Intermission

I dreamed for the longest time. At first my dreams were of fire and pain, while my body burned in an eternity of agony. Later I heard voices, angry voices; one snarling that if it had been there this would never have happened; another answering sharply that it was quite capable of looking after one child on its own.

The other voice didn’t seem to agree, because it snarled again, and said: “Not this one!”

I seemed to hear Mother’s voice, and Gwendolen’s; and tried to open my eyes in vain. I thought, or dreamed, that my eyelids had turned to stone.

After the fire and voices came the peace. When the fire was gone I sat up; a wasted, whispy little body that wasn’t quite solid, and critically observed my limbs. Horned hedgepigs! I could see right through myself.

Well, I thought hopefully, at least I wasn’t dead: perhaps I was dreaming still. I was inside Akiva’s cottage, and I could see her searching through her cupboard full of herbs. She seemed cross: in fact, crosser than I had ever seen her. I had the guilty feeling that whatever it was, it was my fault.

I wafted up behind her with the mischievous idea of frightening her, but when I yelled her name the sound died an inch from my lips, and my breath didn’t even stir her hair. It occurred to me, belatedly, that I had been in my bedroom and had floated right through the wall without thinking about it.

I said, “Horned hedgepigs!” in my new, queer voice, feeling dubiously that saying something a little stronger would have been more satisfying but unable to think of anything sufficiently bad. Akiva turned with a handful of rosemary leaves and walked right through me. That made me feel so odd that for a little while I merely floated where I was. Perhaps I was wrong about being dead.

I tried to move things that day. If it was a day. I did see the morning come and go, and later on Akiva went to bed while the house grew dark, but despite the darkness I found I could see just as well as ever. I waited for a little while to see if I would get sleepy, but I didn’t; so I went on trying to move things instead.

Nothing I tried worked. I tried pushing, pulling– I even tried rushing at things with my transparent body, but all that did was send me rushing through the other side of whatever I tried to manipulate. Before long I was so wild with frustration that I would have thrown something, if only I could. Behind the frustration was a cold fear that I had somehow become stuck in a limbo from which I would never escape.

I spent the rest of the night scrunched up against a wall with my knees at my chest, floating a little above Akiva’s floorboards. It gave me a tenuously safe feeling that dissipated every time I forgot I couldn’t actually lean against the wall, and accidentally passed through it.

Akiva got up earlier than usual the next morning with a grim look about her mouth. I watched her stump about the kitchen with an odd feeling of homesickness and floated along curiously behind her when she unexpectedly left the house. As she passed into the forest from the garden she glanced briefly to the side of the path, and I saw, with a growing sense of indignation, that my body – my real body – was laid out in the grass of the forest. It was marbled and hard and absolutely motionless.

Horned Hedgepigs, what was I? A potted plant? Why wasn’t I laid out in my own bed? I hung over my prone body as Akiva strode on, studying my own features with slightly ghoulish enjoyment. It seemed to me that my face was too fat and my limbs too gangly. I pulled a face at it, but left in a hurry when I realised that I could very easily lose Akiva if I didn’t pay attention. I caught up with her just at the outskirts of the forest. She didn’t hesitate, striding on through the dappled morning light into full sunshine, but when I tried to follow I couldn’t. The forest, implacable and inexplicable, held me inside. I tried pushing, but there was nothing to push against. I tried running at it with my eerily light body, and found myself wafting backwards instead as Akiva’s bony back disappeared down the road. I tried rhymes and tricks and screams, but the forest wouldn’t be persuaded, and Akiva was gone.

At last I sat down at the edge and glared at the spotted sunlight that gleamed off the dew, fiercer and fiercer so that I wouldn’t cry. I thought determinedly of loop-holes.

By and by I began to notice that there was a little more leeway where the forest extended spars of trees into the green grass of the roadside. I edged myself along one of these until I felt as though I were a bean just too big to fit into a peashooter. The thread for the spar continued on in a patch of mossy green right to the road, but it was too narrow to squeeze myself down and I had to own myself defeated. I retreated into the forest and sat down again, exhausted and breathless.

