Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  “Where were they going?” Willa asked, anger leaking into her voice. “Why wasn’t I with them? Why would I be separated from Alliw?”

  “You were here, with me,” her mamaw said gently. “I had decided that the time had come for you to learn the song of the little tree.”

  Willa glanced over at the tree sitting in the stone niche, with the sunlight coming down from the hole above. The Faeran of old had used words to talk with and persuade the ancient guardians of the forest, but songs sung in the Faeran language were even more powerful. It was so long ago that she had forgotten, but Willa suddenly remembered fragments of the song her mamaw had taught her for the little tree, a soft and beautiful melody, but the bile rose in Willa’s throat as it came into her mind. She had gained a song, and lost a sister.

  “Do you remember now?” her mamaw asked gently.

  “Yes,” Willa said, her voice cracking as she wiped the tears from her eyes. She didn’t want to cry right now. She wanted answers from her mamaw.

  “I’m sorry, Willa,” her mamaw said. “I’m sorry about everything that happened that night. The three of them went out into the forest, but they never returned.”

  Willa looked up at her. “But what happened to them?”

  “The day-folk caught them and killed them.”

  “But how?” Willa asked. “They could all blend.”

  “I don’t know,” her mamaw said. “You know that I taught your mother myself, and I taught Alliw as well. If enemies came, they should have been able to hide themselves—”

  Her grandmother stopped abruptly, unable to continue. Willa could suddenly see the pain that had been living inside her all these years, the tremble in her hand.

  “And then I became a jaetter…” Willa whispered, to herself as much as to her grandmother.

  She couldn’t remember all the details of that part of her life, other than the living nightmare of the initiation—the pleading, the isolation, the starvation, the long training through the night.

  “It is the padaran’s law that all the children of the clan become jaetters,” her mamaw said in a low voice, looking into her eyes. “I tried to tell them that it was too soon for you, that you were too young, that you needed time to grieve. Your father would have never allowed you to be a jaetter if he’d still been alive. But your initiation started the day after your parents died…You were just six years old…” Her voice trailed off, and for a moment her eyes closed and her lips pressed together. When she opened her eyes again, she said, “You were the last jaetter to be initiated in the Dead Hollow clan.”

  “Me and Gredic.”

  “Yes,” her mamaw said, “the young boy as well.”

  “At least Alliw didn’t have to go through it,” Willa said. “That would have broken my heart.”

  Despite everything that had happened, and the sadness she felt, Willa knew that she wasn’t the only one who had suffered in their lair. The Dead Hollow clan was dying. It had been withering for decades. From the murderous day-folk, from the predators of the forest, from starvation, from eating poisonous foods, from oak wilt and other diseases, from a thousand causes, they had been dying. The empty corridors and shadowed rooms of the vast Dead Hollow lair were a constant reminder. Willa, Gredic, and the other jaetters were the youngest Faeran in the clan. The few pairs of babies that had been born in the last dozen years had been small and sickly creatures that did not survive. Willa had never even seen a baby with her own eyes, and she’d never heard one laugh or cry.

  Filled with too many thoughts, she looked up at her mamaw. “Do you think the padaran can save us?”

  She knew it was a foolish question.

  Of course the answer was yes.

  The answer had to be yes.

  Gazing at her with steady eyes, her mamaw paused, and she said, very quietly, “No, I don’t.”

  “But…” Willa said, wanting to argue.

  “The padaran cannot save us,” her mamaw whispered. “But you must never speak of this. You must not even think it. Knowing brings death. Do you understand?”

  Willa didn’t understand, and she started to ask another question, but she was interrupted by a faint sound in the distance.

  She rose quickly to her feet.

  It was the sound of many footsteps coming through the labyrinth of corridors toward their den.

  “What is that?” her mamaw asked. “Who’s coming?”

  “They’re coming for me, mamaw,” Willa said, her voice filled with dread.

  “What’s happened, Willa?” her mamaw asked in dismay. “Where did you go last night? What have you done?”

