The Great Forest

The path narrowed between sharp black trunks like spears. Curlew went first, Holly last, with Ember safely in the middle position with Tern.

Under the thick shade they were walking into silence. Bird calls fell behind them and they no longer even heard the warning kik-kik-kik of the woodpeckers. Ember looked up. There was a strip of sky above them, palest blue. It floated, looking unreal. Outside that strip, what was happening? Clouds? Storm? Sunlight streaming golden and hazy with the scent from the trees below? She wondered if the two guards who had turned back had reached home safely, and sent a prayer after them.

“Halt!” Curlew called. Ember reined in Merry and stood in the stirrups for a better view, but Ash, ahead of her, was doing the same and she couldn’t see past his broad shoulders.

Impatiently, she dismounted and tied Merry off to a nearby branch, then slid forward past Thatch with a “Good boy,” a reassuring hand on his rump so he wouldn’t kick. Ash followed her.

There was an elk on the path, taller than any Ember had ever seen. Its antlers were in full summer growth even this early in the season, and it was unquestionably a bull. It stood broadside across the path, turning its head to stare at them impassively.

Holly, Tern and Cedar arrived to stand behind them. The path was so crowded that even dismounted they could not all stand abreast.

Cedar smiled.

“So, do we just stand here until the world freezes again?”

“We can’t go off the path,” Ash said.

Ember shivered at the thought. No, she wasn’t going to leave the path.

“It has to move sometime,” Holly said.

Ash’s hand, as though moving without his conscious thought, went to his bow, but Cedar grabbed his wrist.

“No, brother,” he said. “I really wouldn’t.”

“May be it’s a messenger from the Forest,” Tern piped up.

“But what’s the message?” Ash pondered.

Ember walked forward, shrugging off Curlew’s cautionary hand. Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast, but if this was a messenger from the Forest, then she was the proper person to treat with it. She stopped a double arms’-length from the animal, so close she could smell it: musky and a little rank.

“Greetings,” she said clearly, and gave her best formal bow, even allowing her head to tip flat as she bent, to indicate the respect given to those superior in office, although not in birth. “We entreat you, let us pass.”

The elk turned its head and looked, not at her, but straight at Cedar. He stirred in surprise and came forward, and Ember ceded her place to him, easing past him and rejoining the others. Ash nodded approval at her, and she was thankful for the reassurance.

Cedar stood on the balls of his feet, prepared for battle and then, as if realizing it, visibly forced his muscles to go lax until he was in his normal lounging posture.

“I greet you,” he said, and bowed, but differently. Lower, to indicate respect, but with his head raised. It was a Valuer’s bow, and the elk snorted as though he found it funny, his brown eyes apparently amused.

Then the elk turned his back on Cedar, raised his tail, and deposited a hot stream of dung at his feet. The elk looked back at Cedar as if inviting protest, but Cedar was laughing, laughing hard.

“So that’s what the Forest thinks of us!” he gasped.

It was infectious. Ember’s fear twisted into surprise and laughter, and the others were chuckling, too.

“Thinks of you, my lad!” Ash said, smiling broadly.

As if approving their mirth, the elk moved, threading its way through the narrow tree trunks, disappearing into the shadows surprisingly fast, and they were left with only a pile of fresh dung to say it had been there at all.

The loose pat steamed. Cedar bowed mockingly to it.

“I salute you, message from the Forest,” he said.

Immediately, the dung shifted slightly. Curlew called, “Get back, lass!” and Ash took Ember by the elbows and swung her around behind him, lifting her clean off her feet.

“Ash!” she protested, but he kept an arm out, preventing her from squirming back, so that she had to peer over the top of his elbow.

A plant was growing out of the dung. Fast, too fast, it sprouted one leaf, then two, then the stem grew and grew until it was waist high. Not a plant she recognized: green and mottled brown, it kept the look and scent of its origin. Cedar stared at it with a mixture of astonishment and elation.

“Wondrous!” he muttered.

On his word, it put forth a flower, black as pitch, black as the endless night sky, four-petaled like a briar rose, with deep purple stamens. It seemed to wait, poised at the moment of full display. Then a breeze lifted its head, stirred the pollen from its stamens, spreading it across the face of the flower. The petals withered and fell, velvet black turning to gray ash-like fragments, and the seed pod at the center swelled.

Ember held her breath, and she could see that Cedar was doing the same. He stared at the plant with a ferocious intensity, as though all he had ever wanted was there before him, as a man hanging onto the side of a cliff might stare at the rope that will save him as it spirals down.

The pod opened silently.

Inside, it was bright orange, and in the middle lay a blackness, round as the full moon, about the size of a man’s thumbnail. Slowly, Cedar put out his hand.

“Careful!” Holly called.

“It’s singing!” Cedar said. “Can’t you hear it?”

