The Waking Forest

by Alyssa Wees

  Only this: bricks and sticks and bones, piles of them. Slabs of glass and blackened rubble and bits of trash, a smell of melted plastic, burnt rubber. Sludge and blood and quiet flies flicking over the remains. Ashes, everywhere.

  To the left, the skyline is vaguely visible now, cutting through the murk, arranged like a cluster of oversize knives stuck in the ground by their pointed tips. Like I could grasp the handle of the sharpest tower and plunge it into the rancid heart of whoever did this.

  For a moment I am back in my dream life, confined again by my curse, and I wait and wait and wait for the damage to disappear, for the bricks to mortar themselves back up into buildings, for the bones and blood and ash to stitch themselves back into people.

  But I am no longer cursed. And this is no dream.

  I round on Shay, my fingernails flashing as spits of sparkling magic leak from my hands. “This is not the Hollow.”

  “You are right, my sweet. It is not, not anymore. But it used to be.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I think it is important for you to see.”

  Gabrielle puts her hand on my shoulder, but I wrench away from her touch. Renata and Raisa linger off to the side, silent and staring. Staring at me. I kick at the ash, sending it puffing into the air for all of us to choke on, wishing this were all a game. Guess my name, Rhea Ravenna, guess my name. That quiet, dazzling terror of contending with the Darkness was only a pinprick on my fingertip compared to the sword-slash in my stomach of this new panic.

  “Use this anger, Princess,” Shay says with the same spiderweb-sticky voice, “to do what must be done.”

  I freeze. “And what is that?”

  She lifts her head, straightening her front legs. She is poised and proud. “Whatever it takes.”

  I raise my hands and sweep the ash out of my way as I stalk away from her, my despair disintegrating into desperation. I need to find Rose. Now. But if there is nothing here, then—where is she? If she was under a sleeping spell while whatever battle was lost here seethed through the Hollow, then what has become of her?

  Plowing the ashes out of my path, I begin to run as fast as I can, the others close behind. Somewhere to the side, that infernal thunderstorm cranks like clockwork.

  “Rose?” I cry. “Where are you?”

  “Wait—Ree, over there!”

  I look where Renata points, off to the left and about a hundred feet in the distance beyond a small hill of soot and cinders: a blinding glint like sunlight on a lake.

  “But—” I say, and Renata rises to tiptoe as they all watch me, as if waiting for my permission to hurry forward. “But there’s no water here. That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it? Sunlight on the surface of a pond, or…” I trail off.

  Raisa shrugs. “Why don’t we just go look?”

  “It could be dangerous,” Gabrielle says, stepping in front of me. “It could be some kind of tainted magic, a trap.”

  Shay nudges the ash on the ground beneath her, kneading it with her paws. “We do not know quite what happened here, it is true. And Rhea is right—I do not remember there being any bodies of water in the Heartless Hollow.”

  “Then it’s not water.” Raisa throws up her hands. The manticores remain quiet, looking to me for what to do next. Shay seems to want me to make my own decisions, and then to stick by them. “Or it is, and you just never knew it was here. I mean, how many times have any of you come to the Hollow to go swimming, hmm? How many of you have come here at all? Why would you? This place was horrible, even before all this.”

  Again there is a flash of light coming from the ground, shooting upward like a searchlight or a reflection or—

  A reflection.

  Maybe it’s not water at all.

  Without a word, I start toward the spot, ignoring Gabrielle’s groans of protest. I run through the debris, and soon I can see that it’s definitely not a lake. It’s very small, and continues to gleam in the sunshine. I crest the little hill, keeping my hands slightly lifted in front of me, a thousand spells tucked under my tongue and wedged between my teeth. I’m ready to use any of them at any moment.

  Almost there—

  It’s about twenty feet away when Gabrielle speeds up and grabs my elbow, stopping me. “Hold on,” she says. “Maybe I should go first.”

  Renata steps forward before I can speak. “It’s nothing sinister. I can tell. But—” She closes her eyes, lifting her chin. Her voice goes sort of slippery, and her head falls to one side. “Someone lost hope here. Can’t you feel it?”