Akiva came back later with Mother and Gwendolen. Mother had a straight, deep line between her brows and Gwen was sobbing tragically into a crumpled little hanky. I watched her exasperatedly because I wasn’t dead, after all. I was sorry to have worried Mother, though, who was looking tired and perhaps a little bit exasperated herself.

They argued over my body for quite some time. Mother seemed to be of the mind that I should be inside the cottage but Akiva was still more emphatic that I remain in the forest. I could see their lips moving, but the sound was intermittent; and although I tried to lip-read I was left with very little idea of the conversation. As I watched, frowning in savage concentration, I heard fragments of her conversation that seemed to hiccough along like so: “ . . . Margot . . . patience . . . tried to . . . in the house but . . . forest wasn’t having it . . . no, the wolf is . . .”

This interested me greatly, because of course Bastian must be the wolf, but Mother made her sharp hushing gesture. Gwendolen, who had perked her ears at the mention of Bastian and was watching them both with bright eyes, retired once more into her handkerchief.

I tried moving my fingers and toes for Mother to show her I was there, but my real body wasn’t connected to my unreal one in any way I could understand, and I was still looking rather glumly at my motionless limbs when Mother and Gwendolen went back home. I don’t think Mother wanted to go, but Akiva had gone firm and magical, and insisted upon her leaving in a way that, even without complete sound, was unmistakable. I was grateful to her for that: Mother didn’t weep into handkerchiefs or wring her apron, but she did look after Gwendolen and me up to and beyond the endurance of her own health.

I didn’t try to follow them when they left. There didn’t seem to be much point. But by the time the triad had gone down I was so pale and cold with boredom that I trailed away wispily to the edges of the forest, willing to try and fail at anything rather than hover around the cottage any longer. Akiva, horrible old woman that she was, had merely gone on with her work without so much as a single apron-wring of distress at my condition. But she was forceful and cross as she stomped around the garden, and I began to wonder if that wasn’t the same as apron-wringing in Akiva’s case.

I left her striding between garden beds and hovered by the edges of the forest again, trying to squeeze myself down the ever-narrowing channels that stretched, green and inviting, right to the road. I’m not sure what I thought it would accomplish, since I would have been baulked by the road in any case; but it annoyed me to be stopped, and so I pushed and pushed until I was exhausted. I was so intent on my task that I didn’t notice the growing darkness or the great glowing moon above me, and by the time the triad was rising in a red-gold arc of glory it still hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t sleepy. I merely glared at the searing brightness of it all and went back to trying to stuff myself into a thread that was by far too small for me. It reminded me unpleasantly of the time Gwendolen had insisted on trussing me up in a corset; squeezing, squeezing until it felt as though my stomach was about to burst through my backbone.

“It’s no good!” I said at last, in a gruff, thready voice that was only just loud enough to be a voice. “I’m too fat.”

It’s horrible to be a ghost. You can scream and yell in your patchy little voice, and pretend to stomp your feet, but you can’t throw things and your feet only sink into the ground anyway. I felt as though I could burst with frustration, but there was nothing I could do about it. In the end I floated crossly about a foot in the air with my arms folded – floating being a deedy little trick that I had found fascinating at first, but ultimately useless – and thought hard. Body too fat. Body that floated. Too many things that I couldn’t properly touch. Too many things that were frustratingly incorporeal.

But not the threads. I instinctively fanned my insubstantial fingers through the air, touching cobwebby threads that were somehow more real than they had been when I was properly solid, and pinched one of them meditatively. It constricted slightly, giving off the scent and image of quiet green shadow, and when I released it, blinking thoughtfully at a new idea, it sprang back into its old place and size immediately.

“Horned hedgepigs,” said my voice thoughtfully, startling me. “It’s just a picture, after all. Bufflebrain!”

I looked narrowly at my whispy ghost hands, and instead of desperately trying to use them as though they were flesh and blood, I told them to fade. And do you know, they did fade. I wondered when I had become so frightened I was dead that I had wilfully deceived myself into thinking this smoke-and-shadow body was real.

