Chapter 1: The Errand Into the Trees

The children of Angeau were told the story of the forest the way children everywhere are told the stories that matter, which is to say over supper, with a spoon pointed at them. A wolf had taken a girl in a red cape, and she had never come home. That was the whole of it. Nobody could say which girl, or which wolf, or what the girl had been carrying, and nobody thought to ask, because the point of the story was the fence at the end of the last field and the good sense to stay on the near side of it.

So the town stayed on the near side, and was very proud of its good sense, and sent its fevers and its splinters and its sliced thumbs to the one person in Angeau who never got to stay home sick. She was twenty years old, she had a red cloak hanging on the hook by her door, and she had never once been properly afraid of the trees. The town thought that was because she was brave. The trees, which had been watching a long time, had a different idea.

There were eleven people in my front room that afternoon, and one of them was burning up.

The one burning up was Tobias, Jordane’s boy, who was six, and he was lying across his father’s knees with his cheeks flushed a dark, ugly red. I got two fingers under his jaw before I had said hello to anyone. His pulse was fast and thin, and the skin under my fingertips was dry and hot, which was bad. Wet would have been better. Wet meant he could still sweat.

“Three days,” Jordane said. “He wouldn’t eat, and then he wouldn’t drink, and then he started saying the ceiling was moving.”

“The ceiling is a liar, Tobias, don’t listen to it.” The joke was out before I’d thought about it, and Jordane laughed too hard. I did not look at the line of people behind him. I could count them with my eyes shut. Josette was coughing into her elbow, and Astien was holding a hand wrapped in a rag that used to be white. Old Penda came every second day for his knees, which only ever hurt on days he had a story to tell.

You have to understand something, because it doesn’t make me look good. I loved every person in that room. I had known them all my life, and I would have given any of them my last bandage. And with my fingers on a sick child’s neck, part of me wanted to scream at the line, at all of them at once, and I was so ashamed of wanting it that I smiled harder at Jordane.

I mixed willow bark and feverfew into cool water, tipped it into Tobias a few drops at a time, and held a wet cloth against the back of his neck until the pulse under my other hand slowed to a walk. Jordane cried a little at the end, into his own sleeve, and I told him to keep Tobias drinking and to come get me if the ceiling started moving again. He kissed my hand. I hate that I liked it.

“Noëlle, darling.” Mother’s voice came from the kitchen doorway, bright and carrying. “Look who has been waiting so patiently.”

She was wearing the blue dress, which meant she had planned this. She had Bertrand by the elbow, and she walked him through my front room the way you walk a prize calf through a market, turning him so everyone got a good look. He was tall and clean and stiff in a coat that cost more than the roof over Josette’s head. His hair had been combed with water. He stood exactly where Mother put him, and he looked at me, sure of himself.

“Mademoiselle Noëlle.” He bowed. He actually bowed, over a basket of rags and a bucket of bandages. “I hoped you might have a moment. My father speaks of your work often. My family has always valued a sound, settled household, and I think it is no secret that a woman of your talents would be, well, a cornerstone.”

“A cornerstone,” I said.

“Of the town,” said Bertrand.

“He’s been so looking forward to this,” Mother said, and squeezed his arm, and he glowed. “And you’ve been working so hard, sweetheart. Look at all of this.” She waved a hand at the queue, at the bucket, at me, with the face she wore when the weather went on too long. “You could have a proper house. A proper kitchen. Bertrand’s mother says there is room in the east wing for a still room, if you wanted one.”

I had three clean bandages left and a line out the door. I smiled at Bertrand, and it was the same smile I give a child before I lance something. “That’s so generous of your mother. I’d have to see the still room.”

His face lifted. Mother’s did too. I could have told Mother no in front of everyone, but that would have cost me a week of supper-table silences, and I was tired, so I let it stand. Behind him the people in the queue were nodding, a slow ripple of it, Josette and Astien and the rest, pleased with themselves and with me, settling into a world where I stayed. The healer would marry into a good family. The healer would live in a house with a still room. The healer would be there in forty years when their grandchildren came in with a fever, and in fifty, and in sixty, until the day I was the one lying across somebody’s knees with nobody left to mix the willow bark.

