Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  Every instinct in her body was telling her to run, to get away from him. But the padaran walked fast and hard, pulling her along with the dark and invisible force of his will.

  Two guards pushed her from behind with their sharpened spears pointed at her back. One of them was Lorcan, the commander of the padaran’s guards.

  Lorcan was the tallest Faeran guard she had ever seen, with long, gangly arms and legs. He had a mash of hair the color of rotting twigs, a high forehead like a jutting boulder, and black, bulging eyes. He’d been serving the padaran since long before she was born.

  Wedged between the padaran ahead of her and the two guards behind her, she climbed her way up the narrow, winding woven-stick tunnel, which was so tight that the padaran’s shoulders scraped the walls, and so steep that her calves burned. When they finally reached the room at the top, she gasped at what she saw.

  The room glowed with the orange blazing light of many burning torches. And it was stacked from floor to ceiling with hundreds of day-folk objects, from the tools she’d seen in homesteader barns to strange mechanical instruments of all shapes and sizes. She had no idea what all these bewildering things were for, or why they were here.

  She had always thought the padaran sold and traded their takes to the day-folk for food and other necessities for the clan. But now she saw that he’d been acquiring these objects year after year, hiding them all this time.

  “If we are going to survive,” the padaran said, “then we must understand the tools and weapons of our enemy.”

  She reached toward a complicated-looking brass device with spoked metal circles and many levers, dials, and thumbscrews.

  “The newcomers use it to look at the terrain of the earth and plan out the paths of the roads they build,” he said. “Humans do not seem to be able to understand the world, or even find their way through it, until they have measured it and marked it on their maps.”

  As he spoke, the padaran’s long, clawed fingers caressed the device’s wheels and knobs possessively. He did not appear to know how to use the machine, but he held it as if he owned and controlled its inner power.

  Then the padaran walked over to a collection of hammers, spikes, and other iron accoutrements. “The clanging men use these to lay down the long steel rails that the steaming beasts follow into the forest,” he said, picking up one of the iron spikes. “This is the future,” he declared, looking at the metal object with true reverence in his eyes.

  It was hard not to let his confidence, and his knowledge of the outside world, draw her in, but she didn’t understand. Did he mean that the future belonged to those who controlled the metal? Or that more of these things he called the steaming beasts were coming? Or that iron was the direction he was going to take the Dead Hollow clan? Or that the spike itself possessed some sort of magical power?

  But the most disturbing thing was that she wasn’t even sure he knew the answer. He seemed convinced that the power of the humans lay in these strange metal objects, but he didn’t seem to truly understand the purpose of the devices or how to use most of them. It was as if he thought that by simply possessing them or being near them he would somehow gain their power.

  She had watched the padaran all her life. He was the closest thing she had to a father. He’d always been a strong and forceful leader for the clan, someone she looked up to, someone she feared. But it seemed as if he had spent countless hours in this room, holding these objects in his hands, studying them, trying to divine their hidden secrets. They had become a festering obsession in his mind.

  When her eyes were drawn to a long, gleaming brass tube mounted on a three-legged stand, he said, “Step forward and look through it.” It appeared to be one of the few devices he had actually figured out how to use.

  She studied the contraption uncertainly, wondering if its purpose was to rip out little girls’ eyeballs when they went against the will of the clan.

  Seeing her timidness, he put his hand on the device to steady it, to hold it in his control, as if to make it clear that only through him was it safe for her to use.

  Quieting her breathing as best she could, she stepped closer, leaned slowly forward, and put her eye up to the end of the long tube. When she blinked, the flash of her eyelash startled her so severely that she leapt back in surprise.

  “Now conquer your fear and try again,” he said. “Close your left eye and look through with your right.”

  As she leaned forward, she squinted her eye one way and then the other until she began to see light coming through the tube. Then she caught a glimpse of several Faeran standing together talking among themselves. She pulled back in astonishment. There were no such people in the room, and yet she saw them quite clearly!

  “The humans call this a telescope,” he said, showing her a small opening in the wall through which the tube was pointed. When she peered through the hole, Willa saw the Faeran gathered in the Hall of the Padaran far below them, like bees in a crowded hive. From this vantage point, the padaran could spy on all the Faeran in the great hall, but other uses for the device immediately sprang into her mind as well.

  Watching her, the padaran asked, “Do you understand the device’s power?”

  “Yes,” she said excitedly. “If you took it to the top of the Great Mountain and pointed it outward, you could see to the edge of the world.”

  The padaran’s eyes widened ever so slightly. She could see that it wasn’t an idea that had occurred to him.

  “Now follow me,” he said, dragging her by the arm as the two guards followed close behind them.

  As they left the padaran’s hoard of human-made objects behind them, they crossed through a series of dark, empty rooms with crumbling ceilings and disintegrating walls, one room interconnected to the other, a vast hive of hundreds of abandoned Faeran dens. The murky world of the hollow, dripping rooms had once been the most luxurious chambers of the Faeran of old, but they had come to stink of black and seeping mold.

  When she glanced behind her, the guards seemed just as anxious to leave this decaying place as she was.

