Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  The fear boiling up inside her, she fought and flailed against him, but he was far too strong. He dragged her out of the burning Hall of the Padaran and down one of the smoky side corridors.

  Angry at her resistance, Gredic slammed her up against a wall and pinned her with the force of his body.

  “Stop it, Willa!” Gredic shouted into her face.

  She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. He pushed against her so hard that it was like a rock had fallen against her.

  “The lair is going to burn,” he said, his tone ragged with fear. “Do you understand me? It’s all going to burn! But you and I are going to stop fighting each other.”

  Willa could see what was happening. He’d lost his twin brother and his jaetter allies and now he was alone, which terrified him more than anything he had ever faced. His instinct now was to clan together, even with someone he hated. “We’re going to escape. We’re together now, Willa.”

  She could see the violence in Gredic’s eyes, the need to control, to dominate, but more than anything, she could hear the desperation in his voice. She tried to jerk away from him, but he held her firm, pressed against the wall.

  “We’re together now, Willa,” he said again, as if he could force the thought into her mind.

  She knew there was no way out of this. He was never going to let her go. And even if she managed to escape him, he’d follow her. He was going to hunt her down.

  She needed a different way, a different path.

  She could only see one way out.

  Sometimes you had to do things you didn’t want to do, things that went against everything you had ever done before.

  She stopped fighting him.

  She became very still and she looked into his bloodshot eyes.

  “All right,” she said, nodding her head in agreement. “We’ll leave together, through the labyrinth to my old den. I know a way out of there.”

  Gredic grunted, pleased that she was finally beginning to cooperate with him, but he clutched her arm, wary of a trick, and shoved her along in front of him like one of the human prisoners.

  She tried to wrest her arm away from him, but he wouldn’t let her go. He pushed her and dragged her down through the tunnels of the lair, leaving the smoke and flames and shouting behind them.

  “The whole lair is burning up there,” she said in dismay.

  “We’re going to make it on our own,” Gredic said. “We’re together now,” he repeated with a clinging insistence that sent a cringe down her spine.

  When they finally reached the labyrinth, she guided him down through the stone tunnels that led toward her den.

  When he realized she was leading them in the right direction, she felt his grip on her arm relax a little. She stumbled and collapsed to the floor. Gredic reflexively reached down to pull her to her feet. She leapt up and sprang away from him with all her speed. But he reached out just as quick, grabbed her by the hair, yanked her back, and pulled her off her feet. She screamed in pain as she fell backward and hit the floor, banging her head hard.

  “You’re not going to escape, Willa!” Gredic rasped as he pinned her to the ground with his hand gripping her neck. Her refusal of his offer, her rejection of him, had filled him with rage. “You’re going to regret the choice you’ve made trying to get away from me again. I can see now the nasty little lying beast that you really are. But you’re not as smart as you think you are. After I’m done with you here, I’m going to track down those three little humans of yours that you seem to care so much about. You forget how long we’ve been together, Willa. I know exactly where you hid them. And after I’m done with you here, I’m going to track them down and make sure they never get home.”

  Willa exploded with anger and squirmed from his grip, twisting her body and knocking his clutching hands away.

  She leapt up and darted out of his reach, then sprinted down the corridor.

  She followed the winding passageway, but she could hear his footsteps coming behind her. There was no way to outrun him for long, and he was too close for her to blend into the rock wall.

  She turned down the tunnel on the left, then turned to the right. Gredic followed right behind her, growling with anger.

  When she came to the end of the long, winding tunnel and took the passageway on the left, she did it knowingly. But when she felt the air turning cold, her chest seized with panic despite herself. It was a choice she could not come back from.

  The blackness of the abyss was just steps away.

  She came to the edge of the dark hole at the end of the tunnel, and there was nowhere else to go.

  She was trapped.

  The hole of the abyss fell hundreds of feet down into pitch-darkness. No one knew how deep it was, or if it even had a bottom.

  Gredic lunged forward and clutched her with his bony hands.

  He had grabbed her so many times over the years. She had fought him for so long. But this time, she didn’t try to leap away. She didn’t try to dodge him or fight him. As he charged forward, she pulled him into her, wrapped her arms around him, and held on.

  I’m going to track them down and make sure they never get home, Gredic had said. And that was his mistake.

  She leaned way back.

  “We’re together now, Gredic,” she whispered into his ear.

  In a flailing spasm of wild panic, Gredic tried to escape her embracing arms.

  But it was too late.

  The two of them fell together.

  Willa fell through the black darkness of the abyss. Her mind screamed with fear that these were the last seconds of her life. She felt the sensation of falling in her stomach and her limbs. Her hair floated around her head. The cold air rushed past her, touching her cheeks, her arms, her legs, getting colder as she fell, deeper into the darkness.

  Gredic had let go of her and she had let go of him. She knew he must be falling with her, but she could not see him.

