by Amy Laurens
This, Deena thought, was what every green scratch-and-sniff thing should smell like. Forget your apple, forget your lime; this was green. She inhaled deeply, and despite the oddity of the situation, felt her eyes light up as her body relaxed, melting into the space while at the same time inflated, buoyed, full. Something about this wondrous, spontaneous forest was familiar—and right.
She had no idea what the trees were, but they were tall, straight as ship masts or indigenous spears, thick and thin, rough-barked but paler than stringy barks, a brownish-grey, and the tiny, emerald, coin-sized leaves looked soft as butter, soft as petals.
Deena had tried keeping plants in their third-floor apartment back home, but somehow she could never remember to water them enough, or else she watered them too much and they died, thin and pustulant. She cried, every time, as her mother shook her head and made Deena walk them down to the communal skip bins in the alleyway behind the complex.
Her grandmother had consoled her on the phone each time, had promised that one day she’d have plants aplenty, more than she knew what to do with.
But one day wasn’t soon enough for Deena—which was why she’d taken up hiking, of course. If she couldn’t have plants at home, by golly was she going to surround herself with them in her spare time. So a forest? Amazing.
The other tent, her friends, vanishing? Less so.
Nature was still calling.
And the current cover situation was a little thin for her liking; yesterday, there’d been a handy thicket of salt bushes and something vaguely acacia-like between the grass and the sand dunes. Today, it was just open forest all the way down to the sand behind and to her right, and all the way up to the mountains ahead and to the left.
On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be anyone else around.
Sighing, she attended to her body’s needs, butt cheeks momentarily icing over as a wind whipped down from the mountain, setting the trees rushling and shushling—but it seemed like a freak gust and nothing more, and soon enough she was clothed and warm again—and hungry.
A brief forage in the tent revealed a couple of muesli bars tucked into the pocket of her raincoat, and of course, there were the packet soups in her hiking pack, and she still had a couple of litres of water.
Nothing to heat it with, though; Rachel had had the Trangia in her pack, and sometime in the night—as was pretty usual, these days—she’d snuck into the boys’ tent, taking her pack with her for a pillow.
Which meant that all of the above—Rachel, boys, tent, packs, and cooking stove—were now gone.
Deena sat heavily on the stump by the front of the tent and dropped her chin into her hands.
It wasn’t that she’d never believed in magic before—she’d seen her grandmother’s garden after all, and although she’d stopped protesting to the contrary so people would stop protesting her sanity, she knew full well she’d seen creatures in her grandmother’s garden when she’d been little that had no right existing on this mortal plane.
But on the other hand, until now, magic had been content to merely linger in the background, a blurred, bokehed backdrop to real life, something vaguely sensed, but never fully realised.
What, Deena wondered, had made the difference today? Why now suddenly jump arrestingly into the foreground?
Or, she wondered, gazing around as the trees whispered secretively, why here?
Hmm.
That seemed like a crucial question.
The tent, she felt, was light enough. It would be a bit of a headache to get the whole thing into her pack with her camping mat—yesterday, Rachel had been carrying half the tent, but that clearly wasn’t an option today, and neither was leaving the tent behind—but she should be able to manage.
Because as she saw it, she could either sit here all day, hoping and wondering whether the others would come back—or she could go explore this magical, magical forest that even now was layering calm over her like blankets, like she belonged here, and find out what had happened to the others.
It took about thirty minutes, moving purposefully, to down a couple of muesli bars, swirl a packet of soup into one of the water bottles and gag it down, and pack up all the gear. It did fit in her pack—only just, and she’d had to let all the straps out, but it wasn’t too heavy, just bulky.
And so, with the legs zipped onto her hiking shorts, turning them into pants once more, with her heavy boots on and her beanie still crammed over her hair and her hands deep in the pockets of her emerald-green polar fleece jumper, and her dark blue pack sticking up over her head and weighing down her hips, Deena set off through the trees that had miraculously appeared, heading back approximately the way they’d come in the evening before.
