by Emily Tesh
“Mr Finch?” Silver said.
Tobias spoke abruptly, as though the words were better out fast and over with. “Came to say we may as well trade.”
Silver said, “What?”
“It never bothered me,” Tobias said. “The time, you know. The loneliness. Never gave me all that much trouble. I kept a cat.” His jaw worked. “There was Fay, mind, and that wasn’t so pleasant; but he’s good and gone. Just the wood left, and I know the wood. Plenty to do. Left it a little late in the year to settle for the winter, but I wanted to see Mrs Silver comfortable, and Miss Maud. She’s a good girl. Takes to the work nicely. And it’s not as if you need to be a big fellow for the hunting; not if you know your business and you keep your silver and flint to hand. So that’s that.”
Silver stared at him.
This was the way of it, he thought, with Tobias Finch: he said nothing and said nothing, kept quiet and watchful for month after month, but all the time under that stolid exterior he considered things deeply and carefully, and deeply and carefully and with uttermost patience he decided what he would do, and then if he possibly could, he did it: because he could not bear to be helpless. That little speech had been almost nothing but practicalities, one thing after another. Tobias had offered to return himself to the service of the Hallow Wood as if it were only something to be sorted out, the way he used to sort out his firewood, his vegetable garden, his trapping and his mending.
But Silver knew Tobias, he did; their liaison had been brief but their friendship had not, and he knew that the last time he had heard Tobias come out with a speech that long, he had left Greenhollow the same afternoon; and the time before that, Tobias had kissed him.
He had been wrong, to think Tobias could not imagine it, and could not understand: enormously, absurdly wrong. After all this Tobias had seen, and understood, just what it was that Silver feared so dreadfully. How simple his solution must seem to him. For four hundred years he had lived alone as the Wild Man of Greenhollow and managed well enough. Four hundred years with a cat and a demon for company! And now he proposed to resume that quiet existence without a murmur, and count as an advantage the mere absence of the demon.
“Mr Silver?” Tobias said.
Silver said, “Absolutely not.”
Tobias furrowed his brow. “I—”
“I know I was selfish,” Silver said. “I am—I admit it—a selfish man. And I know that I lied to you. I don’t even believe I’m sorry, though I doubt I would do it again. But—my dear—I am not quite so selfish as that. And the truth is that I do fairly well these days, if I say so myself. I believe the difficulty was trying to live both ways at once, as it were. To be a man within Time and beyond it all at once was . . . uncomfortable. But to take you out of the world again, just for my own relief; to rob you of human voices and human faces and all the things of this time and this place—Tobias, that would make me as cruel a friend as your Fabian once was.” He summoned a smile. “And I like to think I am not quite as bad as all that.”
Tobias said nothing, and said nothing, and licked his lips and said nothing, and then he took two steps forward and took Silver in his arms and kissed him.
Silver was not expecting it. He was speaking into it at first, and then he fell into startled silence, lips parted. The kiss only went on for a moment. Tobias’s lips were chapped and warm, his beard and moustache faintly coarse. Silver had not kissed anyone in more than two years. The sensations fell back into place as if their last kiss had been just yesterday.
When their lips parted, Tobias’s arms were locked close around him, his hands clenched in the sleeves of Silver’s shapeless tweed jacket. “You wore my coat,” Tobias said, as if it were terribly important. “You’re still wearing my coat.”
Silver had honestly stopped thinking of it as Tobias’s coat at some point in the course of the long summer. “My dear,” he said, quietly, and he put up a hand and wiped away the dampness on Tobias’s cheek. “I would be only too pleased if you would like to stay a little while. But I won’t have you stay forever. It won’t do, you know.”
“It’s not right,” Tobias said.
“It is what it is.”
“You should have—your books, and your papers, and things,” Tobias said. “Firelight and music. Friends. You’re a young man—you’ve got plenty to be doing—”
Silver couldn’t bear it, so he kissed him. Tobias clutched at him as if he might disappear. The August evening was still and warm around them; the whole Wood was still and warm, as if this instant of touch and care might last forever, stretch itself out into an eternal and changeless summer.
“You,” Tobias said, when they parted, and he touched the side of Silver’s face, his ear, his hair. Silver understood that you to mean my dear, or sweetheart, or—all the things Tobias could never quite say. He caught hold of Tobias’s careful hand and kissed his knuckles. “Wouldn’t you be better off going back to town?” he said. “I am sure my mother can manage without you, but it would set my mind at rest, I think, if there were two sets of eyes keeping a watch on Maud.”
“She wrote you a letter,” Tobias said, in a tone as close to wheedling as Silver had ever heard from him. “She’s been at your father’s diaries, and there’s naught Mrs Silver can do to stop her. Been writing to some Continental fellow as well. It’s ghosts she’s onto now.”
