The Waking Forest

by Alyssa Wees

  “Thank you, Gabrielle.” She smiles at last, all her teeth showing, and now I really do start to cry, just a little. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and take a breath. Turning to the children, I raise my voice so that I’ll be heard. “How long was I asleep?”

  “One turn of the crow moon.”

  My stomach twists, though that’s not as long as I feared. After all, eighteen years passed in my dream. I was born; I grew up. I lived an entire life while I was asleep. Two lives, really, counting the Witch. But oneiromancy doesn’t adhere to a linear flow of time. In a dream, you could live a thousand lives in a single second.

  “Well.” I try not to choke on the bile creeping up my throat. “A crow-month isn’t so long, is it? That’s only, what—thirty days?”

  Leo steps forward. “Thirty days, or seven hundred and twenty hours, Your Highness,” he says proudly. “That’s two million, five hundred and ninety-two thousand seconds.”

  I stare at him, both impressed and unnerved that he has this information so readily.

  “Are you going to help us, Princess?” Imelda says, drawing my attention away as she rises on tiptoe to be seen through the crowd. “Now that you’re back?”

  At this I straighten my shoulders and lift my chin, doing my best impression of a princess, of a fearless leader. I don’t feel like one. Yet.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “How?” asks Imelda.

  “Oh.” My shoulders slump. “Um, well, I’m not sure exactly…”

  A girl with short, dark curls crosses her arms over her chest. Glenna—I recall her name with a start, and remember too that her magic is strong in divination. “We thought maybe you were dreaming of a solution. And that’s why you were gone so long, because you were thinking and thinking really hard.”

  Dreaming of a solution.

  At once her words jar something loose inside me. Of course, I think, letting my head fall back, my throat stretching long, feeling relieved and incredulous and furious all at once. I laugh, a high, sharp sound, and the stars above rattle and shake, clattering against each other like teeth.

  If my reality before was a dream, then maybe my dream there was real. I remember now: a crumbling wing of the castle, a door at the top of a spiral staircase, sneaking away to explore during the balls, testing the doorknob and finding it locked. A forgotten place, a forbidden place. Something is behind that door, something the king doesn’t want anyone to see. If I find the door and open it, for real this time, I’ll discover some secret that will help me destroy the king’s legacy.

  At the very least, this is a place to start. By the end of this day, the right Ravenna will sit upon the throne—or else I will be dead. The king will not let me go a second time. This is my last chance to fight, and I won’t waste it.

  I won’t.

  “I’ve just remembered something. Something I think can help us,” I say, and the children exchange glances, some of them smiling while others fidget, unconvinced. “I promise, I’m going to make your wishes come true. But first I need you to do something for me.”

  The children gather close, and I ask them to find everyone they can in the forest and tell them that I’m awake, that I’m traveling to the city to confront the king. “Ask them to meet me there, if they are willing.”

  When I’m finished, they clutch their weapons and hurry away into the woods on silent feet. A few throw their arms around me in a tight hug before they go. The only one who doesn’t move is Gabrielle.

  “Come, Witch,” she says, taking my hand. “I will show you the way home.”

  Together we leave the darkest place in the forest, and cross over the bridge to where the pale glaze of the moonlight blushes through the shadowy gaps between the trees.

  “Where are the soldiers you overthrew?” I ask as we hurry away, hopping over fallen branches, brambles scratching our ankles. “What happened to them?”

  “At the bottom of the river,” says Gabrielle. “We had some help from the nymphs,” she adds without remorse, leading me over a rotting toppled trunk.

  The nymphs remind me of Renata, her glistening salt-song that makes no distinction between mirth and mourning. These trees are starting to look familiar, and soon I lead Gabrielle instead of the other way around. I know exactly where to go. I start to walk faster, my breath snagging in my throat—all I want right now is to see Renata and the others again, to know for sure that she is safe.

