The Waking Forest

by Alyssa Wees

  Not us, we think. Surely it’s not us.

  I look at her and I smile, and the world shatters in a final gush of gray sky-guts and broken branches, a torrent of teeth sharp enough to scratch diamonds. “It will be done.”

  I shut my eyes.

  I say, “I am not afraid.”

  Once is enough.

  With a crash and a cry, I come back to myself. Somewhere nearby Gabrielle yelps, helpless, watching me. I trip backward, unseeing, but I don’t fall. Because the Darkness—the Fox Who Is No Fox—is there to catch me. This time I let him.

  It’s a dream. It has always been a dream. I am a princess, a macula, a witch. I am an oneiromancer, a dream-designer—that is my greatest magic. This boy came for me in the Woods while I slept, wanting only to wake me. Instead I slipped away again, and I brought all those I loved with me: Gabrielle, my fierce guardian in the Woods. Rose, a girl who refused to forget me or give up on ever finding me again. Raisa and Renata, the gray gorgon and the nymph who watched over me while I slept, my two best friends in Graiae Forest.

  And my parents, of course, my father the crown prince and my mother the future queen, raised again by this boy who has followed me to the ends of this earth, disguised as darkness because I cursed him to be that way. I cursed myself, not to know him. Not to know myself.

  It seems so unfathomable to me now, that I would ever want to forget. The desperate actions of a frightened girl. A girl so full of hunger, a specific kind of hunger, the kind that curls between your bones when you look up at a cloud-dusted dusk. A girl like a half-moon visible in the late daylight, a pale specter in the sky, like the smell of smoke after the fire is long gone. A loose eyelash on a dry cheek, the chime of a cracked bell. A girl whose face is the first you see right after you fall asleep, even if you don’t remember. In fact, for certain you won’t remember, because I’ll already be long gone. I am fickle and ephemeral and I flow, from one dream to the next. The opposite of stasis, even while I sleep.

  What have I done? I think as I regain balance, the boy’s arm around my waist. This has to end.

  “I know who you are,” I say to him around the rushing roar of my pulse. Rose shouted his name when she interrupted our kiss. “I know exactly who you are.”

  He tightens his hold on me. “Who am I, then? Tell me, Rhea Ravenna. Tell me.”

  “No, Rhea, don’t do this.” Rose rushes forward but stops short of the edge of the darkness, unable or unwilling to go any farther, to leave the safety of the light. I turn toward her, and I can see through the darkness to where she stands, but I see nothing within it, not even my own hands. “You don’t have to. Mom, Dad, Raisa, Renata—I know how to get them back.”

  The sun itself could have fallen at my feet, soft and quietly burning up, burning out, and I would not have been as surprised as I am by what Rose has said. “Wh-what?”

  “This is my dream too. You designed it, but I brought them here. I reached out to where the crown prince slept at the future queen’s side, and where your friends dozed in their prisons. I pulled on their magic, or at the very least their dreams, and I brought them here. For you. So you wouldn’t miss them, so you’d never want to leave.” She dashes her fingertips across her cheek, a quick, angry gesture, wiping away a spill of tears. “But my magic isn’t strong enough—I held on for as long as I could, but they started to wake up, one by one. But now that you know, we can start over. Together. We’ll build a new dream, stronger this time, and with our powers combined, none of us will ever wake up.”

  “Rose! What are you saying? You want me to build a new dream with you? I don’t even know who you are.” I’ve started to shake, my whole body shuddering, but I keep my voice steady and clear. And loudly, so loudly that I’m almost shouting, I say, “You crave beauty even though you already have it. You want love, even though you have plenty of that too. You are a key with no lock, nothing to open or close. You are a quick kiss on a cold smile. You are longing personified, longing without end.”

  Rose raises her chin and doesn’t bother now to hide her tears. “I’m your sister.”

  I shake my head. We were sisters, and maybe we can be again—sisters in spirit if not in blood. But right now all I see when I look at her is the blister-shine of betrayal, pale and raw and about to burst.