  When she hit bottom, the force of the blow struck her so hard that it sent splitting bolts of pain through her ribs. The crash bludgeoned her face as she splashed down into the churning rapids of an underground river. Her body plunged deep into the water, propelled by the force of her fall. There was no up or down, just wild spinning and tumbling over and over as the current took hold of her and swept her away.

  Willa tried to pump her arms and her legs, tried to swim to what she thought was the surface and take a gasp of desperately needed air, but the river was far too powerful. It hurled her through its twisting underground tunnels, flowing through watery caves and narrow chutes. There was no surface to reach. No air. Just water flowing through stone.

  But she was not alone. She had inside her everything every creature of the forest had ever taught her. She was everything every friend had given her. She was a soaring hawk and a roaring panther. She was a healing bear and a running wolf. But most importantly at this moment, she was a river otter.

  She stopped fighting the water, stopped trying to swim against the current, stopped trying to exert her will. She tucked herself smooth, and let herself be taken with the flow, slipping through the water, with the water, part of the water, like her teachers had taught her. Twist and turn, slip and slide, the water was her domain.

  There was no up or down, left or right, there was only one direction: the flow of the river. And she propelled herself through it as fast as she could, knowing that her only hope lay on the other side of the darkness, the other side of the caves and tunnels through which she moved. She didn’t need eyes or ears or other senses. She only needed to go where the water wanted her to go, and get there as quickly as possible.

  The flow of the river hurled her into a cave with a pocket of air. At last, her head broke the surface of the water. She pulled in a blessed breath, filling her lungs with the cold, damp air of the cave. Then she held her breath and went back under, continuing through the next tunnel until she reached the cave on the other side.

  The underground river finally emerged out of
the caves and poured fast and smooth through what felt like a world of giant boulders.

  Floating easily on the current now, with her head well out of the water, she pulled in long, grateful breaths of air.

  Above the water and the boulders and the trees that lined the river, a thousand stars cast their glistening light across the nighttime sky. She had never been more relieved to be alive.

  Something floating in the water bumped her shoulder. Startled, she flinched away from it, and turned to defend herself.

  But when she realized what it was, her heart filled with a different kind of dread.

  Gredic’s body was floating down the river with her. He had drowned fighting what could not be fought.

  She knew she should have been happy to see him dead. But she wasn’t.

  The jaetters had been shattered. Kearnin had died days before. Ciderg and at least a dozen others had been killed in the battle. And now Gredic was gone as well.

  She knew she should have been filled with triumph that she had defeated her enemies, but loneliness darkened her soul. Gredic and the other jaetters had been members of her clan. She had known them all her life.

  A memory from years before came into her mind. Just after her sister and parents died, she and Gredic were pulled into the jaetters. The padaran and his guards took her and Gredic out into the forest alone for their initiation. By the time the guards were done with them, she and Gredic lay exhausted and bleeding on the forest floor. Jaetters weren’t born; they were made. Willa remembered lying there in the dirt and the leaves, looking over at Gredic on the ground a few feet away from her. Wincing in pain, she got up onto her feet, and then she helped him up as well. He limped a few feet away, picked up two long, spear-like sticks from the forest floor, and put one of them into her hand. “We don’t give up, Willa,” he said to her.

  As she floated down the river with Gredic’s body beside her, Willa treaded water over to the river’s edge, reached up to the low-hanging trees, and pulled a stick from the branches. Moving through the water back over to him, she opened Gredic’s cold, white fingers, wrapped them around the stick, and then let the current take him downstream with his spear in hand. “We don’t give up, Gredic,” she whispered.

  She was left drifting down the river alone now, beneath a jet-black sky and a spray of stars. It was quiet, almost peaceful, but there was a faint, orange light flickering on the smooth surface of the river.

  Still treading water, Willa turned and looked back, up the slope of the Great Mountain. It felt like it was always there, always watching.

  The Dead Hollow lair was on fire. It was a great blaze of snaking flame and black smoke rising upward into the midnight sky. From a distance, it almost looked like the Great Mountain itself was burning.

  Leaving Gredic to float down the river without her, Willa crawled up onto the rocky bank.

  The night air hung about her in a drifting haze of gray smoke and orange flickering light.

  That was when she noticed something dripping onto the ground. It was her own blood.

  Over the past few hours, she’d been speared in the neck, dragged on the floor, slammed against a wall, kicked in the side, and stepped on. Now that she’d come out of the cold water of the river and the all-consuming urgency of escape had faded behind her, her body began to hurt in places she didn’t even realize could feel pain. Hialeah had bandaged the bloody wound on her neck, and the twisting roots of the floor had infused her body with a startling jolt of vital power, but she knew that she was losing too much blood. She couldn’t make it very far in this wounded condition.

  She gazed up toward the burning lair. She didn’t want to go back up there, but there was a chance that one area of the lair in particular had survived the fire, and that it could help her.

  She climbed hand over hand, up through the rocks and trees, toward the blaze. She watched as the flames consumed one area after another, the crackling of the burning sticks and the rush of the fiery wind drowning out all else, as the odor of burning wood filled the air.