  The padaran moved quickly through the abandoned dens, intent on reaching some distant point on the other side.

  Finally, they came to an area where the walls of the rooms and corridors were mostly still intact and a little bit of light filtered down through small holes in the woven-stick ceiling. They crossed through a den that looked different from any Faeran room she had ever seen. Clean and dry, it was adorned with human furniture—a table, a chair, a mirror, a wax candleholder, a small decorative box for holding tobacco, even pillows and woolen blankets. It startled Willa to see what looked like a human’s bedroom inside the lair of Dead Hollow.

  But the room didn’t smell of humans.

  It smelled like the padaran.

  It was the padaran’s private den. But what astounded her was that there wasn’t a cocoon of woven reeds like her and the other Faeran slept in. The padaran appeared to sleep in a large, wooden day-folk bed!

  “Come this way,” he said, pulling her through the room and into the next.

  They reached a narrow passage and went up a winding tunnel toward what smelled like fresh air, but Willa’s mind couldn’t let go of what she had just seen.

  The padaran’s collection of day-folk objects…The human bed in his den…Why does he think I won’t tell anyone about what I’m seeing here? she wondered. Where is he taking me?

  Knowing brings death. Her grandmother’s words slipped into her thoughts.

  The padaran pushed open a woven-stick door with his steel spear and pulled her outside, into a dense and secluded area of forest. Lorcan and the other guard came up close behind her with their spears as the padaran led her along a narrow trail, crowded with the bent and twisted limbs of blackened trees.

  Looking around her, Willa could see that they had come out somewhere on the upper side of the Great Mountain, just above the lair, but she’d never been to this area of the forest before. On both sides of the path, she saw wha
t looked like white bones and rotting brown heaps lying in the leaves.

  A sickening feeling crept into Willa’s stomach.

  Where are they taking me? she thought again. And why is the padaran still carrying his spear?

  “Back in my rooms, you saw the machines of the humans,” the padaran said as they walked.

  “Yes, my padaran,” she said, glancing behind her at Lorcan and the other guard, wondering if she could outrun them. Her chest started pulling more air into her lungs, getting her ready.

  “And you understand who I am,” the padaran said.

  “You’re the sacred leader of our clan, my padaran,” she said, as her eyes scanned the forest around them. Her skin was beginning to crawl. The truth was, she had no idea who he was, where he came from, or how he had come to wield such dominion over the clan.

  “You see now that I can give you anything you can imagine from the day-folk world,” he said.

  “Yes, my padaran,” she said, her throat feeling tighter and tighter. She had no idea why she would want something from the day-folk world, but this appeared to be an offer of great significance to him, intended to impress her and draw her in.

  “And I can give you more power in the clan than you ever imagined possible.”

  “Yes, my padaran,” she said, the muscles in her legs beginning to twitch.

  “If Gredic and the others are bothering you, then I can eliminate them, get them out of your way.”

  “Yes, my padaran,” she said, her breaths getting shorter. Now this was something she understood.

  “If I wish, I can make you the leader of the jaetters.”

  “Yes, my padaran,” she said. But why was he telling her this here in the middle of the forest?

  Finally, the padaran stopped. When he turned and peered into her eyes, she couldn’t help but shrink back from the long, sharp tip of his steel spear. With his voice low and menacing, he said, “But if you lie to me, Willa, if you try to deceive me in any way…”

  “No, my padaran, I wouldn’t do that,” she said, trying to back up but feeling the point of Lorcan’s spear against her spine.

  “If you try to go against me, then I will hurt you,” the padaran said. “And I’ll hurt everything you love. Do you understand?”

  “I haven’t been going against you, my padaran,” she said, her voice shaking.

  “Do you know why I’ve brought you out here?” he asked.

  “No, my padaran,” she answered. “I do not.”

  “The world is changing,” the padaran said, as they continued down the path through the forest, leaving the heaps and bones behind them. “If we are to survive, we must change with it. The day-folk homesteaders have been living in these mountains for a hundred years, and now the newcomers are pouring in with their iron machines. We cannot stop them.”

  “But where are they all coming from?” she asked him. She still didn’t understand why he had brought her into this part of the forest, but the questions burned in her mind. “Are they coming from the other side of the Great Mountain? Or the ridges that we see in the distance?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “They come from a place where the land is flat.”

  “Flat?” Willa said. “I don’t understand. What about the mountains?”

  “Beyond the mountains, beyond the valleys, beyond the towns at the edge of our world, beyond all that you can see, the land is flat. To get to that land, they crossed a stationary river so wide that it took sixty phases of the moon to travel across it.”

  Willa took a breath in astonishment. “How could that be possible?”

  “They floated on the water in the carcasses of trees that they cut down in the world they came from. The day-folk are cutters, builders, conquerors, spreading from place to place.”

  The skin on the side of Willa’s neck tingled with fear. She didn’t know what all those words meant, but she knew it wasn’t good. When she listened to the padaran, the threat of the invading day-folk seemed more looming and horrible than ever before.

