A particularly lovely sun-dappled glen opened out into a large grassy space only partially covered by the trees. Some areas of the Wood seemed to lie beneath the Sun, but sometimes it was night instead. An intriguing effect, the Diamond Dogs agreed. Nobody really questioned it.
This clearing was high noon, not scorching but blinding bright. In the center a giant table seemed to grow directly from the ground, with long benches growing up alongside. Benjamin took a seat, knees up to his chin. His eyes were hollow, as if he’d never slept in his life.
A strong-backed woman sat at the table, fletching arrows mid-battle. Her shoulder-length hair was raven black and her cloak was a grayish mauve.
“Anathea,” she said, brusque but not unfriendly. “Watch yourselves, friends. The forest is infected.”
“A pleasure,” said Our Lady Maeve delightfully. “I’m God. We’re looking for the Entwife.”
“That’ll be quite a journey. Going east you’ve got corruption, going west it’s the biggest growth of wildwood I’ve ever seen. Too much of that and a place can get all twisted up. They say the flow turns back on itself, and suchlike.”
Holder nodded at the young woman. She’d seen it herself, apparently.
“What brings you to Redwoods, Anathea?”
“I’m hunting a white hart,” she replied.
“Beautiful,” breathed Maeve, then reconsidered. “…To kill it?”
Anathea shook her head.
“Capture it. For my brother’s ransom. The old judge says he’ll let my brother go free.”
Our Lady cocked her head at that, as if hearing a faraway melody.
“Anathea, how long have you been looking?”
“Long as there’s been a Wood, I’ve been here.”
Something about the way she said it implied eons. The Dreamers tried to imagine having that many memories.
“Can we ask your help in this war?”
Anathea sighed, shaking her head again in the sun.
“I know no magic and very little forestry. I’m highborn, though you would not think it now. We are half-Sidhe,” she said proudly, and shouldered her quiver.
She pointed them toward the safest path, which she warned wasn’t all that safe, and they thanked her warmly. At the clearing’s edge, they turned to see Anathea wave goodbye and head back into the Wood, quiver and bow swinging behind her.
A few hundred yards past the ranger, Our Lady was bursting with questions Holder promised to explain later.
“Not here,” she said. “The trees are listening.”
The safer path led them near the Silver Springs, a series of waterfalls with a deep pool at the bottom.
“Honnico Nix dwells within Silver Springs,” Holder said, trying to remember more about him. She enjoyed playing the docent role. “Standard murderous fairy type, a drowner, a kind of siren maybe. Lures you in by being gorgeous or singing and then — you’re just bubbles.”
A man surfaced then, treading opaque water and smiling brightly with razor teeth. And he was gorgeous, and he was singing. All just as Holder had said.
And without the slightest ado, the Bard Thomas — overconfident and intrigued, but mostly besotted with desire — shrugged Sailorboy’s hand from his shoulder and speedwalked directly toward the water, unbuttoning his red silk shirt as he went.
Queene Death, immune to the nixie’s charms, quickly and efficiently stopped the Bard — grabbed him with those claws, and pulled him back just as he drew near to the object of his sudden desire. Kk-kkk.
Thomas laughed it off immediately, as one must, but he spent the better part of an hour in anxious quiet.
Much later, most everyone admitted to themselves they would have been five seconds behind Thomas, but it didn’t seem smart to let him know. So little actually chastened the man.
What they would never have agreed upon was exactly what the nixie looked like.
They crossed a line of pines encircling a little pond. Wading in the water was a froggy little guy — a grey-green fellow in what looked like a large-brimmed straw hat tied under his chins.
“Leshy,” Holder whispered. “Careful. That’s not really what he looks like.”
A forest spirit. Slavic. Powerful, old. Strong as Benjamin, maybe.
The Dogs didn’t want to find out. He looked at her, piercingly, for a moment — as if he was checking with her to see how he should react. She didn’t know how either. She shivered, and he nodded.
