The Door Before

by N. D. Wilson

The cat was gone. The dog was gone. But the cedar tree with the gaping trunk was right where it had been. She could wake that tree, just like she’d woken the other one. And that meant she knew where to hide.

  Or where to die.

  Maybe.

  Hyacinth didn’t know if the brothers were following, and she almost didn’t care. She and Lawrence sprinted up and over a mound of loose earth and slammed against the big damaged trunk.

  “Inside,” Hyacinth said. “Quick.” And before her brother could ask a question or complain, she shoved him into the dark hollow and heard him yelp as he dropped inside. “Coming!” she warned, and she hopped in after him, sliding down charred wood and rot and landing on earth at the bottom of the hole, more than four feet down.

  Her head and shoulders were above ground level. Outside she could hear the cat yowling and Squid barking and wolves snarling and men yelling. But she couldn’t watch. There wasn’t time. She had to focus on one thing and one thing only. She closed her eyes and placed her forehead and palms against the damaged wood inside the tree.

  “Please,” she said aloud. “Please mend your skin. Live again, and hold us.”

  “Hyacinth!” Lawrence screamed.

  But she couldn’t look. She couldn’t let herself feel anything but the life inside the tree.

  The wood trembled against her palms. Rot rained down around her shoulders.

  —

  HYACINTH DIDN’T SEE CALEB kill the first wolf with his last arrow. She didn’t see Mordecai throw the second wolf over the cypress tree. She didn’t see Ray and Shark nipping at the third wolf’s heels, distracting it from the two brothers as they ran.

  She felt the tree waking and wood growing as centuries stirred beneath her touch.

  And she felt Caleb’s boots as they slammed into her shoulder and knocked her sideways.

  She banged into Lawrence and opened her eyes as Caleb fell into the hole and pressed them both back as far as he could.

  Mordecai stood outside, facing away from the tree, guarding the entrance, a long knife in one hand and his other blazing with vine fire.

  The tree groaned like a ship at sea. The crack was closing.

  Caleb tried to climb back out to join his brother, but Hyacinth grabbed his shoulders, pulling him down and slipping past him.

  “Get in here!” she yelled, and then, from between his boots, she saw what Mordecai was facing.

  The tree was surrounded. With a sweeping lash of light and vine-muscled wind, he sent six mushroom men tumbling, all twelve mouths raging. With a snap of his arm, crossbow bolts bent around him, and as the wolf and the men with scythes approached, he slammed his fire vines against the ground, roiling a wave of shattered rock toward them, pounding them against the trees.

  And through all the noise, Hyacinth could hear him humming. And she could feel his exhaustion. His boots slipped. He slumped forward and caught himself on one knee, just in time to brush a flying scythe up into the trunk. The snarling wolf leapt forward, and he swept it back, but only barely.

  The men saw his exhaustion, and for the first time, they began to smile.

  Sweat was pouring off of Mordecai, and while the vine fire around his hand still burned bright, his skin had gone gray.

  The crack was closing.

  “Let me out!” Caleb jerked at Hyacinth’s shoulder, but she kicked him back and lunged up and out of the hole, grabbing onto Mordecai’s boots.

  The tree trunk pressed against her ribs and spine.

  Caleb didn’t need to be told to pull. Grabbing Hyacinth around the waist, he ripped her back inside, and most of Mordecai along with her. Shifting to his brother’s belt, he jerked him all the way inside, as the wolf slammed its snarling head into the crack.

  Hyacinth and Lawrence and Caleb all pressed as far back against each other as was possible inside the hollow tree.

  Mordecai slumped down into the bottom of the hole, curling up on their feet, instantly asleep.

  The wolf raged and snapped, slavering, spilling its wet anger all over Mordecai’s rounded back.

  The crack was still closing.

  “Best withdraw,” Caleb said quietly. “Or you’ll lose that fine shaggy head.”

  The wolf retreated slowly until it was only a sniffling nose and dripping tongue and bared front fangs.

  The crack closed.

  Mordecai muttered something in his sleep and shifted awkwardly against Hyacinth’s shins, hooking his arm around her ankles.