He put his palm below the seed pod, hoping whatever this was would fall into it, but the blackness stayed resolutely where it was. Cedar swallowed and took a breath so big Ember could see it lift his shoulders.

“I thank you for this gift,” he said, and plucked the darkness from its bright home.

The plant withered in a heartbeat, and the dried dung blew away in a quick wind, leaving only the empty path, and Cedar standing there, holding—

“It’s a casting stone,” he said wonderingly. “The Evenness stone.”

They crowded forward to look as he turned and held it out to them. Black, round, perfect as the full moon.

“It sings to me!” he said, his face full of joy, more open than Ember had ever seen him. And then he reverted to his normal manner and laughed. “Typical, isn’t it? Other people get given their stones in a pouch—mine comes from a pile of dung!”

“If Evenness comes out of dung,” Ash said, chuckling, “gods help us when you get Chaos!”

“Ah,” said Cedar. “Chaos was much easier.”

He pulled a kerchief from his pocket. It was tied up around what had to be a pile of stones. Cedar crouched and laid it on the ground, spreading it so they could see the collection—all casting stones.

“I’ve been finding them for months,” he said. “This is the last one.” He hesitated. “This is where I find out if I’m a stonemaker or a stonecaster. If they all sing for me, I’m a caster.”

Ember fished in her petticoat pocket for her coinpouch and emptied the coins into her hand. She handed the pale yellow pouch to Cedar.

“You’ll need this, I think.”

Cedar smiled at her, acknowledging his own excitement and her generosity, but with that twist to his mouth that she was coming to understand. Not meanness, but a deep appreciation of how ridiculous life could be.

He put the stones from the kerchief inside the pouch and then slowly slid the Evenness stone in on top of them. Ember held her breath. Would they all hear the stones sing, or only him? She had never seen a caster receive his stone set before.

Cedar’s head bowed toward the pouch. Oh, no, Ember thought, but then he raised his head and his eyes were alight, shining with unshed tears.

“They sing like a choir of water spirits,” he said unsteadily.

“So, you’re a caster after all,” Ash said, beaming.

“You can earn a good living, casting,” Curlew said approvingly, and somehow the prosaic comment was what they all needed to return them from the realm of the extraordinary to ordinary life.

Cedar laughed and said, “Aye, I hope so!” He drew the pouch strings tight, then tied it at his belt and rested his hand on it, in that spot Ember had seen him touch so many times.

Ember piled her coins onto Cedar’s kerchief and tied it up. When she slipped it back into her pocket, it banged uncomfortably against her knee, so she handed it to Ash. “Put that inside your jerkin,” she said. “Or in your own pouch.”

“Mine’s not big enough for this much coin!” he teased her.

They were all in good spirits. Perhaps the Forest had decided to welcome them, Ember thought happily, although a deep part of her wondered what would have happened if Cedar had not done everything exactly right, from greeting the dung to thanking the Forest for the gift. Without the right response… the Forest, the old saying went, had no mercy and gave no second chances.

Which seemed to be true of all the Powers.

“Why is She helping us?” Cedar mused as they set up their sleeping pockets on the driest piece of ground they could find, a high bank beside the stream.

“She? Why do you think the Forest is a She?” Ember asked. The Lake People had always referred to the Lake as “She,” but the Great Forest had never been spoken of in the same way. Cedar paused, his sleeping pocket hanging loosely from his hands.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It feels female to me.”

“Feels male to me,” Holly said firmly. Ember let her mind reach out to the Forest in the way she imagined those with Sight did. She was Sight-blind, of course, but still… in her imagination she coursed through the trees, whispering in the night breeze, new growth reaching for the stars and roots covered with rotting needles, flicked past the owls waking, the voles and shrews hiding in their burrows with their tiny blind young, the woodpeckers, the cuckoos, the nuthatches settling into their nests… and other presences: bear, wolf, wolverine, elk and deer, weasel and hare. She had no sense of male or female, just of predator and prey. Life and death. Growth and decay.

“Both,” she said. “The Forest is both.”

Ash had been watching her as she stood there, and now he came over to help her lay out her sleeping pocket.

“Both and everything,” he suggested quietly. “Like some trees only need themselves to set fruit.”

Ember nodded.

“So why is It helping us?” Cedar demanded, taking his boots off. He slid into his pocket and propped himself on one elbow to stare at Ash and Ember.

“Maybe It’s not,” Ash said.

“But—”

Ash smiled, his mouth twisting in the teasing grin he only gave his brothers and sisters. “You said Evenness sang—maybe the singing was driving the Forest crazy and it just wanted to get rid of the bloody stone!”

Ember began to laugh, but then felt the Forest grow quiet around them. The breeze dropped. The owls fell silent. Even the stream seemed to pause in its song.

