The Wildest Woods

by S. K Munt

  Bastien says that you shouldn’t attempt to go above a thousand feet, Lark! Sam called to me inside my mind, and I spun around then, looking back in the direction of The Factory but not being able to see anything but the snow sweeping past between it and myself. Archangels could fly a lot higher back in their prime because they were immortal, but you’re not so anything above a kilometre up will make it impossible for you to breathe and eventuate in you being covered in frostbite, so stay low!

  I deflated as my grand plans to circumnavigate the continent evaporated. So I couldn’t fly through low cloud cover, but couldn’t rise above it- what good was that? The northern half of the continent was mountainous and would probably suffer low cloud cover on a daily basis! Dammit Satan, couldn’t she have made me a soul mate, instead of just an overburdened and ill-equipped human with wings?

  Satan said you were destined to do this, Sam said quickly. But she didn’t say it was going to be easy, wings or no wings, you have to find a way.

  I was about to give him a piece of my mind when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye, and froze. I instantly felt my heartbeat slow down on instinct and following that instinct, I very slowly turned to find myself staring at the wolf that had snuck up on me- and was now standing only two metres behind me and glaring at me from behind yellow eyes.

  Shit shit shit!

  What? What? WHAT?

  Shush!

  ‘Hello…’ I said softly out of reflex, wetting my lips before rubbing them together. ‘What can I, uh… do for you?’ I gave the animal a brief once-over with my eyes, my body twitching a little when I realised that not only was this the very same creature that had attacked Sam on the mountain that day, but probably the same one that had been watching us yesterday. ‘Again?’

  In response, the wolf’s ears flattened back, making my tummy harden and frost over like I’d swallowed a frozen snowball. It growled so quietly that it was barely discernible over the wind, but I managed to read its body language loud and clear: I didn’t have a whole lot of time left to get out of its way. Question was: could I take off before it could grab me? Would my boots offer me protection from its fangs if I did not? Boy, was this day off to a shitty start! First I’d been grabbed by that old... realisation rocked me.

  ‘You may not enjoy the taste, but you will live longer for the nourishment it supplies. Take it, and then flutter off!’

  Oh my God… hadn’t Bastien said that Arial saw things? Was it possible that she’d been talking about me feeding the wolf all along?

  I reached for my back pocket and the offensive jerky inside, the wolf mistook my sudden movement as an indication that I was going to flee or attack and snarled, bending onto its forelegs and launching itself at me. I did not have the time to throw the meat away from me as I had when I’d diverted the last wolf from Sam, but I managed to get the dried meat out of my pocket and then pitch it at the wolf as I flapped my wings and levitated off the ground. The dog jumped at me as I’d feared it would, but it missed and landed on top of the jerky sacrifice instead of my boot, giving me the chance to pull my legs up and then rise swiftly- too swiftly. The wind pounded against me hard enough to almost send me sailing directly over its head and back towards Calliel but I grit my teeth and resisted its pull, shooting up so high that I lose sight of the wolf, but not so high that I lost sight of everything again.

  What just happened? Sam demanded. Was that a wolf? Has it been following you? Explain your thoughts, woman! They’re all disjointed!

  But I turned and coasted back over The Factory then out over the gorge, and I didn’t slow down until the only thing that was close enough to me to be heard was the sound of my heart pounding freely, and the whoosh of the wind through my wings.

  Yes Arial was creepy, but she was certainly proving to be helpful!

  I quickly learned how to fly safely and with a semblance of control that morning after the wolf had inspired me to stay off Terra firma for a while, but I only managed to circle the area north of us for a few minutes before it became apparent that flying was never an activity that I was going to be able to engage in for extended periods of time without suffering, at least not in bad weather anyway. It was cold up there- colder than I’d ever imagined an autumn sky could be- but it was the strength of the wind that had me gasping for breath. I’d originally thought that flying was a lot like swimming, but flying through the northern skies that morning was a lot more like swimming through cold gelatine or crushed ice because it resisted my attempts to sweep it out of my way and left me panting while the muscles in my back burned.

  But I did manage to get a quick overview of the area and to my disappointment, it was almost exactly as Bastien had drawn it, only a lot more complicated-looking. I couldn’t see any higher than the foothills of The Sleeping Giants, but we wouldn’t have been able to make it up those foothills anyway because they were shale and vertical and therefore too slippery and unstable to attempt to climb. Every now and then I flew in as close as possible, but from what I could tell, every nook and cranny was stuffed with Devil’s Claw and Briar and then hidden under the snow. Perhaps a team of well-equipped and experienced Sherpas would have found a way through all of that chaos, but we would not, especially with so many children and elderly individuals in tow.

  The cove also looked every bit as impassable as Bastien had described, but I flew over the edge of it and down into the depths just to be sure, and was almost bowled over by the force of the arctic winds that were sweeping in from the ocean. The water was as malevolent there as it had been that night under Kohl’s command, and several times I had to jerk up and away from the choppy surface when a wave leapt up to lick at my feathers, spraying me with ice water that was so cold that it made my jaw lock up in reflex. The bluffs surrounding the cove were also shale, but the devil’s claw trees themselves were thinner, especially around the edges where the ocean winds had combed through them, and I thought that if it came to cutting a path through them then that would be the best place to try. Then, just as I thought it- I saw what appeared to be an opening in the furthest corner of the cove, and sucked in a breath so cold that I felt my lungs stiffen rather than inflate.

