The Waking Forest

by Alyssa Wees

  I walk.

  Across the clearing, over the swaying drawbridge, and beneath the raised portcullis.

  “Through here,” says the Darkness, and I follow the smoke trail of his voice, mesmerized, as he leads me around corners and down hallways with large gaps in the branches of the walls. Rain still drips off my hair and into my eyes as he takes me farther and farther away—from the cemetery, from my mother’s grave, deeper into this chilling, thrilling dream, and I do not look back. Not even once.

  “Here we are,” he says at last, and a pair of double doors before me opens as if of their own accord. “It is okay to be afraid,” he says, and I step inside.

  A round, open room with columns of twisted vertebrae set into the walls and no ceiling, revealing a sky so low that I can’t be sure it’s a sky at all. Whatever it is, it glows. It glows, but its light doesn’t reach me, and I can’t tell if it’s morning or midnight or somewhere in between, the whole swath of it a sprained shade of green, and encrusted with dim, deflated stars arranged in a crooked constellation not unlike the tattoo on Dad’s back. A spindly hand, reaching for something it cannot have.

  It is dark, dark, except for the glitter stuck in the ground like rocks, but more so, like strange almost-diamonds degenerating back into something that is not quite coal, something hot, something that looks and sounds a lot like secrets, secrets in a tangible, physical form.

  But there is not only glitter on the ground, I realize—there are also hands. Skeleton hands. Lots of them.

  “What happened here?” I breathe, looking down at the discarded finger bones, knuckles, and wrists, brittle and broken, some of them snapped into so many pieces as to be barely recognizable. “What is this place?”

  As if in answer, an echo spills from the sky, as soft as spider-steps, words strung like water drops on a web, glistening a moment before plunging to the earth, too heavy for the thin silk to withstand: Wake up.

  Forcing my gaze away from the floor, I notice then a large, tall tooth carved into the shape of a throne, split clean down the middle, as if cleaved by lightning. I didn’t see it at first, so densely is it draped in shadow. I drift toward it slowly, bones cracking beneath my feet.

  “Careful, Rhea Ravenna,” the Darkness says from near the entranceway, as if he’s willing to venture only so far into this forsaken space. “Do not touch anything.”

  “Why? It’s not real anyway,” I say, stopping before the dais. I had some vague idea of sitting down, but now that I’m in front of the throne I don’t even want to be near it. Its enameled surface is as smooth and shiny as the whites of an eye, and I feel instinctively that if I were to touch it, something in me might burn, might blister, might die.

  Running my hands through my wet, mud-splattered hair, I turn away, to face the center of the room.

  And what I see is this, something that was not there just a moment before: a coffin.

  A coffin raised on a wooden bier, and made entirely of glass.

  And it’s not empty.

  “Mom?” I move toward it, cautious at first but then fast, faster, fastest, sprinting to reach her. “Mom!”

  As soon as I come close enough, I see that I was wrong. There is no figure inside. Just flowers.

  The lidless coffin is filled with roses, and every one of them is red.

  “You didn’t tell me,” I hiss at the Darkness, my eyes on the roses and nothing else. A screech of thunder like a grinding jaw, and the branches of the walls begin to writhe, entangle. “You didn’t tell me that playing your game would make my sister disappear and make my mom suddenly be dead.”

  Silence.

  “This is not my doing,” he whispers. I reach for a rose as if hypnotized, my heart slamming against my sternum in warning. “It’s— Wait, Rhea, don’t—”

  Too late. I wrap my hand around a stem and pull with all my strength.

  But the rose doesn’t budge.

  Instead a row of five thorns digs into my palm, pricking me so hard, it draws blood, a crescent of pain. I wrench my hand back, with a curse and a cry, a ribbon of blood dripping down and encircling my wrist.

  That’s when the screaming starts.

