by Emily Tesh
He let out a piercing screech that did not sound human, and stumbled. Thorny vines had burst from the ground and were snatching at his bare feet. Fabian kicked and swore at them. Tobias blinked, and then blinked again, and suddenly time was pouring slow and green around him, and in its slowness and greenness five tall figures were in the hollow.
He only recognised the smallest of them. The others he had never seen apart from their trees. Bramble’s eyes were glowing like a cat’s in the shadows. She was summoning thorn bushes and nettles by the score to tear at the ghoulish thing that was Fabian’s mind and Silver’s body and the soul of something that Tobias could tell was older by far than both, near as old as the wood: a parasite that had bored in deep long ago.
Tobias wanted to cry out and tell Bramble that it was a waste of time to try to kill the thing that way. All she would do was get herself uprooted for good. But then he realised that she was doing nothing of the sort. While Fabian struggled and swore at her, the other four dryads had taken themselves to the ancient altar and the dry body that lay there.
In the slow green that was the time of the wood Tobias saw them set about the stone. They planted themselves one at each corner, four tall slender aspen trees, and their roots went plunging down into the earth like long spears plunged into flesh. The bones of men and horses that carpeted the hollow cracked and scattered as the new trees grew and grew.
In a matter of moments the altar stone broke. The papery corpse that Fabian had shed like a snakeskin fell to earth. Time suddenly dashed forward like a flooding stream again. Tobias made for the broken stone, reaching out for the body, thinking of the panicked intelligence in those dim eyes. He saw the roots turn it over and push it down, forcing it into earth, more compost. There was a scent in the air of good clean rot as the wood took hold of the hollow.
Fabian screamed in Silver’s voice when the altar cracked. He howled words in a language Tobias did not know, and the spectres that Tobias had heard every year in the mist flooded down the slope towards them all, bringing their light that was not moonlight with them. But the dryads forced their bones under the ground, splitting them smaller and smaller, and the ghosts of all the murdered youths who’d lain on the altar dissipated before they reached the bottom of the pit. Fabian snarled at last and turned on Bramble, who tried in vain to tangle him in thorny vines. He gripped them and they turned grey and then white and fell apart in his grasp. He spat another word in that strange tongue and Tobias cried out hoarsely as Bramble fell, curling in on herself, already cracked and browning at her edges. Fabian looked up at him with Silver’s pale eyes and gave him a sweetly furious smile as he lifted his hands over the crumpling dryad.
A shot rang out in the hollow.
A hole appeared in Fabian’s forehead. He lifted slow hands as if shocked. Blood poured from the wound, and then dust. The dust kept coming. Tobias said, “Fay!” before he meant to, as Fabian stared and stumbled and then collapsed. He was turning to dust even as he fell, Silver’s body blowing away in the fine midnight breeze that was suddenly sighing through the hollow, shaking the four tall new aspen trees. The breeze kissed the sweat that was dripping down Tobias’s forehead and turned him chill and clammy. It tugged at the curls that were falling out of Mrs Silver’s neat hairstyle as she lowered her little pearl-handled pistol.
* * *
They shook Bondee awake and went back to the Hall.
Tobias felt nothing when he crossed the boundary of the wood. He helped Mrs Silver up the stairs and delivered her into the hands of a confused maidservant who took her away, but not before she had ordered that they both be given rooms for the night. The housekeeper knew Bondee—he was her nephew or some such; all Silver’s staff were locals—but looked askance at Tobias, plainly not pleased to see him again. Tobias said nothing. Someone brought him bandages and he took care of the wound in his shoulder, painful but shallow. Then he had nowhere to go, so he went to the bedroom where Silver had put him to convalesce, the room with white walls and heavy furniture where he had first read Tobias the tales he chased like butterflies.
Tobias sat down on the clean white bed and put his head in his hands and sobbed like a child. The sun was rising before he finally slept.