My chest got so tight I couldn’t get a full breath. I put a hand flat against the doorframe and breathed through it. Nobody saw it, since nobody was looking at me, exactly. I still think about that room, all those kind faces turned my way, and how badly I wanted to run out of it.

“Oh!” Mother said, and she had remembered something, and I could have kissed her for it. “Nana’s basket. Noëlle, you promised to bring it before the weather turned.”

I had promised. I had told Nana in the spring, the week I came home from a year at university, that I’d bring her salve myself. At university I had learned what it was to walk across a courtyard without anyone asking me a medical question. At home there was always one more fever, and I had been dodging the date ever since.

The basket was by the back door where I’d packed it two nights before. It held yarrow, comfrey, a twist of dried elderflower, the good honey, and two jars of the salve she swore was the only thing that worked on her hip. It was a three-day walk if you went around the forest the long way, which nobody did, and half a day if you went through it, which nobody did either, so nobody could come with me.

“I’ll go now,” I said. It came out too fast. “While it’s dry. I’ll stay a few days. She’s been alone all winter.”

“Back by Sunday, darling,” Mother said, happily, and it wasn’t a question. “Bertrand’s mother is expecting us for supper.” Bertrand was already nodding, and so was the queue. Everyone in that room had decided where I would be by Sunday, and it was right here.

Here is the excuse, and I used it with a perfectly straight face: Nana’s salve, and her hip, and her long lonely winter. Here is the truth. I wanted one summer when nobody needed anything from me. I said yes to Sunday with the same straight face, and I didn’t believe a word of it. And I missed her. I had been home since spring and hadn’t once made the walk out to Nana’s, and I was ashamed of that too. I kept a drawer of clothes at Nana’s from every summer since I was small, so the basket was all I needed. The forest was the only place in the world where nobody from Angeau would follow me, and I would have walked in there with an empty basket if I’d had to.

I took the cloak off its hook. It was red wool, heavy and soft, and Nana had stitched every inch of it by lamplight the winter I turned fourteen. I swung it over my shoulders and pulled up the hood, and everyone in the front room grinned.

“Careful, Red,” somebody called from the queue, and everyone laughed. “Mind the wolf!”

“Don’t talk to strangers!” Astien shouted from behind his rag.

I had heard that joke since I was fourteen. I laughed at the right place, because I always did. I kissed Mother on the cheek and told Jordane to keep the water coming. I told Bertrand I would think about the east wing, which was the biggest lie I told all year, and I hitched the basket onto my arm and walked out the back door into the afternoon.

The fence at the end of the last field was only waist high. I climbed it anyway, because I loved the sound my boots made hitting the other side.

The cut grass behind me was warm. The first step under the trees was cool at once.

I always stopped there. The town was a few roofs and a smear of woodsmoke at my back. In front of me the birch trunks were white and the light came down between them in green slats, and my shoulders dropped. I had been carrying them up around my ears since spring and hadn’t known it.

“Hello,” I said to the trees, which was silly, and I did it every time.

The path was right where it always was, a pale track of packed leaf mold running in under the branches, and I followed it with the cloak pushed open down the front. The sun through the leaves landed on my bare stomach where my top stopped. I tugged at the frayed hem of my shorts out of habit, and my thumb caught the string of my thong where it had ridden up over the waistband. In town I would have fixed that before Mother saw. Out there I left it alone. Honestly, I liked it. I liked being a little scandalous with only the trees to see, and I would have died before saying so in Angeau. My hair had already come halfway out of its tie, and I shoved it back with my wrist and kept going.

Half a day, I told myself. If I didn’t dawdle, I’d make Nana’s by dark.

Not far in, there was a fern I had never seen before.

It was small, and it clung to the side of a fallen log, and the underside of every frond was furred a silvery blue, and I was on my knees with my nose right up against it before I decided to kneel. I turned a frond over. The spore cases ran in two neat rows instead of the usual scatter, and that was not in any of the plates in Professor Aubert’s text, and I knew those plates by heart. I said, out loud, “Oh, you are not supposed to exist,” in the voice I use when I’m about to be unbearable about botany. I took out my notebook and sketched it, and I spent longer on it than I would ever admit to Nana, and the pencil scratching was the only sound.

When I stood, my knees were green and the path had gone on without me.

