What the Wood Took

The notebook was lying face-up in the leaves where she had dropped it, open to the first page, and the first page was in her own handwriting.

Odile found it. She brought it back to the hollow log where they had made camp, holding it out in both hands, like a girl carrying a bird, and she did not say anything, because she could not. She crouched beside Isolde and put it in her lap. Then she went and sat down very close, with her knees drawn up and her shoulder pressing Isolde's arm, as if the two of them were sharing one cloak.

Isolde looked down.

Bed 41. Hospice of the Quiet Hour. Lower ward, east aisle. Thirteen days (Surgeon Aldous, Tuesday). Bloom at wrist, reaching elbow. Ask about the headboard script.

And above it, in the corner, underlined twice:

LINNET.

She read it. She read it aloud in her head, syllable by syllable, as a scholar reads a word in an unfamiliar tongue. Two syllables. A soft opening, a clipped close. It made a shape in the mouth that was pleasant and slightly sad. She knew the letters. She could have written them in any alphabet in the world. But it was a word, only a word, like the name of a distant town on a map, and when she looked at it nothing came up out of the page to meet her.

She turned the notebook over. She turned it back.

"It's her name," said Odile, very low. "I'm sure it is. It's got an underline."

Isolde nodded. She felt that if she spoke she would lose that too.

She took up the charcoal and wrote the name beneath it, once, carefully. And again. She wrote it down the margin, ten times, twenty, in a column like a schoolgirl's punishment, and each time her hand moved with perfect fluency and each time the word looked a little less like a word. By the thirtieth it had become a row of small black bones.

She stopped.

"Don't," Odile whispered, and put her hand over Isolde's wrist.

…

They had made a fire. It was not a good fire; there was no dry wood in the Hungry Wood, and the kindling Valerian had cut smoked and spat. But it gave a light of a kind, a low blue flicker in the hollow of the log, and it threw their three shadows up against the trunks like a procession of mourners.

He had not spoken since the root. None of them had, aloud. They had taken to the bark, writing, with charcoal and chalk and in one case a sharpened twig, in a running conversation that scrolled slowly across the trunk of an enormous dead oak. It was a curious intimacy. Odile's loops and Isolde's cramped print and, between them, the tall straight upright strokes of a hand that had been taught penmanship in another century.

Odile had written: I used to know how to make shortbread.

Under it: Then I said so out loud. Now I can only remember that I knew.

And under that, in Valerian's hand, with a slight pause before the first word: The wood does not take what is dear. It takes what is spoken. Perhaps the shortbread will return.

Odile had stared at it, and her lip had trembled, and then she had laughed with her hand clamped over her mouth. She was quite right. It was funny. A girl in the pits of the underworld mourning her shortbread. She had gone on laughing for a full minute, soundlessly, shaking, and then she had cried, and then she had fallen asleep with her head on a root and her pot lid for a pillow.

Isolde sat watching her breathe.

I will get you home, she thought. I will. I swear it.

"You should sleep," wrote a hand, on the bark.

She looked up. He was sitting on the far side of the fire, with his back against the oak, one knee drawn up and the charcoal in his gloved fingers. He had not eaten. She had not once seen him eat. His face in the blue light was cut from ice, all hollows and planes. He might have been an effigy on a tomb, except that the eyes moved.

So should you, she wrote.

I do not.

Never?

I have not found the need.

She regarded that. It had a quiet horror in it, of the kind that only reveals itself on the second reading. She picked up the charcoal, and bent over the bark, and wrote the thing she had been thinking for an hour:

What did you lose?

…

He did not answer at once.

She watched him read it. It took him a long time, for six words. He sat with the charcoal poised above the trunk, in the blue light, and she saw the little muscle in his jaw tighten and slacken, tighten and slacken, as a man's does when he has been asked to carry a weight he has long forgotten the shape of.

He wrote, finally:

Everything that mattered.

She waited.

The faces first. I cannot remember the face of anyone who was ever dear to me. I have tried. It is odd. I know that there were some. I know where they stood, in rooms, and I know the weight of a hand on my sleeve. But when I turn to look at the face, there is a place where it ought to be. His hand paused. The charcoal rasped. Like the glass in a window that has been painted over.

How long?

I do not know.

Longer than a year?

His mouth moved. It was the nearest she had seen him come to a smile, and it was terrible.

Longer than that, wrote Valerian.

She looked at the words for some time. The wood was silent about them. A little damp wind moved through the branches and made no sound. She thought of a thing she had been taught by an elderly professor with ink on his waistcoat: that every language is a way of holding the dead. That the first thing a people do is name their ancestors, and the second is make a rule against forgetting them. That words are the only graves that cannot be dug up.

She thought: I don't have the word. And then, with a small hot twist, as if she had stepped on a nail: But I have the face.

She took the notebook. She turned to a clean page. She held the charcoal for a moment, and shut her eyes, and drew.

…

It took her a quarter of an hour. She had never been good at it. She could do a fair map and a neat diagram of a verb. But she had drawn this particular face before, on the margins of lecture notes, on the backs of envelopes, in fogged windows, for the pleasure of watching it grin at her over the top of a book. The hand knew it. The hand did not need the word.

A thin sharp chin. A scatter of freckles over the bridge of the nose, too many, like spilled pepper. One front tooth chipped from a fall on the ice. Dark straight brows that rose to a peak when their owner was lying. A mouth that was always a little too wide, and was always on the verge of saying something rude.

She finished the eyes last. She looked at them for a while.

Then she turned the notebook round, and held it out across the fire.

Valerian took it.

He held the book in both hands. He did it carefully, as a man handles a dish that might break, and he looked down at the face in the blue light for a long, long time. She could not read his expression. It did not change at all. Only his thumbs, where they gripped the edge of the page, were white.