  Gabrielle and I run away from the darkest part of the woods, the stars above watching me warily. Now that they’ve touched me, I feel their ancient fever; I hear their crisp whispers.

  They say, Hurry, little princess.

  Hands ready, little witch.

  Go, little girl, and take what belongs to you.

  “I am not little,” I say to them.

  To us, they say, you are.

  But little things, they say, grow into big things.

  And big things, they say, must not forget they were once little things too.

  Gabrielle and I trip over brambles in the semi-dark until I mutter a flat-footpath spell to clear the debris as we come to it. The terrain becomes more and more familiar: there to the left is the blue-barked Fir of Fates. Pinch a drop of your blood onto its roots, and it will reveal your future when you press your ear to its trunk. Or, depending on its mood, it will simply stretch its pine needle branches down behind you and scratch your unsuspecting spine, begging for more blood.

  And up ahead is the glowberry bush where I hid once from a human hunter with a gun at his hip; just past that pond is the place where I mastered a wind-changing incantation for the first and only time. Over there is the trodden trail to the manticores’ cave, and right around that willow is—

  Wait.

  “Gabrielle?” I slow, my lungs aching, and duck beneath the drooping branches of the willow. Here the trees are right-side up, not like in the clearing, where the roots are avaricious for air and the branches are banished to the worms. “What—”

  I peer around the tree and stop. I blink three times, fast, but the picture before me does not dissolve or disband. I’m not haunted here by visions of death, but I almost wish I still were. Because then the destruction before me wouldn’t be real. I could blink, and it would all disappear.

  Or, rather, what was once here would reappear. Because there is nothing left of the trees beyond the willow, save for some still-smoking sticks, a spread of shrubs, and underbrush spitting sparks into the sky, aiming for the eyes of the seven moons I can now see without the veil of the trees, tiptoeing across the cosmos as if they aren’t sure if they should stop and help or just pretend they haven’t seen the devastation that’s ravaged the rest of the forest.

  The world is hushed, and a gray haze hangs in the distance, occluding my view of the city beyond. What has become of those who lived here? Have they fled deeper into the forest? Left it entirely? Or—

  No. No, no, no, no, no.

  Don’t even think it.

  I bend down, uttering a flame-resistant spell, slowly touching my fingers to a smoldering patch of moss.

  “Don’t—” Gabrielle cries, gripping my shoulder to yank me back. “Do you have a death wish?”

  “It’s okay,” I say, showing her my fingers. My flesh is fine. But I know that if I had let my hand linger, I would have gotten burned, even with the spell. “That’s no ordinary fire, though.”

  “What is it?” Gabrielle asks.

  “Star Fire.” She looks at me blankly. “Star Fire spreads quickly but burns slowly. It could take years before the last of it is gone. See how those trees are still standing, in an almost perfect line? Someone put up a defensive spell there. But whoever it was, they were too late to save all of it.”

  I remember the old, sacred stories that Varon as the Fox Who Is No Fox told me while I twisted flowers into his hair, stories of great h
eroes who boasted they were strong enough to command the stars to hop right into their hands. Every one of those tales ends in disaster. In death.

  Who would willingly pluck a star down, searing and blinding, and then use it to raze the forest, to murder all its creatures?

  I can think of only one person.

  “But how did he even do it?” I wonder aloud. “How did the king get himself a star?”

  “He commanded one of his servants to do it?”

  “A single Immacula would never be able to accomplish something like this. But maybe—maybe it was a whole group of them. Maybe he got them all to do it together.”

  Gabrielle scowls. “And then let them burn here when he was through with them.”

  I clench my jaw, trying to picture him, to see his face in my mind, but I can’t. I can’t remember him. He is a vague shadow skulking around my skull, and nothing more than that.

  For just a moment longer, Gabrielle and I do nothing but survey the wreckage: reddened roots peeking out of the earth, sputtering scrub that once provided prickly padding for the forest floor, diverting those who did not belong there from entering its wild and blood-hungry depths. I keep expecting the flames to vanish with each blink—but they don’t.

