Silver in the Wood

by Emily Tesh

  Mrs Silver turned up when the sun was at its height, with Charlie Bondee in tow. The boy had his pistol, and more to the point he had his own axe and a big two-man saw which he was carrying across his back. Tobias stood up when he saw them coming. Bondee looked at him, and for a moment Tobias imagined seeing himself through the lad’s eyes: tall and broad, with heavy shoulders and big hands, long wild hair and bare feet planted in the ground—and here was Bramble curling around him, standing by him, not bothering to conceal herself from human eyes now, so that Tobias was wrapped in thorns and crowned with leaves: the Wild Man of Greenhollow, a lunatic, a bandit, a follower of the old gods, or at least of something like them. Bondee looked afraid. Of course he did. In all of four hundred years, only Silver had never been afraid.

  “Pay no attention to him,” said Mrs Silver. “Or the dryad. It’s not her tree.”

  Well, thought Tobias, Silver and his mother.

  Bondee swallowed a few times. Then he looked up at the old oak. His expression went doubtful.

  “It’s a big job,” he said. “A job and a half. Be faster with more men.”

  “I very much doubt that a large group could even find the place,” said Mrs Silver. “Two will have to do. You shan’t interfere, Mr Finch.” She said it as a fact, not a request: Tobias would not come between her and her hunt for her son. She barely even looked at him.

  Bondee blinked at her as he took in what she meant by two. “Ma’am, it’s not ladies’ work.”

  “You are not the first man to say that to me,” said Mrs Silver.

  “But—”

  “You’ll never handle that saw, Mrs Silver,” said Tobias quietly. He was still holding his axe. He came and stood by Bondee, and made himself look up at the oak. “We’ll need rope,” he said to the woodsman.

  “Aye,” said Bondee after a moment in which Tobias pretended he hadn’t seen the young man’s hand twitch towards his pistol.

  “I’ve enough,” said Tobias. “Mrs Silver.” He nodded at her. She looked at him for a long moment, familiar pale eyes fixed on Tobias’s own, and then she went to fetch the rope.

  * * *

  It took hours to bring the tree down.

  He was too big for easy felling, bigger by far than the slender many-trunked lovelies of the copse that the woodsmen tended year upon year. He’d been a mighty old king of the forest before Tobias ever came near Greenhallow. Bondee had a queer kind of admiration for him. “Must be eight hundred years on him, easy,” he said.

  “More than that,” said Tobias. Maybe not the full three thousand years back to Silver’s primaeval forest—what had he called it—the Hallow Wood. But the time of the wood ran deepest here beneath the oak: maybe so, then.

  They used rope, and they had Mrs Silver hold the ladder, and they went up into the crown of the old oak’s branches to lop him back a piece at a time. Each of the thick branches they brought down would have made a whole trunk for a lesser tree. Bondee kept shaking his head in astonishment. “Fine timber, as well,” he said.

  “It shall have to be burnt,” said Mrs Silver. “Just in case.” She had a queer focus in her eyes as she watched them work, and she was constantly moving, watching and calling out and offering to fetch and carry and lift things, all with the energy of a much younger woman. Bramble had disappeared somewhere. Tobias didn’t blame her for not wanting to watch this. It was a cruel thing to do to a fine old tree.

  By evening nothing was left of the oak’s spreading leafy crown. Tobias stood back on the ground and looked up at the crooked shape of the naked trunk, each curving gesture at a branch coming to an abrupt and ugly halt. A full moon floated beyond it, and the tree’s wreckage cast silvered shadows all around. “Right,” said Bondee. “We’ll have him down tomorrow.”

  “Mr Bondee, if you attempt to walk home through the wood with the job undone, I assure you that you will be dead well before morning,” said Mrs Silver. “We will certainly have the full attention of Greenhollow and its preternatural inhabitants by now. The tree must fall by midnight.”

  * * *

  It took a long time, with Tobias and Bondee both working the big saw, to bring the great trunk down. Mrs Silver sat on a felled branch with Pearl, the traitress, purring in her lap, and stroked her absently left-handed as she watched. She had a small pistol of her own, pearl-handled, close by her right hand. Silver bullets, Tobias guessed. He’d never made any use of silver. Had to make do with flint.