  Oh my god! What was THAT?!

  I spun to try and get a closer look, but the second that I did, a spasm tore through my upper back so sharply that I screamed again. I dipped so low that I almost collided with the wall on the northern side, but I gave up trying to turn around and managed to flap my wings hard enough to get me up and out of the cove before I started plummeting back towards the earth again. The Devil’s Claw were rising up to tear me to shreds, but I groaned and flapped my wings one more time, and that gave me just enough momentum to carry me over the edge of the forest- sending me hurtling towards the snow field behind The Factory where people were waiting for me, instead of into the sharp and certain death that I’d been dreading seconds ago.

  I was terrified all the same, but I got a good close look at the edge of the forest as I sailed over it, and when I noticed water glistening up through a denser patch of trees, my heart skipped another beat. There was a stream running through that forest and into the cove! So if we could somehow get to that- surely it would lead us to whatever body of water it was trickling out of, yes?

  My mind swum and my heart soared with possibilities, but by the time I finally landed in a half-crash near Sam’s feet, I was practically screaming in pain and incapable of articulating what I’d seen into a comprehensive thought, let alone a string of words that would explain it to others. Sam moved forward to wrap my fur around me and other people were out there watching me and crying out to do something for me, but Bastien was the one that came up behind me and pressed his thumb into the edge of my shoulder blade hard, whispering to me to breathe and providing what was thankfully immediate relief.

  ‘Ssh… ssh… it will pass momentarily,’ he assured me, gently but firmly massaging my twisted shoulder while I shook and shuddered. ‘Breathe. It hurts, I know… you must be very careful when m
aking sharp turns, especially in strong winds, little one. Your muscles need time to adapt to this new way of functioning…’

  I nodded to show that I understood, but I was barely listening to him. All I could think about was all that I’d just seen, and the heavy sky above it that had almost completely obscured the potential path from sight the moment that I had passed it by.

  ‘What is it, Lark?’ Sam asked, furrowing his face in confusion as he attempted to piece my scattered thoughts together like a jigsaw puzzle. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘How long will it take to get everyone ready to leave?’ I managed to ask, looking over my good shoulder and towards the gorge while Bastien continued to massage a wider circle behind my shoulder blade with his thumb. Now that I was coming around, I was enjoying the exquisite agony less, but I needed it more so I clenched my teeth around my agitation to have a man touching me and welcomed the relief.

  ‘Twenty minutes, maybe thirty depending on how much stuff we take with us,’ Bastien said softly. ‘Why?’

  I turned around and grimaced a smile up at him, barely able to see him for the snow flurries that were sweeping down into the valley and coating my eyelashes with frost. ‘Because we’re leaving now- before my path disappears under more snow and I lose my way to the river that I think it connects with.’

  ‘Your what now?’ Sam came forward and knelt, helping me up off the ground as I held up a hand to indicate to Bastien that I didn’t need any more massaging. My wings retracted, but the phantom pressure and ache of them lingered behind deep in my flesh, making me worry that I wouldn’t make it ten metres north let alone thousands now that I’d already exerted myself so much. ‘Since when do you have a path in these parts?’

  ‘Since when do these parts have a river?’ Bastien demanded, perplexed.

  ‘They don’t, but I think the area just north of here does, and if we can get to it through the first twenty metres of Devil’s Claw, we might be able to get to the stream that I think leads to that river.’ My lips were trembling so hard that it was a shaky smile I offered him. ‘It’s not really a stream- just the tail end of a run off that trails off over the edge of the cove- but it has to come from somewhere, right? And that somewhere is where we need to be. I think.’

  Everyone else started whispering that I was insane or seeing things, but my father grinned at me. ‘Are you saying that you’re truly ready to take the lead now?’

  I got up, nodding, and started hobbling back towards the house, determined to set an example for everyone by moving quickly myself. Yes I’d seen a path, but I’d also seen the severe storm swirling towards us from behind it, which meant that every second counted. ‘I don’t think it matters if I am or not, does it? What will be, will be, and nothing will be at all if we don’t make haste and get to the other side of the cove.’

  ‘But the cove is impassable!’ Papyrus argued, rushing to catch up with me. ‘I’ve been investigating it from above for years! I don’t believe that a river feeds into it, but even if it does, how are we supposed to get from this side of the cliffs to that one?’

  ‘By bringing me kerosene, Captain Cooper,’ I snapped, clicking my fingers and generating a tiny flame- enjoying the way he shrank back. It was a pathetic flare and spoke volumes about how fucking cold I was, but he’d learned his lesson and shrank back accordingly. ‘As much as you can find! ’

  ‘Liberty,’ someone whispered from behind me, and I heard Sam chuckle inside his head. ‘She truly is Lady Liberty.’

