Dreamfisher Read online

  She woke up. The hero old man crouched over the fire, feeding twigs to the embers. The sky glowed all fire colors. It was morning.

  * * *

  “Because I am evil,” the girl explained.

  Sitting beside her on the lowest crag overlooking muchwater, the old man eyed her with his shaggy white eyebrows raised. “They gave you those bruises because you are evil?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in what way, pray tell, are you evil?”

  “I—there are wrong things in me.”

  “Such as?” As he questioned her, the hero pulled out of his pack a stick around which was wrapped the thinnest sinew the girl had ever seen.

  “There are oddnesses in my mind and they leap from my mouth. I say wrong things. I said the sun was like a cake.”

  “Well, so it is, sometimes.” He flipped a rock, plucked a grub from under it, and skewered it upon a feathered device at the end of the sinew.

  “I said the man they wanted me to mate was like a turd.”

  The hero laughed and unwound sinew from his stick.

  “I said he was a turd. That was evil.”

  “It was rude, perhaps, but true?” The hero tossed the grub-feather thing to settle on the top of the muchwater. Like a serpent made of cloud wisp the sinew followed. “What is your name, little one?”

  To name a thing meant to say what it was—an enormity. But perhaps a god was allowed to ask. The girl pointed at the deep-tree-sky-gleaming wonderwater.

  “Your name is Pool? Lake? Tarn?”

  Instead of answering—if she could have answered—the girl gasped, for the selfwater roiled and she saw the dark-moon eyes, the maw, the moongleam jaws seizing. The old man shouted and yanked his end of the sinew, pulling the shining mystery clear out of the water.

  With a scream the girl leaped up, standing rigid. It flapped like a wing, but it was not a wing. It shone like running water, but it was not water. It writhed like a serpent—

  “It’s just a fish!” the hero yelled at her. “Big one! Dinner!”

  He hauled it in. On the rock it thrashed wildly, and behind its eyes, red slits opened like wounds. It suffered from being brought out of the wonderwater, the girl saw. But the hero quickly put an end to its suffering with a stone. It lay still.

  “I have never seen such huge trout as are in this tarn,” he said.

  The girl took two cautious steps forward and crouched by the dead—thought?

  “Fish?” she whispered.

  “Yes. Trout. Big one.”

  With one tentative finger she touched its gleaming flank, all the colors of a wet dawn.

  “Do not touch the fins. Or the gills. They’re sharp.”

  Fins? Gills? She pulled her finger away.

  The old man said, “It’s a pity when they flop so. The one you caught didn’t struggle. Not at all.”

  Her mind thrashed like the hooked trout, then leaped free and flew. She whispered, “You gave me a—a one like this to eat?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because—because it is a thing from out of my mind.”

  For once he was the one who did not understand. He raised his cloud-white brows at her, his rain-blue eyes peering.

  “When I ate it,” she said, “in my mind there was a dragon under the mountain. And the berries were eyes—”

  “Dreams,” the old man hero said. “It gave you dreams. Sometimes if you eat heavily before you sleep—”

  “Dreams?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I never—I never did dreams before.”

  * * *

  Sleep became like the wonderwater; sleep was a dark surface under which mysteries shone, a black cave in which shining dragons dwelt, a deep womb in which every night she was reborn.

  In the days the hero taught her the names of things. Fish, fins, gills, swim, bait, hook. Mantle, robe, toga. To the hero everything had a name or ought to have, even the mountains—Mount Etna, Mount Atlas, Mount Olympus. The hero told her stories of his village, called Athens, where the huts were made of stone. And he wanted to know stories of her village, but she knew none.

  “My people do no stories,” she explained as they sat by the fire after yet another excellent dinner of cresses and wild onions, seedmeal cake and roast trout. “My people do no dreams either.”

  “And names?” the hero teased her, for every day he asked her name and she did not answer. “Do your people do no names either?”

  “Just to say girl, boy, man—” She thought of the turd man. “It was because I named him that they drove me away.”

  The hero gazed at her, his brow troubled. After a moment he made a long arm and plucked a wildflower from somewhere in the dark. He asked her, “What is this?”

  “A flower.”

  “Yes, but what kind? Do you know?”

  She shook her head. Kind? “It looks like a little sun,” she said.

  He smiled. “It’s called daisy, day’s eye. The sun flower.”

  “Flowers have names?”

  “Indeed they do. And so do trees. And fish. And so should you.”

  The girl sat mute.

  The hero asked her, “What are you like, girl?”

  And yes, yes, she knew exactly. “The tarn.”

  “Why?”