  The strained and fearful sound of her mamaw’s voice made Willa want to cry, but she didn’t have time for that.

  “They’re going to take me to the padaran,” she said as she quickly dumped out one of her grandmother’s old medicine bags and filled it with the contents of her satchel. All she left in the satchel were two copper pennies that she stuffed deep inside its inner pocket.

  “But what have you done?” her grandmother asked again.

  “Too much,” Willa said.

  Her grandmother reached forward and pulled her behind her, physically protecting her with her own crippled body. “Remember: speak only Eng-lish!”

  “I will, Mamaw,” Willa said, switching to the Eng-lish words.

  Gredic and Ciderg stormed into the room, hissing and snarling. Four of the padaran’s guards followed close behind them.

  “There she is!” Gredic shouted, pointing a clawed finger at Willa.

  As the guards reached for her, her grandmother quickly moved in their way and tried to block them.

  “Don’t hurt her!” her mamaw cried, but they shoved her aside and knocked her to the woven-stick floor.

  They were the last words Willa heard her mamaw speak as the storming guards and hissing jaetters grabbed her with their bony, clutching hands and dragged her down the tunnel toward the Hall of the Padaran.

  The guards hauled her across the floor on her knees into the cavernous central hall of the Dead Hollow lair. For as long as she could remember, entering this place had filled her with dread, whether her satchel was full or not. It was as if she had always known that one day it would come to this.

  They dragged her through the seething crowd of Faeran—the throng of jaetters, guards, and hundreds of clan members—and hurled her to the floor in shame in front of the padaran’s empty, waiting throne.

  Gredic, Ciderg, and two of the guards held her down to the floor. The sniveling Kearnin wiped the sticky ooze dripping from the corner of his mouth with his gnarled hand as his brother chattered his small, sharp teeth and jabbed at her with his stick.

  Her cheeks burned with humiliation as she looked up at the crowd of Faeran, all peering at her now, pressing around her, gathering for the spectacle of her punishment and disgrace.

  The faces in the crowd were mostly middle-aged Faeran, with few grandmothers and grandfathers among them, for many of the elders had passed away in the last few years, and there were no children other than the hissing jaetters. Having spent most of their living hours in the torchlit shadowed walls of the decaying lair rather than the moonlit meadows of the forest, many of the Faeran had mottled dark gray skin, sticky and muculent like slimy toads, and their hair fell gray and straggly from their heads. Others had greenish skin similar to her own.

  Most of the Faeran in the crowd stared at her with scowling faces, anxious to see her fall. Others watched with despairing, fearful eyes filled with sadness. The people came because they had to come. They watched because they had to watch. They had to be part of the clan, no matter what it was doing. If the clan was cheering, everyone had to cheer. If the clan was hissing, everyone had to hiss. There was no choice in this—no standing against the commands of the padaran or the will of the clan. There is no I, only we.

  Many of them didn’t know the reason she had been brought there, but they still snapped and sneered, for the padaran and his most ardent followers had
shown them year after year that to be weak, to be dragged, to be down, was itself deserving of shame in the lair’s eyes.

  “It’s one of the jaetters!” a Faeran in the crowd murmured to the one next to him.

  “It’s the little woodwitch,” one of the others said. “Look at her! They’ve really got her.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She went missing during the night.”

  “She shouldn’t be sneaking out on her own.”

  “It’s that old witch that teaches her.”

  “The padaran sent out search parties during the night.”

  “I heard she was dead.”

  But here I am, Willa thought, beneath the cuts and blows of the grasping hands and the whispering words, wounded and weak, held by force in the center of the room for all to see, surrounded by the scolding, murmuring crowd, as they all waited for the padaran to arrive.

  Willa looked around at the grimacing faces for anyone who might defend her, anyone who might remind the others of her loyalty to the clan or beg the guards to show her mercy. She spotted her friend Gillen. She was sure Gillen would rush forward to the front of the crowd, push Gredic away from her, and talk to the guards on her behalf. But Gillen was standing there, just watching, too frightened to move.

