The Hungry Wood

Nothing in the wood made a sound, and that was the first thing wrong with it.

Isolde stood where the chapel floor had ended and the leaf mold began, with Odile's hand clamped round her arm, and listened for the ordinary noises of a forest. Wind in the canopy. The dry tick of a beetle. A bird, somewhere, annoyed. She heard nothing at all. The air lay on her ears like wet wool. The trunks rose on every side, black and straight and very close together, their bark scored in deep vertical furrows like the lines of an old face, and the light that came through the branches was the color of dishwater.

Behind them, with a soft sound like a page turning, the chapel wall sealed over and was gone.

"Well," said Odile, in a whisper, "that's the last I'll see of that—"

The words left her mouth and did not arrive.

Isolde felt it happen. It was a tiny thing, a flicker at the edge of hearing, as if the whisper had been caught in the air by a hand and pulled sideways. Odile's mouth went on moving for half a second. Then it closed. Her round face went from cheerful to puzzled to blank, and she looked at Isolde, and said, with an extremely careful voice, "I was going to say something about the chapel. What was it?"

"Don't talk," said Isolde.

The sentence went out of her like a coin out of a pocket. She felt the loss of it in her teeth: the weight of the words, and then no weight at all. She tried to remember the second half of what she had said. There had been an and. There had been something about why. It was simply not there.

She put her hand over her mouth.

On the far side of her, a tall black figure turned his head and regarded her with the dry surprise of a man watching a child discover fire. He did not speak. He lifted a gloved finger and touched it to the bark of the nearest tree, and drew it down in a long deliberate line, leaving a pale scratch. Then he looked at her.

She understood. She took the charcoal out of her pocket.

…

Wood eats spoken words, she wrote on the nearest trunk, in her small square hand. The charcoal skidded on the bark. Not written. Not thought. Only said.

Odile read it over her shoulder, and her eyes grew very round. She fumbled in her apron, found a stub of chalk, and wrote beneath it in enormous loopy letters: HOW DO YOU KNOW?

Isolde looked at the question. She did not know how she knew. It was a hunch, and an unpleasant one, and it had arrived the moment the wood took her sentence. But there were other things she knew, and she wrote those too, quickly, under the question, in a column like a sum.

1. Door 2 = a wood. (Obvious.)

2. Silence. Nothing alive.

3. Every word we say, the wood keeps.

4. There is a rule. It is hidden. It is in a tale.

She stopped. She read the last line twice.

A tale. She was sure of it. She was sure, though she could not have said why, that this place had a story at the center of it, and that she had heard that story before. Something about a child. A child, and a forest, and a number. She had read it on a winter night in a narrow bed, with a lamp on a stool and a head resting against her shoulder, to someone who liked the part where somebody pays.

She shut her eyes. She reached for it, and it was there, very faint, like a smell from a house she'd left.

The Child Who Counted Steps.

Her eyes opened.

Old tale, she wrote. Nasty. A child lost in a wood. She counts her steps to find her way home. She never gets home. Her hand slowed. The end is missing. In the book, the last page was torn out. I always wondered.

Valerian had come up beside her. She felt rather than saw him, a cold tall presence at her shoulder. He took the charcoal stub from her fingers, which she allowed, and wrote under her note in a hand that was surprisingly beautiful, spare and upright and old:

The torn page is the rule.

She looked up at him. He was close enough that she could see the pale scar through his eyebrow, and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. They were not the lines of a man of twenty-six. They were deeper than that.

How do you know? she wrote.

He regarded the question for a long moment. Then he took the charcoal again, and wrote one word, and handed it back.

Habit.

…

They walked.

There was nothing else to do. The wood offered no path, and the trees had no moss on any side, no way of telling north from south, and after the first hundred paces she understood why this was a place that people did not leave. It was a maze with no walls. Every trunk was a twin of the last. The light never changed. She kept the notebook open on her palm and made a mark with the charcoal at every tenth step, and found that her marks lay in no pattern she could use.