I do not have the word for her, wrote Isolde, on the bark, in letters that were not quite steady. I have lost it. But I have the face. And I thought: there should be at least one face in the Hollow that someone has kept.

He read that.

He looked at the drawing again. He looked at her. He seemed, for a moment, about to say something. His lips parted. But the wood was listening, and the silence of the place pressed down, and he closed his mouth again with a kind of effort. He lifted the charcoal, and under her message, in a hand that shook very slightly, he wrote:

She is very like you.

She is not.

She has your impatience.

Isolde laughed. It was a silent, shocked, cracked little breath, and she bit it off, and put her fist against her mouth. He was watching her. He was watching her with an expression she'd have called surprise, if she had not known that he did not do surprise.

He gave her back the notebook. His glove brushed her fingers. It stayed there a moment longer than it needed to.

Keep it, wrote the Overseer. I should not like to lose her.

…

The wood was speaking to him.

It had been doing so for hours. It was not a voice. It was a feeling at the back of the skull, a long cold pressure like a thumb on a bruise, and it came from the trunks and the roots and the dead soft leaves, and it said what the forest always said, when he walked in it.

Give me.

He did not give it. He had nothing left to give. The wood had starved on him for years, and had never understood why. It ate the cries of the lost and the names of the dying and, once, memorably, an entire aria sung by a woman who had thought her voice would save her. It did not eat his words, because he had not spoken enough of them in a thousand years to make a meal.

But the girl.

She was asleep at last. She had fallen across her notebook with her cheek on the open page, and her braid had come loose, and a smear of charcoal ran down the side of her nose. Her mouth was a little open. The drawing lay under her hand. He sat with his back to the tree and his knees up and his gloved hands hanging, and looked at her, and told himself that it was a precaution. She was his charge. The covenant required it.

He knew what the covenant required. He had read it, over her shoulder, in the old tongue, and the tongue had sounded in his skull like a bell in a drowned church. He knew that she could not have written it. He knew that nobody could. He knew that he had signed his name at the bottom of it, and that the name had come out of his arm without his leave.

And he knew, with that same cold sureness, that there was something he was forgetting.

It sat in the middle of his mind like a locked door. He could not see it. He could only feel it, as a man feels the shape of a thing in a dark room. Sometimes, when she said a word in that dead script, the door shook in its frame. Sometimes, when she looked at him with that level green-gray gaze, it opened a crack, and a draft came through, and he heard, behind it, a voice that was nearly his:

Tell her.

He did not tell her. He did not know what he would say.

He moved, slowly, so as not to wake her, and drew his coat over her shoulders. It was an absurd thing to do. She was not cold. He was not warm. But the coat was heavy and black and smelled of snow, and when she turned her face into it, with a small sleepy sound, something in his chest that had been still for three hundred years turned over like a stone in a river.

He did not think about that, either.

…

The key was where the tale said it would be.

Twelve and twelve, until the end. They walked it in the morning, if it was morning, in a zigzag that bent every twelve paces, left and right, left and right, Isolde counting on her fingers and Odile chanting the numbers under her breath. The path made a long slow spiral inward. By noon, or what served for it, the black trunks had begun to thin, and the ground rose a little under their feet, and the light turned from gray to the faint green of a pond.

They came out into a clearing.

It was small and round, and in the middle of it stood one tree. It was the largest she had ever seen. It was very old, and very wide, and hollow, split from root to crown by a vertical gap as tall as a door, and in the gap was darkness. From a branch above the opening, on a thread of black silk, hung a small silver bell.

Isolde looked at it. Then she looked at Valerian.

No, he wrote. I cannot touch it. It is a thing of the Door. You must ring it.

What happens?

The tree will ask for a word. He hesitated. It will ask for one more than you have spent. It will ask for one that you would be sorry to lose.

And if I refuse?

Then the Door stays closed.

She stood for a moment looking up at the bell. It was a tiny thing, no bigger than a thimble. It turned a little in the green light, and the thread twisted, and the tongue did not touch the sides. She thought of the page in her notebook, and the face she had drawn, and the row of small black bones.

She thought: What else do I have?

She thought of her mother's name. She thought of the street where she was born. She thought of a hundred conjugations, a hundred verbs. She thought of the word for door in the Old Tongue, which was vael, and which she had first learned at nine years old from a book with a green cover, and which she had loved ever since the way one loves a particular shade of color.

She reached up and rang the bell.

It chimed, once, very sweetly. The tree breathed in.

"Say it," said the wood.

It had a voice after all. It was soft, and dry, and it came from the dark inside the trunk, and it sounded like a great many people whispering at once. Isolde felt her tongue move. She felt the word rise in her mouth like a bubble, and she thought, with real surprise: Oh. It's a small one.

"Cake," she said.

The tree took it. She felt the word go, a faint cool sip. For a moment she could not think what it had meant. Then she remembered: a sweet round thing, with a sticky top, that Odile had once described in the Hungry Wood. She had never eaten it. She would never know what she had given away.

The tree opened.

The gap in its side widened, and wider, and beyond it was not darkness but light: gold, flickering, warm as a church at evening. A long vaulted nave. Rows of candles on rows of iron stands, burning white and clear, and under the candles, in the rafters, pale figures with their faces upturned. She heard the ring of steel. She heard a man shout. She heard, quite distinctly, someone scream in a voice she recognized from a chapel, and she turned, and found the Overseer already at her shoulder, his hand at her back.

"Do not step through yet," said Valerian aloud.

The wood did not take it. She noticed that. He had said a full sentence in front of an open Door, and the wood had not touched it, as if even the trees were afraid to eat him.

"Why?" said Isolde.

"Because there is a battle in the cathedral." He said it very quietly. "And we are about to walk into the middle of it."