  ‘She really flew!’ Channél whispered to Martya, as other people’s voices began to rise. ‘I’ve never seen someone fly before!’

  ‘I’ve never seen someone fly that poorly, either.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do any better!’

  ‘Never said I would!’

  ‘She fought off that wolf!’

  ‘She fed a wolf, you moron. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Satan will damn you if you speak like that!’

  ‘I’ve bin damned since the day we were wed, woman... Satan doesn’t scare me now.’

  ‘You’re a clod, Damion.’

  I should have taken offence to some of the things that were being said about me, but it wasn’t their words that I was turning over in my mind, but my own- words I’d once exchanged with Kohén a very, very long time ago; about how little things grew from big things.

  ‘That’s what I heard. The stream starts tiny and gets bigger and bigger, so those who can stand the cold long enough to follow it get to a real paradise…’

  ‘But the north has been ruined! It’s all ice and dead forest! And The Wildwoods are overgrown and full of wolves and bears and-’

  ‘So they say- but who knows what’s true until we’ve seen it with our own eyes?’

  Well, I’d seen evidence that water was flowing though the Devil’s Claw and into the cove from above, and if those small miracles were possible, then maybe the existence of a true paradise was as well.

  15.

  The Wildlands

  Larkin

  We left The Factory behind at six that morning, and the only person that stayed with it was Gigi, the old crone I’d spotted the night before whom had never intended to come with us because she was already eighty-seven years old and couldn’t climb a flight of stairs, let alone a mountain. Eighty-seven wasn’t that old by our books, but Sam explained that Gigi had been beaten up a lot in her forties when she’d been tossed out into The Wildwoods for practicing Witchcraft, and her bones had never healed right, leading to a long list of health problems that she suffered from every hour of every day.

  I felt a flood of empathy for her after Sam explained what he’d unearthed from her mind, but he quickly informed me that I ought to save my sympathy for someone else- for Gigi truly had been a witch, and such an ill-intentioned one that the coven from Hope Station had barred her from practicing with them. She’d had the power to be able to tell when someone was going to die- not a God-given, Nephilim power but one she’d worked hard to cultivate- and she’d used that power to convince them that she could break death’s grip on them if they paid her a small fee that wasn’t technically small.

  However, she had only used the people whose fates she’d guessed correctly as an example, and had fleeced people that were destined to live long, happy lives out of their money with that proof of her prowess, creating fake potions to sell to them as placebos to ward their deaths off with. Most of those potions had been harmless, but one had contained ingredients that had given a teenage girl a bad allergic reaction, causing her death so suddenly that Gigi only foresaw it seconds before it happened when it was already too late for the girl to be saved. That girl’s grieving parents had made accusations against her to a Shep, and when dozens of people had stepped forward to attest that they too, had made a similar transaction with that woman after she’d approached them, she was allocated a Shep’s hearing on several counts of fraud.

  After years of cheating people out of their money, Gigi was swiftly proven to be a hustler when it came to light that she’d never offered the people that had actually died in the region a potion- only those that had already been in perfect health anyway. She’d been branded as a thief and a witch after and hurled over that fence without a backwards look, proving that for all of their faults, sometimes, the Arcadian justice system got it exactly right.

  I grew furious after hearing the entire story, demanding to know how many other horrid people like that I’d have to tolerate to appease Satan, but Sam had said that Satan had only kept Gigi around long enough so that she could look me over, and declare if I was destined to live a long life, or a short one. In the end, Gigi had refused to tell Bastien the verdict and so he had no qualms with leaving her behind- especially seeing as how Bastien and Gigi both knew that she would be dead by noon the next day anyway.

  Yes apparently not even she had the ability to thwart her own gift- for she’d seen her death five years beforehand and had been waiting expectantly for it since.

  Sam an
d I discussed this verbally as we traipsed through the remainder of The Wastelands, but we could have done so silently because Siria had my bracelet and was breaking it up into tiny pieces- threading the drilled beads onto smaller bits of string as she walked with Gabrielle’s help so that the kids would have tiny rings to wear. Sam was thrilled with how clear and uncrowded his mind was becoming already (Siria had given them to the most obnoxious children first) that even I had thanked Siria for her help- and had meant it, though I had asked Sam to talk to me verbally as much as possible because my head was already pounding from a lack of sleep and stress.

  Sam wasn’t a perky character by any means, but he was in a brighter mood as we walked that morning as one by one, the children’s thoughts were blocked from his overcrowded mind, and I couldn’t help but notice that Martya was so transfixed by this brighter, less irritable Sam that she did not stray far from his side for long.

  I longed to ask Martya about her crush on Sam and her romantic life in general (and if she’d ever had one at all) so that I could get to know her better again, but I knew that it would be too awkward a subject for either of us to tackle yet. Truth be told, we’d never been the kind of friends to giggle about boys, but to caution one another against them, and so it seemed better that we should stick to discussing less invasive subjects while we were still repairing the jagged cracks in the foundation of our friendship.