  “I lost a little bit of hope, when I saw that the Hollow had been completely obliterated,” I admit.

  “You did not lose hope,” says Shay firmly. “You gained anger.”

  “Wrong. I was already angry.”

  “Were you?”

  “Of course!”

  She shrugs her sleek lion shoulders. “It was not enough.”

  “Rhea, you need to shut up and focus,” Raisa snaps before I can reply.

  Shut up, shut up, shut up.

  “Witch, wait here.” Gabrielle rockets toward the object. Immediately I follow.

  “It’s—an old mirror,” she says, arriving half a second before I do. She stands a few yards from it, wringing her hands and looking down. “Not magic, Witch—just a mirror.”

  Just a mirror?

  No.

  Nothing is ever just anything, is it?

  Magic mirror, on the wall, am I beautiful—or not at all?

  As the others come up behind us, uncertain, I lower myself to my knees and crawl across the remaining few feet to where the long oval mirror lies, its ornate bronze frame slightly chipped in places but otherwise whole. I look down, fully expecting to be greeted by my own unsmiling face. But it’s not there.

  I don’t see my own image, or that of the others gathered around me, all of us peering down at the surprisingly pristine surface, free of dirt and cracks and nicks in the glass. No, the girl who blinks back at us has long blond hair secured in a high bun, ice-cap eyes that melt and drip tears down her cheeks, a strange sheen to her skin like the side of a blade, glinting each time she moves. Like a portrait, she’s visible only from the shoulders up.

  “Rose?” Something small and sharp, pebbles or bits of shrapnel, burrow into the dry skin of my bent knees. I grip the ground, curling my fingers into the mud. “R-Rose?”

  Silence and stillness and suffering. Like waiting for a voice at the end of a phone line, wondering if they’ve already hung up, if they’ve already gone.

  Then, Rose’s voice: “Go away.”

  Her lips move and she blinks. I actually twist around and look up to the place she should be in order to be reflected in the mirror. But it is only Gabrielle and Raisa and Renata and Shay huddled over me.

  How is this possible?

  “Rose? Is that really you?” I lean closer, pressing a fingertip to the glass. Cold, cold. For a second, I believed I might be able to reach right through and touch her. Might be able to grasp her and haul her out. But no—the mirror is solid, real. “Um, what am I seeing exactly? Are you—are you in the mirror?”

  She shies away, half turning, so that all we see is her profile. She seems to come up against some invisible barrier, and can’t quite maneuver herself completely out of the frame. Finally she hunches her shoulders, not looking at any of us. Her voice is stifled, as if she’s talking through water. “Leave me alone.”

  “Aren’t you happy to see us?” Renata says.

  “I almost lost my life to a manticore sting while trying to find you,” Raisa adds. “The least you could do is say hello.”

  Rose says nothing.

  “But it is you, isn’t it?” I seize the frame, adjusting the mirror so that it slants at an angle instead of lying flat on the ground. She wobbles a bit but doesn’t lose her ba
lance. “You’re really here?”

  She sighs. “Yes.”

  “This is strange magic,” Shay says, taking a few steps back. The other manticores follow, stamping their front paws. “I do not like it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll just—get her out, I guess.” I cross my legs, propping the mirror against my calves. “There is no spell that cannot be undone.”

  I don’t know, actually, if this is strictly true, but it seems true, so I raise my hands and try to touch the edges of the magic that has bound her living body inside the mirror. As I probe, I realize that Shay is right—this magic is uncanny. It feels like a sore in the corner of your mouth, stretching and chafing each time you part your lips even a little bit, to laugh, to breathe, to bite, to scream. This magic hurts to touch, and it will probably hurt to terminate it too.

  “Liesinge” is the only counter-curse I can think of. Release her. I open one eye, peeking at the results.

  Nothing.

  I try again. “Cymst.”

  Nothing.

  “Abeata!” I cry in frustration. “Abeata, breca!”

