by the blade of the whittling knife, highlighted by the shadows that played on the garden, for the sun smoldered like a red coal low behind the root-white fence. It is impossible to know whether the boy was _aware_ of his new life then or not; if he was, it would be as a person deaf, senseless, and unseeing–unable to share any piece of their experience with others, unless you were an authority at interpreting the hypnotic head-nodding of supernaturally animated vegetable avatars.

It was no coincidence that the gardener was precisely such an expert. Unfortunately, he uttered no explanation, not even to the plants with whom he so often conferred–many of which leaned toward the stump, vying for a better view of things like curious children packed around a street magician. Or perhaps it was only their natural inclination to descend as the sun did likewise.

The old man arched a single eyebrow as he watched the boy, then he reached into a leather pouch tied to the threadbare rope that served as his belt. With sun-browned fingers he extracted a single grain of uncooked rice and push-pinned it into the middle of Pence's hitherto blank face.

"Your brothers and sisters will be the fruits and flowers and all that grows in the garden. And, like all families, there is a little fungus here, as well." The gardener took a luxurious whiff of the night air. "It will do you good to learn the difference. I'm not telling you to walk past the poor and pungent holding your nose, though, no, no, no," the old man whispered as he fine-tuned the rice's placement. "No, it's always wise to keep an open nose. Even something so small as a scent may pull a person... or a potato... to the path of their destiny. In fact, that is precisely why _I_ pulled _you_."

Pence continued to nod in time with his heartbeat.

"It's a big nose, yes," the gardener mumbled. He scooted back to the stump on his knees, his face level with the boy's own. "And I know you must be thinking: girls won't love me on account of my beaky honker! _Not so!_ Not so, no. _My_ nose is so big I can store nuts up there for the winter, and yet long, long, _long_ ago the most beautiful princess in a hundred kingdoms fell in love with me, when no other girl would give me so much as a _how-do-you-do?_ Not that I introduced myself to every milkmaid and innkeeper's daughter... but I divert. If you find that the girls you meet give you snooty looks, you can always push it in a bit more. It might poke into your brain, but that shouldn't hurt at all."

Twilight diminishing, the gardener had to squint as he stared at the boy. "Anyway, as for the girls, remember to pull it back out after you part ways. I don't think it would do well for you to go about whiffing your own thoughts all the day long–that's best left for people with lavish names and impressed opinions of themselves."

Pence kept nodding.

The gardener chuckled to himself then because Pence could not yet listen to a word he spoke. Rather, he had no ears; in fact he was a better than average listener.

A purple-handled knife hung at the old man's hip. He unstrung it and nicked two acute slits on either side of Pence's head, twisting and tilting the blade as he withdrew it so that each slit became a spiraling flourish like tiny seashells poking their way out of the boy's head.

At once, Pence stopped nodding. He sat stock still as a potato may sit.

A dreamy swarm of glowflies appeared beside the stump, seemingly drawn to the boy's drumming heartseed.

"Your name is Pence," the old man whispered to the boy. "Don't ask me why."

Pence tilted upward his faceless head. He put his hands to his new ears, seeing them through his fingertips.

"Do you... hear me?" the gardener asked. He held his breath, the knife forgotten in his hand. His eyes trained on the boy, following his every experimental movement.

Pence slowly raised one hand out toward the voice of the gardener.

The gardener extended his muscular right arm and bent his wrist such that he met Pence's fingers with the sensitive skin on the back of his own sun-browned hand.

Pence blindly ran his fingers up and down the smooth skin aback the gardener's hand and never felt its end.

The old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, what lessons of long-forgotten history, no one can say. Such is the mystery of old men.

### Chapter III

The gardener swung his knife down on the dumbfounded boy's head, cutting insatiably, as a passionate cook dices vegetables with artistic flair, stray bits and flecks flying every which way.

Catching his breath, he stared at what his hand had wrought by instinct, the spontaneous antithesis of what had taken all his last ageless morning to create. He squinted, keenly aware of the cold dusk air on his listless eyeballs, and tilted his head to one side so as to properly evaluate the pattern of the cuts he had made: Pence had thus been capped with a criss-crossing crop of stumpy spikes, the hairstyle of a boy who has never been properly introduced to soap and hot water.

"We'll wait on a beard until you've proven you can handle one," the old man said as he placed the knife on the ground next to the discarded purple jewel. "Brace yourself, Pence. This next one is really going to rock your mind." He plucked from a concealed pocket in his tunic a pair of pellucid green gemstones, iridescent circles of a similar size to the metronomic heartseed.

"To be your eyes, for they capture light without dissolution. These were once her earrings," the gardener told Pence, not knowing whether he truly heard or not, "that princess of mine."

*****

Along with the purple jewel lying in the dirt, the green gems were by far the most valuable material belongings the gardener might claim, but they were not all he possessed that was of great worth: the gardener knew things such as the world itself conspires to keep secret, and such secrets will always fetch a higher price than the rarest coins in the King's cache... but only in bazaars full of black-topped tents where men with honest earnings do not dwell.

During his long sentence of solitude and reflection, of working the land and coaxing color and life from spent earth, of listening to the psalms of the wind and the chorus of the clouds and the trees, the gardener had learned much about the heart of the world and the harmonies that govern everything from the unfolding of roots underfoot to the dance-steps of galaxies.

Only the comings and goings of men remained a mystery to him. Of courts and castles and kings he knew nothing and cared less. He had no neighbors, no friends, and no family. And yet, somehow, despite his dearth of visitors, word of his sequestered corner of the kingdom spread like birds from the crash of a felled tree.

Throughout the term of his confinement, folks who had nary caught a glimpse of his fenced-in estate nonetheless were apt and willing to invent tales about the very ancient, near-mythical mystagogue within. As they told it, he could call the spirit of life to spring from dead land; so, too, he could command it to depart; he spoke the languages of certain rare animals... or of all the animals... or of all living beasts, both animals and men; his blood ran green, his tongue black as the soil he dined on every meal; he could transform a splinter into a blade that would cut through stone; he could set a stone to lie unsinking upon water; he beckoned the clouds at will; he heard words spoken on the other side of the world, carried hither and yon over the wind; he understood the riddles of womankind; he talked to trees, and they talked back. Or was it that he turned into a tree himself? It was impossible for any one index of his secrets to retain an identity for more than a telling or two, being unavoidably tumbled up with countless other variations.

The rumors that circled longest were those as concerned the old man's left hand. He never opened it, never had; a terrible secret he clutched therein; it had come to pass through a covenant with demons, or a long lost prince, or sometimes just an ordinary girl; if he ever opened it, his head would surely fall off. In taverns around the world, it was many a crafty traveler's trade to swap a fresh theory about the old man's hand for a cold drink on the house, possibly a warm bed overnight if the telling drew a gainful crowd.

There were, however, occasional truths to be found in the sledge of gossip. These truths appeared courtesy of a handful of rovers and vagabonds who had stumbled upon the garden in the wrinkles of their own adventures. Despite any good intentions, it seldom took long for such travelers' honest words to be distorted and their good faith quite pitilessly detached. Simple details were worked against the old man: his fence was white–therefore it was made of bone; there was a large stump somewhere inside his fence–no doubt the stage of gruesome ritual beheadings; he guarded a wishing well–or, for those who knew better, a hole for the decapitated heads.

It was not long before the assorted farmers and villagers of the foothills came to regard the old man's quiet ways as unwelcome, if not downright dark sorcery, though none ventured to go and try for an introduction, let alone an indictment.

_He should leave his boastful garden_ , they grumbled by rote, though none of them had ever seen it. _He must prove he means us no harm_ , they intermittently rallied. _We will make him open his hand and reveal his prize_ , they pledged, _or we will cut it off!_ Fortunately, for the gardener, no vinomadefied mobs ever managed to arrive at his gate before their spirits either wore off entirely or else proved too much an obstacle in and of themselves to overcome.

Those who did find him held no pitchforks or torches. They brought–more often than not–little more than a penny to toss into the well, for these were men and women who did not seek the gardener out as a scourge. Nor were they in search of the forgotten lore of the world before man. They were ramblers and drifters, bards and beggars, nomads and wanderers, not fighters, killers, or cowards; the old man's place in their own widely strewn stories was as a law writ in stone both uninvited and overlooked. And this is precisely the model by which a clever man with a vested interest came to locate the gated haven.

*****

He watched from a clove of trees and underbrush at hailing distance, his eyes fastened on the outline of the immaculate white gate.

He had no particular interest in the gardener's jewels or his gemstones. He had no more a need of fruit blossoms or flowers. One thing only commanded his attention.

He had found it at last, one hundred years' searching one hundred kingdoms. He would sooner turn to dust than turn his eyes from the garden and what awaited him within.

*****

The gardener pressed the pellucid green gems into the boy's face. Like _that_ Pence was staring wide-eyed and unblinking at the world, but he looked only at the gardener.

The gardener, having had no company for a very long time, smiled his best grandfatherly smile.

Pence clasped his hands over his heart, either to make sure that his pulse–his only continuing concept of the world thus far–was still where he had last left it, or else because that same pulse was now drumming a ravenous, indefatigable beat inside his chest.

Imagine a person who has never read a book: if they were to find–in the span of an unexpected instant–that their formally vapid mind was suddenly filled with all the ideas of a library's worth of pages... that may be what it felt like for Pence to begin to see. His eyes attesting infinite starlight, sparkling with newborn amazement, he stared at his creator.

The old man's hair flowed snow white over his sinewy shoulders. He wore a thin tunic the color of seasons of toil and long hours under a merciless sun. His beard was a rippling waterfall, in places tangled, in places frayed. The brown skin of his face was a maze of crinkles that led to dark eyes. His nose resembled a wrinkled walnut.

There was no shade but gray in the sky when the old man raised the purple-handled knife and with methodical exactness cut across Pence's face halfway between his rice nose and his chin.

"Speak then," the gardener urged the boy, "go on, and tell me I'm not mad to risk the resurrection of the White Tree, for a man's wish is rarely worth even the penny he pays."
Chapter IV

The old man's charcoal eyes were set fastidiously upon Pence's mouth, willing him to move or form words. He wrung his grip on the handle of the whittling knife as though it was a wet towel. "Pence? Pence! Don't hold back, boy. What do you think? Feeling a bit self-conscious? Not the man you thought you'd turn out to be? Need another grain of rice somewhere, is that it?"

The boy's mouth hung open in a wide-angled wedge of negative space. His eyes reflected the stars above as lifelessly as diamonds underground glittering in torchlight.

"The strong, silent type, eh? Nod again, then, if that's your way. Nod your head as you were before."

No reply, no movement.

The old man slapped the top of the stump. "Pence! Pence!"

But the silence was definitive.

"Naturally," the gardener sighed. "Did I expect anything else? And yet you _did_ move... You _see..._ You plainly study me... Say _anything_ ," the old man pleaded, exaggerating the act of speech as he spoke, "make any sound. Nod your head," he begged as he nodded his own. " _Anything..._ "

The boy betrayed no spark of selfhood.

The old man's shoulders sloped as he turned his gaze from Pence and studied the ruination of his own left hand, its lifeless musculature sapped of human spirit. The colorless necrosis had spread to his fingers, his wrist, and most of his forearm. Even as he looked on, it enveloped his elbow and beyond with the silent industry of snow falling through the night.

The corresponding change in Pence was unmistakable–in the short span since the gardener had pushed the seed into the boy's body, his opulent flesh had developed a faint but discernable luminosity. His chest ticked up and down, up and down, until it seemed the small boy genuinely breathed even with no windpipe, no lungs, no circulating blood. He grew a shade brighter with every heartbeat that ebbed into the air.

Then the gardener's eyes flared. " _No! Not yet!_ "

He reached for Pence.

The instant the old man's fingertip contacted Pence's chest the boy jerked backwards to form a rigid, impossible arch–his body crackled and transparent blazed–and the white bark lining the perimeter of the stump began to glow. The gardener's wrist, where it passed a hand's length above the circumference of the stump, smoldered and turned pink but he could not detach his fingertip from the boy's chest or otherwise pull away–in his brilliance Pence had become as unmovable as a tree with a thousand roots.

The old man's eyes ricocheted back and forth between Pence's simmering skin and his own white hand, then the stump blasted a thick beam of pure light into the sky where it splintered into infinite branches in the moonless night. A cacophony of screeches erupted from flocks of startled birds in the far distance. The gardener could only fling his left arm over his face to cover his eyes and pray his arm would be whole when the beam of light abated.

Pence opened his mouth under his own power for the first time and with the raw intensity of a most literally hot potato he funneled out yellow jets of steam as he screamed a shrill, inhuman scream.

The gardener twisted his body away, but his right forefinger was still fused with the boy and he could not rip free.

The furious din of the screeching birds came to a peak, threatening to shatter a kingdom's worth of windows and wine glasses, and then there was peace.

The searing white beam was gone. The old man prised an eyelid open: Pence was on his knees, swaying not unlike the gardener himself. The boy's luster had relinquished to a pallid, wraithlike diffusion, but from his mouth a tendril of glowing, grass-green fog spiraled up with the otherworldly beauty of a hypnotized serpent rising from its coil.

The tendril soon revealed itself to be a sapling, sprouted from the heartseed up and out through Pence's mouth. At its tip a pair of symmetrical white petals spontaneously diverged.

The old man froze. To breathe he was not set upon. He no longer felt the encroachment of death. Attached to the boy, reunited with the forfeit heartseed, he felt as young as when he was a boy himself first wandering into the garden.

"May I live on?" he mouthed breathlessly. He could not conceal a ruminating smile.

To keep his time alive, after all... forever trussed to the white stump. Or until the phantom seedling wilted and Pence shriveled to nothing, an epilogue in line with the old man's own.

He grinned and wiggled his forefinger, testing the connection. He leaned in closer to the middle of the stump, bringing the full brunt of his concentration upon the sapling's unfolding leaves and the mindless thing that was almost a boy and the mysterious bond between these two and himself.

The sapling snaked skyward with mesmerizing grace and soon was twice as tall as Pence. Its stalk was greener than fairytale pastures and the white light of the first twin leaves made Pence's own flesh appear misty and translucent, like a potato grown on the moon.

It was then that the gardener grew alert to an oozing sensation within his right arm. It was not blood or water or sweat, but something _inside_ his arm seeping from his chest up to his shoulder, down the length of his limb, and exiting through his outstretched finger where he was quite sure it oozed right on into Pence, though no such evidence was given to the naked eye. He considered whether this siphon was providing for the phantom sapling's impressive growth surge.

With all his strength the gardener reared back, trying again to tear his finger from the boy.

The bond redoubled its pull, vengeful he should try to free himself with such a common ploy as brute force.

By now the sapling had multiplied in size twice over again. Ghostly tendrils twisted and turned under the surface of Pence's skin like a filigree of fine nerves. Thin fibers slipped out the ends of his blocky feet and into the stump; the white wood of the fallen tree was hard as stone, but the sapling's furtive roots sunk into its surface like oars cutting still water.

The gardener picked up his knife clumsily with his left hand. He set the razor sharp blade ever-so-gently to Pence's waist. The boy moved no more than ever.

The old man screwed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw and then shifted the blade to his own finger, a knuckle away from his hand.

He raised the knife, paused for one savored breath, then swung it down on his extended forefinger.

There was a bright crack and a black shattering and underneath it all an old man's savage roar reverberated throughout the hills. The gardener flew backwards and landed with a thud.

The sapling flashed and shimmered, petals curling back like burning paper. It writhed along its entire spine; below, Pence's body was whipped mercilessly this way and that, slammed repeatedly against the stump. Then, roots to leaves, the phantom shoot unceremoniously evaporated into nothingness and Pence went sailing off the stump into the night without a sound.

With his last strength of the day, the old man crumpled forward and leaned against the stump. His breathing was scathed, like a crow pecking in the dirt. The last thing he noticed was that the glowflies had all gone away.

*****

Swathed in a thick purple cloak pulled tight for warmth, there sat the man in the shadows like a stone set unsinking upon water, peering and never blinking at the starlit outline of the garden gate. He had seen the white beam erupt into the sky, branching out like the very soul of a tree. He had seen the eerie green glow through the cracks in the fence. He heard the gardener's primal roar and the sickening crack that preceded the perfect silence, not to mention all the nonsense the old man had been shouting earlier–the word _pence_ over and over, as if in his senility he had suffered a sun-addled epiphany about all of life's bitter losses being won back with one lucky coin.
Chapter V

The gardener rolled his head back until the skin of his neck was taut and his gullet jutted out like the sun rising over a hill. He leaned forward to cough and retched out a pluming black cloud of dust from his mouth and nostrils. The smallest motes of it were up caught in the air like tiny moths; the rest floated down to land on his beard, his tunic, and the ground, where later that morning it would all appear no different than so much scattered dirt. His eyes flared with indignation and he raised his chin high, but only briefly, then he sagged and sucked up another tremulous breath.

An unfamiliar weight tugged at his right arm. "Is this what I have sown?" he whispered to himself and to the garden. He knew what had happened without looking.

He had two stumps now. Where his left arm was white, his right was black. Where his left was sallow and insipid, his right had become stone-hard wood charred to a crisp, splintered point–roughly the same shape as his hand had last made, lone forefinger extended to the boy. But he had brought the knife down hard: nearly the entire finger had been excised.

"So, Pence, I think I know what it must have felt like to have _your_ body whittled away." The old man swallowed uncomfortably. "Last night, when I realized what was about to happen with you on the stump, well... I guess I should have used ol' lefty instead."

Warm currents of low wind washed through the foothills and cascaded over the fence, banishing the chill. A butterfly grazed the old man's nose and raced off. The telltale pulse of Pence's heart echoed out its cadence from within the russet husk of the potato from whence he was born, now at rest a step away from the gardener's left foot.

"So, you won't speak, but you'll busy about in the middle of the night like a fieldmouse trying to find a warm hole to nestle in?" The old man chuckled when he saw that the opening of the husk had been turned face-down to the earth–no daybreak light or worldly concerns would disrupt the boy until it was rolled over. "I don't blame you, my boy–that was very much a harrowing night. I think we both nearly saw our last stars, truth be told."

When it became apparent that Pence was not going to materialize at the sound of the gardener's voice, the old man leaned back and tilted his head sideways as if emptying cluttered thoughts out his ears. In a trance, he silently whispered, "I walk in the shade of the White Tree. I eat the fruit of the White Tree. I sleep in the arms of the White Tree." His eyelids fluttered shut. "Though my body returns to the earth, the color of my mind is–"

The potato skin gave a start, then rolled over toward the sun, revealing its lone window to the dawn sky. A green glow drifted out of the husk as the daybreak light set Pence's gemstone eyes ablaze. And then the boy stepped out of the parched peel and climbed up to strike a pose atop it, his back to his creator, his arms akimbo and every bit of him from his bold grin to his backside both as bare and as proud as you please.

Pence stared directly into the sun as it climbed over the top of the rough-hewn fence. After luxuriating in a back-crackling yawn, he said, "Good to meet you at last, sir," and extended one arm in order to shake hands. "I hope you won't sour if I say you're more roundish about the middle than I remember from last night... yes, a gladsome deal _brighter_ , as well. It would seem these early hours agree with you! You'll have to tell me your secret, sometime–when _I_ woke up this very morning I felt like an old, spoiled tomato... Pardon me, sir, but why do you not shake my hand? I thought it customary between gentlemen of fancy, such as ourselves?"

"That's the _sun_ ," the old man croaked behind him.

" _You're_ the _Sun_? But of _course_ you are! _Ha!_ In fact, your reputation precedes you: You are a man of few words, no? I'm much the same." Pence nodded again to his outstretched arm to remind the morning star that he still thought it proper for them to shake hands.

"The sun hasn't _got_ hands," said the old man.

" _Yeck!_ " Pence jerked his hand back. "Why hasn't he?"

"Quiet, my boy, the winds find unguarded words–"

"How primitive. No hands... To think!"

"Yes, why don't you try that? _Thinking._ "

"Funny," the boy said to himself, still staring full-on into the sun, "that the voice in my head is telling me to _think_. But isn't that what I was already doing? Or is there some secret way of thinking, better than what I'm doing now? For a voice in my head, that's a pretty conceited thing to say."

"No, no, no," the old man hastened to correct, " _I_ am not a voice in your head. And the sun does not commune–"

"This is very odd," muttered Pence–one blocky hand tracing the chip-chop contour of his chin–even as the gardener spoke. "I can hear someone, but I _see_ no one at all. Oh, I hope I haven't damaged my nice new eyes staring into _you_ , accursed Sun!"

The gardener continued, " _I_ am the old man who made you, and the sun is the last of those to mistrust–"

Pence put his hands over his ears. "Now the voice claims to have _made_ me, despite itself not having any arms or hands! _What if_... what if the _voice_ is in cahoots with the _Sun_!" He crouched down, hands up and balled into little fists cocked to punch anything that invaded his personal space.

"I'm _behind_ you, Pence," the gardener informed him.

Pence shot straight up. When he landed, he hunched over and covered his head like a man about to be pummeled from above.

"I've _got_ arms... sort of," said the old man. "And a hand, too, strictly speaking."

"Then maybe you should have used them to put these eyes on the other side of my head, genius!" snapped the boy as he stood back up. "Instead, I've been aimed at the Sun over here all day like an idiot!"

"Too true," granted the old man. "Had you considered using your legs to turn yourself around? It works quite well, I find."

"Of course I had," Pence lied. "I was just... warming up a bit, first." He half-heartedly feigned a leg stretch.

"Take your time."

" _You_ try sleeping in a wrinkled, dry, old skin," Pence pressed on defiantly.

"Somehow that sounds familiar," said the gardener.

"I was cramped up all night. I've got cricks in every joint. It could happen to anybody."

"Anybody that could fit inside a potato, certainly."

"Hey, it's my first day here," Pence hotly retorted. "It hasn't been easy. You could try to be a little more supportive."

"You are absolutely right," the old man patiently agreed. "You've only been up for two minutes but you're right, I do owe you that much, and a penny more. So here is my support: a lesson to learn on this, your first day in the world."

"A lesson?" Pence groaned. "You mean like school? You've got to be kidding me! I was thinking more along the lines of financial restitutions–"

"Listen," said the gardener, "you must learn to think before anything else, my boy. I gave you that rock in your head for a reason... and it's already proving sharper than a diamond. So use it! Think before you speak. Think before you act. Think on what you know, and that much more on what you don't. Think of what has happened to you after each and every step you take; of what might happen to you before you take the next. Think before you do anything, Pence. Think before you even turn around to see me. Can you do that?"

Pence's silence was prolonged. A halo of green light drifted like dockside mist around his eyes, but all the old man could see were the lumpy, telltale marks of the whittling knife on the back of his head.

When at last the boy answered, "No," was all he said flatly, shaking his head once. And a moment later he affirmed, "No, I just don't think I can. To be frank, now that I'm here and I'm out and I'm free, I would live a life of risks and riotous thrills!" His voice was giddy, teetering. "I want all the sultry pleasures in the world for myself! I crave the rarest and most spurious passions!" He raised his arms, gesturing uninhibitedly as he spoke. His voice spiraled higher and higher. "Give me adventure to draw my blood and tears! Give me the romance of the stars and the moon! Give me mystery! Merriment! Mirth! Moral certainty! Eternal-immortal-indivisible _glory!_ Yesterday I was a potato," he stated plainly with a steep decrescendo. "Today, my roots are cut. My bond with the earth is unmade. Why shouldn't I fly? I have nothing else."

"Well spoken, my boy," said the old man, "but that is not exactly true. The bond you speak of has never been stronger."

As Pence thought about these words, only the rhythm of the heartseed could be heard.

After one more stubborn leg stretch, the boy turned to meet his creator at last.

### Part Two

Chapter VI

Pence's waxy flesh radiated like burnished gold in the sheer angles of the early light. Chin up, eyes unblinking as ever they would remain, he smiled at the gardener cordially for much longer than was merely good manners. His eyes played tricks in the light, flaring like embers and then glowering, making it impossible to tell where exactly he was looking.

The old man watched him skeptically.

"Welcome to the garden," Pence called up, throwing the gardener a cheery wave. "Shall we shake hands? After all, _we_ are civilized men, you and I."

" _Welcome to the garden,_ " the old man repeated in a stupor. He had been talking to the back of the boy's head until now; addressing Pence face-to-face, the old man found himself unable to procure a solid thought. " _Ummmm..._ " he began for lack of a better idea.

"Not very bright, is he?" whispered the boy–with one hand covertly screening his mouth–to the gardener's left foot, which was sprawled out next to the potato. "Probably getting a bit drafty in the attic. Let's the two of us keep an eye on him, eh? That'll be best."

Pence gave the old man's foot a conspiratorial nod. Then, pretending he had only been wiping his nose, he casually dropped his hand from his face and pivoted back around to face the gardener. He grinned broadly and shrugged, as children often do when playing innocent before their elders.

The old man regarded him squarely, arching one eyebrow in suspicion.

"What's that?" the boy quickly asked, shifting any scrutiny off his own shoulders by pointing behind the old man's head to an engraving near the top of the white stump: in the bark, two carved lines formed a wide-angled V. The cuts exposed ancient green wood with dark veins running underneath the white bark. If there had once been an upper half to this glyph, it had long since been chopped away, for the twin lines had plainly been cloven during the same act that felled the tree itself.

The gardener did not look when Pence pointed, but merely grunted, "Long story."

Pence's smile collapsed but his eyes remained level, boring into the cut marks. He put his hands together, spread like an upturned triangle with an open top, replicating the shape he saw.

"For later," the old man amended, and that was all it took to summon the boy's carefree grin back as swiftly as it had slid away.

Pence raised himself to his full height. Smiling blissfully, he stuck his hips out and circled them around and around with extraordinary showmanship. " _Ahhhh_ ," he exulted, "but that breeze feels _amaaaazing!_ What do you say, old man: Care to join me as nature intended?"

"Pence!" blurted the old man unabashedly, jolted out of his daze. "Pence! _Ha!_ It's worked! You're talking and, and, and... and _everything_!" The gardener fell back against the stump in peels of laughter, although he bit back periodically to peer bulging-eyed at the boy as if to make sure he had not vanished with the last wisps of dawn's lingering dreams.

Pence took a very small step forward–he was still atop his husk–and put one hand up like a man approaching an untamed stallion. "Whoa... Whoa there," he hushed his creator. "Easy does it. Easy, now. I'm not going to hurt you."

The gardener's eyes shot open. "Pence! Pence, _ha!_ What in the world is going on? You're _alive_! I mean, of course you're _alive_ , but you're... more... than I... I mean... is this real? _Ha!_ But I've bought the rabbit if it isn't! Oh, oh my..." the gardener swallowed meekly, screwing his eyes shut to steady himself against the rush of blood and bilious dirt to his brain.

"That's too much excitement for him," Pence whispered to the old man's left foot with a mother-knows-best hardening of his brow. "Watch how I handle this."

The boy sent both his tinder-stick arms shooting up and flailed them about wildly to catch the old man's attention. "Hey now, big fella', hey now! Try to calm down, huh? We've all had a big day. That's right, _breathe_. Innnn... out. Innnn... out. Good job." As he spoke, the boy instinctively folded his arms into and away from his chest like a bellows. "Innnn... out. There you go, great. Really feel the wind funnel up your–"

"Pence! Pence. That will do, that will do, my boy. Thank you. Nary a funneling goes a' wanting 'round here, trust me on that."

But Pence was not listening. From his low post atop the potato the boy was now intently surveying what he could of the garden, one hand shielding the sun from his eyes despite having previously shown no discomfort staring fully into the light. When he completed a circle–footpaths to pumpkins, ferns to flowers–he was again facing the old man, who, for his part, was with wide eyes watching the boy's every move.

Pence addressed the gardener in a painstakingly slow accent, as though the old man's mumchance stammering was a sure sign of infirmity, and that he must therefore be deaf also. "I've got a lot of questions," he shouted up. "I also have some concerns about the way you've been managing things around here."

The gardener tilted his head in curiosity but did not say anything aside from what his grin told.

The boy shook his head with tragic unction. "Also, if I may say so, I believe I could be of some general assistance to your _romantic_ pursuits." Pence looked the old man over for a moment. "Or lack thereof," he added, grimacing as though his every sensitivity were offended by the gardener's slovenly upkeep.

"Let's start with the questions," said the gardener, who had at last eased out of his gleeful hysterics and was breathing easier. "And you needn't speak like an imbecile–it's not my ears that plague me."

"To the point," replied the boy, giving a nod. Then he wrinkled up his forehead and stuck his nose high, attempting as serious a look as he could achieve with his odds-and-ends pastiche of facial features. "Now, I mean to get answers, all right? First off: Are you my Mother?" he demanded. "Because you're not very attractive, as mothers go–have you considered trimming your beard, or putting it in braids? What are all the other old maids doing with their beards these days? And is this _all_ there is of the world? Where _is_ everyone? Where are all the _ladies_? And who am I, exactly? How much money have I to my name? Speaking of money, what is the nature of good and of evil?" Pence paused, albeit briefly. "What is love? What is the reason I find myself here, now, with you? How long shall I plan to stay? In other words, when may I expect myself to die? And why is the Sun such a gut-rotten rooster of a villain?"

"Is that all?" the gardener chuckled.

"Not remotely! I can keep going–"

"No, no, my boy. That will make for as fine a start as any. So then..." the old man stalled as he set about gathering his wits, "here we go... No, I am not your Mother; perhaps more than any other living thing, you may call the world itself your Mother, for every last bit of you was beget of the earth–I did no more than bandy the elements together. Secondly, _if_ my beard is ever cut again, it won't be by _my_ hand... and my head will almost certainly go with it. Some things you just know, my boy. There is a fateful symmetry to life; you will find it if you look carefully. And no! The world expands beyond this white fence of ours and never ends, not ever, not ever I think. It is so vast no man has seen more than a wave of its waters, or read more than a word from its pages. Of ladies–both those with beards of their own and those without–we have none, I regret to inform you. _We_ are the only two in this garden. Additionally, _you_ are the _only_ one of _your_ kind, in this garden or anywhere else. What day it is, you ask? The same as every day: it is a good day to live, but it may be your last, so you darn better had tell yourself it's as good a day to die. Money? Good and evil? Indivisible. Seek you none of it, for greed spins like wheels down a hill. Love _is_ the reason. And, lastly... you _are_ made from a potato, after all, and you're right: you are no longer with your roots. Therefore I am inclined to estimate that you may be fortunate to live for as long as a couple of days, if not a precious few more."

The sun pulled itself clear over the fence. For a moment it seemed to merge with the flat top of the white wall like a finger pulling a drop of water up from a calm pond, connected like two halves of an hourglass for one quivering instant before the gap between them is stretched too wide. The old man looked up to the sky and smiled. "Oh, yes... as for the Sun, open your eyes! There may be a hundred kingdoms of man, but all of them would perish inside a season if the morning star refused to rise. That is why a true gardener wears the sun for his hat. And the wind for his belt, and the soil... Pence?"

Pence was not listening, again. Instead, he was absorbed in examining every brightly lit pore and pattern of the old man's bare left foot, which was, after all, the nearest major landmark to his potato. He gave no sign that he had unraveled any of the old man's epically thorough response, or that he had even been paying a whit of attention.

His nose drifted near to the foot with a mind of its own, pulling his head along behind. The gardener's sole was dark with soil and sunburns and hard as oak. Crusted earth was plastered under and around his untrimmed toenails.

Standing on the potato, no room to take another step, Pence bent forward awkwardly trying to reach his face closer to the gardener's foot, like a boy leaning in for his first clumsy kiss. "Pardon me," he said shyly, intoxicated.

He inhaled deeply.

" _Gack!_ " he cried in dismay at the odor, trapping his hands over his nose. Knees buckling, his gemstone eyes rolled back in his head and without further fanfare he fell off the hollowed-out potato face first.

"What can I say?" the old man blushed, flexing and stretching his grimy toes. "A true gardener wears the soil for his sandals. And I fertilize the land myself," he revealed with a wink. "Keen to use your nose, though? Have a walk among the flowers, boy, while still you may. Your time in the garden will come to an end sooner than you think."
Chapter VII

Pence sprang back up to his feet like a puppet hoisted to a tension by all strings at once. Looking down, he saw that he stood wholly engulfed in the shadow of the gardener's left foot, and he had to tilt his head back as though peering up a mountain in order to see the old man's head. "At least I'm bigger than the Sun," he reassured himself.

The gardener's face, where it was not sprouting whiskers, was a lattice of warm wrinkles. His smile was old of the earth, his teeth as bright as the stump to which his lot was tethered. His shoulders were not broad, neither frail. His upper arms, along the short length where his flesh was still brown and hale, were bare but for thinning silver hair. Sunburns and scratches patterned his lean, corded muscles.

Below the elbow, however, his left arm was toneless and emaciated, the flesh of a ghost. His right arm fared worse–warts and twisted knobs of black wood had cropped up as high as his shoulder, and an outbreak of ashen bruises sprawled up the taut skin of his neck.

When Pence's eyes finally arrived at the old man's hands–the one foul black, the other lifeless white–his tiny lips curled back in feral disapproval. "Now hold on just a pocket-pickin' minute," he said, shaking his oversized head and raising an arm to call for silence as though he was presiding over a noisy town hall meeting. He marched toward the gardener, stopping abruptly next to the old man's left knee. "What's happened to your branches? You've been bumwhushed! Ruined! Razed! What brute would dare such disrespect against a defenseless old weatherbag! Give me the name of the coward who worked these curses on you and I'll have him hopping headless before my days are done."

