Where the Woods End

by Charlotte Salter

  It was full of animals who had wandered in and drowned, but they were perfectly preserved, their fur lifting and settling with the movement of the water. Thick, blubbery blue weeds curled between them like waving hands. At the bottom of the bog there was a rotting wooden table and a set of chairs, with weeds growing up the legs. There was one place set for the Briny Witch’s dinner.

  The Briny Witch floated down beside her and laughed. He had no trouble opening his mouth underwater.

  “I like this,” he said, gurgling again. “I don’t have to make deals with dead people. I’ll just wait for you to drown and take what I want.”

  He reached out for Kestrel, and she kicked him away clumsily. He sniggered and stepped back to watch her struggle.

  As Kestrel floundered for the surface red dots grew in front of her eyes, and she felt light-headed with the effort of kicking. Everything around her grew vague. In her dizziness it looked like the animals were laughing, shaking their heads as they watched. The Briny Witch settled into his waterlogged chair, waiting for her to drown and come floating down.

  She faltered for a second and drifted back, barely fighting the terrible urge to take a deep breath. She should have known this would happen. Granmos always said she was a terrible swimmer, and that anything that wanted to kill her should just push her into a pond.

  Kestrel started to kick. She was not going to prove her grandma right.

  She struck for the surface with every last ounce of energy. The Briny Witch jumped up and came after her, but it was too late. Kestrel’s hands broke into the air, and then she was pulling herself out of the hole and onto the path. The Briny Witch tried to grab her ankles, but she withdrew them just in time.

  Kestrel spat out a particularly unpleasant-looking waterbug and pulled herself to her feet. She waited for the Briny Witch to emerge, but nothing happened.

  She growled and stamped over to the hole in the bog.

  “Come out, you coward!” she yelled.

  The Briny Witch politely cleared his throat behind her.

  Kestrel turned and grabbed his hands just as he reached for her face. They thrashed around for a few seconds before falling over, then Kestrel’s right hand went through its chest, which, with him being a corpse, was wet and bloated. They both shouted in disgust as her hand touched his ribs.

  “Get your hand out of my ribs,” the Briny Witch snarled.

  “Let my hand go,” Kestrel snarled back, her fingers trapped between its bones.

  “Not until I get your eyes.”

  “I’m not leaving until you make me invisible, and you don’t get my eyes, because that’s gross.”

  “Maybe I’ll just take them!” the Briny Witch hissed.

  “Maybe I’ll knock your head off, and you won’t need eyes!” Kestrel hissed back.

  They glared at each other. Kestrel could feel his waterlogged heart thumping under her fingers. Maybe if she squeezed it she could stop him altogether, but the thought of killing him with her bare hands made her shudder.

  Kestrel moved her free hand to her pocket, looking for something sharp enough to hurt him with, but her fingers closed around the round, holey stone that Finn had given her.

  “It won’t take a second,” the Briny Witch said, his hand pressing against her face. “I’ll just pluck them out and pop them in.”

  “Wait,” she gasped, her fingers scrabbling on the stone, although it came out more like a muffled gasp. The Briny Witch hesitated, then parted his fingers so she could speak. “Wait. I have something better than my eyes.”

  “So now you want to trade,” the Briny Witch said gloatingly. “You know exactly what I want.”

  “You can have an eye,” she said. “Just not the one in my head.”

  The Briny Witch peeled his hand away, probably so Kestrel could see his sneer all the better. Kestrel finally managed to pull her fingers free of his ribs.

  “I have a special stone from the forest,” she said before he could move again. “If you look through it, you can see the future.”

  The Briny Witch snorted and tried to grab the stone from her hand, but she closed her fist around it.

  “I still want invisibility,” she said.

  “I still want your eyes,” he replied quickly.

  “What’s the point? You know they’ll rot,” she said, looking at his bloated, wet body. “You live in the water. You’d go blind again in days. But stones last forever.”

  The Briny Witch scoffed, but she knew that she’d caught his attention. He grudgingly held his hand out, and she dropped the stone into his palm. He brought it to its mouth and licked it. Kestrel held her breath.

  “You’re a tricky one,” he said.

  Kestrel snatched it out of his hand.

  “Do we have a deal?” she snapped.

  The Briny Witch hesitated. The hole in his chest was leaking water, and he suddenly looked old and tired.

  “Come with me,” the Briny Witch said shortly.

  Kestrel extracted her spoon from the nearby badger, silently apologizing, and followed the Briny Witch to the edge of the bog. She stayed well back from him, but it didn’t seem like he was going to try any more tricks.

  “What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Take your little victory and don’t push it, or I’ll change my mind,” the Briny Witch said sharply. He was clearly not happy with what he was about to do.

  He plunged a hand into the bog and broke the salt crust, making a big hole through which Kestrel could see gray goop.

  “Please excuse me,” said the Briny Witch. “This is . . . embarrassing.”

  He turned to the hole.

  “Hurble, hurble, toil and turble,” he said to the hole. He lowered his voice, as though he didn’t want Kestrel to hear any more. “Fire burn, and cauldron . . . burble.”

  He waited a moment, then sighed. He seemed to know that Kestrel was laughing, even though she hadn’t made a sound.

