The search for the missing wardens began almost immediately. Akiva organized us into parties and sent us on our way, methodically covering every blade and leaf of the forest.
Sometimes I walked with Bastian, who slipped reluctantly into his wolf-form, the better to smell; sometimes Akiva sent us out separately. Cassandra had begun to reach out chubby hands to the forest threads so I took her with me whenever I went out alone: it made me feel less solitary, and it kept Cassandra happy.
We found them slowly. Some were alive and well, but more were dead or gone beyond any help we could give. Tancred, who was luckier than most, had been turned into an eagle, and aside from an inclination to hunt for field-mice and a tendency to snap his head around with a glare whenever one of us moved too quickly, he was healthy and whole.
Akiva, in addition to arranging the systematic search of the forest, had begun the onerous task of finding wardens to replace those who were dead, and the setting of the forest to rights. She was exhausted more often than not. It was a long process, and a weary one, but by and by the forest began to settle back into its quiet rest.
A collective sigh of relief went up the day we found the last warden. Gwydion had found one too many milestones along the Queen’s Highway, and retrieved at last a grim-faced warden called Katerina. I looked at her face, stony in its silence as Akiva pulled away the last remaining threads of the spell, and found myself guiltily appreciating Cassandra’s choice of spell.
Katerina looked once at the baby Cassandra, and said: “You should kill her now, while you still can.”
I didn’t need the sideways grin that Gwydion shot at me behind Katerina’s back to remind me to hold my tongue. Bastian moved between Katerina and I, his wolf-form a warning without overtly threatening, but I only tickled his ears. It was something we were all going to have to learn to live with.
Nevertheless, I left them ministering to Katerina and took myself and Cassandra into the forest where she wouldn’t be an unpleasant reminder to anyone of the friends they had lost.
We never found Cassandra’s house again. It was a dark blot that blackened the past along with the few wardens who were irreparably lost. I hoped that somehow the statues had escaped, and it cheered me to think, as Akiva said, that the forest knew very well what it was about. What needed to be done would be done, in time.
I could say so much more. I could say how Bastian and I were married beneath the canopy of the forest in the cool and shadow, with David to give me away, and Gwen to prance after me with her hand in Thomas’ arm. I could tell how Cassandra began to walk shortly after, and how she filled the house with living forest as her infant hands reached out to the forest lines.
But I think only one thing really needs to be said, after all, and that is this: we lived happily ever after.