Free Passager by Jane Yolen Page A

arrowpoints, and scratches all over his body, which was brown everywhere from the sun. His thatch of straight, dark hair fell across his face, often obscuring his eyes, which were as green as the woodland, with gold highlights, like rays of sun showing through.
    He had never made a fire, was even a little afraid to, for he believed fire was a younger son of the lightning that he thought the very devil, for it felled several of the great trees and left only glowing embers. Still, if he worshipped anything, it was the trees that sheltered him, fed him, cradled him.
    He laughed at the antics of baby animals but could not tell a joke.
    He imitated birdsong but could not sing.
    He liked the way rain ran down his hair and across his cheeks, but he did not cry. An animal does not cry.
    He was eight years old and alone.

2. HISTORY
    THE WHOLE TIME HE HAD LIVED ALONE IN THE woods came to one easy winter, one very wet spring, one mild summer, and one brilliant fall.

    A year.
    But for an eight-year-old that is a good portion of a lifetime. He remembered all of that year. What he could not recall clearly was how he had come to the woods, how he had come to be alone. What he could recall made him uneasy. He remembered it mostly at night. And in dreams.
    He remembered a large, smoky hearth and the smell of meat drippings. A hand slapped his—he remembered this, though he could not remember who had slapped him or why. That was not one of the bad dreams, though. He could clearly recall the taste of the meat before the slap, and it was good.
    He also remembered sitting atop a great beast, so broad his legs stuck out on either side, and no beast in the forest, not even the deer, was that broad. He could still remember three or four hands holding him up on the beast, steadying him. Each hand had a gold band on the next-to-last finger. And that was a good dream, too. He liked what he could recall of the animals musty smell.
    There was a third dream that was good. Some sweet, clean-smelling face near his own. And a name whispered in his ear. But that dream was the haziest of the good dreams. The word in his ear was softer than any birdcall. It was as quiet as a green inchworm on the spring bough. So quiet he couldn’t make it out at all.
    The other dreams were bad.
    There was the dream of two dragons, one red and one white, asleep in hollow stones. They woke and screamed when he looked at them. That dream ended horribly in flames. He could hear the screams, now dragon and now something else, as if everything screaming was being consumed by fire. The smell he associated with this dream was not so different from the smell of the small hare he had found charred under the roots of a lightning-struck tree.
    And there was another dream that frightened him. A dream of lying within a circle of great stones that danced around him faster and faster, until they made a blurry grey wall that held him in. Awake, he avoided all rocky outcroppings, preferring the forest paths. At night he slept in trees, not caves. The hollow of an oak seemed safer to him than the great, dark, hollow mouths that opened into the hills.
    The scariest dream of all was of a man and a sword. He knew it was a man and a sword, though he had no name for either of them. Sometimes the man pointed the sword at him, sometimes he held it away. The sword’s blade was like a silvery river in which he could read many wonderful and fearful things: dragons, knights riding great beasts, ladies lying in barges on an expanse of water, and—most awful of all—a beautiful woman with long, dark hair that twisted and squirmed like snakes, who beckoned to him with a mouth that was black and tongueless.
    He could not stop the dreams from coming to him, but he had learned how to force himself awake before he was caught forever in the dream. In the dream he would push his hands together, cross his forefingers, and say his name. Then his eyes would open—his real eyes, not his dream