  More feverish and urgent than I’ve ever heard it. I clap my hands over my ears, smearing blood against my cheek. The walls twist and grate in earnest now, and the ground seems to clench like a muscle, tautening beneath my feet. The sky tears down the middle, and the glitter chips in the ground turn blue, then violet, then black. The columns lean and crash into one another, gouging holes in the frenzied walls. I watch all this with wide, wide eyes, dizzy and entranced.

  A dream can’t hurt me.

  Can it?

  An arm slides behind my knees, and another wraps around my back—and then I am being lifted, up off my feet, tucked tightly against a chest I can’t see. The Darkness holds me against him, and then—he runs.

  Through the doors and down the halls, over the wildly undulating drawbridge and out of the dead and dying castle, back to the clearing where he found me. I expected him to feel like stone, inflexible, but his skin is warm and soft, his bones protruding in little knots and lines beneath a thin layer of muscle. I press my face into his neck, and his pulse there feels more like a flinch than a beat.

  Why does your heart sound like an apology? I think. What are you sorry for?

  He sets me down, and I sink to my knees, Gabrielle licking my cheek. Gabrielle—why didn’t she enter the forest with me? I wrap my arms around her and pull her close, water in my eyes, and I realize that it’s raining again. I wipe the tears with the back of my hand and blink at my surroundings, at the neat rows of tombstones and sculpted angels watching over them, the black fence separating the cemetery from the sidewalk and the road beyond, the perpetual rattle of traffic.

  Somewhere nearby there are loud footsteps splashing in the unrelenting rain, and I wonder what other lonely soul is out here in the storm, crying tears that are immediately washed away.

  “Are you here?” I whisper, hoping the Darkness is still near, gripping Gabrielle’s fur as I wait.

  “Rhea?” a voice yells, but it is not the Darkness. Someone splashes through the cemetery, and even though I knew it was him by his call, it’s still a shock to see Dad standing there, holding up a big blue umbrella. “Rhea, what are you doing?”

  I open my mouth but nothing comes out.

  “Raisa called.” Dad crouches down, shielding me with the umbrella, his shoes drowning in mud. “She said I might find you here. She said you were upset.”

  “Mom is…gone?”

  Dad nods, resting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing.

  “No,” I say. “No.”

  “Let’s talk about this at home,” Dad says gently, lifting me by my arm. “You can have a nice hot bath, and relax.”

  I let him lead me away, my clothes suctioned to my skin, cloaked in muck from head to toe. When I inspect my injured hand, uncurling my fingers from a fist, the wounds are still there—five little punctures, curved like a wolf-bite, bitter and red as a rose.

  * * *

  —

  Dirty pajamas, stiff with dried mud. Damp hair, runny nose. My legs are scrunched to my chest. The rain has stopped but the clouds remain, the sky looking the way my eyes feel after I’ve cried—salt-stiff and puffy and shining. I sit on the ground in the center of Mom’s small garden, facing the sparse trees rimming the backyard, staring at a crow perched on a high branch. He blinks back at me as if he recognizes me but is hesitant to say so until he is sure. Gabrielle sits at the base of the tree, her gaze stuck to the bird, tail tensed with elated voracity, even as the crow ignores her completely, unthreatened. I clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

  To call this a garden is generous. It’s now just a patch of naked earth, marred by scars of prickly green weeds, the bristled heads of dandelions bobbling on
skinny stems. I keep waiting for them to transform back into flowers, into bright leafy gems, but they don’t.

  I keep waiting for the dream-haze to drain out of my head, to feel like I’m real again, but it doesn’t and I don’t.

  The only thing keeping me from falling asleep is the sting in my chest, like fresh jabs of the needle, ripping me open again and again.

  “Rhea?”

  The crow flaps away, making no sound, and I turn toward the house. Dad stands in the doorway, peering out. He’s been checking on me every twenty minutes since he found me in the cemetery and drove me home, the promised sandwiches on the backseat. He crammed my bicycle into the trunk while Gabrielle sat curled in my filthy, damp lap.

  “You’ll catch your death,” he says now, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “I don’t care.”