* * *
And there was April, and there was May; spring painting the land with tender green, summer swelling fruit on the bough. Tobias did not feel it. Tobias stayed in the white room, slept like a log on the heavy bed, and said nothing to anyone. Twice a day a servant brought him food on a tray. Mrs Silver must have ordered it. Tobias ate the food, but he would not have missed it if it had not been there.
Mrs Silver came to him after a time. She asked sharp little questions, about Fay, about the wood. Tobias answered them because it seemed the easiest way to have her to leave him be. She’d been into the library, into Silver’s books. She’d found Fay’s books there too. Silver had had them all along, bought them off obscure collectors, dug them out of old libraries: pieces of Fabian Rafela’s life as scoundrel and scholar and halfway wizard. Tobias felt nothing about it. He felt nothing about anything. Mrs Silver brought him one and pointed at a page, the sizzling loops of Fay’s handwriting under a diagram and Silver’s notes around it. Tobias told her he couldn’t read, said nothing else, and endured her scorn and frustration as he might have endured a passing rainstorm.
Mrs Silver couldn’t find the place where the cottage had been, the grave of the old oak. It hadn’t occurred to Tobias she’d try. She wanted Silver, he saw eventually. Twenty-three years old. Of course she wanted Silver.
She’d get nothing back of her son now. The wood had taken him. Tobias had seen it happen.
Then on the first of June Mrs Silver received a letter from a woman who wrote about a cursed lake that took children every year. She summoned Tobias to her study and read it aloud to him.
“Nixie,” said Tobias, eventually, when it became clear that Mrs Silver was waiting for him to say something. “Young ’un.”
“You’re certain?”
“Had one in the old pond a few years back.”
“When?” said Mrs Silver.
Tobias thought hard. “Forty-six. No, forty-four.”
“Which century?”
Tobias shrugged.
Mrs Silver sighed. “Well.”
Tobias said nothing.
“Maybe the change of seasons matters to Greenhollow,” she said. “Maybe it must be the equinox before I can find him.”
Nothing.
“A nixie,” she said. “I’ve never encountered one before. You had better accompany me.”
She took Tobias to town.
They travelled on the stagecoach, then a hundred and twenty miles west by train. The train was a belching smoking monster of a thing. The people looked warily at Tobias’s tall figure and long hair, but when he picked up Mrs Silver’s luggage for her they stopped seeing him. The nixie wasn’t so much trouble, in the end, though Tobias got soaked head to toe and caught a cold after. He sneezed glumly on the train all the way back to town, and there they found three more letters waiting for Mrs Silver, each more urgent than the last.
There were more letters after that, and after that. Mrs Silver gave Tobias a permanent room in the townhouse and a wage. “My assistant,” she said to the few who asked. Tobias felt the absence of the wood as an itch in his heart, but there was nothing real to it. He didn’t belong to the wood anymore, nor it to him.
The town was full of tall smoke-stained buildings, with glass windows that were not cloudy and flawed. It was never dark from night to morning: gas lamps burned in the streets all night long, and Tobias never saw the stars. It was as unlike Greenhallow as it could possibly be. At first it was a nothing of a place, but the months went by, and the room in the townhouse became familiar. It was not the cottage that he had kept precisely to his liking, but it was clean and dry and warm. He spent his wages on baubles at the market, odd little things that took his fancy, porcelain-faced statuettes and prints on card of sailing ships
and coloured glass bottles. They were the things of this world and of this time, human right through. Tobias started to find he liked them.
He kept his flint knife and his steel, his crossbow, a new pistol loaded with plain lead bullets and a little pouch of silver shot he wore at his belt. He laid monsters low across wide swathes of country he’d never seen before; even a few in the towns, turned nastier by their confusion. Sometimes the letters requested Mr Finch and Madam Silver both.
The world was far bigger than Tobias remembered from four centuries ago. It was bigger than he had ever known, and he was living in it. He had thought himself a thing uprooted, like the great oak, ready to begin his death.
“Mr Finch,” said Mrs Silver, the one time he said anything about it, “you are not, in point of fact, a tree.”
