Chapter 8: The Hollow Tree

Angeau forbade its children the whole forest, every trunk alike, on the strength of a story with no tree in it. A wolf took a girl and she never came home, and nobody in town could have said where, since the wolf had not left a note.

Only Crispin could have shown them the tree, and he had spent twenty years steering around it. This morning he would walk a girl straight to it and explain, as politely as he could, what had happened there. He believed this would be the worst hour of his summer. The tree had stood for a hundred years waiting for someone to run away from it on purpose, and it kept that to itself.

Noëlle waited a respectable while after the bet before she asked about the tree, and I knew she was waiting the whole time. It meant I had been dreading it for just as long.

She asked at breakfast, with a spoon in her hand, in the voice she uses for a fern she has already decided to draw. “You said he chased her and bit her. You haven’t said where he caught her.”

My tail pulled itself in behind my knee. “It’s... at a tree,” I said. “It’s just a tree.”

“Crispin.”

I could have told her it was far. I thought about it for the length of one bowl of porridge, and I will admit that I only told the truth because she would have known, and she would have looked at me.

It was nearer than the lair, and I had let her think the lair was all of it. We walked there with her cloak over her arm, because the morning was warm, and she wore the torn denim shorts and the cropped top and her boots, and I walked in front so I wouldn’t look at the shorts. I had been trying to be reasonable about those shorts since the day we met. I lost most mornings.

You can smell the tree before you see it, a dry rotting-wood smell with wet leaves around it. I stopped at the edge of its roots, where the ground rises, and I looked at my boots.

It was enormous, split down one side a long time ago and hollowed out from the inside, and the opening was wide enough for a person to stand in without ducking. Green light came through cracks in the bark and fell in bars across the floor of it. The bars fell across her face too, when she walked straight in, and I did not follow her, because my feet had the sense I lacked.

“Oh,” said Noëlle. She spun a slow circle in the hollow with her head tipped back. “Oh, it’s huge. You could keep a pony in here.”

“Please don’t keep anything in here.”

“Sorry.” She wasn’t. She had stopped by the inside wall, where the bark had been rubbed into long scars, and from the scars hung what was left of some ropes. They were grey and fuzzy and had rotted into soft knots, still tied where somebody had tied them.

“Rope,” she said, to the wall. “Real rope. Crispin, did he bring this?”

“No. It was... here before him.” My ears went down. “Earlier wolves. Not his. I don’t know whose.”

“So somebody was tying people to this tree before he was ever born.” She touched one with two fingers, very lightly, and the end of it came away and fell apart into dust before it reached the floor. She rubbed her fingertips together and studied what the rope had left on them. Rust had been bad enough on her skin, but this I could stand, because it was only dust. “It would take a century to do this. More than a century.” She turned the next one over with her fingertips, and it crumbled too. “What happened here? Exactly. In the order it happened.”

She asked it like someone who would hold still for the answer, which was worse.

“He ran her down,” I said, to the ground. “To here. It’s... she was running, and he came out of the trees behind her, and he got her up against the wall of it. About where you’re standing.” She moved her feet a little, and I wished I had said a different tree. “And he bit her. On the shoulder. That’s the... that’s what he did.”

“And then?”

“And then he took her to the lair.”

“I know the rest,” she said. “I just wanted to hear it at the actual tree.”

My tail had wrapped around my leg so tightly that it hurt. This was where I would have stopped, in any other conversation, and said it was only an old story and the real one wasn’t much better.

I had said the next sentence once already, to a fire. This time I walked it all the way up to her myself, and I can’t blame anyone else for it.

“For the magic to start,” I muttered, “I... have to chase you. And I have to... mark you.” It came back out of the hollow at me. “And I hate how it sounds.”

She said nothing. I made myself look up, as far as her boots, and then I made myself look up the rest of the way.

Noëlle was standing in the hollow with grey dust on her fingers and the ropes hanging behind her head. She had a hand pressed to her chest the way she had in the lair, and she was grinning at me so hard that I took a step back out of habit.

“Crispin,” she said. “Say it again.”

“I’d... rather not.”

“No, I mean it, I want to know if it’s as good the second time.” She laughed, breathless. “It’s thrilling. I can’t help it. You are standing at the actual tree, and you are telling me to my face what it takes. Last time you told the coals.” She stepped to the opening of the hollow, to the edge of the shade, with the dust still on her fingers. “Can I tell you what I’m changing?”

My ears came up before I had agreed to anything. “You’re... changing something?”

“Every place in the story, I change one thing. It’s my rule, I just made it.” She held up a finger. “Scarlet was run down to this tree. I’m not. I’m running from it. By my own choice, on my own word, and you’re the one who gets to catch up.” She brushed her hands on her shorts and left a grey print on the denim, and I lost to those shorts again. “Is it okay if the rope stays rotten? I don’t need it. It isn’t that kind of day.”

I had a good sentence ready, about how nothing had to happen today. What I said was, “Are you... sure? Because we agreed. Either of us. Any time...”

“I’m sure. The chase, today. I can stop it, and so can you.” She put her chin up, and then she said it without any joke around it at all. “Yes. Do it.”

My tail unwrapped from my leg and hung there. I did not move, and neither did she.

“Head start,” said Noëlle.

“You’re... what?”

“I get a head start. It’s a chase, Crispin, not an ambush, and you’re faster than me. I want you to count until I’m out of sight.” She was already backing out of the hollow, swinging the cloak around her shoulders and tying it at her neck, because if she was doing this she was doing it in costume. “Slowly. Don’t you dare skip ahead.”

