Barefoot on the Wind

by Zoe Marriott

  Hana… the trees breathed. I heard sadness, and worry, and reproach in their voices. But also … acceptance. Maybe even hope.

  “You will help me?”

  Walk. Walk. Walk.

  “Thank you,” I said. Turning my face in the direction that the trees called me, I set off.

  With the light, and a full belly, and an excellent night’s rest behind me, the first part of my journey to the Dark Wood felt easy. At least, easier than the nightmarish trek through the dark and the wailing wind I had made a month ago. Nor did I have anger and despair and the awful weight of guilt sitting on my back.

  Yet then I had been at the peak of my strength – a strength I had barely noticed, because it had always been mine. I was not so strong now, despite all Itsuki’s care and his remedies. It did not take nearly as long for me to begin to feel the distance I had walked, and I noticed the aches and pains in my body as a recent invalid does, with the fear that something important might choose to give way at any time. The longer I walked, too, the more I felt my anxiety for Itsuki rising, a creeping foreboding about what the Yuki-Onna had done to him while she had him in that cage, and what state I might find him in when I finally arrived. Hurry. Hurry. There’s no time. No time.

  My progress was determined, and as quick as I could make it, but the light had still faded into a silvery grey dusk before I found myself in a part of the wood that was unknown to me. I was forced to stop for a short rest there, taking a seat on a tree stump and washing the sweat from my face in a tiny stream that trickled near by. After the enlivening splash of the water had woken me up, I drank from and refilled my waterskin, and ate around half of the food. My knees creaked as I pulled myself to my feet, making me grimace.

  There was no wandering into the Dark Wood unawares tonight. Though it was night by the time I reached the boundary, and everything was draped in deep shadows, the line of dense dark pines was unmistakable – and impassable. Their heavily scented branches seemed to have woven together into a single wall of green-black foliage, and if there were any gaps or holes, the thick thorny vines that grew around the pines’ feet – a cousin to the maze thorns perhaps – blocked the way just as thoroughly.

  I moved up and down the line of the trees, seeking some opening, any chink in that wall that might reveal itself if I looked hard enough. The trees at my back shuddered and shifted, as if in encouragement. But no opening did I find.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry, said that familiar voice in the back of my mind. No time, no time…

  Reluctantly, for this was the edge of the Yuki-Onna’s territory and I did not want to alert her to my presence yet, I stopped where I was and leaned my body into the strong, springy wall of pine boughs. Softly, I whispered:

  “Sisters. I know your mistress has commanded that I be kept out. But I also know what she does not – that you have thoughts and feelings of your own. You saved me once before, and I think that you love Itsuki in your way, and would help me to rescue him from his suffering if you could.”

  The pines rippled and shivered against me. Then they sighed, Hana.

  I smiled, encouraged. “Yes, it is me. I have come to help, and to try to mend what has needed mending for a hundred years. I am going to slay the monster. Will you aid me? Will you let me pass?”

  The dark trees moved again, as if a great silent wind had buffeted against them. Then, as one, they murmured, Hana.

  Help. Mend.

  Hana.

  Friend.

  The closely knitted green wall began to part, the branches drawing back. Below them, thorns curled into themselves and slithered out of the way. A narrow opening appeared, just wide enough for me to squeeze through if I turned sideways and was very careful with my pack and quiver.

  “Thank you,” I told them. “I will do the best I can.”

  With that, I slipped into the Dark Wood.

  I did not see the narrow ravine where Itsuki in his beast form had played cat and mouse with me. For that, I was grateful. My path remained simple and straight, as if the trees were falling back before me to ease my way, and only a few minutes’ walk brought me out from under the dense canopy of leaves to open sky. Black as pitch and depthless, the night was filled with great glittering drifts of stars so bright that it was almost possible to not miss the light of the Moon.

  Before me stood the tall outermost hedge of the maze, looming and dark as ever it had been. I approached cautiously. The thorns had never spoken to me, nor to Itsuki that I knew of, or given any indication that they were sentient like the trees. But they had rolled back of their own accord to allow me in, I presumed – and I had seen them open for the wildcat.

