Two and Twenty Dark Tales by Georgia McBride Page A

some wavering sound, but his friend clapped a hand over his face.
    “Don’t you dare. S’enough yer drunk, but if they hear ya singin’…”
    “I remember music…”
    “Aye, aye. Ye remember the location of yer house? Let’s get ye home. Enough about music and magic. Ridiculous ideas, both of ‘em. Nothin’ good ever came of thinkin’ on either.”
    After they ambled away, Marnum crept to the spot they’d stood and peered between two ramshackle houses to the fields beyond, and a strange and sudden hill that rose up to be ringed by bobbing lights. He frowned.
    The bobbing lights rearranged themselves, zipping to positions before the hill and lining up—tiny, fluttering, pinpricks of light, marking a path.
    He gulped. It was the wind. Nothing more. The wind and the reflection of stars hanging far above. He looked up at a cloud-covered sky that only the moon dared pierce. If not the reflection of stars, then it was surely swamp gas.
    He was hunted. Told by his mother he was the one to change everything. He’d always been different, he knew.
    He froze at the edge of the road. Don’t step off the road , was the warning from many a childhood tale. Strange things lurked in the wild. But the path to the odd hill was marked and clear. And strange things lurked everywhere—strange as that creature that had barreled into the barracks and mauled Jaxson before they could kill it. No wonder the other workers whispered it was like something straight from a nightmare. He swallowed again, but his feet kept him moving forward. If danger was everywhere, on and off the road, why not take the risk?
    Still, he sprinted from the road’s edge, running pell-mell between the shifting lights, all the way to the hill’s base and across ground that was not at all swampy.
    He bent over to catch his breath. When he straightened, he laughed at his own foolishness. He was nineteen. No need to be scared of things he couldn’t see—especially when what he could see was frightening enough. When the hill tore open, the ground shuddering beneath his feet and hurling him into the hillside’s waiting and rock-lined maw, he reconsidered just what he should be afraid of.
    Pitching forward, he landed hard on his knees. His eyes adjusted to the glow oozing up from a brazier in the middle of a strange room. Smoke filled his nostrils and made his eyes tear and blink at its sweet, acrid scent. The place was dark and littered with reflections and shadows in odd shapes and sizes. He felt, more than saw, walls around him—walls that curved up toward a close but vaulted ceiling.
    A shadow shifted right in front of him, and he stumbled back. “Woman as old as time…” he mumbled.
    A candle stuttered to life, lit from the brazier, and he gasped when it illuminated the face and slender form of a young woman seated cross-legged on the floor. She could have been as much as twelve years his senior or two years his junior, but old as time? Hardly. Yet there was such a slow and steady gravity to her voice, such depth to her dark eyes, that he wondered if the hill had existed before her or had grown up over centuries around her.
    “Speak of what it is you seek,” she said, her gaze slowly taking him in.
    “The Pieces of Eight.” Even as the words came out, he felt fire rise in his face. Ridiculous.
    Her eyes burned with sudden intensity. “Why now?”
    “The Dreamland Tree…” He sighed. “Weird things are happening. Strange creatures coming into the towns and cities, diseases we’ve never suffered before. Things out of nightmares. It’s said this Dreamland Tree needs to be… shaken?”
    Her lips turned up at their ends.
    “It sounds crazy.”
    “Not to one such as I. To shake the Dreamland Tree, you must connect the Pieces of Eight and find the arrangement to reorder your world.”
    Marnum blinked at her. Ridiculous. “You speak as if the tree is tangible— real .”
    “I have slept in the shade of that tree. It is as real as I am,” the