Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  As she slowly began to remember everything that had happened, she felt a pain in her heart unlike anything she had ever felt before, an aching, throbbing wound that sucked down into her soul so deep that it felt as if she was going to stop breathing if she didn’t force her chest to keep rising and falling. She would never hear her grandmother’s voice again, never feel her touch. She would never explore another forest dell with her, or look into her grandmother’s eyes.

  “Gwen-elen den ulna, Mamaw,” she said. Wherever you’re going, Mamaw, may you walk among trees.

  As she said these last words to her mamaw, she realized that not only would she never see her grandmother again, she would never again hear the Faeran language.

  Willa laid her head back down in the black, soft, wet dirt that lived between the roots of the trees near the side of the river, and she shut her eyes.

  There was a numbness in the darkness that gave her a sort of comfort that the sight of the world did not. The world was too painful, too empty, too full of thoughts to endure.

  In the swarming clan of the padaran, love and family had become the smallest and rarest of leaves, struggling to survive, and now it felt as if the last of those leaves had withered and died. Her mother and father were gone, memories long passed. Alliw was gone, nothing but a handprint of paint on an echoing wall that she would never see again. And now her mamaw was gone, like the song of the morning birds had disappeared. It felt as if she were the only one still living in the world.

  There was no one left to fill the quiet or hear her voice, no one left to warm her shoulder or touch her hand, no one left to forage with, or sleep with in their den, or tell her stories to, or learn from. It felt as if the spirit deep within her living body were nothing but a bleeding wound, and soon she would die.

  When she awoke a few hours later, she heard the delicate sound of small, soft footsteps moving slowly toward her.

  She opened her eyes to see a doe and a little spotted fawn stepping carefully through the fine grass that grew along the edge of the stream, their tiny hooves making no more noise than a breath as they touched the ground.

  The fawn had beautiful tawny fur with white spots that helped her stay hidden in the forest and the fields—not that different from her own camouflage, except that the fawn’s took a season to change.

  The mother deer twitched her ears this way and that as she scanned the area for danger. But there was no danger. Only Willa.

  While she was sleeping, Willa’s skin had naturally turned as black and brown as the stream bank, with the color and texture of roots running along her arms and legs and chest. The mother deer could smell her and see her there, lying on the ground beside the stream, but Willa’s presence did not alarm her.

  Willa watched as the mother deer leaned down and drank from the stream, but the little fawn standing beside her stared at Willa, as if she wasn’t sure what she was.

  The mother deer nudged the fawn, reminding her to drink.

  The fawn leaned down on splayed shaky legs, lowered her head, and drank a little bit from the stream, but then quickly raised her head again and stared at Willa.

  There was something in the fawn’s eyes, not just the curiosity that Willa expected, but something else as well. The fawn seemed to sense that she was upset, that she’d been crying…that she needed help.

  Uncertain what the fawn was going to do, Willa didn’t move.

  Finally, with its nose twitching and its eyes blinking, the fawn took a few uncertain steps toward her, and then stopped.

  “Eee na nin,” Willa said, which meant It’s all right but had a gentler sound to it.

  Fawns were sensitive little creatures. The slightest movement or the faintest whisper of the wrong word would send a fawn running. For the fawn to feel safe enough to come to her, Willa had to slow her breathing and her heartbeat. She had to find the stillness in her body and in her soul. She focused her mind on her heart, and brought it down slower and slower, until it was beating just once every few seconds.

  The fawn’s little white tail twitched nervously as she slowly made her way closer, her skinny little body suspended on her tremulous, overly long legs, and her dainty black hooves.

  The fawn came very close, studied Willa for several seconds, then folded her legs, and curled up into a little spotted ball in the place between Willa’s folded legs and her chest.

  Willa felt the soft warmth of the fawn’s silky fur against her skin, the minute movement of the fawn’s gentle breaths, and the beat of her tiny heart. Willa slowly let the blood begin to flow through her heart again until her heartbeat matched the fawn’s. While the mother deer fed on the nearby grass and watched over them, Willa and the fawn fell quietly asleep.

  When Willa woke in the middle of the night, the mother deer was still feeding a short distance away, as if grateful to have a few moments on her own while she knew her fawn was safe. Willa, without disturbing the fawn, slowly reached out and grasped some of the fine, thin grass at the edge of the stream. It tasted wet and sweet in her mouth.

  The presence of the mother deer feeding nearby, and the little sleeping fawn in the bend of her body, felt like a salve to her hidden wounds, as if one of the leaves from her mamaw’s little tree had begun to touch her soul.

  As she lay there in the darkness, she noticed a tiny point of glowing blue light hovering a few inches off the ground on the other side of the stream. Just as she turned toward it, it went dark and disappeared.

  She thought she must have imagined it, but then another blue light appeared a few feet away from her, and then another farther out in the trees. A moment later, hundreds of tiny blue lights lit up the darkness around her, gliding slowly a few inches off the ground on both sides of the stream and all through the forest, setting the nighttime world aglow with steady, soft blue light.