"They are not curses, my boy," said the old man. "I chose my own fate, as you will yours."

Pence eyed the old man distrustfully.

"The poorest piece of all is that I would see my princess again after all these long, lonely years... More than anything, I would hold her hand again... yet I know this shall never come to pass. How can it? _Ahhh_ , Pence, the world is no place for a boy." The old man's voice scraped from his throat like iron nails sketching on stone. "I have lived a hundred years in a secret garden and all my love jailed from me for the term of it. How young I was when first I climbed up..." He closed his eyes and nestled closely into the unyielding stump. Pence could only watch in disbelief as the gardener began snoring in the span of a moment.

"Right, have a lovely nap, then," Pence called up loudly. "I'll just figure out this whole _being alive_ thing on my own! _Alone_! In my _infancy_! With _the Sun_ slinking around, biding his time until I blink. Yeah, I can tell _you_ never had kids!"

"Simmer down," the old man grumbled, hardly opening his mouth. "I'm not accustomed to sleeping much; I'm sure I'll be back around in no time. Why don't you take a walk and get to know the garden instead of sassing me every chance you get?"

Reluctantly, Pence turned around and found himself staring down a footpath that disappeared deep around a bend. His hands twitched at his hips like a man before a duel. Overwhelmed by the sudden silence and the weight of the choice before him, he looked away to the right of the stump where lay the purple jewel and the old man's bucket; for a distraction, it was all he needed.

The ground around the bucket was wet, watertight buckets being difficult to build with only one working hand. Pence crouched down and pressed his crude fingers into the damp silt while lifting his eyes to the sky. "Just like Mother used to make it," he shouted up to the old man, grinning, but when the gardener did not so much as flitter an eyelash, Pence sullenly stepped away from the bucket and knelt beside the purple jewel instead. He set a hand upon its lustrous surface. "We had a good run, while it lasted," he whispered tenderly.

The gardener cocked an eyebrow at this. "Tell me, Pence," he said, his eyes still shut and his voice low, "I am curious: Now that you've had a proper spot to think... how _do_ you feel to be here, corporeal, with a stone for a brain and gems for eyes and rice for a nose, walking and talking and breathing in the warm air but a day removed from a cold, dark, lonely existence underground?"

Pence froze. "Is your life above any less lonely?" he said staunchly. He withdrew from the jewel and stomped back to his husk. "And anyways," he spat with a flash of scorn, "I _liked_ it underground!" Nimbly, he jumped atop the potato skin and sat down cross-legged, looking away from the gardener and into the sun. "If you want to know the truth," said Pence, "things have been rather difficult so far, and your... your... your _cavalier insensitivity_ toward my situation is _not_ making it any more palatable."

" _So much for keeping him well-grounded_ ," the old man muttered under his breath. Then, loud enough for Pence to hear, he replied, "My cavalier insensitivity? Dear me, dear me, I had no idea I was acting self-centeredly and uncouth. I shall be more... appreciative... of you in the future."

"See that you do," said Pence curtly. "It's the least I deserve and you know it."

"Anything else troubling you, then?" the old man kindly solicited.

"What a stupid question! Of course there is! My life has been one calamity after the next, all dragged through the dirt! Which you did well enough to inform me is actually a century's worth of your daily bum-nuggets and–"

"Pence!"

"–then there's this matter of you drifting off to sleep every other time I turn around–I'm guessing you're not a big hit at parties." Pence threw his arms up in revulsion. "And I hardly need to say anything about _this_ moron," the boy fumed, gesturing to the sun with one hand. "Between yourself and _him_ , you can see how I might be feeling a little bereft of intelligent company, can't you? Throw in the fact that I'm the _shortest_ guy in the neighborhood _and_ I'm _completely naked_ , and you might get an idea of what's ' _troubling_ ' me."

"You know, my boy," the old man mused, seemingly indifferent to Pence's malcontent, "it really is most peculiar, the manner of words and language you've picked up so far. I think you must have heard me talking to you, to _all_ of you," the old man nodded to indicate the entirety of the garden, "in your seasons underground. How else to explain your... vocabulary?"

"Well, naturally," Pence scoffed. "You do have a way of going on and on. Kind of difficult _not_ to listen to you."

"Astounding," muttered the old man, more to himself than to the boy. "And yet... and yet I cannot dismiss the feeling that some... _presence_... of me, some intangible _fiber_ of my younger self seeped into you last night when we were connected... but it's tricky to say..."

"Of course it did! Was I the only one paying attention?" Pence wheeled around like a top and pointed at the old man accusingly. "Wasn't this whole arrangement _your_ idea, after all?"

The gardener shrugged his shoulders, causing his two stumps to sag even further. He smiled wanly.

A glint of light caught Pence's notice when the old man shrugged; in his withered left hand the gardener clutched something that deflected a bright band of sunlight back into the boy's eyes, shattering his righteous consternation.

Pence promptly dismounted his potato like a circus rider expertly spinning off his saddle and ran over to investigate, freshly animate with the promise of some shiny new treasure to be discovered.

"This is the tool I used to bring you out of your old skin," the gardener told him.

Pence gawked at his reflection in the blade of the whittling knife. It was the first he had seen of his own face. He pulled the flat blade closer to his eyes until his breath fogged the surface. "I'm... I'm... I'm stu- _pen_ -dously handsome," he crooned. "Am I not? Oh, wow. Oh, my. The ladies don't stand a chance. I ought to be blindfolded, to make it fair for them."

The tiny green gems were afire in the mirrored light and the silver blade seemed to hum in the glow as it seduced him, but finally the boy tore himself away. He turned up to the sky and to the sun, drinking in the light with a carefree smile. He gazed reverently at the flowers that surrounded the stump on all sides, lifted his nose to sample the slew of aromas meandering the morning air like so many merchants at a market square. He looked at the dirt and clay below his feet, then to the stump, and finally, slowly, back to the gardener.

"Old man, I must apologize for my contumelious behavior," Pence said at last. "My words were unbefitting of a gentleman and a potato. After all, I am not a child anymore, as I was last evening. I am a young man, and I shall mend my ways. I don't know what else to say, but that this is all very strange to me."

"And to me," the old man reassured him with his best grandfatherly smile. "Make no apologies–your life shall be far too short to bother with such nonsense as feeling sorry."

"Thank you for reminding me of that," Pence said sincerely. "I will do as you say and think before I speak."

"A wise investment of your time will you find this to be."

Pence rolled his eyes, but nodded respectfully. Then, with his chest puffed out–rising and falling by the depth of a penny with every beat of the heartseed–he approached the bending garden path. He took a single step past the discarded purple jewel–marking the farthest he had yet traveled from his old husk–and turned around to beam up at the gardener like a boy who has just learned to lace his own boots. Then, suddenly conscious of how childish he must look, he scrunched up his face into a more adult expression. "I _think_... I'd like... to go... for a... walk," he said, enunciating every word in a most conservative and well-considered manner. "To... _familiarize_ myself with... stuff."

"By all means," said the old man, smiling at the prospect of an uninterrupted rest.

"I have big plans for the day."

"Oh?" frowned the old man, plainly preferring a nap to a run-down of Pence's lofty agenda. "I was not aware." A sound like a preparatory snore rumbled out of his nostrils.

"And how should you be? I've told no one. _Ha!_ Really, old man, you say the quaintest things sometimes." Pence affected a laugh and shook his head gently. "I'm keeping it close to the vest, you see?" He tapped his bare chest to illustrate. "However, since you asked–"

"No, I didn't," squirmed the old man.

Pence paid him no mind. "–I'm going to go on a magnificent adventure. Then, I'm going to count my money; I'll have loads of it by the time I return, no doubt. I have a pretty good head for the bankroll, what with having had a precious jewel for a brain the first time I was born. I won't be sharing a solitary cent, though. That would be bad business. So there you are. No hard feelings, though–nobody likes a poor loser. Let me see... after all that frivolity I may decide to spend a good chunk of time hammering out a few theories I've been developing about everything in the galaxy that ever was. _Fascinating_ work, you know," Pence carried on, "you couldn't _hope_ to fit it all in that big, squishy brain of yours. Philosophy taxes my rock, though, so I'll tuck in for a good nap after lunch, _annnnd_ I assume by this evening I will have acquired a veritable coterie of comely young ladies of whom I shall henceforth be able to take my pick. But again–not sharing. I'm only prevising you now so you can try not to look jealous."

"You're very ambitious, and that's as well," the gardener said with a reserved snort. "But as I mentioned earlier, I'm afraid I haven't seen any young ladies around these parts for quite some years."

"So you say, and, well, _ha!_ No offense, _old man_ ," the boy chortled, "but this is obviously a pretty big garden. Look at how _big_ everything is! You probably just don't know where to look. Are there any second-hand jewelry shops hereabouts?"

"Not to my knowledge," replied the gardener amicably.

"Overpriced bakeries?"

"Believe it or not... no."

"Shoe stores? Salons? Bootlegged handbag boutiques?"

The gardener shook his head scarcely for each.

"No matter," Pence waved the old man off. "There must be scads of women tucked away in here, somewhere. They've been waiting for a new vibe, that's all. I'll bring them out. You'll see."

"You sound very confident, my boy."

"What can I say? Women love a man who's not afraid of a little fresh breeze." Pence gave his rear end a triumphant wiggle, then drew himself up impenitently. "My grand adventure cannot wait forever. Nor my contemplations. _Nor_ my nap. _Nor my ladies._ _Especially_ nor my ladies."

"Nor I," chorused the old man. "Before you hie away, though, would you like some proper garb for your walk? You did mention a concern about your... over-exposure. I could tell you how to tailor a suit for yourself using the leftover skin of your husk. It wouldn't take long."

Pence spurred around and looked up at the old man, eyes ablaze. "Old man, I know you don't claim to be a smart fellow, particularly when it comes to potatoes, but that is the most repulsive, cold-blooded, barbarian idea I've heard in my entire life. Cut my old skin into a coat and sport it? Are you literally _trying_ to be this creepy? No wonder you've scared all the ladies away! My old _skin?_ Heads on a stang! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I mean, really!"

The old man hiccoughed and bit his lip, bottling in what was nearly a pressure-leak of laughter. "My apologies, then, very much so. Wherever are my manners?"

Pence stood with his hands on his hips like a father taking the measure of his wayward son. "I don't know, but if I find them I shall certainly return them to you. What do they look like?"

The gardener could not properly answer.

"On second thought," said Pence, stepping in place impatiently, "never mind what _you've_ lost. I've got my _own_ manners, for _me_. I can't worry about everyone else's manners. You're forever delaying me, old man, and it just won't do. It's time I put my foot down." He leaned in near the old man's left foot and whispered, "Nothing personal, chum."

"Go on, then, my boy," the gardener encouraged. "You needn't be bedraggled by me and mine. Go on your adventure. Mind you keep to the path, though. And remember to think before each step you take! And after each step. So that's actually twice the thinking in between steps. You understand?"

Pence put his hands up, trying to slow the old man's torrent of better-late-than-never advice, but to no avail.

"Keep your nose open; sometimes one scent is all it takes to lure a boy off his path–mark my words. And, when you return, I'll tell you that story you asked about."

Facing the path, Pence raised one foot off the ground but held it hovering uncertainly. He put one hand to his chin in a model of contemplation while his leg hung in limbo. "Is this good?"

"Yes, my boy, you'll be just fine if you take things nice and slow like that."

"Okay, I'll take things nice and slow," Pence called back. He stamped his foot down. "Onward!" he shouted and in the twinkling of an earring the boy from the potato was sprinting away at top speed as though he had been running races for years. Arms chugging like runaway wagon wheels, he rounded the bend and was gone.

" _Wait!_ _Pence!_ _Slow down!_ " wheezed the old man, " _Stay away from the well!_ " but his rasping voice barely reached his own feet, let alone the boy, and at once he fell into a long fit of violent coughing. When he regained his composure there was nothing to do but wait, one eye resting, one eye cracked and keeping watch.
Chapter VIII

A sudden, shrill whistle made the air ring, obliterating the old man's reverie. Quick as a spark, a blurry shape slashed down from above, whooshed past the gardener's face, and crashed into a plot of windbell flowers with the speed of a thunderbolt and all the grace of an errant cannonball.

"What ho! A surprise? Magnificent entrance!" said the gardener by way of introduction. "Unannounced, uninvited, undeterred–reminds me of a prince I once met."

Out of the undergrowth popped the head of a small nut wren, her dark profile defined by ruffled feathers. Her black eyes shone like wet stones. She impatiently curtsied before hurrying back into the shadows below the flowerbed. "You'll have to excuse me, old friend, but I'm famished," she called, not in words but in birdsong. "I'll drop out of the sky if I don't find something to eat straight off."

"Please help yourself," the gardener replied, whistling in the same key as his guest, "the garden belongs to you as much as to me."

"You speak beautifully," cooed the nut wren as she rummaged for a meal. "Why, you could fool a tree into thinking you belonged up its bough."

"Something tells me I'll just be sticking to my stump, here," replied the old man, gulping dryly.

" _Gads, I'm starving!_ " the little wren howled before the gardener finished speaking. The dirt-pecking and stem-shuffling moved from beneath the windbell patch to a neighboring row of moondaisies. Tall and delicate, they swayed like seaweed while the tiny bird jostled about beneath. "Where has all the food crawled off to? Preemptive retreat, is it? Did you tell them I was coming?" The pecking and shuffling abruptly ceased.

"How could I have known you were coming? You fell out of the sky like a duck swum on grog. And so few of you visit anymore," the old man sighed, a sound like leather scrubbed on a washing board, "I'm afraid my sense for such things has all gone dull."

"Well past dull, from what I'm told," the nut wren whistled back matter-of-factly. "We're not even supposed to _come_ here anymore, normally. Pappy says your gizzard is no good."

"Ridiculous," the old man dismissed. "I've not heard this blather before. Why, I was speaking with an old crow just the other day. Or... was it..." he trailed off, unable to pinpoint the past. "What day _was_ it? Might have been a _few_ days, come to think of it."

"Not _days_ , old friend. Think _decades_. And more than a few," said the nut wren. "Since before I was born, anyway."

The gardener snorted irritably but he did not deny the wren's claim.

"Pappy says you just stopped listening to the birds one season, that you never said why."

"Oh, I doubt not that birdkind has forgotten the _why_ of it," the gardener said sourly. "Hardly uncharacteristic for a species that live and die in the blink of an eye."

"That's not nice! Life is tough for chicks."

"The birds of old vowed to... help me. They abandoned this pledge." The old man's voice was hollow as he reeled in his moth-eaten memories. "After that, no longer could I listen to the songs that came from the treetops, and silence is at once an instant and an eternity. I did not know it had been this quiet... quite this long."

"The promise is not forgotten," the little wren squawked, trying to rouse her host's morale. "The birds of old _did_ search. Pappy has told me the story more times than I can count. A crusade of birds, they flew to this _vow_ of yours, as you say it, old friend. To all the One Hundred Kingdoms of Man did this crusade for you bear devoted wing, yet never a hint nor hair of her in any castle, cave, or cloud. How can you fulfill a vow to find someone that cannot be found? Still, it is the great torment of birdkind to have failed you, old friend. _Failed_ , Pappy says, but not forgotten."

"Do they look for her still?" the old man asked pointedly.

The nut wren nervously rapped her talons.

" _Forgotten_ ," said the old man ghoulishly, "or as good as." His eyes shifted rapidly, scanning the footpath for any sign of Pence returning from his walk.

"Pappy gets all weepy when he tells it," the nut wren carried on casually, "but I'm not interested in history. I'm more into flying around, chirping at things I see, preening, leavesdroppings–the usual stuff."

The old man stared into space, tallying lost time.

"I can't find _anything_ ," the unremitting wren continued, whistling fast and high and all of one breath, "and I have an epic flight today. I've got to eat, by all that's bloody sacred!"

"Huh?" grunted the old man absentmindedly.

"I'm meeting our Gramsy at midday tomorrow for a fish luncheon. She lives by the sea, right on the _coast_ ," the wren squealed in mock distress, hidden from view as she searched below the checkered pumpkins that overshadowed the moondaisies. "Do you know how _far_ that is? I'm going to be flying all day! And I hate fish."

"I'm sorry to hear how difficult life is for you," said the old man, struggling to breathe without gargling up more despoiled muck.

"I didn't volunteer for this! I don't know why we bother with her in the first place. Pappy says she's crazy as a dip-fried loon. See, here's what she does," the riled-up wren persisted in one long, winding whistle, " _she watches whales!_ That's her _thing_ –that's what Pappy says. She's got a spot up top some creepy old castle... she just sits there all day and watches whales. Whoever heard of it?"

"That sounds sublime," whispered the old man with a low exhaling whistle.

"It's absurd. It's downright _pedestrian_. And I don't even know what a whale _is_! Why would anyone want to watch _any_ thing all day, sitting on some dank, filthy old gargoyle? It's batty, isn't it? A _bird_ just doesn't do such things. A bird _flies_."

"Perhaps her wings have grown tired," said the old man.

She ignored him. "Anyway, I have to go, creepy old castle or not. If it's important to the flock, it's supposed to be important to me, too. And I'll just have to brave her cooking–that much can't be helped."

"I admire the courage you display in spending an afternoon with your Grandmother."

" _Ha_ , no, she's not my Granny, you old sod; Granny got eaten by a billy goat," the wren chirped with a prudent trill. " _Gramsy_ is a _lot_ older than that. Cleverer, too... moreso than a goat, at least. They say she's completely white, even her eyes, that's how old she is. Some call her the Oldest Bird in the Sky. Only a chick would believe that, though." The trail of her voice suggested the talkative guest had left the pumpkin patch and was now exploring under a swathe of low-sweeping straw ferns. " _Aaargh_! Where _is_ everything? Pappy said this place used to be a goldmine for grubs, but I've found nothing but tiny tunnels, all deep as wells. Why does the very earth conspire against me?"

The gardener rolled his eyes.

"Old friend, have _you_ any grub to spare? I still can't find a single bite."

"It's entirely possible that I regurgitate a number of my vital organs later this afternoon, if you'd like to stick around for that," the old man whistled quietly, still wary of overexerting himself and duplicating his unearthly upheaval from that morning. "Elsewise, no, I have nothing."

The sound of pecking underneath a soggybottom bush ceased. "That sounds pretty tasty. Nice and fresh and pink, I'll bet. If I didn't have this flight ahead of me I would stay and see what comes up. I do love gall bladder, you know. And intestines. Oh, _curse_ this ill-plotted luncheon! Curse fish! Curse whales! And castles! And Gra–"

"Don't say it," warned the old man, cutting in sharply, forfeiting the tranquility he had attained. He sat forward and coughed violently several times, but no bilious dirt was emitted this time, and very little blood.

"You're right! You're right! _Ahhh_ , shame upon me," the little wren repented, filling her miserable wail with a shuttering vibrato. "It's the hunger makes me say such things!"

"Don't be _too_ hard on yourself," said the gardener, rolling his eyes again.

"While I'm gone, if any gall bladder or intestines come up, would you save me just a bite? I'll be back in a few days and I hate to miss my favorite dish."

"If, when you return, you find my intestines or any other pieces of me strewn about, you are most welcome to them," the gardener politely offered, his notes losing their melody for want of water to wet his whistle. "Though, to be honest, it's more likely to be beard-hairs and blood on the stump."

"Perfect for nest building!" came the wren's happy approval. "Hey, do you think all the little grubbers being gone has anything to do with what happened here last night?" She suddenly burst out from under the canopy of windbell blossoms, to which she had come back full-circle, and alighted on the gardener's left big toe.

She had white feathers cresting her head, while the rest of her was chestnut brown with black stripes, offsetting a strawberry splash of color on her chest. "Because I was asked to come here _not_ to fill up before my flight, but to tell–" then she shrilled and thrashed her wings in place as if battling thunderous winds. " _But what has happened to your arms?_ "

"Do not whistle a word of that!" the old man barked curtly, reverting to spoken words for the first time since greeting her. He fixed the wifty wren with a redoubtable stare.

"That's not good," she chirped, unperturbed by the gardener's commanding display. She jumped down to the ground beside his right arm. " _Sayyy_ ," she whistled, "that's really lousy! You're in wet socks with that one."

"Improvident bird! I know that. Now stuff up!"

"But what happened?" She hopped back and forth on one foot, occasionally popping into the air for short, frenetic bursts whenever her excitement bubbled over the top.

"Very well, if it will curb your tireless verbigeration for one blessed moment," the old man surrendered. "You eavesdrop on those who travel under your trees, do you not?"

"Who doesn't? But we call it _leaves_ dropping."

"I thought leavesdropping was when you... _ahem_ ," he cleared his throat, "on travelers' heads. Sort of a past-time in the treetops?"

"No, no. That's leaves _droppings_." She flew a quick, fluid somersault. " _Big_ difference. Especially for the ones who don't wear hats."

The gardener blinked once but was otherwise stone-faced. "Indeed. So then, in all your time listening in on those below you, have you ever heard a parent tell a child not to pick their nose?"

"Sure, sure. That's great advice."

The gardener nodded to his right hand, indicating his cracked-off and blasted remnant of a finger. " _This_ is why."

The nut wren screeched her disapproval of the jest and gave the old man a poisonous stare. Then, hop-stepping over to the purple jewel that had almost been Pence's brain, she inspected her fragmented reflection, bobbing her head back and forth. "Soon there will be too many here asking questions for you to parry," she whistled back over her wing.

"Nonsense," groused the gardener. "I've never been more ready to parry. I welcome all comers–I'll parry all night long! Shoot, if there's going to be a crowd, maybe I'll go ahead and bake a couple of wild parry pies!"

"Many saw the White Tree!" countered the nut wren. "Pick your nose with _that_."

" _What_ White Tree?" the old man shot back instantly, forgetting to whistle.

" _What_ White Tree, he says!" She honked like a startled goose. " _The_ Tree! Here! Bright as a river under the sun. But it was like a cloud on a windy day–here then gone." She studied his face. "How can you not have known?" she asked at last. "Or is your gizzard fizzled out for real?"

Statuesque, the gardener stared into the wren's black eyes and beyond.

The little bird shivered and looked away. She tried to speak but hesitated, fidgeting nervously. Finally, she tucked her wings behind her back, much as an orator does with his hands before addressing a large crowd. "They will come for answers, old friend. The White Tree... They will come in droves, birds and men, and other beasts besides. So what will you tell them? Will you greet them all with parry pie? Because you certainly won't be greeting anyone with a handshake." Here she looked down, embarrassed to have perhaps crossed a line of etiquette. The old man signaled no offense, however, so she drew herself up and continued her peckish reproach. "Be warned–and _this_ is a message from _all_ the flocks, as well as the true reason I was sent: _one is already outside_. He watches you from the–"

"How long?" demanded the gardener. "How long has he been here, this _man_ in _purple_?"

"Yes, yes," the nut wren cheeped excitedly, "he does wear purple robes and a purple hat! Purple trousers, belt, and buckles. But how did you know? He is darker in the shadows than the stool of a rat. He was concealed even to the flocks until the White Tree cast its light. You cannot yourself have seen him, when you were blind to the light itself?"

The old man opened his eyes and took a deep breath. "I saw the light... it was too bright. Alas, I turned from the Holy Tree. As for the man in purple... he has been here before, that one. You might say I have his scent."

After a brooding stretch of silence, the nut wren flew over to the bucket beside the gardener. She landed inside with a piddling splash, the water being in good need of a refill. "You don't mind if I bathe in your bucket, do you, old friend?" she whistled amidst the din of much fraying about and birdplay.

"Why would I mind?" grunted the old man. "I was only planning on drinking from it."

"How?" the wren asked brusquely. "Your arms are bushwhacked and bedeviled."

"I thought I'd just tip it over when I'm ready for my last drink and soak up what spills with my feet. _Now_ ," he said fully to end all diversion, "tell me about the man outside."

The playful splashing stopped. "He is silent as the dead and just as hidden. His manner is fouler than a grave." Her words rebounded and vibrated roundly as she whistled up from the bottom of the bucket. "He does not belong among our trees–all of us feel this way! The flocks have left these hills but they yearn for homecoming. At your consent, we will usher him from here, a thousand-winged storm in his face." Suddenly she appeared at the lip of the bucket–plumage pristine, obsidian eyes gleaming–and the disconcerting echo was gone as if it never was. "And gladly, too–t'will be a morning's sport," she piped. "What do you say? For, as he no doubt seeks you, it is not our place to send him back butt-rosied without your blessing."

"Well spoken, my lady," said the old man. Grinning, he bowed his head what little he could to the wren. The rest of him was motionless, his legs and torso melding with the ground and the stump like heavy stones sinking into moss.

"So? What say you? Shall we give him the old nutty flap?" She demonstrated her offer with a series of slow, elaborate spanking gestures with one wing.

"No... no, my friend. Let him be, for now, for now. He'll be no threat to any of you unless goaded. We may assume that if last night's fireworks did not prompt him to come a'knocking, he is waiting for his own cues to act."

"If you say so," the wren allowed, though her key was diminished. "But the flocks won't wait forever. Pappy says _three days_ to settle your score, or the birds march. Fly. Something! _Go to war_ ," she concluded dramatically. Then she added, behind her wing as if sharing a secret, "It's never happened before, you know–a big fracas. _That's_ why I've got to go see Gramsy. No one will fight without _her_ blessing. Your approval is important, too," she tacked on dutifully, "but hers is the one that counts."

The old man contemplated his guest's bleak report. "What ever happened to the fish luncheon and the whale watching?"

"Oh, that's all cakes and gravy, sure. It's kind of a complicated mission, don't worry if you can't follow along–that's one of the first symptoms of a fizzled gizzard."

"I believe I once heard that only birds have gizzards," the gardener whistled with augmented emphasis. "Are you very sure it's not Pappy that's gone fizzled?"

The wren shook him off. "Does the man in purple seek the White Tree?" she asked. Her pearly talons gouged into the moist lip of the bucket.

"If _he_ had any knowledge of the White Tree, _he_ would not have leveled it so long ago."

The wren shrieked like a boiling teapot at this revelation and blasted into the sky, a sparkling waterspout jetting up like a rocket. Then, before the last drop of her castaway water had fallen back to the earth, she plummeted vertically for a stomach-gulching moment and pulled up next to the gardener's foot with a tip-of-the-talon landing. Her strawberry-splashed chest heaved as though warrior spirits possessed her. "When the others hear–"

"The others _never_!" the old man interjected. "You must tell _no one_! I should not have divulged that. Strike it from your mind! _Ahhhh_ ," he lamented, "but what bird could ever keep a wriggling piece of gossip down." His voice took a resentful edge. "You listen to me, nut wren, and you listen good: fly hie to your appointment. Do not repeat what I have said. If your brethren hear those words of history and heresy, they will besiege the man in purple as surely as the sun holds sway over the earth, and they will not wait for _any_ one's blessing."

"This man deserves the hardest punishment our feathers can dole out. The White Tree was to my–"

"I know what the Tree was!" the gardener hissed more sharply than perhaps he intended, for he took a necessary moment to sit back and reconvene his composure. When he resumed whistling, his tone was distinctly diplomatic, even pleading. " _Old friend_ , when has it fallen to birdkind to judge and condemn _men_? Our affairs will only muddy your rudders. No, I will deal with him in good time, for I fear that if he is provoked, not only will the ground be soon littered with the bones of broken wings, but he will guess the reason behind it, too–he will see that I have learned of his presence by collusion with the same birds that keep watch on him from shadows higher still. This may spur him to hasten his plans. And if he comes to the gate and finds me like this, the garden will wither at his very touch."

"Then do not let him in!" squealed the wren.

"I must! I must!" the old man bellowed like a forge, growing red and black as coal in the face. "I _must_ let him in! That is how it _must_ be; it can _be_ no other way. The garden belongs to him as much as to me! As much as to you!" Agitated, he began coughing and could not stop until he spewed out a bitter mist of dirt and a teaspoon of blood. He spat the last sticky flecks off his lips, holding the horrified wren eye to eye. "If he finds me like this... like _this_... the garden will surely burn and the White Tree will never give life again. Now, precisely how long has he been espying?" the old man asked the rapt wren. "This is vital."

"Like I said, old friend, the flocks only saw him last night–testimony to his unnatural ways. A man able to hide under _our_ trees with no bird the wiser? It reeks like a big, fat hat. Sorcery, most likely!"

The gardener frowned. "I am accused of witchcraft as well," he said, "but the truth is far less outlandish. I suspect the same as concerns our visitor."

She flew up to the gardener's big toe and perched there. "Hear this! Though _birdkind_ learned of him only last night, the _trees_ hint that it has been much longer... _maybe a fortnight_!"

"A _fortnight_?" gasped the gardener.

"Yes, a fortnight," the little wren solemnly replied.

"I see. A fortnight... Curious, indeed."

"A fortnight is curious?"

"A fortnight is altogether too curious. I should have supposed no more than three nights and two days."

She studied the gardener attentively. "Why three nights and two days?"

"Tell me," said the gardener permissively, "what news of the traveler in the tattered cape who came here three days ago and left the very night? The one with the tan pants who peddled charms to bring good luck. What news hath birdkind of he?"

"If you suspect that the tatter-caped traveler and the man in purple may be the same, disguised... it is not so. He of the tan pants is far from here. He left with great haste, taking many foolish shortcuts. I say foolish _and_ a pity because a day-and-a-half away from here he rushed blind through a hedge and headlong into a gang of half-wild pigs."

"Oh dear," said the old man, slitting his eyes.

"They weren't too pleased about being barged in on– _you know pigs_!" She paced back and forth atop the gardener's toes like so many stepping stones while she recounted the traveler's fate. "In the end, the imbecile had both his hands bitten clean off, trying to keep the pigs from snarchin' off his... _lucky charms_."

"Scandalous!" cried the gardener. "What is the world coming to?"

"That's what tan pants will get you," the nut wren assessed without sympathy.

"Is that all you know of the poor fellow? Had he done anything dubious or deceitful before these dastardly swine got their snouts on him?"

"We do not believe that he had dealings with the man in purple, not after he left your gate. Whether they met prior to his arrival is not known to the flocks."

"He was the one-hundredth traveler to knock at my gate, but the first to leave without throwing a penny in the well," the gardener tepidly recalled.

The nut wren considered the gardener's words. "Strange season," she chirped at last, "when two men chance their way to this garden inside a fortnight!"

"Only one came by chance," said the old man with a consonant tone. "Now, you mustn't tell anyone what has happened to my arms," he grimly repeated. "Not anyone, lest it be put into the spoken word and the man in purple catch wind of it. _And he must not know._ "

The wren cocked her head, a dispirited slump to her small frame.

"He harbors heartless intentions for this place," the gardener continued, "as you have felt for yourself. Sooner tell a hawk you sprained a wing. Or _wings_ , I suppose, in my case. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, yes, I am not a chick! No need to tell me thrice!" she snapped. " _Bah!_ And still no grub! _And_ I'm beginning to think you weren't serious about coughing your insides out. All this talking... I nearly forgot how hungry I was!"

"You'll find something as you fly," the gardener assured her.

"Will I?" she cried, anchored to his foot. "Gramsy's tower is wayside of the mountains. There's no wind through the tunnel road–a bird could never wing it. No, I have to take the mountains roundabouts, over open sea. No food to be had _then_. Strange things in the sky, too, on the other side. _Big_ things. Pappy once told me a whale of a tale... Birds, they say, do best to stay away."

"Good heavens," observed the gardener.

"Pappy says Gramsy likes to be left alone, that's why she roosts where she does. Beyond where little feathers can fly, above the wind. To get to the top, Pappy says I've got to take the _stairs!_ " She hung her head as though all the world approached its end and she wailed, "I'm just not _right_ until I've had my third breakfast!"

The gardener cocked an eyebrow. " _Third_ breakfast? You mean you've been carrying on all this time when you've already eaten _twice_ this morning?"

The little bird nodded despairingly.

"You had best take wing," commanded the gardener in a no-nonsense baritone. "No good will come of lingering here this day." He nodded earnestly as he whistled his rude and hurried goodbye, indicating to his uninvited guest that she depart at once. "Do not let the man in purple see you when you return, if he still lives to haunt these hills," he whistled. "He may try to catch you, and if he so deigns he will have his hand around you in no time. You'll wish the hawks had you then, I promise that. Go now, and leave the flocks as they are. Their wait will not be long, one way or the other. All scores will be settled before three days are done."

The little wren looked at the gardener, eyes blank, head cocked to one side. The gardener nodded farewell to her again, casting his eyes upward suggestively.

"Go on then, shoo!" the old man said at last, shuffling his feet so that she was rudely jutted into the air.

Fanning her wings like a ship's sails in a full wind, the nut wren sped back to the fence, coasted low over the top, and was gone as quickly as she had arrived.

