Mara’s first thought as she shrugged into her pack and took in the forest around her, was that the quiet game Eli had devised was more necessary than she’d expected. She hadn’t spent any time in the woods, but she knew the way the city’s parks sang with insect songs after dark. These woods were like a library, like the city during a snowstorm. Soft, worshipful silence all around.
The second thing she noticed was the damp. Although it was cool, the air clung to her skin and formed coils out of the loose tendrils of hair at her ears and the nape of her neck. Her boots sank deep into the spongy earth, and the silhouette of every surface–every tree trunk, every stone–was softened by a thick layer of moss.
The third thing, which perhaps should have been the first, was the immensity of the trees. She’d known they were big. Davy had described them to her–how one could form a chain of a dozen men, arms outstretched, and still not wrap around the base of the largest Loftland fir. None of these were that big, but even so… it was so different to see it than to hear about it. She felt like a child gazing up at her parents. Like she was standing at the feet of gods.
Turning her attention back to her companions, she saw that Eli had replaced and covered the trap door, which was half-hidden already between a large rock and a rotting log. He’d also donned his own pack and was hoisting Nick up to ride on his shoulders. The enchanted light had been snuffed out and stowed before they climbed the ladder, but enough moonlight streamed through the trees that she could make out the shapes of things if not the details. She could see Nick’s hands clasped in Eli’s hair, the keen excitement on her son’s face.
She joined them and rose up on her tiptoes to tweak Nick’s hat so that it better covered his ears and button up his little wool coat. Spring in these parts was a time of crisp nights. When she stepped back, Eli caught her eye, his own little more than sparks in the darkness.
She nodded, following as he stepped off into the darkness.
The forest floor was surprisingly free of vegetation, their boots scuffing through a thick carpet of fallen needles, snapping the occasional twig. She wondered if Nick was doing his job, keeping a tally of noises when she walked too close to a sapling and broke off a branch. He must be. He loved being given little tasks like that and he always performed them with a sense of purpose that reminded her keenly of his father.
Shrugging off that thought, she turned her attention to the woods around her. The quiet, unlike the quiet of the tunnels, wasn’t oppressive. It wrapped the rest of her senses in cotton batting, soothed her frayed nerves. She tipped her head back as she walked and studied the canopy, through which she could just make out wispy scudding clouds, flickering stars. She couldn’t find the moon, but its light limned the branches of the trees and suffused the forest with a softness to match the quiet.
As she walked, more at peace than she had been since Davy left for his patrol, her stubborn, fretful mind turned away from the forest itself to the legends she’d heard of it.
Ferals made their homes here–great lawless packs of them, uncivilized and innately immune to magic. The Order held them up as emblematic of the great evil of shadow-casting, but Mara knew better than to believe that propaganda. Shadow-casters had nothing to do with the ferals. Their magical resistance was an inherited trait, not a spell. Shadow-casting didn’t work en masse the same way persuasive magic did. If it did, the Order never would have been allowed to rise to power in the first place.
She didn’t believe the bit about the ‘why’ ferals existed, but she did believe the rest. Davy himself had come home with stories of feral attacks. Of tangled hair and animal eyes, clothing made entirely of mismatched animal hides, sharp teeth, crude weapons. Bloodlust.
And what else had he told her? Tales of giant wolves, taller on all fours than a grown man, and of spiders with bodies the size of dinner plates. He told her about the golden birds—the Sight-Snatchers—that sat on high branches, eyeing passersby, and how 99 times out of 100, they’d sit in silence and once they’d dive, pluck out some poor fool’s eyeball, and then fly away. Once, the Order had put out a command to hunt them all down, but nobody had ever managed to shoot one.
Looking around, stretching her senses out to capture the song of the ancient trees, Mara wondered how this place and the Loftland of legend could possibly be the same. She trusted her intuition. It had never led her astray. And her intuition was not singing a song of warning to her here, of eyeball-napping birds and mammoth wolves. It was singing a song of peace.
Of safety.
Eli, too, seemed to be at ease, which further enhanced her sense of security. His stride was as relaxed, unhurried, and though he seemed to have his senses tuned, head occasionally quirking as if listening, he didn’t have the same alert tension he carried when he was leading them through the city, or even through the tunnel.
They walked for a longer uninterrupted stretch than they had at any point before. Two hours, perhaps three. If Nick grew bored at any point, she couldn’t tell. He sat tall atop Eli’s shoulders, looking about him as if the forest itself was reading him a story. Mara let her own mind settle into a walking meditation, using the breathwork to tune herself into the forest’s rhythm—a slow pulse beneath her feet.
When they stopped, she and Eli spread their jackets on the damp ground and sat, and the mossy earth cradled her weary body better than the finest leather armchair. She leaned back against the mossy tree trunk with a sigh.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“Okay,” Eli said, his voice a low murmur that snaked through the silence rather than breaking it. “Who do you suppose won the quiet game, Nick?”
Nick, who stood between them, one hand pressed to the trunk of the tree, looked to Eli, then to Mara. She raised her eyebrows. He looked back to Eli. “Mama?”
Eli chuckled. “No, your mama snapped that branch, remember? And I coughed.”
