The Lost Gate Read Online Free Page A

was broken along with a few thousand capillaries.”
    Since neither Zog nor Gyish was even slightly educated in the drowther sciences, they had no idea what they were being accused of having done, but they were clearly angry and abashed at having the tables turn like this.
    â€œAnd while you’re torturing this child,” said Tweng, “and refusing to let him speak, has anyone thought that only he knows where he hung that tee-shirt with a brace of stupid disobedient fairies inside?”
    Danny could have kissed her then and there, if he’d thought that Auntie Tweng would stand for it. Within a few moments, uncles Poot and Mook had Danny on his feet and helped him keep his balance—he was faint with pain—as he led them back to the tree.
    It was farther than Danny had remembered, or perhaps pain magnified the distance, since every step jostled him and made it hurt worse. But finally they were there, with all the Aunts and Uncles—and now a fair entourage of cousins, too—staring up into the tree.
    â€œI don’t see it,” said Zog. “He’s lying.”
    â€œHe said he put it high in the tree,” said Auntie Tweng. “Of course you can’t see it. The leaves are in the way.”
    â€œI can’t climb that thing,” said Uncle Mook.
    â€œCan you get the tree itself to bring them down?” Aunt Lummy asked Uncle Poot.
    â€œIs it on a living branch?” Poot asked Danny. “Green with leaves?”
    â€œYes,” said Danny.
    â€œThen we should try another way,” said Poot, his voice now gentle, “before we ask this scarlet oak for such a sacrifice.”
    â€œThen Zog,” said Auntie Tweng. “Send up a bird to untie the shirt and bring them down.”
    Zog whirled on her, but then seemed to swallow the first terrible thing he had meant to say. Instead he spoke softly. “You know my heartbound died in the war. Such birds as I can speak to now have no such skill as the untying of a knotted shirt. I can make them attack and kill, but not untie a knot.”
    â€œThen someone has to climb the tree,” said Uncle Poot.
    â€œMake a clant first,” said Auntie Tweng, “and see how high it is, and how dangerous the climb might be.”
    Uncle Poot was one of the foremost clanters of the Family, and he must have been showing off a little, for he sat down at the base of the tree and formed his outself into a clant using the leaves and twigs of the living oak. The smaller branches merely bent toward each other to form the leaves into the vague shape of a man. It progressed up the tree by joining higher leaves into the shape and letting lower ones fall away behind it. Soon it came back down, little more than a rapid quivering of the leaves and branches, yet always shaped like a man, and Uncle Poot opened his eyes again.
    â€œHow could you climb so high?” he asked Danny. “How could such slender branches bear your weight?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Danny. “I climbed up them and they didn’t break and I didn’t fall.”
    â€œI can’t send another child up there,” said Uncle Poot. “As we were so recently reminded, we have no healer capable of dealing with grave injuries.”
    â€œThen let me go,” said Danny.
    â€œWith that shoulder?” asked Aunt Lummy. “I don’t think so!”
    â€œI can do it,” said Danny. “It’s only pain. I can still move my arm.”
    So he climbed the tree for the second time today, slowly this time, testing the strength in his left arm and shoulder every time before relying on them to hold him.
    When he was far enough up the tree that he could see none of the people below him, he came to a place where he couldn’t find any kind of handhold at all. The next higher branch was simply out of reach. Yet he had come this way. This high in the tree there were no alternate routes.
    I was moving faster,