When I was nothing but a consciousness bobbing against the barrier at the end of the forest, prickly and excited and scared all at once, I narrowed that consciousness out still further, and just slipped along the feather edge between forest and road. There was no pretending to have a voice down there, where the threads were raw streams of power and it was all I could do to stop myself being swept away in the great, fierce being of it all. I let myself be carried a little way further down, feeling as though I had gotten to the very roots and foundations of the forest. I thought dizzily that if I had Bastian here, now, I could unravel his curse with one flick of my nonexistent finger.

I only just stopped myself from being dashed into nothingness at the end of the forest, where huge green life met brown, dead gravel and drove its roots firmly to a stop. It was a surprisingly violent ending given the usual peace and rest of the forest, and I lingered there for quite some time, catching my entirely metaphysical breath. Here was raging green life, potent and deep. There was brown, dusty death, the cessation of all life. The idea of it sent a shard of pain to the place that used to be my heart, until I realised that it wasn’t entirely death: beneath the unyielding hardness of the village road was more life. It wasn’t seething and strong like the forest; it was quiet and solid and sleepy. It was alive, though. I wondered if I could liven it up– send the forest energy out there to make it green again. But when I tried the same quiet sleepiness rose up against me in dogged rebellion until at last I understood that it was meant to be that way.

I returned to the topside forest, trying not to feel absurdly hurt that the outside had refused my help. Mother, after a particularly frustrating family meal with Father’s relations, had once said: “Help that you don’t want is no help at all.” I hadn’t understood it then, but I did now.

I made my whispy little body appear again once I was back in the forest proper. I didn’t exactly need it, but it was a comfort to me. The triad, its foremost sun sinking low and its last, small and hopefully lingering well above the horizon, sent shafts of dusty orange-red through my limbs, and made me wonder for the first time just how much time had passed. I floated my way carelessly back to Akiva’s cottage, more aware than before of the forest around me with its hidden quirks of life and its boundless length. If I was to be much longer out of my body, I thought, tossing a glance at my real body as I passed it, I might like to explore its length, just to see where it ended. Just to see if it did end.

Akiva was just coming in from the garden when I breezed through the walls. It didn’t occur to me until I was watching her try to wash the dirt from her leathered old hands that the grass in the front garden was overdue its scything by a few days at least. I was intimately familiar with the differing lengths of the grass, since it was my job to scythe it as soon as it became too long, and not a fortnight had passed that didn’t see me pleading with an unmoved Akiva that the grass could wait ‘just one day longer!’ I’d scythed some days before I met the gryphon – pesky creature! Horned hedgepigs, if I came across it again, it would be sorry! – but unless I had been insensible for the better part of a week, I had lost three days trying to squeeze myself into a thread at the edge of the forest.

“I didn’t even notice,” I said aloud, partly for the practice and partly because it was impossible to be as annoyed as I felt in silence. “Where did they go?”

Akiva, unhearing, dried her hands briskly on her apron and fetched the cheese in its chequered wrap from the coolbox. This prompted me to think wistfully about bread-and-cheese without having the hunger to justify it. If I didn’t become hungry or tired, how was I to keep track of the days? And it was suddenly so very important to keep track of them: just one tiny reminder that I wasn’t as alien as I felt. I tried scratching marks, prisoner-like, on Akiva’s tidy old walls, but my insubstantial fingernails didn’t flake a single spot of plaster; and while I could float myself, it proved impossible to manipulate anything else into moving.

It wasn’t until several days later, which I counted as carefully as though I were measuring out ingredients for one of Akiva’s teas, that I realised that although I couldn’t manipulate anything about the cottage, I could manipulate the forest itself. I was in one of my determined fits that made me want to travel to the farthest edges of the forest and see what there was to be seen: impatient with my unresponsive body for just lying there, irritated with Akiva for just letting it lie there, and worried that Mother was spending too much time with it. I’d travelled well out of Akiva’s wardship and into the next one, only realising the difference with the changing of the seasons, since at this level the forest didn’t seem to have boundaries or wardships. It was simply The Forest.