Summer, autumn. Long, cold winter days which Mrs Silver spent with her books while Tobias tramped around town, peering into shop windows, watching the people hurry along the cobbled streets. Occasionally he got accosted by thieves; he only looked at them and they went away. Once a group of small children followed him down the street, hooting and throwing stones that landed safely shy of his new leather boots. It was a far cry from getting shot by Charlie Bondee when he saw the wild man come out of the wood.
Mrs Silver never made Tobias cut his hair, but she sniffed when she looked at him occasionally. Eventually, he plucked up his courage and trimmed it himself, taking the worst of rattiness off the ends. The hanks of hair that fell away from the scissors never turned to dead grass and scattered bark. They stayed as scruffy knots of human hair. Tobias was not now what he had been before.
January. February. Tobias felt time as a physical thing dragging him along. On the first of March, Mrs Silver booked a hire coach to take them back to Greenhollow Hall. She didn’t say a word about it to Tobias until the night before. He found himself unsurprised.
She’d never held a funeral for Henry, never wept a tear. When her acquaintances asked her about her son, she told them nothing at all. Tobias still saw in his dreams more often than he’d like the solid young body with Fabian’s mad light in its pale eyes blowing away like dust; he saw the withered corpse getting ploughed under the earth by the roots of the aspen trees.
They spent the first three weeks of March at the Hall on the edge of the wood. Tobias never set foot in it, and he doubted Mrs Silver did either. Locals came by to pay her their respects. Tobias kept to the white room that he thought of by now as his. When memories of Silver pushed themselves forward for his attention he got out his knives and sharpened them one by one. When he’d run out of knives to sharpen he started darning all his socks. He’d put plenty of holes in them over the last year.
The sun rose on the day of the equinox, and Mrs Silver went to the wood. Tobias watched her go and did not follow.
She came back after dusk, dry-eyed, and came to his room. “Mr Finch,” she said.
“Ma’am,” said Tobias.
She looked at him for a long time. She was a fearsome woman, but Tobias’s vision doubled, and he saw someone tired, getting older, with no family in the world but one lost son. Fabian hadn’t remembered ever having a mother. Tobias remembered his, vaguely, but he could not have told the colour of her hair, or the sound of her voice.
“I do not blame myself,” she said. “Henry and I disagreed that night, but he knew when he invited me to inspect the progress of his research that we were likely to disagree. In any case, by the time I reached that altar it was already too late.”
“If there’s a fault, Mrs Silver,” said Tobias, “it’s mine.”
He had not said it aloud before. But it was the truth.
Mrs Silver snorted. “On the contrary. You specifically told Henry not to visit you on the equinox. If I know my son—”
She halted.
“I imagine he planned to argue with me that night,” she went on thinly after a moment. “Precisely to give himself an excuse, you understand. Nothing, Mr Finch, has ever stopped Henry from pursuing his own curiosity to the uttermost limits of folly.”
Tobias said nothing. It was not Silver he was thinking of now. It was Fay in his library, as it had been before the big windows and mahogany shelves: maybe two dozen books, and the young master of the Hall with his red braid and his brilliant smile and the secrets of the old gods held in the hollow of his hand. Fay seeking riches, and beauty, and immortality.
Silver at least had never had any cruelty in him.
“Aye,” he managed at last. There was nothing else to say.
“I believe,” said Mrs Silver, “that you know Greenhollow Wood better than anyone.”
Tobias said nothing.
“His body for burial, at least,” she said. “Tell your dryads that. They do not need his bones.” Her jaw stiffened. “And I do.”
Tobias stood up slowly, took up all his sharpened knives one by one, and his crossbow, and the new pistol.
Alone by moonlight he went out to the wood.
* * *
Near the threshold he passed a strong young sapling with an oddly knotted trunk. No one would ever have taken it for a former walking stick. Tobias placed his hand on the bark a moment, but it was only a tree. If he had not known better, he would have thought it no different from any other young tree in the wood.