"Seems like a nice girl," the old man said to himself. "I always liked how birdkind call everyone they meet _old friend_." In the silence that followed he spoke to himself inaudibly, determined not to overtax his struggling vocal tendons and clamping throat. "As for _my_ old friend... there can be no doubt he has returned in refuge of selfish meditations; now he waits for... _what_? I've lost my good arm, _and_ my..." he looked down at his left hand but did not finish the sentence. "And the White Tree can grow again only if I abandon _my_ plan, which would now seem to involve casting Pence out to pit wits against the Prince." He paused. "It's not what I would have asked for, but it won't be _his_ wish come true to pass either, and that might be worth more than the hands he sought to sacrifice."
Chapter IX

When he came back to the stump at midday Pence marched purposefully over to a white root that swam through the ground like a sea serpent stuck in frozen waters, to a coil of its back that hunched up near the gardener's knee. He dashed up the root's cresting spine, sprang into the air with a spry somersault and a high-pitched " _Alley-oop!_ " and landed sprightly on the old man's leg. He flung his arms wide and bellowed, "Behold, the prodigal son has returned!"

The gardener did not stir–indeed he looked no more likely than the stump to stretch out and wake up–but his knee did twitch where Pence stood; to the boy, so pithy a spasm was like a wave roiling in a fevered storm. "Avast!" he shouted and dove away, his arms spread like the wings of a gull before he tucked into a ball at the last possible instant.

Rolling through a smooth landing, Pence popped to his feet with one hand deftly flourishing what appeared to be a makeshift cape: he had looped the stem of a violet-hued velvetleaf around his neck and smushed the end into a crude knot. The tip of the leaf curled up and away behind him, revealing a spidery hint of crimson underneath its veins.

The old man let out a timbering, ribbed yawn that sounded more like creaking floorboards than any noise a man ought to make. A sleepy tear ran down the side of his walnut nose. "Haven't missed anything, have I?"

Pence unhanded his cape and stood up rigidly. "Nothing. Forget it."

The gardener cracked an eyelid. "Got yourself a little mantle, have you? Looks like you fell in a rubbish heap, but all right, it's a good color. _Regal_."

Pence said, "Thank you," and politely curtsied.

"Pence, generally young lads prefer to bow instead of curtsey."

"I know that," snapped the boy in defense of his manhood, "but my sunhat will fall off if I bow."

"Your _sunhat_? Is that...? Are you wearing an upside-down moondaisy like a bonnet, boy? That's not what I meant about gardeners wearing hats... oh, never mind. If you want to flop a flower on your noodle," the old man sighed, more to himself than to the boy, "who am I to stop you?"

"You're nobody to tell me so," Pence sang merrily.

The old man began to grumble a response, but thought better of it and instead gave the boy a curt nod.

From under the canopy of the moondaisy's petals, Pence flashed his biggest smile. "This baby's going to make all the difference when I finally go toe-to-toe with the Sun. Just imagine the look on his face," Pence giggled with rebellious bliss. Then, from behind his back, tucked snug into the topknot of his cape, he violently whipped out what could only be one thing.

"And don't forget the _sword_!" he called up in a tizzy of vanity. He lunged forward, brandishing a sickly, splintered black twig. He parried and thrust, sliced and slashed, icily dispatching hordes of invisible foes with a bloodthirsty snicker.

"That's a marvelous ensemble you've got yourself there, my boy," the old man eventually surrendered.

Pence could not conceal his excitement, nor did he try. "Do you like it? Truly, do you? I knew you would!" He barked a laugh and whirled around twice, showing off the leaf-cape, daisy-bonnet, and twig-sword from every angle. "And the ladies do appreciate a fellow in a smart manteau–always have, always will."

"But whatever happened to going as nature intended?" asked the gardener innocently.

"Yes, excellent question. I suppose I still support as much for _the common man_ , for slouches and layabouts such as yourself," Pence pontificated, using the black twig as a walking stick while he paced and prattled on, "but it's simply not good _business_ for a man of aplomb, such as myself, don't you see? I'm going to be a role-model. People are going to look _up_ to me one day. I've got to be vigilant against getting any bad publicity–obviously, I can't embrace my destiny in the out-and-out raw, if you see what I mean."

"Though you were eager enough to embrace as many womenfolk as you could find," noted the gardener.

"Fulsomely!" chimed Pence, dipping into a stately curtsey. "People do love a cad. But I can't very well meet _kings_ without _clothes_."

"Pray you don't," the gardener said with a dry snort, "seeing as most kings are nearly as old as I am. That's a lot of wrinkles, son. Wrinkles in places–"

"Right," Pence said with a shudder, " _that's_ the kind of lingo that scares the ladies away. Old man, if you _do_ see your princess one last time–although good money says she's just a figment of your delusions–we had better let _me_ do all the talking." The boy accommodated himself with one last theatrical shudder, then turned around and stalked over to the discarded purple jewel. He pursed his lips and admired his reflection. "She may not want to kiss you, either, when she sees you and smells you and hears that graveyard voice of yours, so I'll be gallant enough to handle that part of the negotiations on your behalf."

Wielding the misshapen twig in both hands, Pence set the blast-ended point upon the jewel's gleaming surface. "Now, let's see what this killing machine can really do." With all his strength he swung the charred-looking weapon up and back over his head. "Forgive me, old bean," he whispered to his former brain.

"Pence, you found my finger!" boomed the old man in an instant of revelation.

Pence released the dismembered digit at the peak of a prolific backswing.

The gardener flinched as the black stub sailed past his face–a fingertip away from lodging up his nose–and landed on the stump, where it briefly hissed like a candle flame pinched between moist fingers.

The old man cringed as if expecting cannon fire to sound behind his head, but nothing further came of it. "Never fear, my boy, never fear," he said a moment later with another elusive wink.

"Great–now I'm unarmed!" Pence glared at the gardener. "I don't stand a chance without a worthy sword!"

"A chance of what?" the old man tried to ask, but the boy was in no mood to be patronized.

"In case you hadn't noticed, I'm the size of goat stool! I'm smaller than a peapod! I bet I'm even smaller than your wrinkled, old–"

"Pence! We are _civilized_ men."

Pence kicked the purple jewel. " _Ow!_ _Darnation!_ Who put that there?" He sat down and nursed his foot in misery. "All my wonderful dreams will never come true," he mourned, "if I can't threaten, maim, and backstab my way to the top." Unhanding his foot, he pointed high to the white stump. "There's no other way; I need my sword; I must get up there. I'll have to climb your beard. I hope you won't feel less of a man, if that's even possible."

"Pence, my boy..." the old man chuckled, slowly shaking his head, "Pence... I don't know quite how to put this..." His voice fell. "There is a symmetry to life, Pence, and the heartseed in your breast is a point of correspondence. This stump is where you were brought to life. But it's more than that. If you seek to climb it, I believe it will possess you and never let go. I must proscribe, for now..." the old man trailed off, noticing the look of complete confusion on the boy's face, and switched approaches. " _Ah-ha!_ But I have just the thing for you! How would you like a blade of _champion_ quality, eh? How would you fancy that?"

Pence's eyes hastened from the upturned triangle carved in the stump's edge–to which he had been transfixed–down to the old man's whittling knife. "I'm listening," he begrudgingly admitted.

"Near the garden gate there is a particular slat in our otherwise monotonous fence that has the meagerest sliver spearing out, waist-high. If you find it, and can manage to free it, it will serve you well."

Pence jumped up. "I can't wait any longer! I have to go at once! Why, I'm as giddy as a groom bachelor at bunting time!"

"I will tell you which path leads to the gate when it is time for you to leave–"

"But I already left, and just returned," Pence cut in with a critical laugh. "I had galoots of adventures while you slept like a slug, or have you forgotten already?"

"Forgive me if I'm still a bit logy," said the old man. "And what of your adventures? Were they adequately grand? Any real sockdologers?"

"I exceeded all expectations, as I had no doubt I would. The feats I accomplished are purely the stuff of legend. No sock-dollars, though," Pence added glumly. "Are those worth more than regular dollars?"

"Never mind," said the old man. "Carry on."

Pence waved his arms about passionately while he spoke, highlighting the peaks of his story. Just as he had claimed, there was no end to his resume of bravado: he had conquered anthills, co-invented the cartwheel along with a bit of cottonwood tuft, and raced a snail. He had had a staring contest with the Sun, which he vehemently swore he won because the Sun had cheated and made him look away by making his brain grow too hot. He had seen the shapes of terrifying monsters emerge from the clouds and, by only his willpower and a dash of patience, had caused them to melt away again. He had counted the stars in a single glance, though he felt it was a strange sign that the sum came to zero, excepting the Sun, whom Pence suspected was to blame once again.

"Pence, sometimes a man's travels are best relived inside his own head," said the old man when he could take no more, "kind of like reading a good book."

"Hogwash! I've got to spread the word. Children around the world are going to aspire to my example, one day."

"Well, maybe not a _good_ book..."

"You don't like listening to me? Outrageous! What's wrong with you? This stuff is pure gold! I know what the problem is: those _curses_ must be all up in your head-bones. It's a shame you're not as durable as me." Pence knocked on the side of his head and grinned proudly at the rock-solid thud. "I'll have a look-see up there for you and straighten everything out. I think I can squeeze in through one of your ears. Probably I'll need a torch."

"My boy, your stories are the grandest in the kingdom. Only _think_ what stories you'll have to tell _after_ you've left the garden! Out the gate, Pence... Beyond the fence, if your heart can bear it." The old man was deathly still but for a twitch of his left arm at the wrist.

Pence considered the gardener's words. "I get it. You don't want to _hear_ what I saw in some old well–you want a piece of the _action_ , eh? _Fantastic_ , I say!"

"What you saw in the well?" the gardener echoed in a sudden sort of daze.

Pence ignored him even while speaking to him just the same. "Where will we go? When do we leave? What will we do in inclement weather? Because I am _not_ standing underneath your butt if it rains."

"Impossible... no one can see the bottom of the abyss," the gardener said doubtfully.

"Come to think of it," Pence wondered aloud, studying the old man with an atypical glimpse of deliberation, "can you even walk? You look downright pitiful– _that_ I won't argue–but it would be plain bad form to ask me to carry you."

"Did you really–could you really–see so far?" the gardener asked. "What saw you there?"

By now, Pence was an old hat at sidestepping the gardener's questions in favor of his own breadcrumb trail of new ideas. While the old man waited, prayed, and suffered for an answer that only the boy could give, the boy gave his thoughts to no one but himself. Pence pounded one fist into an open palm and shook his head in disapproval–at what, he did not say–before stoically raising his eyes to the sun. "I can't wait to fetch my new sword. It's going to be bloody _brilliant_. I'm going to maim so many–"

"Wait, wait! Not _we_ , my boy. I walk no more. Every path hereafter is yours alone, all the way full-circle and up to the end. I expect to die where I am, just here. On the bright side, you'll know right where to find me if you happen to survive your return."

This had a punctually sobering effect on the boy. He stopped bouncing from foot to foot. His hands unhinged from one another and his mouth fell into a peculiar shape like a turned-down heart. He stared at the gardener with the bewildered, betrayed eyes of an abandoned animal.

"Tonight, my boy," the old man was careful to lock eyes with Pence before he continued, "tonight you will see a thing I myself have not witnessed in a hundred years. What lies beyond the fence? I cannot say, but you– _you!_ –a boy from a potato, _you_ will see it all. You ought to be overjoyed! You ought to be ebullient!"

Pence's lip quivered.

"Oh no, not this," said the old man. "Anything but this." He turned his head away, grinding his teeth as if he expected to be battered with ungodly sleet and snow at any moment.

And Pence began to cry. "You don't _like_ me! You want me to _leave_ ," he sobbed, every word exploding from his throat like overstuffed water skins bursting apart. " _Just_ when I was _starting_ to _think_ I _ought_ to _try_ to _like_ it here with you!"

"Pence, Pence, Pence," smiled the gardener, "courteous to a fault."

"So this was your plan all along?" Pence accused the old man venomously. "Is that right, you great bully? To create me, to give me life, to guide me like a father guides a son as I learned the ways of the world? Only to turn around and show me the door? To push me out of the nest? To trust me on my own? _How dare you?_ "

"Pence, there comes a time in every boy's life when–"

"I thought you were my _friend_!"

"Well, you do have an unusual way of–"

"I thought you were my _Mother_!"

"We talked about that, boy, I said–"

"You _said_ you liked my _ensemble_!"

"Did I really say that?"

"But you lied! You _lied_! Admit it: I'm nothing but a dandy to you! A devilishly handsome dandy! With great taste in capes!" With a final train of anguished wails Pence ran back to his hollow husk, flapping his velvetleaf in busy little waves as he ran. He catapulted himself inside and rolled the whole skin over so his lone portal to the outside world lay flush with the ground.

"You're being unreasonable," the old man urged.

All was silent for a short time. The gardener shook his head like a gambler whose horse has decided to trot the entire race.

"Nuts to you!" came the boy's reply a moment later.

"Confound it, boy! _I_ never acted this way! How then you? Get a hold of yourself and stop sniveling like a yellow-bellied ninny!"

Of course, this made Pence cry with far greater motivation. "My belly _is_ yellow, you cavalier horse's rear! _See?_ _I told you so_ you were cavalier! You big, heartless _baritone!_ "

The old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, what lessons of long-forgotten history, no one can say. Such is the mystery of old men.

The potato rolled over. Pence popped his head out to see why the gardener was not hurrying to apologize to him. "Hey! Aren't you going to say something?" His voice was decadently bitter. "Hey, you're not sleeping again, are you? You better not be sleeping!"

"Think of the adventures you'll have!" the old man blurted impulsively. "The world is _soooo_... so much _grander_ than one garden."

Pence ducked back out of view and hurriedly flipped the potato face-down again. The crying recommenced.

"Think of the fortunes to be made!" the old man coaxed.

Pence seized this opportunity to launch a dizzying new orchestration of howls and moans, wheezing and huffing between every soaked-dry sob.

"Boy, listen you to me," the gardener said in his most commanding tone. "Think of the comely ladies."

This did the trick. The potato rolled right-side-up and out peeked Pence, smiling as sure as the first time he stepped into the morning. His eyes were stone dry but his voice cracked as he asked, " _Why_ must I leave? Have I turned out a failure?"

" _Tsk tsk_ , no, Pence. You are an unimaginable success!" The gardener's wrinkles gathered around his eyes. "Well, except for your hands. Carving out thumbs proved more difficult than I would have guessed."

Pence looked closely at his fingers and grinned like a schoolboy with a new slingshot.

"You're going to have a hard time picking up anything very small," said the old man.

"That's all right!" Pence replied. "I'll not concern myself with small things, anyhow. Folks might think I was a sally. Only big things for me from now on."

"Sometimes the most important things to concern yourself with are the smallest, Pence."

"I disagree, old man. I've been small my whole, stinkin' life. I'm sick of small. _You_ wouldn't understand."

The gardener looked up at the sky in such a way that Pence likewise turned his gaze to the heavens. "Pence, even I am very small. Beyond our fence, here, I am as small in the world as you in this garden. I understand your perspective very well, I think."

"If you say so," said Pence while scratching his hindquarters absentmindedly.

The gardener's left arm twitched again, causing the tip of the whittling blade to scratch across the parched dirt path. The boy watched the skittish play of the sharp point on the ground. When he looked up, the gardener was staring a hole through his chest with zealous, bloodshot eyes, the tiny veins therein tinted black of the earth.

"You really are ate up, aren't you?" Pence asked nervously, forcing a laugh. "Just, you know, make sure to _think things through_ before you do," he gulped, "anything _brash_."

With a resinous groan, the gardener shifted his left arm at the shoulder, lifted his elbow, quivering and failing, and slammed his fist into the right side of his body. The unsheathed blade of the whittling knife plunged deep into his chest.
Chapter X

The knife pierced the gardener's ribcage with the crisp crunch of a horse biting an apple. Rivulets of foamy black earth cascaded from his split skin like sand pouring out from a broken hourglass. His hand fell away from the purple handle as the dark spring burped and quickly petered out.

When the old man saw that Pence's face had blanched in horror, he distracted the boy with an all-knowing wink and said with utmost dignity, "Gracious me, it would appear I've soiled myself."

Pence took a step back.

"Why doesn't anyone ever laugh at my jokes?" the old man asked the garden.

Pence's jaw dropped open as if an invisible wedge of cheese had been crammed into his mouth. "Old man, I'm starting to feel very uncomfortable with some of this..."

"I didn't mean to do that so hard," admitted the gardener with a bemused grin, "but no harm in scratching at old scars. I suspect it would take a battleaxe and a royal rage to cut me down, now."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Pence said flatly.

"Did you know, my boy, that even a curse can be a blessing?"

Pence nodded sagely. "Yes, every fool knows that."

"Every fool and now you, Pence. So you see–no harm done." With that, the gardener looked down for the first time to inspect the selfsame wound he had just selflessly dismissed. "Of course, the fact that I seem to be turning into petrified wood is _some_ cause for concern. Come over here."

Pence took another step back, his eyes locked on the tool that had excised him from his potato, pinned high in the old man's body like a flagpole in a tower wall. The flow of dirt from the gardener's trunk had subsided, an hour of life siphoned in a moment.

"Life cannot be counted," the old man whispered to the garden. Then he confided to the boy, "I only meant to slit my breast pocket open. I have something to show you before you fetch your new sword, but it must be lost in all this earth that's spilled out of me." He paused, sizing up the boy. "It's important, Pence. Climb up here and see if you can uncover it."

" _See if I can_ uncover _it?_ From this stinkful, sacrilegious mountain of bile that just came gushing out of your stab-hole?" Pence shook his head in disbelief. "Here's another idea: don't stab yourself! And if you do _one_ more twisted thing like that, I'm getting out of here. I'm serious. That's enough. My nerves are shot. I'll leave."

"Agreed," nodded the gardener, "but not before you see this..." he trailed off, searching for the right word, "this... _heirloom_ I've decided to bestow upon you. Think of it as your inheritance, if you'd like, for I shan't expect you to return it, and but for the value of the very life of you and another penny's worth of advice, I have nothing else to pass along."

"My... _inheritance_?" Pence took several instinctive steps forward and knit his hands together. "And it's... _in there?_ " he attempted to ask offhandedly, nodding toward the glistening mound of run-off dirt.

" _Buried_ ," the old man stressed, "like _treasure_."

Pence yipped uncontrollably, threw a hand over his mouth, and set the other atop the dome of his sunhat, massaging his mind around in furious little circles. " _Uncover... buried... treasure_ ," he chanted to himself as though he was speaking holy words in a sacred ritual. He took a step closer to the gardener.

"The stuff of the earth," the old man enticed with a persuasive smile, "as you lay entombed in long seasons before I chanced to pluck you out and wake you up. It will be as familiar to you as mother's milk."

"Excellent point," said Pence, not at all hiding how pleased he was to be given solid grounds for diving into the muck in pursuit of unspecified riches. Smiling brightly, he scrambled up the old man's tunic like a spider, arms and legs splayed wide for balance. At the top, he removed his sunhat and delicately placed it on the old man's kneecap, followed by his cape, which he unfastened with a shimmying, spinning curtsey. Once again bare-bottomed and undeniably as proud as you please, Pence glanced down over his own backside and a look of admiration conquered his face. "Lovely," he whispered as though he had caught a glimpse of paradise.

"Hurry up, boy, or do you think the sun will be above us forever?"

Pence gave the old man's left foot a sidelong glance and a roguish grin, as if to say, " _Not after I'm done with him_ ," then he wormed his way headfirst into the slope of gargled silt. He disappeared in no time, save for the testimony of tiny avalanches that silently spilt down as he tunneled below the surface.

The old man shut his eyes, breathing only through his nose. The sun, near its zenith, demanded a steep toll in sweat from his bronzed brow but there was no water left in his body to pay for more time. In the span of this one morning the wrinkles on his face–formerly supple and smooth as warm putty–had dried out like cracks in baked mud. Only the silver hairs above his lips moved, dancing in the narrow plumes of air that he managed to expel.

Something flew out of the hill of muck. As it arced low over the gardener's thigh it left a tail of finely sifted dirt in its wake like a button-sized comet spewed from the earth. Small, round, and flat, the object skidded to a stop next to the old man's knee.

The boy tumbled free a moment later and sat up, panting and gasping for air, finally wiping his face off with one forearm as he spat repeatedly to clear out his mouth. He stood up and looked all around for his treasure.

"You're standing on it," said the old man.

"Nonsense," said Pence. He looked down. "There it is!" He sat himself cross-legged on a smooth spot of tunic and placed the penny in his lap. The gardener's beard ran beside him like a wild stream; festooned with dirt and specks of clay, twigs, and dry leaves, the old man's beard could have been mistaken for a bird's nest if it had been attached to a tree instead of a chin.

"I'd say that makes you a genuine fortune hunter," the old man gently chided. "So how do you feel? Ready to pen your memoirs, I daresay."

Pence sat forward and crossed his arms, resting elbows on knees. His spikes of hair were grubby and flattened, jutting all which ways. He looked up to the gardener and smiled impishly. His nose was blacker than a chimneysweep's.

"Well done," complimented the old man. "Your grain of rice is all gone to pot, though. Pity."

Without thinking, Pence plucked out his nose, reversed it, and jammed it back in not-quite-the-right-spot, spoilt side first. "Good as new," he decreed.

"Pence! Come on, lad, what did I tell you? _Think_ before you do things like that. Whatever gave you the idea it would be okay to stab something into your..." He glanced down embarrassedly at his own chest. "Oh. Never mind."

Pence's attention had already moved on. With his head craned low, he studied the object that he had rescued. It was a dull circle the width of a bottle cork.

In one fluid motion Pence stood up with hat and cape in hand and adorned himself inside a single pirouette. He bowed his head politely and his gemstones glinted under the shadow of his brim of pale petals. "Not that I ain't grateful, and I hate to be a cadge, _but_... there better be a boatload more than _that_ to my inheritance or I am going to totally lose my chivalry up in here."

"It is small, I understand, but its worth is more to me than all the gold in all the kingdoms of man, Pence."

The boy shrugged. "Great. _You_ keep it. Get some gold and hook me up like that."

The gardener frowned, which made Pence blush. "Is that any way for a gentleman to receive that which is bequeathed unto him? What sorry thing has befallen the vegetable patch these days, that a boy from the back row shall scoff at a simple gift?" the old man bristled. "Now mind your cheek and have a closer look."

Pence sighed heavily, but he stood up and obediently trudged back to his grime-lacquered reward. He picked it up and held it before himself like he was helming a ship. "Oh yes, I know what this is," he stated blandly. "It's a wheel. Wow. One wheel. I'll add it to my collection." He dropped it in disinterest. "Great air-loom. Thanks for getting my hopes up so high."

"Pence, you brat, pick it up and clean it off. It's not a wheel and this is not a game, you remarkable twit! I should box your ears if I hadn't given you the only life I had left in me."

Pence recoiled from the gardener's suddenly aggressive words like an animal spooked by thunder.

"The hours slip away, and there is so much yet for you to learn," said the old man. "And don't think it a jest when I say you'll be on the other side of the fence before this day is spent, even if I have to pick you up myself and _throw_ you over the dang-about gate!"

Pence stood stock still until the old man had long since finished reproaching him. "Big _talker_ ," he finally mouthed under his breath, but he kept his eyes down and once more dutifully fetched up the as-of-yet unnamed object of his inheritance. This time, without a complaint, he rubbed away the dirt on the object until only a thin, intractable layer remained, obscuring the finer details.

Silent in protest, he stood up and thrust the object out for the gardener to appraise.

"What you hold... is a _penny_ ," said the old man fondly. "Happy birthday, my boy. Huzzah, hoopla, and all of that."

Pence lowered the penny to his own eye-level, but he was stalwart in showing no curiosity or appreciation.

"Would you like to hear something interesting about pennies?" the old man asked.

Pence rolled his eyes like a boy whose grandfather has just asked him if he still enjoys playing with dolls, but he replied, "Fine."

"That'a'boy. Hungry for knowledge, I see. Well, Pence, not all pennies are the same, and not all pennies are common. Just like people, Pence. Just like potatoes. Isn't that neat? And the penny you hold is a very old, very _uncommon_ coin indeed; I doubt there are more than... just the three of us," the old man said wistfully, his eyes unfocused, his breathing ragged, "just the three of us in this late season of man who know the face that you will come to see buried beneath the dirt. Keep a strong hand on it, Pence–rare pennies are harder to keep hold of than a hot potato."

Pence looked down at the penny, frowning.

"Now, I polished it for you yesterday and so I do apologize for its unfortunate current condition, as well as my own clumsiness in the matter, but, you know–" the old man shrugged his lifeless, twisted black arm, "–sometimes plans branch off unexpectedly."

"Well spoken, old man." Pence gave the gardener a subtle bow, alert not to tilt his sunhat off, nor did he miss the opportunity to give his cape a tasteful snap. "In all honesty, however, I was hoping for a little more than a solitary cent. I can't start my fortune from _one_ measly coin. I mean, don't be ridiculous! How am I to support a lavish coterie of ladies with _one_ penny? I need diamonds and gold, man, _diamonds and gold_! Plus a sword–for establishing the peace–and maybe a horse, too. And definitely my own castle." Pence shook his head regretfully. "Sometimes I think I'm growing too big for this garden."

"Even if you were to grow as big as a tree, Pence, you will always have a home here," pledged the old man.

Pence looked up the white stump to its plateau, out of his sight and out of his reach. When his gaze locked onto the hand-carved lines, simple and symmetrical, he became still as a lamb upon the altar. Then he slowly wiped away the last loose residue of dirt on the penny.

The heartseed hiccupped in his chest and skipped a single, ominous beat. The boy's green eyes seemed to magnify and expand as they delved into the picture that was etched upon the dull metal.

The picture was a girl's face engraved with an artist's respect of empty space, but the sorrow expressed in the one cut that made her smile was captured as fully as any masterpiece on canvas. The girl stared out from her small, round window with life her own, seeking something lost, and Pence stared back at her.

"Meet my princess," the old man whispered.

"My _eyes_ ," Pence choked in the crushing silence. "You didn't tell me she was..."

"Yes?" the old man encouraged. " _What?_ Didn't tell you she was... _what_?"

"You didn't tell me she was..." Pence hesitated, then sighed, " _...so beautiful_." He flipped the penny bottoms-up, breaking the girl's hold on him. "What's this?" he marveled. "Did you do this? It looks like it was done by a man with one hand." With a manifestly less capable talent than that which had designed the girl's visage, someone had carved the shaky symbol of a heart into the penny's opposite face, obscuring what looked like traces of an ancient script underneath.

Pence studied the unfamiliar shape with a frown, lifting the droopy petals of his sunhat out of the way with one arm. He stole a glance at the old man's left hand, which, after letting go of the knife, had frozen in a partial-sprung claw–on his palm, clear as day, the green scar.

Lastly, Pence looked up to see the symmetrical lines carved in the white stump–the joint they formed matched the lower half of both other hearts. He returned his eyes to the penny, flipping it heads-up to examine the girl again. "Old man, I think you had better tell me what's going on. My inheritance bares the same mark as your hand, the same mark as the White Tree looks to have borne before it fell. Yet, here is also a likeness of a girl that you say was your true love _and_ a princess, no less. I would normally attribute this to your plethora of mental failings but that _I_ have seen this angel's face before! That is to say _mine eyes have seen her_. You have given me her earrings, haven't you? I'm beginning to think some of these things may not be coincidences. To speak nothing of my heart, or what I saw in the well. I am no longer a boy, as I was this morning: it is time I knew the truth."

"Do you recall these visions of her?" the gardener asked, sitting forward hastily only to begin coughing, forced to sit back. "Why did you not say so at once?" A grainy streak of dirt-flecked spittle dripped from the corner of the old man's mouth as he rushed his words, "What do you remember of her, boy? Tell me everything."

Pence's voice was ascetic as he spoke. "She is no memory–her beauty is seared inside my sight. She wore me. I have touched her skin. She has held me in her hands. In fact... in fact I love her."

" _Pah!_ If you love her," shot the old man, raising one eyebrow, "then why so much talk about your quest for romance and road-proud young ladies?"

"Well," said Pence, thinking the question through carefully, "I reckon I just like to talk a lot."

"Then tell me what you see of her. It has been too long for an old man to remember a woman the way he might wish."

Pence rolled his head around in a circle of concentration. "I can see the braided creases inside her hands and the patterns of her fingertips... Her earlobes are perfect raindrops... The plummeting curve of her neck, the fuzz on her cheek like a flower petal that only an earring can notice... Her hair is mesmerizing, swaying like a thousand silent wind chimes... And of course I have an excellent view down the front of her nightgow–"

"Pence!"

"Only goofing!"

"Your insolence knows no ends!"

"I was goofing, old man! Come on, smile for once–you'll live longer."

"Pence, I should have mashed you and eaten you for brunch. What do you know of love? You're a potato! You've only been here a day!"

"I love her!" Pence cried. "I love her more than you do!"

"Impossible," harrumphed the old man. "My love for her is the very beginning of you and I both."

"Then mine shall be the ending of us!" Pence rebelled, thrusting his arms into the air gloriously, knocking his hat down over his eyes again.

"My love for her is as old as her brittle bones and her wrinkles and her hair, now white as snow."

" _My_ love for her... wait one... wait... _what_? What do you mean 'white hair' and 'wrinkles?'" Pence slowly lifted the moondaisy petals out of his face. "Are these your lies? Where from this vile chicanery?"

"Pence, she is every season my coeval. Did you think I fawned over a girl as butter-cheeked young as yourself?"

"Frankly, I wouldn't put it past you."

"Pence... what else do your eyes remember? _Please._ Your words may be the last I ever see of her."

Pence's gemstones glossed over. "There is nothing else. My heart yearns for what it is separated from. My brain is heavy on my shoulders–laden with deep thoughts, I presume. And my flesh misses the cool darkness and the wet of my roots. Only my eyes have witnessed history, and only for a day, but I did not remember until I looked into the well."

The old man closed his eyes. "The well... yes... makes sense, in a way," he muttered to himself. "I've often found old thoughts and scraps of memories come bubbling to the surface of my mind when I kneel to draw water."

"That's not what I meant," said Pence. "My mind was quite blank, I assure you. It was what I _saw_ in the well."

The gardener's eyes popped open. "I nearly forgot! You never did say what you saw at the bottom, and I am most keen to hear."

"There is no bottom," said Pence. "I saw pennies falling. I guess five. No, I guess ten. Or a hundred pennies. I don't know–I can't count! I didn't know they were pennies, either, back then when I was just a young boy, this morning. I thought they might be stars. All of them were falling, some much farther down than others."

"Impossible," whispered the old man. "Why, it's been seasons since anyone made a wish in the well–the world _cannot_ be so deep as that, for here I have drawn water every day with this very bucket. The abyss played a trick on you, I think," he said, trying to convince himself.

"Every penny I saw had her face on one side, but none of them were marked with a heart. The nearest is as far as the Sun," Pence added matter-of-factly.

The old man stared at the sky as if counting the paces to the morning star. Pence looked at the sun and scowled as if it was making faces at him that only he could see.

At length Pence sighed and ran his hands over the penny. "I want to know _why_ , old man. _Why have you made me?_ What have I to do with a very old woman whom once my eyes adorned and adored? I like my women... I don't know how I like my women, yet. Younger than a hundred, for one thing. Comely. Extravagantly well-to-do. And... very, very short, I think. Oh, yes, and ideally she would be made out of a potato, just like I am! Or what about a nice, chaste gourd? No, no, too many warts on a gourd. A leek, maybe..."

"Once upon a time there was a boy," said the gardener, cutting Pence short, "a boy who had a good and simple lot in life. One day he stumbled his way into a garden untended, unnamed, unclaimed, and–as the boy would learn–what very much seemed to be _everlasting_."

Pence was immediately riveted. He leaned in closer for every next word, gripping the penny as though he was trying to squeeze water from its core. Furtive lights danced in his gemstones like a child's eyes at a midnight fireside.

"In the center of the garden there was an ancient well," said the old man, his voice austere. "Overshadowing the well, an enormous tree. The tree was breathtakingly white. To the boy, it looked like a giant shepherd keeping watch over the hills.

"The boy knew at once that he would stay in the arms of the White Tree and make his home.

"This is the story of what befell them, boy and tree together, long, _long_ ago on a sad, sad, sorry day if ever there was one...
Chapter XI

...The time is more than a hundred years ago today. The boy's name is forgotten. We shall call him Gee.

He had no home before he found the White Tree. He had no memory of a family but for the mountains and the rivers and forests and the vast plains, the sky, the rain. He ran with beasts that had antlers like trees. He spoke to the moon with wolves. He rode on the backs of whales, the eldest of all creatures.

He found the garden on a care-free afternoon, which was the only sort of afternoon he partook in. In those days the first thing you saw when you came around the last turn of hills was the White Tree, pure as driven snow and taller than a castle turret. He found its branches–seen through the leaves when the wind blew just so–were grown like a man looking to the hills as though to keep vigil. As big as the White Tree was, Gee thought it strange he had not seen it from a distance along back on the path. His suspicion was fleeting; as boys will so often do, he shrugged it off and ran and jumped to the lowest branches and climbed the day away.

In the hidden world of the White Tree's bough there were a thousand nooks to explore and cozy corners to curl up in. The jungle maze of limbs and leaves and things to eat, the canopy pierced in a scattered array of dust-speckled sunbeams, all seduced and enchanted him.

Gee's decision to stay was the easiest of his life. Outside, the kingdom he roamed was grown haggard and stony, both the land and the people, but the garden whispered to him that it need not be so in this one hidden corner of the map.

He lost count of days and seasons and years. It rarely rained, never stormed or snowed. His skin grew brown in the sun for he spent as much time out in the garden as he did in the reclusive shade of the White Tree's bough. His hair grew long. His senses expanded and sharpened to all that lived around him, such that he could smell a rose still inside a seed or hear his heartbeat beside a din of crickets in the night. This is when he realized he was thoroughly and powerfully lonely.