  “Gillen,” Willa said, looking toward her.

  Gillen held her gaze for a moment, her eyes pleading for Willa to understand, and then looked away in shame.

  Willa’s mind filled with despair. Not even Gillen was going to help her.

  Willa lowered her head and peered down through the floor of meshed sticks, down to the creek that ran below, wondering if she could somehow escape into the dark spaces beneath the lair, slip into the stream, and let it carry her away from this wretched place.

  But she knew there was no escape. There never had been and there never would be. She was part of this clan, and it was part of her, as inextricable as root and soil. Willa looked up, beyond the throng of the Faeran that surrounded her, toward the ceiling. The hall had been built for many thousands of people to gather here, but far fewer than that remained. The walls of the great hall rose up all around, vast expanses of dark brown woven sticks reaching to a large gaping hole broken to the sky above. What was left of the decaying ceiling and walls was held aloft by the ancient, massive woven-stick sculptures of giant trees, the columns of their trunks soaring upward to spreading canopies above. Thousands of hand-curled leaves glimmered with emerald green, and brilliant kaleidoscopes of ornately woven birds of all shapes and sizes and colors seemed to be flying through the branches of the trees. The name had been changed to the Hall of the Padaran decades before, but in the old language the great hall had once been called the Hall of the Glittering Birds. The walls of the great hall were ragged with rot now, the woodwitches who made them long dead, and many of the sculptures of the birds had disintegrated. The only birds that remained undamaged by time weren’t the sculptures, but actual living birds—carrion-eating black vultures circling in the hole above, floating on the smoky, steaming heat of the rising air, waiting for another Faeran body.

  As Willa’s eyes drifted down from the vultures, she noticed a pile of tattered brown rags lying on the floor near the base of one of the woven-stick trees. But then she realized it wasn’t just a pile of rags. When she looked more carefully, she saw the long blackish hair and the dark brown skin matching the color and texture of what was around it. It was a very old Faeran woman crumpled on the floor, and she was blending.

  Mamaw, Willa thought, her heart leaping.

  Somehow, her grandmother had pulled herself along the floor with her arms, dragging her useless legs behind her, and made it all the way to the hall, her ragged medicine bag slung over her shoulder.

  To the rest of the clan, she was a craggy old stump of a woman, too rough and gnarled to care about or even notice, but to Willa, she was a tendril of bright green hope.

  “Thank you, Mamaw,” Willa said softly.

  At that moment, the room shifted. All the faces in the crowd blanched with dread. Hundreds of pairs of eyes widened. Bodies went still. Whispers went silent.

  Willa turned to see the padaran emerging from a passageway behind the throne.

  The padaran moved with commanding ease, hunched with massive shoulders, his arms and legs stout with muscles, and the quills on the back of his bulging neck as thick and sharp as a porcupine’s. His skin wasn’t gray like many of the others, or streaked and spotted green like hers, but a woody bronze. As the crowd looked up at him in awe, his face seemed to almost glisten with color, shimmering like the reflection of moving water in the morning sun. He was the god of the clan, their sacred leader, their padaran.

  Willa had never seen or even heard of another Faeran like him. He was said to be very old, but he did not look old. He was the strongest and most vibrant Faeran she knew. Some believed him to be what Faeran used to be. Others said he was what Faeran would someday become. But no one still alive seemed to know, or at least be willing to talk about, who or what he truly was. To the inhabitants of the lair, the padaran was not a mortal being. It was said that he had never been a boy, never been a normal Faeran. He had no wife, no children, no twin brother, no name. He had come down from the Great Mountain to lead them, and he held the clan together with absolute power.

  The padaran’s guards stood ready for his orders, and his pack of sniveling jaetters swarmed around him, but he ignored them all. As he sat on his throne of blackened, twisted, rotting sticks, it creaked beneath his weight. He gestured toward Willa with a flick of his clawed finger. Gredic and the guards immediately dragged her forward and hurled her to the floor at the padaran’s feet.

