I dreamt of Comfrey and Tin several nights ago, the characters from my 2018 children’s ecological fantasy novels The Wild Folk and The Wild Folk Rising. In the dream, I had dreamt of them. They were dreams within dreams, and yet viscerally real. I suppose this is how fictional characters are in the minds of their writers; dream-like, yet intimately known. I felt they had something to tell me, but I wasn’t sure what. So in honor of that dream, and the recent translation of The Wild Folk and now its sequel The Wild Folk Rising into Turkish, I thought I would share an excerpt from the first book with all of you…
In this excerpt you will meet Comfrey, daughter of the Country, and her leveret companion Myrtle, just after they have ventured across the boundary-line that separates humans from Wild Folk, ordinary from otherworldly….
Chapter 7.
The Fire Hawk
“You mean I can never go home?”
Comfrey stood at the top of the hill, trying to keep her voice steady. Myrtle was clutched in her arms. The Coyote-men were still ranged and snarling behind her, and the camp of the Basket-witches was just down the slope in front of her. She was perched at the edge of the Wild Folk territory, perched at the edge of her own heart, ready to cry. She hadn’t meant to abandon her mother for ever in this way, only to ask the Wild Folk a few questions! The Basket-witch in the fennel-yellow dress beckoned her nearer, one hand on her hip. On the woman’s shoulder the fiery hawk opened his beak and hissed, his tongue an orange flame.
“Don’t show you’re afraid, don’t show weakness,” whispered Myrtle. “Creatures like that Fire Hawk can smell fear.”
“Fire Hawk? It has a name?” Comfrey whispered back, her eyes wide on the shining bird.
“Of course, silly! We are in Olima now!” retorted the leveret, shivering.
Comfrey took a deep breath. Hadn’t she just been boasting the other day of her own courage? She sniffled, blinked several times to clear the tears from her eyes, and began to walk downhill, placing her feet carefully one after the other along a narrow deer trail to the base of the slope, away from the Coyote-men and towards the camp of the Basket-witches.
“I won’t throw you in my soup and eat you, girl, cheer up,” said the woman in the yellow dress as Comfrey drew nearer. She stirred at the pot of nettles, dandelion greens and the bones of deer. “And never,” she added, “is a very strong word. But what would have been the point in coming here, only to turn around and run home again? No one is ever allowed out of the land of the Wild Folk so easily. The Coyote-folk guard the borders well.” She grinned as if this was perfectly amusing. On the woman’s shoulder, the Fire Hawk opened his beak and a single flame curled from his mouth. Somehow, the flames of his feathers did not singe the Basket-witch at all. Myrtle quaked and squirmed deeper into Comfrey’s cloak.
“Then…” stammered Comfrey, dizzied by the Hawk’s bright feathers. “I’m not the first one to come here, to break the rules?” She was standing close to the fire now, and the pot of bubbling dark green soup. The woman set down the ladle with the force of her laughter, and the oak titmouse in her hair flapped its wings, cheeping, which sent the Fire Hawk flapping off into the sky.
“Oh my dear Comfrey, oh my dear Myrtle! Yes, you, little leveret, you can come out now.” Myrtle popped her nose out of Comfrey’s cloak. “You may be the first girl and hare combination to come here together. Yes, that is unusual, it’s true. But how, child, do you think the tales about the Wild Folk got formed? How can you know where an edge between places really is unless somebody steps over and never returns, or returns in fifty years as an old grey man, with another piece of the map?”
“You – you know my name too?” Comfrey exclaimed. Myrtle eased herself slowly to the ground and stayed close to the girl’s ankles, sniffing the ground and the air, where the Fire Hawk circled lazily.
“Just like the Bobcat-girl, and the Greentwins! How do all of you know who I am? See, that’s why we came – that is, we were trying to find you…”
“Soup?” the woman said. She grinned at Comfrey’s startled expression. This was not the reply the girl was expecting. It was not a reply at all. The Basket-witch held out a basket woven all of bracken-fern root fibres, big as a tea mug, and watertight. It was full of steaming green broth. The Hawk swooped lower and landed on the edge of one of the wagons. He lifted his head and the edges of his wings with a ripple of ember orange, a gust of heat. “Not for you, love,” said the woman to the bird. “We are not making hare soup today. These are our guests. Now sit down Comfrey,” she said, turning back to the girl and the leveret. “Eat first, questions later.” The woman placed the bowl in Comfrey’s hands and gestured for her to sit on the ground and drink. Myrtle tucked herself away behind Comfrey’s ankles.
Comfrey was about to make some impatient reply, but a warning nip from Myrtle stilled her, and she sat obediently. The taste of the soup filled her up like nothing she had ever eaten: dark-mineralled greens, salt and cream and the tang of the blood of deer bones. The woman laughed at the look of delight on Comfrey’s face, and sat down with her own soup, reaching a hand to pat Myrtle’s head amiably. Myrtle ducked round the other side of Comfrey in alarm.
“As for your name,” the woman said after she’d slurped almost the entire bowl. “Well, that’s the simple part. Wild Folk can see right into ordinary folk, didn’t you know? And your name’s right there on the surface, easy to pick out as a smell or a colour.”