Birds were his only company. He lived among them so long that he learned their language near completely, and it's few men or women as can say that. But birds come and go. They live and die in the blink of an eye, it often seems. Their flighty chatter only fanned the isolation that was smoldering in his heart.

Gee considered leaving the White Tree and the garden altogether, but something told him that if he left he would never find his way back. Did the garden itself reveal this to him? Or the well, groaning up silent warnings from the abyss? Perhaps. But if they did it was never in words, only in the quietude of the White Tree's long shadow, where his thoughts tended to trail away like leaves in a river.

Seasons carried by. He never left. The abundance of the garden and the White Tree provided all the food he needed. He was lonely, but contented to stay, letting his mind float in and out of daydreams like a ghost through cellar walls. Years drifted along. Until...

One day–one day, as the boy was fond of thinking, when it seemed the sun rose earlier than usual–he heard a bell. Then he caught a scent of something new and decidedly pleasant in the garden below. He peeked down from his loft in the bough and saw a girl was there. He thought _she is the reason why the sun has woken early_.

Gee dropped from the tree, surprising the girl very much, though she hid her fright well. He told her his name and she told him hers, but it is long-forgotten. We shall call her Pea, if only because the setting is so appropriate.

She wore a shimmering green dress under a white apron and her golden hair flowed to her waist in loops and braids.

It was this particular instant when Gee realized that his own hair was what a proper lady must regard as an utter disaster and his clothes–what remained of them–were in shambles and his feet were covered in... well, his feet were... _fertilized_. So he nearly feinted when she was willing to meet his eye. He blushed, having forgotten what it was a boy is supposed to say to a girl.

She grinned like a cat. He laughed like a donkey. Of course they fell in love, at least for the one quiet day fate afforded them. But the day flew by and at dusk, as she readied herself to depart, Gee asked her to stay in the garden with him for a little while more. To leave even once was to risk never finding the way back, he told her, at once painfully aware how desperate his words would sound.

Pea insisted she had to return home. Gee wanted to know why. So she told him she was the daughter of the King and she would already be in enough trouble for sneaking off all the day without her Honor Guard. Nevertheless, she promised to slip away from her father's custody and come back the next morning. Gee believed her, although he was inclined to think the bits about the King and an Honor Guard were a yarn.

As Pea was getting on her seat, Gee took her hand and pulled her to his side. He grabbed the knife that hung at her apron-strings and pressed it against the smooth, pale skin of the White Tree. Slowly, slowly as the dead march, he carved into his beloved tree a heart. Green sap oozed onto his hand as he dragged the knife across the wood. He told Pea it was a charm to ensure she found her way back safely.

In truth it was no such thing. It was just a boy stalling, afraid to feel alone again.

He should have kissed her then; instead he waited, doubting himself, and she only smiled and returned to her seat. As she rode passed him, she unfastened her two small, green earrings in the blink of an eye and dropped them into Gee's hand. They were to be _his_ charms, to ensure he remained safely in the garden for _her_ , she teased.

When she was gone, the boy climbed up to his favorite crooked branch and lay awake all through the night. Earrings? Honor Guards? Was her story true? It would certainly explain the unique contraption she rode in place of a horse, he supposed.

In the morning, Gee found something worrisome had happened to his hand: there was a vivid scar on his left palm, yet he had felt nothing during his night-long daydream, and certainly it had never been there before. Equal to the size and shape of the heart he had carved upon the White Tree, the scar was green as grass with no trace of blood or scabbing or even an underlying cut or burn.

His first thought was worrying about Pea. Had the same thing happened to her? If so, would she still return? The boy did not yet understand the symmetry of fate–he fretted all through the long, cold sunrise without comfort.

When there was enough light, he brushed his teeth with a white twig. He combed his hair with another white twig. White leaves served to wipe his cheeks.

Pea returned shortly after dawn with the ringing of a bell, to Gee's immeasurable relief. Without a word she dismounted and turned to the boy and raised her right hand–there she held his own scar's twin, grass-green and bright as flame. Her face was streaked with tears, and in one of life's all-time most dimwitted of moments the boy asked her how come it made her cry.

It was not the heart that upset her, she explained. Rather, her father, the King, had discovered the scar first thing in the morning and thrown a brutal fit. For she, Pea told Gee, was to be married away to a foreign kingdom and how would it do for her to arrive on her wedding day bearing a sign of love for another man–or boy–permanently seared inside her hand?

Although he asked for no proof of her story, Pea took from her pocket a penny and bade Gee study the engraving thereupon. It was a picture of Pea, her smile as sad as the purple sea.

Gee could not speak when he looked into her eyes, but she came to his rescue and filled the silence: the pennies were a sort of token for those who would seek her hand in marriage, one hundred in all, each hand-crafted. But, she told him, none of the indentured artisans had been able to make her look joyful, try as they might. This made the King furious. The craftsmen were all of them thrown out the window, but the pennies were minted and sent on their way regardless, his majesty being supremely impatient. One-a-piece in purple coaches the coins were delivered to all the kingdoms of man. On the back of each penny was a direct query: _What will you pay for her hand?_

Only one penny was not sent, the Princess told Gee as she took the selfsame back from his hand.

Gee could not think what to say, having no mind for politics, but Pea assured the twig-brushed boy that she had no desire of any kind to marry a grown man, especially one she had never met, and _especially_ one who would himself be all too willing to wed under such atrocious conditions. She left Gee's side and approached the well. She would cast the penny in, she said, and make her wish to stay in love with the boy in the garden forever and never grow old.

That is the crescendo of any happiness to be found in this story. Before the penny left her hand, she was interrupted by an uninvited visitor who stole his way into their sanctuary with no intention other than to deliver his wickedness upon the garden and all therein.

It was the Prince, her younger brother, second in line to inherit the Crown. He had followed Pea to the garden under their father's duplicitous orders. The King, according to the Prince, had always had an ear for tales about the mysterious garden and he was thus keenly aware that artifice, guile–these were not the traits of the men and women who stumbled their way to the cusp of the ancient well and lived immortally in shade under the stewardship of the White Tree; so, too, the King knew the color of his own son's heart–he knew the Prince would never be beckoned to the garden by fate's good grace alone.

Perhaps the King allowed Pea to abscond again that fateful morning–when it was clear where she would choose to go–because he believed it was the only chance for the Throne to gain the privileges and the powers of the garden. Whatever his motivation, let her go he did, with the Prince loosed soon after to hunt.

Robed in a rich satin cloak, the Prince waltzed into the garden as though he owned it, or as though he believed his father owned it. He trampled flowerbeds and spat into the well. He told the Princess she was commanded to return to Court and never see the boy again.

Gee jumped in between the Princess and her brother, but the Prince had all the advantages. He had been around the playthings of war all his life. He flung the boy aside effortlessly and laughed as though it was a lark to tear apart a pair of hearts.

The Prince grabbed Pea by her wrist and even as she screamed and pummeled him, he pulled her to his horse, bound her hands in chains, and tied her to his saddle. He unclasped the purple-handled knife from her belt–the one that had carved the heart into the White Tree–and returned to Gee.

Gee made another feeble move to reach the Princess and somehow free her, but he never stood a chance. The Prince threw him against the White Tree, rushed into him and stabbed the knife fast into his breast, driving it deep and twisting it in like a corkscrew.

Blood poured from Gee, dark and red as the King's best wine. The Princess shrieked and never has the garden heard a sound like that before or since. She tried to bite and claw herself free, as if possessed.

Gee felt his mind begin to unravel itself from his body like roots unclasping clumps of soil as their flower is pulled from the earth. He saw blood at Pea's mouth and fingernails where she fought against her chains. In his liminal state he thought this a terrible shame, and for some reason very silly of her.

The Prince returned to his horse and mounted, lifted his reigns to leave, but hesitated, just as Pea had done the evening prior. Silently, he dismounted and strode back to the White Tree, cradling a double-bladed axe with a wooden handle as black and sleek as tar. Set between mirrored crescent blades–shaped as twin dragonheads–was a purple jewel that flashed with rich shadows like a living eye.

He looked down at Gee, who must have been very nearly dead by now, and announced, "I am your Prince, whom it pleases to dally in your garden. Have you anything to say before the Crown?"

Gee spoke not. All he could think was how unusual it was that the Prince wore long pajamas under his cloak with grass-stains on his knees.

"As I thought," said the Prince. "Too in awe of your future King to speak. Very well. The Throne is... _satisfied_... with your loyalty this day." Standing astride the gasping boy, blocking out the sun and smiling ear to ear, the Prince wound back and recoiled, sinking the axe into the White Tree, cleaving the carving of the charmed heart in two.

It took him until sunset to cut the tree down. The earth shook and a thousand-thousand leaves rained down in sheets that covered every corner of the garden. The cracking of a hundred branches, the ruination of the great stronghold of birdkind, this was the penultimate tragedy–the felling of the White Tree–as much with hatred as with the strength of steel. Yet who else would ever shed a tear? The world itself may have its heart divided and men will never hear, but for the ones at the axes.

The Prince tied his sister's riding contraption to his saddle with a length of rope, then he mounted his horse and left the garden behind and Gee for dead. Pea was dragged away by her chains. Her screams faded one hill at a time.

What happened to the boy? Did he die? His heart was ripped apart like butcher's meat, yes, but no, it was not his day to die. And yet he may as well have. He never saw his princess again and his life, although long and peaceful, has sorely thirsted for her love.

But no, he did not die. That would be a fate without balance. No... in place of a death so imminent, an unexpected thing occurred as he lay in the dirt, staring at the sky, inhumed in a white sepulcher of fallen leaves: once again there was an unfamiliar _something_ in his hand. Inside the scar of the heart, in the center of his palm, Gee felt a minuscule pulse. Craning his neck as much as he could manage, he saw what he held was a small white seed.

He knew at once it was a gift from the White Tree. He closed his fingers around it gratefully and fell asleep for days.

When he next awoke he felt death no more. His body was his own and as heavily mortal as ever and he knew, somehow, that as long as he held onto the seed he need not fear what had happened to the heart in his chest, whether the flesh and fibers within mended or not.

Right at once he dashed off in pursuit of Pea and the Prince, but within a hundred paces he felt a twinge of pain in his chest, a warning shot from the underworld. The seed stopped beating for an instant.

It only took another moment to verify that he was trapped. Beyond a certain span from the stump the seed could not survive. Without the seed, Gee would die as certainly as the earth without the sun, he knew. It hit him then: he could never leave the stump. He could never take up the Prince's trail. He would never see his beautiful princess again. She would marry another. Gee would diminish and perish alone in the garden.

I believe that is when he vomited, but it was very long ago and difficult to say now.

By days the wound in Gee's breast sealed itself and scabbed over, although no beat would ever again echo from those savaged chambers. He wandered among what was left of the garden, what had not been covered in splintered debris, retracing every step he had taken with a girl's hand in his own.

The birds left the garden to find new trees and build new homes, but they visited the boy and promised him they would find Pea no matter how long it took.

Her purple-handled knife and the jewel from the Prince's axe–knocked free amid his mad chopping–both lay on the ground beside the stump as a constant reminder of what crimes had been rendered there. The boy loathed looking at them or thinking about them, but after days, then seasons, and more than a year, this feeling waned. One gray day like any other he put the jewel in his pocket alongside Pea's earrings, picked up the knife, and set to work restoring the garden.

He never counted the days or seasons that he labored, but unmeasured time saw the boy cut off the arms of the fallen tree and trim, smooth, and shape them, all with merely a dagger and a lone hand to hold it. In a great circle he built a fence as far from the stump as he could walk without feeling the seed begin to dwine.

No word came of his princess. The old birds died. A new generation learned to fly and the search recommenced, but with half the heart, and soon they too passed on. And with every blink a new generation took wing, each with less care for old vows than the last. In time the promise was broken. Gee stopped listening, and the birds stopped visiting, but who can say which happened first?

There he remained and grew old, talking to himself and to the flowers. There he abides–the most resplendent prison in the world, perhaps, but a prison withal.

The Princess is alive. She is out there, somewhere–he knows this. It is the one thing he learned from the white seed, for a man keeps his love in his heart...
Chapter XII

The gardener ended his story without punctuation, but Pence interpreted the quiet period that followed as suspense before the hand-in-hand inevitability of love unkinging fate. He sat forward, thrumming the penny and staring at the remainder of the once-charmed heart carved in the stump.

"So? What happened?" he finally asked.

The gardener considered. "Well... I suppose _you_ did."

Pence looked from the stump to the back of the penny to the old man's left hand. "You are the boy?" he asked with a voice thinly skimmed over his fascination.

"I _was_ the boy," corrected the gardener.

"So that's your name–Gee? _Ha!_ Well, gee!" Pence whooped with laughter.

"No. The name is passed on."

"And she is Pea?" Pence pressed, holding up the penny as though it was all so simple. "I like _that_ name. Speaks highly of her parents–obviously well-grounded persons. Well, except for the evil King, I suppose."

"No one holds her name. It is gone, along with the boy's. It is the symmetry of the story you need to tune your mind to. There is a _lesson_ here."

" _Hmmm_ ," Pence buzzed aloud. The sun was more than a quarter past its peak and burning squarely into the boy's gemstones under the brim of the moondaisy.

"Your thoughts?" asked the gardener.

"It wasn't _entirely_ as boring as I thought it would be. At least there was some good bloodshed."

"Thank you, Pence," said the old man, nodding courteously. "The pleasure was all mine."

"Good," said Pence. "Lesson learned."

"And what is that?" asked the old man.

"The Prince is the bad guy. Life isn't fair. Wishes don't come cheap. Holding hands with a girl too long will leave you broken-hearted."

Pence flipped the penny heads-up and ran his fingers along the engraving of the Princess–under her chin, around her cheek, dawdling on her ear. His hands were the perfect size for her. As he traced her form, his eyes turned to the sun and he frowned.

"What troubles you, my boy?"

Pence looked to the old man, alarmed. "Are you serious? _Everything_ troubles me! Your whole story was nothing _but_ trouble! To weigh what the Sands of Time have stripped from you! Where are the Scales of Justice? In the vegetable patch we had peace. In the patch we had order, and everybody stayed in a row. But _this_! _This_ is outrageous. Didn't anyone tell the King what his scaramouch son had done? _Arrghh_ ," Pence bellowed like a grizzled pirate, "but the Prince has accrued a steep debt. I say we take that axe of his and lop off his ruddy boll–"

"Pence! Mind your language, my boy." The old man waited for him to settle. "Although I feel the same way, incidentally," he tacked on a moment after.

Pence kicked the dirt, ill-pleased. "What in the hills happened to the Princess? Did she marry? This is outrageous! If the birds failed to find her, can the wind not tell you the way?" He lowered his voice to a murderous hush, "And what of our nemesis, the nefarious Prince? Have the Axes of Symmetry seen to his demise?"

The gardener's brow slumped as he answered, "Of the Prince, I have heard from precisely one hundred guests no untainted account, but it seems to be rather widely agreed upon that he never took the Throne; a fuller history of things probably does not even exist anymore in the halls of this skeletal kingdom." The old man drew a patient breath like a bucket of fresh water pulled from the well, a task he savored. "There is gossip in the wind from long ago that he made his going down a dark road. However, in the interest of remaining fair, there is just as much of the same tripe for sale with my name attached. Ingrown things, rumors," he concluded with masticating distaste.

"He never took the Throne? Then _who?_ The Princess, maybe?" Pence worked zealously to deduce the answer. "A long-lost twin? That would be symmetrical, right?"

The old man shook his head.

"A brother from another mother?"

"Mercy, no."

Pence's head vibrated back and forth with the effort of his calculations. "Did the King pen a secret will of last rights, leaving the entire kingdom to his best-favored but illegitimate three-legged horse? Oh, wait–that's not a symmetry. Dang, this is tricky."

"No one took the Throne, Pence."

" _No one?_ But that's _outrageous_!"

"When the King's reign ebbed–and this is long, long ago, mind you–the kingdom... it became a dangerous place. Laws are not forged by the Crown today; they are made wherever one man is meaner and stronger than his neighbor. That is all you need know."

Pence nodded approvingly, tapped the side of his nose in a kind of secret signal to the old man's left foot, and waved his hand for the gardener to continue.

"Now, there are happy corners left on the map and decent people–so say those I have been fortunate enough to welcome here, from time to time. But the roads that divide the good are long and dry and there is no faith in this season of man. I do not know what you will find out there 'midst these lost hills."

"What became of our Princess?" Pence demanded. "You said that my heart told you that she was still alive, and I feel her, too! That must be what love is, my heart confirming her!" he sang, hovering on his tiptoes with bliss. His face fell suddenly. "But where is she? You said you hosted travelers–you must have asked them what providence delivered her. Did she marry? Did she never escape? Or send a note that said she still likes you? And what of the penny? What does it all mean?"

"I... I know not whether she loves me, or where she is... No guest of mine has heard her story, and I have spoken to you of the birds. Even the wind carries no fragment of her fate and no sound but the waves when I ask, as if I put an ordinary conch to my ear." The gardener's voice suddenly cracked, sick with age and sorrow and he cried like an old tree creaking, "Where is she? Why is there no report of her?"

Pence observed the old man with the natural concern that was cut across his brow. "Surely the Prince will be able to put answers to all of that," he stated bluntly, all at once standing up and brushing himself off with no shortage of pomp and pageantry. "And you've learned nothing else for a hundred years?"

"Only what I've learned from the stump."

"What can a stump teach a man?" asked Pence, adjusting his cape.

"If you know how to listen, the stump will teach you many things. It taught me that if you love something but cannot go to it, then it must come to you. It taught me how to wait. The stump is wise."

Pence nodded respectfully, straightened his sunhat, and walked over to the path nearest the gardener's right arm, opposite the direction he had taken earlier in the afternoon. He held his chin high and made as if to leave without another word.

"Pence, where are you going? What's gotten into you, boy?"

"Nowhere. Nothing. I'm just going to zip outside real quick and ask him where she is." Pence pointed a thumb back over his shoulder, toward the path, as if that explained everything.

The gardener shrugged–a speech-smitten request for elaboration.

"The _Prince_!" cried Pence. "I'm going to go talk to the bloody Prince!" He turned and started boldly down the path. "I'll be right back."

The gardener watched him go, caught off guard, but quickly snapped to his senses and called, "Pence! Wait! Wait, my boy. How is it that you come to say the Prince is outside? The world beyond the fence is much bigger than you might think."

"Ha, good one!" Pence shouted back without stopping. "You crack me up, old man. I'll be fine. As a gentleman of fancy, and being much wiser than I was in my errant youth, outsmarting the Prince is going to be as easy as one, two... well, I don't know what comes next, since you've neglected to educate me properly. But it's going to be easy, I'm certain of it."

"Pence! Wait, enlighten me, please. Please, just a moment before you go rushing off into the unknown. The world can wait one moment."

Pence stopped and spun around sharply, not hiding his annoyance at the delay.

"Why do you say the Prince is out there?" the old man repeated.

Pence held up the penny. "Who gave _this_ to you?" he asked luridly.

It was the old man's turn to play innocent. "Oh... just a traveler... a young man... first in... about a year... not but three days ago," the gardener revealed little by little. "Had himself a tight pair of tan pants and a long, swish cape, if somewhat worse off for the wear. You would have liked it. Queer fellow, though... nervous... left in the middle of the night. When I woke up, the penny was on the stump heads-up and bright as a bronze star. The heart was inscribed as it is."

"Only the Prince can be behind this–the mark of the heart is too great a coincidence," Pence said decisively. " _That_ is how I know that he is here."

"Will you find my princess for me, Pence?" the old man pleaded before the boy had finished speaking.

"And what?" Pence asked curtly. "Lead her back to you with a trail of pumpkin crumbs? Stand on the stump like a priest and wed you?"

"Yes, whatever you can," the old man rasped with a contented smile, closing his eyes. "That last bit would be especially appreciated, thank you."

"Wait– _that's_ your big plan?" Pence shook himself as if to shed a confusing dream. "Find her for you? 'Do whatever I can?' _Really?_ Just skip around the Prince–who likes to kill people for no good reason, as I understand it–then find your ancient girlfriend–somewhere even the birds and the wind cannot locate–and _do whatever I can?_ Unbelievable," Pence muttered under his breath. "You do realize I can barely even lift this penny, don't you?"

"Do you begin to see now how desperate I truly am," asked the gardener, unmoving.

Pence eyed the old man up and down like a farmer sizing up a scrawny goat. "It's a terrible plan– _terrible_ –just like your stench, your sense of humor, and social skills that would get you hogtied at a pig-roast."

" _Will you find her for me?_ " the old man persisted.

"Would you have told me the Prince was hereabouts if I hadn't figured it out on my own, or would you have sent me out to meet him unwittingly?" Pence challenged, eyeing the old man as if he might have a fork and a frying pan hidden behind his back. "Just what exactly did you have on the menu for me?"

"Pence, in all honesty, with _you_ I don't believe it's even going to make a difference."

Pence stiffened in surprise, then relaxed his shoulders and puffed out his chest and drew his cape around himself.

"Will you find her?"

The boy resumed his march down the path to the gate, penny held proudly. "I have a pretty good head for getting women to follow me, what with having had a precious jewel for a brain when I was first born," he called back over his shoulder. "And I _always_ put the welfare of others above my own." He was nearly around the bend. "I'll find her."

"Wait!" called the gardener.

"Now what?"

"How... how did you know which path to take? I never told you."

"It runs opposite the well," Pence replied without looking back. "Every potato knows the well is the beginning of the garden, so this path," he nodded forward, "must lead to the end, which must therefore be the gate. How's _that_ for symmetry?"

"That's not _exactly_ how it works, my boy–"

"I'll be right back, you'll see. I'm just going to ask him a few questions. Maybe break a toe or two. Then again, torturing my enemies might lead to bad publicity. Hey, it really does help to think things through!"

"I... I... I... could use a sip of water," the old man hoarsely beseeched, anxious to stall the boy by any means.

" _What?_ " Pence wheezed as though he could not believe what he was hearing. He looked back over his shoulder. "You've got to be kidd–"

"I'm dying of thirst, Pence. Just one sip. You could fetch a few drops for me in that nifty cape of yours, I'll wager. The gate will wait. The gate will wait."

" _Nifty?_ Do you really think so? I wasn't sure you liked it before–I mean, _no_! Fetch you a drink? That will take _forever_ ," he moaned like a boy told to spend a summer's day whitewashing a fence. "I'd probably end up falling in the bucket and drowning!" He took a few steps back. "I thought you _wanted_ me to leave the garden. And you're not dying of thirst, either. You're dying because you don't have a heart." Pence continued to slowly back away as he talked faster and faster. "Or maybe it's because you're twice cursed, your each side at odds with the other. I'm not really sure what's going on there. It's awfully disgusting to look at, though. Rub some dirt on it and walk it off before I get back with the old bag. So long!" He sidestepped once and was gone behind the bend.

"Pence!" called the old man. "Stay to the path, whatever you do! If you get in any tight spots, just calm down and use your head! Don't go in water! Don't get on fire! Don't feed wild animals! If you meet the Prince, reveal nothing of what has become of my arms! And if you find my princess, just tell her your name!"
Chapter XIII

By the time Pence reached the gate he had a solution to the difficulty of how best to lug around his unwieldy inheritance: a creased blade of grass looped and knotted over one shoulder like a sling with the coin tucked snugly in the crease, then clamped securely under his armpit.

He patted the penny reassuringly as he gazed up at the fence. The immaculately measured, smoothed, and sequenced planks rose above him like a sleek cliff face jutting into the clouds.

A delicate trellis was all that distinguished the gate from the rest of the fence. The trellis, like all the rest of the carpentry in the garden, had been fashioned from the fallout of the White Tree. Arcing over the gate in a precise semicircle, the interwoven strips of wood were pleached with purple ivy and green ferns. Pence stopped well short of the gate.

The splinter the old man had mentioned did not take long to find. It cast a shadow as small as the crack of a peeking eye, but Pence's perfectly cut gemstones picked it out in a snap. "Now I claim my sword," he said to the garden, "and leave all childish things to eat my dust."

The old man had been accurate in his description: the splinter was waist-high up the fence–the waist of a grown man. Pence surveyed his task with dismay. "I didn't anticipate this. How am I to reach it? Why didn't that old man tell me how to deal with every problem I'd encounter? What a shortsighted blow-gut."

The splinter angled out from the fence like an arrow set for the boy's heart. Pence tried jumping up and down for it, though he was well beyond reach of the fence and could leap no higher than his own knee. He tried throwing clods of dirt to knock the splinter loose, but his aim was hopeless. He tried threats and empty promises. "And I can't go back and ask for help, of course," he reasoned with himself manfully. He stroked his chin with one hand and looked up at the sun.

Then he raised his arm, attempting–at a new height of naivety–to physically reach for the splinter. He stretched his hand open as wide as he could, frowned, reaching farther, leaned in, flexed his fingers...

The splinter began to glow. A ghostly green vapor drifted off the bright, white shard. It wiggled once, then snapped free and flew straight toward Pence's outreaching hand.

"Yeah!" he shouted happily; then, " _Gack!_ " as he dove out of the way at the last moment to avoid being skewered by the blazing, thumb-length sliver of a spear.

Pence stood up, dusted off his knees and belly, and stepped cautiously to where the splinter had landed. He found it plunged half its length into an acorn-shaped rock. The entry cut was as clean as a crevice in ice. The green phantom glow had ceased.

"No way!" Pence reveled, for as he wrapped his fingers around the splinter the glow returned. He pulled it easily from the rock and held it before his eyes. The white wood shone like silver in the sun. The green mist swirled and danced in the air like roots and tendrils growing, intertwining, ever-changing, then fading like old smoke in a breeze.

The heartseed pounded like a cauldron drum inside his chest.

"The old man has _got_ to see this." Pence looked to the gate, torn for a single moment by the temptation to finally begin his journey into the world without any more interruptions.

"The old man was right," he said aloud. "The gate can wait. _Ha,_ I rhymed," he laughed, although he had only been repeating his creator's words. "I think I must be the first potato who was a poet. Perhaps that old man should have named me Poeto. Poeto, Poeto, Poeto. Now, _there's_ a name a boy in a cape could be proud of."

*****

Pence marched into the clearing like a man out for blood. He stomped up a rising white root that was in his way, surfed down the opposite end, and walked directly to the bucket of water. He drew his splinter—the white wood blazed. Green tendrils of milky light spilled off the small sword and illustrated the air like the ghosts of newly sewn plants writhing toward the sun.

Pence swung once, flinched away from his own strike in sudden fright and fell down, but his slash had opened a gap in the wooden bucket like it was no firmer than wet paper. Cool water gushed out for a brief moment, soaking into the ground around the gardener's feet, causing them to sink into the earth a subtle fraction.

"Drink up," Pence said heroically, or to the best of his ability. As he returned to the path to the gate, he ran his hands through the grass that lined the first row of windbell flowers. Pressing his face against their shoots, he inhaled deeply, fanning air into his grain of rice with both hands. "The fragrance is rather like feet," he concluded detachedly.

"I wonder why that is," said the old man, absent-mindedly staring at his feet. The purple handle of the whittling knife still protruded from his chest.

"It certainly warrants further investigation," said Pence. With a tinge of melancholy he whispered, "But something tells me I'll not ever know."

"That would be the garden speaking to you," the old man said now to himself, but he was asleep before his last word.

When he walked back past the purple jewel, once upon a time the crowning eye of a prince's axe, Pence tapped it lightly with the tip of the luminous splinter. The white wood melted through the jewel like it was warm butter. Pence stared in shock, put one hand to his temple as though there was an invisible hole in his head, then turned and ran away.

*****

He approached the gate without breaking stride. This was the first time he had come so close to the fence as to touch it since the hour of his digging-up. He grinned like a man leaving on holiday.

The gate began to glow. The white wood brightened and a fuzzy green fog steamed off in hints and patterns of new tiny flora growing and curling, the same mysterious aura the splinter sword created but here a thousand times to scale.

Without a touch the gate swung open just enough for a very small boy to pass through.

Only the rhythm of the heartseed could be heard.

Pence walked out of the garden and the gate closed itself behind him.

"Now, what have we here?" said the man in purple.

### Part Three

Chapter XIV

Waves of foothills defined Pence's immediate horizon, each a colossus in its own right to the boy. In the gaps between the waves he saw a sea of forest growing uninterrupted to the faraway first knuckles of a range of soaring mountains. Resembling conjoined bony fingers, the megaliths' wind-whittled tips had been visible from inside the garden; now outside, Pence could see this ring of spires encompassed the ends of the earth in every direction like a circle of open hands upholding the world in their gathered palms.

The only road in sight disappeared around the hills and into the woods. There were no signposts, boot marks, or horse tracks, let alone princes.

Cobwebbed cracks interrupted Pence's pace every few steps. He slowed to consider his footwork. "If there's a path that leads to the garden, why don't more people find it?" he asked himself as he picked his footing with the care of a man cleaning between his teeth with a knife. "Now where is that pickle-brained Prince?"

*****

The man in purple kept a pensive lookout from the shadows. He had seen the white gate shine, swing open a sliver, then reseal. Now a small _something_ –was it a child's doll?–was eagerly wending its way down the path. "His powers exceed compare," the man whispered, licking his cracked, bloodless purple lips. "Blast his shrunken head."

He removed his hat. "I didn't want to have to do this," he said with heavy lament. On his bald head rested a brown bottle, one quarter full of a gloppy, undulating liquid. He rolled his eyes up balefully as though he could _almost_ read what lay in store for him within the bottle's murky ambience. With long, nimble fingers he switched hat for bottle and then raised the drink in front of his eyes as though he was locked in a battle of wills.

His body swayed like a flickering candle flame; his head remained eerily still. Tilting back, he took a short, strained swig of the syrupy concoction, his gullet bouncing up and down like a cork in water.

"Terrible!" he spat, replacing the bottle under his hat. " _Finest in the land._ " Then he stepped drunkenly onto the path in front of the boy, who froze dead in his tracks.

*****

Pence stood like a picket in the ground, rigid, speechless. Standing in one place for more than a moment provided him a rare chance to think, and he made his mind up quickly as to what to do next: he charged the purple-clad giant with his sword leveled like a jousting lance, the green mist flowing as wildly as the mane of a galloping war-horse.

Pence drove his sword clean through the man in purple's black boot. The boot promptly withdrew from the fight. Pence put his hands on his hips and his posture bloated triumphantly. Then the boot swung back through, a sweeping pendulum kick that sent the boy zipping heels over backside through the air like a trapeze artist without a net. He crashed down in a tumbling heap, head bouncing on knees until his foot caught in a divot and momentum sprouted him up into a set of mismatched, flimsy front-handsprings, punctuated by an abrupt stop square atop his feet.

The force of the kick caused Pence's cape to cocoon around his body, preventing his meager belongings from scattering when he landed, but the velvetleaf itself took significant damage. Running his fingers along one frayed edge, Pence exhaled with livid patience, struggling to constrict his anger. He reached to pull the petals of his hat lower, lest the ever-intrusive Sun try his temper any further. Curiously, the moondaisy was not on top of his head. He looked up. He looked down the path. The flower was nowhere to be seen. His thin-cut lips resiled like a beast baring fangs and he stalked toward the purple-clad giant.

The purple-clad giant–who was no giant at all among other grown men and women and some few tall children–had been hopping up and down on his good foot and holding the bad, but when he spotted Pence on the warpath he plucked the splinter out of his boot, flicked it spinning into the grass with habile contempt, and put both feet on the ground. Diaphanous green mist spiraled up from the tiny hole in his boot. He wobbled unsteadily, like a man who has been standing too long in the sun, though his head never moved a whisker, for he kept his bottle hidden there and ever balanced.

"Here now, the Prince!" boomed Pence with a voice so condescending it could only mean he had no forethought whatsoever how much harm a second kick might do him. "Stop this sniveling and return my sword to me, at once! I'll not ask again." Pence extended his open hand in the air, the same ingenuous motion he had used to summon the splinter free from the fence.

The Prince shifted weight off his tender foot. He studied the boy in silence, eyes coved in shadows under the brim of his hat. The purple stovepipe set a gaunt silhouette against the sun, while his lustrous fur cloak billowed like a bag of smoke. With a sable-lined cowl raised over his mouth, only his long white nose peered out into the daylight, crooked with an ancient break, the tip peppered with dirty pores and pin-sized pockmarks.

"You provide a poor introduction of yourself, the Prince," Pence called up with his hands cuffed around his mouth.

The Prince's nostrils flared.

"Look alive," said Pence as he entered into the giant's long shadow, "and make ready my sword, man. It was an accident, letting go after trying to maim you. It could have happened to anyone that was trying to maim you, you see? Honest mistake. That was my first fight, actually. Also, you've made me lose my best and favorite and only hat. I demand compensation."

The Prince glowered and stooped closer. He cracked his nose like a man cracks his knuckles. "I beg your pardon?" he growled from the iciest vaults of his lungs.

"Rules of war, you know," Pence added in a conciliatory tone. "I assume we can skip past the usual tired alimony? Good." As he spoke, Pence paced to and fro with his hands clasped behind his back, as had been his habit in the garden. "Now, after you pay me–and it's got to be diamonds and gold, I really cannot stress that enough–I will directly commence to interrogate you. Expect copious amounts of torture and horrors of every unimaginable preclusion."

