Franca came back to a destroyed house.

She had to walk for the last few miles: she had called a couch, but the man had wobbled, folded on himself and fell dead and spitting blood on the road. She had left him under the unerring sun of Sicily and drove the horses herself, though not without difficulty. Alexander had tired himself to sleep after a full day of screams, his little face streaked with tears. Better this way. Better this way. She could experience a bit of peace.

A bit of peace.

The wind did not carry voices. Not yet, anyway.

When she found her old house she let out a tired whimper. A little part of her had hoped she could find her old room, wind down, maybe even share a warm meal with her little boy.

The roof had caved in, turning the upper walls into a splintered flower, a blooming of thorns. The lower levels lay open, bare. Windows shattered, the insides looked dark and empty.

She left the couch to itself. The horses did not move, they seemed to wait for her, or maybe they lay down as all animals did when they were close to a predator.

Her old home had been eviscerated. Mold and weed grew in the corners, eating away at the light. Whatever might have been precious or useful and not nailed to the walls had been pilfered.

Then a second wave of raiders must have had stolen the nails as well. Her steps creaked on a surface of shattered glass and old wooden planks that bemoaned her presence.

“F-Father?” She asked, knowing very well he lay down in a crypt seventeen miles away. Nobody was there. She walked upstairs, holding Alexander to her chest. Slowly, she found her room, or what remained of it. Her bed had been overturned, her windows broken. Her wardrobe and clothes.

She had lost everything.

She sat down on the hard bed. Alexander let out a little groan of disapproval as he shifted in his restless dream.

“It’s alright,” she said. “It’s alright. Everything is going to be alright.”

She licked dry lips as she sat looking at the shadows lengthen. From under the bed her fingers found the broken remains of a wooden crucifix, the one that she had broken the night she forsake her faith.

It wouldn’t be of use to her now.

Alexander woke up. She kissed his head and lulled him to sleep once more. She had nothing to give the poor creature, but she had been out of milk for weeks and out of money for days.

But everything would be fine once more.

She followed the stairs as they lead her down to the base floor and then outside: the trees seemed closer, the forest looming over her. The Old Country, come back to swallow her child.

A few hundred feet behind her, someone appeared from the edge of the woods. A tall and broad man with a dark beard, holding an axe. Their gazes met for a moment.

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The man called out to her and started to advance in her direction.

She shrieked and bolted towards the woods.

The canopy of the forest welcomed her.

She ran. Branches biting down into her arms.

She ran. Leaves cutting her skin.

She ran. Low-hanging boughs grasping her hair.

Alexander woke up. His cries mixed with the whispers, coming back like the tide called by a wide cruel moon.

Sunlight disappeared. The glow of morning, of the world of men, gave way to a sickened light, green and corpse-like. Like the will o’ wisps she had heard about when she still used to live in Britain. But unlike their bluish brightness, these were a dark emerald, casting forsaken shadows all about.

At last, each breath a blade of pain coursing through her chest, she stopped in the middle of a small circular opening. The trees once again looked like bent shapes, twisted in their agony, holes in their bark like eyes and screaming mouths.

You have come, said the voice. It was as smokey and as deceptively soothing as always. It seemed to ebb and flow, speak to her ears and inside her brain and coming from echoes a mile away.

“Yes. I’m sorry. I did not know… I tried to… I’m sorry. What have you done to…? To me? What’s happening?”

I gave you seven years, the voice calmly stated. From between the wall of trees the same figure appeared. Just as tall. Still holding her staff. Her head surrounded by horns like a halo. Green flames licked her silhouette but she never seemed to be able to make her out. And in payment, your firstborn. Such was the pact.

“I’m sorry! I just… I just can’t! I can’t!”

A boon, turned inside out. Beauty into blight.

“What can I do?” She looked down at the face of Alexander. Her baby. Her amazing, beautiful baby. His eyes opened and he looked at her.

Payment is long overdue. A bonus is expected.

Franca froze. Slowly, she turned her gaze away from her son, towards that of eyes burning like pools of gold from between the trees.

So. I ask you, Child of Men. What will you gave up?

Franca trembled. She smiled to Alexander through her tears.

“It’s going to be alright,” she whispered, her voice just as broken as her windows. Just as her life. “It’s going to be alright.”

She put one last kiss on the brow of her beautiful son.

Slowly, she lowered his body to the ground.

-

The woodcutter huffed as he pushed through the dense forest. This place gave him the creeps, even to him who was a good Christian and as thick as an oak. He kissed his thumb and signed himself. He had seen the woman running in this direction – she couldn’t be far. What was a lonely woman doing this close to the damned forest, holding a baby in her arms? She might have been a mother running from brigands. They came back to the old collapsed house from time to time.

He froze as a far-away wail reached his ears.

“Miss!” He shouted, cutting through the bushes with his axe. “Miss!”

He followed the wail, stopped only when he reached a strange tree, bent upon itself. The shape of its trunk was unnatural. The branches, hanging low, looked like the arms of a person covering her face. The roots a gangly of knotted wood.

The wail came from there. He turned, trying not to look at the holes in the bark that looked exactly like two eyes and a wailing mouth.

At the feet of the tree lay a beautiful baby, with fair skin and piercing green eyes.

“There, there,” the woodcutter said holding him up. He was clothed in fine linen, covered with words in a language he did not understand. French maybe? How odd. “It’s fine now. It’s fine.” He patted on the baby’s back, though that seemed to do little to calm him down.

Something caught his attention.

Behind the trees.

It had been just a moment, but – a shadow, a tall one. A flicker of green flames. Bright golden eyes.

He bit his lip, turned and left that blighted place behind him. He was tall and strong, but all of a sudden he was seven again, scared to tears by tales of the Old Country and the Wicked Fae who lived there.

The woodcutter ran away. The echoes of his steps disappeared, as did that of the child’s wails.

In a few moments, only echoes of the wind remained.

They seemed to linger around the strange tree, the one with the bent, awful shape.

Then they disappeared as well.

Silence came, and there was no voice in the woods.