  Nothing and nothing and nothing.

  “Be careful, Princess,” warns Shay. “You do not want to hurt her.”

  “Is this some sort of trick?” I ask Rose, wiping a fresh drip of sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. “How did you get in there? Who put you there?”

  “Well.” She takes her time in answering, squinting her eyes in the mild morning sun. “I put myself here, Rhea. For protection. This is an unbreakable mirror. It’s been in my family for ages. Each night before I went to find you, I said a spell and crawled into the mirror to sleep, where I knew I’d be safe if anything happened. You can’t dream when you’re dead.”

  “That is very clever magic,” says one of the manticores, impressed, and Shay exhales, stamping her paws.

  “Thank you,” Rose murmurs. “Only I can undo the spell, though.”

  “Well, great,” I say, slightly annoyed that she didn’t just say this outright. “Then are you coming out now?”

  “I’d rather not, thanks.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because.”

  It’s like we’re four years old again. “Because why?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  I give the frame a sharp shake. Not enough to injure her, only to rattle her, just a little. “Come out of there right now.”

  She stumbles. “No.”

  “I command it.”

  “No.”

  “As your princess, I command it!”

  “No.”

  “As the Witch of Wishes in the Woods, I command it!”

  “Look around!” she cries, her voice thumping against the glass. “This doesn’t look like the Woods to me.”

  I shake the mirror again, wanting to hurl it halfway across the world. “You’re being stupid, Rose!”

  “I don’t care.”

  “So what are you going to do? Stay in there and sulk forever?”

  “Maybe.” Her eyes flick up to the others, then back to me. She speaks quietly, and I have to lean in to hear. “I am not beautiful anymore.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not.” She doesn’t look me in the eye as she speaks. “My magic—it isn’t wonderful like yours. When I use too much of it too fast, I get dizzy, I get sick—my chest hurts, and I feel like I can’t breathe. I get tired so easily, and my head starts to feel like it’s being squeezed by huge hands that won’t let go. It’s not—it’s not pretty. It’s messy, and it makes me feel like I can’t handle things. Like I’m not—I don’t know. Worthy.”

  “Rose,” I say, my heart breaking for her, all my frustration driven away. “I’m not a doctor, but I don’t think any of that is because of your magic. It sounds like anxiety. It sounds like you have panic attacks. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn’t make you weak or not able to handle things, and it doesn’t make you any less of a macula than me, or anyone else. I mean, look at me—I’m the queen of anxiety. Or, rather, the princess! It comes with a crown I can never take off, but some days I don’t even notice it’s there. And during the times when it became too heavy for me to hold my head up, in our life with the house by the beach when I had visions and nightmares, no one in our family ever called me crazy, even though my crown was invisible to you. Worth has nothing to do with it. You know that, don’t you?” Rose says nothing. I stand up, taking the mirror in my arms. “I’ll just take you and the mirror with me. And you can let me know when you’re ready to come out, okay?”

  “I may never be ready.”

  I try to smile, but the corners of my lips don’t quite curl the way I want them to. “Then I’ll carry you forever.”

  Her gaze flits up to me, then back down again. She nods once, and says nothing more.

  “Here. I’ll carry her,” Renata says. “You should keep your hands free. In case of a magical emergency.”

  “Yes, good thinking. But hang on just one second….” Still clutching the mirror, I hurry away from them, scattering ash with my feet. I don’t go far—just far enough to be out of earshot. “I wanted to ask you something. Your name—is it really Rose?”

  “Um, no. You didn’t know my name as the princess, so Rose is the one you gave me in the dream. My name’s really Vittoria.” She gives me a sheepish shrug. “But I think I like Rose better.”

  “But are you sure? Vittoria is so pretty.”

  “I don’t feel like Vittoria anymore.”

  “Okay,” I say, nodding. “Then Rose it is.”

  “Thank you.”

  I start to turn, but stop when she speaks again.

  “Have you found Varon yet? Is he all right?”

  Varon, Varon, Varon. The boy in the darkness, my Fox Who Is No Fox.