  Raisa steps up behind him, her chin jutting just over his shoulder. Rose is there too. She’s on tiptoe, peering at me over the top of his untidy head.

  “She made waffles.” I scoot my legs in tighter, thighs pressed to my chest, trying to be as small as possible. “Just two days ago. You ate some, Dad, right at the kitchen table. And then you had a sword fight with the silverware.”

  Raisa groans. “Come on, Ree. Stop it now.”

  I have eyes only for my father, who pinches the soft skin on the underside of his chin and looks at me. “Did you win the duel, Dad, or did she?”

  He says nothing.

  And nothing.

  And nothing.

  I shrug, turning back around so I won’t have to see that gaunt, haunted look on his face, or the warning in Raisa’s lifted eyebrows, or the idle distraction I don’t know how to construe in Rose, who bites her lip and glances away.

  “Oh, well,” I say. “I guess it was a draw.”

  Spider-bite midnight: an infected emerald sky strung with clumps of silk-woven stars, a cobweb moon. The Witch of Wishes had conscripted an army of arachnids to decorate the universe for her that night.

  She rested on her back on top of the empty stone altar in the glade, with the Fox Who Is No Fox sprawled beside her, a soft, thick blanket beneath them. Their knees were bent like pyramids pointed straight up, so close that they touched and held each other up, her right thigh against his left. A piece of her hair was pinned beneath his bare shoulder, the rest of it spread around her head like black fire.

  “Tell me,” she said, “about what happened after the magic princess put herself to sleep.”

  The Fox Who Is No Fox blinked up at the poisoned green sky and continued his story, quiet and clear:

  Deep in Graiae Forest, the princess slept, on and on and on. She lay in the deepest and darkest part of the woods, where even the stars would not allow their light to flow, and for a long time, no one came.

  The Immacula who had spoken to her in the north wing might have gone to her side, but he had been sentenced to languish in the dungeons indefinitely. Unbeknownst to the princess, he had been there that day, in the woods, when she had cast the sleeping spell. Roused by the commotion of the guards, he’d followed the king and his soldiers all the way to the woods’ edge. When the princess had fled into the forest, he had given chase with a mind to stop her—to help her, to hide her, anything but that she should place an irreversible curse upon herself. But the soldiers had snared him before he could catch her. Accused of conspiring with the princess against the crown, he’d been spared only because he excelled in the enigmatic magic of necromancy, and the king knew that his only known necromancer was far too valuable to kill.

  All this time the necromancer had wished only for freedom—freedom he’d thought the princess could grant. But now, because of his foolishness, he would never know freedom. Neither would his sister, who’d lived in hiding in the Heartless Hollow with their magicless parents since the day they had been caught a year before.

  He would never forget the choice they each had had to make, the way his mother had clasped her palms to his eyes while the king’s ichoromancer had plunged her shimmering hands into his father’s chest, reaching through skin and muscle and bone, through his human heart, and then closed her fist around its center. But not even his mother’s trembling hands could conceal his father’s screams, or the tang of burnt blood he could somehow taste on his tongue. And he remembered how, when it was done, his father had clutched the boy’s shoulder for support while the ichoromancer had performed the same mutilation on his mother. The boy had watched without shield this time as the ichoromancer had yanked his mother’s small macula heart out, for a moment shining like silver in her slick palm before it had crumbled into dust, gone.

  Forever after, he could not understand nor accept his parents’ decision to surrender the chance for freedom. For though he was now an Immacula, living in a glass tower with a whole host of other Immaculae, being used by the king when he needed something—a bewitched weapon for some skirmish with a foreign territory, or to heal a stubborn illness, or to resurrect the dead loved ones of those who could afford to pay for a private session—well, at least, even then, he still had his magic, even if he could not use it for himself.

  He knew he might never see his family again, except for his sister, an oneiromancer hiding in a musty attic, who had managed to escape on the day the others had been caught a year before, and who had sought refuge with the Forest Forgotten until it had been safe to join their parents in the Heartless Hollow. Every night since he’d become a prisoner, they’d met in their dreams. She reached out to him while he slept and wrenched him away with her to a place where they could be alone, if only for a few hours.