  All at once, I miss my curse. Well—not so much my curse, exactly. I miss my family, and our quiet house by the sea. I miss all of us, living together. I miss the neighbor boys pedaling past, teasing, Look, guys. It’s the Raving Ravennas! How you ghouls—girls—doing today? I almost laugh now, thinking about Brett and his friends. How would they feel if they knew they’d been taunting a nymph, a gray gorgon, a macula, and a witch princess, all of us so powerful that together we could turn them into frogs, moldy amphibians to keep as pets in a jar, only kissing them back into boys when—and if—we felt like it?

  I wish Raisa were here with me right now, to rage at our enemies, to tell them who we are and what we will do to them if they wish to stand against us. She has always been the best at succinctly saying exactly what she means, fearless—though sometimes careless—with words. I wish Renata were here, to seek out the places where nobody thinks to look. Those hiding places, those sighing places—they are saturated with a strange and wonderful sort of magic, and with it, I know Renata would be able to fashion a happy ending out of all this madness and mutiny.

  And Rose, Rose—I wish only that she would press her cold, cold hands against my forehead. I wish she would stomp around this ruined forest and crush the flames beneath her feet.

  Because, this place? It is not beautiful anymore.

  “Should we continue on?” Gabrielle asks eventually. “There’s not much we can do here.”

  “Actually,” I say, “there is something we can do.”

  As much as I might miss my house by the sea, my dream within a dream, there is something here that I never had there.

  Here I have magic.

  I take a few steps forward, gesturing for Gabrielle to hang behind. She watches me, curious and a little wary as I look up, up, up and I revolve in place, scanning in every direction. But there is not a single cloud in sight.

  I stop spinning, and close my eyes. Concentrating very hard, I send out feelers with my magic, searching for a nearby cluster of clouds, a hint of a hurricane, the start of a storm—anything already formed so that I don’t have to do it myself. I feel in the direction of the forest behind me, the city before me, and the ocean beyond.

  Finally I find something—a small but violent thunderstorm about a mile or two out from the coast. I form magic hooks that sink into its edges, and when the connection seems secure, when I am so thoroughly bonded to it that the lightning is snapping and the thunder is snarling inside my own head, I stretch my hands high and drag the storm across the sky.

  Gabrielle moves toward me, the heat from her body at my side almost distracting. “Um, Witch?”

  I say nothing. I pull and pull.

  “Witch, what are you—”

  “Shhh.” To her, it probably just looks like I’m tugging at an invisible rope. “You’ll see in a minute.”

  It takes more than a minute, my arms shaking from the effort, but soon the storm is on the horizon. I still hear it in my head, but now I hear it with my ears too, gnashing both inside and out. Only once I feel a splatter of cool rain do I open my eyes and sigh. I release my hold, dropping my arms and sagging against Gabrielle’s side.

  “Ah,” she says, putting an arm around me for support. “I see.”

  We watch in silence for a while, periodically wiping the rain out of our eyes. The flames on the ground hiss. They don’t vanish completely, but it’s something, at least.

  “Let’s go.” I push away from Gabrielle and resume walking toward the misted city, the palace. “It’s time to move on.”

  All around us the field that was once a mighty forest sputters and writhes with the last remains of slow-smothered Star Fire as the rain falls. But soon I notice there’s something odd about these clouds. They’re wrong, somehow. Their lightning is mechanical, flashing at intervals of five seconds exactly. And the thunder—it’s the same every time: a long, low howl followed by a quick crash and then deepest silence. Again and again and again.

  We pause, the rain coming straight down at the same even pace. Snick of lightning, two-part thunder. Five seconds. Snick of lightning, two-part thunder. There is no wind.

  The storm makes me think of Raisa, who always ran to the front porch to watch whenever one blew through. Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in the eye of a storm, she said once as we stood together in the open doorway, just out of reach of the rain, clouds like thick, frayed gauze bandaging a broken sky. Like I’m the only quiet, still thing in a world that won’t stop spinning.

