Free Beguilers by Kate Thompson

round it, inspecting the trunk from top to bottom. I was right; there was no name.
    It was an extraordinary discovery. Finding an unowned jub tree is about as likely as finding a gold mine, and nearly as valuable. I shinned up the tree and knocked down a dozen of them. Most of them I added to the weighty load in my shawl, but I kept out a couple of small ones to eat before I moved on. I had never tasted one before, but I had heard that there’s nothing like a jub-nut if you’re hungry. They have a wonderful invigorating quality, like eating condensed sunshine, which is why they’re so valuable. People buy them for sickly children or convalescents. Apothecaries grind them up and add them to tonics or aphrodisiac potions for the wealthy. The two that I ate sent my spirits soaring and filled me with energy for the next leg of the journey, so that despite the considerable extra weight I covered a lot of ground during the next couple of hours.
    In the cool of the early evening I came to a small clearing which caught the yellow light of the setting sun. Looking back later, I realised that I should have stayed in that pleasant spot and made an early camp for the night, but I was not adept at following life’s orders and I soon got up and pushed on. I pushed on so hard that I came out of the rhododendron belt and into the druze bushes just as it was growing dark, and as I searched for a place to sleep I wished that I had been in less of a hurry.
    No one ever spends time in the were-forest unless they have to. The black leaves of the druze bushes lower the spirits as well as being highly poisonous. It’s considered a dangerous weed, partly because the plants store a huge amount of water in their roots and leaves, and if they become too plentiful in an area they can take water from the ground that would otherwise trickle down to the levels where we grow our food. If it were allowed to, it would spread down the mountainside towards the plain, but one of the main duties of a forester is to cut back any druze that shows up among the trees. The rhododendron seems to be a good match for it and provides a natural barrier, but occasionally a strong out-growth will break through and begin to spread. If that happens a party from the village goes up to clear it out, but there’s no point in trying to plant anything else in its place because the soil where it grows is poisoned for years after it has been cut. So the area has to be checked out on a regular basis unless the druze grows back and re-establishes itself.
    I back-tracked for a few minutes, but in the dusk I must have been travelling among a mixture of druze and rhododendron for some time without realising it and there was no sign of an end to it as I descended. Darkness was catching up with me, and in desperation I made for a heavy thicket of rhododendron which I hoped would be untainted by druze. It isn’t that contact with it will harm you, not in the short term anyway. But it’s difficult to describe the effect that those black leaves have upon the mind. Not only do they lack colour themselves, but they seem to draw all other colours out of their environment so the world appears to consist of nothing except black and grey. I didn’t want to wake up to that.
    It wasn’t until I stopped walking that I realised how cold it had become. I was only a mile or two below the permanent snow-line now, and the air smelled of ice already and held its crisp breath. I unpacked the food from my shawl before I cooled down too much and wrapped it around me to keep the heat in. My supplies tumbled around my feet and I laid out a mat of rhododendron leaves and heaped everything on to it, picking out the yellow-pips and eating them as I went along. I knew that snatchers didn’t come as high as this, but I wasn’t sure about pig-rats. There was no way to be sure they wouldn’t rob me. The best I could do was to curl myself up around my pile of food and hope for the best.
    By now it was fully