  As the padaran stared down at her with his searing glare, Willa wanted to wither into a little ball.

  The god of the clan leaned forward, looming over her with his long, square, protruding face and his massive biting jaws.

  “Why have my guards brought you before me in this way?” he snarled. “Where have you been, jaetter?”

  Willa wanted to stay strong. She wanted to be brave, to stand up to him, but she couldn’t keep her body from shaking. The menacing stare of the padaran was too much to bear.

  “What have you done, jaetter?” he asked her, his voice low and growling.

  She knew he was already aware of much of what she had done. He wanted her to explain herself, to beg him for forgiveness, but even lying on the floor before him, under the looming threat of his presence, she couldn’t find the dark and murky pit in herself to say the words he wanted to hear.

  “I don’t know why your guards brought me here,” she said sullenly. “I am a loyal member of the clan.”

  The crowd gasped at her insolence. Nothing but subservience and apology was ever allowed at the feet of the padaran.

  Gredic darted in and jabbed her with his stick, outraged that she wasn’t whimpering in submission.

  The whole room began to erupt, but the padaran raised his open hand and closed his clawed fingers into a fist, bringing the room to immediate silence.

  The padaran picked up his long, steel spear in his right hand. The jaetters, and the guards, and everyone in the crowd had seen him use the spear of power many times to kill the Faeran who had committed crimes or gone against the will of the clan. The padaran’s spear was the only metal allowed in Dead Hollow other than what the jaetters brought back in their satchels, and each jaetter’s take must always be given to the padaran the moment the jaetter returned.

  Still holding his spear, the padaran peered down at Willa lying on the floor in front of him.

  “I will tell you why you are here,” he said, his voice filled with a dark and scathing tone, his eyes flicking out across the watching crowd. “Last night you crept past the Watcher. The Watcher sees all, and so do I. Not only did you leave the lair without my instruction or my permission, you left without the other jaetters. You went out thieving on your own.”

  The padaran’s eyes shifted back and forth across the faces
of the crowd, gauging their reaction as he spoke.

  “And when you finally returned, you slithered back into the lair like a rat, without making yourself known to me or my guards. You entered places in the lair that you knew you were not allowed and you did things you knew were wrong.”

  By the time he came to the last of her crimes, his voice had become a vicious roar. “What is the meaning of this behavior, jaetter?”

  The walls of the hall seemed to vibrate with the power of his voice, and the people hunkered down in fear.

  Willa wanted to scream up at him that she’d been hurt and needed his help. But she knew he wouldn’t care, and if he found out that she’d been shot by a homesteader, it would make him even angrier.

  She could hear the murmurs of hostility toward her spreading through the crowd, and the padaran seemed to sense it, too. He leaned down toward her and shouted, “This is your clan, jaetter! These are your people! Everything you do must be for the others! Do you understand the harm you cause them when you split away from me and the other members of the clan, when you do these things on your own? The members of a clan must stick together. We must fight for each other! Care for each other! There is no I, only we.”

  As he said these words, his voice soared and his skin glistened, and the people looked up at him with adoration in their eyes.

  When he rose once again to his full height and stepped toward her with his spear in his hand, the swarm of the crowd shrunk back in fear. The jaetters cowered. Willa’s heart pounded in her chest. He was going to thrust the point of the steel spear into her body at any moment.

  “Do you wish to die, is that it?” he asked her. “And after all that you did wrong, you didn’t come to me when you returned to the lair. You were pulled to my throne against your will by my guards. And you appear to have come empty-handed. You have nothing! You were a good jaetter once, but now I see nothing before me but a creature without a clan.”

  They were the harshest of words. A Faeran without a clan did not survive. And the padaran’s words weren’t just a punishment or a reprimand. They were a threat. With a thrust of his spear, he could kill her, but with the roar of a command, he could cast her out, a fate that most Faeran considered more cruel than death itself.