Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  But the padaran had said, If they catch you, they will kill you. And that was where the problem lay.

  She kept remembering the man with the killing-stick who had cornered her in his barn. He could have shot her again. He could have hurt her or killed her in so many different ways.

  But he didn’t.

  After that man saw who and what she was, he did not try to harm her. He tried to help her.

  She had been caught, and she hadn’t been killed.

  But if the padaran was the god of the clan, how could he be wrong?

  And if he was wrong about this, then could he be wrong about other things, things he’d been telling her all her life?

  Was it possible that her own thoughts and her own feelings could be as good or even better than his?

  Was it possible that she could be more Faeran in her heart than the god of the Faeran clan?

  It was clear that the padaran saw the mother wolf as expendable, as worth the bounty he would earn from the newcomers when he brought them her pelt. He had learned the language of the day-folk, but he had forgotten the language of the wolves. Did that make him a supreme being? Or a lesser one?

  As Willa looked at all the steel traps lying beneath the leaves, and watched Luthien coming down the path toward her den of pups, dismay poured through her. She knew she was supposed to stay at the padaran’s side and watch the trap spring. She knew she was supposed to watch the wolf die. She knew that was what her padaran and her clan demanded of her. And through all this, she kept remembering the look in her mamaw’s eyes, the way her mamaw seemed to be thinking, You’re blending in a way that I never taught you. But it’s keeping us both alive.

  But the thought of the steel trap crushing Luthien’s leg, holding her there as she tried frantically to tear her leg away and save her pups, was more than she could bear.

  Willa grabbed the spear of power out of the startled padaran’s hand and leapt to her feet. She felt the press of the spear’s cold steel shaft in her grip and the weight of it in the muscles of her arm. Then, as the mother wolf ran toward her pups, Willa gathered all her strength, pulled back her arm, and hurled the spear in the direction of the coming wolf.

  As the spear soared through the air, it looked like it was going to strike the wolf. Everything seemed to be moving so slowly—the shocked look on the padaran’s face, the running wolf, the spear arcing through the sky—it almost felt as if she could stop it, reverse it, pull it back. But she knew she couldn’t. She’d already grabbed the spear. She’d already thrown it. It was far too late. There was nothing she could do to change the spear’s path now. Or hers.

  “Luthien!” Willa shouted a warning.

  The wolf dodged out of the way just in time and the spear struck the trap. The trap snapped shut with a sudden jerk.

  “The traps are all over the path!” Willa shouted to Luthien in the old language. “Get your pups and flee!”

  “You little fool!” the padaran shouted at her.

  “Better a fool than a traitor!” Willa shouted back at him in the old language.

  “Kill her!” the padaran ordered his guards.

  Lorcan thrust his spear straight at her chest. Willa dodged the attack, but the other guard lunged forward and clutched her with a bony hand. Willa flipped wildly upside down, kicking like a panicking rabbit, and tore herself from his grip as she hit the ground. Then she scurried rapidly across the forest floor like a wiggling salamander, blending as she went, Lorcan stabbing and then stabbing again, until she sprang to her feet and ran.

  She sprinted down the killing path where the traps had been laid, her legs exploding with strength and propelling her forward.

  Her chest pumped with fast, shallow breaths as she ran down the path, frantically avoiding the leaves next to the marking stones. One wrong step and she’d suffer the pain of the clamping teeth, and then feel the thrusts of her enemies’ spears.

  When she glanced behind her, she thought she had put a good distance between her and her enemies, but the padaran and his men were in close pursuit, charging after her. They were fast runners. They were gaining on her. And she knew they weren’t going to give up. There was no way to escape them, no way to slow them down.

  Then she had an idea.

  She dove to the ground and draped her body over one of the stones that marked the location of a trap. Then she blended herself into the leaves.

  The padaran came running down the path. “I want her dead!” he screamed to his guards as he ran. “Find her and kill her!”

  He saw only leaves.

  The trap snapped shut with a sudden, violent jump. The steel teeth cracked against the bone. The padaran shrieked in pain and tried to leap away, but the trap had clamped onto his leg, driving its teeth into his shin. He roared in agony as he crumpled helplessly to the ground, his bloody hands trying to pry the trap from his leg.

  Lorcan and the other guard stopped to help the padaran, pulling desperately at the closed trap, but it was jammed into place.

  “Get it off!” the padaran howled as they frantically tried to pry it open with their hands.

  Willa leapt to her feet and ran. When she glanced back, she was expecting to see the padaran on the ground screaming in misery, but she saw an even more startling sight. The padaran’s skin had actually changed from radiant bronze to splotched and wrinkled gray, like many of the oldest Faeran in the clan. Slimy sweat dripped from all over his shriveled face and arms and legs. A dark fluid oozed from the corner of a clouded eye, and his hair hung loose and straggly around his old, withered head.

  As she ran down the trail back toward Dead Hollow, the wailing screams of the padaran rose up behind her like the screeches of a ghoul.