“I ask forgiveness if I misspoke,” Ash said. Ember could see the pulse beating at the side of his throat—fast and strong. He was wary, but not afraid. She wished she could be like him. Her own heart, as always, was leaping and jumping in fear.

With a sound like an avalanche so far off it was invisible, a giant sigh went through the trees and the noises of the Forest began again. They prepared for bed in silence, Holly, Curlew and Tern sleeping this time and Ash taking first watch, Holdfast at his side.

“I’ll wake you at midnight,” Ash murmured to Ember. She nodded, pleased that he wasn’t trying to exclude her from responsibility. But it took her a long time to sleep. Part of her was waiting. Waiting for the avalanche to hit.

Ember woke at midnight to find Ash gone. She scrambled into her boots and stood up, scanning the edges of the tiny clearing. The moon was up, a little larger, and the trees cast steel-sharp shadows across the ground, making it hard to see anything else. Then she spotted him, by one of the larches, standing with his bow where a long bough had broken off and made a cleft in the skirt of branches that swept the ground. His back was to the tree and he was staring across the open space, but not at her.

She turned slowly. A wolf. On the other side of the stream, a wolf silver in the moonlight, muzzle lifted as if howling, but silent, silent as a ghost. Cedar was standing on their side of the water, staring at it.

Ash had an arrow nocked, but his bow hung in his hands, ready to be raised if the wolf leaped the stream, but not threatening. Not hunting. The two dogs were with him, alert, ears pricked, on point, but not antagonistic. Interested.

Then Ember heard the wolf’s howl. She was expecting the familiar ululation that she had heard all her life, when the winters were fierce and the wolves came down from the north to feed on the Last Domain flocks, on anything they could find or scavenge around human settlements—including children.

She knew that howl, that salute to the moon, as all northern children did. Wolf howls were loud, meant to carry across the silent night woods, across the hard-packed snow, claiming territory, gathering the pack, seeking a mate.

But this wolf howled almost silently; a thin thread of sound that raised the hairs on her neck, crept like ice down her spine, curled her fingers into claws. A silver crooning, barely heard over the stream, spiraling up into the sky on a long, rising single note. It took her breath and her heart with it, and she looked up, too, following the wolf’s gaze to the clear moon above them, to the milk-pale curve of moon breast, the silver tipping cradle, and the stars beyond it.

Cedar began singing in response, starting low and rising, climbing, as if the tone could take his heart and his soul higher and higher, as if they could together reach the sky.

The wolf’s tone changed to meet his, as wolf howls do when a pack mate joins the salute. Ash took a step forward, the dogs following, and Cedar’s attention turned to them for a second, and so did the wolf’s. Their song faltered. Then their gazes locked and the wolf started the note again, its eyes fixed on Cedar’s as if asking, “Are you pack or not-pack?” Among wolves, such a look was a challenge to a subordinate. He began to sing again, at first deliberately matching its tone, then as it tilted its head back to again watch the sky, he looked up too.

Ember felt his song free itself from deliberation, felt it soar, matched and matching with the wolf’s, yearning, longing, rising and falling, rising again, and from every part of the Forest she could hear the fragile, slender howl go up, from pack after pack, throat after throat…

Time fell away. She did not feel cold, or frightened, or even excited. She was simply there, listening, and the moon above her was cold and silver and white and out of reach, all the things Fire was not, and she yearned toward the peace it promised, toward the idea of silence and peace beyond the confines of the world.

When the moon’s lower tip touched the edge of the highest trees, the wolf fell silent, and a heartbeat later so did Cedar. Ember looked back down at it and bowed a little in respect. It met her eyes for a brief moment only and then looked away, as wolves do with their pack mates; then it was gone into the dense shadow. Cedar stood, swaying.

While he had sung, Ash had come forward and now stood beside her, his bow still strung but his arrow back in its quiver. The others were awake, sitting up with their furs around them; she was aware for the first time that Ash had draped her with his sleeping pocket to keep her warm.

Holly stared at Cedar consideringly.

“I think that was well done,” she said. “But I don’t pretend to understand why you did it.”

Cedar smiled at her, exalted but obviously tired.

“My turn to watch,” Holly said. “After all that, I think you both need some sleep.”

Ember was tired. Yes. Exhausted. But she felt light, as though Cedar had sung out her weaknesses, as though he had twined a bridge across a chasm with that singing, and she could walk out over empty air without fear.

“Go to sleep, princess,” Ash said, but his voice was gentle. He turned to Cedar. “Little wolf, go to sleep.”

She gave Ash back his pocket and slid down into her own, not even bothering to take off her boots. From down on the ground, only the very edge of the moon showed over the treetops, and as she watched it disappeared, leaving a halo of light around the highest branches.

Ember fell asleep, and did not dream.

In the morning, she was relieved to see paw prints in the bank on the other side of the stream. Not a vision, then, or a sending of the Forest, but a real wolf.

She supposed that was good.