  “Wait!” said Bondee when they were near enough to done, and Tobias wiped sweat off his brow and stood up. Bondee was squinting in the moonlight. Mist had come up out of the trees around them. Tobias looked around and saw that the shape of things had moved while they worked. The wood did that plenty, but it seldom did it to him.

  “That can’t be right,” said Bondee, looking from the oak to Tobias’s cottage and then back to the oak. They’d started the work angling so the tree would fall away. Now after the forest’s shifting the great trunk would come down right through Tobias’s roof.

  Tobias looked at the tree. He thought of four hundred years repairing and re-repairing that roof; of scrubbing out the floors, fixing the doors and shutters, planting and replanting his little garden. Four hundred years while his cottage grew around him like a tree growing its rings; Pearl’s mother and grandmother and great - great - great - great - grandmother all the way back to the cat who’d ambled around Greenhallow Hall when Fabian had been its master; four hundred years of the wood, and barely a soul passing through the whole time. Bramble had never set foot in the cottage, nor had any of her sisters. No fairy would ever have come near the place. And of mortals a few, a very few, and of all those only Henry Silver more than once.

  And he thought of Henry Silver: soaking wet the first time Tobias saw him, wringing out his hair and smiling, trying to flirt the whole damn time—trying though he must have known damn well what Tobias was, after all, all that time while his pale eyes were watching; must have been keeping notes in his damn notebook about it. Silver sitting with him when he had that hole in his leg, after paying for a doctor, telling him old stories; Silver among his books, turning his face up from the map he’d drawn; Silver’s voice rolling up and down, full of hills and valleys, Silver blushing rosy pink when he sang.

  Henry Silver, here in Tobias’s wood, human as could be, until the moment Fabian decided to take him away.

  Bondee was suggesting ways they could get around the problem of the old oak’s fall. Tobias shook his head to all of them. “There’s nothing that’ll stop him coming down where he wants,” he said. “Let it happen.” He looked again at his cottage, neat and tidy as it was. There were things in it that he might have tried to save, if he thought he was going to survive all this. But Mrs Silver was right: he’d outlived his right to be in the world long ago. Time to have done, then.

  Bondee looked at him nervously but didn’t dare argue.

  They finished the felling. The great trunk came down in the end with a crash, down through Tobias’s roof and all the tidy rings of his long existence. The neat little cottage was a smashed ruin. Whatever came out of this night, Tobias knew he would never live there again.

  Now there was nothing in the clearing but wreckage and the gigantic stump. Mrs Silver was on her feet with her pistol in her hand. The mist was boiling out of the trees around them now, and the whole wood thrummed with the expectation of something. Tobias, remembering the sounds of jingling bits and horses’ hooves, picked up his crossbow. Whatever it was that Fabian belonged to now, there were a lot of them. Scores more in the last four hundred years; Tobias had cause to know.

  He heard the hooves, and the bridle bells. But nothing came out of the mist. Mrs Silver lifted her chin and peered around. “It must be now,” she said—firmly, but Tobias could hear the worry underneath. She wanted her son, of course. “With the tree dead it must be—”

  “Tree’s not dead,” said Tobias, before Bondee could.

  He knew it the same way the woodsman knew it, becau
se he knew trees: but he also knew it with the knowledge of the Wild Man of Greenhallow, who felt every slow green beat of the forest’s heart. You could cut a tree down to nothing and it’d still put out shoots in the springtime, if the roots went deep enough. The forest would feed it, the sun would wake it. And no roots were deeper than the old oak’s.

  “We haven’t the tools for the stump,” said Bondee. He was holding his gun too. Tobias hoped Mrs Silver had shared her silver bullets. “We’ll need horse and chain for that, or else gunpowder, for the size of it.” He sounded afraid: spooked, no doubt, by the mist and the bells.

  “It must be done by morning!” snapped Mrs Silver.

  “It’s not possible, ma’am—”

  Tobias said, “I’ll do it.”

  Bondee stared at him. Mrs Silver’s pale eyes fixed on him too. She didn’t look confused like the lad did. Tobias nodded at her. After a moment she returned the nod, regally, and held up a hand to cut Bondee off when he started to object.