  I bite the inside of my cheek. “No, he’s not here. I think he’s in the castle, where he was before my second sleeping spell.”

  I straighten my shoulders, gazing over the frame of the mirror to the sea glass skyline beyond, my heart clenching with something like determination.

  “But don’t worry,” I say, grim and eager all at once. “It just so happens that that is exactly where we’re going.”

  The city stands, but it is empty.

  Massive and winding, with shiny black streets that always look freshly paved and edged in scalloped cement, sidewalks like lace. Enchanted orbs that float at night like tethered balloons, conjuring shadows that drip like rain down the sides of the seven-story houses, tall and narrow and tightly touching each other, heavy doors adorned with all manner of gothic flourishes: corrugated steel columns and chrome corbels, copper gargoyles and stained glass windows ranging from tongue-pink to bloodless-lip lavender to apricot blush. The houses grow wider and sturdier and taller and newer the closer you come to the palace, which is set far from the inland entrance and sits proudly on a cliff overlooking the sea.

  The crystal castle is really a cluster of skyscrapers in the shape of a castle. It’s sprawling, enormous, with towers like turrets rising one hundred stories high, connected to each other by long, slanted bridges with rounded glass roofs. Behind the keep at the castle’s center, out of sight, is the abandoned wing made entirely of stone, with only little holes cut into it at intervals to let in trickles of light. There is no moat or battlements or anything like that; this is not a fortress. The king was confident that the castle would never be attacked.

  And he was right. Even now it’s still polished and perfect and impermeable, like a city in itself.

  “I feel sick,” Raisa complains as we walk down a deserted street, the castle high on the hill before us. “All your life you’ve had to live in this nauseating monstrosity, Ree. How did you stand it?”

  “I didn’t really have a choice.”

  “Do you feel it n
ow?” she asks. Even Shay and the manticores appear paler than normal, nauseous and cringing.

  “I don’t know.” I’m a little dizzy, but I’m not sure if that’s due to the steel storefronts and iron facades of the mansions, or to the anticipation of what I might find when I get to the top of that hill. Dad, Mom, Varon—they are all there, and that thought comforts me, the thought of seeing them soon.

  But.

  The king is there too.

  I look down at myself, at my palms and my elbows and my knees, just visible beneath the hem of my ripped dress. My glow has dimmed. Maybe it’s the metal, or maybe it’s something else. Something like fear.

  Misty sunlight illuminates the stained glass in the houses on either side of the street, casting us in colored shadow. Soon we pass into the heart of the town, which is as quiet as a graveyard, with only the sound of whispers and breathing and footfalls skimming the sidewalk somewhere out of sight. A prickling starts at the top of my spine, and my heart starts to beat very fast.

  “Is it always like this?” Renata whispers, clutching the mirror to her chest, her arms wrapped around the bottom of the frame so that Rose can still see out. “Is it always so…dead?”

  “No,” I say, thinking of the first crowds usually forming in front of the shops along these streets even at such an early hour, and the elevated trains that slid high above the street, floating along on unseen tracks. “It used to be very much alive.”

  Raisa shudders and sidles closer to Gabrielle’s side. “Then where is everybody?”

  “Hiding,” Shay says, nodding toward the nearest building. For the first time, I realize there are people inside all these seemingly empty houses and stores, their noses pressed to the windows. They’re watching as we walk by. “Most fled the castle when the burning of the Hollow and the forest began. But some stayed, Princess. The ones who had nowhere else to go.”

  I look back behind me, and there are faces there too, out in the open, eyes on the ground that tentatively flick up to me and back down. The people dart into alleys when they see me seeing them. I stop, and my sisters and Gabrielle and the manticores stop too, and together we watch as the people emerge from their hidden places behind posts and corners and front doors. Some of them have brands on their hands and red sores on their wrists where iron chains once chafed their skin, while others have large X’s inked on the backs of their hands to show their solidarity. The rest of the Forest Forgotten are there too, the children still in their stolen uniforms, weapons in hand.