  Despite the sadness in her heart, Willa smiled. They were the blue ghost fireflies that her mamaw had shown her and Alliw years before. They were some of the rarest creatures in the world. These beautiful blue spirits appeared only in certain glens hidden deep in the forest on particular mountains, and only for a few moments on a few nights each year.

  It was as if her mamaw had brought them out tonight just for her, to remind her of who she had been, and who she still remained.

  And now, as Willa sat alone with the blue ghosts floating gently around her, their wandering lines of soft glowing light became a dance, with the humming of the forest insects and the babbling of the stream their music, and her heart filling with awe.

  She slowly came to the realization that despite everything that had happened in her life, the forest wasn’t dead. The forest was still alive. And she was alive within it, her heart still beating.

  She knew that she had betrayed her clan. And she had betrayed the padaran. But more than that, she realized, he had betrayed her.

  She didn’t understand who or what the padaran was, or how he became the god of the clan, but he had betrayed the…What had he betrayed? The Faeran ways? But what were those ways in a world that moved like a river changing from season to season, storm to storm? She didn’t know.

  What she did know was that he had betrayed her, her ways, her heart. He had trapped and killed the animals of the forest. He had captured and imprisoned humans. He had sent his jaetters to kill her mamaw, to silence the last of the ancient whisperers.

  Willa looked around her at the forest. She had followed the padaran loyally all her life. She had idolized him, struggled for him, stole for him, all for him, all for the clan. There is no I, only we.

  But deep down, what kind of Faeran was he? What kind of Faeran could do these things that he had done? She didn’t know. What she wondered now was what kind of Faeran she was going to become.

  She slowly climbed up onto her feet. She looked down the path of the stream as it meandered between the trunks of the great trees and disappeared in the distance. She gazed at the blue-glowing mist curling through the branches that reached toward the sky. And then she
looked up toward the slope of the mountain.

  The forests of the Great Smoky Mountain, she thought. The breath of life. My life. My grandmother’s life. Food and water. Light and darkness. The trees, the animals, the flow of the river, the cut of the rocks, and all the world around me.

  The padaran had said that she would be cast out into the world on her own, and that she could not survive. But she could survive.

  She knew how to forage for food. She knew the ways of the forest animals. She knew the spirit of the world.

  I’ll live like the Faeran of old.

  And maybe there were other places she could go, places she’d never been before, places she couldn’t even imagine. And maybe there were other people out here. Maybe there were other clans, places she could find warmth and shelter when winter came.

  Standing there in the forest on her own, she didn’t feel strong. And she didn’t feel happy. But she finally felt as if she could go on.

  She said farewell to the little fawn and the mother deer and she started walking. She wasn’t sure it was even possible, but she decided that she was going to try to climb to the top of the Great Mountain and look out at the world in which she lived.

  She didn’t know exactly why she was doing it. She just wanted to climb, to feel the motion of it in her body.

  It was an easy walk up the forested slope at first, eating the red berries of the mountain ash along the way. Then it became much rockier and steeper, and the difficulty of it drove her to keep going. The muscles in her arms and legs burned. The cold mountain air pushed through her lungs. As she pulled herself up the side of the mountain, the sharpness of the jagged rock tore at the bare skin of her hands. She didn’t know why, but she liked the sharp, tangible, physical pain of it. The blowing wind pulled tears from her eyes.

  Where the ground became too steep, she grabbed the roots and branches of the rhododendron like they were the rungs of a homesteader’s ladder. When she spotted blackberries growing in the mountainside thickets, she stuffed some in her mouth. She drank from the little rivulets of water that dripped down the crevices of the rock past profusions of lush ferns.

  With its steep rocky slopes, the mountain had always told people that it didn’t want to be climbed, but she couldn’t help but think that today it was providing for her along the way.

  She followed the rocky streambeds that snaked up between the spurs of the mountain, up through the boulders and the old, weathered trees torn and twisted by the wind. She climbed hand over hand, up through the silent, craggy stone of ancient times.

  Her heart worked painfully in her chest. Her lungs dragged for air. But she kept going. She wanted nothing now but for the pain in her body, and the loneliness in her soul, to block out what lay behind her.

  She came into an area of thick fog where the Great Mountain often hid its head when it was sleeping, its dreaming mists floating across its smoky peak. But then she realized that it wasn’t just the normal fog she was used to down in Dead Hollow and the valleys below. She was so high up that she was actually inside a cloud as it moved across the sky. She felt the cool touch of the cloud’s tiny droplets on her cheeks as she climbed, and she tasted the sweetness of it on her tongue.

  Way up in the sky now, the air had chilled, but her body was sweating despite the cold. Her muscles ached. Her fingers bled. Blisters pained her feet. But she kept climbing, pushing, driving her mamaw’s death from her body. Reaching and grabbing and pulling and climbing, up and up and up she went. She wanted to get to the top of the mountain and see the entirety of the world.

  And then suddenly there was nothing more to grab. She was surrounded by a dense stand of giant fir trees, with trunks thicker than her outstretched arms, but there was no higher ground.