  “Thorns, thorns, you know me,” I whispered, softer even than I had spoken to the dark pines. “I am Hana, Itsuki’s friend. I have come to help him, and bring an end to the suffering here, if I can. Will you let me pass?”

  There was no response – not a dry rattle, not a twitch, not a sigh – from the hedge.

  Very well.

  I took off my pack and quiver, tested my grip upon the axe, and swung it hard.

  The blade was sharp and my aim was true. I felt the stems of the thorns part beneath the hatchet. Yet when I reached the bottom of my swing and made to pull the hatchet back, I had to drag it free with both hands and the whole weight of my body, as if the thorns had already grown into place behind it. Or reached out actively to try to seize it. My blow had left no gap in the hedge. I sighed.

  A woodsman’s methods would not avail me, then.

  Turning back to the trees of the Dark Wood, I appealed to them. “Is there no way in? No way to break through?”

  The trees quivered, wordless. Frightened? I frowned. They knew something, then, but did not wish to speak it. Yet they had not been too frightened to help me so far, despite the threat of the Yuki-Onna’s wrath. What could frighten trees more than magic?

  The answer came as if my own grandmother, tree-whisperer and wood walker, had breathed it into my ear: Fire.

  Itsuki had said that winter never came to the maze properly, and in the weeks that I had been with him the skies had always been blue. I had not seen so much as a light drizzle, let alone rain. These tangled hedges might have been forced to grow for decades on magic, instead of water. What was more, didn’t the stories talk of Moon Priests driving out demons and yokai with flames?

  Dry wood was vulnerable to fire. So was magic.

  For a heartbeat I quailed at the thought, for I had grown up in a village of wooden houses with thatched roofs, surrounded by forest. If there was one single thing that we had been taught to fear more than the monster in the forest, it was fire. The maze was home to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of harmless animals. I could not allow them to be trapped and burned to death. Nor did I wish to be trapped myself.

  But Itsuki was on the other side of those thorns.

  Hurry, no time, hurry, hurry…

  I must do more than make a path for myself to the Yuki-Onna’s island; I must burn the maze down, so that all the denizens of the thorns – and I, if necessary – would be able to get free and escape into the woods.

  Bringing out the tinderbox, then my bow and some of the arrows, I offered a silent apology to my mother before I began to rip strips off the bottom of my nagajuban. I wrapped them in little bundles around the tips of the arrows, working as quickly as my fumbling fingers would allow. Itsuki was waiting for me.

  A few paces into the trees I found a long, sturdy stick of dry wood, perfect for burning. I rolled its end in the dark sap that oozed from the boles of the pine trees, and made a torch of it by binding layers of the fraying fabric over that, then rolling it in pine resin again. Then I set to work with my flints. The torch smoked sullenly for a few moments, but eventually smouldered and began to burn steadily. Once I was sure that no stray breeze would put it out, I went back to the hedge.

  “This is your last chance,” I told the thorns, unsure if they could hear or understand. “If you won’t open, I will have no other choice.”
/>
  Nothing. After a few beats just to make sure, I leaned in and held the fire to the thorns.

  The dry tangle of the hedge caught light instantly, as if it had been waiting for fire all its life. With a soft whoomph and a shower of sparks, a gout of flame streaked away up to the top of the hedge. I jumped back in alarm. The sudden heat made my cheeks feel red and raw, and the yellow-white light caused my eyes to water as much as the smoke.

  New tongues of flame crackled out in either direction as I watched anxiously, waiting for the fire to eat a hole in the thorns. Slowly, the place where I had first set the blaze began to fall down into ash, all its fuel consumed. I shrugged my pack and quiver back on, shoved the handle of the axe into my obi, then took the bow and my handful of wrapped arrows firmly in my right hand and the torch in my left.

  I backed up to the trees. Braced myself. Ran forwards as fast as I could – and leapt through the gap in the burning thorns.

