EMELINE WALKED ACROSS THE stage towards the microphone. Her body moved on instinct, her footsteps automatic. Like a confident, seasoned musician.
At least, that’s what she hoped she looked like.
On the inside, Emeline was a wreck. Her mind was a dizzying rush of memories, swelling like a storm.
Beneath the bright white of the lights, she blinked, trying to find her bearings. She reached for the mic, her hands shaking a little as she adjusted its height.
“Hello, bonsoir, Montréal!”
Her voice echoed through the speakers, the familiar amplification calming her enough to pull the strap of her Taylor over her head. A round of cheering rose up beyond the lights. She sensed more than saw the faces in the crowd. Heard the coughs and murmurs. Felt the sway of warm bodies.
But Emeline was only half there. Her other half was in the green room, knee-deep in memories she’d only just recovered.
Sensing the chaos swirling inside her, Emeline’s brain took over, putting her on autopilot. Telling her body what to do based on all the other gigs she’d ever played.
“Je m’appelle Emeline Lark,” she heard herself say. “It’s a pleasure to play for you tonight. C’est un plaisir de jouer pour vous ce soir.”
If her voice quavered, no one noticed. The audience clapped and whooped out there in the dark. Somewhere in that crowd, Daybreak reps were watching.
Emeline fastened on a smile as her fingers quickly plucked strings and adjusted tuning pegs. Her set list lay at the base of the mic stand, in perfect view. The titles of the songs Chloe had written for her scrolled in bold black letters down the white.
But before she could even start playing, Hawthorne’s voice flooded her mind.
I knew a girl once whose songs helped her stand against all the forces stronger than she was.
The set list at her feet blurred before her.
Sometimes, you remind me of her.
Don’t do it, she told herself. Stay focused. This is everything you’ve been working towards. Don’t screw it up.
And still, she looked away from the set list and into the lights. Remembering that not so long ago, all she wanted was to sing her own songs up onstage.
She still wanted that.
Pulling her guitar strap back over her head, she set it down on its stand, then picked up her ukulele and quickly tuned it. Her voice was thick in her throat as she said, “This song is about forgetting. And … and remembering.”
Emeline started to strum. It wasn’t one of Chloe’s songs; it was one of hers. The one she’d written about her grandfather. Except now, standing on this stage, she realized that wasn’t really true.
The song wasn’t about Pa. It had never been about Pa.
“Breathing slow and steady
Sleep has settled in
I trace the pathways, midnight blue
That run beneath your skin
Some spirit I have lost somewhere
I search for it in vain
Some beauty I’ve forgotten
Since you forgot my name
Every time I close my eyes
You’re waiting there for me
Rooted in my deepest dreams
Strong and silent as a tree
Some spirit sleeps but never dies
Some beauty never fades
Some love lies dormant underground
Since I forgot your name”
And as she sang, one last memory crashed into her.
THAT FIRST YEAR AWAY from Edgewood, she did what she needed to make ends meet, playing in whatever venues would pay her—cafés, dive bars, charity fundraisers. When money was tight, she busked in the street.
She made an EP and used it to apply to music festivals in the fall. She started getting into those festivals. Started seeing her name on their posters. One of the best managers in the business signed her as a client.
But it wasn’t enough. No matter how frugal she was, she fell further into debt.
Her manager told her to hire a writer and change up her sound. Fearing this was her one and only chance to make it, she took his advice.
Suddenly, she was getting better gigs—ones that paid her well enough to eat more than instant noodles.
Suddenly, she was doing it; she was building a career.
But there was something else building too: the woods. They came for her at every performance, but not like they used to. Where once their presence was soft and quiet, slipping in through the doors like any other adoring fan, now it was something else entirely. The woods no longer left tokens of appreciation in her guitar case—handfuls of acorns and feathers and maple keys. Instead, they came like a scorned lover: possessive and hostile. Erupting through venues as if they couldn’t let her go.
As if they refused to let her forget.
Emeline could ignore the woods if she was careful and clever. What she couldn’t ignore was the ache they brought with them, putting down roots in her chest and spreading ever deeper, bit by bit.
At first, she thought it was homesickness. The woods were reminding her of everything she missed: Edgewood. The stars and the quiet and the vast amount of space. Pa and Tom and Maisie and all her old neighbors. Her friends Sable and Rooke.
But you were supposed to get homesick when you moved away. It was a part of growing up.
This was something else. A hole in her life. A deep, dark missing.
She hadn’t heard Hawthorne’s voice in months—not since the last time she called home and he happened to be visiting Pa. She hadn’t seen Hawthorne’s face since Christmas, the only time she’d been back since leaving Edgewood last summer.