  From above, faint orange light found its way dimly down the hollow tree.

  Eight inches away, Caleb managed to shift and face her.

  “What was the point of that?” he asked.

  “What was the point?” Hyacinth sputtered. She felt her adrenaline turning to anger. “The point is that we are alive. That’s the point!”

  The orange light above them vanished. Warm, moist, rotten darkness swallowed them whole.

  “Hy,” Lawrence said quietly. “Are we stuck?”

  NIMIANE HELD THE CAT tight, stroking her blood-sticky fur, feeling the low, angry drumming of her inner purr.

  She faced the healed tree, a cedar as mighty as any she had ever seen. A cedar that had swallowed children and had then sent up new branches as thick as galley masts, and had splintered stone beneath Nimiane’s feet with deep, worming roots.

  Her men were all around, shifting quietly in the darkness, now that the fire arches had dwindled, waiting for a command from Nimroth’s ancient daughter. Every drop of Nimiane’s blackened blood itched in her veins, hot with anger. It would have burned its way out of a lesser body, but she had mastered the struggle of immortality long ago, when she had imprisoned her raving father and taken his many thrones.

  “Queen.” The wizard who spoke was young and vain, still struggling to grow his downy blond beard. She listened to him throw back his cape and bow, but she did not look his way. “If you would allow us to burn the tree, or even set to it with axes, this could be ended quickly. We could fetch you this green man, kill the others, and be done.”

  Nimiane extended her hand toward the wizard’s voice and beckoned him. His steps were hesitant as he approached, but no man here would ever defy her. When she felt the warmth of his life beside her, she let her fingertips gently find his face, his lips. And then she wormed a whisper into the young man’s mind.

  Fool.

  She drew his life into her as easily as breathing. His heat vanished, and then his breath. And last, his terrified thoughts. The man’s body, dry and ashen, collapsed beside her, brittle and rustling like leaves.

  He had not been strong. Consuming him had been as satisfying as dipping her tongue in water when she had a thirst large enough for rivers. But it had been calming nonetheless.

  Nimiane could have split the tree with one finger. She could have burned it with a word. But she didn’t need to. She knew there were no human lives inside it. There were no souls she could touch with her own. And the only trace of the young green man was on the ground at her feet, where vines lay coiled with trampled grapes.

  The children were gone. And they had been by the time Bast had returned to her and she had found her way to the scene of the struggle.

  Strangest of all, they were gone without any trace of magic. No spells tainted the air with their acidic taste. No ghostly vine fire had left trails on the tree.

  She had waited. She had been patient. And still, she could sense no lives within.

  —

  HYACINTH WAS DREAMING. SHE was dreaming that she was trapped inside a tree, balled up in the bottom of a hole with Lawrence sweating on top of her, unable to straighten her legs, raise her arms.

  She was barely able to breathe.

  “Wake up.” Someone was grabbing her shoulder.

  Hyacinth jerked, trying to slap the hand away. But her right arm was pinned to her side, and Lawrence’s legs were on top of her left.

  She was in fact balled up in the bottom of a hole inside a tree. Lawrence was practically sitting on her
lap, and Caleb’s rounded back was crushing her.

  Mordecai was the only one standing and awake. Daylight and a tiny trace of coolness trickled down the hollow trunk above him. He was the one who had grabbed her shoulder.

  “You’re all right,” Mordecai said. “It was just a dream.”

  Hyacinth sniffed at the stagnant air, thick with hours of breath and sweat, and already rotten to start.

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream. What was I doing?”

  “Kicking and shouting,” Mordecai said. “Here, stand up. Get some blood in your legs.”

  With his one good arm, he lifted Lawrence’s legs off of her, and he used his foot to push Caleb’s back a few inches farther away. Then he extended his hand to Hyacinth.

  Hyacinth grunted and tried to get her bare feet underneath her, but they were numb and clumsy. After a moment of trying to do it herself, she grabbed Mordecai’s forearm.

  He pulled her up and she immediately slumped back against the rotten wood wall, grimacing as a roar of needles marched through her feet.