I came across golden-haired Gwydion as I travelled. That was nothing unusual: I’d frequently seen one or another of the wardens in my peregrinations about the forest. It made it easier to tell which part of the forest I was in.

Gwydion was kneeling by a deadened tree with one hand resting lightly on the bark, and I thought he looked puzzled. I wafted up behind him curiously, following a browning trail of forest thread that made me frown, and skirted the trunk while Gwydion remained on one knee before it. It wasn’t ordinary dead: it was drained husk dead. The piece of forest around it was a little out of synch with the rest of the forest, its lines almost severed from the smooth continuity of the forest, making me blink away a sense of double vision.

“What have you done to it?” I said crossly to Gwydion. He didn’t hear me, and I couldn’t really convince myself that he’d done this to any part of his wardship, either by mistake or deliberately. Had Cassandra? I circled the trunk once more, distaste wrinkling my insubstantial nose by habit, and then sat down and crossed my legs– also by habit, since I was hovering a foot in the air and sitting or not sitting didn’t really matter.

I ran my fingers along the longest, brownest thread, studying the tiny flecks of gold and green that were still present in it, until I came to the jagged join where it met with the rest of the forest. It looked, I thought, gazing down at it with eyes that were tight and hot despite being not quite real, as if someone had grabbed a handful of forest and tried to tear it out.

Wouldn’t I just kick them when I found out who they were!

I felt a vague tickle in the forest lines and looked around swiftly. Gwydion, his mouth tight, was feeding power into the lines– power that reached the bottleneck and could go no further. It pooled and grew dangerously.

“Stop it, you bufflehead!” I yelled, ineffectively swatting his shoulder. “It’s going to– horned hedgepigs, there it goes!”

Gwydion, shoving harder than was wise, burst the dam of power and was laid flat on his back by his own magic.

“You’ve got to fix it first!” I told him impatiently, wishing I could kick him. The solution was as plain as the nose on his face.

Gwydion sat up ruefully, shaking his head, and gazed at the dead tree trunk with his lips quirking. He seemed to be at a loss, so I heaved an insubstantial sigh and began to fix it for him. I unravelled the thread to its base fibres, delighting in the sensation of touching something, and then joined them again, rapidly rolling the thread between my palms as if it were rope. Father had shown me how to make rope once, and though I’d never been much good at it, rolling the forest thread was much easier. Magic, I decided, must be sticky.

I did the same for all the others until the piece of forest no longer looked like it was out of focus, then busily fed all of Gwydion’s pooled magic back down the threads. The tree trunk creaked and grew rapidly, spreading new limbs and new greenery, and the surrounding grass leapt into better focus. I could almost feel the forest let out a breath of relief.

“Oi!” said Gwydion in surprise. His voice was patchy, but easier to hear than Akiva’s voice. Perhaps I was getting better at deep forest. “What– who– Rose, is that you?”

“Bufflehead!” I said fiercely, my eyes hot and tight again. I couldn’t touch him or talk to him, but at least I’d fixed the forest. That was that.

I went home after that. Exploring the forest had lost its appeal for the moment, and I had had an interesting thought. I’d been looking for a way to keep track of the days for some time: as far as I could tell, I had been bodiless for nearly two weeks now, and the days were beginning to merge. Pushing Gwydion’s magic into the lifeless tree trunk had been an epiphany. As I watched it grow and live, it had occurred to me that if I couldn’t mark out the days with scratches on a wall or a tree trunk, I could do so with flowers. Nothing simpler. Just grow a flower for every day that passed.

So I sat in Akiva’s front garden and tried to make a flower grow. It was harder than I anticipated, pushing that thing up through the soil, and when it came out it looked nothing like a flower. I was trying for a sunflower: they’re big and brash and happy, not delicate and perfumed like the others. But when it sulked from the soil, it was a blackened, shrivelled head bobbing unconvincingly on a dark green stalk that looked more like soggy rope than a flower stem. I glared at it by reflex, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d got something wrong.

There was a crack of laughter, and when I looked up, Akiva was gazing at my pitiful attempt at a flower with an ironic eye. “There’s something you’ve forgotten,” she said dryly, and went back inside.

