Canebrake Grove

Canebrake Grove smelled like nothing they'd smelled at either of the last two islands — not warm and buttery, not dark and smoky, but green and sharp and outdoorsy, the smell of something growing rather than something made. Tall, cane-like stalks stood in rows taller than Mummy, swaying slightly though there wasn't much wind, each one striped in bands of gold and deep brown like a stick of rock grown straight out of the ground.

"You can just SMELL it wants to be sweets already," Felix announced, flattening himself against the nearest stalk in a way that could generously be called a hug.

Nobody came to meet them at the shore this time. That, more than anything else so far, made Alex slow down.

"No boats," he said, looking along the empty little jetty. "At Liquorice Lane there was someone. At Simmer Slopes there was someone. Here there's nobody at all."

They found the mill first — a long, low building at the grove's edge, two enormous rollers turning slowly inside it, worked round and round by a wheel out front that nobody was currently turning by hand. A thin, sweet-smelling stream trickled from beneath the rollers into a channel that should have carried it onward, except the channel was dry, and the puddle of spilled juice had spread instead across the stone floor just inside the doorway, wide and glistening and going nowhere.

"WATCH THE FLOOR," called a voice from further down the row of stalks — an old, weathered-looking figure, cane-cutting knife in one hand, not looking up from the plant they were examining. "It's murder on shoes, that patch. Been meaning to mop it up all week and never quite got round to it."

Felix, naturally, heard this as a challenge rather than a warning.

• • •

"Bet I can get across before it grabs me," Felix said, eyeing the glistening puddle with the confidence of someone who had never once in his life been wrong about something like this.

"That is not a bet anyone should take," said Alex, already knowing exactly how this would go and choosing to watch anyway, because some things about Felix simply had to be witnessed rather than prevented.

Felix ran. For about four steps, it worked beautifully. On the fifth, his left shoe met the very stickiest part of the puddle, stopped completely, and stayed there while the rest of Felix kept going.

He landed, in sock feet, in a heap on the drier stone beyond it, laughing before he'd even finished falling.

"MY SHOE," he said, sitting up, delighted and horrified in roughly equal measure.

The shoe itself did not stay put for long. The spilled juice was already inching, slow and syrupy, toward the channel and the turning rollers beyond — and the shoe, glued fast to the floor by its own sole, went with it, dragged inch by inch across the stone until it reached the gap beneath the rollers and vanished with a soft, final little shloop.

It came out the other side a full second later, flat as a pressed flower, thin as paper, and — everyone agreed afterward — a truly remarkable shape for a shoe to be.

Alex picked it up between two fingers and held it out at arm's length, turning it slowly. "Well," he said. "That answers what the warning meant."

"That could've been my FOOT," Felix said, with the particular delight of someone who had just survived something and was already rather enjoying having survived it.

"It could not," said Alex. "Your foot's still attached to you. That's just your shoe." He paused. "Your extremely flat shoe."

They both looked at it a moment longer. Then Felix started laughing again, and this time Alex did too.

• • •

The laughing stopped fairly quickly once the actual problem set in.

"Mummy's going to KILL me," Felix said, holding the flattened shoe up like evidence at a trial. "Not even killed like sad-killed. Killed like NO MORE ADVENTURES ALONE, EVER killed."

"She might not mind," Alex offered, though even he didn't sound totally convinced.

"She minded about the JUMPER," Felix said darkly, referring to an incident neither of them ever discussed in detail. "She's going to mind about a whole SHOE."

They agreed, without much further debate, that the sensible plan was to fix it, or find something to fix it with, before anyone at home ever had to find out a shoe had been involved in anything at all. It was, they both privately felt, an excellent plan, and also — though neither said this part out loud — not really the kind of plan either of them would have been especially proud to explain if asked.

They were still turning the flat, useless shoe over between them, no ideas yet, when the old figure from the rows finally came to see what all the noise and laughing had been about.

• • •

Saffron looked at the shoe for a long moment, then at Felix's sock foot, then back at the shoe, with the exact expression of someone doing several sums at once and not liking the answer to any of them.

"That'll be the syrup spill," he said, not unkindly, but not exactly apologising either. "Should've mopped it days ago. Been putting off rather a lot of things, lately, if I'm honest."

"Days ago?" Alex repeated, gently, the way he asked most of his real questions.

