“Elara! What’s wrong?” Kirst found his wife on the porch of their meager cabin, covering her face with both hands. He’d dropped everything to respond to her anguished voice a moment before. He’d felt it this time—he was on the cusp of successfully dowsing iron. But that could wait. Still catching his breath, he went to her and caressed her shoulder. “Was it another apparition?”
“No.” Elara’s voice was muffled behind her hands, and sounded broken. Her hands lowered, revealing red-rimmed eyes. “Bouden. He was just here, and now he’s gone.”
Kirst’s initial fears were allayed even as others arose. Apparitions had plagued them ever since they’d uprooted the eontree near the house, causing second and third thoughts about this venture. He looked out at the surrounding plane, darkened only by Wearriht Forest in the distance. A forest Kirst found unsettling since their arrival at the Moor.
Elara let out a ragged breath and waved her hands at their barren surroundings. “Where could he have gone, Kirst? We should have listened to the Gornings.” Her desperate tone carried a hint of accusation. Kirst bristled.
“We’ve been over this, Elara. Those backward villagers think every stray stone has a say in their doings. Forget their—”
“Kirst.” Elara’s eyes penetrated his heart, pupils darting this way and that. “Karstati take you! Our son is gone, and you would argue with me about superstition?”
Kirst looked down, and sighed. “Forgive me, Ela. I’ll find our son, and we’ll discuss our plans later.”
“Good.” Elara whirled and retreated into the cabin.
Kirst wasted no time. Yet his mind lingered with Elara as he retrieved his horse, Willow, from the shed adjoining their house. She had a right to be in anguish until her son was safe in her arms again, with everything that had been happening. Scarcely a week before, another of their men had disappeared, only to be found mangled on the outskirts of the territory they were surveying. Problem was, he’d gotten home safely from that survey hours before his frantic screams alerted everyone of ill tidings. Kirst rubbed his temples before prodding Willow into a canter. Every moment of their son’s absence gave Kirst and Elara time to imagine what might be happening to him—no matter how unrealistic.
The night advanced before Kirst got far, and lay unusually dark despite a full moon when he reached the trees. He had scoured the plane, and this overgrown wood seemed the only remaining place to look. The outlying trees sprawled outward, leafless branches stretching toward Kirst’s homestead as if urging on the musty breeze that tickled, then numbed his nose. He shivered as Willow’s careful gait carried him into their shadow. This was only the latest setback in his operation of nigh three solstices. Six of fifteen mercenaries—of varying quality--hired at the outset, had disappeared. The first vanished just after their first solstice in the Moor, and the rest disappeared periodically since, up to the one whose remains they’d found days ago. An image intruded on his thoughts of that first mercenary, and he looked over his shoulder at the receding light outside the forest, as if to make sure he wasn’t followed. One by one the missing men filed through his mind, paired with imaginings of shadowy figures pacing just outside his limited vision in the murk of gnarled tree and root. Kirst gritted his teeth.
What seemed to be an hour later, Kirst found the boy huddled against a huge tree deep in the forest. His breath caught in his throat and tears sprang to his eyes as he climbed off his horse and rushed to the huddled form. After hours of looking for him, Kirst had begun to believe the pious insane. The ones who warned him about cutting too many eontrees, what that could bring. Shifting from gratitude to pride, he leered into the surrounding darkness. The idea that a forest, of all things, could go feral was anything but the product of a sound mind. The men who’d gone missing? Probably deserters. Maybe that most recent one had been taken by a wolf.
When his fingers touched his son’s cold skin, a shudder seeped through him, but not from the cold. Kirst recoiled from the boy, and re-evaluated him. Bouden’s chest heaved normally, thank the suns. Yet… A forbidding presence bade him tear his eyes from his son and look up at the tree towering over them.
The hulking plant had black, coarse-looking bark and a hideous tangle of branches that began high off the ground and streamed downward. Its longest branches stuck back into the dirt. Kirst imagined furrows trailing behind them like massive claws grasping, grasping… The tree was big enough to swallow him and Bouden together in its quiet embrace. Kirst shook his head violently, swearing his hatred of credulous folk. It wasn’t the first invasive thought he’d experienced of late, between mental glimpses of the nearest eontree, and perverse imaginings of tree-men doing terrible things to himself and his family. But if the Gornings hadn’t planted those images in his mind, how else had they gotten there? Kirst had a growing certainty that insanity had taken him. No thanks to the rote-minded village dwellers he couldn’t stop thinking about. Along with the implicit understanding that he and his crew shouldn’t have cut so many eontrees from the Moor.