The Prince squelched back a guttering hiccup. Behind his cloak and shadows he peered at the boy with naught but his dagger nose and said no more.

" _Now_ ," Pence enounced both as formally and resentfully as he could, "are you prepared to accept the consequences for your crimes in the garden one hundred years ago, the Prince?"

"No man alive knows the face of the royal son who felled the Holy Tree," spat the cold voice behind the thick sable. "Who are _you_ to address me so, charge, and judge me? Who are _you_ to perceive the color of my heart as though I wore it pinned to my lapel? _What_ are you?" he added as his momentum waned.

"I'll ask the questions!" Pence fired back, eyes blazing like serpent scales in torchlight. "What's your game with _this_?" He untucked the penny and thrust it forward, displaying the carved heart to the Prince.

" _Tsss!_ " the Prince hissed and drew back, looking away as though the coin burned his eyes to the sight; this afforded Pence an unrivaled view of the giant's yawning nostrils. " _My wish..._ _The last..._ _It was supposed to..._ That tan pants-ed fool!" the Prince jabbered. "Then you must be... But how? I cut out–"

"I don't know what you're blathering about," said Pence, staring the Prince directly in the nostrils, which were the likeliest looking things to be eyes that he could see on the giant's face, "but _my_ name is Pence and I know _your_ hands are at the heart of this." He shook the penny in frustration as he spoke. "What does it mean? Why did you send it? Where is the Princess? And fetch my _bloody_ sword already!"

The Prince burped. An oily bubble drifted out of his nose and spiraled away before imploding. " _Pence?_ _Pence_ , you say? Truly? After all these many travails... And you can hear me in there? And formulate words? Move by your own volition? And you remember your name? Your mind is undaffled?"

Pence eyed the purple giant queerly. "Just how melon-coddled are you, the Prince? My mind is a rock."

"Astounding! So lifelike. I've not seen this trick before," the Prince prattled. "How is it accomplished? What wizardry have you forged, hidden in your own legend? And what's to stop me from stepping on you right now and taking the penny back to the well where it belongs? _Har!_ "

"What a rotten, ugly thing to say! What are you, the world's biggest onion? Shame on you! Why should you want to _step_ on me? What have I ever done to you?" Pence set one leg back to brace himself, opting to weather any blows from above rather than dive away if the Prince's foot fell true to his word.

"What spell is it, then? Tell me!" the Prince barked. "Did the well grant this miracle? Did your human bones grow too old? What legions of nature do you command?" The Prince waved a hand above Pence's head, testing the air for invisible puppet strings. Finding nothing, he let his hand drop as he gazed into the sky, investigating the clouds for clues to the force that animated the boy. "Vegetables... are _they_ the key to immortality?" he wondered aloud.

"My Mother would probably say so," Pence politely replied.

The Prince licked his lips. His right hand squirmed into his haversack. "Maybe with salt..." he mumbled.

"Don't even think about it," said Pence, standing his ground. "Try to eat me and I'll rip out your tongue. Tell me what you know of Pea and let's be done with it. I want to go home."

"Peas? What peas?" the Prince said absently. "I wonder if I still have some of that whale butter left over..."

"Why did you send the penny?" Pence demanded.

The Prince quit his search for salt and shuffled forward. "But it should be obvious," he grinned. "I have a wish, too. Now here we are, and I see nothing in between myself and the well but one small scoop of smashed potatoes." He raised his boot over Pence's head.

Comprehending at once the gravity of the predicament, Pence threw his hands over his head, penny held up like an umbrella. "Hey! Whoa! Wait a minute! Let's talk about this!"

"I thought it long odds, I confess, trusting that clod with the tan pants. It was a poor decision that cost far too much."

"Are you going to bore me to death or step on me?" Pence asked impatiently.

The Prince pulled his left hand from his sleeve and held it up for Pence to see–what remained there was fingerless, the row of fragile bones hacked off below the bottom knuckles, leaving a broad stump with his thumb stuck out like a gnarled stick, still gloved in black. Blood scabbed over the grisly mess, solidified with flesh, bone, and sawed leather.

"To think," said the Prince, "I did _this_ because I feared _you_... The stories about you are many. But look at you, now. I do not understand what exactly you've done to yourself, nor why you've come out to meet me, leaving your sanctuary and the well unprotected–" his voice lowered hatefully with each word, "–and why my _penny_ is out _here_ , with _you_ , instead of in _there_ ," he pointed to the garden with his nose, "buried like a bad dream at the _bottom_ of that forsaken abyss." All the while his boot hovered over Pence, shaking with strain, ready to drop. "But this chance is too good to pass. When you are dead I will take the penny to the well myself. I shall say the words to bring us back. Goodbye, Pence. Ever you have been a loyal subject to your Prince."

"Don't do it! At least give my sword back so I can defend myself! I'll not ask again–"

"This time, stay dead."

Pence dug his heels into the dirt, flexed his arms, and stared pleadingly into the Prince's nostrils. "The gate may not open if you squash me," he peeped, his voice failing him for the first time in his life.

The shadow of the foot lifted away.

Pence lowered the penny in relief.

A heavy thud made Pence turn his head. The silver beaks of a two-headed dragon greeted him, gleaming like the full moon–here was the Prince's battleaxe, sharp and heavy. "The gate will open, I think," said the Prince.

"Uh oh," said Pence.

The Prince stepped back from the boy. Holding the axe with his one good hand, he aligned the deadly blades with Pence like a croquet mallet introducing itself to a ball. "This will be a little more satisfying, I think. No need to get my boots dirty."

Pence evaluated the scene while the Prince perfected his stance, which was no simple feat given his handicap. When the Prince was at last content with his approach, Pence had very nearly puzzled out what was going to happen to himself when the axe came swinging through. He held up the penny like a shield this time.

"Is that the most you can do against me?" the Prince roared.

Pence ducked his head low behind the penny and set his feet wide.

"Can you not rise up into a tree? Can you not cause roots to seize my ankles or stones to fall from heaven upon my head? That is what they say, is it not? _Har!_ " He jabbed the brim of his hat up with his left-hand stump and Pence was finally granted a clear view of the face that belonged to the long white nose.

Where the gardener wore his age well, the Prince's skin was like the surface of an old fallen log–petrified and cracked and rotting all at once, speckled with fleshy truffles and scabby knobs. His sneer was a permanent fixture, like bark warped around a knot in wood. He raised the axe into a high backswing.

"When you see him, tell my old man I'm sorry I didn't find the Princess," croaked Pence. If he could have closed his eyes, this would have been when.

Mid-swing, the Prince twisted before the great battleaxe split Pence in half. The twin dragons screamed up over his top hat in a wild loop–he twirled like a ballerina to keep from losing his handle. With a huff of effort, he corralled the gleaming blades around to land precisely where they had begun.

"Was that just a practice swing?" Pence asked. "Fair enough. Well, go ahead, I'm ready." He tightened his grip on the penny.

" _What_ old man?" cried the Prince. "I thought _you_ were the old man!"

"Oh, _you're_ one to talk! You look like a dry-suckled radish with root mites! Do _I_ _look_ like an old man?" Pence asked accusingly. "I'm a gentleman of fancy in the prime of my youth, you moron."

"What old man, then?"

" _You_ should know– _you_ cut out his heart and kidnapped his girlfriend. Any of this ringing a bell? Oh yeah, _he's_ waiting for _you_ , all right, the Prince. _He's_ waiting for you _good_."

The Prince took a step back and his face receded into his hideaway of sable shadow. "Then what has he sent you for?" he queried in a rasp.

"How many times must I tell you? To find _her_!" Pence thrust the penny forward, heads-up to the giant.

"Why has he not come himself?"

Pence looked down at his feet, infinitely irritated. "Why _would_ he, when he's got _me_? Now, are you going to answer my questions or shall I kill you with my bare hands right on this spot? I'll just add sword-burglary and wanton stupidity to your index of transgressions and be done with it."

"Forgive me if I'm confused, but I still don't understand what I'm supposed to be afraid of, here?" the Prince said softly, perhaps to himself. His eyes flickered with quick calculations. "Have you supernatural powers or haven't you?"

"Of course I have! Women fall before me like leaves before winter!"

"What will happen if I just step on you and go to the garden?"

"No telling." Pence shrugged casually. "That old man is kind of a soggy biscuit. The girl made him go crazy in the head, and I'm afraid he was never very bright from the get-go. If you go chopping his door down, I don't know _what_ he'll do to you, although he kept warning me about something not to tell you... something about his arms. I wasn't really paying attention."

"So, he's armed, is he?" the Prince mused to himself. "This complicates things a bit." A moment later, he turned away from Pence with one shoulder held high, shielding his face the same as a mime preparing a new personage. When he turned back he dropped to one knee, using his left-hand stump to balance himself on the handle of his axe; as he did so, his shadow on the path shortened by half, leaving Pence within the dark confines of the top hat. "I do not know if the Princess lives," he said urgently, "but I know where to find her."

Pence looked up. "You don't know anything about anything. I should rip your tongue out right now to stem your lies."

"In all likelihood I am the _only_ one alive who might deduce her location."

"My old man said neither wind nor wing could find her. How could _you_ know? You're so _old_ ," Pence reasoned as though he had a sour taste in his mouth.

"Yes, I am–among other things–quite exceedingly very terribly old. But I am equally well-traveled. In my distended years I have journeyed to each and all of the One Hundred Kingdoms of Man. I have met every lord and nobleman who ever put on a pair of silken pantaloons. I have opened every door in every hall of every court in every castle, and the princess is not in any of them. That is how I know where she _is_. If you would only be so kind as to part with a small token for all my troubles... say, the penny... I will show you the way. That is what you seek, after all, is it not? Then we shall both have what we must."

Pence glared savagely at the Prince. "You lie to save your own skin. _She_ stays with me," he nodded down to the penny, now back in its sling, concealed by the velvetleaf and secure under his armpit, "where she _likes_ it. And if you try to lay so much as a finger on her, I'll–"

"Boy! Silence, you! I'll not stoop to it, you can believe that. A broken hook will catch no fish, a grincheur's penny buys no one a wish. And stepping on you here does me no good, if the gardener still abides." The Prince took a moment to think. "It seems there is only one thing left to say."

"Enlighten me, do. Then prepare to die."

"Certainly." The Prince swallowed another belch and gathered himself for a moment. "I am not the Prince who tried to murder the orphan boy in yonder garden these hundred years passed," said the purple-clad giant with suddenly hurt feelings. "You have me obfuscated, young master, by your leave."

"Obfuscated, am I? Impossible! I used to have a precious jewel for a brain–that makes me a master of politics. Don't think you can outsmart me."

"Your error is quite common, really. Nothing to be ashamed of."

"Hey," Pence could not help but react, insulted, "just what are you insinuating, huh? I've got nothing to be ashamed of!"

"Exactly. So we agree."

"Hold on–"

"You said it yourself, young master: there's nothing wrong with being obfuscated about the truth. You are very wise."

"I said that? Are you certain?" Pence called up. " _Very wise_ , did I?"

"Oh, yes."

"Because I rather doubt any obfuscation has occurred. _Is_ occurring. _Errr_... I'm overwhelmingly certain I'm... fuscated. Yes. Nothing whatsoever could possibly convince me otherwise. It's all that purple you've got on–you've _got_ to be the Prince. _And_ you've been spying on me, which is just what I would do if I were you."

"Precisely!" concurred the purple-clad giant. "I've been on the lookout for him, too! After all, if _I_ was the notorious Prince who felled the Holy Tree, who murdered an orphan boy in yonder garden, who took his sister's hand away and was forthwith exiled from the line of his father, the King, _I_ should be _running_ from you right now–as you have so eloquently explained to me that the wrath of flowerbeds and pumpkin patches at long last comes to call–instead of being on the lookout, here, for myself somewhere else erstwhile, unbeknownst to you and me and all the three of us."

Pence took a step back and offered a rudimentary curtsey. "Well put. I like a man who's plainly spoken. But if you are not the Prince, then who is? And why did you try to step on me and kill me with your axe–which, I must inform you, also fits the Prince's bill?"

"I was only _pretending_ to kill you because you thought I _was_ the Prince, and isn't that what the Prince _would_ do, after all? So you see, I was aiding you in _your_ attempt to capture what you mistook to actually be me. _Tsk, tsk._ Espionage is a tricky omelette, young master, one best left to the professionals."

"Yes, I see that now." Pence shook his head, disappointed in himself.

The Prince offered the boy an encouraging flare of his nostrils, then he cracked his nose again. "Your mind truly is a rock, isn't it?" he muttered with mild amusement.

"So who are you?" Pence asked with an embarrassed start.

The purple-clad giant tottered from good foot to bad as if weighing which of two paths to choose. Finally he settled on the unpunctured option and said as extravagantly as a man can, "I am known by many names in many pied, prosperous provinces, young master... perceived publicly as a perpetually pious and pleasant person, _per_ adventure, yet my purposes and parameters presently are private, a pleochroic pilgrimage principally personal in point but paramount in perspective. So prithee, if you'll pander to a potatory presdigitator such as presently performs before you, previse me as the... as the... as the Purloiner... yes, the Purloiner, if you please, of Previously Less Portable Properties... of Other Peoples. Who _Also_ Wears Purple."

The Purloiner bowed deeply, throwing his cape into an arpeggio of ripples with a flick of his wrist. "At your disposal, young master."

"What a lavish name," Pence cooed, smitten. "I sure am impressed!"

"Thank you, young master. It will serve, in that case. Now then, let us be on our way."

"What?" blurted Pence, startled by the suddenness with which the Purloiner was prepared to embark. "Where?"

To which the Purloiner turned his nose to the woods and said only, "We go the tunnel road."
Chapter XV

The Purloiner's suggestion hung in the air like a snowflake buoyed on a winter draft, floating back and forth, dipping down and curling up until the words finally came to rest on the nape of Pence's neck. The boy shivered, shook his head, and wrapped the ragged velvetleaf around his tiny shoulders like a pauper in a threadbare jacket.

The Purloiner scratched inside his nostril. "As I said, I do not know if the Princess still lives–"

"She does," Pence said faithfully, "my old man told me so. And I feel her in my heart, though fainter than before, as if she was wilting..."

"Then it is time for a rescue, is it not? I will suspend my hunt for the oh-so-clever Prince," declared the Purloiner. "I do not think he will take this road while we are away." He dipped into another deferential bow toward the woods like a servant unrolling red carpet before his lord. "Do come along, young master. For the old gardener's benefit, mind you. When we return, he shall have his hearing with royalty. Such tales you'll have to tell of your travels, then."

"The road is too far," said Pence, taciturn. "I'd have to run to make good time, and I surmise you to be in too poor of health to keep up with me."

The Purloiner arched an eyebrow.

"I'm faster than I look," Pence assured him, stealing a sideways step away from the giant. "Honestly, we should go back to the garden. You'll like it there. There are flowers to look at and lots of pretty crud like that. And lots of girls, too."

The Purloiner raised his other eyebrow.

"Although I haven't _technically_ met any for myself–"

"Your offer sorely tempts me," the Purloiner cut in with maudlin remorse, "but a man does not wait through the grinding of a century for something only to leave it to luck on the last hand."

"You should tell my old man that," said Pence, preoccupied scratching grit from one ear. "Hold on–what have _you_ been waiting a hundred years for?" he asked the purple-clad giant with sudden energy, although his show of interest may have owed to the fresh ball of earwax he had just excavated.

"Why, the _Prince_ , of course! Haven't I already said?" The Purloiner chuckled like a man caught cheating at cards. "Now, young master, it would be best to reach the tunnel road before the things in the night begin to bay. Let the distance be the least of your worries: I have a... _method_ of travel that will have us there more swiftly than a flying horse whipped to its wingtips. We will find the Princess's door by daybreak and be back to your garden before this same hour tomorrow."

"If you really know where she is," Pence hedged skeptically, "we should warn my old man before we bring her back. He'll need time to put on some drawers." He glanced back over his shoulder, clearly anxious to return to the gate. "If you don't want to come, wait here. I'll be back. We'll get her, then." He took another sideways stride back, like a step in a waltz of cat and mouse; in perfect rhythm, with great flair, the Purloiner took two sliding paces forward, negating Pence's withdrawal a hundred times over.

"Yeah, like I said, I told my old man I would be back soon. You know how it goes," Pence said nervously. "If I'm late, I'll be making a liar out of myself, and he'll probably fret over me until his beard falls out." Three more hurried steps back. "Give a holler if you see the Prince. Fare well! Good to meet you. Yes. _Bye!_ " Pence turned his back to the Purloiner and trotted away, but the giant was too fast for him.

The Purloiner closed the short gap between he and the boy with one final stomp as though the waltz had ended and the dancing was done. He raised his right arm, cloak up-clutched in his hand, and curled it high above and behind Pence, curtaining off the road to the garden like a vulture spreading a wing to cut off the escape of his prey. "There is no time for that," he said to the boy, foreclosing all debate.

"Move your cape, sir," said Pence, fighting to keep his voice from quivering, "I want to go home."

"You seek adventure? What lad has ever said _no_? This will be your biggest adventure of all." The Purloiner knelt and draped his lustrous cloak nose-close to Pence, attempting to usher the boy backward, toward the woods. "I'll even let you ride on my hat. What do you say? Can any other sprout or spud from the garden boast such a story?"

"I don't know... it _is_ tempting... but I did tell that old man I'd be back soon... Oh, life is so _difficult_ when you don't know what to do! Am I to believe you really have a magical flying horse machine–"

"That's not quite how I phrased it–" disclaimed the Purloiner with a pinched expression.

"–and that you simply left it all alone by the side of the road where it might wander off? Sounds pretty fishy."

"Of course not," scoffed the Purloiner. "That would be preposterous. It's tied to a tree."

"Oh. Okay then." Pence may have been satisfied with this answer in particular, but apparently not with the plan itself, for he refused to budge. He stood staring into the yawning swathe of purple fabric that was draped before him like a man gazes into the mouth of a vast cavern. "Please move your cape. I'll not ask again."

The Purloiner deflated. He let his cape droop, though nowhere near enough to allow Pence a free route forward. "I see you'll not change your mind. A pity, a pity. At the top of the next hill, where my... _device_... is tethered, we might have caught a truly inspiring view of this sunset before we embarked."

" _Sunset?_ " gagged Pence. "Come again? You mean the Sun is going to _land_? On the _ground_? And we could see _where_?" He snickered fiendishly as malign machinations whirred to full speed behind the lights of his eyes. "The _fool!_ He _would_ come here, sneaking onto _my_ territory, and he thinks I won't figure his tricks out?"

"That's not... It's a little different..." the Purloiner trailed off, uncertain how to correct Pence's misguided notions as succinctly as possible. Eventually he just said, "Sure, that's the gist of it."

"This will give me a _huge_ tactical advantage," Pence whispered to himself behind his hand as if the gardener's left foot was ever-presently there to listen to his every idea. "I may not _need_ my sword if I can ambush him in his sleep."

"Does this mean you're coming with me?" asked the Purloiner.

Pence ignored him. Pacing left and right, he lectured to himself, "If I let the Sun get away when I have the opportunity to follow now and finish him once and for all, I will return to the garden a failure." Pence turned on his heel, facing the woods, straightened his back and thrust his chin high, his grain of rice nearly vertical. "Lead the way, good sir the Purloiner."

The Purloiner's sable cowl slipped for an instant, revealing a wide smile of pointy black teeth and purple gums, but he pulled the sable up to his mouth again before Pence saw. "As you wish, young master."

"Well, get on with it, then," said Pence. "You say I'm your master, but all you give me is attitude."

"Forgive me," the Purloiner crooned as he curved into a formal bow, rigid at the waist. He pulled his hat off in one swift motion–his head remained level, the bottle of grog balanced effortlessly on his bald, bumpy cranium–and he scooped Pence up with the brim of his hat like it was a spatula. Standing tall, the purple-clad giant placed the stovepipe cap back over the bottle–all in the same smooth motion–and Pence found himself suddenly looking at the world from a highly privileged yet precarious new point of view.

He braced himself on the circular brim of the silk top hat like a sea captain on the foredeck of his ship, gazing over the fields of brittle grass waving in the wind as though they were endless ocean. He whistled his admiration.

The Purloiner glided away from the garden without another word.

"This was a terrific idea," said Pence happily. "My old man told me to _think_ before every step I took; it would have taken me a thousand years just to get beyond sight of the garden! Step, think, step, think, step, think... But _this_! _Yeah..._ You do all the legwork, I get to rest my feet and run my mouth. This partnership might work out, after all."

The Purloiner did not respond to this, nor when Pence asked how long it would take to reach the hill with the flying horse, or what the flying horse looked like, how the Purloiner acquired the flying horse, how the flying horse flew, and if the flying horse ate carrots, because Pence knew a few that were getting too big for their britches.

Pence was unable to see the Purloiner's face from his stance atop the hat, of course, and he decided against leaning over the brim to press his questions. Instead, like any young child, out of sight soon became out of mind and the boy fell silent, traveling with his own thoughts as though he was the only person in all the world. Then he spotted something in the grass.

"My sword!" he shouted. "My sword! It's there!" He ran around the Purloiner's hat elatedly, circling the cylindrical center over and over. "There it is! Stop! _Ha!_ What fortune! Fate smiles upon me as ever with her magnanimous buxom!"

The white splinter lay among an infinity of blades of grass, each cut in fragmented rays of light, but Pence's eye was equal to the task–to him the single sliver of white wood shone out like frozen lightning. Luckily, it lay only a step or two beside the path. "Oh, happy day!" Pence caroled. "Oh... Hey, wait. Wait! Stop, it's right there!"

The Purloiner grunted and kept walking.

"Stop! Stop, for the love of big giant ladies with beards! Stop, _please_!" Pence cried desperately, but there was nothing he could do to control his course now.

The Purloiner ignored his pleas with princely silence.

"I need a sword if I'm to slay the Prince!" Pence begged him. "I need a sword if I'm to rescue the Princess! Oh, why won't you stop?"

The Purloiner's pace was single-minded. Pence saw the tiny white splinter for the last time by the grace of a shimmer of sunlight stretched low over the fields.

"What good can I accomplish without a weapon? My foes will all laugh at me. The Prince will laugh at me. The _Sun_ will laugh at me." Pence fell silent as the Purloiner devoured the barren path with long, brisk strides. "And yet," Pence said softly, "and yet... when I _think_... it was the Sun's light to show me where my sword lay. Surely the dastard knows I would only wield it against him?" He gazed up to the mountains and the sky. "Why would he aid me, then? We are mortal foes, now and forever–he _knows_ this. Sometimes, I just do not understand."

The Purloiner cracked his nose and said nothing.

Pence balanced on the brim of the stovepipe hat and contemplated the fading of the light.
Chapter XVI

The hill was surrounded by dead trees. The clearing at the top was all dirt. The whole of it looked like a bald head donning a coronet of nettles. As the Purloiner hiked up, Pence kept his eyes on the sun, determined not to miss a single detail of its descent, as if pointing out which two mountains it ultimately sank between would guarantee him a smooth and inscrutable victory.

They arrived on the peak of the hill and Pence put a hand over his eyes like a sailor on the lookout for land. "Where is your enchanted winged steed? I yearn to finish this madness–I've been away from home so long... you could never understand."

"Just behind those shrubberies, there," said the Purloiner, pointing halfway down the hill's opposite side, "although I fear you may have your expectations set a _little_ high, young master."

"Yes, I don't concern myself with anything short or small," Pence affirmed quite seriously.

The Purloiner approached the shrubberies and spread them aside with one hand. Tied to an old crab tree stooped over with age was a small cast-iron bicycle with a shoddy pair of wooden practice wheels attached to either side.

" _Ooooh_ ," said Pence, mouth agape.

The bicycle was painted pink. There was a little silver bell affixed to the left handlebar. It was most obviously engineered for a young girl.

" _Ahhhh_ ," said Pence, eyes aglow. "I especially like the rainbow-colored ribbons hanging off the sides. Is that what gives it the magic to fly?"

The frame of the bicycle was solid iron, as were the primary tires, the one in front being twice the size of the rear. Spiraling spokes connected the rims to the frame. Iron stirrups were affixed to the pedals. The wooden training wheels in the back were full of chips and chinks and the handles and seat were covered in peeling, parched leather.

"So this is what a flying horse looks like, huh?" Pence whistled in astonishment. "I've got to say, it's exactly like I imagined it."

A massive iron chain was looped over, under, and around every conceivable part of the bicycle's frame, then wrapped around the crab tree and secured with a rusty padlock.

The Purloiner fished in his haversack and produced an ornate key that may have been even heavier and more rusty than the padlock. He knelt to unlock the chain. The padlock creaked open. Pence giggled with excitement, standing at the edge of the top hat so as not to miss anything. The Purloiner stuck the key back into his bag, then stared at the lock, one finger tapping the tip of his nose as he considered.

"One question," said Pence giddily. "How will I reach the handles when I'm on the seat? And the pedals? Two questions, I guess that was. And what is its name? So that's... let's see... three! Wait, how many questions do I get?"

The Purloiner spat out of the side of his mouth, hoisted up the cumbersome padlock with his good hand, and dropped it into his bag. Immediately his gravity shifted off-center and his perpetual wobbling devolved into something altogether more chaotic. He took a knee to avoid capsizing.

"Another question," said Pence. "What about manure?"

Without a word, the Purloiner unknotted the chain, piled it in coils on the ground, and stared at the pile. Then he picked it all up with a prevailing grunt and stuffed it into his bag.

"Just how much can you fit in that purse of yours?" Pence asked curiously, poking his head over the brim of the hat. "Must be roomier on the inside than it looks. You know, my old husk was like that, too."

The Purloiner stood up, which took him a great while longer than usual. His wobbling had all but stopped, now–the chain was simply too heavy to allow any superfluous movement.

He up-righted the bicycle. The handlebars came barely to his waist, while the leather seat was closer to his knees.

"She's kind of puny, isn't she?" Pence observed. "What is she, a runt? Maybe you should feed her more. Like I said, I know these carrots, they think they're _so_ cool–"

"One drink for the road," the Purloiner muttered. He scooped his hat off, ever mindful of his fragile passenger, and with a deft snap of his fingers he switched the hat for the bottle of grog hidden on his hairless head. He stared miserably at the uninviting mixture, then shut his eyes in resignation and took a swig. The grog glopped out of the bottleneck and into his throat with all the speed of bird droppings oozing down the side of a barn roof.

He belched hideously; the air in front of his face distorted from the stench like waves of heat rising from a tar-pitched road. "Awful!" he hiccoughed. Two tiny bubbles wafted out of his nose and sailed away. " _Finest in the land._ "

He straddled the bicycle and sat down. His cloak draped over the rear end, training wheels and all, while in the front his knees bumped into the handlebars and his legs flayed out sideways at cramped-up angles.

"Hey, I thought that was _my_ seat," Pence called from the hat. "I can't ride up here the whole way–there's no safety harness!"

The Purloiner stared tiredly at the bottle in his hand, resting his wrist on the handlebars. His eyes swam and sank. He burped again–one bubble.

Pence was relentless. "Hey! Talk to me! Hey, big-nose! Up here! Whoa, that _reeks_ ," he said, coughing and staggering back from the edge of the hat as the stink from the giant's belch hit him square in the face. "Light a candle, man."

The Purloiner rolled his eyes up as though he could see Pence through the underside of the brim.

"Hello?" Pence yelled down. "Are we leaving? Hey! Why won't you answer me? Hey! I'm up here, remember? Do I need to speak LOUDER? HEY!"

The Purloiner closed his eyes tightly.

"Where can I ride? Don't forget about me! What about _meeeee_?"

Then the Purloiner smiled; the points of his teeth all touched so that his grin looked like a crooked chessboard. He brought the bottle to his chest and held it pressed there with his left arm. With his right hand he grabbed at Pence, who instinctively raised the penny above his head as though protecting a baby from a rising flood; as he did so, his velvetleaf cape curled tautly around his body like a fruit peel–this made him just the right size and shape for a giant hand to take hold most easily.

"Hey! Hey!" Pence continued to shout, though now for an entirely different reason. As he was lifted down, he fought to land a kick on the Purloiner's nose but was just out of range.

"In you go," said the Purloiner and he began fitting Pence into the bottle of grog. Legs vice-gripped together, arms clamped above him, Pence slid through the narrow opening right up to his shoulders.

"This is intolerable!" he roared, but his voice was muffled by his armpits squishing his face between them like an olive in a nutcracker.

"Roomier than it looks, I daresay," the Purloiner said through his teeth as Pence thrashed wildly, "like your old husk, isn't that right?"

" _Ahh!_ Stop it! I don't want to go in there! This is nothing at all like my husk! _Help!_ "

"Don't _fuss_ , young _master_ ," the Purloiner grumbled, trying to get his thumb over Pence's head in order to push him the rest of the way down.

Pence deflected the giant's thumb with the penny several times, but the longer he hung suspended in the bottleneck, the more the rim of the bottle cut up into his armpits, which in turn sapped his strength to wield the coin as a shield. "Foul play! _Yowch!_ Foul play!" he bellowed with waning force and dimming eyes.

"Stop squirming!"

"Villain!" Pence was down to his chin. "You're no... _ugh_ , better than the– _ow!_ –than the Prince, are you?"

The Purloiner raised his right hand to his mouth and used his teeth to pull off his glove. He flexed his fingers, each long and white, more bone than flesh, nails chewed and raw. He placed his bare thumb on the penny, pressing it down onto the boy's head, mushing his spikes of hair flat.

"No!" cried Pence in abject terror. The heartseed burst into a thunderous drum roll, charging the air with panic.

And then, with the merest pressure from the Purloiner's thumb, Pence plunked out of sight down into the bottle, landing with a splat in a third-pint of grog. The penny had not fit down–it was stuck in the neck of the bottle as snug as a cork. Pence's crudely whittled hands, which had been clutching either side of the penny when he was pressed down into the hole, were crimped off between fingers and thumbs like so little pie crust. Pitifully they fell away to the path without a sound, where the Purloiner carefully smashed them into the ground with the toe of his boot.

The Purloiner raised the bottle to his nose. He poked the penny with his pinky finger and it spun about its axis like a turnstile. "Fitting," he said with a twinkle in his eye.

He kicked the bicycle off to a start and began pedaling madly down the path. They careened down the bramble-crowned hill and up the next, sailing over the land as though the tires tread on a cushion of air and touched the earth not at all.

*****

Pence sat in a bog of brown goop in utter darkness inside a stiflingly silent bottle, itself concealed under an opaque top hat. The air in the bottle smelled of sulfur and hot sick. Pence pushed his nose into his head.

His sword, of course, was long gone, as was his moondaisy bonnet. Now the penny had been stripped from his hands and his velvetleaf cape–that morning the pride of his fashionable ensemble–was torn, tattered, and sopped in syrupy liquor. His brow stiff with resolve, he reached for the leaf's stem, knotted at the back of his neck. At the slightest touch the knot dissolved and the cape slid off his shoulders and into the bog. With a sigh, Pence ducked his head under the strap of his grass sling and let it fall away, too.

His hands were gone. Each of his arms ended in a pinched-off, flattened wedge. His thumbs–which had not been cut off by the penny–had nonetheless been too small to survive on their own and had crumbled apart soon after he fell. He had nothing left from the garden but his head and his heart.

Knees to chest, back to the glass, he raised his wrists before his eyes. "This is what I get," he said miserably, "for cutting my old brain in half; I've lost my sense for worldly games and gotten played like a pawn for it." He sat and stared into nothingness like a man considering his next move in a match of wits. In this manner he was delivered through the woods in the night.

*****

"It _is_ safest for you in there, young master. Trust me." The Purloiner's sugary voice seeped into the bottle and reverberated cyclically until it seemed he had bellowed his placations into a cave of a thousand echoes. _Trust me_ , they called, fading amorphously, _trust me, trust me, trust me..._

"I couldn't very well keep you on my hat when we undertake the tunnel road," the Purloiner interrupted his own echo, "there's no room left in my bag, and I don't believe in keeping pockets. I've lost far too many pennies to holes in pockets. Don't sulk–you're going to meet a princess! Could be your courage will earn you a kiss." The Purloiner gave Pence a chance to reply, but with his legs pumping all the while and the iron tires screaming, he heard nothing the boy may have said.

"I don't know why you're so put out. _I_ should _like_ to be dunked in a bottle of brew."

The bicycle squealed as the pedals raced the chains and the rusty gears spun like tops, but the ride was ever smooth. "Truly, the tunnel road is no place to be gallivanting around up there like a sightseer," said the Purloiner. "It's as black as the Kingdom of Crows all the way, except where you can see the barest outline of the road by the glowing red eyes of blood-sucking vampire bats. There are pits a thousand leagues deep and turns and twists that make corkscrews look straight, most on roads as narrow as your nose. Nightmarish monsters _may_ devour us. Fire bursts from the cracks in the walls without warning. There is not a safe breath the entire way, and it will take us all the night to go it. I have crossed safely in the past but that gives us no advantage today–so plentiful, so terrifying are these perils. There is no strategy to survival, but to wing it and hold our breath."

From the woods there came a howling.

"When I touched your head with my bare thumb, young master, I felt something... familiar... old... something I have felt before." He paused. "It was... like a _pulse_. As though I held a bird in my hand and felt its heart flutter as I crushed it. What _was_ that? It tugs at my memory..."