  “Is this a joke?” Kestrel asked, straightening her face and folding her arms.

  “They won’t come unless you make a fool of yourself and sing,” the Briny Witch said. “Do you have any frog spawn?”

  “Er . . . no?” said Kestrel, thrown.

  “Very well.” He dug a stone out of the ground. “By the picking of these . . . plums,” he said, “something tasty this way comes.”

  The bog continued to belch.

  “Come out, you little idiots,” the Briny Witch snapped.

  Three faces bobbed out of the gray bog, round and pudgy like babies, with blue eyes and rosy cheeks. They looked livid. The largest face spat at the Briny Witch.

  “Whaddya want?” it demanded, swiveling so it could look directly at them. It had the voice of an old man who smoked thirty pipes a day. “We were having a nap!”

  “Yeah!” said the second and third shrilly, spinning around. Kestrel gagged as some of the bog hit her.

  “Give me invisibility,” the Briny Witch said. “Go on.”

  “Just like that?” said the biggest head. “Just give it to you?”

  “I command you,” the Briny Witch snapped, pushing the head under the water. “Just do it.”

  The other two heads cackled and disappeared after the first.

  “Give me your cloak,” the Briny Witch said. Kestrel stared at him, aghast. He snatched the wolf skin away from her.

  “That’s mine,” she snapped, trying to grab it.

  “You’ll get it back,” he said, rolling it into a ball.

  “What are you doing? What are they?”

  “Minions,” said the Briny Witch, disgusted. “They’re awful. I don’t recommend them at all.”

  The bog coughed and sputtered. The Briny Witch dropped the cloak in, which hissed like water in an oil pan. Then he picked up a stick and slowly stirred the soup. Kestrel ho
pped from foot to foot impatiently.

  “They’ll take their time,” the Briny Witch said. “There’s no point fidgeting.” He poked the soup, then sniggered. “Did you find that grabber you were looking for?”

  Kestrel frowned. It looked like the Briny Witch was enjoying himself.

  “My grandma’s grabber? No,” she said cautiously.

  To her surprise the Briny Witch gave a wicked smile. He pointed at the edge of the bog, just a few hundred yards away.

  “Look over there,” he said, grinning.

  Kestrel looked at him suspiciously, then trod carefully toward the edge of the bog. There was a large bone on the ground, half covered in dirt. She circled it slowly, peering at it from every angle. Then she felt something underfoot, looked down, and saw a slim finger bone poking out from under her boot. She drew back quickly.

  She was in the middle of a bone graveyard. There were hundreds of bones on the ground, all different sizes and shapes. There were teeth as well, from huge fist-size molars to tiny incisors that could have belonged to a mouse.

  Kestrel gingerly picked up a bone and inspected it. It wasn’t old; it could only have been here for a couple of years. There was a thin layer of salt on the outside, enough to make it undelicious to the scavengers that lived in the forest.

  The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and not because she was being watched. Kestrel dropped the bone and looked around again. She could see other small things among the bones, like horribly familiar tarnished silver rings and the broken chain from a silver necklace.

  Kestrel got up quickly, shivering as a bone crunched under her foot. She backed away until she was almost in the bog again. She could see the whole thing clearly now.

  She had been standing in the remains of a dead grabber. She could even see its outline, as though it had gently lain down and fallen to bits.

  And near its hip bone was a huge, bronze key.

  For a moment she thought she would be sick. She knew that key. It was the key her grandma’s grabber had stolen from her, to help make its body. And those rings—she saw them flashing on her grandma’s fingers. She saw them swing toward her as her grandma surprised her with a knife in a training exercise. She stepped back, the bog swinging sickeningly around her, and put her foot down on a tarnished silver locket. She remembered it pressing against her ribs as her grandma forced her against the wall and shouted at her. The grabber had taken it all.

  “It’s been there a few years,” the Briny Witch said conversationally. “The grabber dragged itself all the way over here, then collapsed.”

  Kestrel turned away from the remains, feeling ill. She couldn’t make herself look at them any longer. Her grandma was among those remains, the woman who she’d helped kill. And that was her grandma’s grabber. Dead. How?

  “There must have been something wrong with it,” Kestrel said, trying to ignore her racing thoughts. “That’s why it died. Maybe Granmos was too tough for it.”

  Over in the bog, the Briny Witch sniggered.

  “Think again,” he said, clearly having fun. “I see grabbers crawling past sometimes. All half dead. All full up after their meals. They disappear into the forest and collapse, and they never come past again.”

  Kestrel put her hands over her ears, blocking him out.

  “If grabbers were just lying down and dying all the time, I would have come across their bodies,” she said. “I would have seen all sorts of weird things in the forest, like . . .”

  Like silver rings. Like old shoes. Like forks and candleholders and cups. All the trinkets she’d picked up from the forest.

  Kestrel’s stomach dropped. Was that why she’d never seen a grabber again after it had eaten? Did they just crumble to pieces?

  She thought of her dad’s grabber running toward the cliff after eating him. The image made her queasy, but now she couldn’t brush aside what else she’d seen. The grabber had scattered tiny pieces of its body behind it, as though it was already falling apart. As though now that it had taken its victim, there was nothing left to hold it together.