By the time there were about thirty of the things, they were beginning to look more flower-like. They were still black and weedy, but the blob at the top had begun to unfurl what could be petals if you looked at them sideways. I didn’t know what Akiva meant by forgetting something, but I’d begun to enjoy the daily ritual of growing a flower anyway, despite her derisive snorts. It’s not that there was nothing to do in the forest: I was constantly surprised and even on occasion disgruntled by the amount of small botherations that existed at this level of forest. But that small, everyday chore gave some distinction to the days that they otherwise lacked, and helped me to feel a little more human. Wafting around in my tired little mist of a body, I had begun to feel as though I was more a part of the forest than an individual being. It wasn’t a bad feeling, exactly. It just didn’t feel like me.

Sometimes I pushed on through the forest, exploring threads and dabbling with forest magic, interfering with the wardens as they went about their business. Sometimes I sat for days on end trying to remember what it felt like to smile or frown: trying to form my dream-facsimile face into the right shapes. I visited my body less and less as the days wore on. It never changed, anyway, and it was becoming unfamiliar to me in a way that made me uneasy. By the time I had grown more than a hundred flowers I stopped looking at it altogether, hurrying past it without a second glance whenever I came to grow a flower.

I snuck over to Cassandra’s wardship, of course. In this deeper kind of forest, her house looked huge and white and blurred. That meant that it was made of some kind of stone. I wouldn’t be able to get into the house: there were no forest lines in or out of it. I was familiar with stone, because Gwydion’s house was also made of it, but his was small and cottagey and less blurry. Sometimes, hovering around it, I had the fancy that the stone was almost living, and that Gwydion had the same kind of affinity for stone that most wardens had with the forest. I spent a lot of time around Gwydion’s stone cottage: it was quiet and peaceful, and Gwydion had a habit of talking to himself that meant I could pretend he was talking to me. Maybe he was.

Cassandra’s wardship, on the other hand, left me feeling sick and cold inside, the fair façade of its surface only a thin veneer through which I could see the troubled roots of the forest, twisted out of shape in dark, silent coils. I tried to reach through the veneer to smooth them out, but even this deep in the forest Cassandra had such a strong hold on her part of it that I couldn’t breach her defences.

I did try more than once. Horned hedgepigs, it hurt to see the forest like that! I thought that if I could just niggle at it long enough, I might touch something, change something; in the same way that I’d finally squeezed myself into the thread by the edge of the forest. If stubbornness could accomplish the thing, I thought determinedly, I would do it. I’d forgotten how to put out my chin but I remembered the tug of it on my soul, and I felt it then.

I forget how many days I spent in Cassandra’s wardship trying to puzzle out the trick to her defences. I think there were some days that I forgot to return to the cottage and grow a flower, but I must have remembered most of them, because the sunflowers had grown in population by another hundred or so by the time I allowed myself to feel that I most likely wouldn’t succeed.

I had a splendidly ineffective rage in Akiva’s front garden on that particular afternoon; furious that I couldn’t change things in the forest, more so that I couldn’t get the sunflowers to be yellow, and beyond myself that I couldn’t throw something to ease my frustration.

Horned hedgepigs, was I to be a ghost for the rest of my life?

I screamed that afternoon. I screamed and yelled and kicked my whispy legs. My ghost-voice seemed less real to my frightened ears than it had in the beginning, but I’d forgotten how to cry and in the end all I could do was float above the sunflowers, feeling somehow too stretched and thin. It wasn’t until I’d settled into a sort of quiet despair that I noticed mechanically that the ground beneath me had blossomed with tiny wildflowers and reedgrass. Unwilling to shake off my gloomy sulks but interested in spite of myself, I poked a see-through finger into the soil, tickling the roots with their dead seed husks and tangling myriad tiny, thready forest lines. The seeds must have been lying dormant until that tiny bit of magic, exuded in frustration, pierced them and made them spring into life, seed dying and cracking to sprout with new life.

Horned hedgepigs, I was a bufflehead! No wonder my flowers didn’t look like flowers! They weren’t. Flowers grew from seeds, they weren’t something that could be produced at a whim. Irritating as it had been, Akiva’s snort was justified.