  “I’ve lived in the Hollow for too long now,” she says, her voice low but strained, a vein standing out on the side of her neck like the branch of a cherry tree under ice. “Locked away in the attic for my own safety, with no one to keep me company but my mirror and my dreams. What kind of a life is that? I can’t go back. I won’t.”

  At this my anger softens. Not all the way, but enough that the sheen of betrayal dulls and my jaw unclenches. We’ve both made mistakes.

  “I can’t keep running.” I bring both my hands to my heart. “But I promise that I’ll make things right. You won’t have to live in the attic anymore. You won’t have to hide.”

  Her eyes fall to her feet, and she does not look up again, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “We could go back to the Woods,” she says, so quietly that I have to lean forward to hear. “We could make the wishes of every child in the world come true. We could grant wishes to those who need them most.”

  “That world is gone,” I say, gentle but firm. “It collapsed when the spell broke. And this mirage will too.”

  I turn so I’m facing the boy in the darkness, his arm falling from around me. I can’t see him but I imagine him there, tense and listening.

  “Instead of helping you, I ran, I slept, I dreamed. But still you came for me in the Woods when no one else would. You followed me here, even though it meant drowning in darkness until I was ready to find you. Until I knew your name.”

  I exhale.

  “You are breathlessness,” I say, and I am all skin and nerves, and every inch of me glitters, every inch of me groans. “You are cold fire. You are wonder, and curiosity that cuts through bone. You speak to Death and convince him to give you what’s rightfully his. You promise him diamonds in exchange for souls, but give him coal and time instead. And Death, he falls for it again and again, because your smile is a sword that no one, not even a god, wants to feed with his blood. And your name—” I stop and step back until his darkness no longer touches me. “Your name is Varon.”

  The darkness falls from him like chains unclasped, shackles of thick shadows tumbling to the floor and disappearing in a hissing swirl of black steam. His face is familiar to me now, and I can’t fathom how I could have ever wanted to forget him.

  When the darkness is gone completely, Varon reaches for me, but he stops when he sees me standing still, confused about why I won’t come to him. Kisses are nice, but they won’t work twice. No, a kiss won’t kill this curse, this spell within a spell. Not this time.

  Something savage spreads in me like a yawn, a girl within a girl, and she stretches herself to fit into my skin. All my life I have been waiting and waiting for her to come.

  Now, she says. You are the Witch of Wishes. What is your wish?

  I look first at Rose, who glances away when our eyes meet, and then at Varon, who licks his red, red lips, waiting for whatever comes next.

  Then I wish just this: to scream.

  I clasp my hands to my ears and close my eyes, and I open my mouth to purge my body of this boiling, itching agony I have clung to for so long. And it hurts, it hurts, but I do not stop. There is relief in destruction.

  The stars—they’re different here. The way they’re arranged. They make pretty patterns, and one of them I recognize: an upside-down skeleton hand. And the color—faintly violet. Puckering. Pulsing. No, not pulsing—choking. Choking on what?

  Wishes.

  Wishes, and every one of them tastes like, feels like, apple slices shoved down the throats of the children who make them. That’s what it is to wish, to sacrifice breath for possibility. Wa
iting for a wish to come true—it hurts.

  The stars are the first things I see when I open my eyes. I look at them, and they look at me, and then—they fall. They shrink to the size of a needle-tip as they come, hot and glittering, stitching the darkness with silvery threads of light. They stick to me, to my palms and wrists and shoulders, my knees and shins and ankles, my neck and my cheeks and all around my eyes. I glisten, everywhere.

  For what seems like too much time and no time at all, I lie there with stars on my skin like goose bumps, and I don’t know who I am or what I’ve done. I’d like to stay here, unhinged, floating and drifting, like a shadow—but then I remember that that’s how this all started in the first place. The wish to be left alone, the wish to be a dream instead of a girl. But then a boy came to me, and he showed me what real fear looks like. His fear was that life would always be misery. My fear was that I could not truly help him, and had no real power to change anything.

  “Darkness?” I sit up slowly, half buried in a pile of leaves. “Varon?”