Every night when she came home from a gig, there was an emptiness in her apartment despite it being full of roommates. The people she lived with were strangers. Polite strangers, but still strangers. There was a space where Hawthorne should have been—reading or drawing or cooking—and wasn’t.
More than this, with every new success, the hole in her seemed to widen. Her musical achievements should have fulfilled her. Instead, they left her hungrier than ever.
Emeline might be living her dream. But dreams, she realized now, had shadow sides. Dreams came with costs.
Hers had cost her something precious.
That June, a year after she moved to Montreal, the ache grew into a cavern inside her. She was sitting in a booth at the back of a bar, squished between Joel and his bandmates after a show, watching them giggle and gossip over drinks. It felt like a carousel ride. The painted horses going up and down, around and around. Everyone smiling and laughing and having a good time. But all Emeline wanted to do was get off.
Why am I here? she kept thinking. What am I doing?
A few nights later, she packed up her belongings—she had so few, they fit easily into her car—and the next morning she got up to drive all day until she got to Edgewood.
She had no intention of driving back.
It was early evening when she pulled into Pa’s lane. Pa was standing on the front patio, looking confused as he squinted at her. She parked in the driveway, left everything in the car, and ran to him.
“I came outside to do something, but I can’t remember what it was,” he said as she squeezed him. “Did you tell me you were coming for dinner?”
It was odd, the way he phrased it. “Coming for dinner.” As if he thought she lived up the road. Emeline shrugged it off and shook her head. “I didn’t tell you, no.”
“Well, you have good timing.” He kissed the top of her head. “Dinner’s almost ready.”
Emeline pulled back. If Pa was out here, who was inside making dinner?
She hauled her suitcase from the trunk of her car and went to find out. Dumping her stuff in the mudroom, she kicked off her flats and headed for the kitchen—where the smell of fresh bread and frying onions wafted out.
A young man stood facing the sink, soapsuds halfway up his arms as he washed and scrubbed the dishes. Emeline paused at the sight of him, her heart leaping into her throat.
Sensing he wasn’t alone, Hawthorne turned, hands dripping. He looked different from when she’d seen him at Christmas. Taller. Broader. His dark hair a little longer, curling gently around his ears.
“Emeline?”
She nearly burst into tears at the sight of him.
Emeline ran and jumped into his arms. Hawthorne caught her, hiking her up onto his hips. She buried her face in his throat, breathing in his crushed-pine smell. He pressed his face into her hair, doing the same.
You’re mine, she thought. You belong with me.
“What are you doing here?” he breathed.
“I couldn’t stay there.” Her arms tightened around his neck, remembering the feel of his body—the solid strength of him—now that he was in her arms. “I don’t like cities.”
He let go. Forced to lower herself, Emeline’s bare feet landed on the tiled kitchen floor.
“You love cities.” His voice sounded strange.
She shook her head. “Maybe I don’t.”
He observed her warily.
Sensing his skepticism, she said, “It’s not my dream if you’re not in it, Hawthorne.”
He turned away from her, his muscles tensing as he reached for a hand towel.
“I’m moving home,” she said, more forcefully.
“There’s nothing for you here.”
“You’re here.”
He dried his hands on the towel, folded it neatly, but didn’t set it down as he turned to face her. “That’s not a reason to give up everything you’ve worked so hard for.”
But he didn’t know what it was like, achieving success after success only to be rewarded with an ever-growing emptiness.
“I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then stopped himself. He turned towards the window over the sink, looking to the woods. “Please don’t do this.”
Emeline felt like a dropped spool of thread, unraveling across the floor. She’d been gone for too long, she realized. He’d moved on. Moved past her.
If that was true, she needed him to say it.
“Why not?” She balled her hands into fists. “Why can’t I do this?”
He didn’t turn to look at her, just kept staring out the window. “You’d come to resent me one day. You’d resent yourself. In five or ten years, you’d come to your senses and realize you made a horrifying mistake. One you couldn’t take back.”
“I’m coming to my senses now!” she shouted at him. “I’ve already made the mistake, and I’m fixing it!”
He folded in on himself, like a wounded animal. Staring down at his hands, he whispered, “I wish that were true.”
He wasn’t listening to her.
Why wasn’t he listening?
“It’s my life, Hawthorne. I get to do what I want with it.”
He turned towards her, eyes sharp and piercing. “Fine. But do this, and I will never forgive you for it.”
Throwing down the towel on the counter, he walked straight past her and out the door. Cleaving her heart in two.
The next day, after she spent the entire night weeping, something strange happened. Emeline stopped crying, abruptly, and couldn’t remember why she started.
Nor could she remember why she came home.