Odile walked at her left shoulder, silent, with her pot lid held out in front like a lantern. Valerian walked at her right. He walked easily, as though the ground were a familiar floor, and from time to time his hand would come up and touch a trunk in passing, lightly, the way a man touches the heads of his hounds.

Counting steps, thought Isolde. She had been counting since they entered. One, two, three. The numbers ran in her head, tidy and calm, and she did not say them. Eleven. Twelve.

She stopped.

It was not a decision. It was as if a hand had caught her by the collar. The thirteenth step lay in front of her, a patch of black leaf mold between two roots, and everything in her body refused to enter it. She stood with one foot lifted. She stood so long that Odile ran into her back.

The rule is in the number, she thought.

She put the foot down at a right angle. She turned to the left, where there was nothing, and took a step, and then another, and counted aloud in her head: One. Two. The weight on her shoulders lifted. It was like putting down a sack.

Behind her, Valerian made a small sound in his throat. She turned.

He was looking at her with something she would have called, in anyone else, approval. In him it was only a deepening of the stillness. He lifted two fingers, and then a third, and a fourth, and held up his whole hand with the thumb folded. Twelve. Then he made a slow, turning gesture with the other hand. Turn.

You knew, she thought. You knew the number. You were letting me find it.

She did not know whether to be furious or relieved. She chose, for the moment, to be both. She took out the notebook and wrote it down: Door 2 taboo (probable): do not walk more than twelve steps in a straight line. And under it, because the sampler was still in her mind, she wrote the opening of the tale as she had pieced it from memory:

In the wood the branches lean,

Hungry, patient, evergreen.

Twelve steps forward, then you bend,

Twelve and twelve, until the end.

She had it all at once, as a person remembers a name she has been trying for. It was a children's rhyme, and the second stanza came on the heels of the first, as dry as a rattle:

Say a word and lose it there,

Roots will drink it, roots will share.

Count your steps and hold your tongue,

Or you'll walk it, old and young.

She sat down on a root. She wrote the initials of the stanzas, one under the other, with her hand shaking a little.

I.

S.

And above them, on the page before, with its underline still dark: W. H. A. T.

What is.

…

She put the charcoal down.

It was nothing. It was a coincidence. A child's rhyme with two stanzas, a handful of capital letters. Any four stanzas might spell a word if you looked at them long enough; any two stanzas, any two words. But she had spent her life among texts, and she knew the feel of a thing being done on purpose. The letters had not come out of her own desire to find a pattern. The first rhyme had been four stanzas because the word was four letters long. This one had two, because the word was two.

What is, she wrote. Her fingers felt cold. What is — what?

Valerian had gone very still.

He was not looking at her page. He was looking at nothing. But she saw something shift in his face, at the corner of the mouth and the corner of the eye: not an expression, but the place where an expression would have been. A pale, strained, listening look. It was gone at once. He bent and touched the root beside her, lightly, and wrote on the bark, in a hand that was not quite steady:

You should not look for patterns.

Why? she wrote.

They are not for you.

Who are they for?

He did not answer. He straightened and turned his back, and stood with his head lifted, listening to the silence of the wood.

Interesting, thought Isolde.

…

The voice came an hour later.

She was ahead of the others by then, ten paces on, because she'd found a bent trunk marked with three notches that seemed to mean this way, and she had turned to call them and remembered and bitten her lip. The wood had grown denser. The black trunks pressed in. Her feet ached, and the charcoal marks in her notebook had stopped meaning anything, and she was so tired that when the sound came it took her a full second to know it for what it was.

Izzy.

She went rigid.

It was very faint. It came from the right, from deep in the trees, thin as a thread. It was a young girl's voice, hoarse and cracked, with a child's catch in it, and it had said her name the way no one else on earth had ever said it, with the little rising lilt on the zz, as if she had just been asked to read the last page again.

Izzy, it hurts.

"No," whispered Isolde.