  Willa didn’t understand what she’d just seen, but she had to keep running. She didn’t look back again and she didn’t slow down. Even after she had gone far enough to leave the screams behind her, she kept going. She had harmed the padaran. She had betrayed the clan. As soon as the guards freed him from the trap, they’d return to the lair. The padaran would instruct his stabbing guards and hissing jaetters to rain violence upon her world. When the members of the clan learned of her betrayal, the entire clan was going to swarm against her. They’d destroy her den. They’d destroy her. But worst of all, they’d destroy her grandmother.

  She heard the screaming first. And then the shouts and footfalls of jaetters and guards and other Faeran running all through the Dead Hollow lair. It was as if they had already heard about what she did, but that wasn’t possible. She had run back to the lair and arrived before the padaran and his guards. Something else had happened.

  A new fear seized Willa’s chest. Her heart pounded as she sprinted down the tunnel toward her den. When she came through the door, she immediately screamed out and averted her eyes from what she saw.

  “Mamaw!” she cried as she collapsed to the floor a few feet away from her, too frightened to get closer.

  “Gredic came…” her grandmother rasped in the old language, her voice ragged and weak, so low that it sounded like the flow of a stream.

  Willa couldn’t bear to raise her eyes and look at what they had done to her, but she crawled and slid her hand slowly forward across the floor, until she reached her mamaw’s tiny hand and held it in hers.

  “Tell me what to do to save you,” she whimpered, pressing her face to the floor as she said the words, but she already knew it was too late. She felt so powerless, like the entire world was ending.

  “You are the last, Willa,” her grandmother whispered.

  “I don’t understand,” Willa said, crawling forward on her belly, closer to her mamaw, as she gripped her mamaw’s limp and slippery hand.

  “It’s time for me to go,” her grandmother said.

  “Please, Mamaw! Tell me what I need to do to save you!”

  “Protect it, hold on to it,” her mamaw said. “It’s the most precious thing we have.”

  “I don’t understand. Protect what, Mamaw? How can I protect anything?
”

  Willa clung to her mamaw with both her arms, curled up on the floor, feeling the warm liquid oozing all around her.

  “Please, Mamaw! Don’t leave me!” she cried.

  “Naillic,” her mamaw whispered.

  “What?” Willa asked. “What does it mean?”

  “I didn’t want to tell you this until you were ready to understand, but we are out of time. Do not say it out loud until you wish to destroy everything and everyone, including yourself. Knowing brings death.”

  Willa didn’t understand. What was she talking about?

  Wild screams and angry shouts erupted someplace in the lair above them. The wounded and enraged padaran and his guards had arrived. Now everyone in the clan knew what she had done. They knew she had hurt the padaran. There was no doubt in her mind now: her clan was going to find her.

  Her mamaw squeezed her hand. “You have to go, Willa. You must leave this place. Follow the blood…”

  The sound of shouting and rushing footsteps came pouring down the tunnel. The hissing jaetters and the stabbing guards were going to tear her apart.

  When Willa finally gathered herself up, she didn’t look. She didn’t look at her mamaw’s arms. She didn’t look at her legs. She didn’t look at her chest, or her neck, or her face. She looked only into her mamaw’s eyes.

  As her mamaw looked back at her, Willa could see her remembering all their time together, their sunlit mornings walking among the trees of the forest, the eagles they had seen together flying in the sky, their nights in their den with the moonlight filtering down. And then her mamaw’s eyes finally closed, and the long, last breath came from her body.

  “Don’t leave me, Mamaw,” Willa sobbed as she pressed herself to her grandmother. “Please don’t leave me!”

  But she felt her mamaw’s spirit leave her body and rise up through her own, into her arms and her legs, into her chest and her heart. Where does a spirit go? Where does the new world begin? Into the boughs of the trees? Into the stone of the earth? Into the flow of the river? Into the ether of the air? It passes from one person to another, each into the other.

  All Willa could do was cling to her mamaw and breathe.

  Willa heard the jaetters and the guards coming down through the tunnels that led to the den, at least fifty of them, hissing and gnashing their teeth, brandishing clubs and their sticks and their sharpened spears.

  All she could do was breathe.

  She could weave herself into one of the walls and hide, but they’d block off the door, close in the room, and stab with their spears until they found her.

  All she could do was breathe.

  The coming mob was filled with a screeching violence more terrible than anything she had ever heard.

  All she could do was breathe.

  She was trapped.

  There was no way out.

  Then she looked down at the woven-stick floor.

  Follow the blood.

  Willa reached down and touched the woven-stick floor with the tips of her bare fingers, feeling the woody texture of it. Living here in this room with her grandmother, she had crawled on this floor, walked on this floor, grown up on this floor. She had never thought of it as anything other than a floor. Unmoving. Unmovable.

  But now, her hands trembling and her eyes blurry with tears, she gripped one of the sticks, broke it, and pulled it away.

  Then she pulled out another and another.

  Soon she was tearing the sticks away as fast as she could, scratching at the floor like a clawing animal. Down on her hands and knees, she bit at the sticks with her teeth, biting them away, ripping at the sticks with her hands. Her fingertips bled. Her fingernails tore. But it didn’t matter. She had to keep clawing.