  But there is no reply.

  The trees here are stuck in the soil upside down—roots in the air and branches underground. The darkness here is very still. It doesn’t speak or smile or sigh. I am alone.

  Mom, Dad, Raisa, Renata—they didn’t disappear like I’d thought they had. They were asleep like I was, and now they’re awake. We are awake.

  It’s strange, though, that now I’m awake and I remember who I am, I still feel like my old self. My dreaming self, Rhea Ravenna. Except my name is Rhea Ravenna, but Princess Rhea Ravenna here, and my father is Crown Prince Rafael and my mother was the future Queen Reese. This is the Kingdom of Ravenna.

  My life there in that other place was a dream, but not. We were all there, all sleeping, dreaming the dream together. I will find them, and we will be reunited, a family never to be torn apart this time. A strange family of trembling hands reaching for each other in the dark, not all of us blood-related, but a family just the same.

  And Varon. Where is he? Still in the dungeons, chained and slowly dying?

  I’m coming, I think, wishing he could somehow hear me as I blink up at the star-swollen sky. I’m coming for you.

  And though a part of me is still angry with Rose for lying to me, that part is small and growing smaller. I made her a promise, and I intend to keep it. I’m not sure how just yet, but I will find a way.

  Still covered in tiny cooling stars, I untwist the folds of my dress from around my waist, the red dress I wore for my mother when I was in mourning. Every movement is painful, metallic pain like clusters of bruises roped all along my body, blue-gold and shining, jabbed over and over by invisible fingertips.

  No, not pain, I realize. Magic.

  I am a princess.

  I am a witch.

  I am Rhea.

  I have many faces, and I want to wear them all.

  With a cry that is somewhere between a laugh and a scream, I jump to my feet, setting the leaves around me to spinning. My head is full of fireflies, and my heart is a flashing light. This magic inside me—it is like the sun in your eyes from every angle, careless to the burns it leaves on bare flesh. I hold my hands high and let a burst of flickering light loose from my palms, sending the stars on my skin back to the sky.

  And then the shouting begins.

  “It’s her. It’s the princess!”

  “She’s awake!”

  “Come quickly!”

  “Wandering One, save us!”

  At the sound of the voices, the stars pause their skyward scarpering. They linger just over the treetops, scything the night with their thin, pointed light, as if checking back over their shoulders to see that I’m all right.

  But.

  I am not all right.

  Several armed men surround the clearing, and I realize too late that I probably should have been a bit more discreet upon waking, instead of immediately and cheerfully blasting the stars back up into the dark. The stars are now hovering overhead like a thousand tiny spotlights, every one of them pointing straight at me.

  Me, the wanted, watched-over princess. The one who’s now been cornered by the king’s soldiers. I wonder if this finally means I’ll be carted away, kicking and clawing, to the king. It almost makes me laugh—but then I see the soldiers’ fingers tightening, and the sound shrivels in my mouth, sticky on my tongue. They won’t kill me. This I’m sure of—but that doesn’t mean what will happen instead will be pleasant. I have to be quick, and as long as they take me alive—alive and awake—then it probably doesn’t matter much to the king what means they use to subdue me.

  I reach far inside myself for words I haven’t spoken in a very long time. In a language at once familiar and strange, I look at the men and say, “Astynta.”

  They freeze, blinking, bemused. They are tipped slightly forward, with their weight on their toes, ready to run again at the slightest ease in pressure from my stilling spell.

  “Put your weapons on the ground—carefully!”

  They hesitate: their hands relax, but they do not let go completely. One of them steps forward, and speaks. “Please, Your Highness. We’re not—”

  “Drop them!” I cry, but nothing happens.

  Not to them, at least.

  My palms cramp, and the brands on the backs of my hands burn, itchy and inflamed. A tingling twinge surges up my arms, wraps around my second heart, and squeezes. Using my magic again after being asleep for so long is like popping a dislocated bone back into place—it’s not broken, but it hurts. I flex and roll my wrists, as if I could simply shake away the ache, but it’s too late anyway. The spell splinters completely. The guards rush toward me.

