Of course, the wood itself was prohibited, and the single trade road that cut through the dark forest was now barely a sliver of white rock in the wood—overgrown over centuries of disuse. Some said that the road led to the magical city of Voryn, deep in the heart of the forest, but that was just a story. I didn’t know if Voryn still existed, indeed if it had ever existed. The Wildwood met Nor, a neighboring kingdom, on the other side, and beyond that a vast desert. The few people over the years who had defied the royal decree and ventured even a quarter mile into the wood and come out alive told of bone-eaters with razor teeth, and trees that screamed, and shadows that shifted on their own.
My mother was one of those people.
Papa met her on the road outside of the Village-in-the-Valley, having emerged from the Wildwood, badly bleeding but alive. He nursed her to health, and they fell in love, and I was born. My mother’s memories of the time before she came out of the wood were few, but Papa didn’t need to know anything more about her than that he loved her, and that she loved him. While they lived in this small cottage at the edge of the Village-in-the-Valley, she would sing enchanted songs about the Lady of the Wilds—one of the old gods from before trains and carriages and muskets, the one who, legend said, had gifted the first king of Aloriya with his crown—and the flowers in our small shop would listen.
“We’re not supposed to wander into the wood,” Anwen said as she walked beside me, wringing her hands together. Her hair was cropped close to her head—not a week before, we had been running through the kitchens to show the king the flame she’d finally summoned in her hand, when she’d tripped and her hair had caught fire. Seren had tossed a bucket of water at her to put it out, but there was no other thing to be done than to cut her burned hair off. Seren was constantly getting us out of trouble.
Then again, now that I thought back on it, he was often the one getting them into trouble, too.
“Hello?” Seren shouted into the wood where I had last seen the shadow. “Is anyone there?”
Only the wood answered back, soft and buzzing with life.
Anwen shifted anxiously. “What if Cerys saw an ancient? They take you and turn you into a bone-eater.”
I shivered at the word. A bone-eater was a person who had been woodcursed but hadn’t died, and who wandered the wood in a sort of half-life, empty and hungry. They were the most terrifying denizens in the wood aside from the ancients—monsters that prowled the deepest, darkest parts of the forest. I’d never seen a bone-eater or an ancient before that day. I’d seen wolves and foxes and deer and snakes and all sorts of woodland creatures, but never a bone-eater. I had never wanted to.
Lorne cocked his head, moving the flame from one finger to another thoughtfully. “They wouldn’t dare come this close to the edge. The crown protects us. Besides, what if it’s someone who needs our help?”
“Wouldn’t they already be turned?” I asked.
“Your mom wasn’t,” he replied, to which I didn’t have an answer.
“And there’s nothing to worry about while I’m here,” Seren added.
I felt my chest constrict. “But . . .”
I should have pressed harder. I should have told them it was a trick of my eyes—that we should just go and see the black gelding. Not dawdle here, on the edge of the Wildwood, where the crown’s protection waned. But I didn’t—and so what followed was all my fault.
“Do you hear that?” Lorne asked, turning toward the wood again. He raised his hand higher, and the flame shone orange and yellow against the tree bark and autumn leaves.
Anwen strained to listen. “I don’t hear anything.”
“It sounded like . . . someone crying.”
“You’re hearing things,” Seren replied, but either Lorne ignored him or he wasn’t paying attention, because he took a step into the wood, heading for a sunlit clearing about fifty feet away. “Hey, wait!” Seren shouted.
Lorne walked into the wood, calling, “Hello? Are you hurt?” to someone none of us could hear. Wen fussed with her short hair, pulling at it nervously, glancing back toward town, but there was no one on the road at the moment, and the golden fields behind us were empty, wind bending the soft yellow stems in waves.
“Don’t go too far!” Wen shouted.
Lorne waved her off. “I’m fine! I’m just going to that tree, and if I don’t find them, I’ll turn around.”
“He’ll be fine,” Seren agreed. “It’s just, what, fifty feet?”
“You’re a terrible babysitter,” Wen said.
Seren muttered something under his breath and fingered the hilt of the sword on his belt. When the princess gave him another imploring look, he rolled his eyes and marched into the wood after Lorne. “Slow down, princeling. Don’t want you to burn the whole forest down if you get scared.”
Lorne was twenty feet into the wood now—twenty-five.