Came a hooting laughter from the trees. “(I don’t want to know about this),” she signed, and he grinned behind his mask, shaking his head. She couldn’t detect any fear, even as a bit of trepidation equalized between them. It calmed her a little. He was, at least, steadfast.
“Hello,” Our Lady whispered to the leshy.
“Young Lady,” he croaked handsomely. He did not further engage. It seemed their brief audience was at an end. But Our Lady wasn’t finished.
“…Excuse me? Am I disturbing you?”
Everybody kind of wanted OLM to back off the leshy.
“(If we could possibly avoid angering the magical being?)” she signed at him, willing her own fear down so he wouldn’t catch it, turn it into something bigger. He shook his foxy head, equally perturbed.
The beastie closed his eyes at her, opening them again in a slow blink. His smile had rather more teeth than expected, which threw the Goddess off.
“— All the same, good sir. We’ll leave you to it.”
The leshy pointed them toward a moonlit path in the distance. There was more laughter, and strange lights, outside the circle of pines.
The Dreamers did not dally, except for the woman Dog. She turned to look back, like some ill-fated storybook heroine, but was greeted by an empty pond. He must have ribbited away, she thought, and smiled. Forest gods don’t ribbit. She felt him, quizzical at her sudden laughter in his veins.
Wouldn’t it be nice to stay here, in this glen, and learn his secrets? To be alone, in a beautiful forest, could be a beautiful thing. She wondered whether this nostalgia for a never-was might be a part of the leshy’s magic: He lures you in with wisdom, and snatches you up when you’re finally happy.
Maybe that’s acceptable, she thought. Alone, with silence all around.
She shook the whole train of thought from her head and followed at the back of the group. He met with her, and he walked beside her. Just as he had every step before this one.
Back to work. Back into the story.
Holder cautioned them all to step lightly once they reached the moonlight. They looked down to see white, in the bright moonlight where the trees opened up: not chalk, not clay. Ivory.
“This is the Ancient Bone Path,” Holder said in a hush. “Creatures older than time once came here to die, for thousands of years. Creatures younger than those made a road of sorts. It leads through this part of the Wood to an ornate door of bones, which opens onto a world nobody knows anything about. We’re not going that far right now.”
She led them out further into the moonlight.
“But if we’re lucky, we’ll run into…”
A ghostly white woman floated near to them, from out of the darkness. Holder greeted her warmly, with one hand behind her, silently gesturing: Stay back.
“My Lady, I present the Dreamers.”
The shade smiled, her decayed features like a cracked glass doll. She was lovely, with kind eyes and vicious fangs.
“Dreamers. Meet the beautiful, homesick and perpetually frightened Vampire Princess, Annabelle Lee.”
The princess didn’t offer her hand, thank goodness — just smiled silently, grateful for the company.
“She was shipwrecked on this island thirteen years ago, and lived off the creatures of the forest for eight. Back home she was a brilliant musician — an oboe and viola player — and something of a muse. Now she haunts the Bone Path, sharing her tale of woe with any who will hear it.”
Princess Annabelle waved one fingerless hand excitedly at this, and Holder nodded.
She opened her jaws with a glass-on-glass shriek, and began to sing. She rang like a shadowy bell.
Come to me in bare moonlight, at my lover’s grave
Come to me in secret, no lover to betray
Come to me at riverside, come to me by day
Come to me all quick and cold, that I might hear you say
“Come to me by moonlight, dear, for by the moon I live again
Come to me and have no fear — by the moonlight we’ll begin…”
It was a fairly long song. In the end, the group thanked her and wished her well. She whispered like glass trinkets in the wind.
“You’re about to enter a War neither side must win.”
At the time, they thought she meant the Wildwood.
“The dead don’t need a lot, usually,” Holder explained later. “Just to be heard. Like anyone else.”
Also by Jacob Clifton: Dance Yrself Clean, five stories about what love costs, and whether it’s worth it.