I would like to say I made a gentlemanly decision. I was too stunned to move my feet, and it saved me the trouble. I stood at the edge of the roots and watched her go, and she grinned back over her shoulder and bolted. The cloak swung out behind her, red against all those leaves, and the boots hit the dirt in a hard rush. She was gone into the trees, and I could still hear her.

I counted slowly, as ordered. Somewhere in there my ears started to swivel after her and my tail began beating the back of my leg, so I gave up and ran.

My legs knew how before I did. I had run my entire life from rain and from strangers, so I knew everything about running away. I had never once run toward anything. It turned out to be a different animal. I had a girl in front of me, a flash of red between the trunks, and I was gaining on her and enjoying it so much that I nearly tripped from the shock. I wasn’t even slightly sorry.

The smell of her came back along the trail in pieces: resin and crushed fern where her boots had come down. It was sharper than it should have been. I could hear a jay shouting at someone a long way off, much further than I usually hear them, and I could tell exactly which tree it was in. The light had changed too. Every leaf overhead had a hard clean edge on it. I had been told what the mark does for the one who wears it. Nobody had told me what the chase did to the wolf. I decided it was the running, because I had no better idea, and I kept my feet moving.

“Noëlle!” I called, and my voice cracked on it. “Are you... is this... are you okay?”

She did not slow down. “I’m great!” she yelled back, from somewhere ahead and to the left, laughing so hard that the word came out in pieces. “Don’t you dare stop! Be scary!”

I had no idea how to be scary. I tried. I took a breath and dropped my voice down into my chest and let out my best growl.

It came out like a hinge on a door that nobody has oiled. The jay stopped shouting. Ahead of me the red cloak stopped, too, and doubled over, wheezing. My ears folded down, and my tail, which has never had any pride, kept right on going.

“That was,” she gasped, “the worst sound,” and then she couldn’t finish. I ran into a fern laughing. She was bent over a log with her hair across her face, and I was bent over my knees behind her, and each time one of us caught a breath the other made the hinge noise again to set us both off.

It stopped being funny without either of us deciding. The laughing ran out, and we were both panting, looking at each other across a few steps of moss. My tail was still going behind me, slower now, and I caught myself wanting her to run. She pushed her hair out of her face with the back of her wrist, and she took off.

The second half of the chase was the best run of my life, and I do not have much to compare it to. I ran as hard as I had ever run. She came around a big trunk with the hood flying, the moss was wet, and her boot slid, or she let it. She went down on her back in a deep bank of it. I came over her before I had decided to, and I caught myself on my hands, one on each side of her head, close enough for her breath to land on my chin.

We were both breathing hard enough that neither of us could talk.

Her hair had come loose and spread out. There was a green smear of moss on her cheek. Her top had ridden up and her chest was going up and down, and the shoulder she had shown me with two fingers on the walk back from the lair, the one she had said had plenty to bite and nothing big to hit, was right there under my face, with the cloak thrown back and the neck of her top slid halfway off it.

And I wanted to bite her.

The game was the laughing, the hinge, my hands in the moss. This came from further down, through my blood and up into my jaw, and it went into my teeth. It wanted her shoulder, that exact patch of skin, with a plain, enormous hunger that had nothing to do with me, and I knew whose it was. I was my great-great-grandfather for one second, and I did not hate it nearly as much as I should have.

I did not move. My mouth had come a little open, and I had not been the one to open it. My ears had come forward, both of them, and my tail had stopped moving.

It was the worst second of my life, and the best, and I will not pretend those were two different seconds.

She looked up at me with her face pink and her eyes wide. I don’t know what she saw. I braced for her to tell me to get off, and had been braced for it since I was a child.

“Fenris,” said Noëlle.

She said it sweetly, blushing a lovely deep red, and reached up and tapped the end of my nose with one finger.

I wanted to be angry. I opened my mouth to do it properly, and what came out was a small unhappy sound. “It’s not funny...” I muttered.

“It is a little.”

“It’s... not.” My ears were pinned back so far they pressed against my skull, and I was smiling, and I hated that I was smiling, and the name stung.

The hunger had gone out of my teeth the instant she said the name, and the joke had done it. I will not tell her that. I have told you, because you are not her, and because I owe somebody the truth: the relief of it left my knees shaking, and I would have done almost anything to keep her talking that way for the rest of the day.

I got off her. I did it carefully, one knee and then the other, and I sat back with my hands on my legs.

“I lost,” said Noëlle, from the ground. She did not sound upset. She was staring at the canopy with her hand over her chest. “You caught me. That’s supper for a week. I’m going to put bitter yarrow in all of it, and you’re going to say thank you.”

“I’ll... say thank you.”

“Good.” She was quiet for a moment. “Crispin. Why does the moss smell so loud?”

I looked at her. She was lying with her eyes shut, her nose wrinkled, and she was turning her head from side to side, which I do myself when the wind changes.

“It’s just moss,” I said. “It’s the same as it always...”

“No, it’s loud. It’s like standing next to a bell.” She kept her eyes shut, and without turning her head she pointed straight at me. “You’re there. I haven’t looked.”

She was pointing at the middle of my chest, and I had not made a sound. And I knew, with no effort at all, as if someone had laid a hand lightly on my back, exactly where she was lying, and it was the same place my eyes said she was. I did not trust it.

“You said nothing starts until the wolf runs her down,” said Noëlle, slowly. She sat up on her elbows with moss in her hair. “I think that’s what that was. Wasn’t it?”

My tail crept back around my leg. “I... think so,” I said. “It was only the first part.”

“The first part,” she said, and looked at me, and I looked at the ground, and we sat there in the moss and breathed.