The Prince could still not hear if Pence spoke, near though his ears were to the boy. "Still brooding, eh? Believe me, it's darker out here now than it is in there. We near the mountains." A moment later, he asked, "Would you like to hear a tale, young master? Perhaps it will keep both of our minds off the long road."

Inside the bottle, Pence perked up. "Oh yes, tell me the one about the boy in the garden, that's my favorite! Salty wenches. Liberal bloodshed. But change the ending so that the Prince loses."

"The entrance approaches shortly," the Purloiner said solemnly. "The garden may be lost to us forever now, you know; it jumps about so. And the Princess may very well be dead and decayed. Here... we are entering the tunnel. The hour for a scare is come...
Chapter XVII

...The time is more than a hundred years ago today. The Prince was just a boy, young and full of spirit. He would have made a good king had his sister not been born the year before him. She was first in line to inherit the Throne and the King, their father, refused to change his mind about this, to the Prince's bitter disappointment. Furthermore, as Crown Prince, it would be his life's duty to serve as his sister's Honor Guard and foremost protector, placing her life always before his own. To this end he was trained all of his youth with weapons in his hands. In the few moments he stole for himself away from the accoutrements of killing, he liked to sit at the window in his bedchamber–highest in the tower, overlooking the sea–and watch the whales.

There is no grander house of mortals in a hundred kingdoms, this tower. It was the King's first great ambition, an undertaking so massive it spanned more than half his reign. The price of fulfilling his vision was the best years of countless men's lives–a sum the King was categorically unconcerned with–as well as the better part of his coffers. When construction was finished, no more awesome work had ever been wrought by the minds and hands of men.

The base of the tower was chiseled strike by strike out of a cliff face spearing up from the sea; when the tide rose, it looked as though the tower grew out of the water like a titan's arm grabbing at the noonday sun. The King's throne was shaped from the natural rock of the utmost peak of the cliff, and the walls of the tower were grown around this central room like a tree from seed. Construction to such enormous scale was fueled by an endless supply of white stone mined out of the mountains themselves–this was the conception of the tunnel road.

When the Prince looked out his window he heard neither the songs of birds nor the percussion of waves far below. He was above them all. His life was lived above everything. In his daydreams he often thought about leaping from the window. He would fall forever...

One floor down from the Prince's bedchamber were his sister's quarters. Every night they would talk window to window–late after they should have been to sleep–and watch for whales in the dark.

He was... _misunderstood_ , the Prince. His tutors and trainers–whom he saw more than his own father–raised him with deadly steel in his hands, sparring against orphan children with wooden swords. Young boys should have dirt and frog slime on their clothes at the end of the day, not handprints of blood. The Prince was just a boy...

His father, the King, was a cold man, as though his veins were filled with the same icy waters out of which his tower broached. He was a big man, but frail. The creation of his almighty fortress had sapped his vigor, turned his hair white, and stooped his back with age.

With his tower complete and his legacy unchallenged, there should have been little to weigh on the King's mind, but always he sat brooding on his throne, gripping its arms like an eagle his prey. Who knows where first he heard of the accursed garden? Who knows what tales of the well were whispered in his ear, what promises of fortune, life eternal, or power unbound?

The second half of his reign–and all the last years of his time in this world–the King chased the garden but he never told anyone to what ends. His could have been a life of luxury, prestige, and pleasure, overseeing a sprawling kingdom from a tower that was every other monarch's envy; instead, he dwelt on stories of the garden like a man who cannot reach an itch in the middle of his own back.

He depleted the last of the kingdom's wealth hiring explorers, cartographers, storytellers, mercenaries, anyone with a plan to find the legendary garden. None would succeed. And yet of hundreds, perhaps thousands, only a handful ever returned and tried to explain to the King how a simple garden could prove such vexing quarry. The King smiled and listened patiently and then he made the Prince cut out their tongues and stitch their lips together. Unsurprisingly, no one bothered to return after that, and it must be supposed that any number of his majesty's subjects–farmers and scoundrels and the like–came to collect their share of the rapidly depleting treasury, pretending to be trackers and famous explorers, knowing the old King would give them a little jingling bag of coins and expect them never to return unless they had found a place that was surely no more than a fairytale.

When the gold ran out, the King raised taxes and dismissed the castle staff and auctioned away every piece of furniture, every statue and painting, the silverware, window drapes, doorknobs, rugs, and chamber basins. All he kept was the throne, and only that because it was carved from the mountain itself. But the garden eluded him even as the allure of it bore deeper into his heart.

Destitute and desperate to continue funding his obsession, the aging King schemed to marry off his daughter, the firstborn Princess, to the highest bidder, for she had grown from a big-eared, freckled child into a young woman of renowned beauty. The King's idea was a heartless thing if ever there was one: he commissioned to be made one hundred pennies bearing her countenance on one side–to show off her captivating smile–and then he had them delivered in ninety-nine handsome purple coaches to the richest lords and noblemen in all of the ninety-nine other kingdoms of man. On the back of each penny was an engraved script inquiring what each would-be suitor was willing to pay for the Princess's hand.

Now, although the Prince was not _un_ pleased by the prospect of his sister's departure–for it meant he would ascend the Throne one day, after all–he was observant enough to see how tightly his father clutched the arms of his cold stone seat, how quickly his eyes darted back and forth amongst even his most loyal captains, suspecting them of harboring secrets about the garden. The Prince knew his own position at court had grown tenuous at best, but he was just a boy–what could he do?

While awaiting word back from the would-be suitors, the King set out with his retinue on one last ill-fated campaign to locate the mysterious garden. Lodging at an expensive inn in an otherwise nondescript country village, paying their stay with violent threats for the innkeeper and his family instead of fair coin, the King and his men rode out each day in a new direction, returning to the inn each night in worse airs than the day before.

One gray day like any other, the Princess disappeared without her Honor Guard–without her brother, that is–and, although she returned safely to the inn that evening, the next morning the King discovered a strange brand upon her right hand: a small heart burned into the skin on her palm. Not red and black and cracked and bleeding: _green_ , fresh as a sapling bud, which is to say not _burned_ at all, but... _grown_ , perhaps. Truly there is no word for it, but the King demanded an explanation.

The explanation, the Princess said with far too much satisfaction, was that she was in love, if that loathsome word will suffice. In love with a boy, she said, _from a hidden garden._ The King gazed at her, _through_ her even, then slapped her across the face and sent her to be locked in her room.

The King's fury was to be expected: the Princess knew she was to be married off. It was her own doing, what befell her family for her affair.

If they had been at the tower, she never could have escaped. If they had been at the tower, she would not have found the garden in the first place. However, being a resourceful sort of girl, sneaking out of a third-story suite at the inn, climbing down the ivy trellis, and quieting away cannot have been overly difficult. Especially with no soldiers posted outside–the King had called them in early. As she rode away from the little village, she did not see her brother ducked in the bushes below her window, the only guard left out in the cold, per their father's instructions.

When she reached the garden at dawn, the Prince was a stone's throw behind her, still unseen. She disappeared between broad leaves and bright flowers. There were uncountable multitudes of birds singing in the Holy Tree and the shade was as deep and cool as a hidden pond.

The Prince, for his part, was uncertain what lay ahead, but he knew it was unwise to cross his father. And he was just a boy, he told himself. He sauntered along the garden path with a grin on his face, like a child who has just caught their sibling stealing a piece of candy.

Few men have heard what came to pass in the garden when the Prince confronted his sister and the orphan boy, but the stories generally do not want for color. Be you satisfied that the orphan boy raised a hand against his kingdom's royal son and paid for it dearly. Know the Princess was rescued and brought back to beg for mercy.

When they entered the inn, the Prince pushed his sister before the King. Thinking himself fit for a medal, the Prince was taken aback to find the first of his father's barbed questions fired at himself. "The _garden_ , did you find it?" the old King roared. "Speak, spindly brat! Tell me the way!"

The Prince was a skilled hunter and tracker, but try as he might, though his memory of the path did not seem at first to be overly befuddled, he could not manage to proffer any more intricate directions than if his tongue had been tied in a knot. The King spat in his son's face and turned his wrath to the Princess.

She stood defiant, bound in chains, but _here_ is the curious part: she hid something in her hand, kept low at her hip, out of the King's sight.

The Prince heard... or thought he heard... a beating, like a heart's pulse... or if not _heard_ , then _felt_. It was... most unusual. So he seized her wrist and held it up, boasting his cleverness to the King in order to win favor.

The King told the Prince to cut off her hand if she would not willingly consent to reveal what secret she bore from the garden. The Prince picked up his axe.

The King raised a hand and let it fall onto the arm of his throne like a guillotine blade. He betrayed no more remorse than he did for the countless dead mixed into the mortar of his tower.

It was not a choice. It was the King's order. A boy cannot cross his sire–he cannot even begin to. That is why the Prince hewed off his sister's hand and let her suddenly rigid body collapse to the inn floor. He looked to his father for approval but met only a devil's eyes.

On the floor, the Princess convulsed in spasms of pain, screaming sure enough to wake all the town and countryside. Calm as the eye of a storm, the King told his son to take up her severed hand and pry it open.

The boy's dark road had been assured as soon as the axe came down. Emotionless, he picked up his sister's hand.

Do you know what he found? Do you know what she was willing to lose her hand to try to protect?

It was a penny, young master.

One _worthless_ penny, the last spared from those sent to her would-be suitors.

Why would she do that? The penny was a symbol of a future held captive in courts and castles and false kisses. She should have loathed it, thrown it in the King's face like a hex. Yet she held it fast until the Prince swung his axe.

She lay in a growing pool of blood on the floor but no one dared help her until the King had vented the remainder of his belligerence. Gripping his throne cravenly, he bade the Prince step forward and show him the penny. There were no unusual markings on the coin of any kind, nothing at all to do with the garden–just the Princess's face on one side; on the other, the now-voided proposal: _What will you pay for her hand?_ And what of the mysterious pulse the Prince had felt? Gone without a trace.

The King kicked the Prince away. The boy fell and landed in his sister's blood. By now she had fallen silent. For an instant, deep inside his heart, the Prince lamented that there would be no more long talks between their windows at night.

Later, physicians would treat the Princess's wound with flames and needles and thread, so the story goes, and she would stave off death for a time. But the Prince would never see her again, not to this day.

The penny held fast in his gloved hand, pressing the image of his sister's sad smile into the black leather on his palm, the Prince rose from the pool of blood. "What shall I do, father?" he begged, fighting tears. An older boy might have taken the axe and won the Crown with a single swing, and his father would probably have never let go of the arms of his throne to raise a hand in his own defense. How much better things would be, then? Instead, the boy cowered in his guilt and fear. "Shall I return to the garden in your name?" he whimpered, for he had seen that the garden was more prized to the King than his own children or even his marvelous tower, although the Prince did not and could not then understand why.

The King laughed derisively. "And do what, _in my name_ , you floundering, beak-faced fool? A rock will count the stars before you will stumble upon the garden again! On _this_ they all agree: a man who finds the garden but once has already used more luck than his life is afforded, for the well does not often seek to be found. You have likely ruined any chance for _me_ to ever find it, either, when you stained the sacred soil with innocent blood! A curse is born this day. Let it be on you, and you are no heir of mine."

The Prince was stunned by his father's arcane knowledge of the mysterious garden. More than that, however, his own curiosity was piqued by the mention of the well, as if a hole in the ground was more significant than the Holy Tree itself, to which all legends award preeminence.

"You have sealed your fate," the King told the boy. "Your actions have doomed this kingdom, as they have doomed me. I shall never forgive you. You will never sit the Throne. May your dark deeds be on your shoulders until the end of days and a pox of decay upon your heart. You are forthwith exiled from court."

The Prince fell to his knees, his fine pajamas sopped in blood. He let the axe fall from his hand. In his other fist he still held the penny tight–a talisman, perhaps he felt, against the awful things his father was shouting down at him; a charm to light the dark road he had started down.

"If you return, I will throw you from the top of my tower–let it be out your very own window! Unless," the King could not suppress his obsession, "unless it is to report that by some malfeasant miracle you have managed to lie, cheat, and steal your way back to the garden. And although I am _quite_ certain you will never see it again, if you do, if you _do_... it would vanish again the moment you left. But if you _do_ find it, throw that cursed penny in the well, wish for this sin of yours to never have happened, and pray it comes true. If you should return before _that_ you will find yourself falling through the heavens like an angel with a chain around its wings."

His sister, all that blood... nowadays the Prince never thinks of it. He feels no remorse because he knows that when he finds the well, he will set everything back proper. There will be no blood to cry over. He will be a boy again, watching whales from his window. He has learned much about the garden in his exile; he has heard all the stories–more even than his father–and he has come to believe them just as much. The garden is truly a home of wonders—this, he knows.

That much of the story is common fodder for tavern-rats and barmaids, for the King let news of his son's fall from grace spread like Spring. The Prince soon became synonymous with sedition, evil. The populace vowed to string him up if they ever saw him–they were eager to hold someone, _anyone_ , accountable for the kingdom's shameful debt. Speaking out against the King or his quest for the garden would have been no better than putting the rope around their own necks; so, for a scapegoat, the Prince would have to do.

It was around this time that the drought took hold–not like it is today, though, not at first. It still rained in those days. Now the farmers have turned to dust. Was it because the Holy Tree was unmade? Who can say?

The rest of the Prince's story is not one you'll hear from anyone in _this_ kingdom. But this is only one realm among a hundred, is it not? The Prince rode far and wide, infamy never farther back than his shadow.

It had taken him only a day to realize that the garden simply _was not_ where it had been before. The labyrinth of foothills was not small, but neither was it vast. His father had been right: whatever force presided over the garden, it clearly did not want him to return.

One more day and a near run-in with an ale-roused mob showed the Prince how dangerous it would be to delay any further. He resigned himself to his exile and rode for the border at once. There is not a kingdom in the world he has not visited, now; not a corner of the map he has not explored.

At some point in his travels, a rumor spread about the Prince: his left hand was locked in a permanent fist and no one had ever seen what he held inside. Understandably, the stories were each more ludicrous than the last. Some said it owed to a curse, some to a covenant with demons. Yet it _was_ true that the hand which held his sister's penny he could not open and never had since the day he took the Princess's hand from her body.

His fingers simply would not obey him. Nor could he peel them open with his free hand or any other instrument. A doubt hit him: Had his sister also been unable to open her hand that fateful day she stood defiant before the King? Had he severed her arm for nothing? But then why would she not have said so? Why would she not have groveled for clemency? And what of that ethereal rhythm in her hand that he had heard– _felt_ –just before he cut?

The Prince was struck by a second revelation: _if_ he eventually returned to his homeland to seek the garden, he could not make his wish–as his father had bidden him–because he would be unable to release the penny into the well.

_Ah_ , he thought, _but his was only one of a hundred_. He knew where the other pennies could be found–in the hands of the wealthiest earls, lords, dukes, magistrates, patriarchs, and heads of state in ninety-nine kingdoms around the world.

No other man alive or dead has set foot in each of the One Hundred Kingdoms of Man–indeed, few men can even put a name to more than a tenth of them. For many lands are not so easy to pin on a map as our own. Some lie below seas, or in the clouds, under mountains, or inside dreams. Some are reached through spelled books, some are as small as a tuft of cottonwood. Others lie beyond horse-years of deserts or plains of snow. One can be found only in the memory of finding it, which is quite difficult to remember when you've never been there a first time. The Prince made his way to them all, and _that_ you _can_ trust.

One would have been enough–one penny–and that first one took no great time or talent to collect. It was stuck in the hand of an odiously fat nobleman from the Kingdom of Cows. This repulsive heifer claimed he had not been able to release the coin since the first time he picked it up, when he had been eager to make an offer for the lean, appetizing Princess. The Prince told him he could free the penny easily. The nobleman held out his hand. The Prince swung his axe and the penny fell to the floor, clutched in lifeless, twitching fingers. The fat nobleman bleated like throat-cut cattle until he bled out.

The Prince took his prize and turned for home to seek the garden and make his wish, but he lost the penny out a hole in his pocket. Though he scoured the road for days, retracing all his steps, he never found it.

_Alas, but there are ninety-eight more_ , he dismally conceded.

The second penny was slightly harder to locate, but equally simple to liberate. It was in the hand of a widowed earl. He had been preparing to sell his three daughters to make enough money to be the Princess's highest bidder, so the story goes. The Earl wept as he held out his hand and the Prince obliged to set him free. The axe whistled. The Earl died quietly with guilty eyes. His daughters did not weep for him.

The Prince had not yet left the late Earl's estate when he checked his coin-purse and found inside a tiny hole, the penny gone. Furious, he and the Earl's daughters searched the castle all that season to no avail. Finally, he beckoned each of the girls to him with his axe, demanding they admit to having found the penny and hidden it away for themselves. Although all three maidens claimed to have done precisely this when the silver axe was pressed under their chins, the Prince knew none of them were his culprit.

_Alas, but there are ninety-seven more_ , he dismally conceded.

The third penny was more difficult to track down, and although the Prince took every precaution to ensure its security, he lost that one, too, in an impossible coincidence involving a puddle of mud, three half-wild pigs, and a fungal cucumber.

The fourth penny took an entire winter to acquire, but only the span of an ill-timed sneeze to lose down the side of a waterfall.

The Prince is no fool. He knew there was more than poor luck at play. But he was determined. For every penny he recovered on adventures each the more remarkable than the last, he would lose it in happenstance of astronomical odds all the more remarkable still. And for every penny lost, he set off on another adventure to another uncharted kingdom. Thus occupied in mind and body, the Prince grew comfortable in his exile. Years unwound.

His determination was matched by his success, which was exceeded only by his folly in losing each penny before he could return home, no matter his precautions. He put them in locked boxes, stuffed them in slaves' mouths and sewed them shut, even hung one from a hook attached to his own nose and never took his eyes off it, but never a one did he see safely back to the borders of his homeland.

It is said that he took them all for himself, every last penny. It is said that he had to cut off a lot of hands to do so. The last few dozen were already dead and buried; it seems the Prince was not the only one finding it difficult to let go of a little money.

Now? Ninety-nine kingdoms, ninety-nine pennies recovered on ninety-nine grand adventures of every variety... and ninety-nine pennies gone missing in ninety-nine of the unlikeliest, misfortunate, _inconceivable_ jests of fate the world has surely ever witnessed.

What has befallen the Prince's father, the bygone King? Today the people do not recall. His voice faded from the land as he disappeared back through the tunnel road on that fateful day, home to his tower to stay. In the interregnum, the tower–once a spectacle of the civilized world–has crumbled into disrepair, they say. Certainly no one knows where the Princess was taken, or whether she was ever married off after the physicians finished tending to her stump.

Now? There is only one penny left. In the end, the Prince needn't have chased down all the rest, for the one he held in his left hand was the only one he never lost.

At least he had grown accustomed to the inevitable–it no longer made him sick to his stomach: when he crossed back into his own kingdom for the first time in a century, he calmly held out his left hand and, with his right, raised his axe as he had done so many times before. One final hand to set free.

He has his heart set on the well. He would unravel every season's stitch for a hundred years. He would wash away his crimes and be cleansed of the sins of his father. He will wish away the garden. He will wish away the well.

He would see his sister again. He would talk to her past bedtime and look for whales in the night.

The Prince is happy. He has not felt this way since he was a boy dreaming about stepping off his windowsill...
Chapter XVIII

The iron wheels whinnied like parched horses as they raced ahead, gears and chain-links crinkled, the purple-clad giant huffed and panted–these were the only sounds throughout the night. Although the Purloiner did not speak again, a story with murder and black hearts told to a boy in the dark has a way of echoing in silence; inside the bottle, Pence crouched against the wall, hiding from visitations of a killer's beady eyes.

The bicycle shot out the gaping maw of a seaside cavern and onto a broad, laboriously tiled avenue awash in morning sunlight. The avenue lined the coast as it ran in a stately curve to the tower, met on the right by the mountainside and on the left by a sloping beach where a thousand and more chunks of chalky stone littered the white sand. The stones looked to be ages old, smoothed by the elements, some as large as a man.

"Are we there?" Pence called out, sore and throaty. When no answer came he lamented to himself, "I miss the garden. I miss my old husk. I miss my friend, the foot. I liked him–his toes were all in a row. I wish I was free of this cesspool, if only to see the Sun again for a moment," Pence said fondly. Catching himself, he hastened to add, "Just to make sure he isn't up to no good."

The Purloiner joyously sang over the wind and the sea, "What a night, young master, what a ride! We came within an eyelash of our lives a hundred times, but here we are, as I promised, you and the penny as safe as spinach on a silver plate."

"You must be in better physical condition than I surmised," Pence said to the Purloiner's head, "to bypass such deadly obstacles as though the road were ever flat and true. Are we almost to the Princess, now? When can I get out of here?"

"I'm afraid I cannot reach my hat until we stop," the Purloiner said pleasantly, as though commenting on the maintenance of the road with a passerby. "Won't be long, now."

Presently, the squeal of metal stopped. The grog responded to the abrupt change in momentum by throwing a wave like a boxer's punch into Pence's mouth.

"We are arrived," announced the Purloiner.

The top hat disappeared in a flourish. Dazzling colors danced across the contoured glass of Pence's prison. A shaft of sunlight poured into the bottleneck, split in two by the penny stuck in the opening. Pence's eyes were nearly white as he stared out his only window, for the sky was as bright as the gardener's beard.

"Is that not beautiful?" whispered the Purloiner. He stood on the first step of a long, narrow stairway which rose from the seaside to the tower's one and only door. "You see? I have not exaggerated for splendor. Why would a man pay homage to a white tree when he could worship a king in a white tower? Is it not undeniably grander than anything in your garden?"

"Certainly it is," replied Pence. "It's much like the stump, only a little taller, I suppose. But some folks would rather sit and listen to a bird sing than to a king. And my old man says the White Tree will grow again–then we will see which of the two is best."

"Look," marveled the Purloiner, "you cannot see the topmost windows from down here, even when the clouds part! What do you say to that, young master?"

Pence could see the tower out the top of the bottle, for the Purloiner kept him balanced as perfectly as a butler with a serving tray on his head. "Actually, I can see all the windows just fine. There's a white flower in the highest one."

The Purloiner did not answer. Instead, he picked up the bicycle and swung it over his back, hooking it to the shoulder strap of his haversack, a feat he could never have achieved if the machine was built for anyone other than a young girl. His knees creaked like distended pulleys as he climbed the narrow stairs.

"Let us enter," said the purple-clad giant when they reached the top, "I am eager to see who awaits us. Perhaps you will meet a King this day, young master. Else, a Queen."

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Pence called moodily.

"It would be prudent for you to remain hidden until we have located the Princess," the Purloiner said amicably. He placed his hat back over the bottle.

"Hey!" Pence shouted. "Bad hat! Let me out! I never agreed to this arrangement! If I wanted to be prudent, I'd be a prune, darn it, and I'm a _potato_ , so _set me free!_ "

The clomping of the Prince's boots told Pence they were advancing over stone floors. A door creaked, held, a lock tested. A pause. The explosion of an axe into wood and metal was followed by the grating of rusty hinges. More clomping.

"Hey! Can you hear me or not? Are there guards here? Guards! Guards! Seize this man!"

" _Silence!_ " the Purloiner hissed. "We are very close. Here is the Throne Room. Beyond are the great stairs that circle up into infinity."

"Oh," said Pence, suddenly unsure whether to continue ranting about his wrongful imprisonment or to go along with the Purloiner's plan a little longer for the good of his own garden-given mission.

Another door smashed asunder, lock chewed apart by insatiable steel. More hinges groaned, these much larger than before. The Purloiner advanced several strides and stopped. Without tipping his head or his hat or the bottle, he gave a graceful bow and a sharp snap of his cape.

"What's happening?" Pence shouted in a whisper. "Who's out there? I have rights, too!"

"Would you care for a drink, your majesty?" The Purloiner's words were loose and proud. "You're looking as parched as the land itself." He removed his hat and switched it for the bottle with a flick of his fingers. "It's the finest in the land." There was no response. "Not thirsty? Suit yourself."

The Purloiner jerked the bottle up to his lips and tilted it high without a word of warning for Pence, who was instantly caught in a squelching vortex of grog as the Purloiner sucked down gulp after gulp.

Pence spread his feet, bracing each against the curving walls of the top of the bottle, but the glass was too slick and his legs slid inwards until they pegged into the bottleneck. The vortex pulled him down until he had one leg to either side of the penny, and pulled him lower still. The coin began to slice up Pence's middle, just a hair, when the Purloiner finally withdrew the bottle from his lips. Then the top hat was back over Pence's prison like a blanket on a birdcage. "Long live the Queen," the Purloiner hailed in a prolonged belch. A gaggle of bubbles from his nostrils marked the occasion like so many miniature balloons.

The Purloiner unfastened his axe. He swung it once, to jarring impact, and a sound of ringing stone filled the air, accompanied by the clunk and clank of a skull rolling away and the pitter-patter of broken bone chips sprinkling onto the tiled floor. Only the hands of the King remained after the dust settled, gripping the stone arms of a crumbling throne. "You promised to escort me upstairs, last we spoke," said the Purloiner to the mess he had made, "but I believe I remember the way."

They were walking again. Another door tested–locked; another sound of axe splitting wood and metal. Then there were steps, a winding stair. The grog jostled and splashed with each iterative bounce. "Absolutely intolerable," Pence muttered, wiping the foul glop off his face with his blunt, stunted arms.

"I hope you're comfortable in there–this is going to be a long go," said the Purloiner as though he relished every step of the repetitive climb. "Fortunately, the way down is a lot quicker."

"What do you mean by that?" Pence asked bitterly.

The Purloiner chuckled to himself and cracked his nose.

"You know that's completely revolting, don't you?" Pence commented sourly.

The Purloiner did not speak for a thousand flights of stairs and he did not stop until they reached the top. With a bicycle on his back, an iron chain as big as a jungle snake in his bag, and a bottle balanced on his head with no other support, his legs pumped as though it was all as easy as riding down a hill.

"Well?" Pence ventured when they stopped moving a long while later.

"This is it," the Purloiner whispered reverentially, "the door to her room. And over there, the stairs to the very top–to the Prince's own–they are blocked with ruins...?" His voice was profoundly languished. "What has befallen here? Those stones... on the beach... must have fallen..."

"The Princess's room? Really?" Pence asked. "She's been in her _room_ this whole time? What's so hard to find about that?"

"Should I knock? Or just knock it down? Perhaps she has succumbed to ruin, as well."

"Who's there?" came a woman's startled voice from the other side of the door.

"It's her!" cried Pence. "I can't believe it! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!"

A familiar vibrating thud–the silver dragonheads of the black-handled battleaxe hitting the floor.

"Oh no," said Pence.

"Who goes there?" the woman called again, raspy and distressed. A terse whistle came from behind the door.

"It is I, the Crown Prince, your protector and beloved brother!"

" _What?_ " cried Pence.

"Be gone!" the woman commanded. "Stay out!" Another quick whistle came from her room.

"I've been _had_?" asked Pence, realization dawning.

"Stay out?" the Prince cackled. "Did you hear that, young master? She wants us to stay out. But this is a _rescue!_ "

" _Noooo!_ " Pence bellowed, falling to his knees.

The axe whistled–wood splintered everywhere like a barrage of arrows from an army of mice. "See that? You could have been skewered alive, young master, had I not taken your best interests to heart. You should stay where you are a little longer, don't you agree?"

"You fiend!" Pence screamed, flushed with rage, slapping grog about like a bird in a bucket of water. "You _are_ the Prince! _Arrrghh!_ I was _fuscated_ the whole time!"

The hinges of the battered door swung open tentatively, exchanging nervous creaks with one another.

The Prince entered his sister's room dragging his axe behind him. The steel etched a skittish trail across the stone floor, bright sparks popping alongside the blades like lapping dogs chasing a spilling cartload of carrion.
Chapter XIX

The room was barren but for an old blanket bunched against the wall and a small, round window overlooking the sea. On the windowsill sat an unpainted clay flowerpot, the home to a wilting flower with white petals, their edges crisped like the corners of an old treasure map. Next to the window stood an ancient woman with sun-browned skin and white hair hanging to her waist in loops and braids. Her once-green dress was faded to a pale afterthought, the color of a leaf that never managed to find enough light.

The Prince stepped to the center of the room. " _So,_ " he cleared his throat and glanced at the shabby bedding on the otherwise bare floor, "Father take away all your toys?"

A shadow crossed in front of the open window, blocking the sun entirely, then sailed off like a kite on a windy day.

"Why are you here?" the woman demanded as the sunlight returned to her back, outlining her hair with a silver sheen. "What do you want?"

"Get your shoes! Get your handbags! I'm here to save you, my lady!" rang Pence's voice for an instant before the Prince sneezed to cover it up.

"AHEM! Excuse me," said the Prince as he paced. Adopting an expression of curious disgust, he lifted the woman's blanket from the floor with one foot. It was an old apron, he saw, with waist-strings and a deep pouch in front–not much for a bed at all. He smelled it, dropped it immediately, and sauntered over to the window. The woman backed away as he drew near. "Why do you recoil from me?" he chided her. "Am I not of your blood?"

"Give me _your_ hand and your axe and we shall see," she replied without skipping a beat.

For a moment the Prince stared at her, smiling like a shark. Then he slowly lifted his left arm; layers of purple cloth cascaded away. He uncurled what remained of his hand. The dried scabs crackled and popped as he stretched his tendons back fully–fresh blood trickled out of the tiny new fissures like molten lava crawling down a mountainside.

The woman gasped and grabbed at her own wrist protectively.

"What is it?" cried Pence, hearing her distress. "What has he done to you?"

Again the Prince sneezed and spoke over the boy, " _Ahhhh_ , many a night did we spend at our windows talking deep into the night, brother and sister."

"Many more a night have I spent here alone," said the woman. "I have not a brother, now."

The Prince shook his head–Pence was rocked off his feet, unable to speak through the grog in his mouth. " _Tsk tsk_ , have you still not forgiven me? Immaturity does not keep for those at court," he sneered, cozying up to the windowsill. His butchered hand held aloft, he playfully wiggled his disfigured knuckles. "Now, I understand the _inconvenience_ you have experienced, but that is no justification to pardon you. Had you never went to that accursed garden..." he trailed off with a dark implication.

The old woman stood her ground. The chamber door hung in pieces on axe-battered hinges and the Prince was preoccupied looking out the window, but racing down a thousand flights of stairs was apparently not a winning formula to her mind. She only stared at her long lost Honor Guard, awaiting his next move.

Inside the bottle, Pence found his footing. He pounded on the glass walls with both his stumps, sloshing grog all about. "My lady, hurry, you must free me from this vile prison so I can get you out of this evil tower! This bogart is the Prince! The _Prince_ , can you believe it? Defenestrate him! Defenestrate him! But free me first!"

" _Sister, sister, sister!_ " boomed the Prince, drowning out every word the boy spoke, "I have suffered like none other these hundred years." He swayed as he spoke, occasionally jerking his head to upend Pence and keep him dunked in grog. "Exiled from my home, cut off from those I loved–"

" _Cut off?_ " The woman raised her right arm. Her hand was gone from the wrist, the stump a slaw of crusty stitches, ancient burn scars, and mangled skin. "There is no absolution for you in this tower... but that cannot be why you are here. The Throne, then? You have the wrong room."

"Have I?" He fixed her with a prescient gaze over his stooped shoulder as he placed a hand on either side of the white flower. "And you have never left these quarters since that fateful day?"

"No," said the woman.

"Do you know _why_ you were never sent away, never sold into marriage when a hundred lords of men were offered your hand?"

The old woman raised her stump defiantly.

"You had quite a few old chaps _interested_ ," drawled the Prince, "but then, you see, how can a man pay for something which is already taken? Now, because of you, _our home_ is empty. Abandoned. The bones of our father sat on the throne gathering rot, crown rusted to his piss-yellowed skull–did you know that? I disposed of him with due respect," the Prince assured her quietly. "I suppose that means you're _a queen_ now, sister, or have been for, what, half a century?"

"Neither have I a father," said the Queen. "I shed no tears for the bones of an evil man."

" _Zing!_ You tell'em!" Pence celebrated–the Prince burped at the exact moment–and Pence fell back into the grog.

Another looming shadow swam in front of the window, blocking the sun, then was gone.

"We used to watch the whales together from this very spot," said the Prince as his eyes trailed after the passing shadow nostalgically. "Do you remember this as fondly as I do?"

The Queen shook her head so slightly not one white hair on her head was disturbed. "Have you never seen what happened to the tower, or did your miserly eyes spare you the sight? I myself have not seen firsthand, of course," she disclaimed, "but the stones from your vaulted chamber fell so far I could not hear them hit the sea. I believe the whales were killing away any last remnants of you. I have come to see that they are ever mindful of what we do. If I were you, I would not stand so close to the window."

The Prince stiffened. "Any _last remnants_ of me?" He spun on her. "HERE I AM!" He held her defiant eyes until she looked away. "Your stubbornness will be the death of you," he said in a low tone. "And yet... the King is dead long years, our home is a hollow shell... but here you are, survived in this room _a hundred years_ behind locked door? _How_ , sister? How are you nourished? You should be shriveled bones by now, unless you have been eating your apron-strings." He stared at the Queen as he had stared at Pence when he first believed the boy to be the gardener incarnate. "What is your secret? You must _tell me_."

The woman's eyes darted to the white flower and away quickly, but it was too late.