  The smoke hit my eyes and throat, blinding and choking me at the same time. Coughing, I staggered away from the flames as fast as I could, examining my clothes and braided hair for smoking patches. There were none. Well, I had not set fire to myself then, at least.

  By the light of the torch, I searched for a gap in the hedge that would let me through to the next ring. When I did not find one, I set fire to the thorns again. Behind me the fire was spreading almost too quickly to be believed, until it seemed that at least half the first wall of the maze must be alight or burned away to ash.

  I progressed steadily through the maze, moving in as straight a line as I could navigate, always working towards the centre. Wherever a dead end tried to block my way, I sacrificed an arrow to set it aflame. Stringing and drawing my bow again, after a month of no practice and with the still healing wounds in my arm, shoulder and side was … not pleasant. But it did allow me to make fires in the dangerously flammable hedge from afar, so that the risk to my clothes and hair was minimal.

  Soon animals began to flee past me, back the way I had come. The friendly goats nearly trampled me into the grass, and the slim weasel-creatures tripped me by darting between my feet. I even imagined that I saw the distinctive tufted-eared silhouette of the mother wildcat, her shadow edged in gold, as she slunk away.

  The creatures’ eyes rolled and their nostrils flared with panic at the scent of the fire, but when I looked back, I could see them flying through the gaping holes that the blaze had left in the thorns, and knew they would be able to make it to the wood.

  Of the white peacocks, I saw no sign.

  When the cold began to cloud my breath and rime the hedges of the maze, I stuck the unlit end of the torch into the stiff embrace of the thorns to keep it alight so that I could untuck my kimono. The patched fabric fell in thick, warm folds around my legs. Then I donned the cap and fur I had carried with me, but reluctantly left off the mittens, for they not only seemed a risk when handling fire arrows, but would also interfere with my ability to hold the bow steady and draw its string precisely. Remembering how my hands had turned almost blue before, I held them as close as I dared to the flaming tip of the torch as I walked on, and flexed them, and shook them, trying to keep them limber. Either it worked, or perhaps the fire had affected the ice magic of the Yuki-Onna, for my hands remained pink and warm enough to move, if a little stiffly. I thought that the frost was less thick and the air less bitter, too.

  At last, more weary than I wished to admit, I came to the centre of the maze, and found myself on the shore of the Yuki-Onna’s lake once more. The boat of ice awaited me there, at the end of the path of dark water.

  The snow maiden was eager for us to meet again.

  I hesitated, suddenly struck by the worry that she would decide to get rid of me by sinking the boat halfway across the icy lake.

  Hurry! Hurry! No time!

  The maze burned behind me. Itsuki was ahead. It was too late to turn back – even if I wished to.

  I shrugged off my pack and placed it and my bow in the bottom of the little craft. Then, holding up the thick layers of my clothes with one hand, and clutching the torch in the other, I climbed into the boat.

  Twenty-two

  The little boat barely gave me the chance to sit down before it was off. I held the torch between my knees and assessed my situation quickly as the island got larger and larger beyond the peacock figurehead. I only had two of the cloth-wrapped arrows left, and no time to make more. But my hatchet was still secure in the thick wrapping of my obi, and I thought the torch would last for a little while longer. It would have to do. I slung my strung bow over my right shoulder and put the two arrows into the same hand that held the torch, so that my right one was free.

  The Yuki-Onna did not make me walk her icy maze of horrors again. Each ring of shining white opened and rolled away on either side of me as I approached – and snapped shut behind my heels with the nasty, final sound of a metal bear-trap springing.

  She’s angry. I shivered with the knowledge of what I was about to attempt. Very angry.

  I stepped into the heart of the Moon maze with a face as calm and unrevealing as willpower could make it, and a body that vibrated with long, convulsive tremors of panic. The snow maiden stood waiting for me on the steps of her throne. Her hair and gown flowed around her slender form, fluttering faintly in an unfelt breeze and illuminated by the steady, sickly glow of the maze’s walls. Her dress was not of feathers, this time, but of moths. Black and white moths as large as my hand, still opening and closing their wings, as if they were alive despite having been pinned or sewed together.

