Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  “Iska…” she whispered.

  But every hole she looked into offered a new nightmare.

  Willa checked cell after cell for Iska, but she could not find him.

  She went down one of the lower side corridors to a place where the cells were mostly empty. It seemed to be where they were isolating certain prisoners in an unused part of the prison.

  “Iska, are you here?” she whispered into the darkness.

  She didn’t find him in those cells, either.

  She went down another side corridor and kept looking, using her eyes, her nose, her ears, every sense in her jaetter body focused on finding him.

  Find your take, Willa, she kept thinking.

  “Iska…” she whispered into the next cell, trying to keep her voice from losing hope, but the cell was empty.

  “Help me!” came a gasp from farther down the corridor.

  Willa ran forward to the cell door and looked into the hole.

  A pair of brown eyes peered out at her, filled with hope.

  “Iska!” she said, her heart leaping with joy.

  “It’s me,” he said, their fingers touching through the lattice of sticks.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” Willa said.

  “I knew you’d come back!” Iska said excitedly.

  She could hear the sounds of Nathaniel’s voice in his. Iska was so much a part of her now. And he was alive! Iska was actually alive!

  She didn’t remember giving him any indication that she’d come back for him, but it broke her heart to think that he’d been waiting for her to return all this time.

  She pressed her fingers against his through the lattice of the interwoven sticks, just holding on to them. There was so much to tell him.

  “Do you live in this place?” he asked. “Who are you? Where do you come from? Do you have food?”

  “I’m a friend of your father’s,” she said, ignoring the rest.

  Iska’s face flushed with relief and happiness. “Is he all right? Where is he? Is he here?”

  “No, but he’s been looking for you.”

  “I knew he would be,” Iska said, nodding his head.

  The boy seemed to have been living on nothing but hope in his time here, hoping for her to bring him food, hoping for his father to rescue him. But Willa could hear in Iska’s tone of voice that he had known it was quite possible that his father was dead.

  “What about my mother?” Iska asked, his voice ragged with fear. He seemed to already know what Willa was going to tell him.

  “I’m sorry, Iska,” she said, her voice trembling. “Your mother passed away the night you were captured.”

  She had seen the light in Nathaniel’s eyes when he spoke of Iska’s mother. She had seen the life Ahyoka had lived with him in their home. She had cared for Ahyoka’s goats and her bees, and she had sat on Ahyoka’s grave and read her name.

  “Your father buried your mother in the meadow by the house,” she said sadly.

  Iska’s lips pressed together as he slowly nodded his head and wiped the tears dripping from his eyes. “I saw her lying on the ground,” he said. “By the river…”

  “I’m so sorry, Iska.”

  “But who are these creatures?” he asked fiercely, looking at her through the lattice. “Where are we? What are they doing with us down here?”

  “You’re in the lair of the night-spirits,” she said. “They’ve been capturing human children.”

  “But I don’t understand. What do they want with us?”

  “For you to join them,” she said gravely. It didn’t seem possible, but she knew that was what they were doing.

  “Join them?” Iska said in horror.

  She was relieved to hear from the revulsion in his voice that there was still some fighting spirit inside him.

  “I’ve come to get you out,” she said. “To take you back to your father.”

  “But I can’t get out of this cell,” Iska said. “I’ve been trying to dig through the sticks, but it’s impossible.”

  “Step back away from the door,” she said.

  As Iska followed her instructions, Willa put her hands on the door that separated them. “You’re not going to want to watch this. Turn your eyes away. Quickly now.”

  “What are you going to do?” Iska asked, but in that instant, the door boiled into a wall of writhing, undead sticks and collapsed onto the floor into a slimy pile of twisting black worms.

  Iska wrenched away in startled terror. “Oh my god, what is that?”

  “I told you not to watch!” Willa scolded him as she reached inside, grabbed his arm, and pulled him out of the cell.

  “Come on,” she said, gesturing for him to follow her up the corridor.

  “We need to get my brother and sister,” he said as he followed her.

  “I’m sorry, Iska,” she said, as they quickly turned a corner. “I haven’t seen them.”

  “I know they’re here someplace,” he said. “My sister wouldn’t give up.”

  “But where are they?” she asked.

  “Please, Willa,” Iska said. “We can’t leave without them.”

  Willa’s stomach tightened as she looked uncertainly into the darkened bowels of the rest of the prison. She knew how difficult it was going to be to find two more prisoners in the chaos of all these cells and get them out alive. But she knew that if it was Alliw who was imprisoned here, she could never leave her behind. It was the bond that could not be broken.

  “All right, we’ll start looking for them,” she said. “Starting down here in these side tunnels.”

  As they ran through the lower tunnels of the prison, searching from cell to cell, Willa’s legs pumped beneath her, propelling her forward. Her eyes scanned ahead, looking for danger at every turn. Iska ran beside her, trying to keep up, and whispering his sister’s name into the cells.

  The corridors of the prison had already been dangerous for her, but with Iska in tow, they were far more so now. His skin was alarmingly consistent in color from one moment to the next, and was sure to give them away.

  “You’ve got to run faster!” she whispered back to him as they raced through the tunnels. “If they catch us, we’re dead!”