"Oh my," said the Prince, "I should have guessed." He cracked his nose once, plucked a petal free, and raised it to his lips.

Under the top hat, in the dark, Pence froze. His heartbeat pattered as rapidly as rain funneling out a gutter onto an iron drum.

The Prince put the white petal in his mouth, where it began to glow through his cheeks like a rotten pumpkin with a candle inside. He tentatively chewed and swallowed. A sinister grin spread under his sable cowl. "I feel it in my blood already," he cooed, "like a most tasty grog. Even as I speak these words, I am sated in body and mind. What an extraordinary plant. Men would pay dearly for a draft of it." The Prince soulfully searched one cavernous nostril with a very thorough finger as he spoke, then flicked what he had recovered out the window into the vast gulf of white sky. "I have not seen its like before," he said, "although it tugs at my memory. I consider its condition: Am I to assume it has been here with you all this time, and is only in recent days beginning to fail?"

The Queen pursed her lips.

"Very well," said the Prince, shaking his head, "it makes little difference. I seek a superior prize. But here–you have shared your food with me. Allow me to return the favor." He removed his top hat and placed the murky bottle next to the flowerpot on the windowsill. " _Finest in the land?_ " he offered her with a sadistic grin.

"Egads!" cried Pence as his confined quarters were flooded with intense sunlight. "The Sun has beaten us here? Oh, wait... of _course!_ Why didn't I figure it out sooner?" He slapped himself on the forehead. "The _Sun_ must be the one behind the Princess's abduction–it's the only explanation! He has kept her here above the wind where only he can worship her divine beauty."

Then Pence noticed the white flower and everything else evaporated from his mind. He pressed himself against the glass facing the flowerpot as though his gaze was called by a powerful magnet. " _What is this?_ " he cried, his voice catching in his throat.

"What black craft are you at now?" demanded the Queen, for Pence's blurred shape behind the thick glass looked to her to be the silhouette of either a very small rodent or a very large insect. Then she felt the cadence of the heartseed. "That pulse–"

"I have been thinking about just that," said the Prince lazily, enjoying himself very much. "The day I _rescued_ you from the devil's garden–do you recall it?"

The Queen stared at him with brimming malice but refused to give him the satisfaction of conversation.

As Pence strained to press his face closer to the white flower, his nose–pushing against the glass–disappeared bit-by-bit inside his head, in turn nudging the brown pebble out of the back. The white flower began to glow softly.

The Queen shifted her eyes from the Prince to the flower.

The Prince grinned and continued musing, "I took you to our father and informed him that you carried a secret from the garden–an object which also beat like a human heart. Do you recall what happened next?"

The flower perked up. The brown decay lining its edges dissolved into the white glow like a snowflake on warm skin. Traces of green mist wafted off the delicate petals.

The Queen put her hand to her open mouth.

"What I found in your fingers, after all that unpleasantness with the screaming and the blood, was a penny–the last leftover of those minted for your impending grooms. But to me, you see, that never felt–" the Prince twirled a fingerless knuckle in the air as he searched for the right word, "– _natural_."

The Queen advanced a step. "What..." she began, but could take neither her eyes nor her mind off the white flower.

" _What_ indeed," said the Prince offhandedly. "I have often wondered, you know: _What_ was she holding–" he idly spun the coin inside the bottleneck, "– _before_ she _switched_ it for _this_ selfsame penny out of her still-bleeding, severed hand?" His eyes locked on her hers to ascertain the truth of his theory.

The white flower had fully recuperated. Pence pulled back from the glass–his face was flattened to the dull contour of the bottle's interior. "Princess!" he wailed. " _Princess!_ "

She gasped and took a step back–it was the first time Pence's voice had escaped the bottle unimpeded to reach her ears.

"And _now_ I _know_ ," said the Prince, thrilled with himself. "Like the boy's heart, here, it was a talisman from the garden–it was a _seed_ in your hand! You held a seed, not the penny! A seed from the garden! No doubt the same used to grow this implausible flower!"

"Aren't you clever?" snorted the Queen. "Where else would a flower come from–an egg? But you're a century late. It began to wilt two moons ago, the same night the sky was filled with white light." As she spoke, her eyes were cemented to the bottle.

"Princess!" Pence called again. "It is I, Pence, a small boy from a potato, budding poet laureate, and all-around gentleman of fancy and leisure come to liberate you this fine day! My old man sent me! I can escort you to the garden!"

The Queen rushed forward, but the Prince stepped in front of her before she could reach the windowsill. He violently threw her to the floor. She landed on her paper-thin apron with a clatter, as though all her bones had tumbled out of a bag onto the cold stones.

The Prince grunted his observance of her sorry state and turned his back. He stared out the window. There were no whales in sight.

"You unsavory sack of spoiled asparagus!" Pence shouted in rage at the Prince's abuse of the Queen, but his tirade was stopped short when the Prince slapped a cupped hand over the top of the bottle–the suction when his hand pulled free caused the syrupy liquid inside to bubble up and Pence found himself with yet another face full of grog.

"The boy is correct," said the Prince to the prostrate Queen. "I will soon make my eternally ordained return to the garden. You will accompany us, and the old fool will have no choice but to open the gate. I have the thing–the penny–that started all of this. When I stand over the well all your lonely years will be undone. This tower will be as it once was and we at our windows always. There is no reason to delay. We leave at once. Get up," he growled, turning back to the Queen.

She was up and ready for him–she flung the pouch of the apron over the Prince's head, crying, "You will never return to your window!" He lunged blindly, swiping at her face with his bleeding snub of a hand, but she sidestepped and deftly tripped him. Even on the floor, the Prince's legs continued to pump crookedly up and down, as though they were still in their iron bicycle stirrups. He flopped around in circles like a fish out of water, fighting to unwrap the pouch from his face, but the more his legs drove him around, the more the apron-strings caught underneath his shoulders and twisted tighter. He gasped for air, his right hand clawing hysterically at his throat.

The Queen approached the windowsill and set her eye flat to the bottle's opening like it was the lens of a spyglass. Pence spat grog out of his mouth and looked up to see what had suddenly blocked the light. The Queen blinked rapidly as she came to comprehend at what it was she was looking–or, rather, at whom.

"Cheerio!" Pence called up, waving his arms like windmills.

The Queen jerked her head back in surprise, but continued to peer into the hole with a squinted eye. She spun the penny around experimentally, studying each side briefly before aligning it vertically so as to see the boy trapped below.

"You are as exquisite as my eyes recall," sang Pence. "And do _you_ remember _me?_ "

Gazing into Pence's eyes, the Queen put her good hand to one of her earlobes and nodded once in earnest.

Pence smiled, then frowned. "But where is your beard? I thought it the customary fashion, these days."

The Queen leaned back over the bottle, skin to glass. To Pence, her eye was a green mirror showing his own face warped and enlarged like a heads-up penny flattened by a heavy wagon wheel.

"You are indeed a gentleman, little one, I can see that already–and with bravery to spare, that you have come so far to find me. But what are you doing inside this foul bottle?" Her words, although polite, were harried; behind her, the Prince was attempting to tear in half the cloth that bound him by biting one end and pulling the other.

Pence gazed up. Whether it was the frank compliments or the fact that his brow was now obtuse–flattened by the side of the bottle–his expression was dumbfound wonder. Then he remembered his manners and curtsied proudly, although he no longer had a sunhat to worry about upsetting. "Alas, my love, that I have ever been prone to bravo; in my zeal I was blind and the Prince used his mind-tricks to gain advantage over me. He is a very cagey adversary, you know. He must have a jewel in his head the size of a kickball. But please don't tell anyone he got the best of me–I would never recover from the bad publicity."

The Queen was anxious to fit in her next question between Pence's never-ending parade of words. "Are you truly a messenger from the boy in the garden?"

"I am indeed a humble servant of the garden," Pence carried on as though that had been his thesis all along, "but the old man there is no more a boy than I am a turnip, which is of course ridiculous. He is an old man, but he loves you very much. And so do I. I'm not ashamed to say it, either! You are much more lovely in person. On my penny you look so sad."

"Thank you, little one. I knew he must be alive–I can feel it when I stand at the window... or, I _could_ , until my flower began to wither. And so he has grown old with the rest of us? Somehow I doubted he ever would."

"Oh yeah, he's _really_ old. Almost dead. He's _desperate_ to see you. Shoot, am I botching this? I'm such a lump. I promised him I'd be a smooth talker to you. Let's see... I don't know... shall we have a kiss?"

The Queen let out a subdued laugh. "Oh, little one, I think I should prefer not to put my lips anywhere near the business end of this bottle. But quickly now, do you bring a missive? Or... some other form of aid?"

"He wanted me to help you, that's all. Are you hungry? I have a grain of rice, if you like." Pence fumbled at his face with his stumps but the rice was already wholly jammed inside his head. He looked down at his feet, ashamed at his clumsiness. "Apologies, my love: I cannot find my own nose. All this grog must have made my brain go fuddley. It seems that, try as I might, I have lost everything my old man gave me. He told me I was a grand success, but that is not true. Unless you'd like a bite out of my tummy?"

"No, no, little one–never mind all that. You are the unlikeliest hero I ever met! Chin up, now. What words do you bring? Please, what is our plan?"

There came the sound of fabric ripping.

"Well, actually... my old man was a little hazy on the nuts and bolts of things. Do you think your hair is long enough to let out the window and climb... _uh oh_."

Behind the Queen a purple silhouette stood tall, all boxy angles and serpentine curves. "Sister... that was quite less than cordial of you. _Most_ unbefitting of a queen." The Prince threw the torn, wadded-up apron out the window.

The Queen spun around, her back pressed against the windowsill where the bottle and the flowerpot sat between her arms protectively. The Prince leaned in to her, his nose poked past her one ear and then the other. "Give me the bottle. You can keep your flower–I am feeling generous today. I need only the penny. And of course I need _you_ , as I know you need me. The boy's heart will also do nicely, if that is not asking too much."

"Why ask at all?" spat the Queen, turning her nose away from his rank breath. "Last time you wanted a boy's heart cut out you were not so genteel."

"My heart? Oh, gods!" Pence bawled. "Don't let him take it, Princess! Save me!"

"I believe," said the Prince through his teeth, "that there is truth to the old saying: a stolen hook will catch no fish. So give me the bottle, _kindly_."

The Queen turned her nose up a fraction more.

" _Now!_ " roared the Prince.

"I will not," the Queen said forcefully.

"That'a'girl!" cheered Pence.

"Step a- _side_ ," the Prince hissed.

"I should sooner jump to the sea than allow you any path to make a wish. Your rotten, purple heart would bring a pestilence to a hundred kingdoms before the words left your lips. You will never stand at your window again. I will never speak to you there. I expect to die for this–" The Queen lurched sideways and pushed the flowerpot out the window with her stump. Faint green mist trailed after its fall like phosphorescent vines growing upside-down. With her good hand the Queen seized the bottle around its neck.

The Prince grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back, but he was too slow by a tick.

The Queen flung the bottle out the window whirling end-over-end like a throwing knife.

" _AHHHHHHHH!_ " Pence cried in terror.

" _Old witch!_ " shrieked the Prince as he thrust a hand into the bowels of his haversack. In a blink, he withdrew a crossbow fashioned like a dueling pistol with a mainsail set atop the barrel and a fishing reel beside the flintlock, all made of sturdy wood and iron, ornate with silver. As the bottle reached the peak of its flight, the Prince pulled the trigger of his weapon and a metal bolt with a square of cloth tied around its middle zipped through the window in pursuit.

It was a perfect shot. In the exact and only instant in which the bottleneck was openly aligned with the window, the half-sized arrow pinged past the penny–setting it spinning like a waterwheel–and flew straight for Pence, who was pinned to the bottom of the bottle by the force of rotation, like water stuck in a bucket swung in a quick circle.

A perfect shot, otherwise, but the minimal contact with the penny was all it took to activate the black cloth tied around the bolt: it released backwards and unfurled–a parachute, connected to the bolt as well as to the crossbow's reel. With the arrowhead a penny's length from piercing Pence's chest, a tremendous and sudden blast of air from below the bottle filled the arrow's black sail and whipped it away, jerking the bolt back out of the bottleneck just in time. At the other end of the reeling line, the pistol was yanked out of the Prince's hand. It floated away out to sea, carried by its full sail, sinking quickly through the clouds.

Without a moment to spare, the Prince was searching through his haversack again while keeping one eye out the window on the bottle. He pulled out a crumpled piece of black paper from under the massive chain and padlock. He frowned at the wrinkled paper and quickly tried to smooth the corners out on the windowsill, but the bottle was falling too fast for him to waste time making it perfect.

The Prince lifted the paper to his lips. "Bring me the penny," he commanded, inflecting his voice with a mystic tremor. The paper stirred like a dry leaf and carried off his hand as if from a gentle breeze. Airborne, the paper puffed up imperceptibly and quite suddenly it was shaped like a bat with slightly fractured wings.

The bat chased the bottle down, flying rather groggily due to its crumpled corners, or perhaps to the intoxicating fumes on the Prince's breath. It stretched out its folded claws and clutched the penny with surprising strength, but the coin was wedged in too tight to come loose.

"Stupid bat, be gone!" Pence shouted, shaking his arms like a farmer at crows in his crop.

The paper bat fanned out its wings, readjusted its claws on the penny, and ripped back. The penny shifted.

A streak of brown with black stripes tore across the sky and shredded the enchanted bat in one merciless swoop. Black scraps spiraled everywhere, lifeless confetti. A high-pitched, preternatural whistle accompanied the demise of the insubstantial creature.

From the Queen's window, the Prince glared at the bird that had just assassinated his own dark servant. The nut wren flew toward the small, round window as though to carry on her assault with the Prince, but she veered upward at the last moment and disappeared from view.

"What have you done?" the Prince shouted at the Queen. He grabbed her hair, dragged her out the bedroom door, flung her over his shoulder so that her head was stuffed in his haversack, and mounted the bicycle, which he had left perched precariously at the top of the stairs, trusting to its pencil-thin kickstand.

"Save him!" screamed the Queen in the direction of the window just before being muffled entirely by the canvas bag, "Save him, please!"

"Who are you talking to?" demanded the Prince, but he was in no state to wait for an answer. Without another word he set his ever-pedaling feet in their stirrups and the bicycle jolted to a start.

"You broke your nose last time you tried this!" the Queen shouted when she realized what the Prince was about to attempt.

"I've had a lot practice since then," he replied in monotone accordance with the truth as the front wheel dipped over the first step. And down they went, sparks flying every time pink iron scraped across chalky stone. Echoes of the Prince's mad tirade climbed the staircase like smoke rising, "The garden will appear! It will have no bloody choice but to appear. The Princess returns!"

Outside the Queen's chamber a shadow flew arms-length in front of the window. The shadow had skin like gray marble. It had a gleaming black eye the size of a watermelon. The eye squinted, angry. The shadow passed in a breath.

A moment later an enormous tail smashed through the stone wall, sending a typhoon of debris and dust chasing down the tower stairs after the fading echoes of the Prince.

From out of the storm of rubble came a pair of birds diving toward the sea. The nut wren was young and small, birthmarked with a strawberry breast. The second bird was not much larger but flew with ancient, unsurpassed speed and surety. Her wings were as bright as the flower petals that floated down from the Queen's window. Around the white bird's neck, tucked behind her wings, was a cloth patchwork purse looking every bit like a doll-sized haversack, purple, yellow, green, and white, all woven with thread finer than silver hair.
Chapter XX

Looking out the bottleneck, Pence had rapidly cycling views of the tower, the sun, and the sea. Then the tower was gone, in its place a collapsing fury of stone and a mushrooming cloud of white dust. With another spin he saw two birds fly in front of the sun; another, and the sea below was blocked from his small, round window–all he could see was a single gray storm cloud intercepting him on an otherwise beautiful day. On his final rotation, the tower was no more, the birds were gone, and the bottle crashed into the unlucky storm cloud with a squelching _plunk_.

The jarring catch threw Pence from the bottom of the bottle–now topmost–to the top of the bottle, now at the bottom. He wiggled like a totem dancer twirling a hoop around his stomach, trying to somehow free himself, but his legs were once again jammed in the slick funnel of the bottleneck. He succeeded only in creating enough free space between his waist and the glass for a trickle of grog to siphon away. It dribbled down his legs, past the sluice-gate penny, and out of the bottle.

The storm cloud shook violently–Pence's torso slammed left and right into the glass–and a baritone explosion blasted from every direction as though the cloud itself had a case of whooping cough. A pocket of pressure built under Pence with nowhere to go but up. "That's not what I meant about enjoying the breeze on my backside," Pence groaned regretfully. He wiggled again, releasing more grog down the bottleneck.

The cloud lurched, followed by another tuba-groan of asphyxiated strain. The pressure underside Pence ballooned. His gemstones bulged like a bullfrog's eyes and his brain jutted farther out the back of his head. Then his rice nose zipped free from his face like a dart from a blowgun and ricocheted off the glass walls repeatedly until it lost steam and slid back down the side of the bottleneck. Pence sandwiched it between his two stumps and pressed it back between his eyes a bit crookedly, but no worse off.

"This cloud must be one of the Sun's henchmen," Pence reasoned, his speech slowed by the pressure building inside his body. "Ow... my head hurts. Must get... to stump. Save... penny. Meet... women." He tilted his head back sickly. In his daze he tried to dislodge himself one more time; as he squirmed, the last of the Prince's grog escaped out of the bottle.

Again came the thunderous moan, lower than before–a sound of stress and suffocation–and the clot of pressure under Pence swelled to a bursting point. Jets of hot air whistled up the miniscule gaps between his body and the glass. His flesh blushed, his eyes rolled in their makeshift sockets like marbles. "Big... scary... cloud... _Ha!_ Can't even handle... a little... grog." Pence chuckled with delirium, then hiccoughed and a finger of yellow steam curled out of his mouth. He stared at its trail cross-eyed. "What was it... that old man told me?"

Steam drifted out of his seashell-sculpted ears. His cheeks turned umber, his head pressure-cooking from the inside out.

"If I... get in any... tight spots–"

His brain was near fully exposed out the back of his head, threatening to shoot out in the same kinetic manner as his nose. Thin, spiderwebbing cracks crept up the glass walls as the pressure below flexed against every edge of its confinement.

"– _use my head!_ " Pence recited. He frowned. "How's that going to help here?" He giggled drunkenly. "Crazy old man. I'm going to... kick him in the shins... when I get... _home_." With his last word, he feinted. His mouth hung open slack and his head slumped back and bounced against the sloping walls of the bottleneck, where his protruding brain chipped one of the hairline cracks, releasing the pressure. The bottle instantly shattered and was blasted out of the storm cloud in a geyser of boiling air. Pence was blown high and away along with one brown penny and a shower of glass shards.

This was a view for Pence like no other. He wiped the grog and the daze from his eyes as he flew up. Stalling at the top of his trajectory, he gave a thoughtful glance left and right–the mushroom cloud, quick to form but slow to fade, looked like a big white tree of broccoli; "I like that better than the tower already," Pence said to himself–and then he came back down like a limp-limbed rag doll. As he fell, his perfect eyes picked out the penny against the backdrop of empty sky and purple sea. He spread his arms and legs, causing his body to level out horizontally. He tried to swim through the air to reach the penny, flapping his arms like a bird and kicking his legs together like a fishtail. This had no effect.

Pence put his stumps under his chin, stymied. A flake of glass had slashed him above the eyes in the aftermath of the storm cloud's eruption and his brow was cut with deep concern once more. After some consideration, he reached a hand out just as he had with the white splinter at the fence. The penny sparkled for an instant, but Pence saw this was only the light from the sun toying with him. "A cape would sure come in handy right now," he observed.

On his next slow rotation Pence saw that he and the Queen's clay flowerpot shared intersecting lines of descent; they were very near to each other already and closing in quickly. Pence was the higher of the two, falling as fast as a bird without a third breakfast. The flowerpot fell marginally slower–its few remaining petals had fanned upward to create an array of tiny umbrellas, giving the simple vase just enough drag for Pence to catch up, or down, as it was.

He landed bulls-eye in the dry soil, using one arm to brace himself against the flower's stem like a man planting a flag on a newly discovered island. With his added weight aboard, the handful of petals broke away and the flowerpot accelerated to full freefall. Peeking over the side of the pot, Pence saw how the sea was lined with waves in rows to the horizon, like a field of corn seen from a mountaintop, and that there was no chance of the flowerpot landing anywhere but in the water. "Well, this was a bum deal," he noted like a man whose new hat has a hole in the top. "Abandon ship!"

He jumped for his life over the side of the flowerpot, but remained inevitably beside it as they both continued to fall. "Why didn't that old man tell me how to calculate relative terminal velocities of bodies in motion," Pence griped. Resignedly, he reached an arm out and climbed back aboard the clay pot.

The once-white, twice-withered flower began to glow. The brown decay on the stem was swept away in the upward wind like sawdust; underneath, healthy growth shone root-white. Pence's heartbeat doubled its pace. The stem pulsed with light.

Then the green mist flamed to life, shedding trails of snaking floral patterns, phantom vines intertwining to write sideways-up scripts in the empty sky.

One more look over the edge of the flowerpot at the approaching sea was all the impetus the boy required: he scrambled up the white stem and when he reached the top he continued climbing right on up the green mist without a second thought. "I'm going to make it!" he elated. But when he reached the top–the point in space where the green mist had first begun to glow–the makeshift ladder ended. He looked around with one hand shielding his eyes from the sun, searching for the penny, but he could no longer see it. He hung his head, mourning his poverty.

"I suppose I can wait here until I'm rescued," he sighed. "I saw a pair of birds earlier... they'll have to do. But fancy _me_ needing to be rescued by a _bird!_ Impossible! Obviously I'll leave that part of the story out when I get home. _Hmmm_ , I wonder what's taking them so long. Birds!" he called as if they were right in front of him, wearing blindfolds. "Are you daft? It's _me_ over here! Where are you?"

Out of the corner of his eye Pence saw the sun watching him. "Oh, I bet you're just loving this, aren't you?" The sun said nothing. "Shut up!" Pence cried. " _Birds!_ Hurry up! You're killing me, here! Where are you?"

Not so far below, the flowerpot plunked into the purple waves. The green mist faded with the soft sound of the splash, but just before it did so Pence leapt from his perch, soaring high–limbs flayed like a four-pointed star–and grabbed hold of a dangling line of string. The Queen's threadbare apron, light as a tissue, had been running a more leisurely race to the sea.

After a flurry of panicked grasping and chomping, Pence held one of the waist-strings between his stumps and the other in his mouth. The pouch filled with air—a parachute—but the holes which the Prince had torn in the fabric worked against Pence like so many leaks in a rowboat. Despite its condition, he found that he could approximately steer by angling his legs this way and that. He set himself a course for the shoreline, for now he saw the Prince riding into the entrance of the tunnel road with the Queen stuffed in his haversack, her legs stuck out upside-down like a pair of branch-thick arrows in a giant quiver.

"Mmph gmph mmmph!" Pence shouted in a rage with his mouth stuffed full of yarn. He shook his head savagely, which is how he caught sight again of the penny.

"Mmmph, mmn mnny!" he celebrated and, forgetting the Prince for an instant, aimed his legs to steer himself back over the sea, losing priceless altitude in every degree.

The penny, however, was already well beneath him, too far away to ever catch up with, even if he let go of his parachute.

"Mmmmmm," Pence said sadly.

A white bird swooped into view like a painter's brushstroke across a landscape. Using her colored purse like a butterfly-net, the bird caught the penny in mid-air so near to the sea that her wingtip cut the water like an inverted dorsal fin. The bird immediately executed a quick loop and disappeared behind Pence's latitude of view.

"Mmmm, mrrt mmn mnny!" Pence shouted angrily. He kicked his legs like a pedaling prince to turn himself around and see where the white bird was making off to with his beloved coin in tow.

There was a whale, finally. The colossal creature moved through the air without a sound.

"I can see what the big fuss is about these guys," Pence said dryly, forgetting to bite down on the apron-string.

The whale's wingspan could have shadowed a small city, with webbed feathers layered like humongous, flat ferns. Its slick trunk was gray with dark swirls and milky blotches. As it fanned its wings up and down, slow as the tide, Pence saw waves form in the sea below where the beast's reflection swam.

The white bird landed on the whale's back, next to a little brown nut wren.

"The two-bit thief, its got a cohort in crime!" Pence shouted. "Conspiracy to commit aerial robbery–that's got to be some sort of a felony!" He bit down on the second apron-string again, but his diatribe had cost him valuable height. He was nearly level with the whale, now.

The whale tilted its wings and curved its tail up like a scorpion; the effect was a slow veering, like a large ship turning against the wind.

"Oh, ffffffertilizer," said Pence, for the mammoth beast was going to intercept him.

The whale ebbed closer. The white bird and the nut wren waited patiently, their talons anchored in thick blubber.

Pence set his jaw square as he touched down deftly on the whale's back just behind a ridge of holes of scaled sizes, like an overstuffed oboe. The birds were only a step away, watching him with furtive twitches of their heads.

Pence released the apron-strings–the tattered fabric blew right away and was gone–and gave the birds his utmost admonishing stare. "Forgive me if I don't offer to shake hands with you two goons. I'm here for my penny. Don't make me ask twice."
Chapter XXI

The white bird whistled a tone Pence did not natively understand–one he had only heard before through the Queen's bedchamber door–and the nut wren flew at Pence without warning. Pence tried to duck but found that against the buffeting winds he was barely managing to stay on his own two feet. The wren closed her talons around his torso and pulled him off the whale's back.

"You sneaky– _urmph_!" Pence grunted. "If I had my sword I'd spit you like a hog in the belly!"

"Yeah, well, when pigs fly, mate," the wren whistled.

" _Ha!_ " Pence snorted despite himself, "you're funny!"

The hole directly behind where Pence had been standing puckered, then blasted out a visible gust of hot air.

"Hot springs!" Pence marveled. "You saved my life! I might have been blown away like a beanbag!"

The nut wren deposited Pence in the shadow of the white bird, whose talons dug into the whale's back like a perfectly tilled row of scaly roots. Her eyes and beak and wings were purely white, as unblemished as a young girl's cheek.

The whale moaned like a foghorn. The white bird whistled to the nut wren, who translated the foreign notes for Pence: "Someone has been feeding this whale old grog."

Pence looked away and tried to twiddle his thumbs, forgetting he had none.

The whale sounded again, which the white bird translated to the nut wren, who translated for Pence: "He wants to say thank you."

Pence looked up in surprise.

"Not much grog to be had up here, I reckon," the wren elaborated.

"Well, I try my best," Pence conceded with protracted humility.

"He says it's the finest he's ever tasted."

Pence made a sour face.

The whale moaned; the white bird whistled slyly, as if she could already see how everything would unwind; the nut wren translated: "He wonders if there's anything he can do for you in return."

"That depends," said Pence, putting a stump under his chin, posing with as much charm as he could muster, "how far will those slugs of grog get me?"

*****

The tunnel road was as dark and quiet as the pumps of a dead heart. There was no fire spewing from the walls, no rock-falls, no monsters. When the Prince swerved off-center, his front tire did not buckle over the edge of a bottomless precipice.

He wrapped his dead-end arm around the Queen's legs to prevent her from sliding off his shoulder. Her arms hung limply to either side of the bicycle's back wheel. Her heart beat quietly between long pauses and the tips of her white hair turned a lifeless brown, like the edges of a wilting flower petal.

The Prince muttered to himself all the way, "White trees, white flowers, white birds... white trees, white flowers, white birds... I've not seen a bird like _that_ before, not in one hundred kingdoms, and _yes_ , I have _been_ to the Kingdom of Clouds, I have been to the Kingdom of Things With Wings. I tell you, these omens speak a pale fortune, sister. _Sister?_ "

When the Queen did not answer, the Prince mistook it for dispute, for he squealed with verjuice passion, "You cannot believe something is good just because it is white!"

He gave her time to rejoin while he stewed in his frustration. "The White Tree was cursed and a curse upon it, darn it!" he eventually burst. "You cannot defend it–you have not heard, as I have heard, the stories that surround it!"

The Queen, of course, was not in a position to correct him.

"Is that so?" replied the Prince to his imagining of her denial. "You think you could know better than I? _You_ , imprisoned beyond the reach of a bird's wings? The White Tree is known far and wide, sister mine, and I have spoken with a man who has been admitted to the garden..." he trailed off as though unconvinced of this himself. "The point is, you see," he concluded, slightly flustered, "I really did a very _good_ thing when I felled the Holy Tree. And now I'm taking you back to the garden to embrace your lost boy again. And _I_ , I shall embrace him again, too, and won't that be jolly, and my axe will be glad to finish the feast that your knife started so many seasons ago."

*****

The white bird had set the nut wren to task plucking tiny shards of glass out of the whale's back, most of which were centered around a bottle-sized blowhole. Pence watched her work from within the safety of the white bird's patchwork purse. She had insisted he ride there–the high winds just below the clouds were unforgiving, although the whale sheared through them easily enough.

"But can this behemoth fly as fast as the Prince rides on his iron donkey?" Pence called over the wind to the white bird.

In response, the whale snorted like symbols rung underwater and blasted fountains of air from the staggered holes on its back. This sent the great beast into a swift descent that nearly whipped Pence free of his makeshift saddle.

"All right!" Pence yelled, his hands cemented over his eyes to keep them from getting chiseled away by the hammering wind. "I get it! You're the boss! I'm a shrimp! Let up!"

The whale pulled up sharply. Pence was sure its wings would break off like the arms of a windmill in a hurricane, but they withstood the tremendous force and the whale returned to cruising smoothly above the mountains at a passenger-friendly pace.

"I ought to thank you for letting me ride in your purse," Pence said to the white bird, "it's very chique. Although, myself, I'm more of a cape man."

The white bird whistled her indivisible tone.

"She says it was her honor," translated the nut wren.

"And also thanks for saving my penny. That catch was primetime."

The white bird bobbed her head modestly.

"Will we be able to see the garden from on high? It seemed like a pretty big place when I was there, but I never realized the world was so..." Pence trailed off as his eyes drank in the full of the earth, "...so much _bigger_."

The white bird whistled curtly like a woman to her horse.

"She knows the way," said the nut wren.

"You do?" Pence excitedly asked the white bird. "Have you been there before? Do you know my old man? He's a card. You can nest in his beard–it's very dirty and unkempt–I'm sure you'll feel right at home."

The white bird whistled; the nut wren translated, "I was there once, child, before the man, before the tree. I have not returned."

"Why not?" asked Pence, tone-deaf to the melancholy in the white bird's melody.

Again the nut wren translated her elder: "You ask more questions than the old woman. I like your spirit. You strike me to be a well-grounded boy."

Pence was beside himself with pride.

The white bird continued, "There was a time I might have gone back... there was a village I always wanted to visit... it seemed so important at the time. None of it matters now. I flew away. When the White Tree fell, I lost any reason to return. Will the old woman return to the tower, now that it lies in pieces in the sand? Of course not. Neither I to the garden." Near as the nut wren tried to translate the white bird's song into notes Pence could make sense of, there was no way to relay her pining emotion as she whistled, "What would a bird say to a stump? Would she sing for it? Give up the wings she wished for? Those endings are a girl's daydreams."

"My old man told me the stump is wise. I'm sure you could find something to talk about."

The white bird whistled bittersweetly.

"She will not return to the garden," said the nut wren. "The White Tree is felled. She will leave you to your own devices when we arrive, and return to the sea."

Pence looked down glumly. Were his old husk nearby, he may well have crawled inside to sulk.

"But _I_ won't!" blurted the nut wren all on her own. " _I'll_ take him in," she whistled to the white bird. "I'm not scared of that ugly purple man–I already tore up one of his little tricks. Besides, an old friend offered me some free food last time I was there and I hate missing a fresh meal."

The white bird nodded her approval and said no more for the rest of the journey.

Pence studied the horizon. Couched inside the mountains were ravines teeming with unbridled forest growth. He saw waterfalls rushing down ice-capped cliffs, rivers roaming every which way, fish leaping, birds flocking in urgent formation, villages, cities, and entire kingdoms of man, and above them all the omnipresent sun gave light and warmth without license.

They flew for the rest of the morning and the better part of the afternoon. The sun looked Pence square in the eye, as honorable adversaries must do before an escalating showdown. "You could have done me in easily when I was stuck on that weird vine," Pence said to his lifelong nemesis.

The sun said nothing but spoke of tranquility.

Pence looked away, ashamed. In the distance, he saw the craggy ring of upheld hands–the perimeter of mountains that he had seen when he first left the garden.

"You gave light to the white flower," Pence said reluctantly to the sun. "You gave it life, and that gave my Princess life. You did not kidnap her. I think you watched over her. You traveled over the mountains every night for a hundred years to keep her flower alive."

The sun twinkled like an old man's wink.

"I may be getting on in age," said Pence, regarding his own sun-browned, parched, and wrinkled skin, "but I still have much to learn." He stared into the light, deep in thought.
Chapter XXII

The Prince had drunk his fair share of grog before losing his bottle, but it seemed only to oil his joints if nothing else—he rode out of the tunnel with his legs churning as robustly as when he had first purloined Pence from the path. The Queen had not made a peep the entire ride, for her head was stuffed in a canvas sack and her heartbeat was fading like an echo in a deep cave, but she clung to the barest edge of life like a bicycle riding the lip of a bottomless precipice.