  A dream-walker, that’s what she was—not to be confused with a dream-designer, a rare kind of oneiromancer with magic so powerful that they could create new dreams—

  Here, the Witch huffed, short and sharp. She’d been listening closely, concentrating so hard on his words that her forehead wrinkled, an ache creeping from temple to temple.

  “Enough of this boy and his sister,” she said. “I want to know what happened to the princess. This is a story about her, yes?”

  “Not only about her,” said the Fox Who Is No Fox. “There are many others who—”

  He stopped at another terse sigh from the Witch. He tilted his chin back to the sky and continued:

  Right away the king sent his men to watch the princess’s sleeping form, so if anyone wanted to revive her, they would find their path through the forest considerably more dangerous than usual, as the soldiers’ orders were to kill on sight anyone who attempted to approach.

  Even her own father dared not wake her. If he were the one to interrupt her rest, then the princess would die too. Whoever tries to wake me will die, as will anyone whom that person holds dear.

  Days passed, and the crown prince did nothing but pace the castle corridors from dawn to dusk, gnashing his teeth and sliding deeper into grief. He neglected his royal duties and ignored the king, who tried in vain to calm him, to control him. The crown prince had known all along that his wife and his daughter were maculae, keeping their secret hidden with the promise to change things as soon as he sat on the throne. But now that what he had feared most had come to pass, with both his wife and daughter beyond his reach, he could not even convince the king to make an exception for the princess, to let her live a free life as if her secret had never been revealed.

  Erasing minds is beyond my power, the king said. Even if I pardoned her, the people would never accept her as their princess. Not now that they know what she is.

  Then banish her to the forest, release her to the wilds! The prince paced before the throne, fuming. He was the heir, wasn’t he? And yet, he was powerless to save his own family. How would he someday defend a whole country when he had failed to shield his daughter from his own father? Disown her, deny her, send her away—anything but this.

  But the king only sighed. It is too late.<
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  So the prince raged and mourned and walked a thousand miles without ever leaving his castle, wandering the halls like a phantom. But soon his despair began to look like something else, something like determination. All this magic had him thinking strange and sticky thoughts: I can’t save my daughter right now, but what about my wife? The dead queen lay entombed in the castle temple, before the altar of the Wandering One, a god whose left hand symbolized life, and the right hand death. Under cover of night, a week after the princess’s curse, the prince summoned the necromancer from the dungeons.

  The necromancer said his spell, and the dead queen opened her eyes—but something was wrong. Her lips were rose-red again, her skin flushed and her lungs gaping, greedily gathering air. Though her awed husband stood by her as she awoke, clasping her unstiffening hand, she could not focus on him, did not even seem to know he was there. Her eyes closed, and her heart slowed—but did not stop.

  Before the prince could even kiss her newly warmed lips, she slipped into sleep, dreamless and deep. And though he tried, he could not wake her—not with a touch or a cry or a mighty shake of her shoulders. A sleep like living death had taken her, just as it had taken their daughter.

  The prince was distraught, but the necromancer had suspected something like this might happen.

  She needs magic, he said. Without her natural magic, she will never truly return to herself.

  The prince did not divert his gaze from his wife, not once, not ever. How does she get new magic?

  The necromancer hesitated. She will need time to restore it. And this was true—but only for a healthy macula. If someone used too much magic in a day, they would fall tired, and only a long sleep would return them to normal. But if, like the queen, they’d been drained of their blood and their magic entirely—then they were dead. The only hope of the queen coming back to life relied upon new magic being given to her. The necromancer also thought of the very rare spell to transfer magic between maculae—but the spell made the allocation permanent, and he did not know if such a spell would work, so he pushed all these thoughts aside. He feared the prince would command him to gift his magic to the unconscious queen, and to defy the prince was to defy the king—neither was worth his life.