Chapter 2
Cassir turned his head to see a dirty dusty boy named Crumb standing in a doorway leading into a hallway dimly lit by candle fire. Crumb, an orphan, was a boy Cassair had spent a lot of time with growing up on the streets. Crumb and his two brothers, Drumb and Clomb, had been orphaned when their parents had mysteriously disappeared in the Broken Bark Forest, locals had claimed to see a little boy running naked in the woods, and as any responsible parent would, folks would follow the boy into the woods and try to help, but would never be seen again. Crumb's parents had allegedly disappeared the same way, but unfortunately, it was never confirmed where they had gone.
Crumb and Cassair had become very good friends over the years they spent with each other in the market streets. The adventures and shoplifting they had formulated together had got them plenty of riches, riches that would allow for Crumb the eldest of the three brothers to provide just a little more than the orphanage could. The keeper of the orphanage, Calub, was getting on in years, still spry and capable of handling the boys he was charged with looking after. He had taught them to read to the best of his abilities, but always told them to try and find books with pictures to better understand their contents. The boys' writing skills weren't too far behind their ability to read. But their manners had been forgotten long ago, when Calub realized how hard it was to teach twenty, give or take, boys how to read. Even his own manners went out the door…hand-in-hand with his patience.
“Crumb, what are you still doing up?” Calub said, keeping a firm grip on Cassair's arm.
“I heard a noise, and got scared you might need help, Calub.” Crumb stepped into the room and started to smile at Cassair. “Cass what are you doing here with your arm in Calub’s hand?”
“Cass?” said Calub scratching his red papered beard. “That doesn't sound familiar, are you new here then? Go on, tell us what happened to your parents?”
“No, no he doesn't belong here, he’s still got parents!” exclaimed Crumb.
“Oh so he is a friend of yours huh? You know him?” Calub lightened his grip on Casair's arm a bit.
Cassair wanted to pull away and run while he still had a chance, the door was still wide open and he was certain he could outrun Calub especially in the dark. But then something, almost as if it was standing behind him, whispered in his ear, “stay”.
“Yes, my parents dropped me off, they don't want me any longer.” He said, unable to think up a lie. In Cassair's mind this was probably true anyway and even if he told Calub where to find his parents, they would probably tell him that exact thing. He gave Crumb a quick glance hoping he would understand and go along with the lie.
Calub, fully letting go of Cassair's arm, took a step back and looked the boy up and down. Other than some dirt and grime from playing in the streets like boys will, his clothes were relatively new or at least well kept, whereas the orphan boys had to make due with what they had. Their clothes were torn and tattered and had holes in them, their shoes were falling apart and some of them only had one sock left if they were lucky to have one at all.
“Didn’t want you any longer?” he said, frowning. “It looks like they could afford you well nuff, how old are you?” asked Calub.
“I’m thirteen and a half," said Cassiar.
Calub exhaled exhaustedly at all the work he would have to do the following day to make sure everything was on the up and up. He would have to report it to the local law enforcement and try to contact the parents just to make sure he wasn’t harboring a runaway child and be blamed as a kidnapper.
“Alright, you can sleep on the floor next to Crumb for the night, and 'n the mornin’ we will figure this all out. Where do your folks live anyway?” he asked. Crumb seemed to be getting more and more excited but Cassiar was beginning to get more and more nervous.
For the evening though Cassiar kept all his clothes on and slept with a single dirty blanket on the floor right next to Crumb's bed. Crumb's bed wasn’t much of a bed. It didn’t have a bed frame at all. It was a mattress made of straw that was poking out of the fabric along the sides. Crumb was a loud sleeper…he didn’t snore so much as he kicked and turned all night, and kept muttering something to himself, but Cassair wasn’t able to make out what he was saying. Cassair didn’t feel like sleeping anyway. He didn’t plan on being caught at the orphanage, nor did he plan to lie about his parents giving him up in the middle of the night. He lied on the floor under his blanket imagining his mother breaking into tears missing him and his father commanding the police to search every nook and cranny for him but he couldn't help but think they would tell Calub that it would be better off for them if he simply kept Cassair and never brought him back.