  Do not say it out loud until you wish to destroy everything… Her mamaw’s warning about saying “Naillic” echoed in her mind. Her old den, the great hall, the homes of all the Faeran people were being destroyed by the fire. She couldn’t help but feel the weight of it as she climbed.

  By the time she reached Dead Hollow, most of the lair had burned down into ruined, smoking piles of charred wreckage, the dry sticks of its old walls and floors providing ample fuel for its own destruction. Where once there had been a vast hive of twisted-stick tunnels and rooms, now there was nothing left but the blackened remains of disintegrated walls and heaps of smoldering ashes.

  All the Faeran of the clan had fled the lair to escape the fire, so the entire area was abandoned, and most of what remained was unrecognizable. But there was one small part of the lair at the bottom of the gorge where the fire could not go. And that was what she was hoping for.

  She climbed through the ashes and debris until she reached the lowest, oldest part of the lair.

  She had been in this area just a few hours before with Gredic, but now it looked completely different. All the woven-stick passageways and walls were burned away, and all that remained was the labyrinth of stone tunnels and ancient caves where she and her mamaw had lived.

  Willa climbed down inside and then made her way through the tunnel that led to her den, down the passageway with the painted figures of the Faeran past. Despite the burning that had occurred above, the paintings on the stone walls had survived. She came to the River of Souls, thousands of hands touching the wall, her mother’s and her father’s, Alliw’s and her own, the left and the right, the forward and the back, all together.

  W I L L A and A L L I W, she thought, remembering the strange human symbols.

  “Good morning, sister,” she said, touching her living hand to her sister’s handprint as she walked by. “I’m glad you made it through.”

  Finally, Willa came to the den where her mamaw had raised her.

  Those areas of the floor that had been made out of woven sticks had burned and were gone. And the intense heat of the surrounding conflagration had melted and destroyed their cocoons and all their other belongings. Most of the small trees and other plants that her mamaw had nurtured in the small circles of light were wilted from the heat and dead.

  All except one.

  The little tree was still alive.

  She sighed with happiness and smiled. It was sitting in a stone pot on a stone ledge, protected and safe in its little niche. It was an ancient tree, miniature in size, its small branches gnarled with age, but its tiny leaves were green with living spirit. Her heart warmed to see that the little tree was waiting for her.

  “Hello, my friend,” she said as she moved closer. “I know it’s probably been difficult to breathe these last few hours, but don’t worry. I’ll get you someplace safe, with plenty of light and water and nutrients.”

  She took several of the leaves that had fallen from the tree and pressed them to the wound at her neck. The relief from pain was immediate. She felt the intense power of the tiny plant surging into her skin, through her muscles, and deep down into her blood. One by one, she treated the most painful of her wounds.

  “Thank you, Mamaw,” she whispered softly, not just for nurturing and protecting the little tree all these years. Not just for teaching her how to use it, and for the many other gifts of the mind that she’d given her. But for the love that had come with it.

  “Protect it, hold on to it,” her mamaw had pleaded with her before she died.

  Willa hadn’t understood at the time. But she knew now that her mamaw wasn’t telling her to hold on to the little tree, or to the secret of Naillic’s forbidden name, or even to the ancient lore of the forest. She was imploring her to hold on to what was in her heart: her love, her compassion, her sense of her soul; not just her instinct to blend, but sometimes her willingness to stand up and make herself known, to throw the spear, to spring the tra
p, to set things in motion that cannot be undone.

  Her mamaw had been watching the decline of the Dead Hollow clan for many years, and Willa came to realize what her mamaw already knew: that the Dead Hollow clan hadn’t started dying because of the arrival of the day-folk, but with the rise of the padaran who came after—the quelling of the Faeran words, the disconnection from the forest, the drowning of love and compassion and sympathy in a swarm of fear and malice and control.

  Without love there could be no families, no children, no elders. There could be no future.

  As she held the little tree, she came to a realization, something that she didn’t think she could have understood before. For years, her mamaw had been unable to fight against the growing power of the padaran and his control of the Faeran people. To go against him meant death. Willa realized now that she herself had been her mamaw’s last try. She was her last hope, to live and to love and to follow the path of the heart.

  “I’ll protect it, Mamaw, I swear I will. I’ll protect what’s in my heart,” Willa whispered in the old language. “I’ll never let it go.”

  Willa carried the little tree slowly up and out of the old stone tunnels and walked through the ashes until she reached what was once the center of the Dead Hollow lair.

  She looked around her at the vast gray field of ashes.

  Her premonition that she would never again see the Hall of the Padaran—the Hall of the Glittering Birds—had been correct.

  The once magnificent walls of the great hall had burned and crumbled down. The hall wasn’t just empty or damaged. It was gone.

  The great throne of the padaran had burned into a charred, blackened heap.

  She stepped slowly forward, into the area that had been behind the throne.

  She began to make out a dark shape on the ground. It was burned and blackened, but she could see the outline of what was once a leg, and the oblong mass of a scorched and smoldering head. The knees and elbows were folded up to the chest. The person had died cowering in fear.