Kirst clenched his jaw, and inhaled sharply. He turned back to Bouden. “Need to get you home,” he mumbled, the madness ebbing for the moment. He scooped the child up, ignoring the icy tingle that replaced the normal warmth one ought to feel when holding a child. The sensation shook him as he hugged Bouden to his chest. “You’ll be home soon,” he said as comfortingly as he could, for his own benefit. He turned to see his horse, uncharacteristically quiet since they entered the forest, had drawn slowly away from the tree. He couldn’t blame it. He shifted the boy to one arm and pulled himself up onto the animal.
A violent shudder ran through Bouden’s body and Kirst held him tighter, fear’s frost gripping his mind.
“Take us home, Willow.” Kirst enunciated the words with care to curb the shaking in his voice. Willow obeyed with an eagerness that matched that of his owner.
Bouden was just cold. He shouldn’t have been out this late. Kirst shouldn’t have left him and his mother alone. The metals called to him from the earth, and without the eontrees’ numbing influence, he was so close to finding the riches he—his family, deserved. Yet how could he have known the pervasive thoughts drawing him to the forest weren’t his alone? The boy had never confessed even to nightmares. Kirst shook his head and flicked the reigns, though Willow had already broken into a canter.
Bouden awoke, inhaling deeply. He pulled his head away from Kirst’s shoulder. Tentative relief enveloped Kirst as he looked into his son’s face. The boy’s eyes were wide open. Too wide.
Then Bouden screamed. Long, high, with a desperate note that shredded Kirst’s tense chest, and caused his throat to constrict, as if straining to join the eerie song. Forcefully retaining a hold on his faculties, he leaned forward, putting his mouth close to Bouden’s ear as the scream died. “Hold, son. What’s the matter?”
“Father, don’t--” the boy whimpered, tightening his own grip on Kirst’s body, and huddling against him.
Kirst kicked, bringing Willow to a gallop. “We’ll be home soon, Bouden. Not just the farmstead. Home.” They should have left this place months ago. Bouden convulsed, almost shaking from Kirst’s grip.
Kirst caught the boy before he could fall. Bouden stilled, but did not huddle against his father. Instead he stared over Kirst’s shoulder reaching past him with both hands, taking no heed of anything but what he now apparently saw, which filled his eyes with terror.
“Don’t you see him?” The boy’s voice quivered more than could be explained by the horse’s gait as he pointed behind them.
Kirst followed his son’s gaze in time to see a vaporous shape—or was it just the trees rushing away into the uncertain light? He stilled the turmoil stirring in his gut. “It’s the fog of this wood, son. I don’t like it either. We’ll be ou—”
Another scream from Bouden cut him off, and he nearly dropped the boy as convulsions wracked the small body.
“No, father,” the boy finally whimpered, slumping against him again, his lungs evidently depleted.
“Everything will be all right son. We’ll be away soon.”
“But…don’t you hear it?” His son’s voice had grown calm, collected, as if resigned to some unseen fate.
“What is it, son? What does it sound like?”
“I’m bound, father.”
Kirst held his ear close to the boy’s mouth to catch the words, as the child’s voice shrunk like a dying fire’s light.
“What do you mean?”
The boy’s eyes shone in the moonlight. “Turn back.”
Why in all Vadra would he want to turn back? Kirst shook his head and turned the boy so he faced forward, hugging him tight with his free arm as spasms wracked the tiny body again. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing something dreadfully wrong. He resolved to himself that everything would be sorted once they reached the cabin, and the boy’s mother could tend him.
Bouden went rigid in Kirst’s grasp and cried out. “Father…” His voice died away as they broke from the trees, entering the cool moonlight. A piercing scream from behind them nearly shed Kirst’s skin from his body, but for the first time since his rescue, Bouden seemed relaxed.
Finally Kirst allowed relief to swell in his chest where his son’s head rested. Willow slowed to a canter as they crossed the plane. Clearly whatever had tormented the boy did not transgress the bounds of the forest. And they would never do so again either.
A smile tugged at Kirst’s features as the cabin came into focus in the low light. A moment later he dismounted, carrying Bouden to the door, which opened forcefully before Elara’s urgent motion. Her relieved expression brought warmth to Kirst’s heart—and chilled the blood in his veins when it froze on her face. Having carried the boy into the light, Kirst looked down to see Bouden staring vacantly at him, and realized the boy’s rest was in fact final. The Wood had exacted its price.