The next morning by the time the sun had been out for a couple hours already, Crumb finally woke up and rolled over so he was face to face with Cassair.
“Ya’ ready to tell the others you're staying here from now on?” He asked, breathing his morning breath straight into Cassair's face.
“Um, yeah, sure.” Cassair responded.
They got up and Cassair rolled his blanket up and dropped it on the floor where he had laid his head all night. Crumb ran through the bedroom door and down the hall toward the room they had talked to Calub a few hours earlier and started yelling to some other boys in the room, while Cassair was nervous even exiting the room. Before long he could hear dozens of other feet running down the hall with excited laughter and yelling. As the other boys' faces lit up the doorway with smiles and excitement, Cassair couldn’t help but give a smile back. They grabbed him by the arms and pulled him out and they started for the front door, but Calub was sitting at a table in the kitchen that was to the right of the front door.
“Cass, come here for a moment," he slightly shouted to be heard over the boys' excitement. They all got quite immediately and looked back from Calub to Cassair and back again. Calub nodded his head toward the front door and all the boys knew exactly what that meant as they quietly filed out the door into the yard. Calub stood at the door waiting for Cassair to approach the door.
“We have a few errands to run in town and if I’m being honest with you, I would rather try to watch twenty, or however many boys there are here now, in town and try to keep them from stealing everything in sight than trust them not to totally destroy this house," said Calub. He released a gaze and stare combination that seemed to highlight the white hairs scattered throughout his messy hair and the crows feet patterns around his eyes. He waved Cassair through the door and they set off for town.
All the boys, except for Crumb, had disappeared already down the road toward town by the time Cassair got outside, he could only hear them somewhere off in the distance. Cassair had never made this trek in the daytime before, he could see the entire town of Dinah sprawled out, spilling out of the forest along the mountains and foothills out into the coast's shores. He could see the smoke wafting up into the sky from the center of the town where the market was and then all the homes surrounding slowly getting bigger and more elegant as they got closer to the harbor. When Cassair squinted, he could see his neighborhood atop the hill nearest the harbor, a sense of dread overwhelmed him for a second and he felt sick to his stomach imagining what would happen once they reached his house. He already had an idea that they wouldn't mind him going to the orphanage and it was that very thought that worried him.
Calub had strapped three satchels over his back, full of leaves and twigs they had gathered from the surrounding area. No one in town really need the leaves or twigs from Calub but they bought them anyway in a sort of pity to help take care of the orphans. So each week the boys would take turns raking and gathering dried up leaves and sticks and Calub would take them into town and barter them off to whoever would buy them first. He had one standing order however with a bakery in the marketplace. In exchange for the leaves and twigs, the baker would give Calub a few loaves of bread to help feed the boys.
They slowly made their way through town and gave away three bushels of leaves and twigs and before too long they had started making their way to harbor. They reached Cassair's house where Calub would knock on the front door and one of the home keepers would answer the door and summon Cassair's mother to the door.
“Honestly I had no idea he had left. If he wants to stay with you, it would make my life easier. He is constantly nagging for something or another. Be a darling and take him for me,” said Cassair's mother. She had already waved her hand, which meant the conversation was over, and marched back into one of the rooms where Cassair was sure the other women of the hierarchy were sitting and plotting someone's demise.
The walk back toward the market place was for the most part silent, Cassair kept his hands dug deep in his pants pockets with eyes on his feet while they walked until he ran into something, he looked up and it was Calub's legs he had stumbled into.