To visit Pa, because she was homesick. Was that it? Or was it to get away from the music scene for a while? It drained her, sometimes—the gossip, the grind, the cutthroat competition. Maybe she should find some friends outside the industry. Nice, well-adjusted ones.
But why was her car packed full of all her stuff? Had she intended to move home? But that was absurd. Her whole life was in Montreal. Her career was on the rise. She couldn’t move home.
No matter how hard she tried, Emeline couldn’t remember why she was here.
What she did know was that she was booked to play at a music festival the following week. If she didn’t head back soon and prepare, she wouldn’t be ready in time.
So, the next morning, she threw her suitcase into the trunk, kissed Pa good-bye, and drove back to the city.
Where her life was.
BENEATH THE BRIGHT LIGHTS of the stage, Emeline’s fingers stopped strumming. As her song ended, the crowd behind the lights clapped and cheered.
Ever since she was a child, Emeline dreamed of singing her songs onstage. But not long after she moved to Montreal, something changed. Your songs aren’t marketable, her manager told her. And you won’t be young forever. If she wanted to pay her bills, if she wanted a rising career instead of a tanking one, she needed to sing different songs and she needed to do it immediately—before her youth ceased to be a selling point and the industry grew bored of her.
So, trusting her manager, she locked her songs away, using poetry for a password.
And then Hawthorne made me forget.
Emeline glanced down at her set list. The music she’d prepared lay right at her feet. The Daybreak reps were in the crowd somewhere. All she had to do was start and keep going. All she had to do was show them what she was capable of.
This was her biggest, oldest dream.
Except … was it?
This was what she’d realized two years ago, right before Hawthorne took her memories: This—playing someone else’s songs, touring with jaded musicians, living so far from what she loved most—was a twisted version of her dream.
It was what the woods had been trying to tell her when they stalked into her performances over the past year, demanding true songs. Nineteen years ago, her grandfather had asked the woods to protect Emeline, and the woods took that responsibility seriously. They were protecting her—by reminding her of who she was, and what was important.
You were going to abandon your dreams. You were going to stay. Here. For me.
She understood why Hawthorne did what he did—not that this excused him. He was trying to save her from herself, believing that giving up on her dream would make her miserable in the long run, because he knew how desperately she had wanted a music career.
I still want it.
There was nothing else Emeline would rather be doing than singing on brightly lit stages or in darkened bars—she simply wanted to do it on her terms. She wanted to sing her own songs.
Maybe I still can.
She’d recovered her old songs. She could sing them right here. Right now. Her manager would be furious, but so what?
The question lifted an invisible weight from her. One she’d been carrying for too long.
Emeline looked out over the silhouetted crowd behind the lights, emboldened. But as she chose her next song—one she’d written for Sable all those years ago—and started to play it, the atmosphere changed. The air thickened, dampening her skin, and the putrid smell of mold seeped up from somewhere nearby. Emeline wrinkled her nose and squinted into the lights, scanning the darkness beyond.
It smelled like …
Jagged silver thorns began to sprout from the microphone as something rasped across the stage floor. She looked down to see the floorboards buckle and burst as thick gray roots sprouted up from below, slithering towards her. With them came dozens of leaves, blown by an unnatural breeze, gathering in a pile around her feet. They weren’t the vibrant green of healthy leaves. Nor were they the crisp golds and reds of freshly fallen ones.
These were sickly and ashy and gray. Diseased.
The woods had come.
Emeline, they rasped, reaching for her.
She stared in horror at the lethal-looking thorns growing out of the mic, at the snakelike roots headed straight for her. One thick root rose to her full height and, before she could flinch away, brushed across her cheek like a parting caress.
We came to say good-bye.
Good-bye?
Emeline thought of the curse, slowly consuming the forest, creeping closer and closer to the King’s City. She thought of the shadow skins breaching the walls. Thought of Sable and Rooke, forced to resume their true forms, unable to ever change back.
The curse grows more powerful every day, Grace’s voice chimed through her. You need to escape this place before it devours us.
What had the curse done to the woods? To her friends?
Behind the lights, the audience’s cheers fell to murmured alarm as more and more floorboards cracked and burst as twisted roots pushed up through the stage.
I need to go back …
Emeline flipped her ukulele over her shoulder, letting it hang on its strap across her back. As the dying woods erupted around her, she reached for the neck of her guitar. Lifting it from its stand, she said, “Thank you, merci. This has been a dream.” Taking one last look at the theater beyond the lights, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “But there’s somewhere else I need to be. Bonne soirée.”
One day, she’d return to this stage—on her terms, singing her songs. She might need to rebuild her career from scratch, but so what? She’d faced down scarier things.
With that thought in her heart and the woods in danger, Emeline strode off the stage and didn’t look back.