  Tobias turned to the great stump, wide across as a dining table.

  “Out you come, now,” he murmured. He planted his feet a shoulders width apart in the ground. After a moment he closed his eyes.

  Here was the wood.

  Slow and green he felt the life of it, the life that had been his life as well these four centuries past. It poured around him thick and steady, binding all together: the long patient strength of the trees that anchored, the deep bright power of the handful of dryads—Tobias felt Bramble clear as day among them, young and strong—and then the small and necessary, the bracken and ferns, the mosses and mushrooms. Here were the songbirds and ravens and solemn wide-winged owls, shy deer and burrowing rabbits, fox and badger and snake, beetles and moths and midges, all the things that were the wood, that lived each in their own way under the shelter of the old oak.

  And here was the oak, no more dead than Tobias was, living in all he had shaped and was a part of. Here was the great stump that was the least of him. And here—

  Tobias felt his footing shift as something crumbled beneath him, and he fell to his knees, almost choking on a sudden gust of foul air that seemed to come out of nowhere. This was not rot. Rot belonged in the wood; it fed the must, went back to the soil, brought forth mushrooms in the wet dark. This was different. It was a foulness that refused to surrender to cleansing decay. Year on year it endured, throwing off poison in all directions, waiting in the dark, coiling itself into the fabric of the wood. He grunted with the effort of keeping it from dragging him in. The stump, he thought, though he could barely think of why any longer, and Silver and Silver’s mother and the poor woodsman were all a fleeting dream. Time to uproot the stump.

  The roots moved in the earth like mighty snakes. Soil rattled away from them. Things knotted deep in the ground cracked and groaned. Bondee let out a stifled oath. Mrs Silver stood up straight. Tobias heard himself let out a wordless roar, and the stump heaved itself from the shuddering ground.

  It was a long time before Tobias could lever himself upright again. When he stood up at last and his swimming vision settled, he saw that Bondee had fainted dead away. Mrs Silver was watching Tobias with a curious look. The stump and its coils of broken roots lay uprooted among the wreckage of the oak in the clearing. The moon-silvered mist was thicker than ever all around them. And where the oak had stood there was a great dark hollow in the ground, gaping open like a mouth. Tobias could still taste foulness in the air, bubbling up from below.

  “No wonder Henry was fascinated,” said Mrs Silver softly, still looking at Tobias. “You are a marvel of the unnatural, Mr Finch.”

  Tobias grunted.

  “Well, then,” she said, turning her attention to the hollow. “Let us descend.”

  Tobias could think of nothing he wanted to do less than to walk down into that darkness. But Mrs Silver came to his side and held out her arm, imperious. “I am not as sprightly as I once was,” she said. “I would appreciate your assistance on the slope.”

  They went down together. The earth underfoot heaved with crawling things fleeing back into the safety of the upturned soil. Every step forward made Tobias’s mouth taste sourer. Silver’s mother seemed fearless, but her hand on Tobias’s forearm gripped very tightly. The hollow itself was not deep: it seemed to be nothing more or less than the space carved out by the old oak’s growing. Cracked tangles of roots still poked roughly out of the walls.

  “I hope they passed Bondee by,” murmured Mrs Silver after a moment.

  Tobias looked up and saw what she meant: the mist that had lurked around the clearing had boiled in closer and now hung over the hollow. He could no longer make out the stars in the sky. It was not dark, but he knew the light they walked by was no longer moonlight.

  Mrs Silver tripped. “Careful, now,” Tobias said.

  “I shouldn’t have looked down,” she replied, and for the first time she sounded shaken.

  Tobias glanced down and then made himself carefully look up again.

  They were walking through a scattered pile of bones. Even a moment’s look had been enough to know that there were many bodies here: scores, hundreds. Horse skulls were strewn among the human bones here and there. There had been a graveyard beneath the oak, buried deep, deeper every year, feeding on the wood as the wood fed upon it in turn.

  At the heart of the pit there was a stone, pitted with time, carved in long grooves. Tobias had never seen it before. He could feel the cold age of it, older than the shrine by the village, older than the barrows on the hills.