Comfrey looked up from her soup, startled. She found the woman’s dark face solemn. Up close it was covered in a hundred fine lines.
“You can call me Salix,” the woman continued, “and my sisters Sedge and Rush.”
“Oh,” stammered Comfrey, watching the two women Salix had just named emerge from the far side of the wagon. They carried tall bundles of tule stalks, of sedge roots, of young willow sticks.
“Can you tell me what you meant yesterday about the basket of my own fate?” the girl ventured, eyeing the other Basket-witches shyly.
Salix looked at her with a little smile. Then she ladled soup into two more basket bowls and handed them to her hungry sisters, her yellow dress hushing along the grass. The other Basket-witches had just laid their bundles down and were now seating themselves with contented sighs in the meadow.
“Careful what you ask for,” said the one called Rush. “You never know what you might learn.” Her fibrous hair was pale like oatgrass. She was creamy-skinned, the colour of the milk of mammals and certain flowers, and round hipped, and wore a braided skirt of pale cattail stalks. Comfrey had never seen anyone so white before. Her eyes were paler blue than the winter sky. In her tangled hair perched the yellow flashing body of a goldfinch.
“Well, what about the fate of Farallone?” Comfrey persisted. “The Greentwins say a danger is coming. The risk of another Collapse, worse even than before. That Farallone might die!”
“Nonsense, child,” said the one called Sedge. She was slim as sedge grass, her hair the same green as the soup in its coiled cone-basket headdress, her skin the colour of acorns. She wore all green and her bare feet were covered in silver toe rings. Her voice was sharp and without humour. In her reedy hair a marsh wren rattled her call. “Don’t you know your histories, and all the Elk sacrificed to keep Farallone safe? Those meddlesome Greentwins. One can’t trust the sort who choose to go among your kind. You humans proved your foolishness and your inability to take care of Farallone long ago. You should be ashamed of yourself and of your people. If there was anything amiss we would be the first to know, not you, and not the Greentwins either, who do not respect the boundaries laid by the Elk at the time of the Collapse.”
Comfrey turned to Myrtle, wide-eyed with both hurt and awe. So the Elk of ancient legends was real?
“Told you they were hard to talk to,” the hare said, tentatively wriggling free of Comfrey’s arms now that the Fire Hawk had settled a good distance away. “They are Basket-witches, after all. As a general rule, Wild Folk aren’t greatly fond of humans. They have good reason.”
“But I’m not bad! And neither is my mother, or the old ladies who tell stories in the village, or the cobbler who has been to Tule. And I thought you said the Greentwins were doctors! I know it was very terrible, what happened between the City and the Country, but the people I know are good people…” she trailed off, eyeing Sedge, who eyed her back coldly, arching a disdainful brow.
A great cackling laughter rose up from the two other Basket-witches. Salix had her hands and eyes busy splitting willow switches, but her face folded with mirth, and the chickadee in her hair flapped and chirruped.
“Sedge is a bit hard going,” said Salix, chuckling. “You are an innocent-enough young thing. Perhaps it isn’t fair to blame you for the entire history of your kind. After all, before the coming of the Star-Priests, those men of Albion now called the Brothers, the ancient people of Farallone were quite respectable on the whole. But still, we Wild Folk have good reason not to trust humankind.”
Just then, the Fire Hawk swooped low, his talons extended. The wind from his wings moved Comfrey’s braids, singeing them.
“Great Hare-mother above!” exclaimed Myrtle, flinging herself back into Comfrey’s arms and hiding in her cloak once more.
“You seem to have caught his attention,” said Rush, watching the Fire Hawk with interest. She smoothed absently at her braided tule skirt, then turned to her sisters. “Perhaps we might see something useful in the girl’s weaving. The Fire Hawk has been listless of late. These two have excited him.”
“I’ll say,” muttered Myrtle. “It’s called being a hare.”
“Who is the Fire Hawk, anyway?” said Comfrey, ignoring the leveret and gazing after the luminous bird. Myrtle nipped her from inside the cape.
“Impertinence!” the leveret hissed. “For goodness’ sake Comfrey, be careful, asking the wrong question of the Wild Folk never ends well, and nobody even knows what the wrong question is! All the more reason to take care.”
Salix smiled, her broad face crinkling, and handed Comfrey a bundle of fresh willow. Biting her bottom lip to keep back more words, and breathing deeply, Comfrey took the bundle and sat down among the Basket-witches by their fire.
“The world is very much bigger than you can fathom, Comfrey,” said Salix. “You do not know how one question, one particular path taken or decision made, can affect the whole. How that one little hermit thrush now singing in the firs speaks of the life of the whole forest, and the bobcat hunting voles at the meadow’s edge.”
Comfrey opened her mouth to retort that this was no answer, and to ask another question, but then remembered herself and shut it again.
“Now, help us split these willows, there’s a good lass,” said Rush, touching Comfrey’s hand with a pale finger. “Then you may weave your own basket, and we will read it for you at dawn.”