  She shouldn’t have even said it.

  At that moment, three guards came running down the corridor, spears in hand.

  Willa hurled herself against Iska and pinned him to the wall with her body, then blended into the brown surface of the woven-stick wall just as the guards came.

  “What are you doing?” Iska whispered.

  “Stop wiggling!” she hissed beneath her breath as she pressed herself against him.

  As the guards rushed down the corridor, Willa saw that the larger of the two was Lorcan, the commander.

  “I’ve been feeding the prisoners in the upper cells just as you ordered,” the smaller guard said. “But two of them won’t eat, and there’s one in the lower cells who has tried repeatedly to escape. It bit one of my guards.”

  “Keep culling out the weak ones,” Lorcan told him. “And the next time the one in the lower cells tries to escape, drag it out of here and throw it into the abyss. They need to obey or they die.”

  Willa smelled the stench of the guards’ bodies as they passed. When they had finally gone out of sight, she exhaled a long breath of relief and uncovered Iska.

  “How did you—” he started to ask in amazement, but she grabbed his hand and pulled him down the corridor in the opposite direction from the guards. If they were going down into the lower levels, then she was going up.

  “Just trust me, Iska,” Willa said. “Follow me as fast as you can.”

  They ran up through one tunnel after another, turning corner after corner, up through the main corridor of the prison, then down the side tunnel and the many turns that followed, until they finally came to the hole she’d used to sneak her way into the lair.

  “Crawl in there and hide,” she told him.

  “What? I can’t,” Iska protested. “We ne
ed to find my brother and sister.”

  “Just listen, Iska,” she said. “I’ll go back into the prison for your brother and sister. I swear I will. But I can’t have you with me. You’re too conspicuous.”

  “Because of that thing you do with your skin,” he said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I can blend, but you can’t, so I need to go alone.”

  “I’ll wait here, but we’ve got to find them,” he said.

  “Listen to me,” she said, grabbing his hands as hard as she could and looking into his eyes. “If I don’t return, it means I failed and you need to make it home to your father on your own. If I don’t come back, you’ve got to get out of here without me.”

  “I understand,” he said, nodding. “Be careful.”

  She had put on a good front for Iska’s sake, so that he’d follow her instructions, but as she ran back up the corridor toward the prison cells, she felt the bile rising up in her throat. Her whole body was filling with dread. A terrible premonition invaded her mind.

  You’re not going to survive this, Willa, she thought as she ran.

  She had lived in the vast Dead Hollow lair all her life, but after the time she’d spent in the forest, she realized what a truly lifeless place it had become. It had once been the hidden domain of the forest folk, her people of old, living in harmony with the trees and animals around them—the woodwitches sculpting its glorious, green, living walls—but now it had become a dark and sapless hiding place. She had always known that her powers didn’t work well in the unnatural lairs of the day-folk, but this place wasn’t much better. After years of the padaran, there was nothing left here but rotting sticks and dead souls, lifeless Faeran followers who’d given up on the beauty of the world.

  You were born here and you’re going to die here. The words came into her mind as she turned the final corner toward her fate.

  Without her animal allies and the full powers of the forest, how was she going to find Iska’s brother and sister? How was she going to fight off the guards? There were no living trees, no wolves or bears or otters—nothing she could draw on for strength and no one to ask for help.

  You’re not going to make it, she thought as she ran toward the prison cells.

  Willa turned the corner and immediately came upon two guards near the entrance of the prison. She jerked back, pinned herself to the wall, and blended.

  “That human has been fighting hard,” one guard was saying to the other as they came out of one of the larger cells.

  “Then don’t go easy on it,” the other said. “The harsher you are, the faster it will break.”

  Her skin crawled as the guards walked right past her. She waited for them to go up and out of the prison toward the main area of the lair before she moved.

  At that moment, an idea came into her mind.

  The answer had been right here in front of her all this time, but it had taken the guards to remind her.

  The shouts and screams that she’d been hearing, the pleading eyes peering out at her through the lattices of the cells…

  She had thought there was no one who could help her. But that was wrong. There was someone who could help her. There were many who could help her. They all had mothers and fathers to get home to. They all had brothers and sisters like Iska. And she was surrounded by them.

  There were no animals or trees she could draw on here, but there was something else. In each of these cells there wasn’t an “it.” There was a “he” or a “she.” There was a human being, a living, breathing, thinking soul, with wants and desires just like her—someone fighting to survive.

  She quickly crept over to the closest cell.

  “Hey, I’m Willa, what’s your name?” she whispered.

  “I didn’t do anything. Why am I here?” the voice asked angrily.

  She couldn’t see the prisoner in the cell, but it sounded like an older human boy.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t put you in here,” Willa said as she studied the outside of the door. “But I’m going to get you out.”

  “Who are you?” the boy asked, coming to the lattice and looking out.

  “My name is Willa, and I need your help.”

  “I’m Cassius,” the boy said, his voice strong and determined now, almost hopeful.

  The doors of the cells were bound tightly shut from the outside with knots of vines. Every time she used her power to reanimate the twisted dead sticks of the lair, it sucked the energy out of her, so she knew she couldn’t continue with that. It was a slow process, but she pulled and pried at the vines with her fingers, hoping to unfasten them.