"I expected you to perish before tea-time, sister, without that flower of yours near-to-hand. It would seem some speck of a spirit trails after you even now; that's as well. You will lay your eyes on the garden one last time. Live bait, wriggling in fresh blood."

The Prince brought them to a stop atop the next rise–the last of the mountain's knuckles, first of the foothills. They passed an old crab tree on their right, halfway up. The hill itself was wreathed in leafless trees. The garden was straight down the path. "When last I searched these lost hills they were a maze and a trap. Yet there is only one path before us... and it was not so near as this a day ago," the Prince proclaimed with tepid awe. "The garden, it would appear, has come to greet us. Bow, and it will wither."

The top of the white fence was brown, as if scorched by a sunrise strayed too near. Surrounding the fence were hundreds upon hundreds of animals, from worms and glowflies to pigs and wolves and beasts that had antlers like trees; even a tinker family milling about the outskirts–a man, a woman, and a gaggle of children that Pence would most certainly have approved of, for they all sat in a row–biggest to smallest–on the bench of their family wagon.

The few trees that grew around the bottom of the hill were as visions of paradise, their branches drooping low with exotic birds. The birds watched the worms raptly, but when the Prince arrived and his long shadow was thrown down the hill by the sinking sun–his head and tall hat like a blight on the white gate–all the assembly was hushed and all eyes fixed on the pink bicycle and its rider. The youngest tinker child laughed at the sight of a man on a little girl's toy.

" _Fascinating_ ," said the Prince under his breath to the Queen as he surveyed the crowd, keeping the bicycle between his legs, ready to go in an instant. "Our reunion has turned into something of a festival, it seems." He stood up; every head in the crowd rose a fraction. Wary of the assembly's mood, the Prince hoisted the Queen off his shoulder and planted her beside himself. Too weak yet to stand, she leaned against him for support. He put his arm around her but left the bag over her head.

As a cordial substitution for the formal bow he could not deliver with an old woman cloistered at his side, the Prince took off his top hat and made an elegant gesture. " _Phew_ ," he whispered to the Queen from the side of his mouth, "I half-expected the damned boy to jump out and stick me in the eye." Then, to the crowd of animals and men he called, "Good evening, one and all!"

Every head–man and beast alike–turned to its neighbor and nattered with curious whispers until the Prince spoke again.

"Allow me to introduce myself: I am your–" but he stopped short of designating himself their rightful royal ruler. "I am the Purloiner." There was a silence. "To be precise, I am the Purloiner of Previously Less Portable Properties of Other Peoples–" he elaborated with inscrutable eloquence. The Prince removed his hat again and made another trendy gesture, unsure whether or not he had won the crowd over. "–Who Also Wears Purple."

Many of the heads shifted sideways by a whisker: at the Prince's side, the Queen had begun to come around and was struggling to get her head out of the haversack with great difficulty, for the Prince had cleverly locked her arms behind her back in his duplicitously supportive embrace.

"My companion is of no consequence," the Prince told the crowd, and then, just as she managed to rid herself of the sack, he plopped his top hat over her head straight down to her collarbone. This caused a bewildered titter among the animals, but the man and woman with the tinker wagon looked worried, aware that this macabre performance on the hillcrest was more than foolish theatrics. Nevertheless, they did no more than wring their hands and shush their children.

Silence resumed. All eyes waited on the Prince.

"They seem not to know why they're here," the Prince whispered to the Queen, who was breathing in fits and starts inside the hat. With a devious chortle he suddenly shouted, "There is treasure in the garden! The old man inside would hoard it for himself! He is not a meek gardener, grabbling his own potatoes all the day; he is a Guardian! A Godless Guardian of Greedily Begotten Gobs and Gobs of Glittering Gold! Join me, neighbors, let us stomp down the gate, and you can all be as rich as robbers!"

The animals stared at the Prince blankly, baffled by his talk of men's affairs. The tinker man and woman were no more beguiled–indeed they looked more anxious than before. The woman turned to her man, imploring him to intervene. He grimly shook his head.

The Prince watched them all with darting eyes, his grip on the Queen as tight as shackles. "Very well," he equivocated, thinking fast on his ever-jostling feet, "if they will not join me..."

Employing the same practiced fluidity by which he had always switched his hat for his bottle with a single sleight of hand, the Prince switched himself with the Queen so that she was the one straddling the bicycle. He placed her good hand on the left handlebar where her thumb could reach the bell.

"You see? I am a _good_ brother. I give you back your priceless plaything. I never intended to _borrow_ it from you on that fateful day, but after father requested that I leave, it was the first thing I saw on my way to the stables. I never expected to be gone quite so long."

The bicycle was as undersized for the Queen as it was for the Prince. He bent down to cram her feet into the iron stirrups. She shook her head frantically but the top hat was too snug to escape from.

"Don't worry," said the Prince as he gave her a gentle pat on the back, pushing her over the lip of the hill, "it's like cutting down a tree–you never forget how."

The Queen careened down the hill ringing the silver bell like a beleaguered woodpecker as animals scurried and scampered out of her way lest their tails be run over. The training wheels whizzed and clacked but kept her upright and centered. She could not pull her feet out of the child-sized stirrups to break her speed before she crashed into the gate.

The Queen catapulted over the handlebars, which were bent like broken sticks. The bicycle capsized and the silver bell broke off and rolled away.

The white gate creaked open.

The Queen rose from her stomach to all fours and crawled into the garden, finally tearing the top hat off her face. She headed straight for the clearing of the stump.

Animals and men, the crowd turned their collective eyes back to the Prince, still a silhouette atop a hill that knew no home on any map. He stared, stunned, at the wreckage of the Queen's crash. Then he unclasped his billowing cloak. It blew away in the wind like a purple ghost and was gone. Without the sable cowl or his hat to hide him, the Prince's head appeared remarkably small and shriveled, like a peeled apple that had spent all day in the sun. He had no beard, no moustache, and no eyebrows, as if no hair would consent to grow on such decrepit turf.

He was garbed now in nothing but his boots and a pair of long pajamas, once rich purple, perhaps, but now as faded as the Queen's green dress. There were grass stains and dried blood on his knees from the night he had hidden in the bushes outside his sister's window at the inn. He cracked his nose, swung his axe over one shoulder like a bindle, and marched down the hill after the Queen.

A long shadow shaped like a cross enveloped the Prince. He looked up to the sky just as a downpour of white and purple-speckled poop drenched him like his own personal storm cloud. It smelled of fetid grog.

The throng of onlookers were stupefied for a long, held breath before they broke into tidal peals of laughter. The tinker children all fell off the wagon holding their sides and pointing to the great beast in the sky.

The Prince cursed, wiping the excrement from his eyes and mouth, then he ran into the garden and slammed the gate shut behind him.

The white wood began to glow.

*****

Pence and the nut wren danced in a happy circle, holding feather-tips and fingerless hands.

"Direct hit!" cried Pence. "The day is ours!"

The nut wren shuddered with a raucous hoot, "I never heard of a whale playing at leavesdroppings before! Then again, I never heard of a whale flying, either. Good idea, Gramsy!"

The white bird winked as she watched the two celebrate.

The whale swam in a ponderous loop around the garden, halfway between the clouds and the kingdoms of man.

The celebration was short-lived. The white bird clucked once and the nut wren disengaged herself from the merrymaking. "Look!" the wren whistled to Pence.

Down below, every face surrounding the white fence turned to the whale in the sky like so many clovers opening for the morning star.

"Fans!" said Pence. "I _knew_ people would look up to me, one day."

"No, look _in_ the garden," piped the wren.

The Prince had caught up to the Queen a scant pace before she could reach the gardener.

"Hurry!" shouted Pence, leaping onto his new friend's back.

The white bird was all at once next to them. She held the patchwork purse in her beak. The edge of the penny stuck out to Pence.

"Take it," the nut wren prompted.

Pence looked the white bird in the eye as he grabbed the penny. "If you were a potato girl, I should like you very much, and if you were lucky I should give you a kiss on the lips."

"Pence!" screeched the nut wren, jumping into flight as soon as her passenger had his luggage secure, "you can't talk to the Oldest Bird in the Sky like that! How insolent can you be?"

Pence grinned so wide it seemed the corners of his mouth knew no ends. He hunched low to his new friend's back. "We're about to find out. Let's go crash a garden party!"

The wren folded her wings like a sealed envelope and they dove toward the earth.

A diminutive glint on the outskirts of the crowd caught Pence's eye. "I don't believe it! My sword! I see it! It's a miracle!"

"Where?" asked the wren. "Shall I turn?"

Pence hesitated only an instant. "No time. Look, he has her! Hurry!"

They landed just inside the gate.

*****

The gardener's eyes were crusted shut like tree sap dried and turned to amber, but his eyelashes fluttered in recognition when the sound of someone scraping along the path reached his ears. "Pence? Is that you? Oh, lad, haven't you left yet?" His voice was less than a whisper, like wind blown through the hollows of an old tree.

The Queen gasped in pain before she could speak–the Prince had jabbed the butt of his axe down in the center of her back, slamming her belly-down on the neatly raked dirt and clay. "No! It is I, your indelible Prince, come on errand to your garden. Tell me... do you fear my voice?"

The gardener did not move or breathe, let alone answer his uninvited guest. It was but one day since he had given up the white seed and already his left arm was little more than a scraggly root. His right arm was blistered wood to the shoulder and beyond. His chest, throat, and chin were ashen gray where the two afflictions had come to clash in contrast.

"You are the same boy, lived on after I killed your mortal heart?" the Prince quietly asked him. "You are the same old man, of whom the many stories tell?"

The gardener did not respond.

The Queen desperately tried to roll over or wrestle free, but the Prince leaned all his weight onto the axe, pinning her to the ground like a dead butterfly to cork.

"Well then," the Prince said hotly, ill-conditioned to being ignored, "I thought my sister played the poor host, but you've got her trumped, here." He looked around at the garden; he could see the well easily from where he stood. " _That can't be it?_ Why, it's little more than a wormhole and a ring of skipping stones stacked about like baby blocks. And _you_ are no _Guardian_ ," he spat at the gardener. "Were all the many stories a lie?" He picked up his axe, replacing it with the heel of his boot dug into the Queen's spine, but for one breathless instant she was able to speak.

"Pence!" is all she could hoarsely cough.

Thin trickles of earth ran down from the corners of the gardener's eyes, snaking over his wrinkles one by one. "Have I died at last, and dreamt of you?" came his voice, one and the same with the wind rustling the leaves.

"Awake now? _Gooood_ ," said the Prince, grinding his heel down sadistically. "Pay attention." He set the blade of his axe on the Queen's left wrist. She clenched her teeth as the steel bit a line of blood free.

The gardener's nostrils flared in anger.

"You see this?" the Prince bellowed. "Tell me the secret of the garden or I'll cut it off! She will bleed to her last sweet drop at your feet."

"There are no secrets here," said the gardener. "Please, let her go and leave us be."

"No secrets? Let her go? Please? _Har!_ " the Prince barked. "This whole _place_ is a secret! It is hidden better than the Land of Lost Legends. It _teems_ with power!"

"If it is a secret, then where have all the many stories come from?" The voice of the wind was calm. "If it is hidden, then who is outside the fence? And if you think there is such power to unleash, then why don't you leave before it bites off your big nose?"

"Enough!" screamed the Prince, digging the dragonhead deeper into the Queen's wrist. Her blood fell to the path where it was welcomed by the earth as water to a dry tongue. "What will happen if I cut off her hand?" he asked menacingly, though his voice betrayed a glimmer of uncertainty.

"I think you know what will happen," said the gardener.

The Prince eyeballed the gardener with baited breath. A stalactite of whale poop coalesced under the tip of his nose as he waited for the old man to spell out the answer clearly.

"Symmetry," the gardener supplied at length, "but you knew that."

The Prince cackled madly, mirth watering in his eyes. "Oh, sister, did you hear that? How rich! How suiting! So you'll not defend her?" he needled the old man. "You'll not command the air to leave my lungs? Have no roots drag me underground, no flowers make me sneeze and drop my axe?"

The gardener did not move.

"There are three of us, here met," said the Prince. "The only way to bring _symmetry_ is to chop one of you in half! _Har!_ "

With the Prince's toe on the nape of her neck, pushing her chin into the dirt, the Queen still could not speak. Then the browned tips of her hair transformed color to shine white again before the Prince's astounded eyes.

" _What is this?_ _What are you doing?_ " the Prince demanded of the gardener. " _This_ is the power of the garden! _This_ is what I want! Life returns to her–how do you do it? Tell me how or I'll chop her to pieces a bird could swallow!"

The Queen tensed her muscles, testing the Prince's control over her. His boot slipped. He reaffirmed the pressure quickly, his leg in violent tremors as though he was pedaling up a straight wall. He delved the axe deeper into her wrist but she did not wince anymore.

"Tell me!" the Prince shrieked, panicking as he lost leverage by the moment. "The White Tree, the flower, the bird, that ill-bred boy's heart... how are they connected? What is the power that binds them?"

"If you truly seek the wisdom of the garden..." said the old man, pausing to turn his head and give a last sly wink.

"Yes...?" coaxed the Prince, sensing how close he was after a century of search.

"...listen to the stump."

*****

"Did he just _wink_ at me?" Pence asked himself. He was watching the reunion from inside his old husk, which the wind had blown to the edge of the small clearing.

The Prince raised his axe over the gardener, screaming, " _Arrrrrgh_! I'm _serious!_ "

Pence saw there was no time to spare. He raised the penny up high in both hands and looked to the sun confidently. The engraving of the princess's sad smile glinted in the dwindling light like a candle's flicker in a small, round window.

Across the garden, cued to the signal of the glinting penny, a bell began to ring.

The Prince looked to the sound, his long nose sweeping side to side like a lighthouse beacon on a foggy night.

Pence ran from the husk to the Queen's side, but there was nowhere to hide. The Prince turned his head back, unable to spot the source of the ringing noise. Just before he saw Pence standing uncovered next to the Queen's armpit, the ringing din burst out from a patch of moondaisies and flew straight for the Prince's face–it was a silver bell with brown and black wings, ringing as hysterically as when the Queen had crashed into the garden gate.

"What's this? More garden mischief?" the Prince cried in alarm, raising his axe like a field-tennis racket.

The nut wren flew in tightening circles around the Prince's head, evading his haphazard swings with ease, but the Prince soon saw that this was no enchantment, only a bird and the bell from the bicycle. He calmed his nerves and waited for a clean hit.

Pence had just enough time to climb over the Queen's shoulder and whisper in her ear, "It is I, Pence. Hurry, this is your only chance for love!"

The Prince took one well-aimed swing at the nut wren and made contact with the broad side of the axe like a steel flyswatter. The silver bell soared like a batted ball over the fence with a final tinny ring; the wren crashed into the underbrush near the gate like a fizzled comet.

While the Prince was distracted the Queen crawled the final pace to the gardener. Pence found a snug ride in the hanging crevice of her bodice, smiling like a child on a swing as he rocked back and forth. And in the short moment before they reached the stump, Pence caught a view of the sun. "You helped me sneak past the Prince–you are a true ally, and I call you my friend in the end, for I expect I go to die. No, no, don't say anything–it's true. But I have lived a long and prosperous life. I am an old man, now. I have no regrets. I do wish you to look after my Mother for me when I'm gone–she will need much comfort, for I am her favorite son. Give her warmth from me." Pence cleared his throat as if embarrassed. "You know I was just kidding the whole time about plotting your untimely demise, right?"

The sun smiled brightly.

"Good," said Pence, much relieved. "Shall we shake on it?" He held out his hand pleasantly, but just then the Queen touched the gardener's foot, surprising both the old man and the boy. The gardener's left hand twitched at the familiarity of her warm skin on his own.

"Yes, _yes_ , almost there," Pence murmured in rapturous anticipation, getting ready to jump to the gardener's knee as soon as he was within range. The heartseed pounded fiercely in his chest.

The Prince saw them then and stepped on the Queen's ankle, stopping her short with a splintering of delicate bones. "Yes, _almost_ there," echoed the purple-clad giant. "My, listen to your heart, sister... are you scared of me? Whatever I do to you–should I slaughter you now–I will wish you back to your window. Do not fear it." Then he raised his axe and without ado he cut off her left hand.

The Queen fell flat on her stomach; Pence was squished in her bosom as she fell. A torrent of blood gushed from her arm like a bust dam. Her wrenching screams echoed through the garden; beyond the fence, droves of birds rushed from their trees like startled bats out of a cave. Pence covered his ears with his arms in agony at her shrill, mashing his seashell-sculpted ears into chunky clumps that resembled stepped-on sand castles.

"Tell me now, old fool, how I may live forever," said the Prince when the Queen ran out of voice, "or it will be her heart I cut for next. I will not ask again."

The Prince's words no more reached the gardener's ears now than a penny ever reaches the bottom of a wishing well. The old man looked only at his princess, who, though losing blood like a bubbling spring, pulled herself up to his side. She nestled into the nook of his armpit and smiled like a girl in the branches of her favorite tree.

"I knew you would be here," she said to him. "I think a flower told me... But your heart...?" she tried to ask, her pulse fading fast.

"You are my heart," the gardener whispered in the Queen's ear. He raised his left arm, weightless as green mist, and placed it on her fresh bleeding stump. A hiss filled the air for a moment, the same as when the old man's dismembered finger had landed on the white stump the previous afternoon.

Their arms were made into one when the hiss abated. The Queen's hand and wrist were as white as snow and the blood was gone, evaporated in the fusion. Together, their arms fell into the gardener's lap. Quickly the whiteness spread to the Queen's forearm, her elbow, and above. The gardener's chest, a moment ago ashen gray, was now white as plain as root. Soon his right arm turned white as well, solid wood, still, but no longer charred and cracked. The stub of his excised forefinger grew out like a sapling breaking out of the soil for the first time. His left arm thickened, like a hose filling with water, until it was strong and sturdy. When the Queen's heart beat, Pence heard it echo in the gardener's chest and it filled him with excitement.

He leapt from the Queen's bodice into the gardener's tangled beard. "When they tell my story, they shall say I crossed from heaven to hell in a single bound, and it shall not be a lie," he narrated to himself with wry chagrin.

"Did you not hear me last I told you, on that fateful day?" the Prince lorded over them. "Your love I shall not allow. It does not please me. I do not wish it." He lifted his axe to swing at the gardener. "What say you, now?"

The old man said nothing while the Queen closed her eyes and died, content in his embrace.

"A man of few words," remarked the Prince. He reared the axe back. "So be it."

With his head resting at the edge of the stump where half of a charmed heart was carved, the old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, no one can say. This is the last mystery of old men, and with none but the old is it shared.

Pence looked back and forth from the Prince's axe to the gardener's face. All he could see was the old man's walnut nose and the hairs growing out of it. "This is it," Pence whispered to his creator, "you've got him right where you want him. Use your powers. Obliterate him. He deserves it! Massacre him! Put the hurt on!"

The gardener smiled his best grandfatherly smile.

The Prince swung his ancient weapon, the dragonheads screeching their air-splitting whistle.

The old man's leg jerked as he died, kicking the bucket beside him. The water soaked into the ground around his heels and his feet sank slowly into the wet silt like thirsty roots.

There were a hundred and more rings in the old man's neck, now a stump in its own right. His head rolled into the checkered pumpkin patch. His heart, of course, had stopped beating long ago.

The gardener's beard was cut free along with his head, and Pence–peeking out curiously as he waited for his creator to fight back–had nearly lost his own. When the beard fell away, Pence managed to dive into the cut hole in the gardener's breast pocket without being seen, balancing there like a tightrope walker on the blade of the whittling knife which had never been removed from the old man's ribcage.

Snug inside the gardener's tunic, pressed against the savage scars on the old man's chest, Pence flung a hand over his mouth as though it could stifle the heartseed, which was drum-rolling fiercely to a final act.
Chapter XXIII

Pence peeked out of the gardener's pocket like a child hiding behind a window curtain from his rampaging father. The Prince walked to the well and stood above it, wondering how to wish for something without a penny to pay the price, and finding himself without any experience or good faith in such matters. Shoulders slouched, he kicked a stone into the abyss. If he voiced his disappointment when the stone hit the bottom, Pence could not hear.

The Prince returned to the stump. "I may not have a coin to throw in, sister, but I have you, and one Penny is much the same as another." The Prince grabbed her by the hair and pulled her body up from its peace. "And if the well cannot tender me a wish, at least it will cleanse me of _you_. Come to think on it... I do not wish for you back, after all. What have you ever been to me but a curse?"

The Queen had become one at the arm with the gardener, and he was no sooner going to rise than any old man who is good and settled in his seat, no matter how he was pulled or pried. "Madness!" the Prince cried in frustration. "Must I ever and always use this forsaken axe? Must I chop your bodies apart into firewood?"

Pence heard this and bolted out of hiding, dashed across the gardener's marble-like neck, and leapt to the stump of the White Tree, nearly fumbling away the penny as he did so. The perimeter of white bark began to glow hotly. "Unhand her!" he shouted at the Prince.

The Prince let the Queen fall back to the gardener's lap. His brooding shadow threw the stump into darkness, which made a jagged halo out of the glowing perimeter of bark. "By gundy!" he exclaimed. "If it isn't our recurring gentleman of fancy, returned from his voyage to sea! Had I known the old biddy–my sister, here–was going to throw you out her window, I'd have put you in a bottle with a little ship inside of it! _Har!_ I have one in my sack, you know. _Fiiiine_ purple sails."

Pence's flesh radiated brightly and his heart thumped faster than a hummingbird's wings.

"I see you have brought my penny back, young master," said the Prince with his teeth bared like bars on a birdcage. "Give it to me."

Pence held his inheritance protectively to one side. His green eyes blazed with inner fire. Indeed, there was nothing green in the garden that did _not_ now grow a fledgling light inside itself, some candle or soul of living magic awakened for the fight.

"I _took_ you to the Princess. I _upheld_ my obligation. Now, you conniving, edible _thing_ , give me the penny!"

"No deal! No deal!" Pence objected like a lawyer at a closing trial. "You defrauded yourself, stuffed me in a bottle, and killed my old man's honey-pie! You ruined my whole life, you idiot, and I only got three days! Everything has gone wrong since you showed up–how do you think that makes _me_ feel? Cutting peoples' heads off–what's _wrong_ with you? I wish I had my sword. You wouldn't even know what hit you. It would be my sword."

The Prince stared at Pence until he realized he was beginning to nod his head in time to the boy's heartbeat. Sighing sheepishly, he lifted his axe off the ground with his good hand. " _You_ are the _real_ secret of the garden," he said above Pence. "The seed of the White Tree gives you life–do you deny it? It is the root of life itself, is it not? I'm going to cut you in half," he detailed without compunction, "take out your heart, and swallow it. Then I'm going to eat the rest of you, just to be sure... though I imagine I'll spit out your brain like a cherry pit and use your eyes to buy more grog. I expect that makes you _feel_ like you've greatly failed and that your three-days-life has been abundantly trivial."

Pence's skin was as white as the sun. All around him green mist rose from the surface of the stump like steam rising from a winter lake until the small boy in the middle was all but concealed. In his arms, the penny began to glow, too.

The Prince's eyes bulged in dread at all the elemental power confronting him. "I shall consider it my first royal duty as the newly ascended _King_ of this realm to put this _traitor's_ head–" he nodded down to the gardener, "–on a spike outside the gate and set fire to the rest before I take my leave." He began swinging his axe in a wide circle, as if he wielded a ball and chain.

The penny suddenly burned root-white in the shadow of the shrieking dragonheads. Pence looked at the Princess's face fondly in his last moment as he held the penny above his head for a shield. Facing the Prince, the engraved heart glowed as brightly green as the sap of the Holy Tree. "Even a cent may pull a person to the path of their destiny," Pence whispered to himself, preparing for his end. The penny smiled.

The Prince swung the axe around once more and then he stepped into a powerful chop.

Pence put a foot back to brace himself, but he tripped over the gardener's charred stub of a forefinger. He fell on his back in the center of the stump with the penny held above his chest. "Whoops!" were his last words before the dragonheads slammed into the penny, scoring a large cut across the green heart.

The coin remained one, deflecting the Prince's steel. But the force of the blow was more than Pence's matchstick arms could equal; his elbows buckled out and ruptured and the penny was hammered down onto his chest so hard that it smashed his body into paste and his legs and his head shot off like bottles out of a whale's blowhole. Every bite of him flew in a different direction, scattered amid moondaisies and low-sweeping ferns, windbells and soggybottom bushes. The white seed was the only thing not lost to the garden–when the axe hit the penny and the penny hit the seed, Pence's heart was driven straight down into the stump like the head of a nail. At once, the white glow and the green mist evaporated from the fence and the stump and every other living thing in sight.

The rhythm of the heartseed still could be heard, deep within the stump, strong and steady... a step slower than a walking tempo... a pace at rest.

The Prince took a step back. He raised an eyebrow and examined his axe: in the single, swift instant in which the black handle had passed over the perimeter of the stump, the green halo had cut the tar-black shaft cleanly in two. The silver dragonheads, freed of their lifelong post, had rebounded off the mystically charged penny and sailed high and away.

The Prince dropped the empty handle and moved to fetch up the penny off the stump, but hesitated. "It seems no one can keep you, Penny, without keeping a curse," he said to the coin itself. "Then again, when has a boy ever gotten himself anything but trouble for holding a girl by the hand too long?"

Then he reached for the ancient coin, anyway, emboldened that the coin had returned to its normal color and composition and that he would only need handle it for a moment. As soon as his fingers closed around the scalding metal, he dashed back to the well.

The Prince raised his hand high. "At last! I wish that a hundred years ago, _I_ found the garden first–" but then he heard a whistling that was unlike any bird. He leaned back. He looked up. The dragonheads were diving for him, their blurring speed inescapable.

The Prince had only time to instinctively raise his good hand over his face and gargle, "No fair!" before the blades reached him. They lopped through his wrist and the tip of his nose and his neck at a gruesome angle and then dove into the earth, buried deep out of reach. The Prince's detached hand and his head and the knob of his pock-marked nose hit the ground at the same time. The penny broke free of his fingers and rolled away from the well like a bicycle without a rider. The Prince's headless body teetered, his legs unconsciously pedaling, then he fell forward into the abyss and was gone.

*****

It was another full day before the crowd around the fence dared to go inside and see what had happened, and only then because a small nut wren with two broken wings whistled to them that the fight was over.

Few of the congregated creatures would venture beyond the threshold of the gate. It was only the tinker man and his woman–both their hats full of nervous, curious birds–to enter the garden to see what could be set right.

The stump was deformed, shaped like two people curled together. There was a small white sapling growing from a tiny hole in the center of its surface, but there was no evidence of tragedy, no blood, no bodies. There was a knife stuck deep into the stump, but when the man tried to remove it the blade would not draw free.

The man and woman left the stump and approached the well. There was a dead hand gloved in black leather and a bald, scabby head lying on the ground, its pale cranium covered in white and purple spots of dried droppings. Birds dove for the gloved hand and pulled at the fingers, flying away in a five-ended tug-o-war.

The tinker man skewered the Prince's head with a spear. The woman picked up the purple top hat from beside the path before they left the garden.

Outside the gate, the man set his spear in the ground with the grisly, bloodied head spit atop it. The Prince's eyes were still bulging and crossed as though trying to see the spike that protruded from the center of his skull. The woman put the stovepipe hat on top as a finishing touch.

The man took the bicycle, as any tinker worth his title would, then he and his woman herded their children together and left the foothills at sunset. Wagon tracks told the trail in the dry dirt and clay.

Perched atop the Prince's whittled-down nose, the nut wren watched them drive away, then she nestled herself underneath the purple hat. It would be warm and safe until her wings healed. She pecked at the flaky skin and brittle skull until she had dug an opening in the bone like an ice-fishing hole. " _Joy! Brains!_ " she piped. "Even better than guts and gall bladder."

*****

Two green gemstones came to rest by a row of moondaisies. They looked up at the setting sun and were filled with every kind of light.

A grain of rice rolled to a stop by the fence. It smelled the harvest wind blowing through the cracks.

Pence's head, laden complete with half-exposed brain and misaligned brow of deep-cut concern, landed next to a white root that looked remarkably like the gardener's left foot. Though blind and deaf and arguably quite dumb, his mouth smiled, happy to be in the company of his favorite friend.

"The boy was named Poeto," said his mouth, and all the flowers leaned in closer to hear, "don't ask me why. He had a good and simple lot in life. And he wore a fantastic cape...
Epilogue

A cold wind slices him. The predators that stalk his pigs have begun to bay. He has still not found his daughter.

With his mind an icy concentration of paternal panic and a calmness born of desperate reason, he has covered much ground in the last hour yet found no trace of her.

From where he last knows her to have been, it is as if she simply sprouted wings and flew away, so silent are her tracks. But if he stops running he will cripple inward for the fear in him. Losing her will bring an end to his own life as surely as spilt blood will kill a man who loses his hand.

And so he comes upon the well. No fool, he finds her footprints at once by the gift of day's last light.

_How long ago?_ He lifts his eyes and searches the shadows surrounding him. _Is something watching me?_ But there are no trees or plants nearby to hide devious eyes.

The well comes not halfway to his knee. Prehistoric as the untamed world before man, it promises to soon crumble in under its own weight, by his reckoning. _Then again_ , he thinks.

The depths of the well reced to a nonexistent blackness that knows no light.

_Did she fall in?_ The notion brings him to his knees. He stares into the void and inhales the ancient musk of the world. The hole falls _forever_ , claims the scent.

Hallucinations of her screaming as she falls twist his mind.

_Wait._ _What if...?_

He checks the tracks. _Shame!_ He had all but succumbed to his fears when the tracks are right in front of him, waiting to tell the rest of her story. He hastily studies the ground, then again to be certain he has missed nothing. She did not fall into forever. She circled back to the foothills.

He rises, hesitates... and digs a calloused hand into his overcrowded pocket, withdrawing an old brown penny. _If there ever was a time..._

The coin is filthy as a curse, but the face engraved upon it is just visible. _A girl... young... such a sad smile..._

On the reverse side is a straight but shallow cut set through the middle. There is perhaps some earlier engraving underneath, now obscured. He cannot remember how he came by the penny.

The image of the girl echoes in his thoughts. It squeezes his racing heart in a wretched rapture; it torments him as time itself transforms.

_Got to move!_ _Getting dark._ _What about the pigs? Must find my little girl_. "Bleed the pigs!" he loudly swears.

Without further reflection he drops the penny into the well, turns, and sets off. He is a grown man, and grown men do not believe in fairytale endings when their children are lost. But he welcomes the small company of hope in his wish that his daughter's fate is not foregone and that she might fly back to his arms before the end.
The End

Cool rain fell for days. Deep roots were replenished. In the morning sun the dew on the grass sparkled like viridescent gemstones.

After the day that a Prince's head was raised on a spike outside its gate the garden was no longer so hard to find. For many seasons swarms of animals and men traveled to see the White Tree grow, first as a tiny sapling in the middle of a stump; a hundred years on and it was grown taller than ever before. When the wind blew strong the high branches once again swayed in the shape of a man watching the far-off mountains, never having received what long-awaited wish he waited upon.

It was traveler's tradition to try to pull free the purple-handled knife that stood fast in the tree, but even the mightiest could not remove it. When they left the garden they gave their children coins to toss into the well.

Birdkind returned to their capital, filling the hidden world of white leaves with singsong and chatter. Fruit grew heavy from the bough and down below the garden prospered with flowers and plants from all over the world: rose... dandelion... moondaisy... apple... onion... checkered pumpkin... parsley... potato...

The fence was disassembled by generations of tinkers and traded to scattered carpenters and craftsmen, plank by immaculate plank. What was made with the ageless white wood–good luck charms and toy swords, birdcages, wagon wheels, and wardrobes–was always highly valued, finding homes in kingdoms all around the world.

After countless quiet seasons the number of inquisitive pilgrims to the once-secret garden subsided.

*****

In the highest branches a pair of symmetrical white petals spontaneously diverged. The petals grew large and then uncurled. There was a boy in one and a girl in the other, both green-eyed and dimple-cheeked with wild white hair. They stared at one another. In unison, and without speaking, they raised their hands in mirror time–he his left, she her right–and on their palms were a pair of identical green hearts, as smooth as newborn skin. They shared a knowing smile and climbed down from the tree.

The girl saw the purple handle of the ancient knife and tugged it free without an effort. She gave it to the boy, as if he might care what it was for. He laughed and put it aside.

They walked hand-in-hand through the garden, retracing ancient steps. The boy found a pair of little green gems hiding in the dew and gave them to the girl, but she tossed them away with a playful wink.

Later, when the sun was high and hot, they knelt by the well of crumbling stones to fetch a drink. When the white bucket emerged from the abyss it was chock full of coins: gold, silver, all sizes and every suit. Among the haul were ninety-nine old pennies all of a set, each blank on one side but engraved on the other with a girl smiling brightly enough to bring the sun up early.

As they sipped handfuls of cool water, the boy and girl tossed the pennies back into the well, wishing nothing more in return.

###

Author's note: If you liked Pence, look for my next book, Riverlilly, coming to Smashwords in April 2011. I'm also printing up some paperback versions of Pence this summer with a dozen full-page illustrations. Email if you're interested in seeing the artwork or ordering a copy.

Pence doesn't have a website, but if you have a question please email me at:

riverlilly@gmail.com