  She’d never been able to catch a grabber before it ate, but afterward, it was easier. She’d thought it was because they were bloated and slow, but what if she was wrong? What if they were already dying? It wouldn’t take long for the wolves and the birds to carry away all the tasty old bones. Unless they were covered in salt, like these.

  She made herself look at the bones again. The piece of paper it had stolen from Granmos—the section of her journal about the grabbers—would have long since rotted away. Now only her rings and her locket and the big bronze key were left.

  “You finally got there,” the Briny Witch said, seeing her face. “Your cloak’s ready, by the way.”

  Kestrel floated toward him in a daze.

  Had her mother known the truth all along?

  The thought made her cold. It was a huge lie, a groundbreakingly and fantastically cruel one. It would mean that Kestrel had been risking her life hunting grabbers for nothing. It meant that her mother never had any intention of letting Kestrel go, because Kestrel would never fulfill her end of the bargain and catch her grandma’s grabber. And the villagers thought they needed her mother to send Kestrel hunting, but they were all completely and totally wrong.

  Kestrel shivered. How much of the forest had actually grown from their bodies? How many of the trees had come from an acorn that a grabber had stuck between its ribs? She looked at the nearby tree line and felt even more trapped than ever.

  “One invisibility cloak,” the Briny Witch said shortly.

  Concentrate, she told herself fiercely. You have a job to do.

  Kestrel forced herself to look at the cloak. It was exactly the same, if a little damp.

  “Shouldn’t it be invisible?” she asked, struggling to speak through the fog in her head.

  “No,” the Briny Witch said, turning his head toward her so quickly she was sprayed with water. She could see that he was losing his patience. “How would you ever find it?”

  Kestrel reached out for it, but the Briny Witch held it over his head.

  “Once it’s on, it lasts for an hour,” he said. “Consider this fair warning.”

  That was enough to get Kestrel’s attention.

  “One hour?” she repeated, outraged. “That’s nothing!”

  “We didn’t discuss terms,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “How will I know it works?”

  “Are you calling me a liar?” he said, his mouth widening to show his teeth.

  Kestrel hesitated with her fingers around the stone. She had no reason to trust the Briny Witch, but it wasn’t like she had another choice. She was now certain that her mother was lying to her, and the only way of getting rid of the dog was to destroy her spells with the bloodberries. For that, she needed the cloak.

  “This stone’s worth a lot to me,” Kestrel said, her stomach scrunching up. She’d promised Finn she’d always keep it.

  “I know,” the Briny Witch said.

  “So I want more,” she said, knowing she was pushing her luck. “Tell me what you know about the Marrow Orchard.”

  “You’re bold, aren’t you?” the Briny Witch said. He looked, in some small way, delighted that she’d asked. “It’s no place for a stupid young girl. The Marrow Orchard will chew you up and spit out your bones.”

  “What about the things guarding it?”

  “Bonebirds,” said the Briny Witch. “They chew the body parts that get spit out.”

  He leered and held out his hand.

  Kestrel wanted to know more, but every second she wasted bargaining with the Briny Witch was another second in which her own grabber could grow stronger. She’d have to take the chance. Kestrel took the stone out of her pocket and tossed it to the Briny Witch. He caught it eagerly and pushed it into his right eye, completely regard
less of the eyeball that was already in there. It looked like he was wearing a peculiar monocle.

  “Well?” said Kestrel, perturbed. “Can you see the future?”

  The Briny Witch slowly inserted a finger through the hole and fiddled with it. Then he fixed Kestrel in his particularly stony gaze.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “I can see everything.”

  “What’s it like?” she asked, feeling cold.

  The Briny Witch didn’t answer. Kestrel could feel that weird sensation on the back of her neck again, like something was watching her, and her only instinct now was to get away from the bog. She grabbed the cloak and rolled it up.

  “Can you tell me the way to the Marrow Orchard?” she asked.

  “That way,” he said, pointing a long finger. He sounded like he wanted her to disappear as fast as possible. “Just follow the smell.”

  “Thank you,” Kestrel said, backing away. The Briny Witch still looked deeply disturbed. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” he replied quietly, gazing right through her. “In fact, I don’t suppose you’ll be around for very long at all.”

  THE MARROW ORCHARD

  “Follow the smell,” Kestrel muttered, her hand clamped over her nose. “Good one.”

  “Smell” was an understatement. After scrambling through the undergrowth for more than an hour, Kestrel had arrived at a thick, dark pond. The surface was covered in an oily skin, and every now and then something brown and greasy would lurch from the water and snap at a fly. On the other side of it, just visible through the trees, was a clearing. Kestrel was sure that it was the Marrow Orchard. The smell was coming from there, rolling toward her in thick waves.

  The stink was so thick it made the air sticky, and even though it was nighttime, flies bumbled around lethargically as though they’d just staggered home from an eating contest. Even the trees around the pond were bent over like they had a stomachache.

  Kestrel wondered if the forest got more and more moldy the farther you went from the village, until the whole world just collapsed like a rotten fruit with a tiny cluster of people at its core.