  “You’re green,” a small female voice said behind her.

  Willa turned to see a little girl’s pale face peering out at her through the lattice of sticks on the other side of the corridor. The little girl looked like she was no more than seven years old, and Willa could see the streaks of the tears that had fallen down her cheeks.

  “Yes, sometimes I am,” Willa said. “What’s your name?”

  “Beatrice,” the little girl said in her tiny voice.

  “I’ll come for you next, Beatrice,” Willa said as she finally figured out how to unfasten the vines and open the door to Cassius’s cell.

  “We don’t have much time before the guards return,” she said to Cassius as he came out of the cell. He was about fourteen years old, and had dark brown skin and short black hair. “Now listen,” Willa said. “Do you think you’re able to run?”

  “Yeah, I can run,” Cassius said, nodding.

  “I want you to take Beatrice,” Willa said as she opened the little girl’s cell. “Can you do that?”

  “Yeah, I can do that,” he said. It sounded like he’d do just about anything she asked him at that moment.

  “All right, good,” Willa said, looking up and down the corridor for any signs of approaching guards. As Cassius took Beatrice into his arms, she told him exactly what he needed to do. “Go up this first corridor a little bit, but take an immediate left, follow it around the curve, then turn right, then left, then two more lefts, and then down…” She could see he was listening intently to everything she said. “If you encounter any guards, then pull back into the shadows and hide. If they corner you, then watch out for their spears. They’re very sharp. When you reach the escape hole, there will be a boy there named Iska. Tell him Willa sent you. He’ll show you the way out. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Cassius said, holding Beatrice. “We’re ready.”

  “Now go, Cassius, run! And tell Iska to expect more.”

  In the next cell she found an eight-year-old girl, gave her the instructions, and sent her limping on her way.

  One door after another. Cell after cell. Prisoner after prisoner. She freed them as fast as she could untie their doors, asking them if they’d seen the two children she was looking for, and then telling them to run, to hide, and to help each other get to the hole. “If you see the guards, run as fast as you can!” she told them.

  That’s twenty-three so far, she thought, as she went to the next cell. The more she freed, the more she knew the guards would come. They’d hear the noise. They’d see the commotion. Every child she freed put her further from her own freedom.

  A little boy with freckled skin, ragged red hair, and a muddy face touched Willa’s arm as two of the other children ran up the corridor.

  “I’ve seen her!” the boy said. “I saw the Cherokee girl. She was in the cell across from me when I was down in the bad part. She kept telling me not to give up.”

  “The bad part?” Willa said. “Where is that?”

  The red-headed boy pointed farther down the corridor. “There’s a tunnel off to the side that goes to the right, through an area where there’s been a cave-in, and then curves way down deep. It’s the third door.”

  “Thank you,” Willa said. “Now run.”

  As the boy made his escape, Willa ran in the opposite direction, down into what he had called the bad part of the prison.


  The rotting ceiling sagged so low that she had to duck beneath it to get through. Other areas she had to climb. Black mold coated the woven-stick walls. A dank, unbearable stench filled her nostrils. Finally, she came to the third door and peered into the darkness.

  Willa saw the arms and legs first, all folded up in the corner of the cell. The hands, the thighs, the whole body was wrapped around something.

  The brown skin of the arms and legs was dirty, scraped, and bruised. The long black hair was matted, hanging all around the arms and legs and the thing inside.

  And then the eyes opened and looked at her, brown in color, and staring warily back at her.

  She’s alive, Willa thought in relief.

  The girl’s arms and legs pulled inward, wrapping more tightly around the small boy she was protecting in the bend of her body.

  “Whatever you are, stay away from us,” the girl said, her voice laced with intense fear as she jerked deeper into her cell. “Get away from us!”

  Willa pulled back, startled.

  Crammed down in this darkened cell, this girl had been through too much.

  Willa slowly crouched to the floor, lowering herself so she looked less threatening, and spoke in her softest voice.

  “My name is Willa,” she said. “I’m a friend of Iska and your father, and I’m here to help you, Hialeah. If you’ll let me, I’m going to get you and Inali out of this cell.”

  Hialeah stared back at her in shock. It appeared to be the first time anyone had said her name in weeks.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked.

  I saw it written on your grave, Willa thought, but she did not say it. “I know your father,” she said. “He told me all about you and your brothers.”

  “You’re going to get us out?” she asked in amazement, her voice filled with disbelief and uncertainty. “Is this a trick?”

  Willa slowly opened the cell door.

  “Don’t come any closer!” Hialeah shouted at her, holding her crying brother tight to her body.

  “I’m not coming in,” Willa said, moving back away from the door. “The choice is yours…” she said, speaking so softly now that she knew the girl could barely hear her. “Iska’s waiting for us, Hialeah. But we don’t have much time. We have one chance to get out. And that chance is now. But we’ve got to run. We’ve got to fight. I’m not certain we’ll succeed. If they catch us, they’re going to kill us. But we have this one chance, to either cower down here in this cell, or to run for home. Which do you want to do, Hialeah?”