I gave a low chuckle of laughter despite myself, shaking my head at my own stupidity, and reached out to all the tiny, nebulous threads that were just beneath the soil, searching. When I found one, perfect, dying seed, I snapped it back through the thread towards myself, buzzing with new purpose and new hope. It occurred to me as the seed appeared, almond-shaped and real, that I might not be able to do this sort of thing when I was back in my body. For the first time it seemed a pity that I might have to go back one day.

This time when I pushed the forest magic into the ground, the flower that burst through seed and soil alike was vibrantly yellow and strong, spraying dirt in its desire to reach the sun. To my right, Akiva’s head poked suddenly through the window, her eyes keen and gleaming. I heard the laugh again, but this time it wasn’t dry; it was amused and approving.

“About time!” she said, and pulled her head back in. I made a rude face at the cottage, remembering that particular expression by instinct. She might at least have said ‘well done’. Only then, I supposed, she wouldn’t have been Akiva. I had a sudden fit of the giggles, silent and not-quite-real, because an apprentice was supposed to learn things, after all: only I don’t think that’s what Mother had in mind when she apprenticed me. Learning forest magic as I ghosted through the forest, setting gryphons’ wings, breaking wolfish curses and encountering the ire of an enchantress: I’d certainly found adventure this time. And if it wasn’t all exciting, and sometimes more hard work and frustration than discovery and magic; well, that was all part of the adventure, after all.

By the time there were roughly three hundred sunflowers crowding Akiva’s front garden, I had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t possible to reach the end of the forest. There were edges, of course. So, so many edges and lands, and summer and winter and half-light: places where only the tail end of the triad could be seen, and light was dim, and all the stars were in the wrong places. It was exciting and fascinating and wrong; that the triad should give so little light day after day. I left those far-off parts of the forest largely unexplored, feeling off balance and a little scared, and went on to other parts.

I came across Bastian quite often: he ranged far and wide in his hunts, by turns wolf and human. I think he preferred to be wolf when it came to dinner. I thought feelingly that I might feel the same if I were trapped in the forest with nothing to eat but berries and roots. Even raw meat would be a relief after that.

He didn’t seem to be stopped by the boundaries of the wardships; and, much like myself, roamed the forest freely. He didn’t wander Akiva’s wardship at all, keeping to the limits that she had imposed upon him. I felt both elated and naughty whenever I was in his company, breaking Akiva’s orders without the danger of being caught. He didn’t talk to himself or to me, unlike Gwydion, but it was always interesting to hover alongside him and see what he would do.

He killed quickly and ruthlessly. He ate rabbits, fauns, odd little fluffy blobs that were fat and very bloody, and buried the remains almost automatically. I wondered if that was his human side, or if his wolf side was burying bones for later like the village dogs did. When he was human he climbed often, ran joyfully through the forest seemingly for the single purpose of feeling the wind in his hair, and swam very often indeed. His wolf counterpart didn’t seem to care for the water. Sometimes, rarely, he would be still for the whole time he was human, sprawled beneath a tree with the dappled sunlight on his face, his mouth frozen in a half-smile that was at the same time mocking and grim. That was when I noticed the faint lines by his eyes that made him look old and tired. I didn’t like for him to be sad, so one day I grew him some flowers, which he seemed to like. He didn’t name me as Gwydion had, but he did chuckle suddenly, the lines turning to laugh lines by his eyes; and after that I grew him flowers whenever I came across him.

I’d stopped counting flowers by the time I felt a curious tug at my soul. I was hovering by Gwydion’s house when it happened, watching him set the leg of a rather battered looking chook and paying close attention to his murmured instructions. There was a tug that made me say “Ow!” in surprise, and then I was being gently pulled backwards through the forest, little by little.

“Hey!” I said indignantly, feeling like a trout on a line. The gentle pulling became a heady rush, leaving Gwydion far behind, and I found myself flying through the forest backwards, a delighted chuckle catching in the back of my throat. Then I was no longer flying, but falling: falling with the air whipping past me and my stomach left far behind . . .