  “Raisa,” I breathe, and then I’m running, tearing across the simmering field, not toward the city, the castle, but to the eye of the storm. Neck craned back, hunting for a tower made of enchanted vapor.

  The rain lashes into my eyes as lightning surges and thunder churns, never breaking its five-second pattern. It seems to go on forever.

  And then, just as I’m about to give up, to convince myself I was mistaken, I see it: a cylindrical swirl of peculiar silver clouds, a whipping vortex of condensation roughly in the shape of a turret.

  “Raisa!” I shout, jumping up and down and waving my arms as if she could see me. “Raisa, I’m here!”

  “Can’t you, uh, magic her down?” Gabrielle asks.

  My face flushes, but not from the fire.

  “Oh,” I say. “That would probably be more effective, wouldn’t it?”

  Gabrielle grins, and I see the fox within. A sly, slanted sort of smile that I feel on my own lips like a froth of warmth.

  “I should think so,” she says.

  Mock-scowling at her, I raise my hands yet again, calling on every last reserve of energy. “It’s taking some getting used to, is all,” I add, steeling myself.

  Her smile falters. “What is?”

  “Having magic again.”

  Just as I moved the storm, I send out hooks to grab hold of the whirling column of water and air. It stretches like a tornado, the tip touching the ground, and with all my might I focus on slowing it, and then stopping it completely. Breathing fast, my elbows overextend as I push, as I pull, as I bend the wind to my will.

  Like the careening of an out-of-control carousel, the gust comes to a gradual halt. Its exterior seems almost to crack—as much as wind can crack—and slough away in wisps of gray.

  “Raisa?”

  I sift through the curling miasma, my heart growing a thousand tiny teeth with each step. Poised to eat itself raw if I can’t find her or if I’ve hurt her. If she’s—

  No, no, no, no, no.

  Through the fog, a voice says, “Ree?”

  “Raisa!” Relief is like an injection shooting through my veins,
pushing me forward, urging me toward her. But I don’t quite know where her voice is coming from. “Raisa, oh my god—where are you? Where—” Inspiration strikes. “Aflema,” I hiss. “Disperse.”

  The steam immediately surrounding us clears, and suddenly my sister stands before me, not three feet away. She’s still her, but more so: her teeth are whiter and her skin is brighter, faintly luminous, and her hair is naturally silver-blue. I don’t get a good look at her eyes before she claps her hands over them.

  “Rhea! Don’t look at me!” She hunches over and twists away. Her magic is bubble-gum bright, flashing beneath her skin. The shape and size of it is different from mine—hers is gorgon magic, and mine is human. They have the same source, but not the same form.

  I walk over to her, puzzled and pleased at once. “You—you know me, then? You remember? You remember the house by the sea?”

  “Of course I remember! We were all dreaming together, weren’t we? We—”

  I put a hand on her shoulder, but she jerks out of reach, hiding her whole face behind her hands. Her nails are hot pink and pulsing with light.

  “Don’t look at me!” she says.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a gray gorgon, stupid! If you look into my eyes, I’ll turn you to shadow.”

  “Oh, right. But you never turned Renata into a shadow, did you?”

  “She’s a nymph. She’s not human!”

  “Neither am I, exactly,” I say, but I rip a strip of red fabric off the hem of my already ruined dress. I tap her on the shoulder until she straightens, her eyes still covered. “Here, try this.”

  She fumbles blindly, then snatches the strip and ties it around her head. The fabric is opaque enough that we can’t see her eyes, but thin enough that she can still see through it. She turns to look at me, and we wait. When I don’t turn to shadow, she smirks, as if she were the clever one who came up with the idea.

  “Excellent.” She shifts on her feet, and though I can’t see her eyes, I feel her avoiding my gaze. “And, uh, thanks for, like, saving me. I guess.”