Pence Read online

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  The gardener pressed the pellucid green gems into the boy’s face. Like that Pence was staring wide-eyed and unblinking at the world, but he looked only at the gardener.

  The gardener, having had no company for a very long time, smiled his best grandfatherly smile.

  Pence clasped his hands over his heart, either to make sure that his pulse–his only continuing concept of the world thus far–was still where he had last left it, or else because that same pulse was now drumming a ravenous, indefatigable beat inside his chest.

  Imagine a person who has never read a book: if they were to find–in the span of an unexpected instant–that their formally vapid mind was suddenly filled with all the ideas of a library’s worth of pages… that may be what it felt like for Pence to begin to see. His eyes attesting infinite starlight, sparkling with newborn amazement, he stared at his creator.

  The old man’s hair flowed snow white over his sinewy shoulders. He wore a thin tunic the color of seasons of toil and long hours under a merciless sun. His beard was a rippling waterfall, in places tangled, in places frayed. The brown skin of his face was a maze of crinkles that led to dark eyes. His nose resembled a wrinkled walnut.

  There was no shade but gray in the sky when the old man raised the purple-handled knife and with methodical exactness cut across Pence’s face halfway between his rice nose and his chin.

  “Speak then,” the gardener urged the boy, “go on, and tell me I’m not mad to risk the resurrection of the White Tree, for a man’s wish is rarely worth even the penny he pays.”