That was fine. I found it again. The canopy closed overhead and the light came down thick and gold-green, and the trees grew bigger and older until their roots humped across the trail and I had to watch my boots. Everything smelled of wet bark and crushed fern, and under that was something colder and older, a deep-cellar smell that wasn’t in any of my books. A brook ran somewhere out of sight. A bird I couldn’t name called twice and stopped.

It should have scared me. Everyone in Angeau would have said so, and I tried, a little, to see if it would. It wouldn’t. What I got, standing in the middle of a path that nobody I grew up with would walk on a bet, was the morning after a fever breaks, when the ceiling holds still and the room is just a room. What did scare me was how fast my hands went looking for a job. They kept drifting toward things, a leaf or a cluster of orange berries I definitely should not eat, because I didn’t know what to do with an hour nobody had asked for.

I was supposed to be walking to Nana’s. I was, in fact, walking to Nana’s, but I was doing it very slowly, past a moss-covered rock and a bank of bell-shaped flowers that opened when my footsteps reached them. I stood and tested those for a good while, stepping forward and back. They did it every time. I got my notebook out again.

I told myself I would make up the time. I told myself that three more times between the fern and wherever the sun was by then.

A branch hung low across the path ahead, thick with thorn, the sort that rips sleeves to ribbons. I ducked the wrong way, right into it, and the thorns slid off my hood without catching once, and the branch swung away to one side with a rattle of leaves. I looked at it. I looked at the red wool. Wool should have been catching on that. It was the whole point of wool. “Okay,” I said. “Thank you, I guess.”

The cloak was warm on my shoulders, a little warmer than the day. I decided it was luck, and I was in too good a mood to argue with luck, so I let it be.

I was reaching for the next thing I’d never seen, a tree with bark in long peeling spirals, when the light changed. It darkened by a shade and the air stopped moving. A drop hit my forearm. Another landed on the basket handle, and a third on the back of my neck, fat and cold and very quiet, and above me the leaves started a soft, steady drumming that spread outward through the wood.

The rain came, and the path forked.

Left went on toward Nana’s, the route I knew. Right was a deer track, faint, pushing off between two enormous trunks toward a smell I also knew, the sharp rotten smoke of cooked meat gone wrong. That was goblins. I was nowhere near their camp, and nowhere near far enough from it either. Every year Nana told me the same thing, two fingers jabbed at my breastbone. Keep to the path, girl, and do not go looking at what you can smell.

I turned left. I meant it. I took eleven whole steps, with the rain dripping from the edge of my hood and the hem of the cloak sliding along the ferns, and then something on the right-hand track made a sound.

Goblins chittered. This was a short, wet, caught breath, the sound a person makes when he is trying very hard not to make one.

I knew that sound from a thousand doors.

I would like to say I weighed it, but somebody was hurt, and my feet had spent years learning to go toward that, even on the one afternoon I had promised myself off duty. I had turned around and gone three steps up the deer track before I had thought about it, the basket swinging on my arm, my hands out in front of me, palms down, slow, so whoever it was could see they were empty. Between two trunks the ground dropped into a hollow where a great old beech had heaved up half its roots, and the brown water was already running down them in threads.

There was a boy slumped against the biggest root.

I looked at the wound first, because that is what I do. His gray T-shirt had turned black from the ribs down, and he had a hand pressed over it, the fingers shaking, bright red seeping out between them. It was seeping and not pumping. His jeans were torn at one knee. His head was tipped back against the bark and his eyes were shut, and the dark hair, too long, was plastered flat on one side.

I’m still embarrassed by the order I noticed things in. The healer in me had already decided he would live. The rest of me noticed the line of his throat as he swallowed, once, hard, and his shoulders under the soaked shirt. After that came the ears, two pointed wolf ears, black and furred and pinned flat against his skull, and I kept noticing them for a lot longer than any wound required. If you had asked me right then, I would have said I was assessing him.

Beside him, along the dirt, one long black tail lay very still in the rain.

I stood there with my hands still out in front of me. The smell of goblin rolled up the hollow from somewhere beyond the trees. The basket was still on my arm, and there was nowhere in the world I would rather have been, which should have scared me more than the goblins did. Angeau was a very long way behind me, and the rain kept coming down on all of us while I looked.