The Australian bush was always fairly quiet, so it was some time before Deena realised quite how unnaturally quiet the scene actually was; she was, without exaggeration, the only thing making any sound, if you discounted the still-audible hush of the ocean and the sporadic rustling of the trees when the breeze picked up. No birdsong, no rustling of small animals that she could detect...
Nothing.
It didn’t worry her as much as it might have, the bush being as aforementioned a relatively quiet place anyway, but it was certainly something to note.
Yesterday, they’d come in around the mountain from the south, joining a track at its feet that followed the coastline north to the little cleared area they’d used as a camp. The air had tasted of salt and smelled like teatree as they’d pushed their way onto the narrow dirt track amid the tussocky grass.
Today, there were no teatree thickets, and although Deena had her map and compass and was perfectly adept in using them both, she still felt uneasy striking off the path into the midst of the unknown, with nary a familiar landmark in sight.
That was, of course, except for the mountain. She glanced up at it, with her back to the ocean as she stood somewhere around the point where they’d joined the track yesterday—she knew that because there was the rocky promontory behind her, a tiny stub sticking out into the water no more than ten or twenty metres, but clearly once a lot more impressive because of the small chain of rocky little islands that led out from it.
It was a beast of a mountain, steep and covered in boulders and drop-offs—a fact now largely obscured by the monotonous, tall, straight trees of the spontaneous forest, but a fact nonetheless.
Still. Deena couldn’t help but think that if she could somehow get to the top of the mountain, she might be able to get a better handle on whatever was going on.
Certainly, it was a surer route than striking off the path at random. And at least if she was going up, she couldn’t get lost, spontaneous forest aside.
The fact that something in the forest seemed to be directing her that way, that the chill wind earlier had seemed to come from up there, that had nothing to do with it, of course. All she was after was the view, so she could determine how far this new, strange forest stretched, and see what she could do about getting out of it to find her friends.
And so, up the mountain she went.
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About the Author
AMY LAURENS is an Australian author of fantasy fiction for all ages. She has loved all things green and growing her whole life, but alack, seems perpetually unable to keep them alive.
Amy has also written the award-winning portal-fantasy Sanctuary series about Edge, a 13-year-old girl forced to move to a small country town because of witness protection (the first book is Where Shadows Rise), the humorous fantasy Kaditeos series, following newly graduated Evil Overlord Mercury as she attempts to acquire a castle, the young adult series Storm Foxes, about love and magic and family in small town Australia, and a whole host of non-fiction.
Other Works
SANCTUARY SERIES
Where Shadows Rise
Through Roads Between
When Worlds Collide
The Complete Sanctuary Series
KADITEOS SERIES
How Not To Acquire A Castle
STORM FOXES SERIES
A Fox Of Storms And Starlight
SHORTER WORKS
April Showers
Darkness And Good
Dreaming Of Forests
It All Changes Now
Of Sea Foam And Blood
Rush Job
Trust Issues
NON-FICTION
The 32 Worst Mistakes People Make About Dogs
How To Plan A Pinterest-Worthy Party Without Dying (Or Losing Your Chill)
INKPRINT WRITERS SERIES
How To Write Dogs
How To Theme
How To Create Cultures
How To Create Life
How To Map
PLAYS AND POETRY
For A Little While
Where Your Treasure Is
Find other works by the author at www.amylaurens.com
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Copyright © 2021 Amy Laurens
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations and events are the author’s creation, or are used fictitiously.
Print ISBN: 978-1-925825-62-6
eBook ISBN: 9781393847533
www.inkprintpress.com
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Laurens, Amy 1985 –
A Kiss Is The Secret
68 p.
ISBN: 978-1-925825-62-6
Inkprint Press, Canberra, Australia
1. Fiction—Fantasy—Contemporary 2. Fiction—Fantasy—Romantic 3. Fiction—Short Stories
First Print Edition: June 2021
Cover photo © Free-Photos via Pixabay
Cover design © Inkprint Press
Interior art © Amy Laurens