  “We must learn their ways, their language, and their skills, Willa,” he told her. “We must master their tools and their weapons and their way of life, or our clan will die. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, my padaran,” she said, marveling at how much he seemed to understand the way the world worked.

  “The day-folk are a violent and hateful people,” he continued, “filled with capabilities beyond our imagining. But they are driven by greed. That’s why we steal from them, for without their money, we have nothing. We need their tools, their weapons, but even beyond their greed, they are consumed with fears and superstitions.”

  “What do they fear?” she asked in amazement.

  “They kill the things that they think might do them or their children harm: bears, mountain lions, deep forests—they fear anything that is different from the place they came from. And that is where we will gain an advantage, for we know these forests and these mountains far better than they do. The money the day-folk pay is called a bounty. They will pay us to kill the things they fear, and to bring them the meat and fur. That is why I am selecting a few of my best jaetters to begin collecting a very special kind of take.”

  Far from the lair now, they had reached a deeply shadowed area of the forest, and the padaran turned to Lorcan and said, “Bring it to me.”

  Lorcan and the other guard walked into the forest, did something on the ground with their hands, and then returned with what looked like the jaws of a large fanged animal. But the jaws weren’t old white bone. They were gleaming, bluish-black steel, and they were lined with many sharp teeth.

  “The newcomers call it a leghold trap,” the padaran explained. “It’s one of the ways they capture and kill the animals of the forest.”

  Willa stepped away from the trap in revulsion, finding it almost too horrible to believe that even the newcomers would attack animals in such a cruel and vicious way.

  “But why do they do this?” she asked.

  She could imagine the snapping steel jaws of the trap clamping onto the leg of an animal, the poor creature trying desperately to get away, days upon days terrified and starving, its bloody leg caught in the trap until its enemy finally arrived to kill it.

  “Come this way,” the padaran said, leading them down a path that wound through the forest. “You must be careful here, for beneath the leaves we have set traps all along this trail. Place your feet exactly where I place mine. You must follow in my footsteps.”

  Her stomach churned.

  That was why he’d brought her here, to join him, to follow him, to bond herself to him even more profoundly than she already was. He wanted her, with all her forest skills and wily ways, to be the leader of his new force of animal-killing jaetters.

  As she walked behind the padaran, carefully putting her feet where he put his, her heart beat heavily in her chest. If she put her foot in the wrong spot, the snap of the trap’s jaws would clamp onto her ankle and crush her leg like a twig. She tried to look ahead, tried to see where the traps were before she came to them, but they were hidden beneath the leaves.

  “How do you know where to step, my padaran?” she asked as she followed him along the path.

  “We’ve put a stone next to each trap to show us its location. We know to look for the stones, and avoid the leaves next to them, but the animals do not.”

  Willa marveled at the cruel effectiveness of this trail of death that the padaran and his men had laid.

  “This way,” the padaran whispered to her as he moved quietly along the path. “Now look ahead. This is where we found the den.”

  The den? Willa thought in sudden shock. Whose den?

  Finally, the padaran crouched down with his spear at his side, and Willa crouched with him. The padaran pointed to a gnarly old cedar tree in the distance, its base nearly eight feet across and its thick, red, shaggy bark covered with bright green moss. It appeared as if lightning had struck the tree, scorched it black, and left a long, twi
sting crevice that now led to what looked like a small cave inside the hollow of its trunk.

  Fear crept up Willa’s spine.

  “What’s inside the cave?” she whispered, but she didn’t want to know the answer. She didn’t want to be there. She didn’t want to think about what was going to happen. There were stones all along the path to the cedar tree. The jaws of the traps were open and waiting, their springs coiled tight and ready to snap.

  Suddenly, she heard a soft whining noise coming from the direction of the tree. She sniffed the air to see if she could pick up the scent, and then she heard the whining again.

  It took her several seconds, but then she closed her eyes and pulled in a lungful of air in despair.

  She knew what it was.

  There was a litter of wolf pups in the hollowed-out base of the cedar tree.

  No, Willa thought.

  The pups were hungry and whimpering. They could sense their mother drawing near.

  No.

  Willa’s heart wrenched when she heard the soft padding of trotting footsteps.

  No.

  The mother wolf was coming down the path toward her den of pups.

  It was Luthien.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered desperately as she watched the wolf trotting down the path of traps toward the den.

  She knew now that the padaran hadn’t brought her here just because he was pleased with her take. He had brought here because he had sensed her pulling away from him, her loyalty shifting. If she was to truly join him, if she was to be the leader of his new band of jaetters, then he had to be absolutely certain of her loyalty—not to the wolves or to the forest or to the old ways of her grandmother—but to him and only him.

  “The day-folk are the enemy of our people,” he had told her many times. “If they catch you in their valleys, they will kill you. You’re only safe with the clan.”

  Willa had nodded her head obediently whenever she heard the padaran say these words. They went into her mind as readily as water running down into a hole. There was a part of her that found the familiarity of the words to be reassuring, to know that what she’d known all her life was true. There was a deep satisfaction and sense of well-being in the comfort of knowing who to hate.