Saffron didn't answer that straight away. He sat down heavily on an upturned crate, cane-knife across his knees, and looked out at his own rows of stalks the way someone looks at something they love and are afraid of losing at the same time.

"You'll have come about the deliveries," he said eventually. It wasn't a question either.

"Liquorice Lane's been out three days," Felix said. "And Ribbon Cove. And Simmer Slopes. Everyone's out of EVERYTHING."

"I know," Saffron said quietly. "I've known the whole time. That's rather the trouble."

Alex sat down slowly on the ground nearby, the way he always did when something was about to matter more than it first looked like it would. "Tell us," he said. Not a demand. Just an offer, held open.

Saffron turned his cane-knife over once in his hands. "There's a girl," he said, slow and careful, the way he seemed to say everything. "Down the far row. Learning the—"

"IS SHE STEALING YOUR CANE?" Felix cut in, already halfway to standing, because guessing felt more useful than waiting.

Saffron blinked at him, entirely unhurried by the interruption. "...the trade," he finished, exactly where he'd left off. "Learning the trade. Quick as anything, quicker than I ever was at her age. Knows ripeness by the smell of a stalk now near as well as I do by the feel of one. Another season, maybe two, and she won't need me telling her a single thing."

"That's good, though," Felix said, honestly baffled. "Isn't it?"

"It is," Saffron agreed, sounding like a man agreeing with a fact he still hadn't quite made peace with. "It is good. I've told myself that every single morning for weeks now, and some mornings I've even believed it." He looked down at his own hands, turning the cane-knife over slowly, the way Felix turned his worry-almond over when he was thinking too hard to sit still. "Forty years I've been the one who says when the cane's ready. Not just 'good enough.' The one who KNOWS."

Felix, without quite meaning to, had sat down properly in the dirt beside him, cross-legged, the flattened shoe forgotten in his lap.

"And I got so busy being frightened of not being that any more," Saffron went on, "I stopped cutting on time. Told myself it could wait another day. Then another." Somewhere down the rows, a stalk creaked and settled, as if the grove itself were listening. "Kept telling myself that right up until there was nothing left in the storehouses to send anywhere at all."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Even Felix, who usually had something to say about everything, was quiet, one hand resting flat against the warm ground like he was checking whether it, too, needed comforting.

"So it wasn't an accident," Alex said slowly, working through it the way he worked through everything, without rushing it. "You just... stopped. On purpose. Because you were scared."

"I was scared," Saffron agreed. "Still am, a bit, saying it out loud. But I don't imagine that's much comfort to Mrs Humbug with her empty jars, or Stripe with a shaping bench standing idle, or —" his eyes went to the small, flat, ex-shoe still sitting between the boys "— whatever happened here."

"It's the shop," Felix said, counting on his fingers, the fingers doing rather more careful work than his mouth usually managed. "And the biscuit people, and the jam people, and probably loads of other people we don't even KNOW about yet."

Saffron's face did something complicated at that — like he was only now, hearing it counted out loud, understanding the actual size of what his own quiet worry had grown into. "I hadn't thought about it stretching quite that far," he admitted, very quietly.

"That's the thing about a chain," Alex said, and Felix looked at him, because this was almost exactly what Alex had said on the boat, except this time Alex said the second half too. "If the person at the start stops passing it along, everyone after them ends up with nothing. Only this time it wasn't nobody's fault. It was just — a person, being frightened, and not saying so."

Saffron looked at Alex for a long moment. "That's rather exactly it," he said. "You're a sharp one."

"He's ALWAYS like this," said Felix, not unkindly, with the specific pride of a little brother showing off something he hadn't personally made but felt entitled to boast about anyway.

• • •

Alex was quiet for a while, the way he was when a proper riddle was arriving rather than a quick one — piece by piece, the shape of it folding itself together before he'd let any of it out.

"I've got a riddle," he said eventually. "There's a stalk in this grove that a hundred cutters could stand round and study for a hundred years, and still not agree on when it's ready. And then there's a girl on the far row who can tell in half a second, just by the smell of it. Which one of them is right?"

Saffron frowned. "The girl, I suppose. If she's as good as I say she is."

"Wrong," said Alex. "Both of them. Every single time. You don't stop being right just because someone else learns to be right too. There's just going to be two of you knowing it instead of one." He paused, letting that sit. "That's not smaller. That's just — more."

Saffron didn't answer straight away. When he did, his voice had gone rough in a way it hadn't been before. "Feels like less, some days," he said. "But nobody's put it to me quite like that before. Mostly people just tell me to hurry up."