He kept moving, listening to his footfalls in the damp mulch, smelling the wet spring scent of growth. There were fronded ferns putting out fans of fresh green along the gully of the stream, and rotting autumn leaves still heaped by the wind in some of the clearings. The bluebells were putting up their early sharp stems like soldiers; no flowers till April, but there were patches of crocus here and there promising future colour.
Tobias walked nearly two hours and never saw a sign of the clearing where his cottage had been. No flicker in the corner of his vision gave away Bramble with her sunlit eyes. Nothing uncanny moved in the branches: no corpselight mists roiled beneath the canopy. He heard night-calling insects, and the rattling sigh of the wind in the leaves, and once the distant high-pitched screech of a fox.
At last he knew he was beaten. He sat on a mossy stump and closed his eyes. Not even Silver’s bones for his mother; not even that. Well, what did the wood care for mothers? Tobias should have known.
Then he heard a chirrup. A warm head butted itself under his hand.
Tobias opened his eyes. It was Pearl, looking healthy and pleased with herself, tabby coat dappled in the moonlight. She leapt into Tobias’s lap and stretched, pricking his legs with her claws as she unsheathed them, for all the world as if he had not been gone an hour, let alone a year. Tobias found his mouth making an uncertain shape that was nearly a smile. He scratched the cat’s ears, which she seemed to accept as her due.
He did not know how long he sat on the stump, there in the dark with the cat on his knee and the sounds of the wood around him. At last she jumped down and trotted away into the shadows and he stood up. There was a pinkish quality to the dimness which meant that dawn would come soon. He doubted Mrs Silver had slept. He would have to return to the Hall and tell her the truth: that he had found nothing, that there would never be anything to find. He sighed.
“She never sits so long with me,” said a voice among the trees.
Tobias looked up sharply. His hand went at once towards a knife.
Silver was there in the shadow of the trees. His pale eyes gleamed in the dim light. His hair was curling loose around his face. He was smiling.
“What,” said Tobias, in a voice like the croak of a raven, and he swallowed and tried again. His heart was hammering in his chest. “What—”
Silver’s smile fell off his face and he ran forward as Tobias half-sat, half-fell back onto the stump with his breath coming in sharp wheezes. Four hundred years he had never had to worry about his body giving out on him. Silver seized his hands and said, “Mr Finch—Mr Finch—Tobias—”
Tobias concentrated on keeping his breathing even as Silver spoke frantically to him. “I’m so very sor
ry—I had no idea it would be such a shock—Tobias, please—”
When Tobias could finally see straight again, he saw that Silver was kneeling in front of him and looking very ashamed of himself. He was still holding on to both of Tobias’s hands. “Are you well?” he said. “I am sorry.”
“You rat,” said Tobias.
“I didn’t expect that to happen,” said Silver. “You always seemed so immovable—like a boulder, a mountain—I thought you might raise your brows at me, at the most.”
“How long?” said Tobias.
Silver didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I woke up at midwinter. It was dark. Midnight exactly, I expect, though the ladies are rather vague on concepts like celestial mechanics, and they only rustle at me if I ask them about it.”
“What are you?” said Tobias.
Silver smiled at him. He lifted both hands and ran them through his mud-coloured hair, and then he held them out to Tobias.
Tobias saw the green stains on his fingers. He could not speak.
“I’m more or less what you were, I think,” said Silver. “Though—I had no idea, I really didn’t. Tobias, how did you do it? How on earth did you stay so human? I keep trying, but the time—it just falls away from me. I tried to mend your cottage.” Tobias snorted. “I know, I know, but the wood seemed willing to help, so I did my best, but I kept getting distracted and going for a walk, as it seemed to me for an hour or two, and I’d come back and find everything I’d built undone and ivy growing everywhere. Don’t laugh at me!”
Tobias tried to stop. There was a smile that wanted to creep onto his face no matter what. “Took me a fair while to get the hang of it,” he said. “You don’t have to live by the wood’s count the whole time. Better not. Keep a cat, or something like it, and it’ll keep you awake.”
“Pearl seems to look after herself,” said Silver. “I tried to take care of her for you—”