Silver laughed, and shook his head, and said gently, “I’ll read it later.”
Tobias said, “Please.”
Bramble was watching them from the shadow of a young hawthorn close by. One could hardly expect a dryad to understand the concept of private conversation. Silver stepped out of Tobias’s embrace regretfully and said, “I think you should go.”
He would weep about this himself, later, he thought; when he read Maud’s letter, perhaps, sitting in the library he was determined to preserve for as long as he could, he would weep for another self he might have been—someone for whom the world was young and full of possibility, someone who would write and study and take himself on ill-planned adventures and discover all things marvellous. But he was not the least bit tempted, all the same, by the bargain Tobias proposed. He had glimpsed eternity in the drowned forest, and it had opened something up inside him which could not bear to be any smaller than he already was. And by God, it would be a terrible smallness, a terrible selfishness, to force upon another man a fate he could not bear himself.
And Silver thought of the dry ruin of Fairyland and thought: There are worse eternities than the Wood.
“Yes,” said another voice, answering the thought, “there are many, many worse.”
“Hoi!” said Tobias, sharply, and grabbed hold of Silver’s shoulder, trying to draw him back. Tobias would put himself between anyone and danger, given the smallest opportunity. His other hand already had a pistol in it.
“It’s all right,” Silver said.
The fairy was recognisable mostly by its eyes, which still had the same grey glitter as the first time Silver had seen it. Its body had changed. Before it had only been possible to get a sense of a lean figure standing there somewhere, like a shimmer of reflection in a sunlit pool. Now it was a solid figure, as tall as Silver was, starvation-thin under a patched robe that hung loose from its narrow shoulders.
Silver could not help noticing that its ears were not pointed. A loss for the illustrators of his childhood fairy tales.
“You ate the apple,” he said.
The fairy nodded. It took a careful step forward. A ring of white mushrooms sprang up around its feet. Silver frowned at them. “Give me the greenwood,” the fairy said.
“I beg your pardon?” said Silver.
“An owing. A repayment. Go with your lover, and give me the greenwood. It will be wild, and it will be strange, and it will endure. It is the Wood.”
Tobias swore in a low voice. He was still holding that pistol.
“That’s . . . very kind,” Silver said. “But the Wood is not mine to give. It doesn’t belong to me at a
ll; in fact, I believe it’s almost the other way around. And if you thought to make yourself another Lord of Summer, I could not permit it in any case.”
“No lord I; not in a thousand thousand years. I have served before. I am a faithful servant. Charge me with it. Give it to me. Shall I endure in your debt always?”
It was genuinely upset, Silver saw. “I am sorry,” he began.
“You were unhappy,” said Bramble.
Silver startled. He had almost forgotten the dryad was there. He felt Tobias start as well, the little jerk of his whole body, and that startled him too. Tobias had always known Bramble better than he did. But there was proof, if you needed it, that Tobias did not owe the eternal forest another moment of himself; that he belonged to the human world, and quite right too.
“I thought you had planted yourself,” said Bramble. Out of the shadow of the trees she came, heavy with blackberries, knotted and strong and taller than any of them, which was new. “I thought you would grow well here. We are not wicked. We are not”—she said the unfamiliar word with difficulty—“monsters. But then you were unhappy, and you sowed more unhappiness, and it was wickedness upon wickedness.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Now, then,” said Tobias.
“Hush,” the dryad told him firmly. She turned to the fairy. “I am the wood,” she told it.
“The queen?”
“No,” said Bramble scornfully, “the wood.”
“Ah. She never did quite say what she’d decided on,” Tobias murmured. “Not like a dryad, you know, not to have its own particular tree.”
“I can serve you well,” said the fairy.
“What for?” said Bramble. “Live. Grow. Change. Last. It is enough.”
She turned her gaze back on Silver, and hesitated a moment; then she caught his hand a moment in her strange clasp. Silver yelped as thorns bit into his skin again and tore threads from the tweed jacket. Bramble lifted his hand up and forcefully shoved it down again. Silver made a strangled sound—trying not to laugh—when he realised this was her version of a firm farewell handshake.
And his chest felt hollow with uncertainty, amazement, and not a little sorrow: and as simply as that, the Wood let him go. He felt the change. His feet seemed suddenly to stand a little heavier on the earth, and his sense of the summer evening shrank around him. Rather than a great inchoate knowledge of warm air and warm earth and longing for rain, he was only a man; and, he noticed, he had been bitten by one of the evening’s host of winged insects, square on his ankle where the hem of his trousers was going ragged.
“Will you come back?” Bramble asked.
“Probably . . . not,” Silver said. “At least, I think, not in the way you mean.” He ached suddenly at the thought. To be free of the Hallow Wood meant to be free of its secrets and strangeness. He would take no more walks through Time and beyond it. If he ever sketched the Fairy Queen’s mask, it would have to be from memory.