“Me?”
Eli nodded, and Nick plopped happily onto his bottom, delighted grin shining up at Mara like a little sliver of the sun.
“Good job, my love,” she crooned, tweaking his cheek.
Eli made a show of digging through his bag for the cookies, and Mara noticed the way he pulled one out, making sure to open the bag all the way, revealing how many were left.
“Clever,” she murmured dryly as Eli handed the cookie over and Nick crushed it immediately in clumsy hands, crumbs raining onto his lap.
The corner of Eli’s mouth turned up, but he didn’t answer,
“This place feels safe,” she admitted, trying again for conversation. As much as she loved her son, watching him mangle a cookie wasn’t the stimulation she needed after hours of silent walking.
“It is. This part of it, anyway.”
“Why the quiet game, then?”
He leaned back against the tree trunk, eyes lazily scanning the trees. “Order patrols, mostly. We were already beyond the usual routes, but I wanted to be sure.”
“How are you so sure, now?”
He picked up a duo of dead needles and spun it idly. “The forest is safe, but not passively so. It… patrols itself, I guess you could say. Some areas it’s ceded, nearer to the edges, like a peace treaty with the outside world. But the deeper parts are protected. You can’t come here unless the forest allows it, and Loftland would never let an Order patrol survive so far beyond the woodline.
A little chill of foreboding—the first she’d felt since climbing up the ladder—ran up Mara’s spine as she looked around.
“How are we allowed to be here?”
Eli tossed the needle aside, handing Nick his water flask to wash down the cookie. “It trusts me.”
Mara shook her head. “Nope. No more vague nonsense. You need to speak to me like an adult. Answer my question in more than three words. Please. And speaking of which, now that the silent game is over, what is the plan? Where are we going? How are we getting there? How long will it take? What other secret skills and magical allies are you hiding up your sleeve?”
He didn’t answer for a long moment, his gaze not on her but staring vaguely out into the trees, brow furrowed in thought. She thought, uncharitably, that he might be puzzling out how best to keep her in the dark.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, eyes flicking to her before returning to the distance. “Old habits. What would you like to know first?”
Mara was a little disappointed in the easy capitulation. She’d prepared a whole argument, with numbered points. That was how she and Davy used to do it, when they had big gripes. A few of their arguments turned into prolonged debates, like the great Sleep Training debate of Nick’s first year of infancy. She enjoyed the arguments, the back and forth.
But, to be fair, she also enjoyed winning and apparently she’d won this one.
“Where are we going?”
“We’ll head east,” he said, no hesitation, “through Loftland, for about ten days. Maybe more, depending on how quickly we’re able to move. We’ll leave behind Loftland for Ashfall, though there’s no marked border, just a change in the terrain and the trees. From there it’s a week or so to Cinder–”
“I knew it!” Mara exclaimed, and at his raised eyebrow went on. “I suspected, I mean, that Cinder was in rebellion hands.”
He coughed out a laugh and shook his head. “Cinder belongs to no one. But that means it also doesn’t belong to the Order so we can restock there without risking capture.”
“And after that?’
“After that, we’ll turn north, toward the Ribbon. That leg will be the longest, maybe a month. Ashfall is harsh terrain, and gets harsher, nearer to the river. We’ll cross west of Clearwater to avoid routine patrols and take the cliffside route up to the plains. I’ve got a contact near the river who will sell us horses, so it’ll be less than a week’s ride from there to the Smokestacks. We’ll follow the east fork of the Green River through the Smokestacks up into the Ripshaws, at which point I honestly don’t know what route will take us to the enclave. There’s a guide who lives at the foothills who’s meant to meet us and tell us the way.”
Mara chewed on what he’d said, matching it against the map she’d drawn in her mind. It gave her some confidence that she’d been able to at least deduce which direction they would head.
“And the forest,” she said, waving a hand at the trees. “What do you mean, it trusts you?”
He shifted his back against the tree and breathed a thoughtful sigh. “It’s hard to explain, truly. There’s a potent magic here, a sort of sentience. I did something a long time ago that Loftland decided it liked. Ever since, it’s offered me safety.”
She stared at his profile, anger welling up inside her. What about Davy? she wanted to scream. At him, at the forest. But she couldn’t scream the words, or even say them calmly, because Nick was right there. Even so, Eli seemed to hear her desperate plea.
“We were nearer the wall,” he said quietly, contrition in every syllable. “There’s less old growth there. Less magic. It tried to help, but there are limits.”
It was a long time before she could speak, and when she finally managed the words were laced with acid. She didn’t want to ask Eli any more questions. Didn’t want to add any more flesh to this character while Davy’s image in her mind was just beginning its long, slow decay. Someday, there would be nothing left but bones–calcified, colorless remnants of what had once been a vibrant life, a love that had brought her to her knees.
But the alternative to knowing Eli better was not Davy. The alternative was loneliness which, in this great, empty, sentient forest, made the animal within her balk.
“What was it you did?” she asked. “That Loftland liked so much, I mean.”
Eli pulled in in a breath and took the water flask back from Nick.
“I’ll tell you while we walk.”