  Sore didn’t even begin to describe how Hyacinth felt. Her joints felt like unpopped knuckles. Her skull was trying to expand and contract like a bone lung. Her spine was refusing to straighten, her right shoulder felt like it was stuck in her ear, and her bare feet seemed to be made of bruises. She watched Mordecai slowly roll his damaged shoulder. The fungal teeth created rolling hills beneath his shirt.

  “You okay?” Hyacinth asked.

  Mordecai nodded, looking up the tree at the small patch of daylight at least a dozen feet above them. “Better than I could be,” he said. “Although I am incredibly hungry.”

  “Nothing I can do about that,” Hyacinth said. “Sorry.”

  Mordecai looked at her, studying her face as if she was joking.

  “You can open this tree up,” he said. “If the witch was going to burn it or peel it open, she would have done it by now. And to be honest, I don’t know why she didn’t.”

  Hyacinth looked around at the rough cedar walls. The tree seemed a great deal healthier than it had been the night before. Outside, she would expect new branches. And if she had the energy to really feel for them, she wouldn’t have been surprised by root fingers hundreds of feet long.

  “You want me to crack the tree open?” She blinked and rubbed her eyes. That was different from prodding growth. That was destruction and decay. She wasn’t sure she could do that.

  “I don’t just want you to,” Mordecai said. “You must. Otherwise, you’ve crafted a rather large coffin for four.”

  Hyacinth rubbed her eyes and tried to think.

  “Can’t you pull it open with vines?”

  Mordecai laughed.

  “I don’t know what magic you used or how you shut us in here—”

  “No magic,” Hyacinth said. “I told you that already. And I didn’t do this. I just asked the tree to do it.”

  “—and I don’t care right now,” Mordecai continued. “But if you want us to live, you will get started on the counterspell really soon.”

  Hyacinth brushed back her hair and didn’t try to hide the anger in her eyes. “No spells. I just asked. That’s it.”

  “Then ask again,” Mordecai said.

  “I’d be asking the tree to harm itself,” Hyacinth said. “I’ve never done that. It feels wrong. And I don’t know if it will work. You have a knife, right? Can’t you carve a door?”

  “Maybe. But not before our brothers wake up and need to relieve themselves.”

  “Relieve themselves?” Hyacinth asked. “What do you…oh.”

  Mordecai shifted his weight from side to side. “I’m not just hungry,” he said. “I really have to go.”

  And as soon as he said it, she did too.

  “Right. Okay.” Hyacinth faced the soft cedar wall and ran her palms across it.

  “You’re not really asking it to harm itself,” Mordecai said. “It can grow together again after. And won’t it be healthier with us gone?”

  Hyacinth nodded. He wasn’t wrong. And she wasn’t wrong to ask the tree to split its own gut wide open.

  “I feel like Jonah,” Mordecai said. “Waiting to be vomited up by the fish.”

  “You know about Jonah?” Hyacinth asked, but her senses were already too focused on the tree to listen to the answer.

  “Here,” she whispered, and she dragged her thumbnail slowly up as high as she could reach, leaving a faint groove carved in the soft wood. “Or wherever is easiest. Please.”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t want us in here,” she whispered. “Not really.”

  Hyacinth summoned up every memory of wood splitting, every image of a cracked tree, along with thoughts of survival and release and escape.

  The wood was alive and thriving under her touch, strong and vibrant. She could tell that the tree was feeling wind and basking in sun, but she felt no response to her suggestions at all. Not even rejection.

  “What does it want with us?” Mordecai asked. “Can’t you reason with it?”

  “It isn’t like that,” Hyacinth said. “It’s not an animal. Trees are more like living books, libraries of lives and times. I’m just someone who likes the books, even though I can’t really read them. They can be angry like a storm or at peace in the breeze, but it’s not like they have goals.”

  “How do you know?” Mordecai asked.

  Hyacinth was silent. She didn’t know. She just felt. But, of course, she could be wrong. She hadn’t made the trees or taught them how to wrap their years in rings. All she’d ever really been able to do was get things to grow quickly.

  “Do what you like.” Mordecai pressed himself back against the wood wall and looked up at the light. “But I think you should stop asking politely and command this thing in the name of God and all His angels to let us out right now.”