Back then, I knew him. I knew his favorite color, his favorite food, his favorite book. I knew that he could hit a pigeon out of the air with one shot of his arrow. That he could light an entire room of candles with a single wave of his hand, the Sunder bloodline’s magic so strong in him that things caught fire when he grew too angry. I knew him better than I knew myself, having spent long nights in the tallest spire of the castle, mapping out just how far we’d go. To the seas. To the horizon. To the world beyond. But that was before that day. Before the wood.
Before . . .
“Hey, princeling, why don’t you come back and—” Seren’s words caught in his throat. He paled.
Because in the wood there were only trees and sunlight spilling across the green grove, and silence.
The prince and his firelight were gone.
Seren, only a foot into the wood, took off running into the trees, abandoning the sunflower seeds, calling his name. Wen shouted at him to stop, but I just watched him go. I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t move. Because in the spilling sunlight I saw the shadow from earlier.
I saw the ancient raise its antlered head. I saw it look at me with its deep yellow eyes, bare its bone-white teeth—
There in the clearing one moment, and suddenly—
Wen took off into the wood after Seren, and this time I followed. He couldn’t have gotten far, we thought. Seren shouted Lorne’s name, but there was not a response. The farther in we went, calling his name, the more we began to panic. Soon we could barely see the light of the edge of the wood through the trees behind us. Wen slipped on loose rocks and fell into a ravine. She twisted her ankle and couldn’t move it, so Seren descended into the ravine, picked her up, and put her on his back.
I didn’t even know which way the village was anymore. The trees all looked the same.
Seren called the prince’s name, again and again, his voice bouncing off the oaks and pines, and as the sun lowered, a seeping fog began to crawl across the ground toward us. I recognize the fog now, but back then I didn’t know what it was. I was scared—but I should’ve been frightened out of my wits.
As Seren climbed out of the ravine with Wen on his back, the fog thickened.
“I think there’s something here,” I told them.
A limb snapped to our left and we whirled around. A figure surfaced out of the fog, and Seren reached for his knife—
“Mama!” I cried as a honey-haired woman rushed to me and hugged me tightly.
Seren was perplexed. “How did you find us?”
“You were shouting,” she replied simply, though it seemed impossible now that she could have heard us all the way down in the village. We were well into the forest by then. But somehow, she had come anyway.
She inspected Wen’s foot. “It’s not broken, only twisted.”
“My brother’s lost,” Wen told her, sobbing. “He’s lost and we can’t find him!”
“Shh, it’s okay,” replied my mother, cupping Anwen’s face in her hands. I remember her voice so well, its soft and sweet cadence. She wore her hair in a long, simple braid, and there were always flowers in it. That day they were daisies, the ones she had braided into mine. “It’ll be fine. I’ll find him and keep him safe.”
And we believed her.
She pointed us in the direction out of the wood and told us to run as fast as we could. She told us not to look back. And we didn’t—until we heard a shriek, so loud the wood seemed filled by it. Seren stopped and turned back toward her in the fog. He looked torn.
“We have to keep going,” I pressed. “Mom told us—”
“I know,” he replied. Then he knelt down and slowly eased Anwen off his back, draping her arm over my shoulder so I could help hold her up. He kissed her forehead and told us to keep running out of the wood. “I’ll catch up. I promise.”
“But—”
“The prince is my responsibility. I have to find him,” he replied, and then he ran back into the fog, toward the shriek and the growls and my mother and Lorne. And Wen and I stood there for a moment longer as he fled into the mists—there one moment, and then gone.
“W-We have to keep going,” Anwen hiccupped, sobbing, tearing me out of my thoughts.
But Mom was still in the wood.
I turned to Wen and told her, “Stay here—okay? I’ll be right back.”
She grabbed me by the arm, her nails digging into my flesh to root me there. “You’re not going back in there! You’ll never come back.”
“I can’t leave my mom.”
She hiccupped a sob and held on tighter. “But—but what about me?”
“The wood won’t come for you if you make it out,” I replied, because of the pact the ancient king made with the cursewood. Anwen would be safe, but I couldn’t just sit here while my mother—while she . . .
My best friend’s fingers slowly released me. She slumped against a tree, defeated. “Please don’t leave me.”
“I’ll come back,” I promised, and went into the wood again, deeper than I ever had before. The thorns and briars that curled up from the underbrush picked at the edges of my dress, grabbing at them, as if pleading me to stop. But I couldn’t. Around me, the bone-eaters swarmed like bees, but I couldn’t see them in the thick fog. When I was sure I was back to where I had last left my mother, all I found were trees. They had just disappeared. When I looked back, I couldn’t see Wen anymore, either.