  As soon as she made the hole large enough to fit through, she scurried down inside and tucked herself below. But she couldn’t leave a gaping hole in the floor. Gredic and the other jaetters would follow right after her.

  She pressed her fingers against the stick-frayed edge of the hole. If the sticks had still been green and alive, she could use her woodcraft to re-intertwine them, but these sticks had been dead for a hundred years. There was no life in them, no moisture, no soul.

  I don’t want to do it, she thought. Not here, not like this. Not ever!

  But the truth was, her mamaw had taught her what she needed to do. Her mamaw had shown her how to inspirit the dead when she was seven. But Willa had frightened herself so badly she never did it again.

  But you have to, Willa. You have to escape this place!

  She pressed her bleeding fingers to the sticks and began to push them and pull them into motion, infusing them with her own life. The moisture and blood of her fingers seeped into them. She felt the dead sticks sucking the spirit and nutrients from her body, white, cold pain tearing through the skin of her fingers, then radiating up into her hands. She pulled in a sudden breath of revulsion when the sticks started creaking and cracking with their own twisting, crawling movements like writhing black worms. The sticks were pulling her life out through her pulsing fingertips, draining her of the inner forces that kept her alive, like roots pulling water from the ground. Finally, she yanked her fingers away before it was too late. A few seconds too long, and she’d be dead.

  Asking the living trees to help her cross a river felt as natural to her as having a conversation with old friends, but bringing back the dead was woodcraft in its darkest form. And she knew it would leave her a dried husk if she wasn’t careful.

  Putting her dry, skin-cracked, ice-cold fingers into her mouth to warm them, she looked up at the place where the hole had been and saw that she had succeeded in weaving the sticks together and closing the hole.

  Blending her colors, whispering with wolves, running through the limbs of the tallest trees—her grandmother had taught her so many things, the brightest and the darkest lore of the forest. She couldn’t even imagine living without her mamaw. What was she going to do? Where was she going to go?

  As she crept beneath the now-closed-in woven-stick floor, she heard the footsteps of the guards and jaetters storming into the room above.

  She crawled down into the red-stained branches below, down into the dripping underworld of Dead Hollow, down past the whitened bones of the earth, into the darkness of a rocky, cavelike void until she found the cold, wet embrace of the stream that ran beneath the lair. The rocks all around her were streaked with black and red, cracked with the ancient movement of the mountain, and littered with the white broken sticks of hundreds of Faeran souls. They were the ones who had come before her. The ones who had stood. The ones who had spoken. They were the shattered twins, and the beaten down, and the silenced. Knowing brings death. But the cold swept around her, and lifted her, and carried her away.

  The river was water, was blood, was all that had come before. As she floated with the current, she began to see horrific images in her mind, images of Gredic and the other jaetters pouring through the labyrinth and storming into her grandmother’s room, images of her mother, father, and sister fleeing through the forest from dark figures with long spears, and images of the padaran writhing on the ground in bloody anguish with his leg in the trap, his face turning slimy gray—a thousand images that she could not bear.

  She did not move her arms or legs, or turn her body. She drifted on her back, gazing up into the darkness of the cave. Far above her head, the footsteps of her swarming clan fell like shadows across the weaves of the sticks, like dark locusts flying across a reddened black sky. And the sky was blood. The sky was time. The sky was the past.

  “Good-bye, Mamaw,” she cried, feeling the ache of it deep down in her chest.

  She floated with nothing but sadness, no will to move or live. She just let herself be carried by the blood of the earth, with no want or desire or need, other than to go back, to go back in time, to let them steal her satchel if that was what they wanted, to stay crumpled on the floor of the great hall with her voice silent and her eyes cast down, and more than anyth
ing, out in that forest, to un-throw that spear.

  But she knew a river couldn’t go back, and she had no will to fight it. She felt nothing but numb as the lair of Dead Hollow slipped into the distance behind her.

  As she floated on the river, time had no meaning. No minutes or hours. There was only the movement of the water. All else in the world was still and did not exist. All else was ground. But she was moving, flowing with the sweep of the water that carried her.

  And there was no time.

  Her body slipped into an eddy of the river and bumped against the bank. She had passed through the underworld of the lair and into the living forest, but the thickness of the tree branches above her created a dark and shadowed world with no moon or stars.

  She felt the touch of many small, wet hands with tiny fingers grasping at the skin of her bare arms and legs. Creatures with thick dark brown fur and large, flat, scaly tails surrounded her, their wide teeth chattering as they worked.

  They dragged her body from the stream and partway up onto the earth.

  She lay there on the bank of the river for a long time, too destroyed inside to move.

  She woke to the growls of hunger stirring in her stomach. Her whole body hurt with a dull aching pain.

  When she looked up through the canopy of the trees and saw the slanting rays of the setting sun filtering through the branches, she realized that she must have been lying there for many hours, through both the night and the day.

  The water of the stream, which had been the color of blood beneath the lair, was clear now, sliding along a winding bed of smooth, round, pale gray stones through a thick forest of old trees, twisted and dark, with wet glistening branches hanging down from above and blackened roots twisting across the wet ground below.