  Hyacinth tried again. She shut her eyes and pressed her head against the wood between her hands. The stuffy smell faded. If Mordecai was talking, she didn’t hear him. She even forgot the feeling of the wood against her skin.

  She sensed only the tree. Strength. Glory. Age. Pride. Thousands of trees had come from this one. Entire civilizations of cardinals had nested in its branches, and a record of every song sung and egg hatched and nest raided was written in the rings. In the rings, those birds still sang….

  Hyacinth began to write a story. She whispered it into the wood and heard it echo back in the grain.

  Shame. Shame for the tree that devoured a green man…boy…and a healing grower. Shame for the tree defiled with human meat rotting in its belly. Its branches hold only vultures and their spew, and its wood will grace no halls and hear no laughter. That tree is less than rot.

  The trunk shook, and Hyacinth felt the cedar’s anger.

  A split opened beneath her face, but she didn’t open her eyes and she didn’t stop the flood of her thoughts. Not until she felt warm air blowing on her face and Mordecai’s hand on her shoulder.

  Hyacinth opened her eyes. Her chest was at ground level and she was looking at rippling green grass climbing a symmetrical mound the size of an enormous barn. There were other trees as well, surrounding the mound in an extended ring, and between each pair of trees there stood carved white stones, heavy with moss.

  “This isn’t California,” Hyacinth said.

  “What did you do?” Mordecai asked. “No…don’t,” he added quickly. “You didn’t do anything.”

  He helped Hyacinth up and out onto the grass before climbing out after her.

  The grass felt lovely beneath Hyacinth’s bare feet, spongy turf with lush green blades, cool and moist. The mound inside the circle of trees had clearly been constructed by someone, just as the stones had been placed and the trees planted.

  Mordecai was moving away quickly, toward the next tree in the ring.

  “Where are you going?” Hyacinth asked.

  “Don’t ask,” he said. And then he stepped out of view.

  Hyacinth, wondering if sh
e might be able to find a spot with a bit more privacy, turned her attention back to the tree.

  Apart from being a cedar, it looked nothing like the tree they had entered in the lightning tree grove. And the crack in the trunk was only a few inches wide.

  “Oh, no!” Hyacinth dropped onto her knees. “Lawrence!” She tore grass away from the trunk and shoved both hands into the crack, prepared to soundly curse the tree, to curse it until it welcomed her back inside or spat out her brother.

  Her hands vanished completely into the trunk. Shocked, she jerked them out and waited a moment for her heart to settle back down. Then, spreading her hands wide, she leaned her head toward the crack.

  The smell of sweaty boys and dirt greeted her. Caleb was on his feet, right at her eye level, looking frightened and with his knife already drawn. Lawrence was blinking at the bottom of the hole.

  “Hy?” he asked. “Are they gone? Can we get out now?”

  “Go!” Mordecai shouted.

  Hyacinth pulled her head back out of the tree. Mordecai was sprinting toward her as two men entered the circle, with wide-bladed swords already drawn, spitting anger in a language Hyacinth had never heard before. The men were led by a pair of enormously shaggy orange dogs, bounding through the grass in front of them.

  Hyacinth slid feetfirst back into the tree and waited, with her palms against the wood.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  Mordecai slammed into Caleb and then sat on Lawrence. While the boys yelped, Hyacinth gave the tree a single word.

  Close.

  And the tree responded immediately.

  This time no snapping wolf risked its head. The trunk closed, and Mordecai and Hyacinth looked at each other.

  Mordecai smiled. “I think I just desecrated their sacred grove.”

  Lawrence scrambled up onto his feet, squeezing a space for himself between the brothers.

  “Hy,” he said, “I really have to go to the bathroom.”

  Hyacinth sighed.

  Mordecai almost laughed. “Give it a minute. Then open the tree again.”

  “What’s going on?” Caleb asked. “Is the witch still out there? I waited all night for her to carve it open.”

  Hyacinth shut her eyes. Her mind was struggling to understand what had just happened. Maybe Mordecai could laugh about it, but her stomach was binding itself into a lump that was part lead and part panic.