  My glance at her was fleeting. As soon as I had fixed her location in my mind, my gaze fell away from her to the cage of bones and dead faces at the bottom of the frozen waterfall.

  Itsuki was not moving. I could barely make him out through the layers and layers of white bars. He was only a large, still shape, huddled in one corner of the cage beneath a fraying dark cloak. I was so busy looking at him, praying for something, anything – a twitch, or moan, some proof that he still lived − that I did not notice the first dead servant lunging at me until it was nearly too late.

  The thing moved fast. So fast that its bluish face, looming above me, was thankfully a blur. I barely managed to duck the sweep of a scythe-like arm, and warded it back for a precious second with a wild swing of my torch as I fumbled the wood axe from my obi. The servant came at me once more. With a cry of fear and effort, I flung the hatchet.

  My throw might have been hasty, but my aim was still good: years as a hunter had seen to that. The gleaming quartz blade made a pale arc in the air and sheered through the place where the tangled head of twigs met its smooth icy torso.

  The head tipped one way. Its body went another. The servant fell without a sound, and the ball of twigs that held its face rolled off into the snow. It was awful. I wanted to retch. But I could not stop, for a second dead thing was already running towards me.

  I lit one of my arrows and hastily dropped the other and the torch at my feet, where it smoked but did not quite go out. Then I swung my bow up, aimed, and loosed the flaming arrow directly into the second servant’s head. The tangle of branches exploded into flame, just as the thorn hedge had done.

  The servant made a high, inarticulate scream – almost like a baby’s – as it collapsed. I swallowed, tasted bile, and looked away. They are already dead, I reminded myself fiercely. Dead. You cannot truly hurt what is already dead.

  Can you?

  The Yuki-Onna let out a scream of her own, of fury and frustration. Quick as a flash, I bent and lit my one remaining arrow from the last guttering flicker of the torch at my feet, and raised my bow to aim it at her.

  “Is that your plan?” she demanded, and madness echoed through the words. “To set fire to me, and my entire realm? I am powerful enough to raise everything you have burned again in a single night of the dark Moon, even if there is nothing left but ashes. Even if you burn me to ashes, you cannot destroy me.”

  I sucked in one shaky b
reath, two … and then I allowed the tension of the bow to slacken, and the point of the flaming arrow to drop until it pointed at the snowy frozen ground. “I have not come to destroy you. I want to save you.”

  Her smooth, icy brow wrinkled. “To save … me?” she repeated uncertainly.

  “Yes.” I released the arrow completely, so that it fell into the snow and was extinguished. With an effort, I fixed my eyes on the ruff of her dress, and refused to let my gaze stray back to where Itsuki lay, still unmoving. “From the beast you have become. You don’t deserve to suffer this way. I don’t think any of this is what you wanted.”

  Her head tilted in that curious birdlike manner. “I wanted revenge. I wanted … wanted justice. The power to set right what had been ruined.”

  “I understand,” I told her. “That’s why I came here, into the Dark Wood, to hunt the beast. I wanted vengeance too. But do you think you have found that here, in this place? Do you think what you have made here is truly righting the wrongs that were done to you?”

  “Understand?” She laughed, a shrill, creaking laugh. “How could you possibly understand me? The grief I suffered? You cannot possibly know what it is to hate – you’re nothing but a girl!”

  “You were a girl like me, once. Your grief and anger are still that girl’s. We are not so different. I, too, stood before the people of my village – my own people! – and begged, begged them to save my father’s life, and they would not. They turned their backs on me, just as they turned their backs on you. They expected me to accept their cowardice because I was a just a girl, and they did not fear me. And when I did not listen to them, when I defied them and did what they could not, they tried to paint me as a demon or a liar, tried to turn on me. I despised them as you must have done, loathed and hated them for it.”

  “But then you forgave them,” she sneered. “And so? Do you now preach forgiveness to me?”