Page 80 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being

that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us
down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t
help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”
—

THE WOODEN devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They
were so funny she couldn’t even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep

track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn’t let sixty of their
minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a
volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time
was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that
they were either forgotten or misremembered. The wooden devil’s official duty

was to guard the grave of an alchemist named Rowan Wayland. The grave was
empty; in fact it was one of seven scattered across the continent, and the other
six were empty too. As an alchemist, Wayland had liked the idea of implying
that he’d excelled at his profession—this could only work if he left absolutely no
evidence of having died. His plan had worked. Six centuries had passed and the
residents of the streets surrounding the cemetery still didn’t feel they could rule
out the possibility of his being around somewhere. Every fourteenth of July

without fail the town council received a bag of antique gold from an anonymous
benefactor; symbolic payment for Wayland’s burial plot. It was actually
somewhat unlikely that this payment came from Wayland himself, since the
main reason King Rudolf had ordered the alchemist’s execution was his failure
to produce gold from base metal as promised. Wayland had good friends. They
arranged for a wooden puppet to be buried in place of his body. The man himself

had fled the Czech lands and lived to advance his career in other royal courts.
The wooden devil had been through a lot since she’d been discovered to be
the grave’s sole inhabitant—she’d been waxed and lacquered and pegged to the
earth, frozen, drenched, and dried out again. She’d even seen the traveler in the
trees: “Spinning, as a wheel does.” The life in the wooden devil was slight and
vague, only a little more than that possessed by inanimate puppets, but it was
maintained by the fact that the first impression she gave was one of humanity.

Graveyard visitors approaching the wooden devil from behind tended to mistake
her for someone about the same age as Myrna Semyonova was at that time, and
would confidently strike up conversation, though they were either sheepish or
oddly repulsed when they discovered their mistake. At any rate this persistence