  I turn and run, as fast as I can, toward the Grimly River, to hurl myself into it, to count on the nymphs to ferry me across the current, to hope they’ll capture and drown anyone who dares follow me down into the cold black water.

  As I draw nearer to the river—so close, so close—one of the soldiers speaks from behind me. Not a spell—just an ordinary command.

  “Stop.”

  No, I think.

  “Stop,” the soldier repeats.

  No, I think, again.

  “Stop!” the soldier pleads.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  On the edge of the river, about to throw myself to the mercy of the death-hungry creatures below, I push down the pain of waking, scraping the stupor of sleep from my eyes, from my mind and my heart and my veins. I turn around, raising my cramped hands, and try one last time. “No! Astynta! Do not follow me!”

  The soldiers obey. Their footsteps go suddenly silent; their exhalations loud and lurching as they catch their breaths.

  They stop, and I’m relieved—but then I see that it’s not entirely because of me.

  One soldier has lunged ahead of the rest, and I’m stunned to see that this soldier is not a man like I’d thought, and not even a boy—no, before me stands a girl, a short, thin girl with red hair pulled into a knot on the top of her head.

  “Witch,” she says, more softly now, and I go still as I realize that the other guards are not men either—they’re children, every one of them. Skinny and dirty and wearing guard uniforms as if they were playing dress-up, their hair tangled, and deep purple bruises beneath their eyes. I watch, bewildered, as the red-haired girl who has somehow managed to evade my tenuous spell inches closer to me, cautiously. She called me Witch, not Princess, so I stay and wait for her to come. She says, “They are more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  Above us, the stars tremble and flash. “Who said I was afraid?”

  She shakes her head. “You didn’t have to say anything. I feel it.”

  I peer at her, amazed at the way her apprehension foams in my bones, how her heartbeat skips forward and skids faster to align with mine. I gasp, stepping toward her. “Gabrielle?”r />
  She nods, smiling eagerly, and I notice how young she truly is, barely fourteen.

  “I followed you, Witch,” she said, “and I did my best to keep you safe.”

  There are still a dozen weapons aimed at me, at us, and I’m growing dizzy with the effort of keeping the spell from breaking. Gabrielle notices me straining.

  “It’s okay,” she says gently, and for some reason I want to cry. It’s Gabrielle, and she’s still on my side. “They won’t hurt you. They were just spooked before, when you suddenly awoke and started sending up sparks.”

  “Delita,” I say. The spell snaps, and the fluttering, flickering stars continue their upward slide. The children slump, dazed, and don’t raise their weapons again.

  “You are the Forest Forgotten,” I say, marveling at the memories those words conjure, of nights spent roasting fresh game around a fire, of tucking the orphans into their tents after the meager feast, of tapping them each on the temple and whispering, Go to sleep, and may your dreams be sweet. And Gabrielle, a wiry, smiling child who followed me everywhere, who refused to go to bed until I had told her a fairy story, demanding to hear only those that had a happy ending. Her magic was like a whisper, like a blurred breath in an open ear, soft, and slinking always just out of sight. “You are the Forest Forgotten and—and you protected me? All this time? But where are the guards? How did you get those uniforms, the weapons?”

  “We used our magic, of course.” Her voice is more gruff than I remember, like a fox’s growl, like claws raking bark. As if she were a fox so long that she’s forgotten how to be human. She points at a tall boy whose uniform is short in the arms, his wrists poking out of the sleeves. “Don’t you remember? Leo can turn invisible, and little Imelda there in the back is a pyromancer. As for me, I’m a shape-shifter, mostly. I followed you into the woods as a fox—that’s all I can really turn into so far—and I brought along several others. Everyone here helped stage our own coup against the guards, after the gorgon and the nymph were taken away.” She turns back to me, her cheeks flushed, exuberant. “We’re here to keep you safe, and so you wouldn’t be alone. It was harder to get to you in your second dream—I couldn’t bring the other children that time.”