  She could not quite explain the darkness, the mystery. “Because odd things leap out of me.”

  He laughed, but not the way the men of her people had sometimes laughed at her; his was a good laugh. “Wonderful things leap out of you.”

  “My people did not think so.”

  “Your people were mistaken. Beautiful things swim in you, is it not so?”

  She nodded yes. “Dreams,” she said. It was the most important name she had yet learned from him.

  “Would you like me to name you? Shall I call you Dreamfisher, little one?”

  She nodded.

  “Will you go back to Athens with me, Dreamfisher?”

  She shook her head. “I must go back to my people.”

  The words jolted him so that he sat up like a rock rat, rigid with shock. “But why? They are cowardly, ignorant—they might kill you!”

  “I have to.” Dreamfisher thought of the deep pool with shining fish in it, the midnight depths of her own mind into which she dove and flew, the great undermountain darkness in which a dragon grew, guarding a nameless treasure. “I have to. They need me. No one else can help them.”

  * * *

  “How dare you!” snarled the Turd, hefting a stone the size of his head in both hands. Others stood poised to hurl stones almost as large. Dreamfisher stood unsurprised, for she had not attempted to conceal her return, toiling up the mountain under her heavy packs. The hero had fashioned the packs for her out of the strange not-hide stuff he called cloth, and he had given her a robe of white cloth to wear. If it were not for the white robe making her people wonder, making them hesitate, they would probably have stoned her to death by now.

  Without giving the Turd more than a glance she eased the packs from her back to the ground. The packs also were making them wonder, she knew. Standing tall now, she thought of the tarn and the hero to strengthen her voice as she said, “I have returned—”

  Someone burst through the crowd and hurtled toward her. Sobbing, her mother lunged to embrace her, arms around her neck, head on her shoulder, crying, “Go, flee now, do not come back. They will kill—”

  “Hush.” Feeling a campfire warmth in her heart, Dreamfisher patted her mother’s back. “Don’t cry, brave one.” She risked the name because her mother deserved it, putting her body between her daughter and the stones. “I have come home to stay. You will see.” Gently she pushed her mother aside.

  To the others, in her strong voice, she said, “I have returned to you bearing a gift from the gods.”

  “Blasphemer!” shouted the Turd. “Upstart!”

  But at the same moment, some youngster cried, “What is it?”

  “What is it?” whispered Dreamfisher’s mother. />
  No one else spoke, but the girl saw still, intent faces, hands sagging under the weight of forgotten stones. “It is a gift to all of you.”

  “Bah! Liar!” The Turd was not to be so easily distracted from his wrath as the others. “Why should we believe—”

  Dreamfisher’s mother turned on him. “Who but the gods could have garbed her so?”

  She heard a muted babble among the others: This is true. Listen to her. Let us hear what she has to say. From a few hands, stones dropped, thunking to the ground, sending their own wordless message.

  Dreamfisher said to the Turd in a quiet, level voice, “It is mostly on your account that this gift was sent.” Without waiting for a reply she crouched, her white robe brushing her bare feet, and began to open the packs, sensing more than seeing how her people drew nearer, forming a silent circle around her, their hands open now and empty.

  When she stood and looked around, yes, the Turd waited sullenly with the others.

  “This is a gift of names from the gods.” From her pack she drew something flat and white. “Eat this, sleep this night, and by dawn you will know your name.”

  “How?” barked the Turd.

  “You will see.” She handed him the first slab of dried fish.

  * * *

  The Turd dreamed of a bear and was called Brownbear thereafter. What the bear in his dream was doing he did not say.

  Dreamfisher’s mother dreamed of a mountain stream and was called Rill.

  Others became Sunwing, Moonbow, Redbuck, Hawkshadow. Some could not choose names from among their dreams and Dreamfisher helped them: Leafswim, Skylove, Dayseye. But her people did not call her Dreamfisher; only the hero from a faraway village named Athens ever called her that. Her people called her Wisewoman and brought her gifts and revered her. She lived by herself in a hut a little farther up the mountain and never took a mate, but all the mothers and fathers brought their babies to her to be named. And all the children flocked to her daily, for she loved to play games of naming with them. This stone, what does it look like? That tree? That cloud? This flower? And she loved to listen as they told her their dreams.

  Edgar Award–winning author Nancy Springer,

  well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,

  has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting…

  DARK LIE

  available in paperback and e-book in November 2012

  from New American Library

  Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer…and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.

  “A darkly riveting read...compelling.”

  —Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author of Nightwatcher and Sleepwalker

  “A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden

  Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.