"We're not most people," said Felix, with total confidence, still in one sock.

Saffron huffed something that was almost a laugh, stood up slowly, and looked out at his rows properly — really looked, the way Alex had watched Marzipan look at a spring once, long ago and far away, though of course neither boy could have known that. "Right, then," he said. "Best get cutting. There's a fortnight's harvest to catch up on, and I don't imagine any of it's going to cut itself while I sit here feeling sorry for myself."

He picked up the flattened shoe, turned it over once in his big weathered hands, and made a small, thoughtful noise. "Give me a minute with this," he said. "Might be I can do something about it, seeing as it was my spill that caused the trouble in the first place."

He disappeared into the mill and came back a few minutes later with something that was, unmistakably, a shoe again — rougher than the original, the colour of set honey, warm to the touch and smelling faintly of the grove itself, but a shoe all the same, and it fit Felix's foot almost exactly.

"Hardened cane-sugar," Saffron explained, sounding pleased with himself for the first time since they'd met him. "Sets nearly as hard as leather, once it's cooled proper. Won't last forever. Ought to get you home, though."

Felix wiggled his toes inside it, delighted. "It's a SUGAR SHOE."

"Don't lick it," said Alex, entirely too late, because Felix already had.

"You should tell your mum what happened, you know," Saffron added, glancing between them with the particular knowing look of someone who had clearly once been a small boy who broke things himself. "Whatever you two were cooking up between yourselves back there. Shoes get lost. Mums generally survive hearing about it."

Felix and Alex looked at each other. Neither of them said anything about the plan they'd half-made and never quite finished making.

"...Probably," Felix admitted.

• • •

They stayed long enough to watch the first cart of properly, finally, on-time-cut cane roll down toward the mill, and to watch Saffron introduce them — with something that looked almost like pride, rather than fear — to Clove, the quick-learning girl from the far row, who it turned out already knew both their names, on account of, as she put it, "everyone up and down the whole chain knowing everyone's names about three hours after anything interesting happens, that's just how it works out here."

By the time they left, word was already travelling the other way down the chain they'd just climbed. A boat from Simmer Slopes passed them heading in with empty barrels and passed them again an hour later, low in the water, full to the brim with a fortnight's missing cane. Somewhere beyond that, though neither boy saw it happen, a shaping bench at Ribbon Cove would come back to life, a barrel of proper syrup would arrive at a certain iced building with a peppermint-puffing chimney, and — a little further on again — a small parcel of sugar would find its way to a biscuit oven, and another to a strawberry patch's jam pot, each one arriving with the same short, relieved message: sorry for the wait.

At Liquorice Lane, three days after they'd first pushed open its door, Felix and Alex arrived to find the shelves stacked exactly as they should be — humbugs, fudge, liquorice curled up like sleeping cats, gobstoppers arranged by size like a family photo.

Mrs Humbug looked between the boys, the sugar shoe, and the extremely flat, extremely wrong-textured object Felix was carrying in his other hand for reasons nobody had quite explained yet, and decided, wisely, not to ask.

Felix bought exactly one striped sweet, the same kind Stripe had once pressed into his hand, and had just unwrapped it when the jigsaw piece in his pocket, silent and merely warm for the whole long, sticky, sugar-smelling adventure, finally began to glow — properly this time, gold right through, the way it only ever did when there was nothing left unfinished.

"Now it works," Felix said, delighted, around a mouthful of striped sweet.

"It was always going to," said Alex. "It just had rather a lot of chain to get through first."

They were still holding hands, still glowing, when the kitchen came back into focus around them — Mummy, exactly where they'd left her, kettle only just beginning to sing.

P.S. — The flattened shoe was given a place of honour on Felix's windowsill, where it remained for exactly as long as it took Mummy to find it while dusting and ask, in a very particular voice, "Felix. Why is there a completely flat shoe in your bedroom." The full explanation took eleven minutes, several interruptions from Alex correcting details, and ended, to both boys' considerable surprise, in Mummy laughing so hard she had to sit down.

P.P.S. — "Told you," said Alex that evening, not smugly, just as a simple statement of fact. "Mums generally survive hearing about it." Felix, already half asleep and wearing his new sugar shoe to bed despite several requests not to, mumbled something that might have been agreement, and smelled, faintly and pleasantly, of caramel until morning.