“If you’re joining our family there's three simple rules you have to follow," said Calub, holding up three fingers. “First, we don't steal… from each other no matter what.” he said exhaling exhaustedly. “Two, there's a few things we do to help fund the orphanage, including the leaves and sticks we brought with us. You'll be helping each week to gather those from the woods around the house from now on. And lastly three, and this is the most important one. We aren’t just an orphanage. You'll be with us for a while so that means we are your new family, so it's important that you'll be in charge of washing your own underoos and keeping your feet clean, understood?” he asked. Cassair nodded his head and they began their walk back to the orphanage in continued silence. Crumb had witnessed the ordeal, he had only small glimpsing memories of his parents before he and his brothers had been passed over to Calub’s hands, they had died somewhere doing something no one knew what or how and where they had died but everyone seemed to know they had in fact died. His parents didn’t just give them up for no reason though, at least they had actually died.
They got back to the orphanage and Calub got to work setting up another bed in the same room as Crumb and his two brothers. He showed Cassair more around the orphanage and surrounding property that they would collect the leaves and sticks from. He showed him an apple orchard they took care of that was not too far behind the house. Those trees didn’t produce a whole lot of apples but the bakery loved using the sticks and leaves from those trees more than the others because of the aroma it would leave on the baked goods. Calub and the boys would coach and help Cassair with their chores until Cassair knew when and how to do everything when it was his turn.
Cassair had never had a real family, so spending so much time with a bunch of boys that only wanted to run around the streets of Dinah and play games was really starting to grow on him. Each day that went by, his old family started to slip away from his mind, slowly forgetting about the cold shouldered remarks and being ignored while trying to be seen.
He had been at the orphanage for only three months, when one night, in the orchard, behind the orphanage, he was raking leaves with a wooden rake. He was alone, thinking about the fun adventures he had gone on with the other boys in town that day. They had only stolen food, some bread, cheese, and a few apples that had run down to the piers and ate while watching the ships sail in and out of the port. All he could hear was calm wind brushing through the trees, when suddenly he thought he heard a whispering voice near him.
“Rake, Rake, Rake.”
He dropped his rake and backed up to a tree looking around him, trying to see where the whisper had come from. He thought it was one of the other boys like Crumb, or maybe it was the Calub, but while he scanned his immediate surroundings he didn’t see anyone around him. He leaned against a tree backing around it slowly to make sure no one was behind him.
“He stopped raking!” muttered another voice, this one further away from him but still nearby.
“Who- who are you?” said Cassair, starting to feel a little more scared now that there were two voices.
“Who else is here?” muttered a third voice.
“No one else, just the one little raking brat,” said the first voice.
“Where are you?” asked Cassair. He had stepped away from the tree going into a small clearing surrounded now by apple trees.
“Can he hear us?” said the third voice.
“Don’t be preposterous, of course he can’t," said the first voice. “And even if he could, they are too dumb to understand," he said with a superior attitude.
“I can hear you, and I'm not dumb either!” said Cassair, feeling irritated now that he could hear who was talking to him, but couldn't see them. The voices stopped for a moment and there was only a breeze again. “Hello?” said Cassair, waiting for a response. He spun around a couple times to try and catch someone that could have been talking, but there was still no one around him. He stood still for a moment until the silence became too much for him to handle and he started to back away from the trees, keeping his eyes on the trees and walked backwards toward the house.
“Can you really hear us?” asked the first voice again a little louder this time, almost shouting it. Cassair froze, holding his breath, not moving a muscle, totally terrified now. “Hop on one foot if you understand what I'm saying," instructed the first voice skeptically. Cassair frowned, but he leaned on his right leg and lifted his left leg and hopped three times. As soon as he began to hop, a chorus of hushed voices started to whisper and ooh and ah all around him.
“Show yourself,” said Cassair. The wind around Cassair picked up and started to spin around his feet. A pile of leaves he was raking into began to blow away. Cassair was too focused on the shadows around the trees trying to spot the ones speaking to him that he didn’t notice the leaves beginning to pick up off the ground in the wind and start to form a humanoid shape right next to him. Cassair kept scanning the area around him, until finally, he met the gaze of a man made up of a bunch of green and brown dry leaves and sticks. “Aaahh!” screamed Cassair, falling onto the hard ground and scooting backwards from the figure.