  She frowned in confusion. At first she thought she must have veered off course and reached a false peak, and that the real mountain was still above her—for the mountain had always been above her—but then she realized where she was. She had done it. She had reached the peak of the Great Mountain for the first time in her life.

  Unable to see through the foliage around her, she went over to the thickest and tallest of the giant fir trees. She felt unusually nervous about approaching it. Without her mamaw gone from the world, did her own powers still work? Could she still speak to the trees? Would they still listen? Could she still learn and grow without her teacher? Or had all the magic of the world disappeared?

  “I’m hoping you can help me get a little higher, my friend,” she said softly in the old language, and she started climbing.

  Her small, clawed fingers and her gripping toes clung easily to the rough bark of the colossal tree as she climbed, almost as if the two of them—her and this age-old tree—had grown up to be part of one another’s lives. When she struggled or almost lost her grip, the tree lifted a branch or intertwined a vine around her hand to help her. She climbed and climbed, reaching for one branch after another, up and up through the mist-dripping boughs of the tree, until she came to the highest branches, her body finally swaying gently in the breeze.

  She looked out from her eagle perch with excitement, but all she could see was the gray mist of the clouds rolling all around her. She was surrounded by them, inside them. But the clouds weren’t just sitting still, blocking her sight, they were changing, rolling and turning, opening and closing the space around her, as if the Great Mountain was saying, Just wait a moment, and I will show you…

  As the clouds began to clear, she spotted a patch of sky and the gleam of sunlight. She caught a glimpse of a forested ridge not too far away, and then a peak a little farther out. And then, as the clouds opened up, she began to see a vast world of rolling green mountains and shadowed valleys. Golden rays poured through the openings in the clouds and cast their light across the land.

  She turned one way and then another, gazing out at the world—mountain ranges in every direction for as far as she could see. The forested slopes of the closest mountains lay around her with the evergreen canopy of the trees. The mountain ridges farther on were darker green in color, and the ones beyond those a deep blue, and beyond those a lighter blue, mountains so far away that they seemed to turn into the sky, layer upon layer of mountains, each one’s shade of green and blue blending into the next, hundreds of colors for which humans had no names. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

  She squinted her eyes and looked out toward the edge of the world, but beyond the distant mountains, all she could see were more mountains.

  Then she remembered something that had happened the year before. She had been creeping through the forest near Cades Cove, a quiet valley where a community of homesteaders lived, when she overheard two day-folk men talking as oxen pulled their carriage down the road.

  “Well, ya know,” one of the men had said, “back in the olden days, them folk reckoned the earth was flat.”

  “I can’t see how they thought that,” said his friend. “Even back then, I reckon they knew the earth was round. Look at the shadow cast on the moon.”

  But standing on top of the Great Mountain at this moment, Willa knew that the day-folk men were wrong. The earth was neither flat nor round. It was mountains. It was jagged rocks and steep ravines, treeless windy ridges and shaded wooded glens, streams winding through hidden forest realms, and high, rounded peaks that looked out across the world—and there, too, only mountains. How could it be any other way? she thought. How could the trees and the mountains ever end? It would cease to be the world.

  She remembered floating through the underworld of Dead Hollow, thinking about the padaran, about the way of the Faeran and what that meant. The Faeran ways and the human ways. The us and the them. The we and the I. Maybe there wasn’t just one way, but many. The earth wasn’t flat or round. It was mountains.

  As she gazed across the sky, she spotted something out of the corner of her eye and turned toward it. It was just a speck at first, very distant, but as it came closer she soon realized that it was a hawk soaring on t
he currents of air that flowed like rivers above the ridges of the mountains.

  With the gentle tilt of its wings, the hawk steered its way through the sky. It was coming very close, and then her heart leapt a little when it glided right past her. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t looking up at a hawk, but down at it. And as the hawk flew by, it tilted its head and looked up at her, as if surprised to see her there up on top of the world.

  As the hawk soared on and looked back out across his aerial domain, she wondered again about what the men had said about the shape of the earth. The hawk knows, she thought. He knows the air. He knows the earth. He can see it all up here. She gazed out across the mountainous world, trying to imagine what was out there, trying to imagine where she could go.

  As the mist began to slowly roll back in, it was as if the mountain was gently saying, You’ve had enough now, little one. It’s time for you to go…

  She knew the mountain was used to living in the mist and only seldom showed its true self, and she was grateful that it had decided to show itself to her.

  As the incoming clouds formed along the ridges, she watched the mist roll down the sides of the Great Mountain into the valleys below. She thought about all the living creatures down there, the wolves in their dens and the bears by the lake, the mother deer and her fawn, the Faeran in their twisted lair, and the Cherokee tending their farms, and the homesteaders in their log cabins, and the newcomers with their iron machines, all coming together, the mist of the mountain, the breath of their world, providing life to them all.

  An unusual scent touched her nostrils. Frowning, she sniffed the air, and then turned and scanned.

  She wished she could ask the hawk what he could see, because she knew his eyes were far better than her own, but he was long on his way.

  Then she spotted what looked like a thin line of gray mist floating up from a particular spot in the distance. But it wasn’t mist. It was a trail of smoke rising from one of the valleys far below her.