The word was out before she could stop it. She felt it go. She felt the wood drink it, with a small cool sip, and it left no hole. It was a word she could spare.

Izzy. Please. I can't see.

She was moving. She did not remember deciding. Her legs had simply begun to carry her toward the sound, between the black trunks, through the leaf mold, with the notebook falling out of her hand. It's a trick, said the scholar in her head, calm and dry. It's the oldest one in the book. A loved voice in a bad place. You are being baited. And the scholar said it in the same voice as always, and she heard every word, and her feet did not stop.

Seven. Eight.

"Linnet!" she cried.

It was a proper cry, a real one, the kind that comes from the stomach. It flew away between the trees. The voice answered, nearer, delighted: Izzy! And she ran toward it, across the black mould, with her skirts in her fists and the numbers unrolling uselessly in her head. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

Thirteen.

…

The forest moved.

It moved in the way a sleeper moves, all of it at once, with a long low groan. The trunks bent. The black bark opened along the furrows like mouths. A root came up out of the leaf mold under her foot and took her ankle, thick as a man's arm, and another curled round her waist, and the voice in the dark said in her sister's voice, with her sister's laugh, Gotcha.

She went down. The air went out of her. She saw the branches closing overhead, and the canopy folding in, a great dark hand clenching; and a crack, like a whip; and the root round her waist was suddenly in two pieces.

"Isolde!"

It was a man's voice. It was harsh and frightened and raw. It was the first time she had heard him lose it.

She felt hands. They were hard, and cold, and they went under her arms and hauled, and the ground tore away from her ankle in a spray of splinters. She was jerked back against a long black chest. An arm clamped across her ribs like an iron bar. She smelled cold air and leather and something older, a scent of snow on stone, and she heard Valerian say, close to her ear, in a voice from which all the dryness had burned off:

"Do not. Do not do that."

There were black hands all round them. They stood up out of the leaf mold, long and thumbless, and they caught the roots as they struck and tore them like wet cloth. He held her. He did not seem to be thinking about the hands at all. His heart was going hard against her shoulder blade, quick as a bird's, a stranger's heart, and his arm was shaking.

It lasted a long time. When it was over, the wood was quiet.

She sat in the leaves with her back against his chest and her wrist in his glove. Her ankle burned. The trees had straightened. They stood about her again, innocent and black, and the mouths in their bark had closed. Somewhere behind her, Odile was crying noiselessly into her apron.

"It was a trick," she said. She was unsteady. "I knew it. I knew, and I went anyway."

"You counted," said Valerian.

"I counted to thirteen."

"Yes."

"I broke the rule."

"The wood does not kill for one step. It takes. It is a larger thing, and slower, and more patient." His voice was almost level. He had not let go of her wrist. "It wanted you to hurry. It is only a child's game. It cannot hurt you if you do not run."

"But it knew his—" She stopped.

It knew her name.

It had said Izzy. No one in the Hollow knew that. No one in the world had called her that since— She shut her mouth.

"It knew what?" said Valerian.

"The name. The name of the—" She stopped again.

She was holding on to something, the way one holds on to a banister in the dark. A girl's face. A freckled nose. A voice that said not the tame ones. The shape of it was perfectly clear. She could have drawn it. She could have drawn the way the left eyebrow lifted when its owner was lying. But where the name should have been there was a smooth round place, as if a thumb had pressed a pit out of a plum.

"Valerian," said Isolde.

"Yes."

"I called out for someone."

"I heard."

"What did I call?"

He said nothing. His grip tightened, very slightly, on her wrist.

"Who was it?" Her voice had begun to rise. "Who was I—" She turned in his arm and looked up into his face, and it was white. "I have someone. She's sixteen. She reads the bad books. She has a—" She groped. She had every detail of the girl, down to the chipped front tooth and the ink on her thumb. She did not have the word. "She's in a bed. She's dying. And I can't—"

She opened her mouth to say it.

There was nothing there.