“My name is Azein Appleberry, direct descendent of Zenix Appleberry, who wasn’t a special apple tree and never really did anything worth mentioning.” Azein puffed his leaf chest up proudly. Cassair, for a split second, heard a voice in his screaming so loud it left him with a slight headache, which helped him overcome his shock. Cassair grabbed his forehead and stood back up. He looked at the figure standing in front of him now.
“Cursed… Befouled…” a voice muttered in Cassair's ear. He wasn’t sure, but he had a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach that those words were meant for Azein. Cassair knew that voice. It was Faulks. But his voice seemed older this time, more foul than before, and Cassair could only see him from the corner of the eye. Suddenly a gust of wind spread out from Cassair's feet pushing outward toward with such force that it knocked the leaves and branches from Azein's legs into the air, like leaves off a tree in the fall. Only Azein's torso was left floating in mid air above where his legs had just been. Cassair could see the look of fear and confusion in his leafy face. Then the rest of Azein's form disintegrated and was left as a pile of leaves and sticks.
“Wait! That wasn’t me!” shouted Cassair in even greater shock now.
“Not the you that you are now, you’re right," said Azein, who had reformed just as quickly as he was knocked a part behind a nearby tree.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Cassair.
“What do you think I mean?” asked Azein, keeping half of his body behind the tree. “I’m only an apple tree, born here, never seen anything beyond this orchard of mine. Such is the curse our foreseeds were burdened with for our laborious mortal task.”
“What curse? And what task?” asked Cassair, taking a step closer to the leaf man who was only peering behind the tree now.
“This is our curse. Not to wander the land and feed the starved and hungry. Not to shade the tired and weary. Not to mulch and sustain forests' floors with our leaves. This is our curse. To stay in one place, only able to wander as far as the wind allows our leaves to wander. That is our curse.”
“Why would anyone curse an apple tree?” wondered Cassair. Azein stepped out from behind his tree with his chest puffed up again.
“It was not only upon apple trees that this curse was layed, but upon all nurturing life on the earth, by the forgotten one long ago, the forgotten one, one of many,” said Azein, proud of his knowledge of such lore.
“How do you break the curse?” Cassair questioned. The air immediately deflated from Azein's chest.
“It cannot be broken, for the one who placed it died many generations ago. Even the oldest of trees have forgotten his real name. No, it is hopeless for us now to complete our great task. We stand here, grow old, and slowly fade away to the first, until we have nothing left to give,” he said looking at the dirt around his feet. “Watching those we are meant to provide for have to struggle to gain from us. Terrible is the curse, and terrible is the giver of this cursed curse,” Azein said.
The trees around the orchard all groaned, and twisted their branches around shuttering leaves, until eight more human-like forms of leaves and branches formed, stepping from behind eight individual trees around the orchard and started to walk toward Azein. Cassair nervously took a step back from the apple trees. He didn’t feel like he was in any danger, but then again he had never seen men made of leaves and sticks before and now there were nine of them surrounding him.
“We want our leaves back, little lost one,” said Azein. “Want what little freedom, we are torturously allowed back,” he said. His form wafting away in a breeze, his leaves and branches floated swiftly toward Cassair's feet and spun back into a human shape right in front of Cassair, putting them face to face now. “Have your kin bring back our leaves.”
Cassair thought about what this could mean and then glanced at the rake sitting in the dirt near Azein's tree.
“You mean the leaves we rake up?” asked Cassair.
“Indeed,” said Azein.
“Oh, well, I actually don’t know what is done with those leaves after we rake them up. We keep some of it as tinder here for the fireplace, but I think Calub takes most of it back into town and sells it or gives it away maybe,” said Cassair.
“Bring back our lost leaves, bring back our little freedom we’re allowed.” The other eight figures held their hands cupped together as if Cassiar had the leaves in his pockets to give back.
“Calub takes the leaves into town and sells them to different people, I can try and find your leaves,” said Cassair.