The dryad nodded. Then she went to Tobias, and touched his shoulders with both her thorny hands. “Foolishness!” she said, and let out her odd gurgling-water laugh, which Silver had heard very seldom.
“Now, miss—”
“Not miss,” said Bramble, and she smiled, baring all her pointed brown teeth.
And then she and the fairy were gone; disappeared in the space of a breath, leaving only the circle of white mushrooms where the fairy had stood. Silver knew the way that was done; how between one instant and the next you might drop yourself into the slow time of the wood and be gone. He knew, but the knowledge was faint and sideways. He could not have explained it, or written it down. He could not have done it himself.
“Well,” he said, and then his eyes fell on the vine-choked ruin of Greenhollow Hall, and he burst out laughing.
“What’s the matter?” said Tobias.
Silver turned towards him and said, “My dear—my dearest—” and kissed him.
It had only been meant as a quick expression of affection, but Tobias took the kiss and made it tender. It went on longer than Silver had meant. He did not mind in the least. Tobias had offered to return to the wood for his sake.
“It’s only,” Silver said, when they broke apart, “where am I going to live? In my mother’s house, I suppose! I’ll have to pack all my books. You can carry them. Oh, it’s going to be crowded.” The house in town where Silver had passed his boyhood was respectable but not splendid. “And she and I will argue, you know. We can’t help ourselves.”
Tobias coughed. “Miss Maud’s in the second bedroom,” he said.
“Oh, is she?” said Silver lightly. He bestowed his most winning smile on the big man. So Maud Lindhurst was looking into the question of ghosts! He’d wanted for years to know more about ghosts—he’d never seen a ghost—he hadn’t had much opportunity lately—after all, whoever heard of anything haunting a tree?
“She is,” Tobias said. “And I’m in the third.”
“Well, then. Since it seems there’s no other option,” Silver said, to Tobias’s little smile and the growing brightness of joy in his eyes, “I hope you don’t mind if we share.”
Acknowledgments
With heartfelt thanks to:
My agent, Kurestin Armada, the best advocate an author could hope for.
My editor, Ruoxi Chen, sine qua non.
The Tor.com Publishing team: production editor Lauren Hougen, copy editor Richard Shealy, proofreader Shveta Thakrar; David Curtis, who somehow outdid himself with even better cover art this time, and Christine Foltzer, the art director; Irene Gallo, publisher and creative director; and Mordicai Knode, Caroline Perny, Amanda Melfi, and Lauren Anesta, for the amazing work they put in on marketing, publicity, and social media.
Emma, A. K. Larkwood, and Everina Maxwell, whose support and encouragement saved this book from certain doom.
Jenn Lyons, who gave me kind words when I really needed them.
The Armada, the Sack, and the Ballydaheeners; love to you all.
Mum, Dad, Paddy, and Oli, for everything.
Luke, always.
About the Author
Photograph by Nicola Sanders
EMILY TESH grew up in London and studied classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, followed by a master’s degree in humanities at the University of Chicago. She now lives in Hertfordshire, where she passes her time teaching Latin and Ancient Greek to schoolchildren who have done nothing to deserve it. She has a husband and a cat. Neither of them knows any Latin yet, but it is not for lack of trying.
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Books by Emily Tesh
THE GREENHOLLOW DUOLOGY
Silver in the Wood
Drowned Country
Praise for Silver in the Wood
“It is easy to praise flash and sparkle, but the beauty of the simple and lighter-than-air is more difficult to capture. Silver in the Wood’s sparkle is that of clear water, its flash the snap of a crackling fire . . . like returning to a dream long forgotten or a song half remembered.”
—Alexandra Rowland
“Tesh’s characters and mythology are exquisitely crafted. . . . This fresh, evocative short novel heralds a welcome new voice in fantasy.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Somewhere between fairy tale and myth, only it’s the kind of myth that is probably true.”
—Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
“Find a quiet place in a nearby wood, listen to the trees whisper, and thank the old gods and new for this beautiful little book, of which I intend to get lost in again and again.”
—Book Riot
“Tesh lured me into her rich fairy-tale narrative with the warmth and strangeness, then hooked me on her intricate characters.”
—Kerstin Hall
“A splendid piece of work, self-contained enough to be a perfect use of the novella form, rich enough to tingle on the skin, direct and meaningful enough to be read aloud as a bedtime story.”
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
I: The Demon of Rothling Abbey
II: The Fairy Queen
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Emily Tesh
Praise for Silver in the Wood
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DROWNED COUNTRY
Copyright © 2020 by Emily Tesh
All rights reserved.
Cover image by David Curtis
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Ruoxi Chen
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-250-75659-6 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-250-75660-2 (trade paperback)