  “That, I suppose, is an altar,” said Mrs Silver, with an admirable pretence of calm.

  “Aye. For the old gods,” Tobias said.

  Two figures lay on the ancient stone. One was nothing more than papery grey skin stretched over old bones. Its clothes were rotten rags, and the shape of its teeth was plainly visible under the desiccated flesh of its face. There was a dent in its temple, as if something had broken the skull there. Its hair lay coiled in a brittle braid along its back, still faintly reddish in colour.

  Wrapped in its arms, gripped by bony fingers tipped with long yellow nails, was Henry Silver.

  He lay there as if pleasantly sleeping; his mouth was curved in a faint smile. His mud-coloured curls fell loose around his face, and his collar and cuffs were undone. He’d taken his boots off before he lay down, Tobias saw: they sat neatly side by side at the foot of the altar. Mrs Silver squared her shoulders and marched to his side. She hooked her hands under his arms to pull him from the corpse’s embrace and drag him from the altar. Tobias could have helped her. Silver was a big weight for a little woman to manage and would have been no trouble at all for him. He could have helped, but he was watching Fabian.

  In another lifetime perhaps he would have been the one to dash forward and pull someone he loved away from this ancient and ugly sorcery. Perhaps. Fabian’s dry body did not try to keep hold of Silver. It did not move at all. Tobias kept looking at the dent in its temple and remembering over and over the shadow-bruise on Fabian’s face the night he had taken Silver away, and the sensation of his own skull crumpling on that long-ago evening when Fabian picked up a white stone and smashed Tobias’s head with it.

  “Mother?” he heard Silver say, groggily, and then, “Mr Finch?”

  “Henry, honestly, how could you be such a fool,” said Mrs Silver.

  “Mother,” said Silver, protesting.

  Tobias was watching Fabian’s corpse. He watched its eyes open and its bony hands flex. The flint knife felt cool and steady when his fingers wrapped around it. He walked across the bone-strewn floor and stood over the cracked altar. The dead man looked up at him silently. Four hundred years, bound to the wood, waiting every summer for Fabian to rise out of the shadows blazing like the sun.

  Tobias looked at him a little longer. Silver came up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Come away, Mr Finch,” he said, low and sweet.

  Tobias turned with flint in hand and stabbed him through the eye.


  Mrs Silver screamed shrilly. Tobias heard a shot and felt bright pain bloom in his shoulder from one of her silver bullets. Silver staggered backwards with the knife sticking out of his skull, and then he began to laugh.

  “Toby,” he said, “oh, Toby, Toby, Toby, you were always cleverer than you looked.”

  “Damn you, Fay,” said Tobias, holding his wounded shoulder.

  “I was going to seduce you so prettily,” said Fabian, grinning at him out of Silver’s face with blood dripping from his eye socket. “I was going to sing you songs. We’d do everything all over again, right from the start.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “An you ever loved me,” mocked Fabian. “Toby, I always loved you.” He held his arms stretched out wide. “We’ll bring the wood right up to the house again. We’ll swallow it whole. We’ll sleep in feather beds. You can chase off every monster but me. What do you say, Toby?”

  “You’re a dead man, Fay,” said Tobias, “and even when you were alive you were wicked right through.”

  “Not right through,” said Fabian. “Not right through, Toby; be fairer than that.” He reached up and plucked the knife out of his eye. Blood flooded down the side of his face, and then it slowed to a trickle, and then the trickle turned to dust. He turned and grinned at Mrs Silver. “Oh, Mother, Mother,” he said. “Do you know, I don’t remember ever having a mother.”

  “Henry,” she said. Her voice shook.

  “Not I,” said Fabian. “I am the Lord of Summer, the Master of the Hallow, the prince-by-corpselight. I was here before your darling Henry bought my house; in fact,” he laughed, “I was here before Fabian Rafela’s grandfather built my house.”

  The corpse on the altar was still trying to move, twitching its bone fingers, blinking its dull eyes. Tobias was bleeding. “Fay,” he said.

  “You thought you could take him from me? You thought you could cut down a tree and that would be enough? This is my wood,” said Fabian. “Nothing happens here except by my leave. I am Greenhall—”